22475	----	TORTOISES By D. H. Lawrence NEW YORK THOMAS SELTZER 1921 CONTENTS Baby Tortoise Tortoise-Shell Tortoise Family Connections Lui et Elle Tortoise Gallantry Tortoise Shout BABY TORTOISE You know what it is to be born alone, Baby tortoise! The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell, Not yet awake, And remain lapsed on earth, Not quite alive. A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean. To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open, Like some iron door; To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base And reach your skinny little neck And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage, Alone, small insect, Tiny bright-eye, Slow one. To take your first solitary bite And move on your slow, solitary hunt. Your bright, dark little eye, Your eye of a dark disturbed night, Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise, So indomitable. No one ever heard you complain. You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four- pinned toes, Rowing slowly forward. Whither away, small bird? Rather like a baby working its limbs, Except that you make slow, ageless progress And a baby makes none. The touch of sun excites you, And the long ages, and the lingering chill Make you pause to yawn, Opening your impervious mouth, Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly gaping pincers; Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums, Then close the wedge of your little mountain front, Your face, baby tortoise. Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head in its wimple And look with laconic, black eyes? Or is sleep coming over you again, The non-life? You are so hard to wake. Are you able to wonder? Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life Looking round And slowly pitching itself against the inertia Which had seemed invincible? The vast inanimate, And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye. Challenger. Nay, tiny shell-bird, What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row against, What an incalculable inertia. Challenger. Little Ulysses, fore-runner, No bigger than my thumb-nail, Buon viaggio. All animate creation on your shoulder, Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield. The ponderous, preponderate, Inanimate universe; And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone. How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled sunshine, Stoic, Ulyssean atom; Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes. Voiceless little bird, Resting your head half out of your wimple In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone, with no sense of being alone, And hence six times more solitary; Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages Your little round house in the midst of chaos. Over the garden earth, Small bird, Over the edge of all things. Traveller, With your tail tucked a little on one side Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat. All life carried on your shoulder, Invincible fore-runner. The Cross, the Cross Goes deeper in than we know, Deeper into life; Right into the marrow And through the bone. TORTOISE-SHELL Along the back of the baby tortoise The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge, Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections Or a bee's. Then crossways down his sides Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands. Five, and five again, and five again, And round the edges twenty-five little ones, The sections of the baby tortoise shell. Four, and a keystone; Four, and a keystone; Four, and a keystone; Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone. It needed Pythagoras to see life placing her counters on the living back Of the baby tortoise; Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet, Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell. The first little mathematical gentleman Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law. Fives, and tens, Threes and fours and twelves, All the volte face of decimals, The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven, Turn him on his back, The kicking little beetle, And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly, The long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross. And on either side count five, On each side, two above, on each side, two below The dark bar horizontal. It goes right through him, the sprottling insect, Through his cross-wise cloven psyche, Through his five-fold complex-nature. So turn him over on his toes again; Four pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb- piece, Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancing- head, Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all mathematics. The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate Of the baby tortoise. Outward and visible indication of the plan within, The complex, manifold involvedness of an individual creature Blotted out On this small bird, this rudiment, This little dome, this pediment Of all creation, This slow one. TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS On he goes, the little one, Bud of the universe, Pediment of life. Setting off somewhere, apparently. Whither away, brisk egg? His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings, And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin. A mere obstacle, He veers round the slow great mound of her. Tortoises always foresee obstacles. It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice: "This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg." He does not even trouble to answer: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" He wearily looks the other way, And she even more wearily looks another way still, Each with the utmost apathy, Incognizant, Unaware, Nothing. As for papa, He snaps when I offer him his offspring, Just as he snaps when I poke a bit of stick at him, Because he is irascible this morning, an irascible tortoise Being touched with love, and devoid of fatherliness. Father and mother, And three little brothers, And all rambling aimless, like little perambulating pebbles scattered in the garden, Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins. Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances, of course, But family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings. Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless Little tortoise. Row on then, small pebble, Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine, Young gayety. Does he look for a companion? No, no, don't think it. He doesn't know he is alone; Isolation is his birthright, This atom. To row forward, and reach himself tall on spiny toes, To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the night, To crop a little substance, To move, and to be quite sure that he is moving: Basta! To be a tortoise! Think of it, in a garden of inert clods A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to himself-- Croesus! In a garden of pebbles and insects To roam, and feel the slow heart beat Tortoise-wise, the first bell sounding From the warm blood, in the dark-creation morning. Moving, and being himself, Slow, and unquestioned, And inordinately there, O stoic! Wandering in the slow triumph of his own existence, Ringing the soundless bell of his presence in chaos, And biting the frail grass arrogantly, Decidedly arrogantly. LUI ET ELLE She is large and matronly And rather dirty, A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year And put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs, When food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth Like sudden curved scissors, And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, And having the bread hanging over her chin. O Mistress, Mistress, Reptile mistress, Your eye is very dark, very bright, And it never softens Although you watch. She knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, Reptile mistress. Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, You are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, Dapper beside her, And ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look, His, poor darling, is almost fiery. His wimple, his blunt-prowed face, His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs, So striving, striving, Are all more delicate than she, And he has a cruel scar on his shell. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, And with a grim, reptile determination, Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy Of horizontal persistence. Little old man Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, And hanging grimly on, Letting go at last as she drags away, And closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face. Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle. And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, The immune, the animate, Enveloped in isolation, Forerunner. Now look at him! Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself In his effort toward completion again. Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris, The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces, And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell. Their two shells like doomed boats bumping, Hers huge, his small; Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, And stumbling mixed up in one another, In the race of love-- Two tortoises, She huge, he small. She seems earthily apathetic, And he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue. While I, I pity Monsieur. "He pesters her and torments her," said the woman. How much more is _he_ pestered and tormented, say I. What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, Conceptionless. His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not As her earthen mound moves on, But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin, Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell, And drags at these with his beak, Drags and drags and bites, While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along. TORTOISE GALLANTRY Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency. Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed. Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her. Born to walk alone, Forerunner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy sidetrack, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within. Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless? The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, Driven, after aeons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end. J TORTOISE SHOUT I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise _in extremis_. Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A pæan, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell-- And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. So he tups, and screams Time after time that frail, torn scream After each jerk, the longish interval, The tortoise eternity, Agelong, reptilian persistence, Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm. I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips. And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life. The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence Tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe. 
22531	----	D. H. Lawrence (1916) _Amores_ AMORES Poems by D. H. LAWRENCE New York B. W. Huebsch 1916 Copyright, 1916, by D. H. Lawrence TO OTTOLINE MORRELL IN TRIBUTE TO HER NOBLE AND INDEPENDENT SYMPATHY AND HER GENEROUS UNDERSTANDING THESE POEMS ARE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED CONTENTS Tease The Wild Common Study Discord in Childhood Virgin Youth Monologue of a Mother In a Boat Week-night Service Irony Dreams Old Dreams Nascent A Winter's Tale Epilogue A Baby Running Barefoot Discipline Scent of Irises The Prophet Last Words to Miriam Mystery Patience Ballad of Another Ophelia Restlessness A Baby Asleep After Pain Anxiety The Punisher The End The Bride The Virgin Mother At the Window Drunk Sorrow Dolor of Autumn The Inheritance Silence Listening Brooding Grief Lotus Hurt by the Cold Malade Liaison Troth with the Dead Dissolute Submergence The Enkindled Spring Reproach The Hands of the Betrothed Excursion Perfidy A Spiritual Woman Mating A Love Song Brother and Sister After Many Days Blue Snap-Dragon A Passing Bell In Trouble and Shame Elegy Grey Evening Firelight and Nightfall The Mystic Blue AMORES TEASE I WILL give you all my keys, You shall be my châtelaine, You shall enter as you please, As you please shall go again. When I hear you jingling through All the chambers of my soul, How I sit and laugh at you In your vain housekeeping rôle. Jealous of the smallest cover, Angry at the simplest door; Well, you anxious, inquisitive lover, Are you pleased with what's in store? You have fingered all my treasures, Have you not, most curiously, Handled all my tools and measures And masculine machinery? Over every single beauty You have had your little rapture; You have slain, as was your duty, Every sin-mouse you could capture. Still you are not satisfied, Still you tremble faint reproach; Challenge me I keep aside Secrets that you may not broach. Maybe yes, and maybe no, Maybe there _are_ secret places, Altars barbarous below, Elsewhere halls of high disgraces. Maybe yes, and maybe no, You may have it as you please, Since I choose to keep you so, Suppliant on your curious knees. THE WILD COMMON THE quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping, Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame; Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping: They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim. Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick. Are they asleep?--Are they alive?--Now see, when I Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick. The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes; There the lazy streamlet pushes Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes. Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip, Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow, Naked on the steep, soft lip Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro. What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost? Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook? If my veins and my breasts with love embossed Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took. So my soul like a passionate woman turns, Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love For myself in my own eyes' laughter burns, Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above. Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air, Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad. And the soul of the wind and my blood compare Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad. Oh but the water loves me and folds me, Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood, Blood of a heaving woman who holds me, Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good. STUDY SOMEWHERE the long mellow note of the blackbird Quickens the unclasping hands of hazel, Somewhere the wind-flowers fling their heads back, Stirred by an impetuous wind. Some ways'll All be sweet with white and blue violet. (_Hush now, hush. Where am I?--Biuret--_) On the green wood's edge a shy girl hovers From out of the hazel-screen on to the grass, Where wheeling and screaming the petulant plovers Wave frighted. Who comes? A labourer, alas! Oh the sunset swims in her eyes' swift pool. (_Work, work, you fool--!_) Somewhere the lamp hanging low from the ceiling Lights the soft hair of a girl as she reads, And the red firelight steadily wheeling Weaves the hard hands of my friend in sleep. And the white dog snuffs the warmth, appealing For the man to heed lest the girl shall weep. (_Tears and dreams for them; for me Bitter science--the exams. are near. I wish I bore it more patiently. I wish you did not wait, my dear, For me to come: since work I must: Though it's all the same when we are dead.-- I wish I was only a bust, All head._) DISCORD IN CHILDHOOD OUTSIDE the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips, And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship's Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously. Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned The other voice in a silence of blood, 'neath the noise of the ash. VIRGIN YOUTH Now and again All my body springs alive, And the life that is polarised in my eyes, That quivers between my eyes and mouth, Flies like a wild thing across my body, Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous, Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame, Gathering the soft ripples below my breasts Into urgent, passionate waves, And my soft, slumbering belly Quivering awake with one impulse of desire, Gathers itself fiercely together; And my docile, fluent arms Knotting themselves with wild strength To clasp what they have never clasped. Then I tremble, and go trembling Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body, Till it has spent itself, And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself, Till the bursten flood of life ebbs back to my eyes, Back from my beautiful, lonely body Tired and unsatisfied. MONOLOGUE OF A MOTHER THIS is the last of all, this is the last! I must hold my hands, and turn my face to the fire, I must watch my dead days fusing together in dross, Shape after shape, and scene after scene from my past Fusing to one dead mass in the sinking fire Where the ash on the dying coals grows swiftly, like heavy moss. Strange he is, my son, whom I have awaited like a lover, Strange to me like a captive in a foreign country, haunting The confines and gazing out on the land where the wind is free; White and gaunt, with wistful eyes that hover Always on the distance, as if his soul were chaunting The monotonous weird of departure away from me. Like a strange white bird blown out of the frozen seas, Like a bird from the far north blown with a broken wing Into our sooty garden, he drags and beats From place to place perpetually, seeking release From me, from the hand of my love which creeps up, needing His happiness, whilst he in displeasure retreats. I must look away from him, for my faded eyes Like a cringing dog at his heels offend him now, Like a toothless hound pursuing him with my will, Till he chafes at my crouching persistence, and a sharp spark flies In my soul from under the sudden frown of his brow, As he blenches and turns away, and my heart stands still. This is the last, it will not be any more. All my life I have borne the burden of myself, All the long years of sitting in my husband's house, Never have I said to myself as he closed the door: "Now I am caught!--You are hopelessly lost, O Self, You are frightened with joy, my heart, like a frightened mouse." Three times have I offered myself, three times rejected. It will not be any more. No more, my son, my son! Never to know the glad freedom of obedience, since long ago The angel of childhood kissed me and went. I expected Another would take me,--and now, my son, O my son, I must sit awhile and wait, and never know The loss of myself, till death comes, who cannot fail. Death, in whose service is nothing of gladness, takes me; For the lips and the eyes of God are behind a veil. And the thought of the lipless voice of the Father shakes me With fear, and fills my eyes with the tears of desire, And my heart rebels with anguish as night draws nigher, IN A BOAT SEE the stars, love, In the water much clearer and brighter Than those above us, and whiter, Like nenuphars. Star-shadows shine, love, How many stars in your bowl? How many shadows in your soul, Only mine, love, mine? When I move the oars, love, See how the stars are tossed, Distorted, the brightest lost. --So that bright one of yours, love. The poor waters spill The stars, waters broken, forsaken. --The heavens are not shaken, you say, love, Its stars stand still. There, did you see That spark fly up at us; even Stars are not safe in heaven. --What of yours, then, love, yours? What then, love, if soon Your light be tossed over a wave? Will you count the darkness a grave, And swoon, love, swoon? WEEK-NIGHT SERVICE THE five old bells Are hurrying and eagerly calling, Imploring, protesting They know, but clamorously falling Into gabbling incoherence, never resting, Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping. The silver moon That somebody has spun so high To settle the question, yes or no, has caught In the net of the night's balloon, And sits with a smooth bland smile up there in the sky Smiling at naught, Unless the winking star that keeps her company Makes little jests at the bells' insanity, As if _he_ knew aught! The patient Night Sits indifferent, hugged in her rags, She neither knows nor cares Why the old church sobs and brags; The light distresses her eyes, and tears Her old blue cloak, as she crouches and covers her face, Smiling, perhaps, if we knew it, at the bells' loud clattering disgrace. The wise old trees Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt, While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh; As by degrees The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt, And the stars can chaff The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old church Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that lurch In its cenotaph. IRONY ALWAYS, sweetheart, Carry into your room the blossoming boughs of cherry, Almond and apple and pear diffuse with light, that very Soon strews itself on the floor; and keep the radiance of spring Fresh quivering; keep the sunny-swift March-days waiting In a little throng at your door, and admit the one who is plaiting Her hair for womanhood, and play awhile with her, then bid her depart. A come and go of March-day loves Through the flower-vine, trailing screen; A fluttering in of doves. Then a launch abroad of shrinking doves Over the waste where no hope is seen Of open hands: Dance in and out Small-bosomed girls of the spring of love, With a bubble of laughter, and shrilly shout Of mirth; then the dripping of tears on your glove. DREAMS OLD AND NASCENT OLD I HAVE opened the window to warm my hands on the sill Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone. The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine, Like savage music striking far off, and there On the great, uplifted blue palace, lights stir and shine Where the glass is domed in the blue, soft air. There lies the world, my darling, full of wonder and wistfulness and strange Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as I greet the cloud Of blue palace aloft there, among misty indefinite dreams that range At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd. Over the nearness of Norwood Hill, through the mellow veil Of the afternoon glows to me the old romance of David and Dora, With the old, sweet, soothing tears, and laughter that shakes the sail Of the ship of the soul over seas where dreamed dreams lure the unoceaned explorer. All the bygone, hushèd years Streaming back where the mist distils Into forgetfulness: soft-sailing waters where fears No longer shake, where the silk sail fills With an unfelt breeze that ebbs over the seas, where the storm Of living has passed, on and on Through the coloured iridescence that swims in the warm Wake of the tumult now spent and gone, Drifts my boat, wistfully lapsing after The mists of vanishing tears and the echo of laughter. DREAMS OLD AND NASCENT NASCENT MY world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm; An endless tapestry the past has woven drapes The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform. The surface of dreams is broken, The picture of the past is shaken and scattered. Fluent, active figures of men pass along the railway, and I am woken From the dreams that the distance flattered. Along the railway, active figures of men. They have a secret that stirs in their limbs as they move Out of the distance, nearer, commanding my dreamy world. Here in the subtle, rounded flesh Beats the active ecstasy. In the sudden lifting my eyes, it is clearer, The fascination of the quick, restless Creator moving through the mesh Of men, vibrating in ecstasy through the rounded flesh. Oh my boys, bending over your books, In you is trembling and fusing The creation of a new-patterned dream, dream of a generation: And I watch to see the Creator, the power that patterns the dream. The old dreams are beautiful, beloved, soft-toned, and sure, But the dream-stuff is molten and moving mysteriously, Alluring my eyes; for I, am I not also dream-stuff, Am I not quickening, diffusing myself in the pattern, shaping and shapen? Here in my class is the answer for the great yearning: Eyes where I can watch the swim of old dreams reflected on the molten metal of dreams, Watch the stir which is rhythmic and moves them all as a heart-beat moves the blood, Here in the swelling flesh the great activity working, Visible there in the change of eyes and the mobile features. Oh the great mystery and fascination of the unseen Shaper, The power of the melting, fusing Force--heat, light, all in one, Everything great and mysterious in one, swelling and shaping the dream in the flesh, As it swells and shapes a bud into blossom. Oh the terrible ecstasy of the consciousness that I am life! Oh the miracle of the whole, the widespread, labouring concentration Swelling mankind like one bud to bring forth the fruit of a dream, Oh the terror of lifting the innermost I out of the sweep of the impulse of life, And watching the great Thing labouring through the whole round flesh of the world; And striving to catch a glimpse of the shape of the coming dream, As it quickens within the labouring, white-hot metal, Catch the scent and the colour of the coming dream, Then to fall back exhausted into the unconscious, molten life! A WINTER'S TALE YESTERDAY the fields were only grey with scattered snow, And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge; Yet her deep footsteps mark the snow, and go On towards the pines at the hills' white verge. I cannot see her, since the mist's white scarf Obscures the dark wood and the dull orange sky; But she's waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half Sobs struggling into her frosty sigh. Why does she come so promptly, when she must know That she's only the nearer to the inevitable farewell; The hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow-- Why does she come, when she knows what I have to tell? EPILOGUE PATIENCE, little Heart. One day a heavy, June-hot woman Will enter and shut the door to stay. And when your stifling heart would summon Cool, lonely night, her roused breasts will keep the night at bay, Sitting in your room like two tiger-lilies Flaming on after sunset, Destroying the cool, lonely night with the glow of their hot twilight; There in the morning, still, while the fierce strange scent comes yet Stronger, hot and red; till you thirst for the daffodillies With an anguished, husky thirst that you cannot assuage, When the daffodillies are dead, and a woman of the dog-days holds you in gage. Patience, little Heart. A BABY RUNNING BAREFOOT WHEN the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind, They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water; And the sight of their white play among the grass Is like a little robin's song, winsome, Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one flower For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings. I long for the baby to wander hither to me Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water, So that she can stand on my knee With her little bare feet in my hands, Cool like syringa buds, Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers. DISCIPLINE IT is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane, The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves; The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves. It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I endured too long. I have pushed my hands in the dark soil, under the flower of my soul And the gentle leaves, and have felt where the roots are strong Fixed in the darkness, grappling for the deep soil's little control. And there is the dark, my darling, where the roots are entangled and fight Each one for its hold on the oblivious darkness, I know that there In the night where we first have being, before we rise on the light, We are not brothers, my darling, we fight and we do not spare. And in the original dark the roots cannot keep, cannot know Any communion whatever, but they bind themselves on to the dark, And drawing the darkness together, crush from it a twilight, a slow Burning that breaks at last into leaves and a flower's bright spark. I came to the boys with love, my dear, but they turned on me; I came with gentleness, with my heart 'twixt my hands like a bowl, Like a loving-cup, like a grail, but they spilt it triumphantly And tried to break the vessel, and to violate my soul. But what have I to do with the boys, deep down in my soul, my love? I throw from out of the darkness my self like a flower into sight, Like a flower from out of the night-time, I lift my face, and those Who will may warm their hands at me, comfort this night. But whosoever would pluck apart my flowering shall burn their hands, So flowers are tender folk, and roots can only hide, Yet my flowerings of love are a fire, and the scarlet brands Of my love are roses to look at, but flames to chide. But comfort me, my love, now the fires are low, Now I am broken to earth like a winter destroyed, and all Myself but a knowledge of roots, of roots in the dark that throw A net on the undersoil, which lies passive beneath their thrall. But comfort me, for henceforth my love is yours alone, To you alone will I offer the bowl, to you will I give My essence only, but love me, and I will atone To you for my general loving, atone as long as I live. SCENT OF IRISES A FAINT, sickening scent of irises Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table A fine proud spike of purple irises Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable To see the class's lifted and bended faces Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and sable. I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast you With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin as you dipped Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast you, Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks, Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not outlast. You amid the bog-end's yellow incantation, You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above, Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs, Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love; You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent, You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove. You are always asking, do I remember, remember The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up And kindled you over deep with a cast of gold? You ask again, do the healing days close up The open darkness which then drew us in, The dark which then drank up our brimming cup. You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of night Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible; Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you! --And yes, thank God, it still is possible The healing days shall close the darkness up Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew. Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God, The fire of night is gone, and your face is ash Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day; The night has burnt us out, at last the good Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea. THE PROPHET AH, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall loom The shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their faces, Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant groom, Wounding themselves against her, denying her fecund embraces. LAST WORDS TO MIRIAM YOURS is the shame and sorrow But the disgrace is mine; Your love was dark and thorough, Mine was the love of the sun for a flower He creates with his shine. I was diligent to explore you, Blossom you stalk by stalk, Till my fire of creation bore you Shrivelling down in the final dour Anguish--then I suffered a balk. I knew your pain, and it broke My fine, craftsman's nerve; Your body quailed at my stroke, And my courage failed to give you the last Fine torture you did deserve. You are shapely, you are adorned, But opaque and dull in the flesh, Who, had I but pierced with the thorned Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast In a lovely illumined mesh. Like a painted window: the best Suffering burnt through your flesh, Undrossed it and left it blest With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now Who shall take you afresh? Now who will burn you free From your body's terrors and dross, Since the fire has failed in me? What man will stoop in your flesh to plough The shrieking cross? A mute, nearly beautiful thing Is your face, that fills me with shame As I see it hardening, Warping the perfect image of God, And darkening my eternal fame. MYSTERY Now I am all One bowl of kisses, Such as the tall Slim votaresses Of Egypt filled For a God's excesses. I lift to you My bowl of kisses, And through the temple's Blue recesses Cry out to you In wild caresses. And to my lips' Bright crimson rim The passion slips, And down my slim White body drips The shining hymn. And still before The altar I Exult the bowl Brimful, and cry To you to stoop And drink, Most High. Oh drink me up That I may be Within your cup Like a mystery, Like wine that is still In ecstasy. Glimmering still In ecstasy, Commingled wines Of you and me In one fulfil The mystery. PATIENCE A WIND comes from the north Blowing little flocks of birds Like spray across the town, And a train, roaring forth, Rushes stampeding down With cries and flying curds Of steam, out of the darkening north. Whither I turn and set Like a needle steadfastly, Waiting ever to get The news that she is free; But ever fixed, as yet, To the lode of her agony. BALLAD OF ANOTHER OPHELIA OH the green glimmer of apples in the orchard, Lamps in a wash of rain! Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stack-yard, Oh tears on the window pane! Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples, Full of disappointment and of rain, Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples Of autumn tell the withered tale again. All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen, Cluck, and the rain-wet wings, Cluck, my marigold bird, and again Cluck for your yellow darlings. For the grey rat found the gold thirteen Huddled away in the dark, Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and keen, Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark. Once I had a lover bright like running water, Once his face was laughing like the sky; Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I. What, then, is there hidden in the skirts of all the blossom? What is peeping from your wings, oh mother hen? 'Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste for wisdom; What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men! Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom, And her shift is lying white upon the floor, That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a rain-storm, Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store. Oh the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples, Oh the golden sparkles laid extinct! And oh, behind the cloud-sheaves, like yellow autumn dapples, Did you see the wicked sun that winked! RESTLESSNESS AT the open door of the room I stand and look at the night, Hold my hand to catch the raindrops, that slant into sight, Arriving grey from the darkness above suddenly into the light of the room. I will escape from the hollow room, the box of light, And be out in the bewildering darkness, which is always fecund, which might Mate my hungry soul with a germ of its womb. I will go out to the night, as a man goes down to the shore To draw his net through the surfs thin line, at the dawn before The sun warms the sea, little, lonely and sad, sifting the sobbing tide. I will sift the surf that edges the night, with my net, the four Strands of my eyes and my lips and my hands and my feet, sifting the store Of flotsam until my soul is tired or satisfied. I will catch in my eyes' quick net The faces of all the women as they go past, Bend over them with my soul, to cherish the wet Cheeks and wet hair a moment, saying: "Is it you?" Looking earnestly under the dark umbrellas, held fast Against the wind; and if, where the lamplight blew Its rainy swill about us, she answered me With a laugh and a merry wildness that it was she Who was seeking me, and had found me at last to free Me now from the stunting bonds of my chastity, How glad I should be! Moving along in the mysterious ebb of the night Pass the men whose eyes are shut like anemones in a dark pool; Why don't they open with vision and speak to me, what have they in sight? Why do I wander aimless among them, desirous fool? I can always linger over the huddled books on the stalls, Always gladden my amorous fingers with the touch of their leaves, Always kneel in courtship to the shelves in the doorways, where falls The shadow, always offer myself to one mistress, who always receives. But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good. There is something I want to feel in my running blood, Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain, I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain Me its life as it hurries in secret. I will trail my hands again through the drenched, cold leaves Till my hands are full of the chillness and touch of leaves, Till at length they induce me to sleep, and to forget. A BABY ASLEEP AFTER PAIN As a drenched, drowned bee Hangs numb and heavy from a bending flower, So clings to me My baby, her brown hair brushed with wet tears And laid against her cheek; Her soft white legs hanging heavily over my arm Swinging heavily to my movement as I walk. My sleeping baby hangs upon my life, Like a burden she hangs on me. She has always seemed so light, But now she is wet with tears and numb with pain Even her floating hair sinks heavily, Reaching downwards; As the wings of a drenched, drowned bee Are a heaviness, and a weariness. ANXIETY THE hoar-frost crumbles in the sun, The crisping steam of a train Melts in the air, while two black birds Sweep past the window again. Along the vacant road, a red Bicycle approaches; I wait In a thaw of anxiety, for the boy To leap down at our gate. He has passed us by; but is it Relief that starts in my breast? Or a deeper bruise of knowing that still She has no rest. THE PUNISHER I HAVE fetched the tears up out of the little wells, Scooped them up with small, iron words, Dripping over the runnels. The harsh, cold wind of my words drove on, and still I watched the tears on the guilty cheek of the boys Glitter and spill. Cringing Pity, and Love, white-handed, came Hovering about the Judgment which stood in my eyes, Whirling a flame. . . . . . . . The tears are dry, and the cheeks' young fruits are fresh With laughter, and clear the exonerated eyes, since pain Beat through the flesh. The Angel of Judgment has departed again to the Nearness. Desolate I am as a church whose lights are put out. And night enters in drearness. The fire rose up in the bush and blazed apace, The thorn-leaves crackled and twisted and sweated in anguish; Then God left the place. Like a flower that the frost has hugged and let go, my head Is heavy, and my heart beats slowly, laboriously, My strength is shed. THE END IF I could have put you in my heart, If but I could have wrapped you in myself, How glad I should have been! And now the chart Of memory unrolls again to me The course of our journey here, before we had to part. And oh, that you had never, never been Some of your selves, my love, that some Of your several faces I had never seen! And still they come before me, and they go, And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene. And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night, And have not any longer any hope To heal the suffering, or make requite For all your life of asking and despair, I own that some of me is dead to-night. THE BRIDE MY love looks like a girl to-night, But she is old. The plaits that lie along her pillow Are not gold, But threaded with filigree, And uncanny cold. She looks like a young maiden, since her brow Is smooth and fair, Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed, She sleeps a rare Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed. Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams Of perfect things. She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream, And her dead mouth sings By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings. THE VIRGIN MOTHER MY little love, my darling, You were a doorway to me; You let me out of the confines Into this strange countrie, Where people are crowded like thistles, Yet are shapely and comely to see. My little love, my dearest Twice have you issued me, Once from your womb, sweet mother, Once from myself, to be Free of all hearts, my darling, Of each heart's home-life free. And so, my love, my mother, I shall always be true to you; Twice I am born, my dearest, To life, and to death, in you; And this is the life hereafter Wherein I am true. I kiss you good-bye, my darling, Our ways are different now; You are a seed in the night-time, I am a man, to plough The difficult glebe of the future For God to endow. I kiss you good-bye, my dearest, It is finished between us here. Oh, if I were calm as you are, Sweet and still on your bier! God, if I had not to leave you Alone, my dear! Let the last word be uttered, Oh grant the farewell is said! Spare me the strength to leave you Now you are dead. I must go, but my soul lies helpless Beside your bed. AT THE WINDOW THE pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter; While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters. Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede, Winding about their dimness the mist's grey cerements, after The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed. The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window glass. DRUNK Too far away, oh love, I know, To save me from this haunted road, Whose lofty roses break and blow On a night-sky bent with a load Of lights: each solitary rose, Each arc-lamp golden does expose Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows Night blenched with a thousand snows. Of hawthorn and of lilac trees, White lilac; shows discoloured night Dripping with all the golden lees Laburnum gives back to light And shows the red of hawthorn set On high to the purple heaven of night, Like flags in blenched blood newly wet, Blood shed in the noiseless fight. Of life for love and love for life, Of hunger for a little food, Of kissing, lost for want of a wife Long ago, long ago wooed. . . . . . . Too far away you are, my love, To steady my brain in this phantom show That passes the nightly road above And returns again below. The enormous cliff of horse-chestnut trees Has poised on each of its ledges An erect small girl looking down at me; White-night-gowned little chits I see, And they peep at me over the edges Of the leaves as though they would leap, should I call Them down to my arms; "But, child, you're too small for me, too small Your little charms." White little sheaves of night-gowned maids, Some other will thresh you out! And I see leaning from the shades A lilac like a lady there, who braids Her white mantilla about Her face, and forward leans to catch the sight Of a man's face, Gracefully sighing through the white Flowery mantilla of lace. And another lilac in purple veiled Discreetly, all recklessly calls In a low, shocking perfume, to know who has hailed Her forth from the night: my strength has failed In her voice, my weak heart falls: Oh, and see the laburnum shimmering Her draperies down, As if she would slip the gold, and glimmering White, stand naked of gown. . . . . . . The pageant of flowery trees above The street pale-passionate goes, And back again down the pavement, Love In a lesser pageant flows. Two and two are the folk that walk, They pass in a half embrace Of linkèd bodies, and they talk With dark face leaning to face. Come then, my love, come as you will Along this haunted road, Be whom you will, my darling, I shall Keep with you the troth I trowed. SORROW WHY does the thin grey strand Floating up from the forgotten Cigarette between my fingers, Why does it trouble me? Ah, you will understand; When I carried my mother downstairs, A few times only, at the beginning Of her soft-foot malady, I should find, for a reprimand To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs On the breast of my coat; and one by one I let them float up the dark chimney. DOLOR OF AUTUMN THE acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn And the snore of the night in my ear. For suddenly, flush-fallen, All my life, in a rush Of shedding away, has left me Naked, exposed on the bush. I, on the bush of the globe, Like a newly-naked berry, shrink Disclosed: but I also am prowling As well in the scents that slink Abroad: I in this naked berry Of flesh that stands dismayed on the bush; And I in the stealthy, brindled odours Prowling about the lush And acrid night of autumn; My soul, along with the rout, Rank and treacherous, prowling, Disseminated out. For the night, with a great breath intaken, Has taken my spirit outside Me, till I reel with disseminated consciousness, Like a man who has died. At the same time I stand exposed Here on the bush of the globe, A newly-naked berry of flesh For the stars to probe. THE INHERITANCE SINCE you did depart Out of my reach, my darling, Into the hidden, I see each shadow start With recognition, and I Am wonder-ridden. I am dazed with the farewell, But I scarcely feel your loss. You left me a gift Of tongues, so the shadows tell Me things, and silences toss Me their drift. You sent me a cloven fire Out of death, and it burns in the draught Of the breathing hosts, Kindles the darkening pyre For the sorrowful, till strange brands waft Like candid ghosts. Form after form, in the streets Waves like a ghost along, Kindled to me; The star above the house-top greets Me every eve with a long Song fierily. All day long, the town Glimmers with subtle ghosts Going up and down In a common, prison-like dress; But their daunted looking flickers To me, and I answer, Yes! So I am not lonely nor sad Although bereaved of you, My little love. I move among a kinsfolk clad With words, but the dream shows through As they move. SILENCE SINCE I lost you I am silence-haunted, Sounds wave their little wings A moment, then in weariness settle On the flood that soundless swings. Whether the people in the street Like pattering ripples go by, Or whether the theatre sighs and sighs With a loud, hoarse sigh: Or the wind shakes a ravel of light Over the dead-black river, Or night's last echoing Makes the daybreak shiver: I feel the silence waiting To take them all up again In its vast completeness, enfolding The sound of men. LISTENING I LISTEN to the stillness of you, My dear, among it all; I feel your silence touch my words as I talk, And take them in thrall. My words fly off a forge The length of a spark; I see the night-sky easily sip them Up in the dark. The lark sings loud and glad, Yet I am not loth That silence should take the song and the bird And lose them both. A train goes roaring south, The steam-flag flying; I see the stealthy shadow of silence Alongside going. And off the forge of the world, Whirling in the draught of life, Go sparks of myriad people, filling The night with strife. Yet they never change the darkness Or blench it with noise; Alone on the perfect silence The stars are buoys. BROODING GRIEF A YELLOW leaf from the darkness Hops like a frog before me. Why should I start and stand still? I was watching the woman that bore me Stretched in the brindled darkness Of the sick-room, rigid with will To die: and the quick leaf tore me Back to this rainy swill Of leaves and lamps and traffic mingled before me. LOTUS HURT BY THE COLD How many times, like lotus lilies risen Upon the surface of a river, there Have risen floating on my blood the rare Soft glimmers of my hope escaped from prison. So I am clothed all over with the light And sensitive beautiful blossoming of passion; Till naked for her in the finest fashion The flowers of all my mud swim into sight. And then I offer all myself unto This woman who likes to love me: but she turns A look of hate upon the flower that burns To break and pour her out its precious dew. And slowly all the blossom shuts in pain, And all the lotus buds of love sink over To die unopened: when my moon-faced lover, Kind on the weight of suffering, smiles again. MALADE THE sick grapes on the chair by the bed lie prone; at the window The tassel of the blind swings gently, tapping the pane, As a little wind comes in. The room is the hollow rind of a fruit, a gourd Scooped out and dry, where a spider, Folded in its legs as in a bed, Lies on the dust, watching where is nothing to see but twilight and walls. And if the day outside were mine! What is the day But a grey cave, with great grey spider-cloths hanging Low from the roof, and the wet dust falling softly from them Over the wet dark rocks, the houses, and over The spiders with white faces, that scuttle on the floor of the cave! I am choking with creeping, grey confinedness. But somewhere birds, beside a lake of light, spread wings Larger than the largest fans, and rise in a stream upwards And upwards on the sunlight that rains invisible, So that the birds are like one wafted feather, Small and ecstatic suspended over a vast spread country. LIAISON A BIG bud of moon hangs out of the twilight, Star-spiders spinning their thread Hang high suspended, withouten respite Watching us overhead. Come then under the trees, where the leaf-cloths Curtain us in so dark That here we're safe from even the ermin-moth's Flitting remark. Here in this swarthy, secret tent, Where black boughs flap the ground, You shall draw the thorn from my discontent, Surgeon me sound. This rare, rich night! For in here Under the yew-tree tent The darkness is loveliest where I could sear You like frankincense into scent. Here not even the stars can spy us, Not even the white moths write With their little pale signs on the wall, to try us And set us affright. Kiss but then the dust from off my lips, But draw the turgid pain From my breast to your bosom, eclipse My soul again. Waste me not, I beg you, waste Not the inner night: Taste, oh taste and let me taste The core of delight. TROTH WITH THE DEAD THE moon is broken in twain, and half a moon Before me lies on the still, pale floor of the sky; The other half of the broken coin of troth Is buried away in the dark, where the still dead lie. They buried her half in the grave when they laid her away; I had pushed it gently in among the thick of her hair Where it gathered towards the plait, on that very last day; And like a moon in secret it is shining there. My half shines in the sky, for a general sign Of the troth with the dead I pledged myself to keep; Turning its broken edge to the dark, it shines indeed Like the sign of a lover who turns to the dark of sleep. Against my heart the inviolate sleep breaks still In darkened waves whose breaking echoes o'er The wondering world of my wakeful day, till I'm lost In the midst of the places I knew so well before. DISSOLUTE MANY years have I still to burn, detained Like a candle flame on this body; but I enshrine A darkness within me, a presence which sleeps contained In my flame of living, her soul enfolded in mine. And through these years, while I burn on the fuel of life, What matter the stuff I lick up in my living flame, Seeing I keep in the fire-core, inviolate, A night where she dreams my dreams for me, ever the same. SUBMERGENCE WHEN along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker round me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be. Nay, though the pole-star Is blown out like a candle, And all the heavens are wandering in disarray, Yet when pleiads of people are Deployed around me, and I see The street's long outstretched Milky Way, When people flicker down the pavement, I forget my bereavement. THE ENKINDLED SPRING THIS spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze. And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost. REPROACH HAD I but known yesterday, Helen, you could discharge the ache Out of the cloud; Had I known yesterday you could take The turgid electric ache away, Drink it up with your proud White body, as lovely white lightning Is drunk from an agonised sky by the earth, I might have hated you, Helen. But since my limbs gushed full of fire, Since from out of my blood and bone Poured a heavy flame To you, earth of my atmosphere, stone Of my steel, lovely white flint of desire, You have no name. Earth of my swaying atmosphere, Substance of my inconstant breath, I cannot but cleave to you. Since you have drunken up the drear Painful electric storm, and death Is washed from the blue Of my eyes, I see you beautiful. You are strong and passive and beautiful, I come like winds that uncertain hover; But you Are the earth I hover over. THE HANDS OF THE BETROTHED HER tawny eyes are onyx of thoughtlessness, Hardened they are like gems in ancient modesty; Yea, and her mouth's prudent and crude caress Means even less than her many words to me. Though her kiss betrays me also this, this only Consolation, that in her lips her blood at climax clips Two wild, dumb paws in anguish on the lonely Fruit of my heart, ere down, rebuked, it slips. I know from her hardened lips that still her heart is Hungry for me, yet if I put my hand in her breast She puts me away, like a saleswoman whose mart is Endangered by the pilferer on his quest. But her hands are still the woman, the large, strong hands Heavier than mine, yet like leverets caught in steel When I hold them; my still soul understands Their dumb confession of what her sort must feel. For never her hands come nigh me but they lift Like heavy birds from the morning stubble, to settle Upon me like sleeping birds, like birds that shift Uneasily in their sleep, disturbing my mettle. How caressingly she lays her hand on my knee, How strangely she tries to disown it, as it sinks In my flesh and bone and forages into me, How it stirs like a subtle stoat, whatever she thinks! And often I see her clench her fingers tight And thrust her fists suppressed in the folds of her skirt; And sometimes, how she grasps her arms with her bright Big hands, as if surely her arms did hurt. And I have seen her stand all unaware Pressing her spread hands over her breasts, as she Would crush their mounds on her heart, to kill in there The pain that is her simple ache for me. Her strong hands take my part, the part of a man To her; she crushes them into her bosom deep Where I should lie, and with her own strong span Closes her arms, that should fold me in sleep. Ah, and she puts her hands upon the wall, Presses them there, and kisses her bright hands, Then lets her black hair loose, the darkness fall About her from her maiden-folded bands. And sits in her own dark night of her bitter hair Dreaming--God knows of what, for to me she's the same Betrothed young lady who loves me, and takes care Of her womanly virtue and of my good name. EXCURSION I WONDER, can the night go by; Can this shot arrow of travel fly Shaft-golden with light, sheer into the sky Of a dawned to-morrow, Without ever sleep delivering us From each other, or loosing the dolorous Unfruitful sorrow! What is it then that you can see That at the window endlessly You watch the red sparks whirl and flee And the night look through? Your presence peering lonelily there Oppresses me so, I can hardly bear To share the train with you. You hurt my heart-beats' privacy; I wish I could put you away from me; I suffocate in this intimacy, For all that I love you; How I have longed for this night in the train, Yet now every fibre of me cries in pain To God to remove you. But surely my soul's best dream is still That one night pouring down shall swill Us away in an utter sleep, until We are one, smooth-rounded. Yet closely bitten in to me Is this armour of stiff reluctancy That keeps me impounded. So, dear love, when another night Pours on us, lift your fingers white And strip me naked, touch me light, Light, light all over. For I ache most earnestly for your touch, Yet I cannot move, however much I would be your lover. Night after night with a blemish of day Unblown and unblossomed has withered away; Come another night, come a new night, say Will you pluck me apart? Will you open the amorous, aching bud Of my body, and loose the burning flood That would leap to you from my heart? PERFIDY HOLLOW rang the house when I knocked on the door, And I lingered on the threshold with my hand Upraised to knock and knock once more: Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor, Hollow re-echoed my heart. The low-hung lamps stretched down the road With shadows drifting underneath, With a music of soft, melodious feet Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet The low-hung light of her eyes. The golden lamps down the street went out, The last car trailed the night behind; And I in the darkness wandered about With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt In the dying lamp of my love. Two brown ponies trotting slowly Stopped at a dim-lit trough to drink: The dark van drummed down the distance slowly; While the city stars so dim and holy Drew nearer to search through the streets. A hastening car swept shameful past, I saw her hid in the shadow, I saw her step to the curb, and fast Run to the silent door, where last I had stood with my hand uplifted. She clung to the door in her haste to enter, Entered, and quickly cast It shut behind her, leaving the street aghast. A SPIRITUAL WOMAN CLOSE your eyes, my love, let me make you blind; They have taught you to see Only a mean arithmetic on the face of things, A cunning algebra in the faces of men, And God like geometry Completing his circles, and working cleverly. I'll kiss you over the eyes till I kiss you blind; If I can--if any one could. Then perhaps in the dark you'll have got what you want to find. You've discovered so many bits, with your clever eyes, And I'm a kaleidoscope That you shake and shake, and yet it won't come to your mind. Now stop carping at me.--But God, how I hate you! Do you fear I shall swindle you? Do you think if you take me as I am, that that will abate you Somehow?--so sad, so intrinsic, so spiritual, yet so cautious, you Must have me all in your will and your consciousness-- I hate you. MATING ROUND clouds roll in the arms of the wind, The round earth rolls in a clasp of blue sky, And see, where the budding hazels are thinned, The wild anemones lie In undulating shivers beneath the wind. Over the blue of the waters ply White ducks, a living flotilla of cloud; And, look you, floating just thereby, The blue-gleamed drake stems proud Like Abraham, whose seed should multiply. In the lustrous gleam of the water, there Scramble seven toads across the silk, obscure leaves, Seven toads that meet in the dusk to share The darkness that interweaves The sky and earth and water and live things everywhere. Look now, through the woods where the beech-green spurts Like a storm of emerald snow, look, see A great bay stallion dances, skirts The bushes sumptuously, Going outward now in the spring to his brief deserts. Ah love, with your rich, warm face aglow, What sudden expectation opens you So wide as you watch the catkins blow Their dust from the birch on the blue Lift of the pulsing wind--ah, tell me you know! Ah, surely! Ah, sure from the golden sun A quickening, masculine gleam floats in to all Us creatures, people and flowers undone, Lying open under his thrall, As he begets the year in us. What, then, would you shun? Why, I should think that from the earth there fly Fine thrills to the neighbour stars, fine yellow beams Thrown lustily off from our full-blown, high Bursting globe of dreams, To quicken the spheres that are virgin still in the sky. Do you not hear each morsel thrill With joy at travelling to plant itself within The expectant one, therein to instil New rapture, new shape to win, From the thick of life wake up another will? Surely, and if that I would spill The vivid, ah, the fiery surplus of life, From off my brimming measure, to fill You, and flush you rife With increase, do you call it evil, and always evil? A LOVE SONG REJECT me not if I should say to you I do forget the sounding of your voice, I do forget your eyes that searching through The mists perceive our marriage, and rejoice. Yet, when the apple-blossom opens wide Under the pallid moonlight's fingering, I see your blanched face at my breast, and hide My eyes from diligent work, malingering. Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw The blind to hide the garden, where the moon Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon. And I do lift my aching arms to you, And I do lift my anguished, avid breast, And I do weep for very pain of you, And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest. And I do toss through the troubled night for you, Dreaming your yielded mouth is given to mine, Feeling your strong breast carry me on into The peace where sleep is stronger even than wine. BROTHER AND SISTER THE shorn moon trembling indistinct on her path, Frail as a scar upon the pale blue sky, Draws towards the downward slope; some sorrow hath Worn her down to the quick, so she faintly fares Along her foot-searched way without knowing why She creeps persistent down the sky's long stairs. Some say they see, though I have never seen, The dead moon heaped within the new moon's arms; For surely the fragile, fine young thing had been Too heavily burdened to mount the heavens so. But my heart stands still, as a new, strong dread alarms Me; might a young girl be heaped with such shadow of woe? Since Death from the mother moon has pared us down to the quick, And cast us forth like shorn, thin moons, to travel An uncharted way among the myriad thick Strewn stars of silent people, and luminous litter Of lives which sorrows like mischievous dark mice chavel To nought, diminishing each star's glitter, Since Death has delivered us utterly, naked and white, Since the month of childhood is over, and we stand alone, Since the beloved, faded moon that set us alight Is delivered from us and pays no heed though we moan In sorrow, since we stand in bewilderment, strange And fearful to sally forth down the sky's long range. We may not cry to her still to sustain us here, We may not hold her shadow back from the dark. Oh, let us here forget, let us take the sheer Unknown that lies before us, bearing the ark Of the covenant onwards where she cannot go. Let us rise and leave her now, she will never know. AFTER MANY DAYS I WONDER if with you, as it is with me, If under your slipping words, that easily flow About you as a garment, easily, Your violent heart beats to and fro! Long have I waited, never once confessed, Even to myself, how bitter the separation; Now, being come again, how make the best Reparation? If I could cast this clothing off from me, If I could lift my naked self to you, Or if only you would repulse me, a wound would be Good; it would let the ache come through. But that you hold me still so kindly cold Aloof my flaming heart will not allow; Yea, but I loathe you that you should withhold Your pleasure now. BLUE THE earth again like a ship steams out of the dark sea over The edge of the blue, and the sun stands up to see us glide Slowly into another day; slowly the rover Vessel of darkness takes the rising tide. I, on the deck, am startled by this dawn confronting Me who am issued amazed from the darkness, stripped And quailing here in the sunshine, delivered from haunting The night unsounded whereon our days are shipped. Feeling myself undawning, the day's light playing upon me, I who am substance of shadow, I all compact Of the stuff of the night, finding myself all wrongly Among the crowds of things in the sunshine jostled and racked. I with the night on my lips, I sigh with the silence of death; And what do I care though the very stones should cry me unreal, though the clouds Shine in conceit of substance upon me, who am less than the rain. Do I not know the darkness within them? What are they but shrouds? The clouds go down the sky with a wealthy ease Casting a shadow of scorn upon me for my share in death; but I Hold my own in the midst of them, darkling, defy The whole of the day to extinguish the shadow I lift on the breeze. Yea, though the very clouds have vantage over me, Enjoying their glancing flight, though my love is dead, I still am not homeless here, I've a tent by day Of darkness where she sleeps on her perfect bed. And I know the host, the minute sparkling of darkness Which vibrates untouched and virile through the grandeur of night, But which, when dawn crows challenge, assaulting the vivid motes Of living darkness, bursts fretfully, and is bright: Runs like a fretted arc-lamp into light, Stirred by conflict to shining, which else Were dark and whole with the night. Runs to a fret of speed like a racing wheel, Which else were aslumber along with the whole Of the dark, swinging rhythmic instead of a-reel. Is chafed to anger, bursts into rage like thunder; Which else were a silent grasp that held the heavens Arrested, beating thick with wonder. Leaps like a fountain of blue sparks leaping In a jet from out of obscurity, Which erst was darkness sleeping. Runs into streams of bright blue drops, Water and stones and stars, and myriads Of twin-blue eyes, and crops Of floury grain, and all the hosts of day, All lovely hosts of ripples caused by fretting The Darkness into play. SNAP-DRAGON SHE bade me follow to her garden, where The mellow sunlight stood as in a cup Between the old grey walls; I did not dare To raise my face, I did not dare look up, Lest her bright eyes like sparrows should fly in My windows of discovery, and shrill "Sin." So with a downcast mien and laughing voice I followed, followed the swing of her white dress That rocked in a lilt along: I watched the poise Of her feet as they flew for a space, then paused to press The grass deep down with the royal burden of her: And gladly I'd offered my breast to the tread of her. "I like to see," she said, and she crouched her down, She sunk into my sight like a settling bird; And her bosom couched in the confines of her gown Like heavy birds at rest there, softly stirred By her measured breaths: "I like to see," said she, "The snap-dragon put out his tongue at me." She laughed, she reached her hand out to the flower, Closing its crimson throat. My own throat in her power Strangled, my heart swelled up so full As if it would burst its wine-skin in my throat, Choke me in my own crimson. I watched her pull The gorge of the gaping flower, till the blood did float Over my eyes, and I was blind-- Her large brown hand stretched over The windows of my mind; And there in the dark I did discover Things I was out to find: My Grail, a brown bowl twined With swollen veins that met in the wrist, Under whose brown the amethyst I longed to taste. I longed to turn My heart's red measure in her cup, I longed to feel my hot blood burn With the amethyst in her cup. Then suddenly she looked up, And I was blind in a tawny-gold day, Till she took her eyes away. So she came down from above And emptied my heart of love. So I held my heart aloft To the cuckoo that hung like a dove, And she settled soft It seemed that I and the morning world Were pressed cup-shape to take this reiver Bird who was weary to have furled Her wings in us, As we were weary to receive her. This bird, this rich, Sumptuous central grain, This mutable witch, This one refrain, This laugh in the fight, This clot of night, This core of delight. She spoke, and I closed my eyes To shut hallucinations out. I echoed with surprise Hearing my mere lips shout The answer they did devise. Again I saw a brown bird hover Over the flowers at my feet; I felt a brown bird hover Over my heart, and sweet Its shadow lay on my heart. I thought I saw on the clover A brown bee pulling apart The closed flesh of the clover And burrowing in its heart. She moved her hand, and again I felt the brown bird cover My heart; and then The bird came down on my heart, As on a nest the rover Cuckoo comes, and shoves over The brim each careful part Of love, takes possession, and settles her down, With her wings and her feathers to drown The nest in a heat of love. She turned her flushed face to me for the glint Of a moment. "See," she laughed, "if you also Can make them yawn." I put my hand to the dint In the flower's throat, and the flower gaped wide with woe. She watched, she went of a sudden intensely still, She watched my hand, to see what I would fulfil. I pressed the wretched, throttled flower between My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white and keen, And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh, Until her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved down to the staff. She hid her face, she murmured between her lips The low word "Don't." I let the flower fall, But held my hand afloat towards the slips Of blossom she fingered, and my fingers all Put forth to her: she did not move, nor I, For my hand like a snake watched hers, that could not fly. Then I laughed in the dark of my heart, I did exult Like a sudden chuckling of music. I bade her eyes Meet mine, I opened her helpless eyes to consult Their fear, their shame, their joy that underlies Defeat in such a battle. In the dark of her eyes My heart was fierce to make her laughter rise. Till her dark deeps shook with convulsive thrills, and the dark Of her spirit wavered like water thrilled with light; And my heart leaped up in longing to plunge its stark Fervour within the pool of her twilight, Within her spacious soul, to grope in delight. And I do not care, though the large hands of revenge Shall get my throat at last, shall get it soon, If the joy that they are searching to avenge Have risen red on my night as a harvest moon, Which even death can only put out for me; And death, I know, is better than not-to-be. A PASSING BELL MOURNFULLY to and fro, to and fro the trees are waving; _What did you say, my dear?_ The rain-bruised leaves are suddenly shaken, as a child Asleep still shakes in the clutch of a sob-- _Yes, my love, I hear._ One lonely bell, one only, the storm-tossed afternoon is braving, _Why not let it ring?_ The roses lean down when they hear it, the tender, mild Flowers of the bleeding-heart fall to the throb-- _It is such a little thing!_ A wet bird walks on the lawn, call to the boy to come and look, _Yes, it is over now._ Call to him out of the silence, call him to see The starling shaking its head as it walks in the grass-- _Ah, who knows how?_ He cannot see it, I can never show it him, how it shook-- _Don't disturb him, darling._ --Its head as it walked: I can never call him to me, Never, he _is_ not, whatever shall come to pass. _No, look at the wet starling._ IN TROUBLE AND SHAME I LOOK at the swaling sunset And wish I could go also Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar. I wish that I could go Through the red doors where I could put off My shame like shoes in the porch, My pain like garments, And leave my flesh discarded lying Like luggage of some departed traveller Gone one knows not where. Then I would turn round, And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber, I would laugh with joy. ELEGY SINCE I lost you, my darling, the sky has come near, And I am of it, the small sharp stars are quite near, The white moon going among them like a white bird among snow-berries, And the sound of her gently rustling in heaven like a bird I hear. And I am willing to come to you now, my dear, As a pigeon lets itself off from a cathedral dome To be lost in the haze of the sky, I would like to come, And be lost out of sight with you, and be gone like foam. For I am tired, my dear, and if I could lift my feet, My tenacious feet from off the dome of the earth To fall like a breath within the breathing wind Where you are lost, what rest, my love, what rest! GREY EVENING WHEN you went, how was it you carried with you My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours? My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers, And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue? Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped And garnered that the golden daylight yields. Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk, As farther off the scythe of night is swung, And little stars come rolling from their husk. And all the earth is gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has withered and gone cold. And so I sit and scan the book of grey, Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading, All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding With wounds of sunset and the dying day. FIRELIGHT AND NIGHTFALL THE darkness steals the forms of all the queens, But oh, the palms of his two black hands are red, Inflamed with binding up the sheaves of dead Hours that were once all glory and all queens. And I remember all the sunny hours Of queens in hyacinth and skies of gold, And morning singing where the woods are scrolled And diapered above the chaunting flowers. Here lamps are white like snowdrops in the grass; The town is like a churchyard, all so still And grey now night is here; nor will Another torn red sunset come to pass. THE MYSTIC BLUE OUT of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping, Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping. Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel. And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops. And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes, The rainbow arching over in the skies, New sparks of wonder opening in surprise. All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously, Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see. 
22726	----	D.H. Lawrence (1918) _New Poems_ NEW POEMS POEMS BY THE SAME AUTHOR LOVE POEMS AND OTHERS AMORES LOOK, WE HAVE COME THROUGH FIRST PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1918 NEW EDITION (RESET), AUGUST, 1919 New Poems By D. H. Lawrence London: Martin Seeker TO AMY LOWELL THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, LONDON AND NORWICH, ENGLAND CONTENTS Apprehension Coming Awake From a College Window Flapper Birdcage Walk Letter from Town: The Almond Tree Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning Thief in the Night Letter from Town: On a Grey Evening in March Suburbs on a Hazy Day Hyde Park at Night: Clerks Gipsy Two-Fold Under the Oak Sigh no More Love Storm Parliament Hill in the Evening Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street Walkers Tarantella In Church Piano Embankment at Night: Charity Phantasmagoria Next Morning Palimpsest of Twilight Embankment at Night: Outcasts Winter in the Boulevard School on the Outskirts Sickness Everlasting Flowers The North Country Bitterness of Death Seven Seals Reading a Letter Twenty Years Ago Intime Two Wives Heimweh Débâcle Narcissus Autumn Sunshine On That Day APPREHENSION AND all hours long, the town Roars like a beast in a cave That is wounded there And like to drown; While days rush, wave after wave On its lair. An invisible woe unseals The flood, so it passes beyond All bounds: the great old city Recumbent roars as it feels The foamy paw of the pond Reach from immensity. But all that it can do Now, as the tide rises, Is to listen and hear the grim Waves crash like thunder through The splintered streets, hear noises Roll hollow in the interim. COMING AWAKE WHEN I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the wall, The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across, And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas In the window, his body black fur, and the sound of him cross. There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember. Why should I? The run- ning lights And the airy primulas, oblivious Of the impending bee--they were fair enough sights. FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW THE glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping, Goes trembling past me up the College wall. Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping, The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall. Beyond the leaves that overhang the street, Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white, Passes the world with shadows at their feet Going left and right. Remote, although I hear the beggar's cough, See the woman's twinkling fingers tend him a coin, I sit absolved, assured I am better off Beyond a world I never want to join. FLAPPER LOVE has crept out of her sealéd heart As a field-bee, black and amber, Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start. Mischief has come in her dawning eyes, And a glint of coloured iris brings Such as lies along the folded wings Of the bee before he flies. Who, with a ruffling, careful breath, Has opened the wings of the wild young sprite? Has fluttered her spirit to stumbling flight In her eyes, as a young bee stumbleth? Love makes the burden of her voice. The hum of his heavy, staggering wings Sets quivering with wisdom the common things That she says, and her words rejoice. BIRDCAGE WALK WHEN the wind blows her veil And uncovers her laughter I cease, I turn pale. When the wind blows her veil From the woes I bewail Of love and hereafter: When the wind blows her veil I cease, I turn pale. LETTER FROM TOWN: THE ALMOND TREE YOU promised to send me some violets. Did you forget? White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge? Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledge Of our early love that hardly has opened yet. Here there's an almond tree--you have never seen Such a one in the north--it flowers on the street, and I stand Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers that expand At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean. Under the almond tree, the happy lands Provence, Japan, and Italy repose, And passing feet are chatter and clapping of those Who play around us, country girls clapping their hands. You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown, All your unbearable tenderness, you with the laughter Startled upon your eyes now so wide with here- after, You with loose hands of abandonment hanging down. FLAT SUBURBS, S.W., IN THE MORNING THE new red houses spring like plants In level rows Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants Its square shadows. The pink young houses show one side bright Flatly assuming the sun, And one side shadow, half in sight, Half-hiding the pavement-run; Where hastening creatures pass intent On their level way, Threading like ants that can never relent And have nothing to say. Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand At random, desolate twigs, To testify to a blight on the land That has stripped their sprigs. THIEF IN THE NIGHT LAST night a thief came to me And struck at me with something dark. I cried, but no one could hear me, I lay dumb and stark. When I awoke this morning I could find no trace; Perhaps 'twas a dream of warning, For I've lost my peace. LETTER FROM TOWN: ON A GREY EVENING IN MARCH THE clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly northward to you, While north of them all, at the farthest ends, stands one bright-bosomed, aglance With fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts, red-fire seas running through The rocks where ravens flying to windward melt as a well-shot lance. You should be out by the orchard, where violets secretly darken the earth, Or there in the woods of the twilight, with northern wind-flowers shaken astir. Think of me here in the library, trying and trying a song that is worth Tears and swords to my heart, arrows no armour will turn or deter. You tell me the lambs have come, they lie like daisies white in the grass Of the dark-green hills; new calves in shed; peewits turn after the plough-- It is well for you. For me the navvies work in the road where I pass And I want to smite in anger the barren rock of each waterless brow. Like the sough of a wind that is caught up high in the mesh of the budding trees, A sudden car goes sweeping past, and I strain my soul to hear The voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it rushes past like a breeze, To hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting the after-echo of fear. SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY O STIFFLY shapen houses that change not, What conjuror's cloth was thrown across you, and raised To show you thus transfigured, changed, Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased? Such resolute shapes, so harshly set In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped In void and null profusion, how is this? In what strong _aqua regia_ now are you steeped? That you lose the brick-stuff out of you And hover like a presentment, fading faint And vanquished, evaporate away To leave but only the merest possible taint! HYDE PARK AT NIGHT, BEFORE THE WAR _Clerks_. WE have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet flowers of night Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of golden light. Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come aflower To the night that takes us willing, liberates us to the hour. Now at last the ink and dudgeon passes from our fervent eyes And out of the chambered weariness wanders a spirit abroad on its enterprise. Not too near and not too far Out of the stress of the crowd Music screams as elephants scream When they lift their trunks and scream aloud For joy of the night when masters are Asleep and adream. So here I hide in the Shalimar With a wanton princess slender and proud, And we swoon with kisses, swoon till we seem Two streaming peacocks gone in a cloud Of golden dust, with star after star On our stream. GIPSY I, THE man with the red scarf, Will give thee what I have, this last week's earn- ings. Take them, and buy thee a silver ring And wed me, to ease my yearnings. For the rest, when thou art wedded I'll wet my brow for thee With sweat, I'll enter a house for thy sake, Thou shalt shut doors on me. TWO-FOLD How gorgeous that shock of red lilies, and larkspur cleaving All with a flash of blue!--when will she be leaving Her room, where the night still hangs like a half- folded bat, And passion unbearable seethes in the darkness, like must in a vat. UNDER THE OAK You, if you were sensible, When I tell you the stars flash signals, each one dreadful, You would not turn and answer me "The night is wonderful." Even you, if you knew How this darkness soaks me through and through, and infuses Unholy fear in my vapour, you would pause to dis- tinguish What hurts, from what amuses. For I tell you Beneath this powerful tree, my whole soul's fluid Oozes away from me as a sacrifice steam At the knife of a Druid. Again I tell you, I bleed, I am bound with withies, My life runs out. I tell you my blood runs out on the floor of this oak, Gout upon gout. Above me springs the blood-born mistletoe In the shady smoke. But who are you, twittering to and fro Beneath the oak? What thing better are you, what worse? What have you to do with the mysteries Of this ancient place, of my ancient curse? What place have you in my histories? SIGH NO MORE THE cuckoo and the coo-dove's ceaseless calling, Calling, Of a meaningless monotony is palling All my morning's pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered wood. May-blossom and blue bird's-eye flowers falling, Falling In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling Messages of true-love down the dust of the high- road. I do not like to hear the gentle grieving, Grieving Of the she-dove in the blossom, still believing Love will yet again return to her and make all good. When I know that there must ever be deceiving, Deceiving Of the mournful constant heart, that while she's weaving Her woes, her lover woos and sings within another wood. Oh, boisterous the cuckoo shouts, forestalling, Stalling A progress down the intricate enthralling By-paths where the wanton-headed flowers doff their hood. And like a laughter leads me onward, heaving, Heaving A sigh among the shadows, thus retrieving A decent short regret for that which once was very good. LOVE STORM MANY roses in the wind Are tapping at the window-sash. A hawk is in the sky; his wings Slowly begin to plash. The roses with the west wind rapping Are torn away, and a splash Of red goes down the billowing air. Still hangs the hawk, with the whole sky moving Past him--only a wing-beat proving The will that holds him there. The daisies in the grass are bending, The hawk has dropped, the wind is spending All the roses, and unending Rustle of leaves washes out the rending Cry of a bird. A red rose goes on the wind.--Ascending The hawk his wind-swept way is wending Easily down the sky. The daisies, sending Strange white signals, seem intending To show the place whence the scream was heard. But, oh, my heart, what birds are piping! A silver wind is hastily wiping The face of the youngest rose. And oh, my heart, cease apprehending! The hawk is gone, a rose is tapping The window-sash as the west-wind blows. Knock, knock, 'tis no more than a red rose rapping, And fear is a plash of wings. What, then, if a scarlet rose goes flapping Down the bright-grey ruin of things! PARLIAMENT HILL IN THE EVENING THE houses fade in a melt of mist Blotching the thick, soiled air With reddish places that still resist The Night's slow care. The hopeless, wintry twilight fades, The city corrodes out of sight As the body corrodes when death invades That citadel of delight. Now verdigris smoulderings softly spread Through the shroud of the town, as slow Night-lights hither and thither shed Their ghastly glow. PICCADILLY CIRCUS AT NIGHT _Street-Walkers_. WHEN into the night the yellow light is roused like dust above the towns, Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in the midst of the downs, Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain along the street, Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in ex- pectancy to meet The luminous mist which the poor things wist was dawn arriving across the sky, When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town has driven so high. All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep, All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea, Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory. Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning looked in at their eyes And the Cyprian's pavement-roses are gone, and now it is we Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a Paradise On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of the town-dark sea. TARANTELLA SAD as he sits on the white sea-stone And the suave sea chuckles, and turns to the moon, And the moon significant smiles at the cliffs and the boulders. He sits like a shade by the flood alone While I dance a tarantella on the rocks, and the croon Of my mockery mocks at him over the waves' bright shoulders. What can I do but dance alone, Dance to the sliding sea and the moon, For the moon on my breast and the air on my limbs and the foam on my feet? For surely this earnest man has none Of the night in his soul, and none of the tune Of the waters within him; only the world's old wisdom to bleat. I wish a wild sea-fellow would come down the glittering shingle, A soulless neckar, with winking seas in his eyes And falling waves in his arms, and the lost soul's kiss On his lips: I long to be soulless, I tingle To touch the sea in the last surprise Of fiery coldness, to be gone in a lost soul's bliss. IN CHURCH IN the choir the boys are singing the hymn. The morning light on their lips Moves in silver-moist flashes, in musical trim. Sudden outside the high window, one crow Hangs in the air And lights on a withered oak-tree's top of woe. One bird, one blot, folded and still at the top Of the withered tree!--in the grail Of crystal heaven falls one full black drop. Like a soft full drop of darkness it seems to sway In the tender wine Of our Sabbath, suffusing our sacred day. PIANO Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past. EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT, BEFORE THE WAR _Charity_. BY the river In the black wet night as the furtive rain slinks down, Dropping and starting from sleep Alone on a seat A woman crouches. I must go back to her. I want to give her Some money. Her hand slips out of the breast of her gown Asleep. My fingers creep Carefully over the sweet Thumb-mound, into the palm's deep pouches. So, the gift! God, how she starts! And looks at me, and looks in the palm of her hand! And again at me! I turn and run Down the Embankment, run for my life. But why?--why? Because of my heart's Beating like sobs, I come to myself, and stand In the street spilled over splendidly With wet, flat lights. What I've done I know not, my soul is in strife. The touch was on the quick. I want to forget. PHANTASMAGORIA RIGID sleeps the house in darkness, I alone Like a thing unwarrantable cross the hall And climb the stairs to find the group of doors Standing angel-stern and tall. I want my own room's shelter. But what is this Throng of startled beings suddenly thrown In confusion against my entry? Is it only the trees' Large shadows from the outside street lamp blown? Phantom to phantom leaning; strange women weep Aloud, suddenly on my mind Startling a fear unspeakable, as the shuddering wind Breaks and sobs in the blind. So like to women, tall strange women weeping! Why continually do they cross the bed? Why does my soul contract with unnatural fear? I am listening! Is anything said? Ever the long black figures swoop by the bed; They seem to be beckoning, rushing away, and beckoning. Whither then, whither, what is it, say What is the reckoning. Tall black Bacchae of midnight, why then, why Do you rush to assail me? Do I intrude on your rites nocturnal? What should it avail me? Is there some great Iacchos of these slopes Suburban dismal? Have I profaned some female mystery, orgies Black and phantasmal? NEXT MORNING How have I wandered here to this vaulted room In the house of life?--the floor was ruffled with gold Last evening, and she who was softly in bloom, Glimmered as flowers that in perfume at twilight unfold For the flush of the night; whereas now the gloom Of every dirty, must-besprinkled mould, And damp old web of misery's heirloom Deadens this day's grey-dropping arras-fold. And what is this that floats on the undermist Of the mirror towards the dusty grate, as if feeling Unsightly its way to the warmth?--this thing with a list To the left? this ghost like a candle swealing? Pale-blurred, with two round black drops, as if it missed Itself among everything else, here hungrily stealing Upon me!--my own reflection!--explicit gist Of my presence there in the mirror that leans from the ceiling! Then will somebody square this shade with the being I know I was last night, when my soul rang clear as a bell And happy as rain in summer? Why should it be so? What is there gone against me, why am I in hell? PALIMPSEST OF TWILIGHT DARKNESS comes out of the earth And swallows dip into the pallor of the west; From the hay comes the clamour of children's mirth; Wanes the old palimpsest. The night-stock oozes scent, And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by: All that the worldly day has meant Wastes like a lie. The children have forsaken their play; A single star in a veil of light Glimmers: litter of day Is gone from sight. EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT, BEFORE THE WAR _Outcasts_. THE night rain, dripping unseen, Comes endlessly kissing my face and my hands. The river, slipping between Lamps, is rayed with golden bands Half way down its heaving sides; Revealed where it hides. Under the bridge Great electric cars Sing through, and each with a floor-light racing along at its side. Far off, oh, midge after midge Drifts over the gulf that bars The night with silence, crossing the lamp-touched tide. At Charing Cross, here, beneath the bridge Sleep in a row the outcasts, Packed in a line with their heads against the wall. Their feet, in a broken ridge Stretch out on the way, and a lout casts A look as he stands on the edge of this naked stall. Beasts that sleep will cover Their faces in their flank; so these Have huddled rags or limbs on the naked sleep. Save, as the tram-cars hover Past with the noise of a breeze And gleam as of sunshine crossing the low black heap, Two naked faces are seen Bare and asleep, Two pale clots swept and swept by the light of the cars. Foam-clots showing between The long, low tidal-heap, The mud-weed opening two pale, shadowless stars. Over the pallor of only two faces Passes the gallivant beam of the trams; Shows in only two sad places The white bare bone of our shams. A little, bearded man, pale, peaked in sleeping, With a face like a chickweed flower. And a heavy woman, sleeping still keeping Callous and dour. Over the pallor of only two places Tossed on the low, black, ruffled heap Passes the light of the tram as it races Out of the deep. Eloquent limbs In disarray Sleep-suave limbs of a youth with long, smooth thighs Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims Of trousers fray On the thin bare shins of a man who uneasily lies. The balls of five red toes As red and dirty, bare Young birds forsaken and left in a nest of mud-- Newspaper sheets enclose Some limbs like parcels, and tear When the sleeper stirs or turns on the ebb of the flood-- One heaped mound Of a woman's knees As she thrusts them upward under the ruffled skirt-- And a curious dearth of sound In the presence of these Wastrels that sleep on the flagstones without any hurt. Over two shadowless, shameless faces Stark on the heap Travels the light as it tilts in its paces Gone in one leap. At the feet of the sleepers, watching, Stand those that wait For a place to lie down; and still as they stand, they sleep, Wearily catching The flood's slow gait Like men who are drowned, but float erect in the deep. Oh, the singing mansions, Golden-lighted tall Trams that pass, blown ruddily down the night! The bridge on its stanchions Stoops like a pall To this human blight. On the outer pavement, slowly, Theatre people pass, Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are bright Like flowers of infernal moly Over nocturnal grass Wetly bobbing and drifting away on our sight. And still by the rotten Row of shattered feet, Outcasts keep guard. Forgotten, Forgetting, till fate shall delete One from the ward. The factories on the Surrey side Are beautifully laid in black on a gold-grey sky. The river's invisible tide Threads and thrills like ore that is wealth to the eye. And great gold midges Cross the chasm At the bridges Above intertwined plasm. WINTER IN THE BOULEVARD THE frost has settled down upon the trees And ruthlessly strangled off the fantasies Of leaves that have gone unnoticed, swept like old Romantic stories now no more to be told. The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought, Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt. Has some hand balanced more leaves in the depths of the twigs? Some dim little efforts placed in the threads of the birch?-- It is only the sparrows, like dead black leaves on the sprigs, Sitting huddled against the cerulean, one flesh with their perch. The clear, cold sky coldly bethinks itself. Like vivid thought the air spins bright, and all Trees, birds, and earth, arrested in the after-thought Awaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought. SCHOOL ON THE OUTSKIRTS How different, in the middle of snows, the great school rises red! A red rock silent and shadowless, clung round with clusters of shouting lads, Some few dark-cleaving the doorway, souls that cling as the souls of the dead In stupor persist at the gates of life, obstinate dark monads. This new red rock in a waste of white rises against the day With shelter now, and with blandishment, since the winds have had their way And laid the desert horrific of silence and snow on the world of mankind, School now is the rock in this weary land the winter burns and makes blind. SICKNESS WAVING slowly before me, pushed into the dark, Unseen my hands explore the silence, drawing the bark Of my body slowly behind. Nothing to meet my fingers but the fleece of night Invisible blinding my face and my eyes! What if in their flight My hands should touch the door! What if I suddenly stumble, and push the door Open, and a great grey dawn swirls over my feet, before I can draw back! What if unwitting I set the door of eternity wide And am swept away in the horrible dawn, am gone down the tide Of eternal hereafter! Catch my hands, my darling, between your breasts. Take them away from their venture, before fate wrests The meaning out of them. EVERLASTING FLOWERS WHO do you think stands watching The snow-tops shining rosy In heaven, now that the darkness Takes all but the tallest posy? Who then sees the two-winged Boat down there, all alone And asleep on the snow's last shadow, Like a moth on a stone? The olive-leaves, light as gad-flies, Have all gone dark, gone black. And now in the dark my soul to you Turns back. To you, my little darling, To you, out of Italy. For what is loveliness, my love, Save you have it with me! So, there's an oxen wagon Comes darkly into sight: A man with a lantern, swinging A little light. What does he see, my darling Here by the darkened lake? Here, in the sloping shadow The mountains make? He says not a word, but passes, Staring at what he sees. What ghost of us both do you think he saw Under the olive trees? All the things that are lovely-- The things you never knew-- I wanted to gather them one by one And bring them to you. But never now, my darling Can I gather the mountain-tips From the twilight like half-shut lilies To hold to your lips. And never the two-winged vessel That sleeps below on the lake Can I catch like a moth between my hands For you to take. But hush, I am not regretting: It is far more perfect now. I'll whisper the ghostly truth to the world And tell them how I know you here in the darkness, How you sit in the throne of my eyes At peace, and look out of the windows In glad surprise. THE NORTH COUNTRY IN another country, black poplars shake them- selves over a pond, And rooks and the rising smoke-waves scatter and wheel from the works beyond; The air is dark with north and with sulphur, the grass is a darker green, And people darkly invested with purple move palpable through the scene. Soundlessly down across the counties, out of the resonant gloom That wraps the north in stupor and purple travels the deep, slow boom Of the man-life north-imprisoned, shut in the hum of the purpled steel As it spins to sleep on its motion, drugged dense in the sleep of the wheel. Out of the sleep, from the gloom of motion, sound- lessly, somnambule Moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned, asleep in the rule Of the strong machine that runs mesmeric, booming the spell of its word Upon them and moving them helpless, mechanic, their will to its will deferred. Yet all the while comes the droning inaudible, out of the violet air, The moaning of sleep-bound beings in travail that toil and are will-less there In the spell-bound north, convulsive now with a dream near morning, strong With violent achings heaving to burst the sleep that is now not long. BITTERNESS OF DEATH I AH, stern, cold man, How can you lie so relentless hard While I wash you with weeping water! Do you set your face against the daughter Of life? Can you never discard Your curt pride's ban? You masquerader! How can you shame to act this part Of unswerving indifference to me? You want at last, ah me! To break my heart Evader! You know your mouth Was always sooner to soften Even than your eyes. Now shut it lies Relentless, however often I kiss it in drouth. It has no breath Nor any relaxing. Where, Where are you, what have you done? What is this mouth of stone? How did you dare Take cover in death! II Once you could see, The white moon show like a breast revealed By the slipping shawl of stars. Could see the small stars tremble As the heart beneath did wield Systole, diastole. All the lovely macrocosm Was woman once to you, Bride to your groom. No tree in bloom But it leaned you a new White bosom. And always and ever Soft as a summering tree Unfolds from the sky, for your good, Unfolded womanhood; Shedding you down as a tree Sheds its flowers on a river. I saw your brows Set like rocks beside a sea of gloom, And I shed my very soul down into your thought; Like flowers I fell, to be caught On the comforted pool, like bloom That leaves the boughs. III Oh, masquerader, With a hard face white-enamelled, What are you now? Do you care no longer how My heart is trammelled, Evader? Is this you, after all, Metallic, obdurate With bowels of steel? Did you _never_ feel?-- Cold, insensate, Mechanical! Ah, no!--you multiform, You that I loved, you wonderful, You who darkened and shone, You were many men in one; But never this null This never-warm! Is this the sum of you? Is it all nought? Cold, metal-cold? Are you all told Here, iron-wrought? Is _this_ what's become of you? SEVEN SEALS SINCE this is the last night I keep you home, Come, I will consecrate you for the journey. Rather I had you would not go. Nay come, I will not again reproach you. Lie back And let me love you a long time ere you go. For you are sullen-hearted still, and lack The will to love me. But even so I will set a seal upon you from my lip, Will set a guard of honour at each door, Seal up each channel out of which might slip Your love for me. I kiss your mouth. Ah, love, Could I but seal its ruddy, shining spring Of passion, parch it up, destroy, remove Its softly-stirring crimson welling-up Of kisses! Oh, help me, God! Here at the source I'd lie for ever drinking and drawing in Your fountains, as heaven drinks from out their course The floods. I close your ears with kisses And seal your nostrils; and round your neck you'll wear-- Nay, let me work--a delicate chain of kisses. Like beads they go around, and not one misses To touch its fellow on either side. And there Full mid-between the champaign of your breast I place a great and burning seal of love Like a dark rose, a mystery of rest On the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart. Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keep You integral to me. Each door, each mystic port Of egress from you I will seal and steep In perfect chrism. Now it is done. The mort Will sound in heaven before it is undone. But let me finish what I have begun And shirt you now invulnerable in the mail Of iron kisses, kisses linked like steel. Put greaves upon your thighs and knees, and frail Webbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feel Ensheathed invulnerable with me, with seven Great seals upon your outgoings, and woven Chain of my mystic will wrapped perfectly Upon you, wrapped in indomitable me. READING A LETTER SHE sits on the recreation ground Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale blue sky. The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy. So sitting under the knotted canopy Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in a balloon Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon. She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one place Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and stirring. But never the motion has a human face Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring. And so again, on the recreation ground She alights a stranger, wondering, unused to the scene; Suffering at sight of the children playing around, Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the even- ing-green. TWENTY YEARS AGO ROUND the house were lilacs and strawberries And foal-foots spangling the paths, And far away on the sand-hills, dewberries Caught dust from the sea's long swaths. Up the wolds the woods were walking, And nuts fell out of their hair. At the gate the nets hung, balking The star-lit rush of a hare. In the autumn fields, the stubble Tinkled the music of gleaning. At a mother's knees, the trouble Lost all its meaning. Yea, what good beginnings To this sad end! Have we had our innings? God forfend! INTIME RETURNING, I find her just the same, At just the same old delicate game. Still she says: "Nay, loose no flame To lick me up and do me harm! Be all yourself!--for oh, the charm Of your heart of fire in which I look! Oh, better there than in any book Glow and enact the dramas and dreams I love for ever!--there it seems You are lovelier than life itself, till desire Comes licking through the bars of your lips And over my face the stray fire slips, Leaving a burn and an ugly smart That will have the oil of illusion. Oh, heart Of fire and beauty, loose no more Your reptile flames of lust; ah, store Your passion in the basket of your soul, Be all yourself, one bonny, burning coal That stays with steady joy of its own fire. But do not seek to take me by desire. Oh, do not seek to thrust on me your fire! For in the firing all my porcelain Of flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain, My ivory and marble black with stain, My veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain, My altars sullied, I, bereft, remain A priestess execrable, taken in vain--" So the refrain Sings itself over, and so the game Re-starts itself wherein I am kept Like a glowing brazier faintly blue of flame So that the delicate love-adept Can warm her hands and invite her soul, Sprinkling incense and salt of words And kisses pale, and sipping the toll Of incense-smoke that rises like birds. Yet I've forgotten in playing this game, Things I have known that shall have no name; Forgetting the place from which I came I watch her ward away the flame, Yet warm herself at the fire--then blame Me that I flicker in the basket; Me that I glow not with content To have my substance so subtly spent; Me that I interrupt her game. I ought to be proud that she should ask it Of me to be her fire-opal--. It is well Since I am here for so short a spell Not to interrupt her?--Why should I Break in by making any reply! TWO WIVES I INTO the shadow-white chamber silts the white Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear, Till petals heaped between the window-shafts In a drift die there. A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed pane Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely stain The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead Stretched out at rest. Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest. Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again With wounds between them, and suffering like a guest That will not go. Now suddenly going, the pain Leaves an empty breast. II A tall woman, with her long white gown aflow As she strode her limbs amongst it, once more She hastened towards the room. Did she know As she listened in silence outside the silent door? Entering, she saw him in outline, raised on a pyre Awaiting the fire. Upraised on the bed, with feet erect as a bow, Like the prow of a boat, his head laid back like the stern Of a ship that stands in a shadowy sea of snow With frozen rigging, she saw him; she drooped like a fern Refolding, she slipped to the floor as a ghost-white peony slips When the thread clips. Soft she lay as a shed flower fallen, nor heard The ominous entry, nor saw the other love, The dark, the grave-eyed mistress who thus dared At such an hour to lay her claim, above A stricken wife, so sunk in oblivion, bowed With misery, no more proud. III The stranger's hair was shorn like a lad's dark poll And pale her ivory face: her eyes would fail In silence when she looked: for all the whole Darkness of failure was in them, without avail. Dark in indomitable failure, she who had lost Now claimed the host, She softly passed the sorrowful flower shed In blonde and white on the floor, nor even turned Her head aside, but straight towards the bed Moved with slow feet, and her eyes' flame steadily burned. She looked at him as he lay with banded cheek, And she started to speak Softly: "I knew it would come to this," she said, "I knew that some day, soon, I should find you thus. So I did not fight you. You went your way instead Of coming mine--and of the two of us I died the first, I, in the after-life Am now your wife." IV "'Twas I whose fingers did draw up the young Plant of your body: to me you looked e'er sprung The secret of the moon within your eyes! My mouth you met before your fine red mouth Was set to song--and never your song denies My love, till you went south." "'Twas I who placed the bloom of manhood on Your youthful smoothness: I fleeced where fleece was none Your fervent limbs with flickers and tendrils of new Knowledge; I set your heart to its stronger beat; I put my strength upon you, and I threw My life at your feet." "But I whom the years had reared to be your bride, Who for years was sun for your shivering, shade for your sweat, Who for one strange year was as a bride to you--you set me aside With all the old, sweet things of our youth;--and never yet Have I ceased to grieve that I was not great enough To defeat your baser stuff." V "But you are given back again to me Who have kept intact for you your virginity. Who for the rest of life walk out of care, Indifferent here of myself, since I am gone Where you are gone, and you and I out there Walk now as one." "Your widow am I, and only I. I dream God bows his head and grants me this supreme Pure look of your last dead face, whence now is gone The mobility, the panther's gambolling, And all your being is given to me, so none Can mock my struggling." "And now at last I kiss your perfect face, Perfecting now our unfinished, first embrace. Your young hushed look that then saw God ablaze In every bush, is given you back, and we Are met at length to finish our rest of days In a unity." HEIMWEH FAR-OFF the lily-statues stand white-ranked in the garden at home. Would God they were shattered quickly, the cattle would tread them out in the loam. I wish the elder trees in flower could suddenly heave, and burst The walls of the house, and nettles puff out from the hearth at which I was nursed. It stands so still in the hush composed of trees and inviolate peace, The home of my fathers, the place that is mine, my fate and my old increase. And now that the skies are falling, the world is spouting in fountains of dirt, I would give my soul for the homestead to fall with me, go with me, both in one hurt. DEBACLE THE trees in trouble because of autumn, And scarlet berries falling from the bush, And all the myriad houseless seeds Loosing hold in the wind's insistent push Moan softly with autumnal parturition, Poor, obscure fruits extruded out of light Into the world of shadow, carried down Between the bitter knees of the after-night. Bushed in an uncouth ardour, coiled at core With a knot of life that only bliss can unravel, Fall all the fruits most bitterly into earth Bitterly into corrosion bitterly travel. What is it internecine that is locked, By very fierceness into a quiescence Within the rage? We shall not know till it burst Out of corrosion into new florescence. Nay, but how tortured is the frightful seed The spark intense within it, all without Mordant corrosion gnashing and champing hard For ruin on the naked small redoubt. Bitter, to fold the issue, and make no sally; To have the mystery, but not go forth; To bear, but retaliate nothing, given to save The spark in storms of corrosion, as seeds from the north. The sharper, more horrid the pressure, the harder the heart That saves the blue grain of eternal fire Within its quick, committed to hold and wait And suffer unheeding, only forbidden to expire. NARCISSUS WHERE the minnows trace A glinting web quick hid in the gloom of the brook, When I think of the place And remember the small lad lying intent to look Through the shadowy face At the little fish thread-threading the watery nook-- It seems to me The woman you are should be nixie, there is a pool Where we ought to be. You undine-clear and pearly, soullessly cool And waterly The pool for my limbs to fathom, my soul's last school. Narcissus Ventured so long ago in the deeps of reflection. Illyssus Broke the bounds and beyond!--Dim recollection Of fishes Soundlessly moving in heaven's other direction! Be Undine towards the waters, moving back; For me A pool! Put off the soul you've got, oh lack Your human self immortal; take the watery track. AUTUMN SUNSHINE THE sun sets out the autumn crocuses And fills them up a pouring measure Of death-producing wine, till treasure Runs waste down their chalices. All, all Persephone's pale cups of mould Are on the board, are over-filled; The portion to the gods is spilled; Now, mortals all, take hold! The time is now, the wine-cup full and full Of lambent heaven, a pledging-cup; Let now all mortal men take up The drink, and a long, strong pull. Out of the hell-queen's cup, the heaven's pale wine-- Drink then, invisible heroes, drink. Lips to the vessels, never shrink, Throats to the heavens incline. And take within the wine the god's great oath By heaven and earth and hellish stream To break this sick and nauseous dream We writhe and lust in, both. Swear, in the pale wine poured from the cups of the queen Of hell, to wake and be free From this nightmare we writhe in, Break out of this foul has-been. ON THAT DAY ON that day I shall put roses on roses, and cover your grave With multitude of white roses: and since you were brave One bright red ray. So people, passing under The ash-trees of the valley-road, will raise Their eyes and look at the grave on the hill, in wonder, Wondering mount, and put the flowers asunder To see whose praise Is blazoned here so white and so bloodily red. Then they will say: "'Tis long since she is dead, Who has remembered her after many days?" And standing there They will consider how you went your ways Unnoticed among them, a still queen lost in the maze Of this earthly affair. A queen, they'll say, Has slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill. Sleeps on unknown, unnoticed there, until Dawns my insurgent day. 
22734	----	D.H. Lawrence (1919) _Bay: A Book of Poems_ Transcriber's Note: These poems were first published by the Beaumont Press in a limited edition. Facsimile page images from the original publication, including facsimile images of the original coloured illustrations by Anne Estelle Rice, are freely available from the Internet Archive. BAY . . A BOOK OF . . POEMS . . BY D: H: LAWRENCE To Cynthia Asquith CONTENTS GUARDS Where the trees rise like cliffs THE LITTLE TOWN AT EVENING The chime of the bells LAST HOURS The cool of an oak's unchequered shade TOWN London AFTER THE OPERA Down the stone stairs GOING BACK The night turns slowly round ON THE MARCH We are out on the open road BOMBARDMENT The town has opened to the sun WINTER-LULL Because of the silent snow THE ATTACK When we came out of the wood OBSEQUIAL ODE Surely you've trodden straight SHADES Shall I tell you, then, how it is?-- BREAD UPON THE WATERS So you are lost to me RUINATION The sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist RONDEAU The hours have tumbled their leaden sands TOMMIES IN THE TRAIN The sun shines WAR-BABY The child like mustard-seed NOSTALGIA The waning moon looks upward COLOPHON GUARDS! A Review in Hyde Park 1913. The Crowd Watches. WHERE the trees rise like cliffs, proud and blue-tinted in the distance, Between the cliffs of the trees, on the grey- green park Rests a still line of soldiers, red motionless range of guards Smouldering with darkened busbies beneath the bay- onets' slant rain. Colossal in nearness a blue police sits still on his horse Guarding the path; his hand relaxed at his thigh, And skyward his face is immobile, eyelids aslant In tedium, and mouth relaxed as if smiling--ineffable tedium! So! So! Gaily a general canters across the space, With white plumes blinking under the evening grey sky. And suddenly, as if the ground moved The red range heaves in slow, magnetic reply. EVOLUTIONS OF SOLDIERS The red range heaves and compulsory sways, ah see! in the flush of a march Softly-impulsive advancing as water towards a weir from the arch Of shadow emerging as blood emerges from inward shades of our night Encroaching towards a crisis, a meeting, a spasm and throb of delight. The wave of soldiers, the coming wave, the throbbing red breast of approach Upon us; dark eyes as here beneath the busbies glit- tering, dark threats that broach Our beached vessel; darkened rencontre inhuman, and closed warm lips, and dark Mouth-hair of soldiers passing above us, over the wreck of our bark. And so, it is ebb-time, they turn, the eyes beneath the busbies are gone. But the blood has suspended its timbre, the heart from out of oblivion Knows but the retreat of the burning shoulders, the red-swift waves of the sweet Fire horizontal declining and ebbing, the twilit ebb of retreat. THE LITTLE TOWN AT EVENING THE chime of the bells, and the church clock striking eight Solemnly and distinctly cries down the babel of children still playing in the hay. The church draws nearer upon us, gentle and great In shadow, covering us up with her grey. Like drowsy children the houses fall asleep Under the fleece of shadow, as in between Tall and dark the church moves, anxious to keep Their sleeping, cover them soft unseen. Hardly a murmur comes from the sleeping brood, I wish the church had covered me up with the rest In the home-place. Why is it she should exclude Me so distinctly from sleeping with those I love best? LAST HOURS THE cool of an oak's unchequered shade Falls on me as I lie in deep grass Which rushes upward, blade beyond blade, While higher the darting grass-flowers pass Piercing the blue with their crocketed spires And waving flags, and the ragged fires Of the sorrel's cresset--a green, brave town Vegetable, new in renown. Over the tree's edge, as over a mountain Surges the white of the moon, A cloud comes up like the surge of a fountain, Pressing round and low at first, but soon Heaving and piling a round white dome. How lovely it is to be at home Like an insect in the grass Letting life pass. There's a scent of clover crept through my hair From the full resource of some purple dome Where that lumbering bee, who can hardly bear His burden above me, never has clomb. But not even the scent of insouciant flowers Makes pause the hours. Down the valley roars a townward train. I hear it through the grass Dragging the links of my shortening chain Southwards, alas! TOWN LONDON Used to wear her lights splendidly, Flinging her shawl-fringe over the River, Tassels in abandon. And up in the sky A two-eyed clock, like an owl Solemnly used to approve, chime, chiming, Approval, goggle-eyed fowl. There are no gleams on the River, No goggling clock; No sound from St. Stephen's; No lamp-fringed frock. Instead, Darkness, and skin-wrapped Fleet, hurrying limbs, Soft-footed dead. London Original, wolf-wrapped In pelts of wolves, all her luminous Garments gone. London, with hair Like a forest darkness, like a marsh Of rushes, ere the Romans Broke in her lair. It is well That London, lair of sudden Male and female darknesses Has broken her spell. AFTER THE OPERA DOWN the stone stairs Girls with their large eyes wide with tragedy Lift looks of shocked and momentous emotion up at me. And I smile. Ladies Stepping like birds with their bright and pointed feet Peer anxiously forth, as if for a boat to carry them out of the wreckage, And among the wreck of the theatre crowd I stand and smile. They take tragedy so becomingly. Which pleases me. But when I meet the weary eyes The reddened aching eyes of the bar-man with thin arms, I am glad to go back to where I came from. GOING BACK THE NIGHT turns slowly round, Swift trains go by in a rush of light; Slow trains steal past. This train beats anxiously, outward bound. But I am not here. I am away, beyond the scope of this turning; There, where the pivot is, the axis Of all this gear. I, who sit in tears, I, whose heart is torn with parting; Who cannot bear to think back to the departure platform; My spirit hears Voices of men Sound of artillery, aeroplanes, presences, And more than all, the dead-sure silence, The pivot again. There, at the axis Pain, or love, or grief Sleep on speed; in dead certainty; Pure relief. There, at the pivot Time sleeps again. No has-been, no here-after; only the perfected Silence of men. ON THE MARCH WE are out on the open road. Through the low west window a cold light flows On the floor where never my numb feet trode Before; onward the strange road goes. Soon the spaces of the western sky With shutters of sombre cloud will close. But we'll still be together, this road and I, Together, wherever the long road goes. The wind chases by us, and over the corn Pale shadows flee from us as if from their foes. Like a snake we thresh on the long, forlorn Land, as onward the long road goes. From the sky, the low, tired moon fades out; Through the poplars the night-wind blows; Pale, sleepy phantoms are tossed about As the wind asks whither the wan road goes. Away in the distance wakes a lamp. Inscrutable small lights glitter in rows. But they come no nearer, and still we tramp Onward, wherever the strange road goes. Beat after beat falls sombre and dull. The wind is unchanging, not one of us knows What will be in the final lull When we find the place where this dead road goes. For something must come, since we pass and pass Along in the coiled, convulsive throes Of this marching, along with the invisible grass That goes wherever this old road goes. Perhaps we shall come to oblivion. Perhaps we shall march till our tired toes Tread over the edge of the pit, and we're gone Down the endless slope where the last road goes. If so, let us forge ahead, straight on If we're going to sleep the sleep with those That fall forever, knowing none Of this land whereon the wrong road goes. BOMBARDMENT THE TOWN has opened to the sun. Like a flat red lily with a million petals She unfolds, she comes undone. A sharp sky brushes upon The myriad glittering chimney-tips As she gently exhales to the sun. Hurrying creatures run Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower. What is it they shun? A dark bird falls from the sun. It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast Flower: the day has begun. WINTER-LULL Because of the silent snow, we are all hushed Into awe. No sound of guns, nor overhead no rushed Vibration to draw Our attention out of the void wherein we are crushed. A crow floats past on level wings Noiselessly. Uninterrupted silence swings Invisibly, inaudibly To and fro in our misgivings. We do not look at each other, we hide Our daunted eyes. White earth, and ruins, ourselves, and nothing beside. It all belies Our existence; we wait, and are still denied. We are folded together, men and the snowy ground Into nullity. There is silence, only the silence, never a sound Nor a verity To assist us; disastrously silence-bound! THE ATTACK WHEN we came out of the wood Was a great light! The night uprisen stood In white. I wondered, I looked around It was so fair. The bright Stubble upon the ground Shone white Like any field of snow; Yet warm the chase Of faint night-breaths did go Across my face! White-bodied and warm the night was, Sweet-scented to hold in my throat. White and alight the night was. A pale stroke smote The pulse through the whole bland being Which was This and me; A pulse that still went fleeing, Yet did not flee. After the terrible rage, the death, This wonder stood glistening? All shapes of wonder, with suspended breath, Arrested listening In ecstatic reverie. The whole, white Night!-- With wonder, every black tree Blossomed outright. I saw the transfiguration And the present Host. Transubstantiation Of the Luminous Ghost. OBSEQUIAL ODE SURELY you've trodden straight To the very door! Surely you took your fate Faultlessly. Now it's too late To say more. It is evident you were right, That man has a course to go A voyage to sail beyond the charted seas. You have passed from out of sight And my questions blow Back from the straight horizon that ends all one sees. Now like a vessel in port You unlade your riches unto death, And glad are the eager dead to receive you there. Let the dead sort Your cargo out, breath from breath Let them disencumber your bounty, let them all share. I imagine dead hands are brighter, Their fingers in sunset shine With jewels of passion once broken through you as a prism Breaks light into jewels; and dead breasts whiter For your wrath; and yes, I opine They anoint their brows with your blood, as a perfect chrism. On your body, the beaten anvil, Was hammered out That moon-like sword the ascendant dead unsheathe Against us; sword that no man will Put to rout; Sword that severs the question from us who breathe. Surely you've trodden straight To the very door. You have surely achieved your fate; And the perfect dead are elate To have won once more. Now to the dead you are giving Your last allegiance. But what of us who are living And fearful yet of believing In your pitiless legions. SHADES SHALL I tell you, then, how it is?-- There came a cloven gleam Like a tongue of darkened flame To flicker in me. And so I seem To have you still the same In one world with me. In the flicker of a flower, In a worm that is blind, yet strives, In a mouse that pauses to listen Glimmers our Shadow; yet it deprives Them none of their glisten. In every shaken morsel I see our shadow tremble As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand. As if it were part and parcel, One shadow, and we need not dissemble Our darkness: do you understand? For I have told you plainly how it is. BREAD UPON THE WATERS. SO you are lost to me! Ah you, you ear of corn straight lying, What food is this for the darkly flying Fowls of the Afterwards! White bread afloat on the waters, Cast out by the hand that scatters Food untowards, Will you come back when the tide turns? After many days? My heart yearns To know. Will you return after many days To say your say as a traveller says, More marvel than woe? Drift then, for the sightless birds And the fish in shadow-waved herds To approach you. Drift then, bread cast out; Drift, lest I fall in doubt, And reproach you. For you are lost to me! RUINATION THE sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist That huddles in grey heaps coiling and holding back. Like cliffs abutting in shadow a drear grey sea Some street-ends thrust forward their stack. On the misty waste-lands, away from the flushing grey Of the morning the elms are loftily dimmed, and tall As if moving in air towards us, tall angels Of darkness advancing steadily over us all. RONDEAU OF A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR. THE hours have tumbled their leaden, mono- tonous sands And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West. I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands; To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I detest. I force my cart through the sodden filth that is pressed Into ooze, and the sombre dirt spouts up at my hands As I make my way in twilight now to rest. The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous sands. A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening stands Defending the memory of leaves and the happy round nest. But mud has flooded the homes of these weary lands And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West. All day has the clank of iron on iron distressed The nerve-bare place. Now a little silence expands And a gasp of relief. But the soul is still compressed: I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands. The hours have ceased to fall, and a star commands Shadows to cover our stricken manhood, and blest Sleep to make us forget: but he understands: To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I detest. TOMMIES IN THE TRAIN THE SUN SHINES, The coltsfoot flowers along the railway banks Shine like flat coin which Jove in thanks Strews each side the lines. A steeple In purple elms, daffodils Sparkle beneath; luminous hills Beyond--and no people. England, Oh Danaë To this spring of cosmic gold That falls on your lap of mould! What then are we? What are we Clay-coloured, who roll in fatigue As the train falls league by league From our destiny? A hand is over my face, A cold hand. I peep between the fingers To watch the world that lingers Behind, yet keeps pace. Always there, as I peep Between the fingers that cover my face! Which then is it that falls from its place And rolls down the steep? Is it the train That falls like meteorite Backward into space, to alight Never again? Or is it the illusory world That falls from reality As we look? Or are we Like a thunderbolt hurled? One or another Is lost, since we fall apart Endlessly, in one motion depart From each other. WAR-BABY THE CHILD like mustard-seed Rolls out of the husk of death Into the woman's fertile, fathomless lap. Look, it has taken root! See how it flourisheth. See how it rises with magical, rosy sap! As for our faith, it was there When we did not know, did not care; It fell from our husk like a little, hasty seed. Sing, it is all we need. Sing, for the little weed Will flourish its branches in heaven when we slumber beneath. NOSTALGIA THE WANING MOON looks upward; this grey night Slopes round the heavens in one smooth curve Of easy sailing; odd red wicks serve To show where the ships at sea move out of sight. The place is palpable me, for here I was born Of this self-same darkness. Yet the shadowy house below Is out of bounds, and only the old ghosts know I have come, I feel them whimper in welcome, and mourn. My father suddenly died in the harvesting corn And the place is no longer ours. Watching, I hear No sound from the strangers, the place is dark, and fear Opens my eyes till the roots of my vision seems torn. Can I go no nearer, never towards the door? The ghosts and I we mourn together, and shrink In the shadow of the cart-shed. Must we hover on the brink Forever, and never enter the homestead any more? Is it irrevocable? Can I really not go Through the open yard-way? Can I not go past the sheds And through to the mowie?--Only the dead in their beds Can know the fearful anguish that this is so. I kiss the stones, I kiss the moss on the wall, And wish I could pass impregnate into the place. I wish I could take it all in a last embrace. I wish with my breast I here could annihilate it all. HERE ENDS BAY A BOOK OF POEMS BY D. H. Lawrence The Cover and the Decorations designed by Anne Estelle Rice The Typography and Binding arranged by Cyril W. Beaumont Printed by Hand on his Press at 75 Charing Cross Road in the City of Westminster Completed November the Twentieth MDCCCCXIX [Logo] SIMPLEX . MUNDITIIS . . . THE . BEAUMONT . PRESS Pressman Charles Wright Compositor C. W. Beaumont 
23394	----	LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH! by D. H. LAWRENCE Published by Chatto & Windus London MCMXVII Some of these poems have appeared in the "English Review" and in "Poetry," also in the "Georgian Anthology" and the "Imagist Anthology" FOREWORD THESE poems should not be considered separately, as so many single pieces. They are intended as an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development, the whole revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself. The period covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre of a man's life CONTENTS MOONRISE ELEGY NONENTITY MARTYR A LA MODE DON JUAN THE SEA HYMN TO PRIAPUS BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN FIRST MORNING "AND OH-- THAT THE MAN I AM MIGHT CEASE TO BE--" SHE LOOKS BACK ON THE BALCONY FROHNLEICHNAM IN THE DARK MUTILATION HUMILIATION A YOUNG WIFE GREEN RIVER ROSES GLOIRE DE DIJON ROSES ON THE BREAKFAST TABLE I AM LIKE A ROSE ROSE OF ALL THE WORLD A YOUTH MOWING QUITE FORSAKEN FORSAKEN AND FORLORN FIREFLIES IN THE CORN A DOE AT EVENING SONG OF A MAN WHO IS NOT LOVED SINNERS MISERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN ITALY WINTER DAWN A BAD BEGINNING WHY DOES SHE WEEP? GIORNO DEI MORTI ALL SOULS LADY WIFE BOTH SIDES OF THE MEDAL LOGGERHEADS DECEMBER NIGHT NEW YEAR'S EVE NEW YEAR'S NIGHT VALENTINE'S NIGHT BIRTH NIGHT RABBIT SNARED IN THE NIGHT PARADISE RE-ENTERED SPRING MORNING WEDLOCK HISTORY SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH ONE WOMAN TO ALL WOMEN PEOPLE STREET LAMPS "SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME" NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH ELYSIUM MANIFESTO AUTUMN RAIN FROST FLOWERS CRAVING FOR SPRING ARGUMENT _After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness_ _MOONRISE_ AND who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away. _ELEGY_ THE sun immense and rosy Must have sunk and become extinct The night you closed your eyes for ever against me. Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings Since then, with fritter of flowers-- Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings. Still, you left me the nights, The great dark glittery window, The bubble hemming this empty existence with lights. Still in the vast hollow Like a breath in a bubble spinning Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the bounds like a swallow! I can look through The film of the bubble night, to where you are. Through the film I can almost touch you. EASTWOOD _NONENTITY_ THE stars that open and shut Fall on my shallow breast Like stars on a pool. The soft wind, blowing cool Laps little crest after crest Of ripples across my breast. And dark grass under my feet Seems to dabble in me Like grass in a brook. Oh, and it is sweet To be all these things, not to be Any more myself. For look, I am weary of myself! _MARTYR À LA MODE_ AH God, life, law, so many names you keep, You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep That does inform this various dream of living, You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving Us out as dreams, you august Sleep Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all time, The constellations, your great heart, the sun Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain; Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon For when at night, from out the full surcharge Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw The harvest, the spent action to itself; Leaves me unburdened to begin again; At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep, Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands Complain of what the day has had them do? Never let it be said I was poltroon At this my task of living, this my dream, This me which rises from the dark of sleep In white flesh robed to drape another dream, As lightning comes all white and trembling From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over, In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep, And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened. If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows richer Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep Must in my transiency pass all through pain, Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude Dull meteorite flash only into light When tearing through the anguish of this life, Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God To alter my one speck of doom, when round me burns The whole great conflagration of all life, Lapped like a body close upon a sleep, Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep Within the immense and toilsome life-time, heaved With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep? Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul That slowly labours in a vast travail, To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow That carries moons along, and spare the stress That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire? When pain and all And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep Rising to dream in me a small keen dream Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent-- CROYDON _DON JUAN_ IT is Isis the mystery Must be in love with me. Here this round ball of earth Where all the mountains sit Solemn in groups, And the bright rivers flit Round them for girth. Here the trees and troops Darken the shining grass, And many people pass Plundered from heaven, Many bright people pass, Plunder from heaven. What of the mistresses What the beloved seven? --They were but witnesses, I was just driven. Where is there peace for me? Isis the mystery Must be in love with me. _THE SEA_ You, you are all unloving, loveless, you; Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods, You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even, Threshing your own passions with no woman for the threshing-floor, Finishing your dreams for your own sake only, Playing your great game around the world, alone, Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to cherish, No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter. Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed young; You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent, cold and callous, Naked of worship, of love or of adornment, Scorning the panacea even of labour, Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's goings, Sea, only you are free, sophisticated. You who toil not, you who spin not, Surely but for you and your like, toiling Were not worth while, nor spinning worth the effort! You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out; You who roll the stars like jewels in your palm, So that they seem to utter themselves aloud; You who steep from out the days their colour, Reveal the universal tint that dyes Their web; who shadow the sun's great gestures and expressions So that he seems a stranger in his passing; Who voice the dumb night fittingly; Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to death with your shadowing. BOURNEMOUTH _HYMN TO PRIAPUS_ MY love lies underground With her face upturned to mine, And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss That ended her life and mine. I dance at the Christmas party Under the mistletoe Along with a ripe, slack country lass Jostling to and fro. The big, soft country lass, Like a loose sheaf of wheat Slipped through my arms on the threshing floor At my feet. The warm, soft country lass, Sweet as an armful of wheat At threshing-time broken, was broken For me, and ah, it was sweet! Now I am going home Fulfilled and alone, I see the great Orion standing Looking down. He's the star of my first beloved Love-making. The witness of all that bitter-sweet Heart-aching. Now he sees this as well, This last commission. Nor do I get any look Of admonition. He can add the reckoning up I suppose, between now and then, Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult Ways of men. He has done as I have done No doubt: Remembered and forgotten Turn and about. My love lies underground With her face upturned to mine, And her mouth unclosed in the last long kiss That ended her life and mine. She fares in the stark immortal Fields of death; I in these goodly, frozen Fields beneath. Something in me remembers And will not forget. The stream of my life in the darkness Deathward set! And something in me has forgotten, Has ceased to care. Desire comes up, and contentment Is debonair. I, who am worn and careful, How much do I care? How is it I grin then, and chuckle Over despair? Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient Grief makes us free To be faithless and faithful together As we have to be. _BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN_ FIRST PART UPON her plodding palfrey With a heavy child at her breast And Joseph holding the bridle They mount to the last hill-crest. Dissatisfied and weary She sees the blade of the sea Dividing earth and heaven In a glitter of ecstasy. Sudden a dark-faced stranger With his back to the sun, holds out His arms; so she lights from her palfrey And turns her round about. She has given the child to Joseph, Gone down to the flashing shore; And Joseph, shading his eyes with his hand, Stands watching evermore. SECOND PART THE sea in the stones is singing, A woman binds her hair With yellow, frail sea-poppies, That shine as her fingers stir. While a naked man comes swiftly Like a spurt of white foam rent From the crest of a falling breaker, Over the poppies sent. He puts his surf-wet fingers Over her startled eyes, And asks if she sees the land, the land, The land of her glad surmise. THIRD PART AGAIN in her blue, blue mantle Riding at Joseph's side, She says, "I went to Cythera, And woe betide!" Her heart is a swinging cradle That holds the perfect child, But the shade on her forehead ill becomes A mother mild. So on with the slow, mean journey In the pride of humility; Till they halt at a cliff on the edge of the land Over a sullen sea. While Joseph pitches the sleep-tent She goes far down to the shore To where a man in a heaving boat Waits with a lifted oar. FOURTH PART THEY dwelt in a huge, hoarse sea-cave And looked far down the dark Where an archway torn and glittering Shone like a huge sea-spark. He said: "Do you see the spirits Crowding the bright doorway?" He said: "Do you hear them whispering?" He said: "Do you catch what they say?" FIFTH PART THEN Joseph, grey with waiting, His dark eyes full of pain, Heard: "I have been to Patmos; Give me the child again." Now on with the hopeless journey Looking bleak ahead she rode, And the man and the child of no more account Than the earth the palfrey trode. Till a beggar spoke to Joseph, But looked into her eyes; So she turned, and said to her husband: "I give, whoever denies." SIXTH PART SHE gave on the open heather Beneath bare judgment stars, And she dreamed of her children and Joseph, And the isles, and her men, and her scars. And she woke to distil the berries The beggar had gathered at night, Whence he drew the curious liquors He held in delight. He gave her no crown of flowers, No child and no palfrey slow, Only led her through harsh, hard places Where strange winds blow. She follows his restless wanderings Till night when, by the fire's red stain, Her face is bent in the bitter steam That comes from the flowers of pain. Then merciless and ruthless He takes the flame-wild drops To the town, and tries to sell them With the market-crops. So she follows the cruel journey That ends not anywhere, And dreams, as she stirs the mixing-pot, She is brewing hope from despair. TRIER _FIRST MORNING_ THE night was a failure but why not--? In the darkness with the pale dawn seething at the window through the black frame I could not be free, not free myself from the past, those others-- and our love was a confusion, there was a horror, you recoiled away from me. Now, in the morning As we sit in the sunshine on the seat by the little shrine, And look at the mountain-walls, Walls of blue shadow, And see so near at our feet in the meadow Myriads of dandelion pappus Bubbles ravelled in the dark green grass Held still beneath the sunshine-- It is enough, you are near-- The mountains are balanced, The dandelion seeds stay half-submerged in the grass; You and I together We hold them proud and blithe On our love. They stand upright on our love, Everything starts from us, We are the source. BEUERBERG _"AND OH-- THAT THE MAN I AM MIGHT CEASE TO BE--"_ No, now I wish the sunshine would stop, and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out between two valves of darkness; the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound obliterating everything. I wish that whatever props up the walls of light would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down, and it would be thick black dark for ever. Not sleep, which is grey with dreams, nor death, which quivers with birth, but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable. What is sleep? It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill, but it does not alter me, nor help me. And death would ache still, I am sure; it would be lambent, uneasy. I wish it would be completely dark everywhere, inside me, and out, heavily dark utterly. WOLFRATSHAUSEN _SHE LOOKS BACK_ THE pale bubbles The lovely pale-gold bubbles of the globe-flowers In a great swarm clotted and single Went rolling in the dusk towards the river To where the sunset hung its wan gold cloths; And you stood alone, watching them go, And that mother-love like a demon drew you from me Towards England. Along the road, after nightfall, Along the glamorous birch-tree avenue Across the river levels We went in silence, and you staring to England. So then there shone within the jungle darkness Of the long, lush under-grass, a glow-worm's sudden Green lantern of pure light, a little, intense, fusing triumph, White and haloed with fire-mist, down in the tangled darkness. Then you put your hand in mine again, kissed me, and we struggled to be together. And the little electric flashes went with us, in the grass, Tiny lighthouses, little souls of lanterns, courage burst into an explosion of green light Everywhere down in the grass, where darkness was ravelled in darkness. Still, the kiss was a touch of bitterness on my mouth Like salt, burning in. And my hand withered in your hand. For you were straining with a wild heart, back, back again, Back to those children you had left behind, to all the æons of the past. And I was here in the under-dusk of the Isar. At home, we leaned in the bedroom window Of the old Bavarian Gasthaus, And the frogs in the pool beyond thrilled with exuberance, Like a boiling pot the pond crackled with happiness, Like a rattle a child spins round for joy, the night rattled With the extravagance of the frogs, And you leaned your cheek on mine, And I suffered it, wanting to sympathise. At last, as you stood, your white gown falling from your breasts, You looked into my eyes, and said: "But this is joy!" I acquiesced again. But the shadow of lying was in your eyes, The mother in you, fierce as a murderess, glaring to England, Yearning towards England, towards your young children, Insisting upon your motherhood, devastating. Still, the joy was there also, you spoke truly, The joy was not to be driven off so easily; Stronger than fear or destructive mother-love, it stood flickering; The frogs helped also, whirring away. Yet how I have learned to know that look in your eyes Of horrid sorrow! How I know that glitter of salt, dry, sterile, sharp, corrosive salt! Not tears, but white sharp brine Making hideous your eyes. I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my chest, my belly, Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through my defenceless nakedness. I have been thrust into white, sharp crystals, Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated. Ah, Lot's Wife, Lot's Wife! The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column of salt, like a waterspout That has enveloped me! Snow of salt, white, burning, eating salt In which I have writhed. Lot's Wife!--Not Wife, but Mother. I have learned to curse your motherhood, You pillar of salt accursed. I have cursed motherhood because of you, Accursed, base motherhood! I long for the time to come, when the curse against you will have gone out of my heart. But it has not gone yet. Nevertheless, once, the frogs, the globe-flowers of Bavaria, the glow-worms Gave me sweet lymph against the salt-burns, There is a kindness in the very rain. Therefore, even in the hour of my deepest, pas- sionate malediction I try to remember it is also well between us. That you are with me in the end. That you never look quite back; nine-tenths, ah, more You look round over your shoulder; But never quite back. Nevertheless the curse against you is still in my heart Like a deep, deep burn. The curse against all mothers. All mothers who fortify themselves in motherhood, devastating the vision. They are accursed, and the curse is not taken off It burns within me like a deep, old burn, And oh, I wish it was better. BEUERBERG _ON THE BALCONY_ IN front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow; And between us and it, the thunder; And down below in the green wheat, the labourers Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat. You are near to me, and your naked feet in their sandals, And through the scent of the balcony's naked timber I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the limber Lightning falls from heaven. Adown the pale-green glacier river floats A dark boat through the gloom--and whither? The thunder roars. But still we have each other! The naked lightnings in the heavens dither And disappear--what have we but each other? The boat has gone. ICKING _FROHNLEICHNAM_ You have come your way, I have come my way; You have stepped across your people, carelessly, hurting them all; I have stepped across my people, and hurt them in spite of my care. But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding We have come our ways and met at last Here in this upper room. Here the balcony Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons slowly Go by with their loads of green and silver birch- trees For the feast of Corpus Christi. Here from the balcony We look over the growing wheat, where the jade- green river Goes between the pine-woods, Over and beyond to where the many mountains Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the morning. I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through me, like the first Breeze of the morning through a narrow white birch. You glow at last like the mountain tops when they catch Day and make magic in heaven. At last I can throw away world without end, and meet you Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white; At last you can throw immortality off, and I see you Glistening with all the moment and all your beauty. Shameless and callous I love you; Out of indifference I love you; Out of mockery we dance together, Out of the sunshine into the shadow, Passing across the shadow into the sunlight, Out of sunlight to shadow. As we dance Your eyes take all of me in as a communication; As we dance I see you, ah, in full! Only to dance together in triumph of being together Two white ones, sharp, vindicated, Shining and touching, Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation. _IN THE DARK_ A BLOTCH of pallor stirs beneath the high Square picture-dusk, the window of dark sky. A sound subdued in the darkness: tears! As if a bird in difficulty up the valley steers. "Why have you gone to the window? Why don't you sleep? How you have wakened me! But why, why do you weep?" _"I am afraid of you, I am afraid, afraid! There is something in you destroys me--!"_ "You have dreamed and are not awake, come here to me." _"No, I have wakened. It is you, you are cruel to me!"_ "My dear!"--_"Yes, yes, you are cruel to me. You cast A shadow over my breasts that will kill me at last."_ "Come!"--_"No, I'm a thing of life. I give You armfuls of sunshine, and you won't let me live."_ "Nay, I'm too sleepy!"--_"Ah, you are horrible; You stand before me like ghosts, like a darkness upright."_ "I!"--_"How can you treat me so, and love me? My feet have no hold, you take the sky from above me."_ "My dear, the night is soft and eternal, no doubt You love it!"--_"It is dark, it kills me, I am put out."_ "My dear, when you cross the street in the sun- shine, surely Your own small night goes with you. Why treat it so poorly?" _"No, no, I dance in the sun, I'm a thing of life--"_ "Even then it is dark behind you. Turn round, my wife." _"No, how cruel you are, you people the sunshine With shadows!"_--"With yours I people the sunshine, yours and mine--" "In the darkness we all are gone, we are gone with the trees And the restless river;--we are lost and gone with all these." _"But I am myself, I have nothing to do with these."_ "Come back to bed, let us sleep on our mys- teries. "Come to me here, and lay your body by mine, And I will be all the shadow, you the shine. "Come, you are cold, the night has frightened you. Hark at the river! It pants as it hurries through "The pine-woods. How I love them so, in their mystery of not-to-be." _"--But let me be myself, not a river or a tree."_ "Kiss me! How cold you are!--Your little breasts Are bubbles of ice. Kiss me!--You know how it rests "One to be quenched, to be given up, to be gone in the dark; To be blown out, to let night dowse the spark. "But never mind, my love. Nothing matters, save sleep; Save you, and me, and sleep; all the rest will keep." MUTILATION A THICK mist-sheet lies over the broken wheat. I walk up to my neck in mist, holding my mouth up. Across there, a discoloured moon burns itself out. I hold the night in horror; I dare not turn round. To-night I have left her alone. They would have it I have left her for ever. Oh my God, how it aches Where she is cut off from me! Perhaps she will go back to England. Perhaps she will go back, Perhaps we are parted for ever. If I go on walking through the whole breadth of Germany I come to the North Sea, or the Baltic. Over there is Russia--Austria, Switzerland, France, in a circle! I here in the undermist on the Bavarian road. It aches in me. What is England or France, far off, But a name she might take? I don't mind this continent stretching, the sea far away; It aches in me for her Like the agony of limbs cut off and aching; Not even longing, It is only agony. A cripple! Oh God, to be mutilated! To be a cripple! And if I never see her again? I think, if they told me so I could convulse the heavens with my horror. I think I could alter the frame of things in my agony. I think I could break the System with my heart. I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break. She too suffers. But who could compel her, if she chose me against them all? She has not chosen me finally, she suspends her choice. Night folk, Tuatha De Danaan, dark Gods, govern her sleep, Magnificent ghosts of the darkness, carry off her decision in sleep, Leave her no choice, make her lapse me-ward, make her, Oh Gods of the living Darkness, powers of Night. WOLFRATSHAUSEN _HUMILIATION_ I HAVE been so innerly proud, and so long alone, Do not leave me, or I shall break. Do not leave me. What should I do if you were gone again So soon? What should I look for? Where should I go? What should I be, I myself, "I"? What would it mean, this I? Do not leave me. What should I think of death? If I died, it would not be you: It would be simply the same Lack of you. The same want, life or death, Unfulfilment, The same insanity of space You not there for me. Think, I daren't die For fear of the lack in death. And I daren't live. Unless there were a morphine or a drug. I would bear the pain. But always, strong, unremitting It would make me not me. The thing with my body that would go on living Would not be me. Neither life nor death could help. Think, I couldn't look towards death Nor towards the future: Only not look. Only myself Stand still and bind and blind myself. God, that I have no choice! That my own fulfilment is up against me Timelessly! The burden of self-accomplishment! The charge of fulfilment! And God, that she is _necessary!_ _Necessary,_ and I have no choice! Do not leave me. _A YOUNG WIFE_ THE pain of loving you Is almost more than I can bear. I walk in fear of you. The darkness starts up where You stand, and the night comes through Your eyes when you look at me. Ah never before did I see The shadows that live in the sun! Now every tall glad tree Turns round its back to the sun And looks down on the ground, to see The shadow it used to shun. At the foot of each glowing thing A night lies looking up. Oh, and I want to sing And dance, but I can't lift up My eyes from the shadows: dark They lie spilt round the cup. What is it?--Hark The faint fine seethe in the air! Like the seething sound in a shell! It is death still seething where The wild-flower shakes its bell And the sky lark twinkles blue-- The pain of loving you Is almost more than I can bear. _GREEN_ THE dawn was apple-green, The sky was green wine held up in the sun, The moon was a golden petal between. She opened her eyes, and green They shone, clear like flowers undone For the first time, now for the first time seen. ICKING _RIVER ROSES_ BY the Isar, in the twilight We were wandering and singing, By the Isar, in the evening We climbed the huntsman's ladder and sat swinging In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes, While river met with river, and the ringing Of their pale-green glacier water filled the evening. By the Isar, in the twilight We found the dark wild roses Hanging red at the river; and simmering Frogs were singing, and over the river closes Was savour of ice and of roses; and glimmering Fear was abroad. We whispered: "No one knows us. Let it be as the snake disposes Here in this simmering marsh." KLOSTER SCHAEFTLARN _GLOIRE DE DIJON_ WHEN she rises in the morning I linger to watch her; She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window And the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow Golden shadow glows as She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts Sway like full-blown yellow Gloire de Dijon roses. She drips herself with water, and her shoulders Glisten as silver, they crumple up Like wet and falling roses, and I listen For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals. In the window full of sunlight Concentrates her golden shadow Fold on fold, until it glows as Mellow as the glory roses. ICKING _ROSES ON THE BREAKFAST TABLE_ JUST a few of the roses we gathered from the Isar Are fallen, and their mauve-red petals on the cloth Float like boats on a river, while other Roses are ready to fall, reluctant and loth. She laughs at me across the table, saying I am beautiful. I look at the rumpled young roses And suddenly realise, in them as in me, How lovely the present is that this day discloses. _I AM LIKE A ROSE_ I AM myself at last; now I achieve My very self. I, with the wonder mellow, Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear And single me, perfected from my fellow. Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving Its limpid sap to culmination, has brought Itself more sheer and naked out of the green In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought. _ROSE OF ALL THE WORLD_ I AM here myself; as though this heave of effort At starting other life, fulfilled my own: Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a core Of seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown By all the blood of the rose-bush into being-- Strange, that the urgent will in me, to set My mouth on hers in kisses, and so softly To bring together two strange sparks, beget Another life from our lives, so should send The innermost fire of my own dim soul out- spinning And whirling in blossom of flame and being upon me! That my completion of manhood should be the beginning Another life from mine! For so it looks. The seed is purpose, blossom accident. The seed is all in all, the blossom lent To crown the triumph of this new descent. Is that it, woman? Does it strike you so? The Great Breath blowing a tiny seed of fire Fans out your petals for excess of flame, Till all your being smokes with fine desire? Or are we kindled, you and I, to be One rose of wonderment upon the tree Of perfect life, and is our possible seed But the residuum of the ecstasy? How will you have it?--the rose is all in all, Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall? The sharp begetting, or the child begot? Our consummation matters, or does it not? To me it seems the seed is just left over From the red rose-flowers' fiery transience; Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the bush Which burnt just now with marvellous immanence. Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a rose Of roses unchidden and purposeless; a rose For rosiness only, without an ulterior motive; For me it is more than enough if the flower un- close. _A YOUTH MOWING_ THERE are four men mowing down by the Isar; I can hear the swish of the scythe-strokes, four Sharp breaths taken: yea, and I Am sorry for what's in store. The first man out of the four that's mowing Is mine, I claim him once and for all; Though it's sorry I am, on his young feet, knowing None of the trouble he's led to stall. As he sees me bringing the dinner, he lifts His head as proud as a deer that looks Shoulder-deep out of the corn; and wipes His scythe-blade bright, unhooks The scythe-stone and over the stubble to me. Lad, thou hast gotten a child in me, Laddie, a man thou'lt ha'e to be, Yea, though I'm sorry for thee. _QUITE FORSAKEN_ WHAT pain, to wake and miss you! To wake with a tightened heart, And mouth reaching forward to kiss you! This then at last is the dawn, and the bell Clanging at the farm! Such bewilderment Comes with the sight of the room, I cannot tell. It is raining. Down the half-obscure road Four labourers pass with their scythes Dejectedly;--a huntsman goes by with his load: A gun, and a bunched-up deer, its four little feet Clustered dead.--And this is the dawn For which I wanted the night to retreat! _FORSAKEN AND FORLORN_ THE house is silent, it is late at night, I am alone. From the balcony I can hear the Isar moan, Can see the white Rift of the river eerily, between the pines, under a sky of stone. Some fireflies drift through the middle air Tinily. I wonder where Ends this darkness that annihilates me. _FIREFLIES IN THE CORN_ _She speaks._ Look at the little darlings in the corn! The rye is taller than you, who think yourself So high and mighty: look how the heads are borne Dark and proud on the sky, like a number of knights Passing with spears and pennants and manly scorn. Knights indeed!--much knight I know will ride With his head held high-serene against the sky! Limping and following rather at my side Moaning for me to love him!--Oh darling rye How I adore you for your simple pride! And the dear, dear fireflies wafting in between And over the swaying corn-stalks, just above All the dark-feathered helmets, like little green Stars come low and wandering here for love Of these dark knights, shedding their delicate sheen! I thank you I do, you happy creatures, you dears Riding the air, and carrying all the time Your little lanterns behind you! Ah, it cheers My soul to see you settling and trying to climb The corn-stalks, tipping with fire the spears. All over the dim corn's motion, against the blue Dark sky of night, a wandering glitter, a swarm Of questing brilliant souls going out with their true Proud knights to battle! Sweet, how I warm My poor, my perished soul with the sight of you! _A DOE AT EVENING_ As I went through the marshes a doe sprang out of the corn and flashed up the hill-side leaving her fawn. On the sky-line she moved round to watch, she pricked a fine black blotch on the sky. I looked at her and felt her watching; I became a strange being. Still, I had my right to be there with her, Her nimble shadow trotting along the sky-line, she put back her fine, level-balanced head. And I knew her. Ah yes, being male, is not my head hard-balanced, antlered? Are not my haunches light? Has she not fled on the same wind with me? Does not my fear cover her fear? IRSCHENHAUSEN _SONG OF A MAN WHO IS NOT LOVED_ THE space of the world is immense, before me and around me; If I turn quickly, I am terrified, feeling space surround me; Like a man in a boat on very clear, deep water, space frightens and confounds me. I see myself isolated in the universe, and wonder What effect I can have. My hands wave under The heavens like specks of dust that are floating asunder. I hold myself up, and feel a big wind blowing Me like a gadfly into the dusk, without my know- ing Whither or why or even how I am going. So much there is outside me, so infinitely Small am I, what matter if minutely I beat my way, to be lost immediately? How shall I flatter myself that I can do Anything in such immensity? I am too Little to count in the wind that drifts me through. GLASHÜTTE _SINNERS_ THE big mountains sit still in the afternoon light Shadows in their lap; The bees roll round in the wild-thyme with de- light. We sitting here among the cranberries So still in the gap Of rock, distilling our memories Are sinners! Strange! The bee that blunders Against me goes off with a laugh. A squirrel cocks his head on the fence, and wonders What about sin?--For, it seems The mountains have No shadow of us on their snowy forehead of dreams As they ought to have. They rise above us Dreaming For ever. One even might think that they love us. _Little red cranberries cheek to cheek, Two great dragon-flies wrestling; You, with your forehead nestling Against me, and bright peak shining to peak--_ There's a love-song for you!--Ah, if only There were no teeming Swarms of mankind in the world, and we were less lonely! MAYRHOFEN _MISERY_ OUT of this oubliette between the mountains five valleys go, five passes like gates; three of them black in shadow, two of them bright with distant sunshine; and sunshine fills one high valley bed, green grass shining, and little white houses like quartz crystals, little, but distinct a way off. Why don't I go? Why do I crawl about this pot, this oubliette, stupidly? Why don't I go? But where? If I come to a pine-wood, I can't say Now I am arrived! What are so many straight trees to me! STERZING _SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN ITALY_ THE man and the maid go side by side With an interval of space between; And his hands are awkward and want to hide, She braves it out since she must be seen. When some one passes he drops his head Shading his face in his black felt hat, While the hard girl hardens; nothing is said, There is nothing to wonder or cavil at. Alone on the open road again With the mountain snows across the lake Flushing the afternoon, they are uncomfortable, The loneliness daunts them, their stiff throats ache. And he sighs with relief when she parts from him; Her proud head held in its black silk scarf Gone under the archway, home, he can join The men that lounge in a group on the wharf. His evening is a flame of wine Among the eager, cordial men. And she with her women hot and hard Moves at her ease again. _She is marked, she is singled out For the fire: The brand is upon him, look--you, Of desire. They are chosen, ah, they are fated For the fight! Champion her, all you women! Men, menfolk Hold him your light! Nourish her, train her, harden her Women all! Fold him, be good to him, cherish him Men, ere he fall. Women, another champion! This, men, is yours! Wreathe and enlap and anoint them Behind separate doors._ GARGNANO _WINTER DAWN_ GREEN star Sirius Dribbling over the lake; The stars have gone so far on their road, Yet we're awake! Without a sound The new young year comes in And is half-way over the lake. We must begin Again. This love so full Of hate has hurt us so, We lie side by side Moored--but no, Let me get up And wash quite clean Of this hate.-- So green The great star goes! I am washed quite clean, Quite clean of it all. But e'en So cold, so cold and clean Now the hate is gone! It is all no good, I am chilled to the bone Now the hate is gone; There is nothing left; I am pure like bone, Of all feeling bereft. _A BAD BEGINNING_ THE yellow sun steps over the mountain-top And falters a few short steps across the lake-- Are you awake? See, glittering on the milk-blue, morning lake They are laying the golden racing-track of the sun; The day has begun. The sun is in my eyes, I must get up. I want to go, there's a gold road blazes before My breast--which is so sore. What?--your throat is bruised, bruised with my kisses? Ah, but if I am cruel what then are you? I am bruised right through. What if I love you!--This misery Of your dissatisfaction and misprision Stupefies me. Ah yes, your open arms! Ah yes, ah yes, You would take me to your breast!--But no, You should come to mine, It were better so. Here I am--get up and come to me! Not as a visitor either, nor a sweet And winsome child of innocence; nor As an insolent mistress telling my pulse's beat. Come to me like a woman coming home To the man who is her husband, all the rest Subordinate to this, that he and she Are joined together for ever, as is best. Behind me on the lake I hear the steamer drum- ming From Austria. There lies the world, and here Am I. Which way are you coming? _WHY DOES SHE WEEP?_ HUSH then why do you cry? It's you and me the same as before. If you hear a rustle it's only a rabbit gone back to his hole in a bustle. If something stirs in the branches overhead, it will be a squirrel moving uneasily, disturbed by the stress of our loving. Why should you cry then? Are you afraid of God in the dark? I'm not afraid of God. Let him come forth. If he is hiding in the cover let him come forth. Now in the cool of the day it is we who walk in the trees and call to God "Where art thou?" And it is he who hides. Why do you cry? My heart is bitter. Let God come forth to justify himself now. Why do you cry? Is it Wehmut, ist dir weh? Weep then, yea for the abomination of our old righteousness, We have done wrong many times; but this time we begin to do right. Weep then, weep for the abomination of our past righteousness. God will keep hidden, he won't come forth. _GIORNO DEI MORTI_ ALONG the avenue of cypresses All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices Of linen go the chanting choristers, The priests in gold and black, the villagers. . . . And all along the path to the cemetery The round dark heads of men crowd silently, And black-scarved faces of women-folk, wistfully Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery. And at the foot of a grave a father stands With sunken head, and forgotten, folded hands; And at the foot of a grave a mother kneels With pale shut face, nor either hears nor feels The coming of the chanting choristers Between the avenue of cypresses, The silence of the many villagers, The candle-flames beside the surplices. _ALL SOULS_ THEY are chanting now the service of All the Dead And the village folk outside in the burying ground Listen--except those who strive with their dead, Reaching out in anguish, yet unable quite to touch them: Those villagers isolated at the grave Where the candles burn in the daylight, and the painted wreaths Are propped on end, there, where the mystery starts. The naked candles burn on every grave. On your grave, in England, the weeds grow. But I am your naked candle burning, And that is not your grave, in England, The world is your grave. And my naked body standing on your grave Upright towards heaven is burning off to you Its flame of life, now and always, till the end. It is my offering to you; every day is All Souls' Day. I forget you, have forgotten you. I am busy only at my burning, I am busy only at my life. But my feet are on your grave, planted. And when I lift my face, it is a flame that goes up To the other world, where you are now. But I am not concerned with you. I have forgotten you. I am a naked candle burning on your grave. _LADY WIFE_ AH yes, I know you well, a sojourner At the hearth; I know right well the marriage ring you wear, And what it's worth. The angels came to Abraham, and they stayed In his house awhile; So you to mine, I imagine; yes, happily Condescend to be vile. I see you all the time, you bird-blithe, lovely Angel in disguise. I see right well how I ought to be grateful, Smitten with reverent surprise. Listen, I have no use For so rare a visit; Mine is a common devil's Requisite. Rise up and go, I have no use for you And your blithe, glad mien. No angels here, for me no goddesses, Nor any Queen. Put ashes on your head, put sackcloth on And learn to serve. You have fed me with your sweetness, now I am sick, As I deserve. Queens, ladies, angels, women rare, I have had enough. Put sackcloth on, be crowned with powdery ash, Be common stuff. And serve now woman, serve, as a woman should, Implicitly. Since I must serve and struggle with the imminent Mystery. Serve then, I tell you, add your strength to mine Take on this doom. What are you by yourself, do you think, and what The mere fruit of your womb? What is the fruit of your womb then, you mother, you queen, When it falls to the ground? Is it more than the apples of Sodom you scorn so, the men Who abound? Bring forth the sons of your womb then, and put them Into the fire Of Sodom that covers the earth; bring them forth From the womb of your precious desire. You woman most holy, you mother, you being beyond Question or diminution, Add yourself up, and your seed, to the nought Of your last solution. _BOTH SIDES OF THE MEDAL_ AND because you love me think you you do not hate me? Ha, since you love me to ecstasy it follows you hate me to ecstasy. Because when you hear me go down the road outside the house you must come to the window to watch me go, do you think it is pure worship? Because, when I sit in the room, here, in my own house, and you want to enlarge yourself with this friend of mine, such a friend as he is, yet you cannot get beyond your awareness of me you are held back by my being in the same world with you, do you think it is bliss alone? sheer harmony? No doubt if I were dead, you must reach into death after me, but would not your hate reach even more madly than your love? your impassioned, unfinished hate? Since you have a passion for me, as I for you, does not that passion stand in your way like a Balaam's ass? and am I not Balaam's ass golden-mouthed occasionally? But mostly, do you not detest my bray? Since you are confined in the orbit of me do you not loathe the confinement? Is not even the beauty and peace of an orbit an intolerable prison to you, as it is to everybody? But we will learn to submit each of us to the balanced, eternal orbit wherein we circle on our fate in strange conjunction. What is chaos, my love? It is not freedom. A disarray of falling stars coming to nought. _LOGGERHEADS_ PLEASE yourself how you have it. Take my words, and fling Them down on the counter roundly; See if they ring. Sift my looks and expressions, And see what proportion there is Of sand in my doubtful sugar Of verities. Have a real stock-taking Of my manly breast; Find out if I'm sound or bankrupt, Or a poor thing at best. For I am quite indifferent To your dubious state, As to whether you've found a fortune In me, or a flea-bitten fate. Make a good investigation Of all that is there, And then, if it's worth it, be grateful-- If not then despair. If despair is our portion Then let us despair. Let us make for the weeping willow. I don't care. _DECEMBER NIGHT_ TAKE off your cloak and your hat And your shoes, and draw up at my hearth Where never woman sat. I have made the fire up bright; Let us leave the rest in the dark And sit by firelight. The wine is warm in the hearth; The flickers come and go. I will warm your feet with kisses Until they glow. _NEW YEAR'S EVE_ THERE are only two things now, The great black night scooped out And this fire-glow. This fire-glow, the core, And we the two ripe pips That are held in store. Listen, the darkness rings As it circulates round our fire. Take off your things. Your shoulders, your bruised throat Your breasts, your nakedness! This fiery coat! As the darkness flickers and dips, As the firelight falls and leaps From your feet to your lips! _NEW YEAR'S NIGHT_ Now you are mine, to-night at last I say it; You're a dove I have bought for sacrifice, And to-night I slay it. Here in my arms my naked sacrifice! Death, do you hear, in my arms I am bringing My offering, bought at great price. She's a silvery dove worth more than all I've got. Now I offer her up to the ancient, inexorable God, Who knows me not. Look, she's a wonderful dove, without blemish or spot! I sacrifice all in her, my last of the world, Pride, strength, all the lot. All, all on the altar! And death swooping down Like a falcon. 'Tis God has taken the victim; I have won my renown. _VALENTINE'S NIGHT_ You shadow and flame, You interchange, You death in the game! Now I gather you up, Now I put you back Like a poppy in its cup. And so, you are a maid Again, my darling, but new, Unafraid. My love, my blossom, a child Almost! The flower in the bud Again, undefiled. And yet, a woman, knowing All, good, evil, both In one blossom blowing. _BIRTH NIGHT_ THIS fireglow is a red womb In the night, where you're folded up On your doom. And the ugly, brutal years Are dissolving out of you, And the stagnant tears. I the great vein that leads From the night to the source of you, Which the sweet blood feeds. New phase in the germ of you; New sunny streams of blood Washing you through. You are born again of me. I, Adam, from the veins of me The Eve that is to be. What has been long ago Grows dimmer, we both forget, We no longer know. You are lovely, your face is soft Like a flower in bud On a mountain croft. This is Noël for me. To-night is a woman born Of the man in me. _RABBIT SNARED IN THE NIGHT_ WHY do you spurt and sprottle like that, bunny? Why should I want to throttle you, bunny? Yes, bunch yourself between my knees and lie still. Lie on me with a hot, plumb, live weight, heavy as a stone, passive, yet hot, waiting. What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What is the hot, plumb weight of your desire on me? You have a hot, unthinkable desire of me, bunny. What is that spark glittering at me on the unutterable darkness of your eye, bunny? The finest splinter of a spark that you throw off, straight on the tinder of my nerves! It sets up a strange fire, a soft, most unwarrantable burning a bale-fire mounting, mounting up in me. 'Tis not of me, bunny. It was you engendered it, with that fine, demoniacal spark you jetted off your eye at me. _I_ did not want it, this furnace, this draught-maddened fire which mounts up my arms making them swell with turgid, ungovernable strength. 'Twas not _I_ that wished it, that my fingers should turn into these flames avid and terrible that they are at this moment. It must have been _your_ inbreathing, gaping desire that drew this red gush in me; I must be reciprocating _your_ vacuous, hideous passion. It must be the want in you that has drawn this terrible draught of white fire up my veins as up a chimney. It must be you who desire this intermingling of the black and monstrous fingers of Moloch in the blood-jets of your throat. Come, you shall have your desire, since already I am implicated with you in your strange lust. _PARADISE RE-ENTERED_ THROUGH the strait gate of passion, Between the bickering fire Where flames of fierce love tremble On the body of fierce desire: To the intoxication, The mind, fused down like a bead, Flees in its agitation The flames' stiff speed: At last to calm incandescence, Burned clean by remorseless hate, Now, at the day's renascence We approach the gate. Now, from the darkened spaces Of fear, and of frightened faces, Death, in our awful embraces Approached and passed by; We near the flame-burnt porches Where the brands of the angels, like torches Whirl,--in these perilous marches Pausing to sigh; We look back on the withering roses, The stars, in their sun-dimmed closes, Where 'twas given us to repose us Sure on our sanctity; Beautiful, candid lovers, Burnt out of our earthy covers, We might have nestled like plovers In the fields of eternity. There, sure in sinless being, All-seen, and then all-seeing, In us life unto death agreeing, We might have lain. But we storm the angel-guarded Gates of the long-discarded, Garden, which God has hoarded Against our pain. The Lord of Hosts, and the Devil Are left on Eternity's level Field, and as victors we travel To Eden home. Back beyond good and evil Return we. Eve dishevel Your hair for the bliss-drenched revel On our primal loam. _SPRING MORNING_ AH, through the open door Is there an almond tree Aflame with blossom! --Let us fight no more. Among the pink and blue Of the sky and the almond flowers A sparrow flutters. --We have come through, It is really spring!--See, When he thinks himself alone How he bullies the flowers. --Ah, you and me How happy we'll be!--See him He clouts the tufts of flowers In his impudence. --But, did you dream It would be so bitter? Never mind It is finished, the spring is here. And we're going to be summer-happy And summer-kind. We have died, we have slain and been slain, We are not our old selves any more. I feel new and eager To start again. It is gorgeous to live and forget. And to feel quite new. See the bird in the flowers?--he's making A rare to-do! He thinks the whole blue sky Is much less than the bit of blue egg He's got in his nest--we'll be happy You and I, I and you. With nothing to fight any more-- In each other, at least. See, how gorgeous the world is Outside the door! SAN GAUDENZIO _WEDLOCK_ I COME, my little one, closer up against me, Creep right up, with your round head pushed in my breast. How I love all of you! Do you feel me wrap you Up with myself and my warmth, like a flame round the wick? And how I am not at all, except a flame that mounts off you. Where I touch you, I flame into being;--but is it me, or you? That round head pushed in my chest, like a nut in its socket, And I the swift bracts that sheathe it: those breasts, those thighs and knees, Those shoulders so warm and smooth: I feel that I Am a sunlight upon them, that shines them into being. But how lovely to be you! Creep closer in, that I am more. I spread over you! How lovely, your round head, your arms, Your breasts, your knees and feet! I feel that we Are a bonfire of oneness, me flame flung leaping round you, You the core of the fire, crept into me. II AND oh, my little one, you whom I enfold, How quaveringly I depend on you, to keep me alive, Like a flame on a wick! I, the man who enfolds you and holds you close, How my soul cleaves to your bosom as I clasp you, The very quick of my being! Suppose you didn't want me! I should sink down Like a light that has no sustenance And sinks low. Cherish me, my tiny one, cherish me who enfold you. Nourish me, and endue me, I am only of you, I am your issue. How full and big like a robust, happy flame When I enfold you, and you creep into me, And my life is fierce at its quick Where it comes off you! III MY little one, my big one, My bird, my brown sparrow in my breast. My squirrel clutching in to me; My pigeon, my little one, so warm So close, breathing so still. My little one, my big one, I, who am so fierce and strong, enfolding you, If you start away from my breast, and leave me, How suddenly I shall go down into nothing Like a flame that falls of a sudden. And you will be before me, tall and towering, And I shall be wavering uncertain Like a sunken flame that grasps for support. IV BUT now I am full and strong and certain With you there firm at the core of me Keeping me. How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed. I wonder what it will be, What will come forth of us. What flower, my love? No matter, I am so happy, I feel like a firm, rich, healthy root, Rejoicing in what is to come. How I depend on you utterly My little one, my big one! How everything that will be, will not be of me, Nor of either of us, But of both of us. V AND think, there will something come forth from us. We two, folded so small together, There will something come forth from us. Children, acts, utterance Perhaps only happiness. Perhaps only happiness will come forth from us. Old sorrow, and new happiness. Only that one newness. But that is all I want. And I am sure of that. We are sure of that. VI AND yet all the while you are you, you are not me. And I am I, I am never you. How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are! Yet I am glad. I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope, Something that stands over, Something I shall never be, That I shall always wonder over, and wait for, Look for like the breath of life as long as I live, Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am, I shall always wonder over you, and look for you. And you will always be with me. I shall never cease to be filled with newness, Having you near me. _HISTORY_ THE listless beauty of the hour When snow fell on the apple trees And the wood-ash gathered in the fire And we faced our first miseries. Then the sweeping sunshine of noon When the mountains like chariot cars Were ranked to blue battle--and you and I Counted our scars. And then in a strange, grey hour We lay mouth to mouth, with your face Under mine like a star on the lake, And I covered the earth, and all space. The silent, drifting hours Of morn after morn And night drifting up to the night Yet no pathway worn. Your life, and mine, my love Passing on and on, the hate Fusing closer and closer with love Till at length they mate. THE CEARNE _SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH_ NOT I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift! If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted; If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides. Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul, I would be a good fountain, a good well-head, Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression. What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them. _ONE WOMAN TO ALL WOMEN_ I DON'T care whether I am beautiful to you You other women. Nothing of me that you see is my own; A man balances, bone unto bone Balances, everything thrown In the scale, you other women. You may look and say to yourselves, I do Not show like the rest. My face may not please you, nor my stature; yet if you knew How happy I am, how my heart in the wind rings true Like a bell that is chiming, each stroke as a stroke falls due, You other women: You would draw your mirror towards you, you would wish To be different. There's the beauty you cannot see, myself and him Balanced in glorious equilibrium, The swinging beauty of equilibrium, You other women. There's this other beauty, the way of the stars You straggling women. If you knew how I swerve in peace, in the equi- poise With the man, if you knew how my flesh enjoys The swinging bliss no shattering ever destroys You other women: You would envy me, you would think me wonder- ful Beyond compare; You would weep to be lapsing on such harmony As carries me, you would wonder aloud that he Who is so strange should correspond with me Everywhere. You see he is different, he is dangerous, Without pity or love. And yet how his separate being liberates me And gives me peace! You cannot see How the stars are moving in surety Exquisite, high above. We move without knowing, we sleep, and we travel on, You other women. And this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone In a motion human inhuman, two and one Encompassed, and many reduced to none, You other women. KENSINGTON _PEOPLE_ THE great gold apples of night Hang from the street's long bough Dripping their light On the faces that drift below, On the faces that drift and blow Down the night-time, out of sight In the wind's sad sough. The ripeness of these apples of night Distilling over me Makes sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why They ever should be. _STREET LAMPS_ GOLD, with an innermost speck Of silver, singing afloat Beneath the night, Like balls of thistle-down Wandering up and down Over the whispering town Seeking where to alight! Slowly, above the street Above the ebb of feet Drifting in flight; Still, in the purple distance The gold of their strange persistence As they cross and part and meet And pass out of sight! The seed-ball of the sun Is broken at last, and done Is the orb of day. Now to the separate ends Seed after day-seed wends A separate way. No sun will ever rise Again on the wonted skies In the midst of the spheres. The globe of the day, over-ripe, Is shattered at last beneath the stripe Of the wind, and its oneness veers Out myriad-wise. Seed after seed after seed Drifts over the town, in its need To sink and have done; To settle at last in the dark, To bury its weary spark Where the end is begun. Darkness, and depth of sleep, Nothing to know or to weep Where the seed sinks in To the earth of the under-night Where all is silent, quite Still, and the darknesses steep Out all the sin. _"SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME"_ SHE said as well to me: "Why are you ashamed? That little bit of your chest that shows between the gap of your shirt, why cover it up? Why shouldn't your legs and your good strong thighs be rough and hairy?--I'm glad they are like that. You are shy, you silly, you silly shy thing. Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come out of their covers. Like any snake slipping into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into your clothes. And I love you so! Straight and clean and all of a piece is the body of a man, such an instrument, a spade, like a spear, or an oar, such a joy to me--" So she laid her hands and pressed them down my sides, so that I began to wonder over myself, and what I was. She said to me: "What an instrument, your body! single and perfectly distinct from everything else! What a tool in the hands of the Lord! Only God could have brought it to its shape. It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the breasts and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow. "When I was a child, I loved my father's riding- whip that he used so often. I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him. So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk. Something seemed to surge through me when I touched them. "So it is with you, but here The joy I feel! God knows what I feel, but it is joy! Look, you are clean and fine and singled out! I admire you so, you are beautiful: this clean sweep of your sides, this firmness, this hard mould! I would die rather than have it injured with one scar. I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord, and have you--" So she said, and I wondered, feeling trammelled and hurt. It did not make me free. Now I say to her: "No tool, no instrument, no God! Don't touch me and appreciate me. It is an infamy. You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat. Your hand would not be so flig and easy. Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the sunshine like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity. And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono- lith, arrested, static. "Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate? I tell you there is all these. And why should you overlook them in me?--" _NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH_ I AND so I cross into another world shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespass on. I am very glad, and all alone in the world, all alone, and very glad, in a new world where I am disembarked at last. I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in. I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is nobody to know. And whosoever the unknown people of this un- known world may be they will never understand my weeping for joy to be adventuring among them because it will still be a gesture of the old world I am making which they will not understand, because it is quite, quite foreign to them. II I WAS so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself. When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering. When I went in a train, I knew it was myself travelling by my own invention. When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction. When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body. It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh. III I SHALL never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end when everything was me, I knew it all already, I anticipated it all in my soul because I was the author and the result I was the God and the creation at once; creator, I looked at my creation; created, I looked at myself, the creator: it was a maniacal horror in the end. I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved, and God of horror, I was kissing also myself. I was a father and a begetter of children, and oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body. IV AT last came death, sufficiency of death, and that at last relieved me, I died. I buried my beloved; it was good, I buried myself and was gone. War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder! Very good, very good, I am a murderer! It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a multitude one on another, and then in clusters together smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them the murdered bodies of youths and men in heaps and heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps; thousands and thousands of gaping, hideous foul dead that are youths and men and me being burned with oil, and consumed in corrupt thick smoke, that rolls and taints and blackens the sky, till at last it is dark, dark as night, or death, or hell and I am dead, and trodden to nought in the smoke-sodden tomb; dead and trodden to nought in the sour black earth of the tomb; dead and trodden to nought, trodden to nought. V GOD, but it is good to have died and been trodden out trodden to nought in sour, dead earth quite to nought absolutely to nothing nothing nothing nothing. For when it is quite, quite nothing, then it is everything. When I am trodden quite out, quite, quite out every vestige gone, then I am here risen, and setting my foot on another world risen, accomplishing a resurrection risen, not born again, but risen, body the same as before, new beyond knowledge of newness, alive beyond life proud beyond inkling or furthest conception of pride living where life was never yet dreamed of, nor hinted at here, in the other world, still terrestrial myself, the same as before, yet unaccountably new. VI I, IN the sour black tomb, trodden to absolute death I put out my hand in the night, one night, and my hand touched that which was verily not me verily it was not me. Where I had been was a sudden blaze a sudden flaring blaze! So I put my hand out further, a little further and I felt that which was not I, it verily was not I it was the unknown. Ha, I was a blaze leaping up! I was a tiger bursting into sunlight. I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown. I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb starved from a life of devouring always myself now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown. My God, but I can only say I touch, I feel the unknown! I am the first comer! Cortes, Pisarro, Columbus, Cabot, they are noth- ing, nothing! I am the first comer! I am the discoverer! I have found the other world! The unknown, the unknown! I am thrown upon the shore. I am covering myself with the sand. I am filling my mouth with the earth. I am burrowing my body into the soil. The unknown, the new world! VII IT was the flank of my wife I touched with my hand, I clutched with my hand rising, new-awakened from the tomb! It was the flank of my wife whom I married years ago at whose side I have lain for over a thousand nights and all that previous while, she was I, she was I; I touched her, it was I who touched and I who was touched. Yet rising from the tomb, from the black oblivion stretching out my hand, my hand flung like a drowned man's hand on a rock, I touched her flank and knew I was carried by the current in death over to the new world, and was climbing out on the shore, risen, not to the old world, the old, changeless I, the old life, wakened not to the old knowledge but to a new earth, a new I, a new knowledge, a new world of time. Ah no, I cannot tell you what it is, the new world I cannot tell you the mad, astounded rapture of its discovery. I shall be mad with delight before I have done, and whosoever comes after will find me in the new world a madman in rapture. VIII GREEN streams that flow from the innermost continent of the new world, what are they? Green and illumined and travelling for ever dissolved with the mystery of the innermost heart of the continent mystery beyond knowledge or endurance, so sump- tuous out of the well-heads of the new world.-- The other, she too has strange green eyes! White sands and fruits unknown and perfumes that never can blow across the dark seas to our usual world! And land that beats with a pulse! And valleys that draw close in love! And strange ways where I fall into oblivion of uttermost living!-- Also she who is the other has strange-mounded breasts and strange sheer slopes, and white levels. Sightless and strong oblivion in utter life takes possession of me! The unknown, strong current of life supreme drowns me and sweeps me away and holds me down to the sources of mystery, in the depths, extinguishes there my risen resurrected life and kindles it further at the core of utter mystery. GREATHAM _ELYSIUM_ I HAVE found a place of loneliness Lonelier than Lyonesse Lovelier than Paradise; Full of sweet stillness That no noise can transgress Never a lamp distress. The full moon sank in state. I saw her stand and wait For her watchers to shut the gate. Then I found myself in a wonderland All of shadow and of bland Silence hard to understand. I waited therefore; then I knew The presence of the flowers that grew Noiseless, their wonder noiseless blew. And flashing kingfishers that flew In sightless beauty, and the few Shadows the passing wild-beast threw. And Eve approaching over the ground Unheard and subtle, never a sound To let me know that I was found. Invisible the hands of Eve Upon me travelling to reeve Me from the matrix, to relieve Me from the rest! Ah terribly Between the body of life and me Her hands slid in and set me free. Ah, with a fearful, strange detection She found the source of my subjection To the All, and severed the connection. Delivered helpless and amazed From the womb of the All, I am waiting, dazed For memory to be erased. Then I shall know the Elysium That lies outside the monstrous womb Of time from out of which I come. _MANIFESTO_ I A WOMAN has given me strength and affluence. Admitted! All the rocking wheat of Canada, ripening now, has not so much of strength as the body of one woman sweet in ear, nor so much to give though it feed nations. Hunger is the very Satan. The fear of hunger is Moloch, Belial, the horrible God. It is a fearful thing to be dominated by the fear of hunger. Not bread alone, not the belly nor the thirsty throat. I have never yet been smitten through the belly, with the lack of bread, no, nor even milk and honey. The fear of the want of these things seems to be quite left out of me. For so much, I thank the good generations of man- kind. II AND the sweet, constant, balanced heat of the suave sensitive body, the hunger for this has never seized me and terrified me. Here again, man has been good in his legacy to us, in these two primary instances. III THEN the dumb, aching, bitter, helpless need, the pining to be initiated, to have access to the knowledge that the great dead have opened up for us, to know, to satisfy the great and dominant hunger of the mind; man's sweetest harvest of the centuries, sweet, printed books, bright, glancing, exquisite corn of many a stubborn glebe in the upturned darkness; I thank mankind with passionate heart that I just escaped the hunger for these, that they were given when I needed them, because I am the son of man. I have eaten, and drunk, and warmed and clothed my body, I have been taught the language of understanding, I have chosen among the bright and marvellous books, like any prince, such stores of the world's supply were open to me, in the wisdom and goodness of man. So far, so good. Wise, good provision that makes the heart swell with love! IV BUT then came another hunger very deep, and ravening; the very body's body crying out with a hunger more frightening, more profound than stomach or throat or even the mind; redder than death, more clamorous. The hunger for the woman. Alas, it is so deep a Moloch, ruthless and strong, 'tis like the unutterable name of the dread Lord, not to be spoken aloud. Yet there it is, the hunger which comes upon us, which we must learn to satisfy with pure, real satisfaction; or perish, there is no alternative. I thought it was woman, indiscriminate woman, mere female adjunct of what I was. Ah, that was torment hard enough and a thing to be afraid of, a threatening, torturing, phallic Moloch. A woman fed that hunger in me at last. What many women cannot give, one woman can; so I have known it. She stood before me like riches that were mine. Even then, in the dark, I was tortured, ravening, unfree, Ashamed, and shameful, and vicious. A man is so terrified of strong hunger; and this terror is the root of all cruelty. She loved me, and stood before me, looking to me. How could I look, when I was mad? I looked sideways, furtively, being mad with voracious desire. V THIS comes right at last. When a man is rich, he loses at last the hunger fear. I lost at last the fierceness that fears it will starve. I could put my face at last between her breasts and know that they were given for ever that I should never starve never perish; I had eaten of the bread that satisfies and my body's body was appeased, there was peace and richness, fulfilment. Let them praise desire who will, but only fulfilment will do, real fulfilment, nothing short. It is our ratification our heaven, as a matter of fact. Immortality, the heaven, is only a projection of this strange but actual fulfilment, here in the flesh. So, another hunger was supplied, and for this I have to thank one woman, not mankind, for mankind would have prevented me; but one woman, and these are my red-letter thanksgivings. VI To be, or not to be, is still the question. This ache for being is the ultimate hunger. And for myself, I can say "almost, almost, oh, very nearly." Yet something remains. Something shall not always remain. For the main already is fulfilment. What remains in me, is to be known even as I know. I know her now: or perhaps, I know my own limitation against her. Plunging as I have done, over, over the brink I have dropped at last headlong into nought, plunging upon sheer hard extinction; I have come, as it were, not to know, died, as it were; ceased from knowing; surpassed myself. What can I say more, except that I know what it is to surpass myself? It is a kind of death which is not death. It is going a little beyond the bounds. How can one speak, where there is a dumbness on one's mouth? I suppose, ultimately she is all beyond me, she is all not-me, ultimately. It is that that one comes to. A curious agony, and a relief, when I touch that which is not me in any sense, it wounds me to death with my own not-being; definite, inviolable limitation, and something beyond, quite beyond, if you understand what that means. It is the major part of being, this having surpassed oneself, this having touched the edge of the beyond, and perished, yet not perished. VII I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me, as I have perished on her. Then, we shall be two and distinct, we shall have each our separate being. And that will be pure existence, real liberty. Till then, we are confused, a mixture, unresolved, unextricated one from the other. It is in pure, unutterable resolvedness, distinction of being, that one is free, not in mixing, merging, not in similarity. When she has put her hand on my secret, darkest sources, the darkest outgoings, when it has struck home to her, like a death, "this is _him!_" she has no part in it, no part whatever, it is the terrible _other_, when she knows the fearful _other flesh_, ah, dark- ness unfathomable and fearful, contiguous and concrete, when she is slain against me, and lies in a heap like one outside the house, when she passes away as I have passed away being pressed up against the _other_, then I shall be glad, I shall not be confused with her, I shall be cleared, distinct, single as if burnished in silver, having no adherence, no adhesion anywhere, one clear, burnished, isolated being, unique, and she also, pure, isolated, complete, two of us, unutterably distinguished, and in unutterable conjunction. Then we shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect. VIII AFTER that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique, that we are all detached, moving in freedom more than the angels, conditioned only by our own pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being. Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled. Every movement will be direct. Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it lest our faces betray us to some untimely fiend. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing singleness of mankind. The blazing tiger will spring upon the deer, un- dimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, we shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight out of the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing in us unbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall _be_, _now_. We shall know in full. We, the mystic NOW. ZENNOR _AUTUMN RAIN_ THE plane leaves fall black and wet on the lawn; The cloud sheaves in heaven's fields set droop and are drawn in falling seeds of rain; the seed of heaven on my face falling--I hear again like echoes even that softly pace Heaven's muffled floor, the winds that tread out all the grain of tears, the store harvested in the sheaves of pain caught up aloft: the sheaves of dead men that are slain now winnowed soft on the floor of heaven; manna invisible of all the pain here to us given; finely divisible falling as rain. _FROST FLOWERS_ IT is not long since, here among all these folk in London, I should have held myself of no account whatever, but should have stood aside and made them way thinking that they, perhaps, had more right than I--for who was I? Now I see them just the same, and watch them. But of what account do I hold them? Especially the young women. I look at them as they dart and flash before the shops, like wagtails on the edge of a pool. If I pass them close, or any man, like sharp, slim wagtails they flash a little aside pretending to avoid us; yet all the time calculating. They think that we adore them--alas, would it were true! Probably they think all men adore them, howsoever they pass by. What is it, that, from their faces fresh as spring, such fair, fresh, alert, first-flower faces, like lavender crocuses, snowdrops, like Roman hyacinths, scyllas and yellow-haired hellebore, jonquils, dim anemones, even the sulphur auriculas, flowers that come first from the darkness, and feel cold to the touch, flowers scentless or pungent, ammoniacal almost; what is it, that, from the faces of the fair young women comes like a pungent scent, a vibration beneath that startles me, alarms me, stirs up a repulsion? They are the issue of acrid winter, these first- flower young women; their scent is lacerating and repellant, it smells of burning snow, of hot-ache, of earth, winter-pressed, strangled in corruption; it is the scent of the fiery-cold dregs of corruption, when destruction soaks through the mortified, decomposing earth, and the last fires of dissolution burn in the bosom of the ground. They are the flowers of ice-vivid mortification, thaw-cold, ice-corrupt blossoms, with a loveliness I loathe; for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart must they need to root in! _CRAVING FOR SPRING_ I WISH it were spring in the world. Let it be spring! Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap! Come, rush of creation! Come, life! surge through this mass of mortifica- tion! Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first- flowers, which are rather last-flowers! Come, thaw down their cool portentousness, dissolve them: snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of white and purple crocuses, flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption, nourished in mortification, jets of exquisite finality; Come, spring, make havoc of them! I trample on the snowdrops, it gives me pleasure to tread down the jonquils, to destroy the chill Lent lilies; for I am sick of them, their faint-bloodedness, slow-blooded, icy-fleshed, portentous. I want the fine, kindling wine-sap of spring, gold, and of inconceivably fine, quintessential brightness, rare almost as beams, yet overwhelmingly potent, strong like the greatest force of world-balancing. This is the same that picks up the harvest of wheat and rocks it, tons of grain, on the ripening wind; the same that dangles the globe-shaped pleiads of fruit temptingly in mid-air, between a playful thumb and finger; oh, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, whirls the pear-bloom, upon us, and apple- and almond- and apricot- and quince-blossom, storms and cumulus clouds of all imaginable blossom about our bewildered faces, though we do not worship. I wish it were spring cunningly blowing on the fallen sparks, odds and ends of the old, scattered fire, and kindling shapely little conflagrations curious long-legged foals, and wide-eared calves, and naked sparrow-bubs. I wish that spring would start the thundering traffic of feet new feet on the earth, beating with impatience. I wish it were spring, thundering delicate, tender spring. I wish these brittle, frost-lovely flowers of pas- sionate, mysterious corruption were not yet to come still more from the still- flickering discontent. Oh, in the spring, the bluebell bows him down for very exuberance, exulting with secret warm excess, bowed down with his inner magnificence! Oh, yes, the gush of spring is strong enough to toss the globe of earth like a ball on a water-jet dancing sportfully; as you see a tiny celluloid ball tossing on a squint of water for men to shoot at, penny-a-time, in a booth at a fair. The gush of spring is strong enough to play with the globe of earth like a ball on a fountain; At the same time it opens the tiny hands of the hazel with such infinite patience. The power of the rising, golden, all-creative sap could take the earth and heave it off among the stars, into the in- visible; the same sets the throstle at sunset on a bough singing against the blackbird; comes out in the hesitating tremor of the primrose, and betrays its candour in the round white straw- berry flower, is dignified in the foxglove, like a Red-Indian brave. Ah come, come quickly, spring! Come and lift us towards our culmination, we myriads; we who have never flowered, like patient cactuses. Come and lift us to our end, to blossom, bring us to our summer we who are winter-weary in the winter of the world. Come making the chaffinch nests hollow and cosy, come and soften the willow buds till they are puffed and furred, then blow them over with gold. Come and cajole the gawky colt's-foot flowers. Come quickly, and vindicate us against too much death. Come quickly, and stir the rotten globe of the world from within, burst it with germination, with world anew. Come now, to us, your adherents, who cannot flower from the ice. All the world gleams with the lilies of Death the Unconquerable, but come, give us our turn. Enough of the virgins and lilies, of passionate, suffocating perfume of corruption, no more narcissus perfume, lily harlots, the blades of sensation piercing the flesh to blossom of death. Have done, have done with this shuddering, delicious business of thrilling ruin in the flesh, of pungent passion, of rare, death-edged ecstasy. Give us our turn, give us a chance, let our hour strike, O soon, soon! Let the darkness turn violet with rich dawn. Let the darkness be warmed, warmed through to a ruddy violet, incipient purpling towards summer in the world of the heart of man. Are the violets already here! Show me! I tremble so much to hear it, that even now on the threshold of spring, I fear I shall die. Show me the violets that are out. Oh, if it be true, and the living darkness of the blood of man is purpling with violets, if the violets are coming out from under the rack of men, winter-rotten and fallen we shall have spring. Pray not to die on this Pisgah blossoming with violets. Pray to live through. If you catch a whiff of violets from the darkness of the shadow of man it will be spring in the world, it will be spring in the world of the living; wonderment organising itself, heralding itself with the violets, stirring of new seasons. Ah, do not let me die on the brink of such anticipation! Worse, let me not deceive myself. ZENNOR PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS WEST NORWOOD LONDON Look! We Have Come Through! D.H. LAWRENCE 5s. NET CHATTO & WINDUS 
54058	----	LOVE POEMS AND OTHERS LOVE · POEMS AND · OTHERS BY · D. H. LAWRENCE AUTHOR OF "THE WHITE PEACOCK" "THE TRESPASSER" DUCKWORTH · AND · CO. COVENT · GARDEN · LONDON MCMXIII _Several of these Poems have appeared in the "English Review," the "Nation," and the "Westminster Gazette."_ CONTENTS LOVE POEMS:-- PAGE Wedding Morn i. Kisses in the Train iii. Cruelty and Love v. Cherry Robbers viii. Lilies in the Fire ix. Coldness in Love xi. End of another Home-Holiday xiii. Reminder xvi. Bei Hennef xviii. Lightning xix. Song-Day in Autumn xxi. Aware xxiii. A Pang of Reminiscence xxiv. A White Blossom xxv. Red Moon-Rise xxvi. Return xxviii. The Appeal xxix. Repulsed xxx. Dream-Confused xxxii. Corot xxxiii. Morning Work xxxv. Transformations xxxvi. Renascence xxxviii. Dog-Tired xl. Michael-Angelo xli. DIALECT POEMS:-- Violets xlii. Whether or Not xliv. A Collier's Wife liii. The Drained Cup lvi. THE SCHOOLMASTER:-- I. A Snowy Day in School lix. II. The Best of School lx. III. Afternoon in School lxiii. WEDDING MORN The morning breaks like a pomegranate In a shining crack of red, Ah, when to-morrow the dawn comes late Whitening across the bed, It will find me watching at the marriage gate And waiting while light is shed On him who is sleeping satiate, With a sunk, abandoned head. And when the dawn comes creeping in, Cautiously I shall raise Myself to watch the morning win My first of days, As it shows him sleeping a sleep he got Of me, as under my gaze, He grows distinct, and I see his hot Face freed of the wavering blaze. Then I shall know which image of God My man is made toward, And I shall know my bitter rod Or my rich reward. And I shall know the stamp and worth Of the coin I've accepted as mine, Shall see an image of heaven or of earth On his minted metal shine. Yea and I long to see him sleep In my power utterly, I long to know what I have to keep, I long to see My love, that spinning coin, laid still And plain at the side of me, For me to count--for I know he will Greatly enrichen me. And then he will be mine, he will lie In my power utterly, Opening his value plain to my eye He will sleep of me. He will lie negligent, resign His all to me, and I Shall watch the dawn light up for me This sleeping wealth of mine. And I shall watch the wan light shine On his sleep that is filled of me, On his brow where the wisps of fond hair twine So truthfully, On his lips where the light breaths come and go Naïve and winsomely, On his limbs that I shall weep to know Lie under my mastery. KISSES IN THE TRAIN I saw the midlands Revolve through her hair; The fields of autumn Stretching bare, And sheep on the pasture Tossed back in a scare. And still as ever The world went round, My mouth on her pulsing Neck was found, And my breast to her beating Breast was bound. But my heart at the centre Of all, in a swound Was still as a pivot, As all the ground On its prowling orbit Shifted round. And still in my nostrils The scent of her flesh, And still my wet mouth Sought her afresh; And still one pulse Through the world did thresh. And the world all whirling Around in joy Like the dance of a dervish Did destroy My sense--and my reason Spun like a toy. But firm at the centre My heart was found; Her own to my perfect Heart-beat bound, Like a magnet's keeper Closing the round. CRUELTY AND LOVE What large, dark hands are those at the window Lifted, grasping the golden light Which weaves its way through the creeper leaves To my heart's delight? Ah, only the leaves! But in the west, In the west I see a redness come Over the evening's burning breast-- --'Tis the wound of love goes home! The woodbine creeps abroad Calling low to her lover: The sun-lit flirt who all the day Has poised above her lips in play And stolen kisses, shallow and gay Of pollen, now has gone away --She woos the moth with her sweet, low word, And when above her his broad wings hover Then her bright breast she will uncover And yield her honey-drop to her lover. Into the yellow, evening glow Saunters a man from the farm below, Leans, and looks in at the low-built shed Where hangs the swallow's marriage bed. The bird lies warm against the wall. She glances quick her startled eyes Towards him, then she turns away Her small head, making warm display Of red upon the throat. His terrors sway Her out of the nest's warm, busy ball, Whose plaintive cry is heard as she flies In one blue stoop from out the sties Into the evening's empty hall. Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes Hide your quaint, unfading blushes, Still your quick tail, and lie as dead, Till the distance folds over his ominous tread. The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low: then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of _his_ oncoming To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! Ah soon in his large, hard hands she dies, And swings all loose to the swing of his walk. Yet calm and kindly are his eyes And ready to open in brown surprise Should I not answer to his talk Or should he my tears surmise. I hear his hand on the latch, and rise from my chair Watching the door open: he flashes bare His strong teeth in a smile, and flashes his eyes In a smile like triumph upon me; then careless-wise He flings the rabbit soft on the table board And comes towards me: ah, the uplifted sword Of his hand against my bosom, and oh, the broad Blade of his hand that raise my face to applaud His coming: he raises up my face to him And caresses my mouth with his fingers, which still smell grim Of the rabbit's fur! God, I am caught in a snare! I know not what fine wire is round my throat, I only know I let him finger there My pulse of life, letting him nose like a stoat Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood: And down his mouth comes to my mouth, and down His dark bright eyes descend like a fiery hood Upon my mind: his mouth meets mine, and a flood Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown Within him, die, and find death good. CHERRY ROBBERS Under the long, dark boughs, like jewels red In the hair of an Eastern girl Shine strings of crimson cherries, as if had bled Blood-drops beneath each curl. Under the glistening cherries, with folded wings Three dead birds lie: Pale-breasted throstles and a blackbird, robberlings Stained with red dye. Under the haystack a girl stands laughing at me, With cherries hung round her ears-- Offering me her scarlet fruit: I will see If she has any tears. LILIES IN THE FIRE I Ah, you stack of white lilies, all white and gold, I am adrift as a sunbeam, and without form Or having, save I light on you to warm Your pallor into radiance, flush your cold White beauty into incandescence: you Are not a stack of white lilies to-night, but a white And clustered star transfigured by me to-night, And lighting these ruddy leaves like a star dropped through The slender bare arms of the branches, your tire-maidens Who lift swart arms to fend me off; but I come Like a wind of fire upon you, like to some Stray whitebeam who on you his fire unladens. And you are a glistening toadstool shining here Among the crumpled beech-leaves phosphorescent, My stack of white lilies burning incandescent Of me, a soft white star among the leaves, my dear. II Is it with pain, my dear, that you shudder so? Is it because I have hurt you with pain, my dear? Did I shiver?--Nay, truly I did not know-- A dewdrop may-be splashed on my face down here. Why even now you speak through close-shut teeth. I have been too much for you--Ah, I remember! The ground is a little chilly underneath The leaves--and, dear, you consume me all to an ember. You hold yourself all hard as if my kisses Hurt as I gave them--you put me away-- Ah never I put you away: yet each kiss hisses Hot as a drop of fire wastes me away. III I am ashamed, you wanted me not to-night-- Nay, it is always so, you sigh with me. Your radiance dims when I draw too near, and my free Fire enters your petals like death, you wilt dead white. Ah, I do know, and I am deep ashamed; You love me while I hover tenderly Like clinging sunbeams kissing you: but see When I close in fire upon you, and you are flamed With the swiftest fire of my love, you are destroyed. 'Tis a degradation deep to me, that my best Soul's whitest lightning which should bright attest God stepping down to earth in one white stride, Means only to you a clogged, numb burden of flesh Heavy to bear, even heavy to uprear Again from earth, like lilies wilted and sere Flagged on the floor, that before stood up so fresh. COLDNESS IN LOVE And you remember, in the afternoon The sea and the sky went grey, as if there had sunk A flocculent dust on the floor of the world: the festoon Of the sky sagged dusty as spider cloth, And coldness clogged the sea, till it ceased to croon. A dank, sickening scent came up from the grime Of weed that blackened the shore, so that I recoiled Feeling the raw cold dun me: and all the time You leapt about on the slippery rocks, and threw The words that rang with a brassy, shallow chime. And all day long that raw and ancient cold Deadened me through, till the grey downs darkened to sleep. Then I longed for you with your mantle of love to fold Me over, and drive from out of my body the deep Cold that had sunk to my soul, and there kept hold. But still to me all evening long you were cold, And I was numb with a bitter, deathly ache; Till old days drew me back into their fold, And dim sheep crowded me warm with companionship, And old ghosts clustered me close, and sleep was cajoled. I slept till dawn at the window blew in like dust, Like the linty, raw-cold dust disturbed from the floor Of a disused room: a grey pale light like must That settled upon my face and hands till it seemed To flourish there, as pale mould blooms on a crust. Then I rose in fear, needing you fearfully, For I thought you were warm as a sudden jet of blood. I thought I could plunge in your spurting hotness, and be Clean of the cold and the must.--With my hand on the latch I heard you in your sleep speak strangely to me. And I dared not enter, feeling suddenly dismayed. So I went and washed my deadened flesh in the sea And came back tingling clean, but worn and frayed With cold, like the shell of the moon: and strange it seems That my love has dawned in rose again, like the love of a maid. END OF ANOTHER HOME-HOLIDAY I When shall I see the half moon sink again Behind the black sycamore at the end of the garden? When will the scent of the dim, white phlox Creep up the wall to me, and in at my open window? Why is it, the long slow stroke of the midnight bell, (Will it never finish the twelve?) Falls again and again on my heart with a heavy reproach? The moon-mist is over the village, out of the mist speaks the bell, And all the little roofs of the village bow low, pitiful, beseeching, resigned: Oh, little home, what is it I have not done well? Ah home, suddenly I love you, As I hear the sharp clean trot of a pony down the road, Succeeding sharp little sounds dropping into the silence, Clear upon the long-drawn hoarseness of a train across the valley. The light has gone out from under my mother's door. That she should love me so, She, so lonely, greying now, And I leaving her, Bent on my pursuits! Love is the great Asker, The sun and the rain do not ask the secret Of the time when the grain struggles down in the dark. The moon walks her lonely way without anguish, Because no loved one grieves over her departure. II Forever, ever by my shoulder pitiful Love will linger, Crouching as little houses crouch under the mist when I turn. Forever, out of the mist the church lifts up her reproachful finger, Pointing my eyes in wretched defiance where love hides her face to mourn. Oh but the rain creeps down to wet the grain That struggles alone in the dark, And asking nothing, cheerfully steals back again! The moon sets forth o' nights To walk the lonely, dusky heights Serenely, with steps unswerving; Pursued by no sigh of bereavement, No tears of love unnerving Her constant tread: While ever at my side, Frail and sad, with grey bowed head, The beggar-woman, the yearning-eyed Inexorable love goes lagging. The wild young heifer, glancing distraught, With a strange new knocking of life at her side Runs seeking a loneliness. The little grain draws down the earth to hide. Nay, even the slumberous egg, as it labours under the shell, Patiently to divide, and self-divide, Asks to be hidden, and wishes nothing to tell. But when I draw the scanty cloak of silence over my eyes, Piteous Love comes peering under the hood. Touches the clasp with trembling fingers, and tries To put her ear to the painful sob of my blood, While her tears soak through to my breast, Where they burn and cauterise. III The moon lies back and reddens. In the valley, a corncrake calls Monotonously, With a piteous, unalterable plaint, that deadens My confident activity: With a hoarse, insistent request that falls Unweariedly, unweariedly, Asking something more of me, Yet more of me! REMINDER Do you remember How night after night swept level and low Overhead, at home, and had not one star, Nor one narrow gate for the moon to go Forth to her field of November. And you remember, How towards the north a red blot on the sky Burns like a blotch of anxiety Over the forges, and small flames ply Like ghosts the shadow of the ember. Those were the days When it was awful autumn to me, When only there glowed on the dark of the sky The red reflection of her agony, My beloved smelting down in the blaze Of death--my dearest Love who had borne, and was now leaving me. And I at the foot of her cross did suffer My own gethsemane. So I came to you, And twice, after great kisses, I saw The rim of the moon divinely rise And strive to detach herself from the raw Blackened edge of the skies. Strive to escape; With her whiteness revealing my sunken world Tall and loftily shadowed. But the moon Never magnolia-like unfurled Her white, her lamp-like shape. For you told me no, And bade me not to ask for the dour Communion, offering--"a better thing." So I lay on your breast for an obscure hour Feeling your fingers go Like a rhythmic breeze Over my hair, and tracing my brows, Till I knew you not from a little wind: --I wonder now if God allows Us only one moment his keys. If only then You could have unlocked the moon on the night, And I baptized myself in the light Of your love; we both have entered then the white Pure passion, and never again. I wonder if only You had taken me then, how different Life would have been: should I have spent Myself in waste, and you have bent Your pride, through being lonely? BEI HENNEF The little river twittering in the twilight, The wan, wondering look of the pale sky, This is almost bliss. And everything shut up and gone to sleep, All the troubles and anxieties and pain Gone under the twilight. Only the twilight now, and the soft "Sh!" of the river That will last for ever. And at last I know my love for you is here, I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight, It is large, so large, I could not see it before Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions, Troubles, anxieties and pains. You are the call and I am the answer, You are the wish, and I the fulfilment, You are the night, and I the day. What else--it is perfect enough, It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more----? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this! LIGHTNING I felt the lurch and halt of her heart Next my breast, where my own heart was beating; And I laughed to feel it plunge and bound, And strange in my blood-swept ears was the sound Of the words I kept repeating, Repeating with tightened arms, and the hot blood's blindfold art. Her breath flew warm against my neck, Warm as a flame in the close night air; And the sense of her clinging flesh was sweet Where her arms and my neck's blood-surge could meet. Holding her thus, did I care That the black night hid her from me, blotted out every speck? I leaned me forward to find her lips, And claim her utterly in a kiss, When the lightning flew across her face, And I saw her for the flaring space Of a second, afraid of the clips Of my arms, inert with dread, wilted in fear of my kiss. A moment, like a wavering spark, Her face lay there before my breast, Pale love lost in a snow of fear, And guarded by a glittering tear, And lips apart with dumb cries; A moment, and she was taken again in the merciful dark. I heard the thunder, and felt the rain, And my arms fell loose, and I was dumb. Almost I hated her, she was so good, Hated myself, and the place, and my blood, Which burned with rage, as I bade her come Home, away home, ere the lightning floated forth again. SONG-DAY IN AUTUMN When the autumn roses Are heavy with dew, Before the mist discloses The leaf's brown hue, You would, among the laughing hills Of yesterday Walk innocent in the daffodils, Coiffing up your auburn hair In a puritan fillet, a chaste white snare To catch and keep me with you there So far away. When from the autumn roses Trickles the dew, When the blue mist uncloses And the sun looks through, You from those startled hills Come away, Out of the withering daffodils; Thoughtful, and half afraid, Plaiting a heavy, auburn braid And coiling it round the wise brows of a maid Who was scared in her play. When in the autumn roses Creeps a bee, And a trembling flower encloses His ecstasy, You from your lonely walk Turn away, And leaning to me like a flower on its stalk, Wait among the beeches For your late bee who beseeches To creep through your loosened hair till he reaches, Your heart of dismay. AWARE Slowly the moon is rising out of the ruddy haze, Divesting herself of her golden shift, and so Emerging white and exquisite; and I in amaze See in the sky before me, a woman I did not know I loved, but there she goes and her beauty hurts my heart; I follow her down the night, begging her not to depart. A PANG OF REMINISCENCE High and smaller goes the moon, she is small and very far from me, Wistful and candid, watching me wistfully, and I see Trembling blue in her pallor a tear that surely I have seen before, A tear which I had hoped that even hell held not again in store. A WHITE BLOSSOM A tiny moon as white and small as a single jasmine flower Leans all alone above my window, on night's wintry bower, Liquid as lime-tree blossom, soft as brilliant water or rain She shines, the one white love of my youth, which all sin cannot stain. RED MOON-RISE The train in running across the weald has fallen into a steadier stroke So even, it beats like silence, and sky and earth in one unbroke Embrace of darkness lie around, and crushed between them all the loose And littered lettering of leaves and hills and houses closed, and we can use The open book of landscape no more, for the covers of darkness have shut upon Its written pages, and sky and earth and all between are closed in one. And we are smothered between the darkness, we close our eyes and say "Hush!" we try To escape in sleep the terror of this immense deep darkness, and we lie Wrapped up for sleep. And then, dear God, from out of the twofold darkness, red As if from the womb the moon arises, as if the twin-walled darkness had bled In one great spasm of birth and given us this new, red moon-rise Which lies on the knees of the darkness bloody, and makes us hide our eyes. The train beats frantic in haste, and struggles away From this ruddy terror of birth that has slid down From out of the loins of night to flame our way With fear; but God, I am glad, so glad that I drown My terror with joy of confirmation, for now Lies God all red before me, and I am glad, As the Magi were when they saw the rosy brow Of the Infant bless their constant folly which had Brought them thither to God: for now I know That the Womb is a great red passion whence rises all The shapeliness that decks us here-below: Yea like the fire that boils within this ball Of earth, and quickens all herself with flowers, God burns within the stiffened clay of us; And every flash of thought that we and ours Send up to heaven, and every movement, does Fly like a spark from this God-fire of passion; And pain of birth, and joy of the begetting, And sweat of labour, and the meanest fashion Of fretting or of gladness, but the jetting Of a trail of the great fire against the sky Where we can see it, a jet from the innermost fire: And even in the watery shells that lie Alive within the cozy under-mire, A grain of this same fire I can descry. And then within the screaming birds that fly Across the lightning when the storm leaps higher; And then the swirling, flaming folk that try To come like fire-flames at their fierce desire, They are as earth's dread, spurting flames that ply Awhile and gush forth death and then expire. And though it be love's wet blue eyes that cry To hot love to relinquish its desire, Still in their depths I see the same red spark As rose to-night upon us from the dark. RETURN Now I am come again, you who have so desired My coming, why do you look away from me? Why does your cheek burn against me--have I inspired Such anger as sets your mouth unwontedly? Ah, here I sit while you break the music beneath Your bow; for broken it is, and hurting to hear: Cease then from music--does anguish of absence bequeath Me only aloofness when I would draw near? THE APPEAL You, Helen, who see the stars As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree, You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses, Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me. Helen, you let my kisses steam Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink Me up I pray; oh you who are Night's Bacchante, How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink! REPULSED The last, silk-floating thought has gone from the dandelion stem, And the flesh of the stalk holds up for nothing a blank diadem. The night's flood-winds have lifted my last desire from me, And my hollow flesh stands up in the night abandonedly. As I stand on this hill, with the whitening cave of the city beyond, Helen, I am despoiled of my pride, and my soul turns fond: Overhead the nightly heavens like an open, immense eye, Like a cat's distended pupil sparkles with sudden stars, As with thoughts that flash and crackle in uncouth malignancy They glitter at me, and I fear the fierce snapping of night's thought-stars. Beyond me, up the darkness, goes the gush of the lights of two towns, As the breath which rushes upwards from the nostrils of an immense Life crouched across the globe, ready, if need be, to pounce Across the space upon heaven's high hostile eminence. All round me, but far away, the night's twin consciousness roars With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought in the brain, Lifting and falling like slow breaths taken, pulsing like oars Immense that beat the blood of the night down its vein. The night is immense and awful, Helen, and I am insect small In the fur of this hill, clung on to the fur of shaggy, black heather. A palpitant speck in the fur of the night, and afraid of all, Seeing the world and the sky like creatures hostile together. And I in the fur of the world, and you a pale fleck from the sky, How we hate each other to-night, hate, you and I, As the world of activity hates the dream that goes on on high, As a man hates the dreaming woman he loves, but who will not reply. DREAM-CONFUSED Is that the moon At the window so big and red? No one in the room, No one near the bed----? Listen, her shoon Palpitating down the stair? --Or a beat of wings at the window there? A moment ago She kissed me warm on the mouth, The very moon in the south Is warm with a bloody glow, The moon from far abysses Signalling those two kisses. And now the moon Goes slowly out of the west, And slowly back in my breast My kisses are sinking, soon To leave me at rest. COROT The trees rise tall and taller, lifted On a subtle rush of cool grey flame That issuing out of the dawn has sifted The spirit from each leaf's frame. For the trailing, leisurely rapture of life Drifts dimly forward, easily hidden By bright leaves uttered aloud, and strife Of shapes in the grey mist chidden. The grey, phosphorescent, pellucid advance Of the luminous purpose of God, shines out Where the lofty trees athwart stream chance To shake flakes of its shadow about. The subtle, steady rush of the whole Grey foam-mist of advancing God, As He silently sweeps to His somewhere, his goal, Is heard in the grass of the sod. Is heard in the windless whisper of leaves In the silent labours of men in the fields, In the downward dropping of flimsy sheaves Of cloud the rain skies yield. In the tapping haste of a fallen leaf, In the flapping of red-roof smoke, and the small Foot-stepping tap of men beneath These trees so huge and tall. For what can all sharp-rimmed substance but catch In a backward ripple, God's purpose, reveal For a moment His mighty direction, snatch A spark beneath His wheel. Since God sweeps onward dim and vast, Creating the channelled vein of Man And Leaf for His passage, His shadow is cast On all for us to scan. Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely: Imitate the magnificent trees That speak no word of their rapture, but only Breathe largely the luminous breeze. MORNING WORK A gang of labourers on the piled wet timber That shines blood-red beside the railway siding Seem to be making out of the blue of the morning Something faery and fine, the shuttles sliding, The red-gold spools of their hands and faces shuttling Hither and thither across the morn's crystalline frame Of blue: trolls at the cave of ringing cerulean mining, And laughing with work, living their work like a game. TRANSFORMATIONS I =The Town= Oh you stiff shapes, swift transformation seethes About you: only last night you were A Sodom smouldering in the dense, soiled air; To-day a thicket of sunshine with blue smoke-wreaths. To-morrow swimming in evening's vague, dim vapour Like a weeded city in shadow under the sea, Beneath an ocean of shimmering light you will be: Then a group of toadstools waiting the moon's white taper. And when I awake in the morning, after rain, To find the new houses a cluster of lilies glittering In scarlet, alive with the birds' bright twittering, I'll say your bond of ugliness is vain. II =The Earth= Oh Earth, you spinning clod of earth, And then you lamp, you lemon-coloured beauty; Oh Earth, you rotten apple rolling downward, Then brilliant Earth, from the burr of night in beauty As a jewel-brown horse-chestnut newly issued:-- You are all these, and strange, it is my duty To take you all, sordid or radiant tissued. III =Men= Oh labourers, oh shuttles across the blue frame of morning, You feet of the rainbow balancing the sky! Oh you who flash your arms like rockets to heaven, Who in lassitude lean as yachts on the sea-wind lie! You who in crowds are rhododendrons in blossom, Who stand alone in pride like lighted lamps; Who grappling down with work or hate or passion, Take strange lithe form of a beast that sweats and ramps: You who are twisted in grief like crumpled beech-leaves, Who curl in sleep like kittens, who kiss as a swarm Of clustered, vibrating bees; who fall to earth At last like a bean-pod: what are you, oh multiform? RENASCENCE We have bit no forbidden apple, Eve and I, Yet the splashes of day and night Falling round us no longer dapple The same Eden with purple and white. This is our own still valley Our Eden, our home, But day shows it vivid with feeling And the pallor of night does not tally With dark sleep that once covered its ceiling. My little red heifer, to-night I looked in her eyes, --She will calve to-morrow: Last night when I went with the lantern, the sow was grabbing her litter With red, snarling jaws: and I heard the cries Of the new-born, and after that, the old owl, then the bats that flitter. And I woke to the sound of the wood-pigeons, and lay and listened, Till I could borrow A few quick beats of a wood-pigeon's heart, and when I did rise The morning sun on the shaken iris glistened, And I saw that home, this valley, was wider than Paradise. I learned it all from my Eve This warm, dumb wisdom. She's a finer instructress than years; She has taught my heart-strings to weave Through the web of all laughter and tears. And now I see the valley Fleshed all like me With feelings that change and quiver: And all things seem to tally With something in me, Something of which she's the giver. DOG-TIRED If she would come to me here, Now the sunken swaths Are glittering paths To the sun, and the swallows cut clear Into the low sun--if she came to me here! If she would come to me now, Before the last mown harebells are dead, While that vetch clump yet burns red; Before all the bats have dropped from the bough Into the cool of night--if she came to me now! The horses are untackled, the chattering machine Is still at last. If she would come, I would gather up the warm hay from The hill-brow, and lie in her lap till the green Sky ceased to quiver, and lost its tired sheen. I should like to drop On the hay, with my head on her knee And lie stone still, while she Breathed quiet above me--we could stop Till the stars came out to see. I should like to lie still As if I was dead--but feeling Her hand go stealing Over my face and my hair until This ache was shed. MICHAEL-ANGELO God shook thy roundness in His finger's cup, He sunk His hands in firmness down thy sides, And drew the circle of His grasp, O Man, Along thy limbs delighted, thine, His bride's. And so thou wert God-shapen: His finger Curved thy mouth for thee, and His strong shoulder Planted thee upright: art not proud to see In the curve of thine exquisite form the joy of the Moulder? He took a handful of light and rolled a ball, Compressed it till its beam grew wondrous dark, Then gave thee thy dark eyes, O Man, that all He made had doorway to thee through that spark. God, lonely, put down His mouth in a kiss of creation, He kissed thee, O Man, in a passion of love, and left The vivid life of His love in thy mouth and thy nostrils; Keep then the kiss from the adultress' theft. VIOLETS Sister, tha knows while we was on the planks Aside o' th' grave, while th' coffin wor lyin' yet On th' yaller clay, an' th' white flowers top of it Tryin' to keep off 'n him a bit o' th' wet, An' parson makin' haste, an' a' the black Huddlin' close together a cause o' th' rain, Did t' 'appen ter notice a bit of a lass away back By a head-stun, sobbin' an' sobbin' again? --How should I be lookin' round An' me standin' on the plank Beside the open ground, Where our Ted 'ud soon be sank? Yi, an' 'im that young, Snapped sudden out of all His wickedness, among Pals worse n'r ony name as you could call. Let be that; there's some o' th' bad as we Like better nor all your good, an' 'e was one. --An' cos I liked him best, yi, bett'r nor thee, I canna bide to think where he is gone. Ah know tha liked 'im bett'r nor me. But let Me tell thee about this lass. When you had gone Ah stopped behind on t' pad i' th' drippin wet An' watched what 'er 'ad on. Tha should ha' seed her slive up when we'd gone, Tha should ha' seed her kneel an' look in At th' sloppy wet grave--an' 'er little neck shone That white, an' 'er shook that much, I'd like to begin Scraïghtin' my-sen as well. 'En undid her black Jacket at th' bosom, an' took from out of it Over a double 'andful of violets, all in a pack Ravelled blue and white--warm, for a bit O' th' smell come waftin' to me. 'Er put 'er face Right intil 'em and scraïghted out again, Then after a bit 'er dropped 'em down that place, An' I come away, because o' the teemin' rain. WHETHER OR NOT I Dunna thee tell me its his'n, mother, Dunna thee, dunna thee. --Oh ay! he'll be comin' to tell thee his-sèn Wench, wunna he? Tha doesna mean to say to me, mother, He's gone wi that-- --My gel, owt'll do for a man i' the dark, Tha's got it flat. But 'er's old, mother, 'er's twenty year Older nor him-- --Ay, an' yaller as a crowflower, an' yet i' the dark Er'd do for Tim. Tha niver believes it, mother, does ter? It's somebody's lies. --Ax him thy-sèn wench--a widder's lodger; It's no surprise. II A widow of forty-five With a bitter, swarthy skin, To ha' 'ticed a lad o' twenty-five An' 'im to have been took in! A widow of forty-five As has sludged like a horse all her life, Till 'er's tough as whit-leather, to slive Atween a lad an' 'is wife! A widow of forty-five. A tough old otchel wi' long Witch teeth, an' 'er black hawk-eyes as I've Mistrusted all along! An' me as 'as kep my-sen Shut like a daisy bud, Clean an' new an' nice, so's when He wed he'd ha'e summat good! An' 'im as nice an' fresh As any man i' the force, To ha'e gone an' given his white young flesh To a woman that coarse! III You're stout to brave this snow, Miss Stainwright, Are you makin' Brinsley way? --I'm off up th' line to Underwood Wi' a dress as is wanted to-day. Oh are you goin' to Underwood? 'Appen then you've 'eered? --What's that as 'appen I've 'eered-on, Missis, Speak up, you nedna be feared. Why, your young man an' Widow Naylor, Her as he lodges wi', They say he's got her wi' childt; but there, It's nothing to do wi' me. Though if it's true they'll turn him out O' th' p'lice force, without fail; An' if it's not true, I'd back my life They'll listen to _her_ tale. Well, I'm believin' no tale, Missis, I'm seein' for my-sen; An' when I know for sure, Missis, I'll talk _then_. IV Nay robin red-breast, tha nedna Sit noddin' thy head at me; My breast's as red as thine, I reckon, Flayed red, if tha could but see. Nay, you blessed pee-whips, You nedna screet at me! I'm screetin' my-sen, but are-na goin' To let iv'rybody see. Tha _art_ smock-ravelled, bunny, Larropin' neck an' crop I' th' snow: but I's warrant thee, bunny, _I'm_ further ower th' top. V Now sithee theer at th' railroad crossin' Warmin' his-sen at the stool o' fire Under the tank as fills the ingines, If there isn't my dearly-beloved liar! My constable wi' 'is buttoned breast As stout as the truth, my sirs!--An' 'is face As bold as a robin! It's much he cares For this nice old shame and disgrace. Oh but he drops his flag when 'e sees me, Yes, an' 'is face goes white ... oh yes Tha can stare at me wi' thy fierce blue eyes, But tha doesna stare me out, I guess! VI Whativer brings thee out so far In a' this depth o' snow? --I'm takin' 'ome a weddin' dress If tha maun know. Why, is there a weddin' at Underwood, As tha ne'd trudge up here? --It's Widow Naylor's weddin'-dress, An' 'er's wantin it, I hear. _'Er_ doesna want no weddin-dress ... What--but what dost mean? --Doesn't ter know what I mean, Tim?--Yi, Tha must' a' been hard to wean! Tha'rt a good-un at suckin-in yet, Timmy; But tell me, isn't it true As 'er'll be wantin' _my_ weddin' dress In a week or two? Tha's no occasions ter ha'e me on Lizzie--what's done is done! --_Done_, I should think so--Done! But might I ask when tha begun? It's thee as 'as done it as much as me, Lizzie, I tell thee that. --"Me gotten a childt to thy landlady--!" Tha's gotten thy answer pat, As tha allers hast--but let me tell thee Hasna ter sent me whoam, when I Was a'most burstin' mad o' my-sen An' walkin' in agony; After thy kisses, Lizzie, after Tha's lain right up to me Lizzie, an' melted Into me, melted into me, Lizzie, Till I was verily swelted. An' if my landlady seed me like it, An' if 'er clawkin', tiger's eyes Went through me just as the light went out Is it any cause for surprise? No cause for surprise at all, my lad, After lickin' and snuffin' at me, tha could Turn thy mouth on a woman like her-- Did ter find her good? Ay, I did, but afterwards I should like to ha' killed her! --Afterwards!--an' after how long Wor it tha'd liked to 'a killed her? Say no more, Liz, dunna thee, I might lose my-sen. --I'll only say good-bye to thee, Timothy, An' gi'e her thee back again. I'll ta'e thy word 'Good-bye,' Liz, But I shonna marry her, I shonna for nobody.--It is Very nice on you, Sir. The childt maun ta'e its luck, it maun, An' she maun ta'e _her_ luck, For I tell ye I shonna marry her-- What her's got, her took. That's spoken like a man, Timmy, That's spoken like a man ... "He up an' fired off his pistol An' then away he ran." I damn well shanna marry 'er, So chew at it no more, Or I'll chuck the flamin' lot of you-- --You nedn't have swore. VII That's his collar round the candle-stick An' that's the dark blue tie I bought 'im, An' these is the woman's kids he's so fond on, An' 'ere comes the cat that caught 'im. I dunno where his eyes was--a gret Round-shouldered hag! My sirs, to think Of him stoopin' to her! You'd wonder he could Throw hisself in that sink. I expect you know who I am, Mrs Naylor! --Who yer are?--yis, you're Lizzie Stainwright. 'An 'appen you might guess what I've come for? --'Appen I mightn't, 'appen I might. You knowed as I was courtin' Tim Merfin. --Yis, I knowed 'e wor courtin' thee. An' yet you've been carryin' on wi' him. --Ay, an' 'im wi' me. Well, now you've got to pay for it, --An' if I han, what's that to thee? For 'e isn't goin' to marry you. --Is it a toss-up 'twixt thee an' me? It's no toss-up 'twixt thee an' me. --Then what art colleyfoglin' for? I'm not havin' your orts an' slarts. --Which on us said you wor? I want you to know 'e's non _marryin'_ you. --Tha wants 'im thy-sen too bad. Though I'll see as 'e pays you, an' comes to the scratch. --Tha'rt for doin' a lot wi' th' lad. VIII To think I should ha'e to haffle an' caffle Wi' a woman, an' pay 'er a price For lettin' me marry the lad as I thought To marry wi' cabs an' rice. But we'll go unbeknown to the registrar, An' give _'er_ what money there is, For I won't be beholden to such as her For anythink of his. IX Take off thy duty stripes, Tim, An' come wi' me in here, Ta'e off thy p'lice-man's helmet An' look me clear. I wish tha hadna done it, Tim, I do, an' that I do! For whenever I look thee i' th' face, I s'll see Her face too. I wish tha could wesh 'er off'n thee, For I used to think that thy Face was the finest thing that iver Met my eye.... X Twenty pound o' thy own tha hast, and fifty pound ha'e I, Thine shall go to pay the woman, an' wi' my bit we'll buy All as we shall want for furniture when tha leaves this place, An' we'll be married at th' registrar--now lift thy face. Lift thy face an' look at me, man, up an' look at me: Sorry I am for this business, an' sorry if I ha'e driven thee To such a thing: but it's a poor tale, that I'm bound to say, Before I can ta'e thee I've got a widow of forty-five to pay. Dunnat thee think but what I love thee--I love thee well, But 'deed an' I wish as this tale o' thine wor niver my tale to tell; Deed an' I wish as I could stood at the altar wi' thee an' been proud o' thee, That I could ha' been first woman to thee, as thou'rt first man to me. But we maun ma'e the best on't--I'll rear thy childt if 'er'll yield it to me, An' then wi' that twenty pound we gi'e 'er I s'd think 'er wunna be So very much worser off than 'er wor before--An' now look up An' answer me--for I've said my say, an' there's no more sorrow to sup. Yi, tha'rt a man, tha'rt a fine big man, but niver a baby had eyes As sulky an' ormin' as thine. Hast owt to say otherwise From what I've arranged wi' thee? Eh man, what a stubborn jackass thou art, Kiss me then--there!--ne'er mind if I scraight--I wor fond o' thee, Sweetheart. A COLLIER'S WIFE Somebody's knocking at the door Mother, come down and see. --I's think it's nobbut a beggar, Say, I'm busy. Its not a beggar, mother,--hark How hard he knocks ... --Eh, tha'rt a mard-'arsed kid, 'E'll gi'e thee socks! Shout an' ax what 'e wants, I canna come down. --'E says "Is it Arthur Holliday's?" Say "Yes," tha clown. 'E says, "Tell your mother as 'er mester's Got hurt i' th' pit." What--oh my sirs, 'e never says that, That's niver it. Come out o' the way an' let me see, Eh, there's no peace! An' stop thy scraightin', childt, Do shut thy face. "Your mester's 'ad an accident, An' they're ta'ein 'im i' th' ambulance To Nottingham,"--Eh dear o' me If 'e's not a man for mischance! Wheers he hurt this time, lad? --I dunna know, They on'y towd me it wor bad-- It would be so! Eh, what a man!--an' that cobbly road, They'll jolt him a'most to death, I'm sure he's in for some trouble Nigh every time he takes breath. Out o' my way, childt--dear o' me, wheer Have I put his clean stockings and shirt; Goodness knows if they'll be able To take off his pit dirt. An' what a moan he'll make--there niver Was such a man for a fuss If anything ailed him--at any rate _I_ shan't have him to nuss. I do hope it's not very bad! Eh, what a shame it seems As some should ha'e hardly a smite o' trouble An' others has reams. It's a shame as 'e should be knocked about Like this, I'm sure it is! He's had twenty accidents, if he's had one; Owt bad, an' it's his. There's one thing, we'll have peace for a bit, Thank Heaven for a peaceful house; An' there's compensation, sin' it's accident, An' club money--I nedn't grouse. An' a fork an' a spoon he'll want, an' what else; I s'll never catch that train-- What a trapse it is if a man gets hurt-- I s'd think he'll get right again. THE DRAINED CUP The snow is witherin' off'n th' gress Love, should I tell thee summat? The snow is witherin' off'n th' gress An' a thick mist sucks at the clots o' snow, An' the moon above in a weddin' dress Goes fogged an' slow-- Love, should I tell thee summat? Tha's been snowed up i' this cottage wi' me, Nay, I'm tellin' thee summat.-- Tha's bin snowed up i' this cottage wi' me While th' clocks has a' run down an' stopped An' the short days withering silently Unbeknown have dropped. --Yea, but I'm tellin' thee summat. How many days dost think has gone?-- Now I'm tellin' thee summat. How many days dost think has gone? How many days has the candle-light shone On us as tha got more white an' wan? --Seven days, or none-- Am I not tellin' thee summat? Tha come to bid farewell to me-- Tha'rt frit o' summat. To kiss me and shed a tear wi' me, Then off and away wi' the weddin' ring For the girl who was grander, and better than me For marrying-- Tha'rt frit o' summat? I durstna kiss thee tha trembles so, Tha'rt frit o' summat. Tha arena very flig to go, 'Appen the mist from the thawin' snow Daunts thee--it isna for love, I know, That tha'rt loath to go. --Dear o' me, say summat. Maun tha cling to the wa' as tha goes, So bad as that? Tha'lt niver get into thy weddin' clothes At that rate--eh, theer goes thy hat; Ne'er mind, good-bye lad, now I lose My joy, God knows, --An' worse nor that. The road goes under the apple tree; Look, for I'm showin' thee summat. An' if it worn't for the mist, tha'd see The great black wood on all sides o' thee Wi' the little pads going cunningly To ravel thee. So listen, I'm tellin' thee summat. When tha comes to the beechen avenue, I'm warnin' thee o' summat. Mind tha shall keep inwards, a few Steps to the right, for the gravel pits Are steep an' deep wi' watter, an' you Are scarce o' your wits. Remember, I've warned the o' summat. An' mind when crossin' the planken bridge, Again I warn ye o' summat. Ye slip not on the slippery ridge Of the thawin' snow, or it'll be A long put-back to your gran' marridge, I'm tellin' ye. Nay, are ter scared o' summat? In kep the thick black curtains drawn, Am I not tellin' thee summat? Against the knockin' of sevenfold dawn, An' red-tipped candles from morn to morn Have dipped an' danced upon thy brawn Till thou art worn-- Oh, I have cost thee summat. Look in the mirror an' see thy-sen, --What, I am showin' thee summat. Wasted an' wan tha sees thy-sen, An' thy hand that holds the mirror shakes Till tha drops the glass and tha shudders when Thy luck breaks. Sure, tha'rt afraid o' summat. Frail thou art, my saucy man, --Listen, I'm tellin' thee summat. Tottering and tired thou art, my man, Tha came to say good-bye to me, An' tha's done it so well, that now I can Part wi' thee. --Master, I'm givin' thee summat. THE SCHOOLMASTER I =A Snowy Day in School= All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum of the class, Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse silence Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons ceaselessly-- But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars, Like full-blown flowers dimly shaking at the night, Like floating froth on an ebbing shore in the moon. Out of each star, dark, strange beams that disquiet: In the open depths of each flower, dark restless drops: Twin bubbles, shadow-full of mystery and challenge in the foam's whispering riot: --How can I answer the challenge of so many eyes! The thick snow is crumpled on the roof, it plunges down Awfully. Must I call back those hundred eyes?--A voice Wakes from the hum, faltering about a noun-- My question! My God, I must break from this hoarse silence That rustles beyond the stars to me.--There, I have startled a hundred eyes, and I must look Them an answer back. It is more than I can bear. The snow descends as if the dull sky shook In flakes of shadow down; and through the gap Between the ruddy schools sweeps one black rook. The rough snowball in the playground stands huge and still With fair flakes settling down on it.--Beyond, the town Is lost in the shadowed silence the skies distil. And all things are possessed by silence, and they can brood Wrapped up in the sky's dim space of hoarse silence Earnestly--and oh for me this class is a bitter rood. II =The Best of School= The blinds are drawn because of the sun, And the boys and the room in a colourless gloom Of under-water float: bright ripples run Across the walls as the blinds are blown To let the sunlight in; and I, As I sit on the beach of the class alone, Watch the boys in their summer blouses, As they write, their round heads busily bowed: And one after another rouses And lifts his face and looks at me, And my eyes meet his very quietly, Then he turns again to his work, with glee. With glee he turns, with a little glad Ecstasy of work he turns from me, An ecstasy surely sweet to be had. And very sweet while the sunlight waves In the fresh of the morning, it is to be A teacher of these young boys, my slaves Only as swallows are slaves to the eaves They build upon, as mice are slaves To the man who threshes and sows the sheaves. Oh, sweet it is To feel the lads' looks light on me, Then back in a swift, bright flutter to work, As birds who are stealing turn and flee. Touch after touch I feel on me As their eyes glance at me for the grain Of rigour they taste delightedly. And all the class, As tendrils reached out yearningly Slowly rotate till they touch the tree That they cleave unto, that they leap along Up to their lives--so they to me. So do they cleave and cling to me, So I lead them up, so do they twine Me up, caress and clothe with free Fine foliage of lives this life of mine; The lowest stem of this life of mine, The old hard stem of my life That bears aloft towards rarer skies My top of life, that buds on high Amid the high wind's enterprise. They all do clothe my ungrowing life With a rich, a thrilled young clasp of life; A clutch of attachment, like parenthood, Mounts up to my heart, and I find it good. And I lift my head upon the troubled tangled world, and though the pain Of living my life were doubled, I still have this to comfort and sustain, I have such swarming sense of lives at the base of me, such sense of lives Clustering upon me, reaching up, as each after the other strives To follow my life aloft to the fine wild air of life and the storm of thought, And though I scarcely see the boys, or know that they are there, distraught As I am with living my life in earnestness, still progressively and alone, Though they cling, forgotten the most part, not companions, scarcely known To me--yet still because of the sense of their closeness clinging densely to me, And slowly fingering up my stem and following all tinily The way that I have gone and now am leading, they are dear to me. They keep me assured, and when my soul feels lonely, All mistrustful of thrusting its shoots where only I alone am living, then it keeps Me comforted to feel the warmth that creeps Up dimly from their striving; it heartens my strife: And when my heart is chill with loneliness, Then comforts it the creeping tenderness Of all the strays of life that climb my life. III =Afternoon in School= THE LAST LESSON When will the bell ring, and end this weariness? How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart My pack of unruly hounds: I cannot start Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt, I can haul them and urge them no more. No more can I endure to bear the brunt Of the books that lie out on the desks: a full three score Of several insults of blotted page and scrawl Of slovenly work that they have offered me. I am sick, and tired more than any thrall Upon the woodstacks working weariedly. And shall I take The last dear fuel and heap it on my soul Till I rouse my will like a fire to consume Their dross of indifference, and burn the scroll Of their insults in punishment?--I will not! I will not waste myself to embers for them, Not all for them shall the fires of my life be hot, For myself a heap of ashes of weariness, till sleep Shall have raked the embers clear: I will keep Some of my strength for myself, for if I should sell It all for them, I should hate them-- --I will sit and wait for the bell. TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH Transcriber's note The author's representation of dialect exhibits some inconsistencies, which have been retained as printed. 
4216	----	TOUCH AND GO A Play in Three Acts By D. H. Lawrence PREFACE A nice phrase: "A People's Theatre." But what about it? There's no such thing in existence as a People's Theatre: or even on the way to existence, as far as we can tell. The name is chosen, the baby isn't even begotten: nay, the would-be parents aren't married, nor yet courting. A People's Theatre. Note the indefinite article. It isn't The People's Theatre, but A People's Theatre. Not the theatre of Plebs, the proletariat, but the theatre of A People. What people? Quel peuple donc?--A People's Theatre. Translate it into French for yourself. A People's Theatre. Since we can't produce it, let us deduce it. Major premise: the seats are cheap. Minor premiss: the plays are good. Conclusion: A People's Theatre. How much will you give me for my syllogism? Not a slap in the eye, I hope. We stick to our guns. The seats are cheap. That has a nasty proletarian look about it. But appearances are deceptive. The proletariat isn't poor. Everybody is poor except Capital and Labour. Between these upper and nether millstones great numbers of decent people are squeezed. The seats are cheap: in decency's name. Nobody wants to swank, to sit in the front of a box like a geranium on a window-sill--"the cynosure of many eyes." Nobody wants to profiteer. We all feel that it is as humiliating to pay high prices as to charge them. No man consents in his heart to pay high prices unless he feels that what he pays with his right hand he will get back with his left, either out of the pocket of a man who isn't looking, or out of the envy of the poor neighbour who IS looking, but can't afford the figure. The seats are cheap. Why should A People, fabulous and lofty giraffe, want to charge or pay high prices? If it were THE PEOPLE now.--But it isn't. It isn't Plebs, the proletariat. The seats are cheap. The plays are good. Pah!--this has a canting smell. Any play is good to the man who likes to look at it. And at that rate Chu Chin Chow is extra-super-good. What about your GOOD plays? Whose good? PFUI to your goodness! That minor premiss is a bad egg: it will hatch no bird. Good plays? You might as well say mimsy bomtittle plays, you'd be saying as much. The plays are--don't say good or you'll be beaten. The plays--the plays of A People's Theatre are--oh heaven, what are they?--not popular nor populous nor plebian nor proletarian nor folk nor parish plays. None of that adjectival spawn. The only clue-word is People's for all that. A People's---Chaste word, it will bring forth no adjective. The plays of A People's Theatre are People's plays. The plays of A People's Theatre are plays about people. It doesn't look much, at first sight. After all--people! Yes, People! Not THE PEOPLE, _i.e._ Plebs, nor yet the Upper Ten. People. Neither Piccoli nor Grandi in our republic. People. People, ah God! Not mannequins. Not lords nor proletariats nor bishops nor husbands nor co-respondents nor virgins nor adultresses nor uncles nor noses. Not even white rabbits nor presidents. People. Men who are somebody, not men who are something. Men who HAPPEN to be bishops or co-respondents, women who happen to be chaste, just as they happen to freckle, because it's one of their innumerable odd qualities. Even men who happen, by the way, to have long noses. But not noses on two legs, not burly pairs of gaiters, stuffed and voluble, not white meringues of chastity, not incarnations of co-respondence. Not proletariats, petitioners, president's, noses, bits of fluff. Heavens, what an assortment of bits! And aren't we sick of them! People, I say. And after all, it's saying something. It's harder to be a human being than to be a president or a bit of fluff. You can be a president, or a bit of fluff, or even a nose, by clockwork. Given a role, a PART, you can play it by clockwork. But you can't have a clockwork human being. We're dead sick of parts. It's no use your protesting that there is a man behind the nose. We can't see him, and he can't see himself. Nothing but nose. Neither can you make us believe there is a man inside the gaiters. He's never showed his head yet. It may be, in real life, the gaiters wear the man, as the nose wears Cyrano. It may be Sir Auckland Geddes and Mr. J. H. Thomas are only clippings from the illustrated press. It may be that a miner is a complicated machine for cutting coal and voting on a ballot-paper. It may be that coal-owners are like the _petit bleu_ arrangement, a system of vacuum tubes for whooshing Bradburys about from one to the other. It may be that everybody delights in bits, in parts, that the public insists on noses, gaiters, white rabbits, bits of fluff, automata and gewgaws. If they do, then let 'em. Chu Chin Chow for ever! In spite of them all: A People's Theatre. A People's Theatre shows men, and not parts. Not bits, nor bundles of bits. A whole bunch of roles tied into one won't make an individual. Though gaiters perish, we will have men. Although most miners may be pick-cum-shovel-cum-ballot implements, and no more, still, among miners there must be two or three living individuals. The same among the masters. The majority are suction-tubes for Bradburys. But is this Sodom of Industrialism there are surely ten men, all told. My poor little withered grain of mustard seed, I am half afraid to take you across to the seed-testing department! And if there are men, there is A People's Theatre. How many tragic situations did Goethe say were possible? Something like thirty-two. Which seems a lot. Anyhow, granted that men are men still, that not all of them are bits, parts, machine-sections, then we have added another tragic possibility to the list: the Strike situation. As yet no one tackles this situation. It is a sort of Medusa head, which turns--no, not to stone, but to sloppy treacle. Mr. Galsworthy had a peep, and sank down towards bathos. Granted that men are still men, Labour _v_. Capitalism is a tragic struggle. If men are no more than implements, it is non-tragic and merely disastrous. In tragedy the man is more than his part. Hamlet is more than Prince of Denmark, Macbeth is more than murderer of Duncan. The man is caught in the wheels of his part, his fate, he may be torn asunder. He may be killed, but the resistant, integral soul in him is not destroyed. He comes through, though he dies. He goes through with his fate, though death swallows him. And it is in this facing of fate, this going right through with it, that tragedy lies. Tragedy is not disaster. It is a disaster when a cart-wheel goes over a frog, but it is not a tragedy, not the hugest; not the death of ten million men. It is only a cartwheel going over a frog. There must be a supreme STRUGGLE. In Shakespeare's time it was the people _versus_ king storm that was brewing. Majesty was about to have its head off. Come what might, Hamlet and Macbeth and Goneril and Regan had to see the business through. Now a new wind is getting up. We call it Labour _versus_ Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to have somebody's head off. The conflict is in pure, passional antagonism, turning upon the poles of belief. Majesty was only _hors d'oevres_ to this tragic repast. So, the strike situation has this dual aspect. First it is a mechanico-material struggle, two mechanical forces pulling asunder from the central object, the bone. All it can result in is the pulling asunder of the fabric of civilisation, and even of life, without any creative issue. It is no more than a frog under a cart-wheel. The mechanical forces, rolling on, roll over the body of life and squash it. The second is the tragic aspect. According to this view, we see more than two dogs fighting for a bone, and life hopping under the Juggernaut wheel. The two dogs are making the bone a pretext for a fight with each other. That old bull-dog, the British capitalist, has got the bone in his teeth. That unsatisfied mongrel, Plebs, the proletariat, shivers with rage not so much at the sight of the bone, as at sight of the great wrinkled jowl that holds it. There is the old dog, with his knowing look and his massive grip on the bone: and there is the insatiable mongrel, with his great splay paws. The one is all head and arrogance, the other all paws and grudge. The bone is only the pretext. A first condition of the being of Bully is that he shall hate the prowling great paws of the Plebs, whilst Plebs by inherent nature goes mad at the sight of Bully's jowl. "Drop it!" cries Plebs. "Hands off!" growls Bully. It is hands against head, the shambling, servile body in a rage of insurrection at last against the wrinkled, heavy head. Labour not only wants his debt. He wants his pound of flesh. It is a quandary. In our heart of hearts we must admit the debt. We must admit that it is long overdue. But this last condition! In vain we study our anatomy to see which part we can best spare. Where is our Portia, to save us with a timely quibble? We've plenty of Portias. They've recited their heads off--"The quality of mercy is not strained." But the old Shylock of the proletariat persists. He pops up again, and says, "All right, I can't have my pound of flesh with the blood. But then you can't keep my pound of flesh with your blood--you owe it to me. It is your business to deliver the goods. Deliver it then--with or without blood--deliver it." The Portia scratches her head, and thinks again. What's the solution? There is no solution. But still there is a choice. There's a choice between a mess and a tragedy. If Plebs and Bully hang on one to each end of the bone, and pull for grim life, they will at last tear the bone to atoms: in short, destroy the whole material substance of life, and so perish by accident, no better than a frog under the wheel of destiny. That may be a disaster, but it is only a mess for all that. On the other hand, if they have a fight to fight they might really drop the bone. Instead of wrangling the bone to bits they might really go straight for one another. They are like hostile parties on board a ship, who both proceed to scuttle the ship so as to sink the other party. Down goes the ship, with all the bally lot on board. A few survivors swim and squeal among the bubbles--and then silence. It is too much to suppose that the combatants will ever drop the obvious old bone. But it is not too much to imagine that some men might acknowledge the bone to be merely a pretext, and hollow _casus belli_. If we really could know what we were fighting for, if we if we could deeply believe in what we were fighting for, then the struggle might have dignity, beauty, satisfaction for us. If it were a profound struggle for something that was coming to life in us, a struggle that we were convinced would bring us to a new freedom, a new life, then it would be a creative activity, a creative activity in which death is a climax in the progression towards new being. And this is tragedy. Therefore, if we could but comprehend or feel the tragedy in the great Labour struggle, the intrinsic tragedy of having to pass through death to birth, our souls would still know some happiness, the very happiness of creative suffering. Instead of which we pile accident on accident, we tear the fabric of our existence fibre by fibre, we confidently look forward to the time when the whole great structure will come down on our heads. Yet after all that, when we are squirming under the debris, we shall have no more faith or hope or satisfaction than we have now. We shall crawl from under one cart-wheel straight under another. The essence of tragedy, which is creative crisis, is that a man should go through with his fate, and not dodge it and go bumping into an accident. And the whole business of life, at the great critical periods of mankind, is that men should accept and be one with their tragedy. Therefore we should open our hearts. For one thing we should have a People's Theatre. Perhaps it would help us in this hour of confusion better than anything. HERMITAGE, June, 1919. CHARACTERS GERALD BARLOW. MR. BARLOW (his father). OLIVER TURTON. JOB ARTHUR FREER. WILLIE HOUGHTON. ALFRED BREFFITT. WILLIAM (a butler). CLERKS, MINERS, etc. ANABEL WRATH. MRS. BARLOW. WINIFRED BARLOW. EVA (a maid). TOUCH AND GO ACT I SCENE I Sunday morning. Market-place of a large mining village in the Midlands. A man addressing a small gang of colliers from the foot of a stumpy memorial obelisk. Church bells heard. Churchgoers passing along the outer pavements. WILLIE HOUGHTON. What's the matter with you folks, as I've told you before, and as I shall keep on telling you every now and again, though it doesn't make a bit of difference, is that you've got no idea of freedom whatsoever. I've lived in this blessed place for fifty years, and I've never seen the spark of an idea, nor of any response to an idea, come out of a single one of you, all the time. I don't know what it is with colliers--whether it's spending so much time in the bowels of the earth--but they never seem to be able to get their thoughts above their bellies. If you've got plenty to eat and drink, and a bit over to keep the missis quiet, you're satisfied. I never saw such a satisfied bloomin' lot in my life as you Barlow & Wasall's men are, really. Of course you can growse as well as anybody, and you do growse. But you don't do anything else. You're stuck in a sort of mud of contentment, and you feel yourselves sinking, but you make no efforts to get out. You bleat a bit, like sheep in a bog--but you like it, you know. You like sinking in--you don't have to stand on your own feet then. I'll tell you what'll happen to you chaps. I'll give you a little picture of what you'll be like in the future. Barlow & Walsall's 'll make a number of compounds, such as they keep niggers in in South Africa, and there you'll be kept. And every one of you'll have a little brass collar round his neck, with a number on it. You won't have names any more. And you'll go from the compound to the pit, and from the pit back again to the compound. You won't be allowed to go outside the gates, except at week-ends. They'll let you go home to your wives on Saturday nights, to stop over Sunday. But you'll have to be in again by half-past nine on Sunday night; and if you're late, you'll have your next week-end knocked off. And there you'll be--and you'll be quite happy. They'll give you plenty to eat, and a can of beer a day, and a bit of bacca--and they'll provide dominoes and skittles for you to play with. And you'll be the most contented set of men alive.--But you won't be men. You won't even be animals. You'll go from number one to number three thousand, a lot of numbered slaves--a new sort of slaves--- VOICE. An' wheer shall thee be, Willie? WILLIE. Oh, I shall be outside the palings, laughing at you. I shall have to laugh, because it'll be your own faults. You'll have nobody but yourself to thank for it. You don't WANT to be men. You'd rather NOT be free--much rather. You're like those people spoken of in Shakespeare: "Oh, how eager these men are to be slaves!" I believe it's Shakespeare--or the Bible--one or the other--it mostly is--- ANABEL WRATH (she was passing to church). It was Tiberius. WILLIE. Eh? ANABEL. Tiberius said it. WILLIE. Tiberius!--Oh, did he? (Laughs.) Thanks! Well, if Tiberius said it, there must be something in it, and he only just missed being in the Bible anyway. He was a day late, or they'd have had him in. "Oh, how eager these men are to be slaves!"--It's evident the Romans deserved all they got from Tiberius--and you'll deserve all you get, every bit of it. But don't you bother, you'll get it. You won't be at the mercy of Tiberius, you'll be at the mercy of something a jolly sight worse. Tiberius took the skin off a few Romans, apparently. But you'll have the soul taken out of you--every one of you. And I'd rather lose my skin than my soul, any day. But perhaps you wouldn't. VOICE. What art makin' for, Willie? Tha seems to say a lot, but tha goes round it. Tha'rt like a donkey on a gin. Tha gets ravelled. WILLIE. Yes, that's just it. I am precisely like a donkey on a gin--a donkey that's trying to wind a lot of colliers up to the surface. There's many a donkey that's brought more colliers than you up to see daylight, by trotting round.--But do you want to know what I'm making for? I can soon tell you that. You Barlow & Wasall's men, you haven't a soul to call your own. Barlow & Wasall's have only to say to one of you, Come, and he cometh, Go, and he goeth, Lie VOICE. Ay--an' what about it? Tha's got a behind o' thy own, hasn't yer? WILLIE. Do you stand there and ask me what about it, and haven't the sense to alter it? Couldn't you set up a proper Government to-morrow, if you liked? Couldn't you contrive that the pits belonged to you, instead of you belonging to the pits, like so many old pit-ponies that stop down till they are blind, and take to eating coal-slack for meadow-grass, not knowing the difference? If only you'd learn to think, I'd respect you. As you are, I can't, not if I try my hardest. All you can think of is to ask for another shilling a day. That's as far as your imagination carries you. And perhaps you get sevenpence ha'penny, but pay for it with half-a-crown's worth of sweat. The masters aren't fools--as you are. They'll give you two-thirds of what you ask for, but they'll get five-thirds of it back again--and they'll get it out of your flesh and blood, too, in jolly hard work. Shylock wasn't in it with them. He only wanted a pound of flesh. But you cheerfully give up a pound a week, each one of you, and keep on giving it up.--But you don't seem to see these things. You can't think beyond your dinners and your 'lowance. You think if you can get another shilling a day you're set up. You make me tired, I tell you. JOB ARTHUR FREER. We think of others besides ourselves. WILLIE. Hello, Job Arthur--are you there? I didn't recognise you without your frock-coat and silk hat--on the Sabbath.--What was that you said? You think of something else, besides yourselves?--Oh ay--I'm glad to hear it. Did you mean your own importance? (A motor car, GERALD BARLOW driving, OLIVER TURTON with him has pulled up.) JOB ARTHUR (glancing at the car). No, I didn't. WILLIE. Didn't you, though?--Come, speak up, let us have it. The more the merrier. You were going to say something. JOB ARTHUR. Nay, you were doing the talking. WILLIE. Yes, so I was, till you interrupted, with a great idea on the tip of your tongue. Come, spit it out. No matter if Mr. Barlow hears you. You know how sorry for you we feel, that you've always got to make your speeches twice--once to those above, and once to us here below I didn't meant the angels and the devils, but never mind. Speak up, Job Arthur. JOB ARTHUR. It's not everybody as has as much to say as you, Mr. Houghton. WILLIE. No, not in the open--that's a fact. Some folks says a great deal more, in semi-private. You were just going to explain to me, on behalf of the men, whom you so ably represent and so wisely lead, Job Arthur--we won't say by the nose--you were just going to tell me--on behalf of the men, of course, not of the masters--that you think of others, besides yourself. Do you mind explaining WHAT others? JOB ARTHUR. Everybody's used to your talk, Mr. Houghton, and for that reason it doesn't make much impression. What I meant to say, in plain words, was that we have to think of what's best for everybody, not only of ourselves. WILLIE. Oh, I see. What's best for everybody! I see! Well, for myself, I'm much obliged--there's nothing for us to do, gentlemen, but for all of us to bow acknowledgments to Mr. Job Arthur Freer, who so kindly has ALL our interests at heart. JOB ARTHUR. I don't profess to be a red-rag Socialist. I don't pretend to think that if the Government had the pits it would be any better for us. No. What I mean is, that the pits are there and every man on this place depends on them, one way or another. They're the cow that gives the milk. And what I mean is, how every man shall have a proper share of the milk, which is food and living. It's like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. I want to keep the cow healthy and strong. And the cow is the pits, and we're the men that depend on the pits. WILLIE. Who's the cat that's going to lick the cream? JOB ARTHUR. My position is this--and I state it before masters and men--that it's our business to strike such a balance between the interests of the men and the interests of the masters that the pits remain healthy, and everybody profits. WILLIE. You're out for the millennium, I can see--with Mr. Job Arthur Freer striking the balance. We all see you, Job Arthur, one foot on either side of the fence, balancing the see-saw, with masters at one end and men at the other. You'll have to give one side a lot of pudding.--But go back a bit, to where we were before the motor car took your breath away. When you said, Job Arthur, that you think of others besides yourself, didn't you mean, as a matter of fact, the office men? Didn't you mean that the colliers, led--we won't mention noses--by you, were going to come out in sympathy with the office clerks, supposing they didn't get the rise in wages which they've asked for--the office clerks? Wasn't that it? JOB ARTHUR. There's been some talk among the men of standing by the office. I don't know what they'll do. But they'll do it of their own decision, whatever it is. WILLIE. There's not a shadow of doubt about it, Job Arthur. But it's a funny thing the decisions all have the same foxy smell about them, Job Arthur. OLIVER TURTON (calling from the car). What was the speech about, in the first place? WILLIE. I beg pardon? OLIVER. What was the address about, to begin with? WILLIE. Oh, the same old hat--Freedom. But partly it's given to annoy the Unco Guid, as they pass to their Sabbath banquet of self-complacency. OLIVER. What ABOUT Freedom? WILLIE. Very much as usual, I believe. But you should have been here ten minutes sooner, before we began to read the lessons. (Laughs.) ANABEL W. (moving forward, and holding out her hand). You'd merely have been told what Freedom ISN'T; and you know that already. How are you, Oliver? OLIVER. Good God, Anabel!--are you part of the meeting? How long have you been back in England? ANABEL. Some months, now. My family have moved here, you know. OLIVER. Your family! Where have they moved from?--from the moon? ANABEL. No, only from Derby.--How are you, Gerald? (GERALD twists in his seat to give her his hand.) GERALD. I saw you before. ANABEL. Yes, I know you did. (JOB ARTHUR has disappeared. The men disperse sheepishly into groups, to stand and sit on their heels by the walls and the causeway edge. WILLIE HOUGHTON begins to talk to individuals.) OLIVER. Won't you get in and drive on with us a little way? ANABEL. No, I was going to church. OLIVER. Going to church! Is that a new habit? ANABEL. Not a habit. But I've been twice since I saw you last. OLIVER. I see. And that's nearly two years ago. It's an annual thing, like a birthday? ANABEL. No. I'll go on, then. OLIVER. You'll be late now. ANABEL. Shall I? It doesn't matter. OLIVER. We are going to see you again, aren't we? ANABEL (after a pause). Yes, I hope so, Oliver. OLIVER. How have you been these two years--well?--happy? ANABEL. No, neither. How have you? OLIVER. Yes, fairly happy. Have you been ill? ANABEL. Yes, in France I was very ill. OLIVER. Your old neuritis? ANABEL. No. My chest. Pneumonia--oh, a complication. OLIVER. How sickening! Who looked after you? Is it better? ANABEL. Yes, it's a great deal better. OLIVER. But, Anabel--we must fix a meeting. I say, wait just a moment. Could I call on your people? Go into town with me one day. I don't know whether Gerald intends to see you--whether he intends to ask you to Lilley Close. GERALD. Oh, it's all right. ANABEL. He's no need. I'm fixed up there already. GERALD. What do you mean? ANABEL. I am at Lilley Close every day--or most days--to work with your sister Winifred in the studio. GERALD. What?--why, how's that? ANABEL. Your father asked me. My father was already giving her some lessons. GERALD. And you're at our house every day? ANABEL. Most days. GERALD. Well, I'm--well, I'll be--you managed it very sharp, didn't you? I've only been away a fort-night. ANABEL. Your father asked me--he offered me twelve pounds a month--I wanted to do something. GERALD. Oh yes, but you didn't hire yourself out at Lilley Close as a sort of upper servant just for twelve pounds a month. ANABEL. You're wrong--you're wrong. I'm not a sort of upper servant at all--not at all. GERALD. Oh, yes, you are, if you're paid twelve pounds a month--three pounds a week. That's about what father's sick-nurse gets, I believe. You don't do it for twelve pounds a month. You can make twelve pounds in a day, if you like to work at your little models: I know you can sell your statuette things as soon as you make them. ANABEL. But I CAN'T make them. I CAN'T make them. I've lost the spirit--the--_joi de vivre_--I don't know what, since I've been ill. I tell you I've GOT to earn something. GERALD. Nevertheless, you won't make me believe, Anabel, that you've come and buried yourself in the provinces--SUCH provinces--just to earn father's three pounds a week. Why don't you admit it, that you came back to try and take up the old threads. OLIVER. Why not, Gerald? Don't you think we ought to take up the old threads? GERALD. I don't think we ought to be left without choice. I don't think Anabel ought to come back and thrust herself on me--for that's what it amounts to, after all--when one remembers what's gone before. ANABEL. I DON'T thrust myself on you at all. I know I'm a fool, a fool, to come back. But I wanted to. I wanted to see you again. Now I know I've presumed. I've made myself CHEAP to you. I wanted to--I wanted to. And now I've done it, I won't come to Lilley Close again, nor anywhere where you are. Tell your father I have gone to France again--it will be true. GERALD. You play tricks on me--and on yourself. You know you do. You do it for the pure enjoyment of it. You're making a scene here in this filthy market-place, just for the fun of it. You like to see these accursed colliers standing eyeing you, and squatting on their heels. You like to catch me out, here where I'm known, where I've been the object of their eyes since I was born. This is a great _coup de main_ for you. I knew it the moment I saw you here. OLIVER. After all, we ARE making a scene in the market-place. Get in, Anabel, and we'll settle the dispute more privately. I'm glad you came back, anyhow. I'm glad you came right down on us. Get in, and let us run down to Whatmore. ANABEL. No, Oliver. I don't want to run down to Whatmore. I wanted to see you--I wanted to see Gerald--and I've seen him--and I've heard him. That will suffice me. We'll make an end of the scene in the market-place. (She turns away.) OLIVER. I knew it wasn't ended. I knew she would come back and tell us she'd come. But she's done her bit--now she'll go again. My God, what a fool of a world!--You go on, Gerald--I'll just go after her and see it out. (Calls.) One moment, Anabel. ANABEL (calling). Don't come, Oliver. (Turns.) GERALD. Anabel! (Blows the horn of the motor car violently and agitatively--she looks round--turns again as if frightened.) God damn the woman! (Gets down from the car.) Drive home for me, Oliver. (Curtain.) SCENE II WINIFRED'S studio at Lilley Close. ANABEL and WINIFRED working at a model in clay. WINIFRED. But isn't it lovely to be in Paris, and to have exhibitions, and to be famous? ANABEL. Paris WAS a good place. But I was never famous. WINIFRED. But your little animals and birds were famous. Jack said so. You know he brought us that bronze thrush that is singing, that is in his room. He has only let me see it twice. It's the loveliest thing I've ever seen. Oh, if I can do anything like that!--I've worshipped it, I have. It is your best thing? ANABEL. One of the best. WINIFRED. It must be. When I see it, with its beak lifted, singing, something comes loose in my heart, and I feel as if I should cry, and fly up to heaven. Do you know what I mean? Oh, I'm sure you do, or you could never have made that thrush. Father is so glad you've come to show me how to work. He says now I shall have a life-work, and I shall be happy. It's true, too. ANABEL. Yes, till the life-work collapses. WINIFRED. Oh, it can't collapse. I can't believe it could collapse. Do tell me about something else you made, which you loved--something you sculpted. Oh, it makes my heart burn to hear you!--Do you think I might call you Anabel? I should love to. You do call me Winifred already. ANABEL. Yes, do. WINIFRED. Won't you tell me about something else you made--something lovely? ANABEL. Well, I did a small kitten--asleep--with its paws crossed. You know, Winifred, that wonderful look that kittens have, as if they were blown along like a bit of fluff--as if they weighed nothing at all, just wafted about--and yet so ALIVE--do you know---? WINIFRED. Darlings--darlings--I love them! ANABEL. Well my kitten really came off--it had that quality. It looked as if it had just wafted there. WINIFRED. Oh, yes!--oh, I know! And was it in clay? ANABEL. I cut it in soft grey stone as well. I love my kitten. An Armenian bought her. WINIFRED. And where is she now? ANABEL. I don't know--in Armenia, I suppose, if there is such a place. It would have to be kept under glass, because the stone wouldn't polish--and I didn't want it polished. But I dislike things under glass--don't you? WINIFRED. Yes, I do. We had a golden clock, but Gerald wouldn't have the glass cover, and Daddy wouldn't have it without. So now the clock is in father's room. Gerald often went to Paris. Oliver used to have a studio there. I don't care much for painting, do you? ANABEL. No. I want something I can touch, if it's something outside me. WINIFRED. Yes, isn't it wonderful, when things are substantial. Gerald and Oliver came back yesterday from Yorkshire. You know we have a colliery there. ANABEL. Yes, I believe I've heard. WINIFRED. I want to introduce you to Gerald, to see if you like him. He's good at the bottom, but he's very overbearing and definite. ANABEL. Is he? WINIFRED. Terribly clever in business. He'll get awfully rich. ANABEL. Isn't he rich enough already? WINIFRED. Oh, yes, because Daddy is rich enough, really. I think if Gerald was a bit different, he'd be really nice. Now he's so MANAGING. It's sickening. Do you dislike managing people, Anabel? ANABEL. I dislike them extremely, Winifred. WINIFRED. They're such a bore. ANABEL. What does Gerald manage? WINIFRED. Everything. You know he's revolutionised the collieries and the whole Company. He's made a whole new thing of it, so MODERN. Father says he almost wishes he'd let it die out--let the pits be closed. But I suppose things MUST be modernised, don't you think? Though it's very unpeaceful, you know, really. ANABEL. Decidedly unpeaceful, I should say. WINIFRED. The colliers work awfully hard. The pits are quite wonderful now. Father says it's against nature--all this electricity and so on. Gerald adores electricity. Isn't it curious? ANABEL. Very. How are you getting on? WINIFRED. I don't know. It's so hard to make things BALANCE as if they were alive. Where IS the balance in a thing that's alive? ANABEL. The poise? Yes, Winifred--to me, all the secret of life is in that--just the--the inexpressible poise of a living thing, that makes it so different from a dead thing. To me it's the soul, you know--all living things have it--flowers, trees as well. It makes life always marvellous. WINIFRED. Ah, yes!--ah, yes! If only I could put it in my model. ANABEL. I think you will. You are a sculptor, Winifred.--Isn't there someone there? WINIFRED (running to the door). Oh, Oliver! OLIVER. Hello, Winnie! Can I come in? This is your sanctum: you can keep us out if you like. WINIFRED. Oh, no. Do you know Miss Wrath, Oliver? She's a famous sculptress. OLIVER. Is she? We have met.--Is Winifred going to make a sculptress, do you think? ANABEL. I do. OLIVER. Good! I like your studio, Winnie. Awfully nice up here over the out-buildings. Are you happy in it? WINIFRED. Yes, I'm perfectly happy--only I shall NEVER be able to make real models, Oliver--it's so difficult. OLIVER. Fine room for a party--Give us a studio party one day, Win, and we'll dance. WINIFRED (flying to him). Yes, Oliver, do let us dance. What shall we dance to? OLIVER. Dance?--Dance _Vigni-vignons_--we all know that. Ready? WINIFRED. Yes. (They begin to sing, dancing meanwhile, in a free little ballet-manner, a wine-dance, dancing separate and then together.) De terre en vigne, La voila la jolie vigne, Vigni-vignons--vignons le vin, La voila la jolie vigne au vin, La voila la jolie vigne. OLIVER. Join in--join in, all. (ANABEL joins in; the three dance and move in rhythm.) WINIFRED. I love it--I love it! Do _Ma capote a trois boutons_--you know it, don't you, Anabel? Ready--now--- (They begin to dance to a quick little march-rhythm, all singing and dancing till they are out of breath.) OLIVER. Oh!--tired!--let us sit down. WINIFRED. Oliver!--oh, Oliver!--I LOVE you and Anabel. OLIVER. Oh, Winifred, I brought you a present--you'll love me more now. WINIFRED. Yes, I shall. Do give it me. OLIVER. I left it in the morning-room. I put it on the mantel-piece for you. WINIFRED. Shall I go for it? OLIVER. There it is, if you want it. WINIFRED. Yes--do you mind? I won't be long. (Exit.) OLIVER. She's a nice child. ANABEL. A VERY nice child. OLIVER. Why did you come back, Anabel? ANABEL. Why does the moon rise, Oliver? OLIVER. For some mischief or other, so they say. ANABEL. You think I came back for mischief's sake? OLIVER. Did you? ANABEL. No. OLIVER. Ah! ANABEL. Tell me, Oliver, how is everything now?--how is it with you?--how is it between us all? OLIVER. How is it between us all?--How ISN'T it, is more the mark. ANABEL. Why? OLIVER. You made a fool of us. ANABEL. Of whom? OLIVER. Well--of Gerald particularly--and of me. ANABEL. How did I make a fool of you, Oliver? OLIVER. That you know best, Anabel. ANABEL. No, I don't know. Was it ever right between Gerald and me, all the three years we knew each other--we were together? OLIVER. Was it all wrong? ANABEL. No, not all. But it was terrible. It was terrible, Oliver. You don't realise. You don't realise how awful passion can be, when it never resolves, when it never becomes anything else. It is hate, really. OLIVER. What did you want the passion to resolve into? ANABEL. I was blinded--maddened. Gerald stung me and stung me till I was mad. I left him for reason's sake, for sanity's sake. We should have killed one another. OLIVER. You, stung him, too, you know--and pretty badly, at the last: you dehumanised him. ANABEL. When? When I left him, you mean? OLIVER. Yes, when you went away with that Norwegian--playing your game a little too far. ANABEL. Yes, I knew you'd blame me. I knew you'd be against me. But don't you see, Oliver, you helped to make it impossible for us. OLIVER. Did I? I didn't intend to. ANABEL. Ha, ha, Oliver! Your good intentions! They are too good to bear investigation, my friend. Ah, but for your good and friendly intentions--- OLIVER. You mean my friendship with Gerald went against you? ANABEL. Yes. And your friendship with me went against Gerald. OLIVER. So I am the devil in the piece. ANABEL. You see, Oliver, Gerald loved you far too well ever to love me altogether. He loved us both. But the Gerald that loved you so dearly, old, old friends as you were, and TRUSTED you, he turned a terrible face of contempt on me. You don't know, Oliver, the cold edge of Gerald's contempt for me--because he was so secure and strong in his old friendship with you. You don't know his sneering attitude to me in the deepest things with you. He had a passion for me. But he loved you. OLIVER. Well, he doesn't any more. We went apart after you had gone. The friendship has become almost casual. ANABEL. You see how bitterly you speak. OLIVER. Yet you didn't hate me, Anabel. ANABEL. No, Oliver--I was AWFULLY fond of you. I trusted you--and I trust you still. You see I knew how fond Gerald was of you. And I had to respect this feeling. So I HAD to be aware of you: and I HAD to be conscious of you: in a way, I had to love you. You understand how I mean? Not with the same fearful love with which I loved Gerald. You seemed to me warm and protecting--like a brother, you know--but a brother one LOVES. OLIVER. And then you hated me? ANABEL. Yes, I had to hate you. OLIVER. And you hated Gerald? ANABEL. Almost to madness--almost to madness. OLIVER. Then you went away with that Norwegian. What of him? ANABEL. What of him? Well, he's dead. OLIVER. Ah! That's why you came back? ANABEL. No, no. I came back because my only hope in life was in coming back. Baard was beautiful--and awful. You know how glisteningly blond he was. Oliver, have you ever watched the polar bears? He was cold as iron when it is so cold that it burns you. Coldness wasn't negative with him. It was positive--and awful beyond expression--like the aurora borealis. OLIVER. I wonder you ever got back. ANABEL. Yes, so do I. I feel as if I'd fallen down a fissure in the ice. Yet I have come back, haven't I? OLIVER. God knows! At least, Anabel, we've gone through too much ever to start the old game again. There'll be no more sticky love between us. ANABEL. No, I think there won't, either. OLIVER. And what of Gerald? ANABEL. I don't know. What do you think of him? OLIVER. I can't think any more. I can only blindly go from day to day, now. ANABEL. So can I. Do you think I was wrong to come back? Do you think I wrong Gerald? OLIVER. No. I'm glad you came. But I feel I can't KNOW anything. We must just go on. ANABEL. Sometimes I feel I ought never to have come to Gerald again--never--never--never. OLIVER. Just left the gap?--Perhaps, if everything has to come asunder. But I think, if ever there is to be life--hope,--then you had to come back. I always knew it. There is something eternal between you and him; and if there is to be any happiness, it depends on that. But perhaps there is to BE no happiness--for our part of the world. ANABEL (after a pause). Yet I feel hope--don't you? OLIVER. Yes, sometimes. ANABEL. It seemed to me, especially that winter in Norway,--I can hardly express it,--as if any moment life might give way under one, like thin ice, and one would be more than dead. And then I knew my only hope was here--the only hope. OLIVER. Yes, I believe it. And I believe--- (Enter MRS. BARLOW.) MRS. BARLOW. Oh, I wanted to speak to you, Oliver. OLIVER. Shall I come across? MRS. BARLOW. No, not now. I believe father is coming here with Gerald. OLIVER. Is he going to walk so far? MRS. BARLOW. He will do it.--I suppose you know Oliver? ANABEL. Yes, we have met before. MRS. BARLOW (to OLIVER). You didn't mention it. Where have you met Miss Wrath? She's been about the world, I believe. ANABEL. About the world?--no, Mrs. Barlow. If one happens to know Paris and London--- MRS. BARLOW. Paris and London! Well, I don't say you are all together an adventuress. My husband seems very pleased with you--for Winifred's sake, I suppose--and he's wrapped up in Winifred. ANABEL. Winifred is an artist. MRS. BARLOW. All my children have the artist in them. They get it from my family. My father went mad in Rome. My family is born with a black fate--they all inherit it. OLIVER. I believe one is master of one's fate sometimes, Mrs. Barlow. There are moments of pure choice. MRS. BARLOW. Between two ways to the same end, no doubt. There's no changing the end. OLIVER. I think there is. MRS. BARLOW. Yes, you have a _parvenu's_ presumptuousness somewhere about you. OLIVER. Well, better than a blue-blooded fatalism. MRS. BARLOW. The fate is in the blood: you can't change the blood. (Enter WINIFRED.) WINIFRED. Oh, thank you, Oliver, for the wolf and the goat, thank you so much!--The wolf has sprung on the goat, Miss Wrath, and has her by the throat. ANABEL. The wolf? OLIVER. It's a little marble group--Italian--in hard marble. WINIFRED. The wolf--I love the wolf--he pounces so beautifully. His backbone is so terribly fierce. I don't feel a bit sorry for the goat, somehow. OLIVER. I didn't. She is too much like the wrong sort of clergyman. WINIFRED. Yes--such a stiff, long face. I wish he'd kill her. MRS. BARLOW. There's a wish! WINIFRED. Father and Gerald are coming. That's them, I suppose. (Enter MR. BARLOW and GERALD.) MR. BARLOW. Ah, good morning--good morning--quite a little gathering! Ah--- OLIVER. The steps tire you, Mr. Barlow. MR. BARLOW. A little--a little--thank you.--Well, Miss Wrath, are you quite comfortable here? ANABEL. Very comfortable, thanks. GERALD. It was clever of you, father, to turn this place into a studio. MR. BARLOW. Yes, Gerald. You make the worldly schemes, and I the homely. Yes, it's a delightful place. I shall come here often if the two young ladies will allow me.--By the way, Miss Wrath, I don't know if you have been introduced to my son Gerald. I beg your pardon. Miss Wrath, Gerald--my son, Miss Wrath. (They bow.) Well, we are quite a gathering, quite a pleasant little gathering. We never expected anything so delightful a month ago, did we, Winifred, darling? WINIFRED. No, daddy, it's much nicer than expectations. MR. BARLOW. So it is, dear--to have such exceptional companionship and such a pleasant retreat. We are very happy to have Miss Wrath with us--very happy. GERALD. A studio's awfully nice, you know; it is such a retreat. A newspaper has no effect in it--falls quite flat, no matter what the headlines are. MR. BARLOW. Quite true, Gerald, dear. It is a sanctum the world cannot invade--unlike all other sanctuaries, I am afraid. GERALD. By the way, Oliver--to go back to profanities--the colliers really are coming out in support of the poor, ill-used clerks. MR. BARLOW. No, no, Gerald--no, no! Don't be such an alarmist. Let us leave these subjects before the ladies. No, no: the clerks will have their increase quite peacefully. GERALD. Yes, dear father--but they can't have it peacefully now. We've been threatened already by the colliers--we've already received an ultimatum. MR. BARLOW. Nonsense, my boy--nonsense! Don't let us split words. You won't go against the clerks in such a small matter. Always avoid trouble over small matters. Don't make bad feeling--don't make bad blood. MRS. BARLOW. The blood is already rotten in the neighbourhood. What it needs is letting out. We need a few veins opening, or we shall have mortification setting in. The blood is black. MR. BARLOW. We won't accept your figure of speech literally, dear. No, Gerald, don't go to war over trifles. GERALD. It's just over trifles that one must make war, father. One can yield gracefully over big matters. But to be bullied over trifles is a sign of criminal weakness. MR. BARLOW. Ah, not so, not so, my boy. When you are as old as I am, you will know the comparative insignificance of these trifles. GERALD. The older _I_ get, father, the more such trifles stick in my throat. MR. BARLOW. Ah, it is an increasingly irritable disposition in you, my child. Nothing costs so bitterly, in the end, as a stubborn pride. MRS. BARLOW. Except a stubborn humility--and that will cost you more. Avoid humility, beware of stubborn humility: it degrades. Hark, Gerald--fight! When the occasion comes, fight! If it's one against five thousand, fight! Don't give them your heart on a dish! Never! If they want to eat your heart out, make them fight for it, and then give it them poisoned at last, poisoned with your own blood.--What do you say, young woman? ANABEL. Is it for me to speak, Mrs. Barlow? MRS. BARLOW. Weren't you asked? ANABEL. Certainly I would NEVER give the world my heart on a dish. But can't there ever be peace--real peace? MRS. BARLOW. No--not while there is devilish enmity. MR. BARLOW. You are wrong, dear, you are wrong. The peace can come, the peace that passeth all understanding. MRS. BARLOW. That there is already between me and Almighty God. I am at peace with the God that made me, and made me proud. With men who humiliate me I am at war. Between me and the shameful humble there is war to the end, though they are millions and I am one. I hate the people. Between my race and them and my children--for ever war, for ever and ever. MR. BARLOW. Ah, Henrietta--you have said all this before. MRS. BARLOW. And say it again. Fight, Gerald. You have my blood in you, thank God. Fight for it, Gerald. Spend it as if it were costly, Gerald, drop by drop. Let no dogs lap it.--Look at your father. He set his heart on a plate at the door, for the poorest mongrel to eat up. See him now, wasted and crossed out like a mistake--and swear, Gerald, swear to be true to my blood in you. Never lie down before the mob, Gerald. Fight it and stab it, and die fighting. It's a lost hope--but fight! GERALD. Don't say these things here, mother. MRS. BARLOW. Yes, I will--I will. I'll say them before you, and the child Winifred--she knows. And before Oliver and the young woman--they know, too. MR. BARLOW. You see, dear, you can never understand that, although I am weak and wasted, although I may be crossed out from the world like a mistake, I still have peace in my soul, dear, the peach that passeth all understanding. MRS. BARLOW. And what right have you to it? All very well for you to take peace with you into the other world. What do you leave for your sons to inherit? MR. BARLOW. The peace of God, Henrietta, if there is no peace among men. MRS. BARLOW. Then why did you have children? Why weren't you celibate? They have to live among men. If they have no place among men, why have you put them there? If the peace of God is no more than the peace of death, why are your sons born of you? How can you have peace with God, if you leave no peace for your sons--no peace, no pride, no place on earth? GERALD. Nay, mother, nay. You shall never blame father on my behalf. MRS. BARLOW. Don't trouble--he is blameless--I, a hulking, half-demented woman, I am GLAD when you blame me. But don't blame me when I tell you to fight. Don't do that, or you will regret it when you must die. Ah, your father was stiff and proud enough before men of better rank than himself. He was overbearing enough with his equals and his betters. But he humbled himself before the poor, he made me ashamed. He must hear it--he must hear it! Better he should hear it than die coddling himself with peace. His humility, and my pride, they have made a nice ruin of each other. Yet he is the man I wanted to marry--he is the man I would marry again. But never, never again would I give way before his goodness. Gerald, if you must be true to your father, be true to me as well. Don't set me down at nothing because I haven't a humble case. GERALD. No, mother--no, dear mother. You see, dear mother, I have rather a job between the two halves of myself. When you come to have the wild horses in your own soul, mother, it makes it difficult. MRS. BARLOW. Never mind, you'll have help. GERALD. Thank you for the assurance, darling.--Father, you don't mind what mother says, I hope. I believe there's some truth in it--don't you? MR. BARLOW. I have nothing to say. WINIFRED. _I_ think there's some truth in it, daddy. You were always worrying about those horrid colliers, and they didn't care a bit about you. And they OUGHT to gave cared a million pounds. MR. BARLOW. You don't understand, my child. (Curtain.) ACT II SCENE: Evening of the same day. Drawing-room at Lilly Close. MR. BARLOW, GERALD, WINIFRED, ANABEL OLIVER present. Butler pours coffee. MR. BARLOW. And you are quite a stranger in these parts, Miss Wrath? ANABEL. Practically. But I was born at Derby. MR. BARLOW. I was born in this house--but it was a different affair then: my father was a farmer, you know. The coal has brought us what moderate wealth we have. Of course, we were never poor or needy--farmers, substantial farmers. And I think we were happier so--yes.--Winnie, dear, hand Miss Wrath the sweets. I hope they're good. I ordered them from London for you.--Oliver, my boy, have you everything you like? That's right.--It gives me such pleasure to see a little festive gathering in this room again. I wish Bertie and Elinor might be here. What time is it, Gerald? GERALD. A quarter to nine, father. MR. BARLOW. Not late yet. I can sit with you another half-hour. I am feeling better to-day. Winifred, sing something for us. WINIFRED. Something jolly, father? MR. BARLOW. Very jolly, darling. WINIFRED. I'll sing "The Lincolnshire Poacher," shall I? MR. BARLOW. Do, darling, and we'll all join in the chorus.--Will you join in the chorus, Miss Wrath? ANABEL. I will. It is a good song. MR. BARLOW. Yes, isn't it! WINIFRED. All dance for the chorus, as well as singing. (They sing; some pirouette a little for the chorus.) MR. BARLOW. Ah, splendid! Splendid! There is nothing like gaiety. WINIFRED. I do love to dance about. I know: let us do a little ballet--four of us--oh, do! GERALD. What ballet, Winifred? WINIFRED. Any. Eva can play for us. She plays well. MR. BARLOW. You won't disturb your mother? Don't disturb Eva if she is busy with your mother. (Exit WINIFRED.) If only I can see Winifred happy, my heart is at rest: if only I can hope for her to be happy in her life. GERALD. Oh, Winnie's all right, father--especially now she has Miss Wrath to initiate her into the mysteries of life and labour. ANABEL. Why are you ironical? MR. BARLOW. Oh, Miss Wrath, believe me, we all feel that--it is the greatest possible pleasure to me that you have come. GERALD. I wasn't ironical, I assure you. MR. BARLOW. No, indeed--no, indeed! We have every belief in you. ANABEL. But why should you have? MR. BARLOW. Ah, my dear child, allow us the credit of our own discernment. And don't take offence at my familiarity. I am afraid I am spoilt since I am an invalid. (Re-enter WINIFRED, with EVA.) MR. BARLOW. Come, Eva, you will excuse us for upsetting your evening. Will you be so good as to play something for us to dance to? EVA. Yes, sir. What shall I play? WINIFRED. Mozart--I'll find you the piece. Mozart's the saddest musician in the world--but he's the best to dance to. MR. BARLOW. Why, how is it you are such a connoisseur in sadness, darling? GERALD. She isn't. She's a flagrant amateur. (EVA plays; they dance a little ballet.) MR. BARLOW. Charming--charming, Miss Wrath:--will you allow me to say _Anabel_, we shall all feel so much more at home? Yes--thank you--er--you enter into the spirit of it wonderfully, Anabel, dear. The others are accustomed to play together. But it is not so easy to come in on occasion as you do. GERALD. Oh, Anabel's a genius!--I beg your pardon, Miss Wrath--familiarity is catching. MR. BARLOW. Gerald, my boy, don't forget that you are virtually host here. EVA. Did you want any more music, sir? GERALD. No, don't stay, Eva. We mustn't tire father. (Exit EVA.) MR. BARLOW. I am afraid, Anabel, you will have a great deal to excuse in us, in the way of manners. We have never been a formal household. But you have lived in the world of artists: you will understand, I hope. ANABEL. Oh, surely--- MR. BARLOW. Yes, I know. We have been a turbulent family, and we have had our share of sorrow, even more, perhaps, than of joys. And sorrow makes one indifferent to the conventionalities of life. GERALD. Excuse me, father: do you mind if I go and write a letter I have on my conscience? MR. BARLOW. No, my boy. (Exit GERALD.) We have had our share of sorrow and of conflict, Miss Wrath, as you may have gathered. ANABEL. Yes--a little. MR. BARLOW. The mines were opened when my father was a boy--the first--and I was born late, when he was nearly fifty. So that all my life has been involved with coal and colliers. As a young man, I was gay and thoughtless. But I married young, and we lost our first child through a terrible accident. Two children we have lost through sudden and violent death. (WINIFRED goes out unnoticed.) It made me reflect. And when I came to reflect, Anabel, I could not justify my position in life. If I believed in the teachings of the New Testament--which I did, and do--how could I keep two or three thousand men employed and underground in the mines, at a wage, let us say, of two pounds a week, whilst I lived in this comfortable house, and took something like two thousand pounds a year--let us name any figure--- ANABEL. Yes, of course. But is it money that really matters, Mr. Barlow? MR. BARLOW. My dear, if you are a working man, it matters. When I went into the homes of my poor fellows, when they were ill or had had accidents--then I knew it mattered. I knew that the great disparity was wrong--even as we are taught that it is wrong. ANABEL. Yes, I believe that the great disparity is a mistake. But take their lives, Mr. Barlow. Do you thing they would LIVE more, if they had more money? Do you think the poor live less than the rich?--is their life emptier? MR. BARLOW. Surely their lives would be better, Anabel. OLIVER. All our lives would be better, if we hadn't to hang on in the perpetual tug-of-war, like two donkeys pulling at one carrot. The ghastly tension of possessions, and struggling for possession, spoils life for everybody. MR. BARLOW. Yes, I know now, as I knew then, that it was wrong. But how to avoid the wrong? If I gave away the whole of my income, it would merely be an arbitrary dispensation of charity. The money would still be mine to give, and those that received it would probably only be weakened instead of strengthened. And then my wife was accustomed to a certain way of living, a certain establishment. Had I any right to sacrifice her, without her consent? ANABEL. Why, no! MR. BARLOW. Again, if I withdrew from the Company, if I retired on a small income, I knew that another man would automatically take my place, and make it probably harder for the men. ANABEL. Of course--while the system stands, if one makes self-sacrifice one only panders to the system, makes it fatter. MR. BARLOW. One panders to the system--one panders to the system. And so, you see, the problem is too much. One man cannot alter or affect the system; he can only sacrifice himself to it. Which is the worst thing probably that he can do. OLIVER. Quite. But why feel guilty for the system?--everybody supports it, the poor as much as the rich. If every rich man withdrew from the system, the working class and socialists would keep it going, every man in the hope of getting rich himself at last. It's the people that are wrong. They want the system much more than the rich do--because they are much more anxious to be rich--never having been rich, poor devils. MR. BARLOW. Just the system. So I decided at last that the best way was to give every private help that lay in my power. I would help my men individually and personally, wherever I could. Not one of them came to me and went away unheard; and there was no distress which could be alleviated that I did not try to alleviate. Yet I am afraid that the greatest distress I never heard of, the most distressed never came to me. They hid their trouble. ANABEL. Yes, the decent ones. MR. BARLOW. But I wished to help--it was my duty. Still, I think that, on the whole, we were a comfortable and happy community. Barlow & Walsall's men were not unhappy in those days, I believe. We were liberal; the men lived. OLIVER. Yes, that is true. Even twenty years ago the place was still jolly. MR. BARLOW. And then, when Gerald was a lad of thirteen, came the great lock-out. We belonged to the Masters' Federation--I was but one man on the Board. We had to abide by the decision. The mines were closed till the men would accept the reduction.--Well, that cut my life across. We were shutting the men out from work, starving their families, in order to force them to accept a reduction. It may be the condition of trade made it imperative. But, for myself, I would rather have lost everything.--Of course, we did what we could. Food was very cheap--practically given away. We had open kitchen here. And it was mercifully warm summer-time. Nevertheless, there was privation and suffering, and trouble and bitterness. We had the redcoats down--even to guard this house. And from this window I saw Whatmore head-stocks ablaze, and before I could get to the spot the soldiers had shot two poor fellows. They were not killed, thank God--- OLIVER. Ah, but they enjoyed it--they enjoyed it immensely. I remember what grand old sporting weeks they were. It was like a fox-hunt, so lively and gay--bands and tea-parties and excitement everywhere, pit-ponies loose, men all over the country-side--- MR. BARLOW. There was a great deal of suffering, which you were too young to appreciate. However, since that year I have had to acknowledge a new situation--a radical if unspoken opposition between masters and men. Since that year we have been split into opposite camps. Whatever I might privately feel, I was one of the owners, one of the masters, and therefore in the opposite camp. To my men I was an oppressor, a representative of injustice and greed. Privately, I like to think that even to this day they bear me no malice, that they have some lingering regard for me. But the master stands before the human being, and the condition of war overrides individuals--they hate the master, even whilst, as a human being, he would be their friend. I recognise the inevitable justice. It is the price one has to pay. ANABEL. Yes, it is difficult--very. MR. BARLOW. Perhaps I weary you? ANABEL. Oh, no--no. MR. BARLOW. Well--then the mines began to pay badly. The seams ran thin and unprofitable, work was short. Either we must close down or introduce a new system, American methods, which I dislike so extremely. Now it really became a case of men working against machines, flesh and blood working against iron, for a livelihood. Still, it had to be done--the whole system revolutionised. Gerald took it in hand--and now I hardly know my own pits, with the great electric plants and strange machinery, and the new coal-cutters--iron men, as the colliers call them--everything running at top speed, utterly dehumanised, inhuman. Well, it had to be done; it was the only alternative to closing down and throwing three thousand men out of work. And Gerald has done it. But I can't bear to see it. The men of this generation are not like my men. They are worn and gloomy; they have a hollow look that I can't bear to see. They are a great grief to me. I remember men even twenty years ago--a noisy, lively, careless set, who kept the place ringing. I feel it is unnatural; I feel afraid of it. And I cannot help feeling guilty. ANABEL. Yes--I understand. It terrifies me. MR. BARLOW. Does it?--does it?--Yes.--And as my wife says, I leave it all to Gerald--this terrible situation. But I appeal to God, if anything in my power could have averted it, I would have averted it. I would have made any sacrifice. For it is a great and bitter trouble to me. ANABEL. Ah, well, in death there is no industrial situation. Something must be different there. MR. BARLOW. Yes--yes. OLIVER. And you see sacrifice isn't the slightest use. If only people would be sane and decent. MR. BARLOW. Yes, indeed.--Would you be so good as to ring, Oliver? I think I must go to bed. ANABEL. Ah, you have over-tired yourself. MR. BARLOW. No, my dear--not over-tired. Excuse me if I have burdened you with all this. I relieves me to speak of it. ANABEL. I realise HOW terrible it is, Mr. Barlow--and how helpless one is. MR. BARLOW. Thank you, my dear, for your sympathy. OLIVER. If the people for one minute pulled themselves up and conquered their mania for money and machine excitement, the whole thing would be solved.--Would you like me to find Winnie and tell her to say good night to you? MR. BARLOW. If you would be so kind. (Exit OLIVER.) Can't you find a sweet that you would like, my dear? Won't you take a little cherry brandy? (Enter BUTLER.) ANABEL. Thank you. WILLIAM. You will go up, sir? MR. BARLOW. Yes, William. WILLIAM. You are tired to-night, sir. MR. BARLOW. It has come over me just now. WILLIAM. I wish you went up before you became so over-tired, sir. Would you like nurse? MR. BARLOW. No, I'll go with you, William. Good night, my dear. ANABEL. Good night, Mr. Barlow. I am so sorry if you are over-tired. (Exit BUTLER and MR. BARLOW. ANABEL takes a drink and goes to the fire.) (Enter GERALD.) GERALD. Father gone up? ANABEL. Yes. GERALD. I thought I heard him. Has he been talking too much?--Poor father, he will take things to heart. ANABEL. Tragic, really. GERALD. Yes, I suppose it is. But one can get beyond tragedy--beyond the state of feeling tragical, I mean. Father himself is tragical. One feels he is mistaken--and yet he wouldn't be any different, and be himself, I suppose. He's sort of crucified on an idea of the working people. It's rather horrible when he's one's father.--However, apart from tragedy, how do you like being here, in this house? ANABEL. I like the house. It's rather too comfortable. GERALD. Yes. But how do you like being here? ANABEL. How do you like my being in your home? GERALD. Oh, I think you're very decorative. ANABEL. More decorative than comfortable? GERALD. Perhaps. But perhaps you give the necessary finish to the establishment. ANABEL. Like the correct window-curtains? GERALD. Yes, something like that. I say, why did you come, Anabel? Why did you come slap-bang into the middle of us?--It's not expostulation--I want to know. ANABEL. You mean you want to be told? GERALD. Yes, I want to be told. ANABEL. That's rather mean of you. You should savvy, and let it go without saying. GERALD. Yes, but I don't savvy. ANABEL. Then wait till you do. GERALD. No, I want to be told. There's a difference in you, Anabel, that puts me out, rather. You're sort of softer and sweeter--I'm not sure whether it isn't a touch of father in you. There's a little sanctified smudge on your face. Are you really a bit sanctified? ANABEL. No, not sanctified. It's true I feel different. I feel I want a new way of life--something more dignified, more religious, if you like--anyhow, something POSITIVE. GERALD. Is it the change of heart, Anabel? ANABEL. Perhaps it is, Gerald. GERALD. I'm not sure that I like it. Isn't it like a berry that decides to get very sweet, and goes soft? ANABEL. I don't think so. GERALD. Slightly sanctimonious. I think I liked you better before. I don't think I like you with this touch of aureole. People seem to me so horribly self-satisfied when they get a change of heart--they take such a fearful lot of credit to themselves on the strength of it. ANABEL. I don't think I do.--Do you feel no different, Gerald? GERALD. Radically, I can't say I do. I feel very much more INdifferent. ANABEL. What to? GERALD. Everything. ANABEL. You're still angry--that's what it is. GERALD. Oh, yes, I'm angry. But that is part of my normal state. ANABEL. Why are you angry? GERALD. Is there any reason why I shouldn't be angry? I'm angry because you treated me--well, so impudently, really--clearing out and leaving one to whistle to the empty walls. ANABEL. Don't you think it was time I cleared out, when you became so violent, and really dangerous, really like a madman? GERALD. Time or not time, you went--you disappeared and left us high and dry--and I am still angry.--But I'm not only angry about that. I'm angry with the colliers, with Labour for its low-down impudence--and I'm angry with father for being so ill--and I'm angry with mother for looking such a hopeless thing--and I'm angry with Oliver because he thinks so much--- ANABEL. And what are you angry with yourself for? GERALD. I'm angry with myself for being myself--I always was that. I was always a curse to myself. ANABEL. And that's why you curse others so much? GERALD. You talk as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth. ANABEL. You see, Gerald, there has to be a change. You'll have to change. GERALD. Change of heart?--Well, it won't be to get softer, Anabel. ANABEL. You needn't be softer. But you can be quieter, more sane even. There ought to be some part of you that can be quiet and apart from the world, some part that can be happy and gentle. GERALD. Well, there isn't. I don't pretend to be able to extricate a soft sort of John Halifax, Gentleman, out of the machine I'm mixed up in, and keep him to gladden the connubial hearth. I'm angry, and I'm angry right through, and I'm not going to play bo-peep with myself, pretending not to be. ANABEL. Nobody asks you to. But is there no part of you that can be a bit gentle and peaceful and happy with a woman? GERALD. No, there isn't.--I'm not going to smug with you--no, not I. You're smug in your coming back. You feel virtuous, and expect me to rise to it. I won't. ANABEL. Then I'd better have stayed away. GERALD. If you want me to virtuise and smug with you, you had. ANABEL. What DO you want, then? GERALD. I don't know. I know I don't want THAT. ANABEL. Oh, very well. (Goes to the piano; begins to play.) (Enter MRS. BARLOW.) GERALD. Hello, mother! Father HAS gone to bed. MRS. BARLOW. Oh, I thought he was down here talking. You two alone? GERALD. With the piano for chaperone, mother. MRS. BARLOW. That's more than I gave you credit for. I haven't come to chaperone you either, Gerald. GERALD. Chaperone ME, mother! Do you think I need it? MRS. BARLOW. If you do, you won't get it. I've come too late to be of any use in that way, as far as I hear. GERALD. What have you heard, mother? MRS. BARLOW. I heard Oliver and this young woman talking. GERALD. Oh, did you? When? What did they say? MRS. BARLOW. Something about married in the sight of heaven, but couldn't keep it up on earth. GERALD. I don't understand. MRS. BARLOW. That you and this young woman were married in the sight of heaven, or through eternity, or something similar, but that you couldn't make up your minds to it on earth. GERALD. Really! That's very curious, mother. MRS. BARLOW. Very common occurrence, I believe. GERALD. Yes, so it is. But I don't think you heard quite right, dear. There seems to be some lingering uneasiness in heaven, as a matter of fact. We'd quite made up our minds to live apart on earth. But where did you hear this, mother? MRS. BARLOW. I heard it outside the studio door this morning. GERALD. You mean you happened to be on one side of the door while Oliver and Anabel were talking on the other? MRS. BARLOW. You'd make a detective, Gerald--you're so good at putting two and two together. I listened till I'd heard as much as I wanted. I'm not sure I didn't come down here hoping to hear another conversation going on. GERALD. Listen outside the door, darling? MRS. BARLOW. There'd be nothing to listen to if I were inside. GERALD. It isn't usually done, you know. MRS. BARLOW. I listen outside doors when I have occasion to be interested--which isn't often, unfortunately for me. GERALD. But I've a queer feeling that you have a permanent occasion to be interested in me. I only half like it. MRS. BARLOW. It's surprising how uninteresting you are, Gerald, for a man of your years. I have not had occasion to listen outside a door, for you, no, not for a great while, believe me. GERALD. I believe you implicitly, darling. But do you happen to know me through and through, and in and out, all my past and present doings, mother? Have you a secret access to my room, and a spy-hole, and all those things? This is uncomfortably thrilling. You take on a new lustre. MRS. BARLOW. Your memoirs wouldn't make you famous, my son. GERALD. Infamous, dear? MRS. BARLOW. Good heavens, no! What a lot you expect from your very mild sins! You and this young woman have lived together, then? GERALD. Don't say "this young woman," mother dear--it's slightly vulgar. It isn't for me to compromise Anabel by admitting such a thing, you know. MRS. BARLOW. Do you ask me to call her Anabel? I won't. GERALD. Then say "this person," mother. It's more becoming. MRS. BARLOW. I didn't come to speak to you, Gerald. I know you. I came to speak to this young woman. GERALD. "Person," mother.--Will you curtsey, Anabel? And I'll twist my handkerchief. We shall make a Cruikshank drawing, if mother makes her hair a little more slovenly. MRS. BARLOW. You and Gerald were together for some time? GERALD. Three years, off and on, mother. MRS. BARLOW. And then you suddenly dropped my son, and went away? GERALD. To Norway, mother--so I have gathered. MRS. BARLOW. And now you have come back because that last one died? GERALD. Is he dead, Anabel? How did he die? ANABEL. He was killed on the ice. GERALD. Oh, God! MRS. BARLOW. Now, having had your fill of tragedy, you have come back to be demure and to marry Gerald. Does he thank you? GERALD. You must listen outside the door, mother, to find that out. MRS. BARLOW. Well, it's your own affair. GERALD. What a lame summing up, mother!--quite unworthy of you. ANABEL. What did you wish to say to me, Mrs. Barlow? Please say it. MRS. BARLOW. What did I wish to say! Ay, what did I wish to say! What is the use of my saying anything? What am I but a buffoon and a slovenly caricature in the family? GERALD. No, mother dear, don't climb down--please don't. Tell Anabel what you wanted to say. MRS. BARLOW. Yes--yes--yes. I came to say--don't be good to my son--don't be too good to him. GERALD. Sounds weak, dear--mere contrariness. MRS. BARLOW. Don't presume to be good to my son, young woman. I won't have it, even if he will. You hear me? ANABEL. Yes. I won't presume, then. GERALD. May she presume to be bad to me, mother? MRS. BARLOW. For that you may look after yourself.--But a woman who was good to him would ruin him in six months, take the manhood out of him. He has a tendency, a secret hankering, to make a gift of himself to somebody. He sha'n't do it. I warn you. I am not a woman to be despised. ANABEL. No--I understand. MRS. BARLOW. Only one other thing I ask. If he must fight--and fight he must--let him alone: don't you try to shield him or save him. DON'T INTERFERE--do you hear? ANABEL. Not till I must. MRS. BARLOW. NEVER. Learn your place, and keep it. Keep away from him, if you are going to be a wife to him. Don't go too near. And don't let him come too near. Beat him off if he tries. Keep a solitude in your heart even when you love him best. Keep it. If you lose it, you lose everything. GERALD. But that isn't love, mother. MRS. BARLOW. What? GERALD. That isn't love. MRS. BARLOW. WHAT? What do you know of love, you ninny? You only know the feeding-bottle. It's what you want, all of you--to be brought up by hand, and mew about love. Ah, God!--Ah, God!--that you should none of you know the only thing which would make you worth having. GERALD. I don't believe in your only thing, mother. But what is it? MRS. BARLOW. What you haven't got--the power to be alone. GERALD. Sort of megalomania, you mean? MRS. BARLOW. What? Megalomania! What is your LOVE but a megalomania, flowing over everybody and everything like spilt water? Megalomania! I hate you, you softy! I would BEAT you (suddenly advancing on him and beating him fiercely)--beat you into some manhood--beat you--- GERALD. Stop, mother--keep off. MRS. BARLOW. It's the men who need beating nowadays, not the children. Beat the softness out of him, young woman. It's the only way, if you love him enough--if you love him enough. GERALD. You hear, Anabel? Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes. MRS. BARLOW (catching up a large old fan, and smashing it about his head). You softy--you piffler--you will never have had enough! Ah, you should be thrust in the fire, you should, to have the softness and the brittleness burnt out of you! (The door opens--OLIVER TURTON enters, followed by JOB ARTHUR FREER. MRS. BARLOW is still attacking GERALD. She turns, infuriated.) Go out! Go out! What do you mean by coming in unannounced? Take him upstairs--take that fellow into the library, Oliver Turton. GERALD. Mother, you improve our already pretty reputation. Already they say you are mad. MRS. BARLOW (ringing violently). Let me be mad then. I am mad--driven mad. One day I shall kill you, Gerald. GERALD. You won't, mother because I sha'n't let you. MRS. BARLOW. Let me!--let me! As if I should wait for you to let me! GERALD. I am a match for you even in violence, come to that. MRS. BARLOW. A match! A damp match. A wet match. (Enter BUTLER.) WILLIAM. You rang, madam? MRS. BARLOW. Clear up those bits.--Where are you going to see that white-faced fellow? Here? GERALD. I think so. MRS. BARLOW. You will STILL have them coming to the house, will you? You will still let them trample in our private rooms, will you? Bah! I ought to leave you to your own devices. (Exit.) GERALD. When you've done that, William, ask Mr. Freer to come down here. WILLIAM. Yes, sir. (A pause. Exit WILLIAM.) GERALD. So-o-o. You've had another glimpse of the family life. ANABEL. Yes. Rather--disturbing. GERALD. Not at all, when you're used to it. Mother isn't as mad as she pretends to be. ANABEL. I don't think she's mad at all. I think she has most desperate courage. GERALD. "Courage" is good. That's a new term for it. ANABEL. Yes, courage. When a man says "courage" he means the courage to die. A woman means the courage to live. That's what women hate men most for, that they haven't the courage to live. GERALD. Mother takes her courage in both hands rather late. ANABEL. We're a little late ourselves. GERALD. We are, rather. By the way, you seem to have had plenty of the courage of death--you've played a pretty deathly game, it seems to me--both when I knew you and afterwards, you've had your finger pretty deep in the death-pie. ANABEL. That's why I want a change of--of--- GERALD. Of heart?--Better take mother's tip, and try the poker. ANABEL. I will. GERALD. Ha--corraggio! ANABEL. Yes--corraggio! GERALD. Corraggiaccio! ANABEL. Corraggione! GERALD. Cock-a-doodle-doo! (Enter OLIVER and FREER.) Oh, come in. Don't be afraid; it's a charade. (ANABEL rises.) No, don't go, Anabel. Corraggio! Take a seat, Mr. Freer. JOB ARTHUR. Sounds like a sneezing game, doesn't it? GERALD. It is. Do you know the famous rhyme: Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes? JOB ARTHUR. No, I can't say I do. GERALD. My mother does. Will you have anything to drink? Will you help yourself? JOB ARTHUR. Well--no--I don't think I'll have anything, thanks. GERALD. A cherry brandy?--Yes?--Anabel, what's yours? ANABEL. Did I see Kummel? GERALD. You did. (They all take drinks.) What's the latest, Mr. Freer? JOB ARTHUR. The latest? Well, I don't know, I'm sure--- GERALD. Oh, yes. Trot it out. We're quite private. JOB ARTHUR. Well--I don't know. There's several things. GERALD. The more the merrier. JOB ARTHUR. I'm not so sure. The men are in a very funny temper, Mr. Barlow--very funny. GERALD. Coincidence--so am I. Not surprising, is it? JOB ARTHUR. The men, perhaps not. GERALD. What else, Job Arthur? JOB ARTHUR. You know the men have decided to stand by the office men? GERALD. Yes. JOB ARTHUR. They've agreed to come out next Monday. GERALD. Have they? JOB ARTHUR. Yes; there was no stopping them. They decided for it like one man. GERALD. How was that? JOB ARTHUR. That's what surprises me. They're a jolly sight more certain over this than they've ever been over their own interests. GERALD. All their love for the office clerks coming out in a rush? JOB ARTHUR. Well, I don't know about love; but that's how it is. GERALD. What is it, if it isn't love? JOB ARTHUR. I can't say. They're in a funny temper. It's hard to make out. GERALD. A funny temper, are they? Then I suppose we ought to laugh. JOB ARTHUR. No, I don't think it's a laughing matter. They're coming out on Monday for certain. GERALD. Yes--so are the daffodils. JOB ARTHUR. Beg pardon? GERALD. Daffodils. JOB ARTHUR. No, I don't follow what you mean. GERALD. Don't you? But I thought Alfred Breffitt and William Straw were not very popular. JOB ARTHUR. No, they aren't--not in themselves. But it's the principle of the thing--so it seems. GERALD. What principle? JOB ARTHUR. Why, all sticking together, for one thing--all Barlow & Walsall's men holding by one another. GERALD. United we stand? JOB ARTHUR. That's it. And then it's the strong defending the weak as well. There's three thousand colliers standing up for thirty-odd office men. I must say I think it's sporting myself. GERALD. You do, do you? United we stand, divided we fall. What do they stand for really? What is it? JOB ARTHUR. Well--for their right to a living wage. That's how I see it. GERALD. For their right to a living wage! Just that? JOB ARTHUR. Yes, sir--that's how I see it. GERALD. Well, that doesn't seem so preposterously difficult does it? JOB ARTHUR. Why, that's what I think myself, Mr. Gerald. It's such a little thing. GERALD. Quite. I suppose the men themselves are to judge what is a living wage? JOB ARTHUR. Oh, I think they're quite reasonable, you know. GERALD. Oh, yes, eminently reasonable. Reason's their strong point.--And if they get their increase they'll be quite contented? JOB ARTHUR. Yes, as far as I know, they will. GERALD. As far as you know? Why, is there something you don't know?--something you're not sure about? JOB ARTHUR. No--I don't think so. I think they'll be quite satisfied this time. GERALD. Why this time? Is there going to be a next time--every-day-has-its-to-morrow kind of thing? JOB ARTHUR. I don't know about that. It's a funny world, Mr. Barlow. GERALD. Yes, I quite believe it. How do you see it so funny? JOB ARTHUR. Oh, I don't know. Everything's in a funny state. GERALD. What do you mean by everything? JOB ARTHUR. Well--I mean things in general--Labour, for example. GERALD. You think Labour's in a funny state, do you? What do you think it wants? What do you think, personally? JOB ARTHUR. Well, in my own mind, I think it wants a bit of its own back. GERALD. And how does it mean to get it? JOB ARTHUR. Ha! that's not so easy to say. But it means to have it, in the long run. GERALD. You mean by increasing demands for higher wages? JOB ARTHUR. Yes, perhaps that's one road. GERALD. Do you see any other? JOB ARTHUR. Not just for the present. GERALD. But later on? JOB ARTHUR. I can't say about that. The men will be quiet enough for a bit, if it's all right about the office men, you know. GERALD. Probably. But have Barlow & Walsall's men any special grievance apart from the rest of the miners? JOB ARTHUR. I don't know. They've no liking for you, you know, sir. GERALD. Why? JOB ARTHUR. They think you've got a down on them. GERALD. Why should they? JOB ARTHUR. I don't know, sir; but they do. GERALD. So they have a personal feeling against me? You don't think all the colliers are the same, all over the country? JOB ARTHUR. I think there's a good deal of feeling--- GERALD. Of wanting their own back? JOB ARTHUR. That's it. GERALD. But what can they do? I don't see what they can do. They can go out on strike--but they've done that before, and the owners, at a pinch, can stand it better than they can. As for the ruin of the industry, if they do ruin it, it falls heaviest on them. In fact, it leaves them destitute. There's nothing they can do, you know, that doesn't hit them worse than it hits us. JOB ARTHUR. I know there's something in that. But if they had a strong man to lead them, you see--- GERALD. Yes, I've heard a lot about that strong man--but I've never come across any signs of him, you know. I don't believe in one strong man appearing out of so many little men. All men are pretty big in an age, or in a movement, which produces a really big man. And Labour is a great swarm of hopelessly little men. That's how I see it. JOB ARTHUR. I'm not so sure about that. GERALD. I am. Labour is a thing that can't have a head. It's a sort of unwieldy monster that's bound to run its skull against the wall sooner or later, and knock out what bit of brain it's got. You see, you need wit and courage and real understanding if you're going to do anything positive. And Labour has none of these things--certainly it shows no signs of them. JOB ARTHUR. Yes, when it has a chance, I think you'll see plenty of courage and plenty of understanding. GERALD. It always had a chance. And where one sees a bit of courage, there's no understanding; and where there's some understanding, there's absolutely no courage. It's hopeless, you know--it would be far best if they'd all give it up, and try a new line. JOB ARTHUR. I don't think they will. GERALD. No, I don't, either. They'll make a mess and when they've made it, they'll never get out of it. They can't--they're too stupid. JOB ARTHUR. They've never had a try yet. GERALD. They're trying every day. They just simply couldn't control modern industry--they haven't the intelligence. They've no LIFE intelligence. The owners may have little enough, but Labour has none. They're just mechanical little things that can make one or two motions, and they're done. They've no more idea of life than a lawn-mower has. JOB ARTHUR. It remains to be seen. GERALD. No, it doesn't. It's perfectly obvious--there's nothing remains to be seen. All that Labour is capable of, is smashing things up. And even for that I don't believe it has either the energy or the courage or the bit of necessary passion, or slap-dash--call it whatever you will. However, we'll see. JOB ARTHUR. Yes, sir. Perhaps you see now why you're not so very popular, Mr. Gerald. GERALD. We can't all be popular, Job Arthur. You're very high up in popularity, I believe. JOB ARTHUR. Not so very. They listen to me a bit. But you never know when they'll let you down. I know they'll let me down one day--so it won't be a surprise. GERALD. I should think not. JOB ARTHUR. But about the office men, Mr. Gerald. You think it'll be all right? GERALD. Oh, yes, that'll be all right. JOB ARTHUR. Easiest for this time, anyhow, sir. We don't want bloodshed, do we? GERALD. I shouldn't mind at all. It might clear the way to something. But I have absolutely no belief in the power of Labour even to bring about anything so positive as bloodshed. JOB ARTHUR. I don't know about that--I don't know. Well. GERALD. Have another drink before you go.--Yes, do. Help yourself. JOB ARTHUR. Well--if you're so pressing. (Helps himself.) Here's luck, all! ALL. Thanks. GERALD. Take a cigar--there's the box. Go on--take a handful--fill your case. JOB ARTHUR. They're a great luxury nowadays, aren't they? Almost beyond a man like me. GERALD. Yes, that's the worst of not being a bloated capitalist. Never mind, you'll be a Cabinet Minister some day.--Oh, all right--I'll open the door for you. JOB ARTHUR. Oh, don't trouble. Good night--good night. (Exeunt.) OLIVER. Oh, God, what a world to live in! ANABEL. I rather liked him. What is he? OLIVER. Checkweighman--local secretary for the Miner's Federation--plays the violin well, although he was a collier, and it spoilt his hands. They're a musical family. ANABEL. But isn't he rather nice? OLIVER. I don't like him. But I confess he's a study. He's the modern Judas. ANABEL. Don't you think he likes Gerald? OLIVER. I'm sure he does. The way he suns himself here--like a cat purring in his luxuriation. ANABEL. Yes--I don't mind it. It shows a certain sensitiveness and a certain taste. OLIVER. Yes, he has both--touch of the artist, as Mrs. Barlow says. He loves refinement, culture, breeding, all those things--loves them--and a presence, a fine free manner. ANABEL. But that is nice in him. OLIVER. Quite. But what he loves, and what he admires, and what he aspires to, he MUST betray. It's his fatality. He lives for the moment when he can kiss Gerald in the Garden of Olives, or wherever it was. ANABEL. But Gerald shouldn't be kissed. OLIVER. That's what I say. ANABEL. And that's what his mother means as well, I suppose. (Enter GERALD.) GERALD. Well--you've heard the voice of the people. ANABEL. He isn't the people. GERALD. I think he is, myself--the epitome. OLIVER. No, he's a special type. GERALD. Ineffectual, don't you think? ANABEL. How pleased you are, Gerald! How pleased you are with yourself! You love the turn with him. GERALD. It's rather stimulating, you know. ANABEL. It oughtn't to be, then. OLIVER. He's you Judas, and you love him. GERALD. Nothing so deep. He's just a sort of AEolian harp that sings to the temper of the wind. I find him amusing. ANABEL. I think it's boring. OLIVER. And I think it's nasty. GERALD. I believe you're both jealous of him. What do you think of the working man, Oliver? OLIVER. It seems to me he's in nearly as bad a way as the British employer: he's nearly as much beside the point. GERALD. What point? OLIVER. Oh, just life. GERALD. That's too vague, my boy. Do you think they'll ever make a bust-up? OLIVER. I can't tell. I don't see any good in it, if they do. GERALD. It might clear the way--and it might block the way for ever: depends what comes through. But, sincerely, I don't think they've got it in them. ANABEL. They may have something better. GERALD. That suggestion doesn't interest me, Anabel. Ah, well, we shall see what we shall see. Have a whisky and soda with me, Oliver, and let the troubled course of this evening run to a smooth close. It's quite like old times. Aren't you smoking, Anabel? ANABEL. No, thanks. GERALD. I believe you're a reformed character. So it won't be like old times, after all. ANABEL. I don't want old times. I want new ones. GERALD. Wait till Job Arthur has risen like Anti-christ, and proclaimed the resurrection of the gods.--Do you see Job Arthur proclaiming Dionysos and Aphrodite? ANABEL. It bores me. I don't like your mood. Good night. GERALD. Oh, don't go. ANABEL. Yes, good night. (Exit.) OLIVER. She's NOT reformed, Gerald. She's the same old moral character--moral to the last bit of her, really--as she always was. GERALD. Is that what it is?--But one must be moral. OLIVER. Oh, yes. Oliver Cromwell wasn't as moral as Anabel is--nor such an iconoclast. GERALD. Poor old Anabel! OLIVER. How she hates the dark gods! GERALD. And yet they cast a spell over her. Poor old Anabel! Well, Oliver, is Bacchus the father of whisky? OLIVER. I don't know.--I don't like you either. You seem to smile all over yourself. It's objectionable. Good night. GERALD. Oh, look here, this is censorious. OLIVER. You smile to yourself. (Exit.) (Curtain.) ACT III SCENE I An old park. Early evening. In the background a low Georgian hall, which has been turned into offices for the Company, shows windows already lighted. GERALD and ANABEL walk along the path. ANABEL. How beautiful this old park is! GERALD. Yes, it is beautiful--seems so far away from everywhere, if one doesn't remember that the hall is turned into offices.--No one has lived here since I was a little boy. I remember going to a Christmas party at the Walsalls'. ANABEL. Has it been shut up so long? GERALD. The Walsalls didn't like it--too near the ugliness. They were county, you know--we never were: father never gave mother a chance, there. And besides, the place is damp, cellars full of water. ANABEL. Even now? GERALD. No, not now--they've been drained. But the place would be too damp for a dwelling-house. It's all right as offices. They burn enormous fires. The rooms are quite charming. This is what happens to the stately homes of England--they buzz with inky clerks, or their equivalent. Stateliness is on its last legs. ANABEL. Yes, it grieves me--though I should be bored if I had to be stately, I think.--Isn't it beautiful in this light, like an eighteenth-century aquatint? I'm sure no age was as ugly as this, since the world began. GERALD. For pure ugliness, certainly not. And I believe none has been so filthy to live in.--Let us sit down a minute, shall we? and watch the rooks fly home. It always stirs sad, sentimental feelings in me. ANABEL. So it does in me.--Listen! one can hear the coal-carts on the road--and the brook--and the dull noise of the town--and the beating of New London pit--and voices--and the rooks--and yet it is so still. We seem so still here, don't we? GERALD. Yes. ANABEL. Don't you think we've been wrong? GERALD. How? ANABEL. In the way we've lived--and the way we've loved. GERALD. It hasn't been heaven, has it? Yet I don't know that we've been wrong, Anabel. We had it to go through. ANABEL. Perhaps.--And, yes, we've been wrong, too. GERALD. Probably. Only, I don't feel it like that. ANABEL. Then I think you ought. You ought to feel you've been wrong. GERALD. Yes, probably. Only, I don't. I can't help it. I think we've gone the way we had to go, following our own natures. ANABEL. And where has it landed us? GERALD. Here. ANABEL. And where is that? GERALD. Just on this bench in the park, looking at the evening. ANABEL. But what next? GERALD. God knows! Why trouble? ANABEL. One must trouble. I want to feel sure. GERALD. What of? ANABEL. Of you--and of myself. GERALD. Then BE sure. ANABEL. But I can't. Think of the past--what it's been. GERALD. This isn't the past. ANABEL. But what is it? Is there anything sure in it? Is there any real happiness? GERALD. Why not? ANABEL. But how can you ask? Think of what our life has been. GERALD. I don't want to. ANABEL. No, you don't. But what DO you want? GERALD. I'm all right, you know, sitting here like this. ANABEL. But one can't sit here forever, can one? GERALD. I don't want to. ANABEL. And what will you do when we leave here? GERALD. God knows! Don't worry me. Be still a bit. ANABEL. But I'M worried. You don't love me. GERALD. I won't argue it. ANABEL. And I'm not happy. GERALD. Why not, Anabel? ANABEL. Because you don't love me--and I can't forget. GERALD. I do love you--and to-night I've forgotten. ANABEL. Then make me forget, too. Make me happy. GERALD. I CAN'T make you--and you know it. ANABEL. Yes, you can. It's your business to make me happy. I've made you happy. GERALD. You want to make me unhappy. ANABEL. I DO think you're the last word in selfishness. If I say I can't forget, you merely say, "I'VE forgotten"; and if I say I'm unhappy, all YOU can answer is that I want to make YOU unhappy. I don't in the least. I want to be happy myself. But you don't help me. GERALD. There is no help for it, you see. If you WERE happy with me here you'd be happy. As you aren't, nothing will make you--not genuinely. ANABEL. And that's all you care. GERALD. No--I wish we could both be happy at the same moment. But apparently we can't. ANABEL. And why not?--Because you're selfish, and think of nothing but yourself and your own feelings. GERALD. If it is so, it is so. ANABEL. Then we shall never be happy. GERALD. Then we sha'n't. (A pause.) ANABEL. Then what are we going to do? GERALD. Do? ANABEL. Do you want me to be with you? GERALD. Yes. ANABEL. Are you sure? GERALD. Yes. ANABEL. Then why don't you want me to be happy? GERALD. If you'd only BE happy, here and now--- ANABEL. How can I? GERALD. How can't you?--You've got a devil inside you. ANABEL. Then make me not have a devil. GERALD. I've know you long enough--and known myself long enough--to know I can make you nothing at all, Anabel: neither can you make me. If the happiness isn't there--well, we shall have to wait for it, like a dispensation. It probably means we shall have to hate each other a little more.--I suppose hate is a real process. ANABEL. Yes, I know you believe more in hate than in love. GERALD. Nobody is more weary of hate than I am--and yet we can't fix our own hour, when we shall leave off hating and fighting. It has to work itself out in us. ANABEL. But I don't WANT to hate and fight with you any more. I don't BELIEVE in it--not any more. GERALD. It's a cleansing process--like Aristotle's Katharsis. We shall hate ourselves clean at last, I suppose. ANABEL. Why aren't you clean now? Why can't you love? (He laughs.) DO you love me? GERALD. Yes. ANABEL. Do you want to be with me for ever? GERALD. Yes. ANABEL. Sure? GERALD. Quite sure. ANABEL. Why are you so cool about it? GERALD. I'm not. I'm only sure--which you are not. ANABEL. Yes, I am--I WANT to be married to you. GERALD. I know you want me to want you to be married to me. But whether off your own bat you have a positive desire that way, I'm not sure. You keep something back--some sort of female reservation--like a dagger up your sleeve. You want to see me in transports of love for you. ANABEL. How can you say so? There--you see--there--this is the man that pretends to love me, and then says I keep a dagger up my sleeve. You liar! GERALD. I do love you--and you do keep a dagger up your sleeve--some devilish little female reservation which spies at me from a distance, in your soul, all the time, as if I were an enemy. ANABEL. How CAN you say so?--Doesn't it show what you must be yourself? Doesn't it show?--What is there in your soul? GERALD. I don't know. ANABEL. Love, pure love?--Do you pretend it's love? GERALD. I'm so tired of this. ANABEL. So am I, dead tired: you self-deceiving, self complacent thing. Ha!--aren't you just the same? You haven't altered one scrap not a scrap. GERALD. All right--you are always free to change yourself. ANABEL. I HAVE changed I AM better, I DO love you--I love you wholly and unselfishly--I do--and I want a good new life with you. GERALD. You're terribly wrapped up in your new goodness. I wish you'd make up your mind to be downright bad. ANABEL. Ha!--Do you?--You'd soon see. You'd soon see where you'd be if---- There's somebody coming. (Rises.) GERALD. Never mind; it's the clerks leaving work, I suppose. Sit still. ANABEL. Won't you go? GERALD. No. (A man draws near, followed by another.) CLERK. Good evening, sir. (Passes on.) Good evening, Mr. Barlow. ANABEL. They are afraid. GERALD. I suppose their consciences are uneasy about this strike. ANABEL. Did you come to sit here just to catch them, like a spider waiting for them? GERALD. No. I wanted to speak to Breffitt. ANABEL. I believe you're capable of any horridness. GERALD. All right, you believe it. (Two more figures approach.) Good evening. CLERKS. Good night, sir. (One passes, one stops.) Good evening, Mr. Barlow. Er--did you want to see Mr. Breffitt, sir? GERALD. Not particularly. CLERK. Oh! He'll be out directly, sir--if you'd like me to go back and tell him you wanted him? GERALD. No, thank you. CLERK. Good night, sir. Excuse me asking. GERALD. Good night. ANABEL. Who is Mr. Breffitt? GERALD. He is the chief clerk--and cashier--one of father's old pillars of society. ANABEL. Don't you like him? GERALD. Not much. ANABEL. Why?--You seem to dislike very easily. GERALD. Oh, they all used to try to snub me, these old buffers. They detest me like poison, because I am different from father. ANABEL. I believe you enjoy being detested. GERALD. I do. (Another clerk approaches--hesitates--stops.) CLERK. Good evening, sir. Good evening, Mr. Barlow. Er--did you want anybody at the office, sir? We're just closing. GERALD. No, I didn't want anybody. CLERK. Oh, no, sir. I see. Er--by the way, sir--er--I hope you don't think this--er--bother about an increase--this strike threat--started in the office? GERALD. Where did it start? CLERK. I should think it started--where it usually starts, Mr. Barlow--among a few loud-mouthed people who think they can do as they like with the men. They're only using the office men as a cry--They've no interest in us. They want to show their power.--That's how it is, sir. GERALD. Oh, yes. CLERK. We're powerless, if they like to make a cry out of us. GERALD. Quite. CLERK. We're as much put out about it as anybody. GERALD. Of course. CLERK. Yes--well--good night, sir. (Clerks draw near--there is a sound of loud young voices and bicycle bells. Bicycles sweep past.) CLERKS. Good night, sir.--Good night, sir. GERALD. Good night.--They're very bucked to see me sitting here with a woman--a young lady as they'll say. I guess your name will be flying round to-morrow. They stop partly to have a good look at you. Do they know you, do you think? ANABEL. Sure. CLERKS. Mr. Breffitt's just coming, sir.--Good night, sir.--Good night, sir. (Another bicycle passes.) ANABEL. The bicycles don't see us.--Isn't it rather hateful to be a master? The attitude of them all is so ugly. I can quite see that it makes you rather a bully. GERALD. I suppose it does. (Figure of a large man approaches.) BREFFITT. Oh--ah--it's Mr. Gerald!--I couldn't make out who it was.--Were you coming up to the office, sir? Do you want me to go back with you? GERALD. No, thank you--I just wanted a word with you about this agitation. It'll do just as well here. It's a pity it started--that the office should have set it going, Breffitt. BREFFITT. It's none of the office's doing, I think you'll find, Mr. Gerald. The office men did nothing but ask for a just advance--at any rate, time and prices being what they are, I consider it a fair advance. If the men took it up, it's because they've got a set of loud-mouthed blatherers and agitators among them like Job Arthur Freer, who deserve to be hung--and hanging they'd get, if I could have the judging of them. GERALD. Well--it's very unfortunate--because we can't give the clerks their increase now, you know. BREFFITT. Can't you?--can't you? I can't see that it would be anything out of the way, if I say what I think. GERALD. No. They won't get any increase now. It shouldn't have been allowed to become a public cry with the colliers. We can't give in now. BREFFITT. Have the Board decided that? GERALD. They have--on my advice. BREFFITT. Hm!--then the men will come out. GERALD. We will see. BREFFITT. It's trouble for nothing--it's trouble that could be avoided. The clerks could have their advance, and it would hurt nobody. GERALD. Too late now.--I suppose if the men come out, the clerks will come out with them? BREFFITT. They'll have to--they'll have to. GERALD. If they do, we may then make certain alterations in the office staff which have needed making for some time. BREFFITT. Very good--very good. I know what you mean.--I don't know how your father bears all this, Mr. Gerald. GERALD. We keep it from him as much as possible.--You'll let the clerks know the decision. And if they stay out with the men, I'll go over the list of the staff with you. It has needed revising for a long time. BREFFITT. I know what you mean--I know what you mean--I believe I understand the firm's interest in my department. I ought, after forty years studying it. I've studied the firm's interest for forty years, Mr. Gerald. I'm not likely to forget them now. GERALD. Of course. BREFFITT. But I think it's a mistake--I think it's a mistake, and I'm bound to say it, to let a great deal of trouble rise for a very small cause. The clerks might have had what they reasonably asked her. GERALD. Well, it's too late now. BREFFITT. I suppose it is--I suppose it is. I hope you'll remember, sir, that I've put the interest of the firm before everything--before every consideration. GERALD. Of course, Breffitt. BREFFITT. But you've not had any liking for the office staff, I'm afraid, sir--not since your father put you amongst us for a few months.--Well, sir, we shall weather this gale, I hope, as we've weathered those in the past. Times don't become better, do they? Men are an ungrateful lot, and these agitators should be lynched. They would, if I had my way. GERALD. Yes, of course. Don't wait. BREFFITT. Good night to you. (Exit.) GERALD. Good night. ANABEL. He's the last, apparently. GERALD. We'll hope so. ANABEL. He puts you in a fury. GERALD. It's his manner. My father spoilt them--abominable old limpets. And they're so self-righteous. They think I'm a sort of criminal who has instigated this new devilish system which runs everything so close and cuts it so fine--as if they hadn't made this inevitable by their shameless carelessness and wastefulness in the past. He may well boast of his forty years--forty years' crass, stupid wastefulness. (Two or three more clerks pass, talking till they approach the seat, then becoming silent after bidding good night.) ANABEL. But aren't you a bit sorry for them? GERALD. Why? If they're poor, what does it matter in a world of chaos? ANABEL. And aren't you an obstinate ass not to give them the bit they want. It's mere stupid obstinacy. GERALD. It may be. I call it policy. ANABEL. Men always do call their obstinacy policy. GERALD. Well, I don't care what happens. I wish things would come to a head. I only fear they won't. ANABEL. Aren't you rather wicked?--ASKING for strife? GERALD. I hope I am. It's quite a relief to me to feel that I may be wicked. I fear I'm not. I can see them all anticipating victory, in their low-down fashion wanting to crow their low-down crowings. I'm afraid I feel it's a righteous cause, to cut a lot of little combs before I die. ANABEL. But if they're right in what they want? GERALD. In the right--in the right!--They're just greedy, incompetent, stupid, gloating in a sense of the worst sort of power. They're like vicious children, who would like to kill their parents so that they could have the run of the larder. The rest is just cant. ANABEL. If you're the parent in the case, I must say you flow over with loving-kindness for them. GERALD. I don't--I detest them. I only hope they will fight. If they would, I'd have some respect for them. But you'll see what it will be. ANABEL. I wish I needn't, for it's very sickening. GERALD. Sickening beyond expression. ANABEL. I wish we could go right away. GERALD. So do I--If one could get oneself out of this. But one can't. It's the same wherever you have industrialism--and you have industrialism everywhere, whether it's in Timbuctoo or Paraguay or Antananarivo. ANABEL. No, it isn't: you exaggerate. JOB ARTHUR (suddenly approaching from the other side). Good evening, Mr. Barlow. I heard you were in here. Could I have a word with you? GERALD. Get on with it, then. JOB ARTHUR. Is it right that you won't meet the clerks? GERALD. Yes. JOB ARTHUR. Not in any way? GERALD. Not in any way whatsoever. JOB ARTHUR. But--I thought I understood from you the other night--- GERALD. It's all the same what you understood. JOB ARTHUR. Then you take it back, sir? GERALD. I take nothing back, because I gave nothing. JOB ARTHUR. Oh, excuse me, excuse me, sir. You said it would be all right about the clerks. This lady heard you say it. GERALD. Don't you call witnesses against me.--Besides, what does it matter to you? What in the name of--- JOB ARTHUR. Well, sir, you said it would be all right, and I went on that--- GERALD. You went on that! Where did you go to? JOB ARTHUR. The men'll be out on Monday. GERALD. So shall I. JOB ARTHUR. Oh, yes, but--where's it going to end? GERALD. Do you want me to prophesy? When did I set up for a public prophet? JOB ARTHUR. I don't know, sir. But perhaps you're doing more than you know. There's a funny feeling just now among the men. GERALD. So I've heard before. Why should I concern myself with their feelings? Am I to cry when every collier bumps his funny-bone--or to laugh? JOB ARTHUR. It's no laughing matter, you see. GERALD. An I'm sure it's no crying matter--unless you want to cry, do you see? JOB ARTHUR. Ah, but, very likely, it wouldn't be me would cry.--You don't know what might happen, now. GERALD. I'm waiting for something to happen. I should like something to happen--very much--very much indeed. JOB ARTHUR. Yes, but perhaps you'd be sorry if it did happen. GERALD. Is that warning or a threat? JOB ARTHUR. I don't know--it might be a bit of both. What I mean to say--- GERALD (suddenly seizing him by the scruff of the neck and shaking him). What do you mean to say?--I mean you to say less, do you see?--a great deal less--do you see? You've run on with your saying long enough: that clock had better run down. So stop your sayings--stop your sayings, I tell you--or you'll have them shaken out of you--shaken out of you--shaken out of you, do you see? (Suddenly flings him aside.) (JOB ARTHUR, staggering, falls.) ANABEL. Oh, no!--oh, no! GERALD. Now get up, Job Arthur; and get up wiser than you went down. You've played your little game and your little tricks and made your little sayings long enough. You're going to stop now. We've had quite enough of strong men of your stamp, Job Arthur--quite enough--such labour leaders as you. JOB ARTHUR. You'll be sorry, Mr. Barlow--you'll be sorry. You'll wish you'd not attacked me. GERALD. Don't you trouble about me and my sorrow. Mind your own. JOB ARTHUR. You will--you'll be sorry. You'll be sorry for what you've done. You'll wish you'd never begun this. GERALD. Begun--begun?--I'd like to finish, too, that I would. I'd like to finish with you, too--I warn YOU. JOB ARTHUR. I warn you--I warn you. You won't go on much longer. Every parish has its own vermin. GERALD. Vermin? JOB ARTHUR. Every parish has its own vermin; it lies with every parish to destroy its own. We sha'n't have a clean parish till we've destroyed the vermin we've got. GERALD. Vermin? The fool's raving. Vermin!--Another phrase-maker, by God! Another phrase-maker to lead the people.--Vermin? What vermin? I know quite well what _I_ mean by vermin, Job Arthur. But what do you mean? Vermin? Explain yourself. JOB ARTHUR. Yes, vermin. Vermin is what lives on other people's lives, living on their lives and profiting by it. We've got 'em in every parish--vermin, I say--that live on the sweat and blood of the people--live on it, and get rich on it--get rich through living on other people's lives, the lives of the working men--living on the bodies of the working men--that's vermin--if it isn't, what is it? And every parish must destroy its own--every parish must destroy its own vermin. GERALD. The phrase, my God! the phrase. JOB ARTHUR. Phrase or not phrase, there it is, and face it out if you can. There it is--there's not one in every parish--there's more than one--there's a number--- GERALD (suddenly kicking him). Go! (Kicks him.) Go! (Kicks him.) go! (JOB ARTHUR falls.) Get out! (Kicks him.) Get out, I say! Get out, I tell you! Get out! Get out!--Vermin!--Vermin!--I'll vermin you! I'll put my foot through your phrases. Get up, I say, get up and go--GO! JOB ARTHUR. It'll be you as'll go, this time. GERALD. What? What?--By God! I'll kick you out of this park like a rotten bundle if you don't get up and go. ANABEL. No, Gerald, no. Don't forget yourself. It's enough now. It's enough now.--Come away. Do come away. Come away--leave him--- JOB ARTHUR (still on the ground). It's your turn to go. It's you as'll go, this time. GERALD (looking at him). One can't even tread on you. ANABEL. Don't, Gerald, don't--don't look at him.--Don't say any more, you, Job Arthur.--Come away, Gerald. Come away--come--do come. GERALD (turning). THAT a human being! My God!--But he's right--it's I who go. It's we who go, Anabel. He's still there.--My God! a human being! (Curtain.) SCENE II Market-place as in Act I. WILLIE HOUGHTON, addressing a large crowd of men from the foot of the obelisk. WILLIE. And now you're out on strike--now you've been out for a week pretty nearly, what further are you? I heard a great deal of talk about what you were going to do. Well, what ARE you going to do? You don't know. You've not the smallest idea. You haven't any idea whatsoever. You've got your leaders. Now then, Job Arthur, throw a little light on the way in front, will you: for it seems to me we're lost in a bog. Which way are we to steer? Come--give the word, and let's gee-up. JOB ARTHUR. You ask me which way we are to go. I say we can't go our own way, because of the obstacles that lie in front. You've got to remove the obstacles from the way. WILLIE. So said Balaam's ass. But you're not an ass--beg pardon; and you're not Balaam--you're Job. And we've all got to be little Jobs, learning how to spell patience backwards. We've lost our jobs and we've found a Job. It's picking up a scorpion when you're looking for an egg.--Tell us what you propose doing.... Remove an obstacle from the way! What obstacle? And whose way? JOB ARTHUR. I think it's pretty plain what the obstacle is. WILLIE. Oh, ay. Tell us then. JOB ARTHUR. The obstacle to Labour is Capital. WILLIE. And how are we going to put salt on Capital's tail? JOB ARTHUR. By Labour we mean us working men; and by Capital we mean those that derive benefit from us, take the cream off us and leave us the skim. WILLIE. Oh, yes. JOB ARTHUR. So that, if you're going to remove the obstacle, you've got to remove the masters, and all that belongs to them. Does everybody agree with me? VOICES (loud). Ah, we do--yes--we do that--we do an' a'--yi--yi--that's it! WILLIE. Agreed unanimously. But how are we going to do it? Do you propose to send for Williamson's furniture van, to pack them in? I should think one pantechnicon would do, just for this parish. I'll drive. Who'll be the vanmen to list and carry? JOB ARTHUR. It's no use fooling. You've fooled for thirty years, and we're no further. What's got to be done will have to be begun. It's for every man to sweep in front of his own doorstep. You can't call your neighbours dirty till you've washed your own face. Every parish has got its own vermin, and it's the business of every parish to get rid of its own. VOICES. That's it--that's it--that's the ticket--that's the style! WILLIE. And are you going to comb 'em out, or do you propose to use Keating's? VOICES. Shut it! Shut it up! Stop thy face! Hold thy gab!--Go on, Job Arthur. JOB ARTHUR. How it's got to be done is for us all to decide. I'm not one for violence, except it's a force-put. But it's like this. We've been travelling for years to where we stand now--and here the road stops. There's a precipice below and a rock-face above. And in front of us stand the masters. Now there's three things we can do. We can either throw ourselves over the precipice; or we can lie down and let the masters walk over us; or we can GET ON. WILLIE. Yes. That's all right. But how are you going to get on? JOB ARTHUR. Well--we've either got to throw the obstacle down the cliff--or walk over it. VOICES. Ay--ay--ay--yes--that's a fact. WILLIE. I quite follow you, Job Arthur. You've either got to do for the masters--or else just remove them, and put them somewhere else. VOICES. Get rid on 'em--drop 'em down the shaft--sink 'em--ha' done wi' 'em--drop 'em down the shaft--bust the beggars--what do you do wi' vermin? WILLIE. Supposing you begin. Supposing you take Gerald Barlow, and hang him up from his lamp-post, with a piece of coal in his mouth for a sacrament--- VOICES. Ay--serve him right--serve the beggar right! Shove it down's throttle--ay! WILLIE. Supposing you do it--supposing you've done it--and supposing you aren't caught and punished--even supposing that--what are you going to do next?--THAT'S the point. JOB ARTHUR. We know what we're going to do. Once we can get our hands free, we know what we're going to do. WILLIE. Yes, so do I. You're either going to make SUCH a mess that we shall never get out of it--which I don't think you will do, for the English working man is the soul of obedience and order, and he'd behave himself to-morrow as if he was at Sunday school, no matter what he does to-day.--No, what you'll do, Job Arthur, you'll set up another lot of masters, such a jolly sight worse than what we've got now. I'd rather be mastered by Gerald Barlow, if it comes to mastering, than by Job Arthur Freer--oh, SUCH a lot! You'll be far less free with Job Arthur for your boss than ever you were with Gerald Barlow. You'll be far more degraded.--In fact, though I've preached socialism in the market-place for thirty years--if you're going to start killing the masters to set yourselves up as bosses--why, kill me along with the masters. For I'd rather die with somebody who has one tiny little spark of decency left--though it IS a little tiny spark--than live to triumph with those that have none. VOICES. Shut thy face, Houghton--shut it up--shut him up--hustle the beggar! Hoi!--hoi-ee!--whoo!--whoam-it, whoam-it!--whoo!-- bow-wow!--wet-whiskers!---- WILLIE. And it's no use you making fool of yourselves---- (His words are heard through an ugly, jeering, cold commotion.) VOICE (loudly). He's comin'. VOICES. Who? VOICE. Barlow.--See 's motor?--comin' up--sithee? WILLIE. If you've any sense left---- (Suddenly and violently disappears.) VOICES. Sorry!--he's comin'--'s comin'--sorry, ah! Who's in?--That's Turton drivin'--yi, he's behind wi' a woman--ah, he's comin'--he'll none go back--hold on. Sorry!--wheer's 'e comin'?--up from Loddo--ay---- (The cries die down--the motor car slowly comes into sight, OLIVER driving, GERALD and ANABEL behind. The men stand in a mass in the way.) OLIVER. Mind yourself, there. (Laughter.) GERALD. Go ahead, Oliver. VOICE. What's yer 'urry? (Crowd sways and surges on the car. OLIVER is suddenly dragged out. GERALD stands up--he, too, is seized from behind--he wrestles--is torn out of his greatcoat--then falls--disappears. Loud cries-- "Hi!--hoi!--hoiee!"--all the while. The car shakes and presses uneasily.) VOICE. Stop the blazin' motor, somebody. VOICE. Here y' are!--hold a minute. (A man jumps in and stops the engine--he drops in the driver's seat.) COLLIER (outside the car). Step down, miss. ANABEL. I am Mrs. Barlow. COLLIER. Missis, then. (Laugh.) Step done--lead 'er forrard. Take 'em forrard. JOB ARTHUR. Ay, make a road. GERALD. You're makin' a proper fool of yourself now, Freer. JOB ARTHUR. You've brought it on yourself. YOU'VE made fools of plenty of men. COLLIERS. Come on, now--come on! Whoa!--whoa!--he's a jibber--go pretty now, go pretty! VOICES (suddenly). Lay hold o' Houghton--nab 'im--seize 'im--rats!--rats!--bring 'im forrard! ANABEL (in a loud, clear voice). I never knew anything so RIDICULOUS. VOICES (falsetto). Ridiculous! Oh, ridiculous! Mind the step, dear!--I'm Mrs. Barlow!--Oh, are you?--Tweet--tweet! JOB ARTHUR. Make a space, boys, make a space, boys, make a space. (He stands with prisoners in a cleared space before the obelisk.) Now--now--quiet a minute--we want to ask a few questions of these gentlemen. VOICES. Quiet!--quiet!--Sh-h-h! Sh-h-h!--Answer pretty--answer pretty now!--Quiet!--Shh-h-h! JOB ARTHUR. We want to ask you, Mr. Gerald Barlow, why you have given occasion for this present trouble. GERALD. You are a fool. VOICES. Oh!--oh!--naughty Barlow!--naughty baa-lamb--answer pretty--be good baa-lamb--baa--baa!--answer pretty when gentleman asks you. JOB ARTHUR. Quiet a bit Sh-h-h!--We put this plain question to you, Mr. Barlow. Why did you refuse to give the clerks this just and fair advance, when you knew that by refusing you would throw three thousand men out of employment? GERALD. You are a fool, I say. VOICES. Oh!--oh!--won't do--won't do, Barlow--wrong answer--wrong answer--be good baa-lamb--naughty boy--naughty boy! JOB ARTHUR. Quiet a bit now!--If three thousand men ask you a just, straightforward question, do you consider they've no right to an answer? GERALD. I would answer you with my foot. VOICES (amid a threatening scuffle). Da-di-da! Hark ye--hark ye! Oh--whoa--whoa a bit!--won't do!--won't do!--naughty--naughty--say you're sorry--say you're sorry--kneel and say you're sorry--kneel and beg pardon! JOB ARTHUR. Hold on a bit--keep clear! VOICES. Make him kneel--make him kneel--on his knees with him! JOB ARTHUR. I think you'd better kneel down. (The crowd press on GERALD--he struggles--they hit him behind the knees, force him down.) OLIVER. This is shameful and unnecessary. VOICES. All of 'em--on your knees--all of' em--on their knees! (The seize OLIVER and WILLIE and ANABEL, hustling. ANABEL kneels quietly--the others struggle.) WILLIE. Well, of all the damned, dirty, cowardly--- VOICES. Shut up, Houghton--shut him up--squeeze him! OLIVER. Get off me--let me alone--I'll kneel. VOICES. Good little doggies--nice doggies--kneel and beg pardon--yap-yap--answer--make him answer! JOB ARTHUR (holding up his hand for silence). It would be better if you answered straight off, Barlow. We want to know why you prevented that advance. VOICES (after a pause). Nip his neck! Make him yelp! OLIVER. Let me answer, then.--Because it's worse, perhaps, to be bullied by three thousand men than by one man. VOICES. Oh!--oh!--dog keeps barking--stuff his mouth--stop him up--here's a bit of paper--answer, Barlow--nip his neck--stuff his mug--make him yelp--cork the bottle! (They press a lump of newspaper into OLIVER'S mouth, and bear down on GERALD.) JOB ARTHUR. Quiet--quiet--quiet a minute, everybody. We give him a minute--we give him a minute to answer. VOICES. Give him a minute--a holy minute--say your prayers, Barlow--you've got a minute--tick-tick, says the clock--time him! JOB ARTHUR. Keep quiet. WILLIE. Of all the damned, cowardly--- VOICES. Sh-h-h!--Squeeze him--throttle him! Silence is golden, Houghton.--Close the shutters, Willie's dead.--Dry up, wet whiskers! JOB ARTHUR. You've fifteen seconds. VOICES. There's a long, long trail a-winding--- JOB ARTHUR. The minute's up.--We ask you again, Gerald Barlow, why you refused a just and fair demand, when you know it was against the wishes of three thousand men all as good as yourself. VOICES. And a sight better--I don't think--we're not all vermin--we're not all crawlers, living off the sweat of other folks--we're not all parish vermin--parish vermin. JOB ARTHUR. And on what grounds do you think you have no occasion to answer the straightforward question we put you here? ANABEL (after a pause). Answer them, Gerald. What's the use of prolonging this? GERALD. I've nothing to answer. VOICES. Nothing to answer--Gerald, darling--Gerald, duckie--oh, lovey-dovey--I've nothing to answer--no, by God--no, by God, he hasna--nowt to answer--ma'e him find summat, then--answer for him--gi'e him's answer--let him ha'e it--go on--mum--mum--lovey-dovey--rub his nose in it--kiss the dirt, ducky--bend him down--rub his nose in--he's saying something--oh, no, he isn't--sorry I spoke--bend him down! JOB ARTHUR. Quiet a bit--quiet everybody--he's got to answer--keep quiet.--Now---- (A silence.) Now then, Barlow, will you answer, or won't you? (Silence.) ANABEL. Answer them, Gerald--never mind. VOICES. Sh-h-h! Sh-h-h! (Silence.) JOB ARTHUR. You won't answer, Barlow? VOICE. Down the beggar! VOICES. Down him--put his nose down--flatten him! (The crowd surges and begins to howl--they sway dangerously--GERALD is spread-eagled on the floor, face down.) JOB ARTHUR. Back--back--back a minute--back--back! (They recoil.) WILLIE. I HOPE there's a God in heaven. VOICES. Put him down--flatten him! (WILLIE is flattened on the ground.) JOB ARTHUR. Now, then--now then--if you won't answer, Barlow, I can't stand here for you any more.--Take your feet off him, boys, and turn him over--let us look at him. Let us see if he CAN speak. (They turn him over, with another scuffle.) Now then, Barlow--you can see the sky above you. Now do you think you're going to play with three thousand men, with their lives and with their souls?--now do you think you're going to answer them with your foot?--do you--do you? (The crowd has begun to sway and heave dangerously, with a low, muffled roar, above which is heard JOB ARTHUR'S voice. As he ceases, the roar breaks into a yell--the crowd heaves.) VOICES. Down him--crack the vermin--on top of him--put your foot on the vermin! ANABEL (with a loud, piercing cry, suddenly starting up). Ah, no! Ah, no! Ah-h-h-h no-o-o-o! Ah-h-h-h no-o-o-o! Ah-h-h-h no-o-o-o! No-o-o-o! No-o-o-o! No-o! No-o-o!--Ah-h-h-h!--it's enough, it's enough, it's enough--he's a man as you are. He's a man as you are. He's a man as you are. (Weeps--a breath of silence.) OLIVER. Let us stop now--let us stop now. Let me stand up. (Silence.) I want to stand up. (A muffled noise.) VOICE. Let him get up. (OLIVER rises.) OLIVER. Be quiet. Be quiet.--Now--choose! Choose! Choose! Choose what you will do! Only choose! Choose!--it will be irrevocable. (A moment's pause.) Thank God we haven't gone too far.--Gerald, get up. (Men still hold him down.) JOB ARTHUR. Isn't he to answer us? Isn't he going to answer us? OLIVER. Yes, he shall answer you. He shall answer you. But let him stand up. No more of this. Let him stand up. He must stand up. (Men still hold GERALD down.) OLIVER takes hold of their hands and removes them.) Let go--let go now. Yes, let go--yes--I ask you to let go. (Slowly, sullenly, the men let go. GERALD is free, but he does not move.) There--get up, Gerald! Get up! You aren't hurt, are you? You must get up--it's no use. We're doing our best--you must do yours. When things are like this, we have to put up with what we get. (GERALD rises slowly and faces the mob. They roar dully.) You ask why the clerks didn't get this increase? Wait! Wait! Do you still wish for any answer, Mr. Freer? JOB ARTHUR. Yes, that's what we've been waiting for. OLIVER. Then answer, Gerald. GERALD. They've trodden on my face. OLIVER. No matter. Job Arthur will easily answer that you've trodden on their souls. Don't start an altercation. (The crowd is beginning to roar.) GERALD. You want to know why the clerks didn't get their rise?--Because you interfered and attempted to bully about it, do you see. That's why. VOICES. You want bullying.--You'll get bullying, you will. OLIVER. Can't you see it's no good, either side? It's no mortal use. We might as well all die to-morrow, or to-day, or this minute, as go on bullying one another, one side bullying the other side, and the other side bullying back. We'd BETTER all die. WILLIE. And a great deal better. I'm damned if I'll take sides with anybody against anything, after this. If I'm to die, I'll die by myself. As for living, it seems impossible. JOB ARTHUR. Have the men nothing to be said for their side? OLIVER. They have a great deal--but not EVERYTHING, you see. JOB ARTHUR. Haven't they been wronged? And AREN'T they wronged? OLIVER. They have--and they are. But haven't they been wrong themselves, too?--and aren't they wrong now? JOB ARTHUR. How? OLIVER. What about this affair? Do you call it right? JOB ARTHUR. Haven't we been driven to it? OLIVER. Partly. And haven't you driven the masters to it, as well? JOB ARTHUR. I don't see that. OLIVER. Can't you see that it takes two to make a quarrel? And as long as each party hangs on to its own end of the stick and struggles to get full hold of the stick, the quarrel will continue. It will continue till you've killed one another. And even then, what better shall you be? What better would you be, really, if you'd killed Gerald Barlow just now? You wouldn't, you know. We're all human beings, after all. And why can't we try really to leave off struggling against one another, and set up a new state of things? JOB ARTHUR. That's all very well, you see, while you've got the goods. OLIVER. I've got very little, I assure you. JOB ARTHUR. Well, if you haven't, those you mix with have. They've got the money, and the power, and they intend to keep it. OLIVER. As for power, somebody must have it, you know. It only rests with you to put it into the hands of the best men, the men you REALLY believe in.--And as for money, it's life, it's living that matters, not simply having money. JOB ARTHUR. You can't live without money. OLIVER. I know that. And therefore why can't we have the decency to agree simply about money--just agree to dispose of it so that all men could live their own lives. JOB ARTHUR. That's what we want to do. But the others, such as Gerald Barlow, they keep the money--AND the power. OLIVER. You see, if you wanted to arrange things so that money flowed more naturally, so that it flowed naturally to every man, according to his needs, I think we could all soon agree. But you don't. What you want is to take it away from one set and give it to another--or keep it yourselves. JOB ARTHUR. We want every man to have his proper share. OLIVER. I'm sure _I_ do. I want every man to be able to live and be free. But we shall never manage it by fighting over the money. If you want what is natural and good, I'm sure the owners would soon agree with you. JOB ARTHUR. What? Gerald Barlow agree with us? OLIVER. Why not? I believe so. JOB ARTHUR. You ask him. OLIVER. Do you think, Gerald, that if the men really wanted a whole, better way, you would agree with them? GERALD. I want a better way myself--but not their way. JOB ARTHUR. There, you see! VOICES. Ah-h! look you!--That's him--that's him all over. OLIVER. You want a better way,--but not his way: he wants a better way--but not your way. Why can't you both drop your buts, and simply say you want a better way, and believe yourselves and one another when you say it? Why can't you? GERALD. Look here! I'm quite as tired of my way of life as you are of yours. If you make me believe you want something better, then I assure you I do: I want what you want. But Job Arthur Freer's not the man to lead you to anything better. You can tell what people want by the leaders they choose, do you see? You choose leaders whom I respect, and I'll respect you, do you see? As it is, I don't. And now I'm going. VOICES. Who says?--Oh ay!--Who says goin'? GERALD. Yes, I'm going. About this affair here we'll cry quits; no more said about it. About a new way of life, a better way all round--I tell you I want it and need it as much as ever you do. I don't care about money really. But I'm never going to be bullied. VOICE. Who doesn't care about money? GERALD. I don't. I think we ought to be able to alter the whole system--but not by bullying, not because one lot wants what the other has got. VOICE. No, because you've got everything. GERALD. Where's my coat? Now then, step out of the way. (They move towards the car.) (Curtain.) 
20654	----	FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS by D. H. LAWRENCE New York Thomas Seltzer 1922 Copyright, 1922, by Thomas Seltzer, Inc. CONTENTS CHAPTER FOREWORD I. INTRODUCTION II. THE HOLY FAMILY III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS V. THE FIVE SENSES VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX X. PARENT LOVE XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS XIII. COSMOLOGICAL XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS XV. THE LOWER SELF EPILOGUE FOREWORD The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it. I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste paper basket without more ado. As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably. Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either believe or you don't. I am not a proper archæologist nor an anthropologist nor an ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed by intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass of revolting nonsense, without a qualm. Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life. I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles. I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different in constitution and nature from our science once was universal, established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so, it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of the geographical nature of this previous world seems to me most interesting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period, the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body on the higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds of to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up mountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes, and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from the marvelous great continent of the Pacific. In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day. Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story. And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent. And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents, mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or divining. If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast ages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his distances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp and the magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth's changing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrest intervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. But nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve something magnificent out of a renewed chaos. I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations. So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge. But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the fire is life. And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak." Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life itself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the early Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to me the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn from the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun. Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some respect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve than just the marvel of the unborn me. One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of mine--"pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say--is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These "pollyanalytics" are inferences made afterwards, from the experience. And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Men live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin, and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future; neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray and opaque. We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the heart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in life and art. Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. And if I try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what I see--why not? If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. And if anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read one single word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he is a critic who needs to scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matter how. TAORMINA October 8, 1921 FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn't fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it _was_ fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly a negative quantity and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really not fair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented and described nothing but an unconscious, in all his theory. The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory. The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human activity. Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element of sex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed, and of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all human relationships, particularly adult human relationships, a large element of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted on this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of superfineness. What Freud says is always _partly_ true. And half a loaf is better than no bread. But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is _not_ sex. And a sexual motive is _not_ to be attributed to all human activities. We know it, without need to argue. Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided into male and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male apart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but which also draws male and female together in a long and infinitely varied approach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without the consummating act of coition is never quite sex, in human relationships: just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say, the act of coition is the essential clue to sex. Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? In one direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysis plainly said so. In one direction, all life works up to the one supreme moment of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely. But we are not confined to one direction only, or to one exclusive consummation. Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towards the act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexual element was present, and important. But not predominant. The same in the building of the Panama Canal. The sexual impulse, in its widest form, was a very great impulse towards the building of the Panama Canal. But there was something else, of even higher importance, and greater dynamic power. And what is this other, greater impulse? It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not "to build a world for you, dear"; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful. Even the Panama Canal would never have been built _simply_ to let ships through. It is the pure disinterested craving of the human male to make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own self, and his own soul's faith and delight, which starts everything going. This is the prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is subsidiary to this: often directly antagonistic. That is, the essentially religious or creative motive is the first motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. And there is a great conflict between the interests of the two, at all times. What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive to its source in the human being, keeping in mind always the near relationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The two great impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no use putting one under the feet of the other. The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether, or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's _Sex_ to Jung's _Libido_ or Bergson's _Elan Vital_. Sex has at least _some_ definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable for everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing. We refuse any _Cause_, whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or ether or unit of force or _perpetuum mobile_ or anything else. But also we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of our present ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There we are, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying _Excelsior_ and trying to clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with the religious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists we practice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or something equally absurd. The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of Pisgah, and the space is _very_ crowded. We're all cornered on our mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's faces in our scream of Excelsior. To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend. The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end of uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey. The blood will soon be flowing faster than either, but we can't help that. We can't help it if Canaan has blood in its veins, instead of pure milk and honey. If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same, whatever we say about it. So is the cause. Let that be a comfort to us. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God has been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn't seem to mind. Why we should take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have a tea party with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unit of energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any other Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got too much of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keep mine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me. But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties with the Origin, or the Cause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit of the stomach, and proceed. There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or the Atom. All I say is Om! The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don't know where I come from--nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cells which are my biological origin became the me which I am. I don't in the least know what those two parent cells were. The chemical analysis is just a farce, and my father and mother were just vehicles. And yet, I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do know. The Moses of Science and the Aaron of Idealism have got the whole bunch of us here on top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll be falling very, very foul of one another in five minutes, unless some of us climb down. But before leaving our eminence let us have a look round, and get our bearings. They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and over there the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, is the chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home of successful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills the Supermen are prancing about, though you can't see them. And there is Besantheim, and there is Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer little tableland, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is Rabindranathopolis.... But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me, heaven, to a telescope, for I see blank nothing. I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to sit down on my posterior and sluther full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser seat. So ho!--away we go. In the beginning--there never was any beginning, but let it pass. We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of all things, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of all these was a little living creature. But I don't know even if it was little. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering and its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as little creatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When the daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of the cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which the young ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its little breath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast--I beg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew away to the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while the clammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemed dark and cold. And so, the first little master was dead and done for, and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in the middle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightness which became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come out of the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which felt like an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world. Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it. But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit of flying as well--and then came back to the young ones. It seems most natural that way. Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life is not and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life is and will be just living creatures, no matter how large you make the capital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: out of the death of living creatures, when their little living bodies fell dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and energies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was just there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. He wasn't Life with a capital L. If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even give you a little song to sing. "If it be not true to me What care I how true it be . ." That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his insouciance. And I chirp back: "Though it be not true to thee It's gay and gospel truth to me. . ." The living live, and then die. They pass away, as we know, to dust and to oxygen and nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, and what we might perhaps know a little more, is how they pass away direct into life itself--that is, direct into the living. That is, how many dead souls fly over our untidiness like swallows and build under the eaves of the living. How many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breed thoughts and instincts under the thatch of my hair and the eaves of my forehead, I don't know. But I believe a good many. And I hope they have a good time. And I hope not too many are bats. I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the dead. I am almost ashamed to say, that I believe the souls of the dead in some way reënter and pervade the souls of the living: so that life is always the life of living creatures, and death is always our affair. This bit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don't like mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: _n'a pas de quoi_. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind me and felt an absolute blank. Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be a dead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got his hind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up like an arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began to mount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it was on a gentleman's coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and the fly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the live twig now remain equally motionless, enjoying their different ways. And when, with this very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar off from the twig, he remains on his tail, arched forward in air, and oscillating unhappily, like some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking, ticking in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. Till at last, after a long minute and a half, he touches the twig again, and subsides into twigginess. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig can't pretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet how the two commune! However--we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I am entirely at a loss for a moral! Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a safe statement. And we become at once conscious, if we weren't so before. _Nem con._ And our little baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developing machine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins to stir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are in bud. But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah sight. We overlook too much. _Descendez, cher Moïse. Vous voyez trop loin._ You see too far all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across the Promised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow. And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size of duck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tender virginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not at all, my dear chap. No such luck of a promised land. Climb down, Pisgah, and go to Jericho. _Allons_, there is no road yet, but we are all Aarons with rods of our own. CHAPTER II THE HOLY FAMILY We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel. So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed through it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't got any hub, we can hope also to escape. We won't be pinned down, either. We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: _I am I._ And that isn't a law, it's just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no straight path between them. There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done. But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always falling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur. You are _not_ me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don't get alarmed if _I_ say things. It isn't your sacred mouth which is opening and shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred ears, just apply a little theory of relativity, and realize that what I say is not what you hear, but something uttered in the midst of my isolation, and arriving strangely changed and travel-worn down the long curve of your own individual circumambient atmosphere. I may say Bob, but heaven alone knows what the goose hears. And you may be sure that a red rag is, to a bull, something far more mysterious and complicated than a socialist's necktie. So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you like Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my individual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crosses the space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of World Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony. Still, the world-regenerators may _really_ be quite excellent performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth. Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye. As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," there's more in it than meets the eye. There's more in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it? Do you think you're as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast, like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got a solar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm going to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home to himself like telling everybody. And I _will_ drive you home to yourself, do you hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice row there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said, "Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an offense against star-regulations." Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites, are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whom they catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I must say I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherine wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowling cur.--Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him, Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom, you hoper. But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provoke me to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth. I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper things, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face at the end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very different after they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so unkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are. Help me to be serious, dear reader. In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," I tried rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don't know why I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, the best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully inviting you to look and believe. No more, though. You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I can't be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human body will show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle or try to look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you've got a solar plexus, dear reader, among other things. I'm writing a good sound science book, which there's no gainsaying. Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you. It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer you to that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness that you are you. Don't say you haven't. I know you have. You might as well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you _are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a _Me voilà_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin ich!_ There you are, dearie. But not only a triumphant awareness that _There you are_. An exultant awareness also that outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a whole universe on which you can lay tribute. Aha--at birth you closed the central gate for ever. Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near the quick. But there are other gates. There are eyes and mouths and ears and nostrils, besides the two lower gates of the passionate body, and the closed but not locked gates of the breasts. Many gates. And besides the actual gates, the marvelous wireless communication between the great center and the surrounding or contiguous world. Authorized science tells you that this first great plexus, this all-potent nerve-center of consciousness and dynamic life-activity is a sympathetic center. From the solar plexus as from your castle-keep you look around and see the fair lands smiling, the corn and fruit and cattle of your increase, the cottages of your dependents and the halls of your beloveds. From the solar plexus you know that all the world is yours, and all is goodly. This is the great center, where in the womb, your life first sparkled in individuality. This is the center that drew the gestating maternal blood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurking, drew it on you for your increase. This is the center whence the navel-string broke, but where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never break until you die and depart from corporate individuality. They say, by the way, that doctors now perform a little operation on the born baby, so that no more navel shows. No more belly-buttons, dear reader! Lucky I caught you this generation, before the doctors had saved your appearances. Yet, _caro mio_, whether it shows or not, there you once had immediate connection with the maternal blood-stream. And, because the male nucleus which derived from the father still lies sparkling and potent within the solar plexus, therefore that great nerve-center of you, still has immediate knowledge of your father, a subtler but still vital connection. We call it the tie of blood. So be it. It is a tie of blood. But much more definite than we imagine. For true it is that the one bright male germ which went to your begetting was drawn from the blood of the father. And true it is that that same bright male germ lies unquenched and unquenchable at the center of you, within the famous solar plexus. And furthermore true is it that this unquenched father-spark within you sends forth vibrations and dark currents of vital activity all the time; connecting direct with your father. You will never be able to get away from it while you live. The connection with the mother may be more obvious. Is there not your ostensible navel, where the rupture between you and her took place? But because the mother-child relation is more plausible and flagrant, is that any reason for supposing it deeper, more vital, more intrinsic? Not a bit. Because if the large parent mother-germ still lives and acts vividly and mysteriously in the great fused nucleus of your solar plexus, does the smaller, brilliant male-spark that derived from your father act any less vividly? By no means. It is different--it is less ostensible. It may be even in magnitude smaller. But it may be even more vivid, even more intrinsic. So beware how you deny the father-quick of yourself. You may be denying the most intrinsic quick of all. In the same way it follows that, since brothers and sisters have the same father and mother, therefore in every brother and sister there is a direct communication such as can never happen between strangers. The parent nuclei do not die within the new nucleus. They remain there, marvelous naked sparkling dynamic life-centers, nodes, well-heads of vivid life itself. Therefore in every individual the parent nuclei live, and give direction connection, blood connection we call it, with the rest of the family. It _is_ blood connection. For the fecundating nuclei are the very spark-essence of the blood. And while life lives the parent nuclei maintain their own centrality and dynamic effectiveness within the solar plexus of the child. So that every individual has mother and father both sparkling within himself. But this is rather a preliminary truth than an intrinsic truth. The intrinsic truth of every individual is the new unit of unique individuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei. This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time--each individual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, the two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears--not the result of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality of individuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singleness of self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation and combination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, he is something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul. This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supreme quality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consume them. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But this does not alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and the father-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyond the old mother-father connections, they are still there within him, consummated but not consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very few people surpass their parents nowadays, and attain any individuality beyond them. Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they are born with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes. So there we are. But considering man at his best, he is at the start faced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertake his tripartite being, the mother within him, the father within him, and the Holy Ghost, the self which he is supposed to consummate, and which mostly he doesn't. And there it is, a hard physiological fact. At the moment of our conception, the father nucleus fuses with the mother nucleus, and the wonder emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new individual cell. But in the new individual cell the father-germ and the mother-germ do not relinquish their identity. There they remain still, incorporated and never extinguished. And so, the blood-stream of race is one stream, for ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individual newness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dry up and be finished. Mankind would die out. Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There sparkle the included mother-germ and father-germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds, family connection. The connection is as direct and as subtle as between the Marconi stations, two great wireless stations. A family, if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic communication between members of one family, a long, strange _rapport_, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many bodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the rupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond all ties or claims. The highest goal for every man is the goal of pure individual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach by the mere rupture of all ties. A child isn't born by being torn from the womb. When it is born by natural process that is rupture enough. But even then the ties are not broken. They are only subtilized. From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalistic communications between child and parents, the first interplay of primal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle interplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body and psyche. Impelled from the primal conscious center in the abdomen, the child seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a blind mouth and gropes for the nipple. Not mentally directed and yet certainly directed. Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the solar plexus. From this center the child seeks, the mother knows. Hence the true mindlessness of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not need to think, mentally to know. She knows so profoundly and actively at the great abdominal life-center. But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, the vibration from the present body of the man. There may not be any actual, palpable connection. But from the great voluntary center in the man pass unknowable communications and unreliable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less essential, quickening dark rays which pass from the great dark abdominal life-center in the father to the corresponding center in the child. And these rays, these vibrations, are not like the mother-vibrations. Far, far from it. They do not need the actual contact, the handling and the caressing. On the contrary, the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with a baby. It may not need even actual presence. But present or absent, there should be between the baby and the father that strange, intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening, strength, knowing. And any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child, means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant. The child exists in the interplay of two great life-waves, the womanly and the male. In appearance, the mother is everything. In truth, the father has actively very little part. It does not matter much if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should, sometimes, and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection, the life-circuit, not allow it to lapse, and so vitally starve his child. But remember, dear reader, please, that there is not the slightest need for you to believe me, or even read me. Remember, it's just your own affair. Don't implicate me. CHAPTER III PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mental consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of our consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the _cul de sac_. The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the great nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness. The solar plexus, the greatest and most important center of our dynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic center. At this main center of your first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily we know, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly and satisfactorily and without question, that _I am I._ This root of all knowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done. The knowledge that _I am I_ can never be thought: only known. This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledge established physically and psychically the moment the two parent nuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral as a piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this one original. But yet the original nucleus, formed from the two parent nuclei at our conception, remains always primal and central, and is always the original fount and home of the first and supreme knowledge that _I am I._ This original nucleus is embodied in the solar plexus. But the original nucleus divides. The first division, as science knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the two parent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That which was perfect _one_ now divides again, and in the recoil becomes again two. This second nucleus, the nucleus born of recoil, is the nuclear origin of all the great nuclei of the voluntary system, which are the nuclei of assertive individualism. And it remains central in the adult human body as it was in the egg-cell. In the adult human body the first nucleus of independence, first-born from the great original nucleus of our conception, lies always established in the lumbar ganglion. Here we have our positive center of independence, in a multifarious universe. At the solar plexus, the dynamic knowledge is this, that _I am I._ The solar plexus is the center of all the sympathetic system. The great prime knowledge is sympathetic in nature. I am I, in vital centrality. I am I, the vital center of all things. I am I, the clew to the whole. All is one with me. It is the one identity. But at the lumbar ganglion, which is the center of separate identity, the knowledge is of a different mode, though the term is the same. At the lumbar ganglion I know that I am I, in distinction from a whole universe, which is not as I am. This is the first tremendous flash of knowledge of singleness and separate identity. I am I, not because I am at one with all the universe, but because I am other than all the universe. It is my distinction from all the rest of things which makes me myself. Because I am set utterly apart and distinguished from all that is the rest of the universe, therefore _I am I._ And this root of our knowledge in separateness lies rooted all the time in the lumbar ganglion. It is the second term of our dynamic psychic existence. It is from the great sympathetic center of the solar plexus that the child rejoices in the mother and in its own blissful centrality, its unison with the as yet unknown universe. Look at the pictures of Madonna and Child, and you will even _see_ it. It is from this center that it draws all things unto itself, winningly, drawing love for the soul, and actively drawing in milk. The same center controls the great intake of love and of milk, of psychic and of physical nourishment. And it is from the great voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion that the child asserts its distinction from the mother, the single identity of its own existence, and its power over its surroundings. From this center issues the violent little pride and lustiness which kicks with glee, or crows with tiny exultance in its own being, or which claws the breast with a savage little rapacity, and an incipient masterfulness of which every mother is aware. This incipient mastery, this sheer joy of a young thing in its own single existence, the marvelous playfulness of early youth, and the roguish mockery of the mother's love, as well as the bursts of temper and rage, all belong to infancy. And all this flashes spontaneously, _must_ flash spontaneously from the first great center of independence, the powerful lumbar ganglion, great dynamic center of all the voluntary system, of all the spirit of pride and joy in independent existence. And it is from this center too that the milk is urged away down the infant bowels, urged away towards excretion. The motion is the same, but here it applies to the material, not to the vital relation. It is from the lumbar ganglion that the dynamic vibrations are emitted which thrill from the stomach and bowels, and promote the excremental function of digestion. It is the solar plexus which controls the assimilatory function in digestion. So, in the first division of the egg-cell is set up the first plane of psychic and physical life, remaining radically the same throughout the whole existence of the individual. The two original nuclei of the egg-cell remain the same two original nuclei within the corpus of the adult individual. Their psychic and their physical dynamic is the same in the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion as in the two nuclei of the egg-cell. The first great division in the egg remains always the same, the unchanging great division in the psychic and the physical structure; the unchanging great division in knowledge and function. It is a division into polarized duality, psychical and physical, of the human being. It is the great vertical division of the egg-cell, and of the nature of man. Then, this division having taken place, there is a new thrill of conjunction or collision between the divided nuclei, and at once the second birth takes place. The two nuclei now split horizontally. There is a horizontal division across the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei are now four, two above, and two below. But those below retain their original nature, those above are new in nature. And those above correspond again to those below. In the developed child, the great horizontal division of the egg-cell, resulting in four nuclei, this remains the same. The horizontal division-wall is the diaphragm. The two upper nuclei are the two great nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion. We have again a sympathetic center primal in activity and knowledge, and a corresponding voluntary center. In the center of the breast, the cardiac plexus acts as the great sympathetic mode of new dynamic activity, new dynamic consciousness. And near the spine, by the wall of the shoulders, the thoracic ganglion acts as the powerful voluntary center of separateness and power, in the same vertical line as the lumbar ganglion, but horizontally so different. Now we must change our whole feeling. We must put off the deep way of understanding which belongs to the lower body of our nature, and transfer ourselves into the upper plane, where being and functioning are different. At the cardiac plexus, there in the center of the breast, we have now a new great sun of knowledge and being. Here there is no more of self. Here there is no longer the dark, exultant knowledge that _I am I._ A change has come. Here I know no more of myself. Here I am not. Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is no longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal, exultant self. The wonder is without me. The wonder is outside me. And I can no longer exult and know myself the dark, central sun of the universe. Now I look with wonder, with tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that which is outside me, beyond me, not me. Behold, that which was once negative has now become the only positive. The other being is now the great positive reality, I myself am as nothing. Positivity has changed places. If we want to see the portrayed look, then we must turn to the North, to the fair, wondering, blue-eyed infants of the Northern masters. They seem so frail, so innocent and wondering, touching outwards to the mystery. They are not the same as the Southern child, nor the opposite. Their whole life mystery is different. Instead of consummating all things within themselves, as the dark little Southern infants do, the Northern Jesus-children reach out delicate little hands of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower-reverential mothers. Compare a Botticelli Madonna, with all her wounded and abnegating sensuality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose soul is pure and only reverential. Beyond me is the mystery and the glory, says the Northern mother: let me have no self, let me only seek that which is all-pure, all-wonderful. But the Southern mother says: This is mine, this is mine, this is my child, my wonder, my master, my lord, my scourge, my own. From the cardiac plexus the child goes forth in bliss. It seeks the revelation of the unknown. It wonderingly seeks the mother. It opens its small hands and spreads its small fingers to touch her. And bliss, bliss, bliss, it meets the wonder in mid-air and in mid-space it finds the loveliness of the mother's face. It opens and shuts its little fingers with bliss, it laughs the wonderful, selfless laugh of pure baby-bliss, in the first ecstasy of finding all its treasure, groping upon it and finding it in the dark. It opens wide, child-wide eyes to see, to see. But it cannot see. It is puzzled, it wrinkles its face. But when the mother puts her face quite near, and laughs and coos, then the baby trembles with an ecstasy of love. The glamour, the wonder, the treasure beyond. The great uplift of rapture. All this surges from that first center of the breast, the sun of the breast, the cardiac plexus. And from the same center acts the great function of the heart and breath. Ah, the aspiration, the aspiration, like a hope, like a yearning constant and unfailing with which we take in breath. When we breathe, when we take in breath, it is not as when we take in food. When we breathe in we aspire, we yearn towards the heaven of air and light. And when the heart dilates to draw in the stream of dark blood, it opens its arms as to a beloved. It dilates with reverent joy, as a host opening his doors to an honored guest, whom he delights to serve: opening his doors to the wonder which comes to him from beyond, and without which he were nothing. So it is that our heart dilates, our lungs expand. They are bidden by that great and mysterious impulse from the cardiac plexus, which bids them seek the mystery and the fulfillment of the beyond. They seek the beyond, the air of the sky, the hot blood from the dark under-world. And so we live. And then, they relax, they contract. They are driven by the opposite motion from the powerful voluntary center of the thoracic ganglion.. That which was drawn in, was invited, is now relinquished, allowed to go forth, negatively. Not positively dismissed, but relinquished. There is a wonderful complementary duality between the voluntary and the sympathetic activity on the same plane. But between the two planes, upper and lower, there is a further dualism, still more startling, perhaps. Between the dark, glowing first term of knowledge at the solar plexus: _I am I, all is one in me_; and the first term of volitional knowledge: _I am myself, and these others are not as I am_;--there is a world of difference. But when the world changes again, and on the upper plane we realize the wonder of other things, the difference is almost shattering. The thoracic ganglion is a ganglion of power. When the child in its delicate bliss seeks the mother and finds her and is added on to her, then it fulfills itself in the great upper sympathetic mode. But then it relinquishes her. It ceases to be aware of her. And if she tries to force its love to play upon her again, like light revealing her to herself, then the child turns away. Or it will lie, and look at her with the strange, odd, curious look of knowledge, like a little imp who is spying her out. This is the curious look that many mothers cannot bear. Involuntarily it arouses a sort of hate in them--the look of scrutinizing curiosity, apart, and as it were studying, balancing them up. Yet it is a look which comes into every child's eyes. It is the reaction of the great voluntary plexus between the shoulders. The mother is suddenly set apart, as an object of curiosity, coldly, sometimes dreamily, sometimes puzzled, sometimes mockingly observed. Again, if a mother neglect her child, it cries, it weeps for her love and attention. Its pitiful lament is one of the forms of compulsion from the upper center. This insistence on pity, on love, is quite different from the rageous weeping, which is compulsion from the lower center, below the diaphragm. Again, some children just drop everything they can lay hands on over the edge of their crib, or their table. They drop everything out of sight. And then they look up with a curious look of negative triumph. This is again a form of recoil from the upper center, the obliteration of the thing which is outside. And here a child is acting quite differently from the child who joyously _smashes_. The desire to smash comes from the lower centers. We can quite well recognize the will exerted from the lower center. We call it headstrong temper and masterfulness. But the peculiar will of the upper center--the sort of nervous, critical objectivity, the deliberate forcing of sympathy, the play upon pity and tenderness, the plaintive bullying of love, or the benevolent bullying of love--these we don't care to recognize. They are the extravagance of spiritual _will_. But in its true harmony the thoracic ganglion is a center of happier activity: of real, eager curiosity, of the delightful desire to pick things to pieces, and the desire to put them together again, the desire to "find out," and the desire to invent: all this arises on the upper plane, at the volitional center of the thoracic ganglion. CHAPTER IV TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS Oh, damn the miserable baby with its complicated ping-pong table of an unconscious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have to listen to the brat howling in its crib than to me expounding its plexuses. As for "mixing those babies up," I'd mix him up like a shot if I'd anything to mix him with. Unfortunately he's my own anatomical specimen of a pickled rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits. But he gets on my nerves. I come out solemnly with a pencil and an exercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a large fir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing like a squirrel on a nut. But the nut's hollow. I think there are too many trees. They seem to crowd round and stare at me, and I feel as if they nudged one another when I'm not looking. I can _feel_ them standing there. And they won't let me get on about the baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouraged me like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday. It is half rainy too--the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only thing is to give way to them. It is the edge of the Black Forest--sometimes the Rhine far off, on its Rhine plain, like a bit of magnesium ribbon. But not to-day. To-day only trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge straight fir-trees, and big beech-trees sending rivers of roots into the ground. And cuckoos, like noise falling in drops off the leaves. And me, a fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil and a book, hoping to write more about that baby. Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. The looming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence. Big, tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Or barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent, strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming. Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individual life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something that frightens you. Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk: you look above you into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft green tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze. You keep on looking at it in part and parcel. It's no good looking at a tree, to know it. The only thing is to sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother. That's how I write all about these planes and plexuses, between the toes of a tree, forgetting myself against the great ankle of the trunk. And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into its wickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually stroked into forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book. My tree-book, really. I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryans worshiped the tree. My ancestors. The tree of life. The tree of knowledge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some time or other, chip of the old Aryan block. I can so well understand tree-worship. And fear the deepest motive. Naturally. This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lips or eyes or heart. This towering creature that never had a face. Here am I between his toes like a pea-bug, and him noiselessly over-reaching me. And I feel his great blood-jet surging. And he has no eyes. But he turns two ways. He thrusts himself tremendously down to the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp, dense under-soil, and he turns himself about in high air. Whereas we have eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards. Plunging himself down into the black humus, with a root's gushing zest, where we can only rot dead; and his tips in high air, where we can only look up to. So vast and powerful and exultant in his two directions. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge, savage, thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his soul?--Where does anybody? A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge primeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength. I lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree. And I can so well understand the Romans, their terror of the bristling Hercynian wood. Yet when you look from a height down upon the rolling of the forest--this Black Forest--it is as suave as a rolling, oily sea. Inside only, it bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans. The Romans! They too seem very near. Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch or even Napoleon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is Rome, and the legionaries of the Rhine that my soul notices. It must have been wonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-like forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerful intensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-dry Sicily, open to the day. The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had a face, and a human voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped an answer. But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrable life which had no voice. They met the faceless silence of the Black Forest. This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Its silence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank before the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array of non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable energy. The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The enormous power of these collective trees, stronger in their somber life even than Rome. No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them: silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindful Romans--and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true German has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everything except the spirit, spirituality. But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gibbering of myriad people all rattling their personalities, I am glad to be with the profound indifference of faceless trees. Their rudimentariness cannot know why we care for the things we care for. They have no faces, no minds and bowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in earth, and vast, lissome life in air, and primeval individuality. You can sacrifice the whole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail your skull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, they can't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all this. But they will live you down. The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. So the Herr Baron told me. One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg, where I have been alone and written this book. I can't leave these trees. They have taken some of my soul. * * * * * Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first I left it out, thinking we might not see wood for trees. But it doesn't much matter what we see. It's nice just to look round, anywhere. So there are two planes of being and consciousness and two modes of relation and of function. We will call the lower plane the sensual, the upper the spiritual. The terms may be unwise, but we can think of no other. Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be a bit dazzled, coming out of the wood. It is obvious that from the time a child is born, or conceived, it has a permanent relation with the outer universe, relation in the two modes, not one mode only. There are two ways of love, two ways of activity and independence. And there needs some sort of equilibrium between the two modes. In the same way, in physical function there is eating and drinking, and excrementation, on the lower plane and respiration and heartbeat on the upper plane. Now the equilibrium to be established is fourfold. There must be a true equilibrium between what we eat and what we reject again by excretion: likewise between the systole and diastole of the heart, the inspiration and expiration of our breathing. Suffice to say the equilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat or too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no such thing as an _actual_ norm, a living norm. A norm is merely an abstraction, not a reality. The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or impose our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the unknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individual himself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some men _must_ be too spiritual, some _must_ be too sensual. Some _must_ be too sympathetic, and some _must_ be too proud. We have no desire to say what men _ought_ to be. We only wish to say there are all kinds of ways of being, and there is no such thing as human perfection. No man can be anything more than just himself, in genuine living relation to all his surroundings. But that which _I_ am, when I am myself, will certainly be anathema to those who hate individual integrity, and want to swarm. And that which I, being myself, am in myself, may make the hair bristle with rage on a man who is also himself, but very different from me. Then let it bristle. And if mine bristle back again, then let us, if we must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It is how it should be. We've got to learn to live from the center of our own responsibility only, and let other people do the same. To return to the child, however, and his development on his two planes of consciousness. There is all the time a direct dynamic connection between child and mother, child and father also, from the start. It is a connection on two planes, the upper and lower. From the lower sympathetic center the profound intake of love or vibration from the living co-respondent outside. From the upper sympathetic center the outgoing of devotion and the passionate vibration of _given_ love, given attention. The two sympathetic centers are always, or should always be, counterbalanced by their corresponding voluntary centers. From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is self-willed, independent, and masterful. In the activity of this center a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal. From this center he likes to command and to receive obedience. From this center likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, determined to have his own way at any cost. From this center, too, he learns to use his legs. The motion of walking, like the motion of breathing, is twofold. First, a sympathetic cleaving to the earth with the foot: then the voluntary rejection, the spurning, the kicking away, the exultance in power and freedom. From the upper voluntary center the child watches persistently, wilfully, for the attention of the mother: to be taken notice of, to be caressed, in short to exist in and through the mother's attention. From this center, too, he coldly refuses to notice the mother, when she insists on too much attention. This cold refusal is different from the active rejection of the lower center. It is passive, but cold and negative. It is the great force of our day. From the ganglion of the shoulders, also, the child breathes and his heart beats. From the same center he learns the first use of his arms. In the gesture of sympathy, from the upper plane, he embraces his mother with his arms. In the motion of curiosity, or interest, which derives from the thoracic ganglion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, explores. In the motion of rejection he drops an undesired object deliberately out of sight. And then, when the four centers of what we call the first _field_ of consciousness are fully active, then it is that the eyes begin to gather their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake to their intelligent hearings; all as a result of the great fourfold activity of the first dynamic field of consciousness. And then also, as a result, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipient control. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral. The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard. The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary adjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the great voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be delicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and independence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mere infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the great voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to the independence which later on is life itself. But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond mother-love. For in the male the dominant centers are naturally the volitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care. It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort of equilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant. A mother may wish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, from the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and tender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance, always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play. "What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see, because it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the "You see, darling." No such nonsense.--Or if a child wails unnecessarily for its mother, the father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you little brat! What ails you, you whiner?" And if children be too sensitive, too sympathetic, then it will do the child no harm if the father occasionally throws the cat out of the window, or kicks the dog, or raises a storm in the house. Storms there must be. And if the child is old enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottom soundly spanked--by the father, if the mother refuses to perform that most necessary duty. For a child's bottom is made occasionally to be spanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinal nerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spanker transfers his wrath to the great will-centers in the child, and these will-centers react intensely, are vivified and educated. On the other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard or indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate sympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show the tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is that so few mothers have any deep bowels of love--or even the breast of love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of the upper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent is a poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances the father must give delicate adjustment, and, above all, some warm, native love from the richer sensual self. The question of corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound, good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a very bad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendings to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meaner than a bang on the head. When a parent gives his boy a beating, there is a living passionate interchange. But in these refined punishments, the parent suffers nothing and the child is deadened. The bullying of the refined, benevolent spiritual will is simply vitriol to the soul. Yet parents administer it with all the righteousness of virtue and good intention, sparing themselves perfectly. The point is here. If a child makes you so that you really want to spank it soundly, then soundly spank the brat. But know all the time _what_ you are doing, and always be responsible for your anger. Never be ashamed of it, and never surpass it. The flashing interchange of anger between parent and child is part of the responsible relationship, necessary to growth. Again, if a child offends you deeply, so that you really can't communicate with it any more, then, while the hurt is deep, switch off your connection from the child, cut off your correspondence, your vital communion, and be alone. But never persist in such a state beyond the time when your deep hurt dies down. The only rule is, do what you _really_, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion. They enrichen the child's soul. For a child's primary education depends almost entirely on its relation to its parents, brothers, and sisters. Between mother and child, father and child, the law is this: I, the mother, am myself alone: the child is itself alone. But there exists between us a vital dynamic relation, for which I, being the conscious one, am basically responsible. So, as far as possible, there must be in me no departure from myself, lest I injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I must absolutely act according to my own true spontaneous feeling. But, moreover, I must also have wisdom for myself and for my child. Always, always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And always a brave responsibility for the soul's own spontaneity. Love--what is love? We'd better get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse--even a good spanking. But wisdom is something else, a deep collectedness in the soul, a deep abiding by my own integral being, which makes me responsible, not for the child, but for my certain duties towards the child, and for maintaining the dynamic flow between the child and myself as genuine as possible: that is to say, not perverted by ideals or by my _will_. Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and I seek to enact this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying. A mother says that life should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance and gentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hateful sticky web of permanent forbearance, gentleness, hushedness around her naturally passionate and hasty child. This so foils the child as to make him half imbecile or criminal. I may have ideals if I like--even of love and forbearance and meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals. And to impose _any ideals_ upon a child as it grows is almost criminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequent deficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolence ideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence, since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, there is a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The great sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs, burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested, round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is the result of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quite dead in its sympathetic activity, but still fixed and determined in its voluntary action. Let us beware and beware, and beware of having a high ideal for ourselves. But particularly let us beware of having an ideal for our children. So doing, we damn them. All we can have is wisdom. And wisdom is not a theory, it is a state of soul. It is the state wherein we know our wholeness and the complicate, manifold nature of our being. It is the state wherein we know the great relations which exist between us and our near ones. And it is the state which accepts full responsibility, first for our own souls, and then for the living dynamic relations wherein we have our being. It is no use expecting the other person to know. Each must know for himself. But nowadays men have even a stunt of pretending that children and idiots alone know best. This is a pretty piece of sophistry, and criminal cowardice, trying to dodge the life-responsibility which no man or woman can dodge without disaster. The only thing is to be direct. If a child has to swallow castor-oil, then say: "Child, you've got to swallow this castor-oil. It is necessary for your inside. I say so because it is true. So open your mouth." Why try coaxing and logic and tricks with children? Children are more sagacious than we are. They twig soon enough if there is a flaw in our own intention and our own true spontaneity. And they play up to our bit of falsity till there is hell to pay. "You love mother, don't you, dear?"--Just a piece of indecent trickery of the spiritual will. The great emotions like love are unspoken. Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will. "Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!" What cant! What sickening cant! An appeal to love based on false pity. That's the way to inculcate a filthy pharisaic conceit into a child.--If the child ill-treats the cat, say: "Stop mauling that cat. It's got its own life to live, so let it live it." Then if the brat persists, give tit for tat. "What, you pull the cat's tail! Then I'll pull your nose, to see how you like it." And give his nose a proper hard pinch. Children _must_ pull the cat's tail a little. Children _must_ steal the sugar sometimes. They _must_ occasionally spoil just the things one doesn't want them to spoil. And they _must_ occasionally tell stories--tell a lie. Circumstances and life are such that we must all sometimes tell a lie: just as we wear trousers, because we don't choose that everybody shall see our nakedness. Morality is a delicate act of adjustment on the soul's part, not a rule or a prescription. Beyond a certain point the child _shall_ not pull the cat's tail, _or_ steal the sugar, _or_ spoil the furniture, _or_ tell lies. But I'm afraid you can't fix this certain soul's humor. And so it must. If at a sudden point you fly into a temper and thoroughly beat the boy for hardly touching the cat--well, that's life. All you've got to say to him is: "There, that'll serve you for all the times you _have_ pulled her tail and hurt her." And he will feel outraged, and so will you. But what does it matter? Children have an infinite understanding of the soul's passionate variabilities, and forgive even a real injustice, if it was _spontaneous_ and not intentional. They know we aren't perfect. What they don't forgive us is if we pretend we are: or if we _bully_. CHAPTER V THE FIVE SENSES Science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another. The body is the total machine; the various organs are the included machines; and the whole thing, given a start at birth, or at conception, trundles on by itself. The only god in the machine, the human will or intelligence, is absolutely at the mercy of the machine. Such is the orthodox view. Soul, when it is allowed an existence at all, sits somewhat vaguely within the machine, never defined. If anything goes wrong with the machine, why, the soul is forgotten instantly. We summon the arch-mechanic of our day, the medicine-man. And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his best. He is really wonderful as a mechanic of the human system. But the life within us fails more and more, while we marvelously tinker at the engines. Doctors are not to blame. It is obvious that, even considering the human body as a very delicate and complex machine, you cannot keep such a machine running for one day without most exact central control. Still more is it impossible to consider the automatic evolution of such a machine. When did any machine, even a single spinning-wheel, automatically evolve itself? There was a god in the machine before the machine existed. So there we are with the human body. There must have been, and must be a central god in the machine of each animate corpus. The little soul of the beetle makes the beetle toddle. The little soul of the _homo sapiens_ sets him on his two feet. Don't ask me to define the soul. You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who so whimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad. A young lady skeltering off on her bicycle to meet her young man--why, what could the bicycle make of such a mystery, if you explained it till doomsday. Yet the bicycle wouldn't be spinning from Streatham to Croydon by itself. So we may as well settle down to the little god in the machine. We may as well call it the individual soul, and leave it there. It's as far as the bicycle would ever get, if it had to define Mademoiselle. But be sure the bicycle would not deny the existence of the young miss who seats herself in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend there is no one in the saddle. Why even the sun would no more spin without a rider than would a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable planets to reckon with, in the spinning we must not begin to define the rider in terms of our own exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is: even a rider of the many-wheeled universe. But let us leave the universe alone. It is too big a bauble for me.--_Revenons._--At the start of me there is me. There is a mysterious little entity which is my individual self, the god who builds the machine and then makes his gay excursion of seventy years within it. Now we are talking at the moment about the machine. For the moment we are the bicycle, and not the feather-brained cyclist. So that all we can do is to define the cyclist in terms of ourself. A bicycle could say: Here, upon my leather saddle, rests a strange and animated force, which I call the force of gravity, as being the one great force which controls my universe. And yet, on second thoughts, I must modify myself. This great force of gravity is not _always_ in the saddle. Sometimes it just is not there--and I lean strangely against a wall. I have been even known to turn upside down, with my wheels in the air; spun by the same mysterious Miss. So that I must introduce a theory of Relativity. However, mostly, when I am awake and alive, she is in the saddle; or _it_ is in the saddle, the mysterious force. And when it is in the saddle, then two subsidiary forces plunge and claw upon my two pedals, plunge and claw with inestimable power. And at the same time, a kind and mysterious force sways my head-stock, sways most incalculably, and governs my whole motion. This force is not a driving force, but a subtle directing force, beneath whose grip my bright steel body is flexible as a dipping highroad. Then let me not forget the sudden clutch of arrest upon my hurrying wheels. Oh, this is pain to me! While I am rushing forward, surpassing myself in an _élan vital_, suddenly the awful check grips my back wheel, or my front wheel, or both. Suddenly there is a fearful arrest. My soul rushes on before my body, I feel myself strained, torn back. My fibers groan. Then perhaps the tension relaxes. So the bicycle will continue to babble about itself. And it will inevitably wind up with a philosophy. "Oh, if only the great and divine force rested for ever upon my saddle, and if only the mysterious will which sways my steering gear remained in place for ever: then my pedals would revolve of themselves, and never cease, and no hideous brake should tear the perpetuity of my motions. Then, oh then I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever, and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy and timeless cycle-race of the stars and the great sun...." Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough to start a philanthropic society for the prevention of cruelty to bicycles. Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. And our individual and incomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that the universe is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to suppose a rider for that also. But we needn't say what sort of rider. When I see a cockroach scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail I stand affronted, and think: A rum sort of rider _you_ must have. You've no business to have such a rider, do you hear?--And when I hear the monotonous and plaintive cuckoo in the June woods, I think: Who the devil made _that_ clock?--And when I see a politician making a fiery speech on a platform, and the crowd gawping, I think: Lord, save me--they've all got riders. But Holy Moses! you could never guess what was coming.--And so I shouldn't like, myself, to start guessing about the rider of the universe. I am all too flummoxed by the masquerade in the tourney round about me. We ourselves then: wisdom, like charity, begins at home. We've each of us got a rider in the saddle: an individual soul. Mostly it can't ride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squadrons of bicycles running amok. We should every one fall off if we didn't ride so thick that we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare! As for myself, I have a horror of riding _en bloc_. So I grind away uphill, and sweat my guts out, as they say. Well, well--my body is my bicycle: the whole middle of me is the saddle where sits the rider of my soul. And my front wheel is the cardiac plane, and my back wheel is the solar plexus. And the brakes are the voluntary ganglia. And the steering gear is my head. And the right and left pedals are the right and left dynamics of the body, in some way corresponding to the sympathetic and voluntary division. So that now I know more or less how my rider rides me, and from what centers controls me. That is, I know the points of vital contact between my rider and my machine: between my invisible and my visible self. I don't attempt to say what is my rider. A bicycle might as well try to define its young Miss by wriggling its handle-bars and ringing its bell. However, having more or less determined the four primary motions, we can see the further unfolding. In a child, the solar plexus and the cardiac plexus, with corresponding voluntary ganglia, are awake and active. From these centers develop the great functions of the body. As we have seen, it is the solar plexus, with the lumbar ganglion, which controls the great dynamic system, the functioning of the liver and the kidneys. Any excess in the sympathetic dynamism tends to accelerate the action of the liver, to cause fever and constipation. Any collapse of the sympathetic dynamism causes anæmia. The sudden stimulating of the voluntary center may cause diarrhoea, and so on. But all this depends so completely on the polarized flow between the individual and the correspondent, between the child and mother, child and father, child and sisters or brothers or teacher, or circumambient universe, that it is impossible to lay down laws, unless we state particulars. Nevertheless, the whole of the great organs of the lower body are controlled from the two lower centers, and these organs work well or ill according as there is a true dynamic _psychic_ activity at the two primary centers of consciousness. By a _true_ dynamic psychic activity we mean an activity which is true to the individual himself, to his own peculiar soul-nature. And a dynamic psychic activity means a dynamic polarity between the individual himself and other individuals concerned in his living; or between him and his immediate surroundings, human, physical, geographical. On the upper plane, the lungs and heart are controlled from the cardiac plane and the thoracic ganglion. Any excess in the sympathetic mode from the upper centers tends to burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with stress, and cause consumption. So it is just criminal to make a child too loving. No child should be induced to love too much. It means derangement and death at last. But beyond the primary physiological function--and it is the business of doctors to discover the relation between the functioning of the primary organs and the dynamic psychic activity at the four primary consciousness-centers,--beyond these physical functions, there are the activities which are half-psychic, half-functional. Such as the five senses. Of the five senses, four have their functioning in the face-region. The fifth, the sense of touch, is distributed all over the body. But all have their roots in the four great primary centers of consciousness. From the constellation of your nerve-nodes, from the great field of your poles, the nerves run out in every direction, ending on the surface of the body. Inwardly this is an inextricable ramification and communication. And yet the body is planned out in areas, there is a definite area-control from the four centers. On the back the sense of touch is not acute. There the voluntary centers act in resistance. But in the front of the body, the breast is one great field of sympathetic touch, the belly is another. On these two fields the stimulus of touch is quite different, has a quite different psychic quality and psychic result. The breast-touch is the fine alertness of quivering curiosity, the belly-touch is a deep thrill of delight and avidity. Correspondingly, the hands and arms are instruments of superb delicate curiosity, and deliberate execution. Through the elbows and the wrists flows the dynamic psychic current, and a dislocation in the current between two individuals will cause a feeling of dislocation at the wrists and elbows. On the lower plane, the legs and feet are instruments of unfathomable gratifications and repudiations. The thighs, the knees, the feet are intensely alive with love-desire, darkly and superbly drinking in the love-contact, blindly. Or they are the great centers of resistance, kicking, repudiating. Sudden flushing of great general sympathetic desire will make a man feel weak at the knees. Hatred will harden the tension of the knees like steel, and grip the feet like talons. Thus the fields of touch are four, two sympathetic fields in front of the body from the throat to the feet, two resistant fields behind from the neck to the heels. There are two fields of touch, however, where the distribution is not so simple: the face and the buttocks. Neither in the face nor in the buttocks is there one single mode of sense communication. The face is of course the great window of the self, the great opening of the self upon the world, the great gateway. The lower body has its own gates of exit. But the bulk of our communication with all the outer universe goes on through the face. And every one of the windows or gates of the face has its direct communication with each of the four great centers of the first field of consciousness. Take the mouth, with the sense of taste. The mouth is primarily the gate of the two chief sensual centers. It is the gateway to the belly and the loins. Through the mouth we eat and we drink. In the mouth we have the sense of taste. At the lips, too, we kiss. And the kiss of the mouth is the first sensual connection. In the mouth also are the teeth. And the teeth are the instruments of our sensual will. The growth of the teeth is controlled entirely from the two great sensual centers below the diaphragm. But almost entirely from the one center, the voluntary center. The growth and the life of the teeth depend almost entirely on the lumbar ganglion. During the growth of the teeth the sympathetic mode is held in abeyance. There is a sort of arrest. There is pain, there is diarrhoea, there is misery for the baby. And we, in our age, have no rest with our teeth. Our mouths are too small. For many ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid, sensual will. We have been converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have become soft and un-quickened. Where in us are the sharp and vivid teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour? If we had them more, we should be happier. Where are the white negroid teeth? Where? In our little pinched mouths they have no room. We are sympathy-rotten, and spirit-rotten, and idea-rotten. We have forfeited our flashing sensual power. And we have false teeth in our mouths. In the same way the lips of our sensual desire go thinner and more meaningless, in the compression of our upper will and our idea-driven impulse. Let us break the conscious, self-conscious love-ideal, and we shall grow strong, resistant teeth once more, and the teething of our young will not be the hell it is. Teething is strictly the period when the voluntary center of the lower plane first comes into full activity, and takes for a time the precedence. So, the mouth is the great sensual gate to the lower body. But let us not forget it is also a gate by which we breathe, the gate through which we speak and go impalpably forth to our object, the gate at which we can kiss the pinched, delicate, spiritual kiss. Therefore, although the main sensual gate of entrance to the lower body, it has its reference also to the upper body. Taste, the sense of taste, is an intake of a pure communication between us and a body from the outside world. It contains the element of touch, and in this it refers to the cardiac plexus. But taste, _quâ_ taste, refers purely to the solar plexus. And then smell. The nostrils are the great gate from the wide atmosphere of heaven to the lungs. The extreme sigh of yearning we catch through the mouth. But the delicate nose advances always into the air, our palpable communicator with the infinite air. Thus it has its first delicate root in the cardiac plexus, the root of its intake. And the root of the delicate-proud exhalation, rejection, is in the thoracic ganglion. But the nostrils have their other function of smell. Here the delicate nerve-ends run direct from the lower centers, from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, or even deeper. There is the refined sensual intake when a scent is sweet. There is the sensual repudiation when a scent is unsavoury. And just as the fullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on the development from the lower or the upper centers, the sensual or the spiritual, so does the shape of the nose depend on the direct control of the deepest centers of consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps the result of a balance in the four modes. But what is a perfect nose!--We only know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators of character. That is to say, it almost inevitably indicates the mode of predominant dynamic consciousness in the individual, the predominant primary center from which he lives.--When savages rub noses instead of kissing, they are exchanging a more sensitive and a deeper sensual salute than our lip-touch. The eyes are the third great gateway of the psyche. Here the soul goes in and out of the body, as a bird flying forth and coming home. But the root of conscious vision is almost entirely in the breast. When I go forth from my own eyes, in delight to dwell upon the world which is beyond me, outside me, then I go forth from wide open windows, through which shows the full and living lambent darkness of my present inward self. I go forth, and I leave the lovely open darkness of my sensient self revealed; when I go forth in the wonder of vision to dwell upon the beloved, or upon the wonder of the world, I go from the center of the glad breast, through the eyes, and who will may look into the full soft darkness of me, rich with my undiscovered presence. But if I am displeased, then hard and cold my self stands in my eyes, and refuses any communication, any sympathy, but merely stares outwards. It is the motion of cold objectivity from the thoracic ganglion. Or, from the same center of will, cold but intense my eyes may watch with curiosity, as a cat watches a fly. It may be into my curiosity will creep an element of warm gladness in the wonder which I am beholding outside myself. Or it may be that my curiosity will be purely and simply the cold, almost cruel curiosity of the upper will, directed from the ganglion of the shoulders: such as is the acute attention of an experimental scientist. The eyes have, however, their sensual root as well. But this is hard to transfer into language, as all _our_ vision, our modern Northern vision is in the upper mode of actual seeing. There is a sensual way of beholding. There is the dark, desirous look of a savage who apprehends only that which has direct reference to himself, that which stirs a certain dark yearning within his lower self. Then his eye is fathomless blackness. But there is the dark eye which glances with a certain fire, and has no depth. There is a keen quick vision which watches, which beholds, but which never yields to the object outside: as a cat watching its prey. The dark glancing look which knows the _strangeness_, the danger of its object, the need to overcome the object. The eye which is not wide open to study, to _learn_, but which powerfully, proudly or cautiously glances, and knows the terror or the pure desirability of _strangeness_ in the object it beholds. The savage is all in all in himself. That which he sees outside he hardly notices, or, he sees as something odd, something automatically desirable, something lustfully desirable, or something dangerous. What we call vision, that he has not. We must compare the look in a horse's eye with the look in a cow's. The eye of the cow is soft, velvety, receptive. She stands and gazes with the strangest intent curiosity. She goes forth from herself in wonder. The root of her vision is in her yearning breast. The same one hears when she moos. The same massive weight of passion is in a bull's breast; the passion to go forth from himself. His strength is in his breast, his weapons are on his head. The wonder is always outside him. But the horse's eye is bright and glancing. His curiosity is cautious, full of terror, or else aggressive and frightening for the object. The root of his vision is in his belly, in the solar plexus. And he fights with his teeth, and his heels, the sensual weapons. Both these animals, however, are established in the sympathetic mode. The life mode in both is sensitively sympathetic, or preponderantly sympathetic. Those animals which like cats, wolves, tigers, hawks, chiefly live from the great voluntary centers, these animals are, in our sense of the word, almost visionless. Sight in them is sharpened or narrowed down to a point: the object of prey. It is exclusive. They see no more than this. And thus they see unthinkably far, unthinkably keenly. Most animals, however, smell what they see: vision is not very highly developed. They know better by the more direct contact of scent. And vision in us becomes faulty because we proceed too much in one mode. We see too much, we attend too much. The dark, glancing sightlessness of the intent savage, the narrowed vision of the cat, the single point of vision of the hawk--these we do not know any more. We live far too much from the sympathetic centers, without the balance from the voluntary mode. And we live far, far too much from the _upper_ sympathetic center and voluntary center, in an endless objective curiosity. Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, in one mode of objective curiosity. There is nothing inside us, we stare endlessly at the outside. So our eyes begin to fail; to retaliate on us. We go short-sighted, almost in self-protection. Hearing the last, and perhaps the deepest of the senses. And here there is no choice. In every other faculty we have the power of rejection. We have a choice of vision. We can, if we choose, see in the terms of the wonderful beyond, the world of light into which we go forth in joy to lose ourselves in it. Or we can see, as the Egyptians saw, in the terms of their own dark souls: seeing the strangeness of the creature outside, the gulf between it and them, but finally, its existence in terms of themselves. They saw according to their own unchangeable idea, subjectively, they did not go forth from themselves to seek the wonder outside. Those are the two chief ways of sympathetic vision. We call our way the objective, the Egyptian the subjective. But objective and subjective are words that depend absolutely on your starting point. Spiritual and sensual are much more descriptive terms. But there are, of course, also the two ways of volitional vision. We can see with the endless modern critical sight, analytic, and at last deliberately ugly. Or we can see as the hawk sees the one concentrated spot where beats the life-heart of our prey. In the four modes of sight we have some choice. We have some choice to refuse tastes or smells or touch. In hearing we have the minimum of choice. Sound acts direct upon the great affective centers. We may voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centers. And we have no power of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient. Nevertheless, sound acts upon us in various ways, according to the four primary poles of consciousness. The singing of birds acts almost entirely upon the centers of the breast. Birds, which live by flight, impelled from the strong conscious-activity of the breast and shoulders, have become for us symbols of the spirit, the upper mode of consciousness. Their legs have become idle, almost insentient twigs. Only the tail flirts from the center of the sensual will. But their singing acts direct upon the upper, or spiritual centers in us. So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane, like our martial songs, our fifes and our brass-bands. These act direct upon the thoracic ganglion. Time was, however, when music acted upon the sensual centers direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance of the sensual mode of consciousness. But the tendency is for everything to be brought on to the upper plane, whilst the lower plane is just worked automatically from the upper. CHAPTER VI FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND We can now see what is the true goal of education for a child. It is the full and harmonious development of the four primary modes of consciousness, always with regard to the individual nature of the child. The goal is _not_ ideal. The aim is _not_ mental consciousness. We want _effectual_ human beings, not conscious ones. The final aim is not _to know_, but _to be_. There never was a more risky motto than that: _Know thyself_. You've got to know yourself as far as possible. But not just for the sake of knowing. You've got to know yourself so that you can at last _be_ yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto. The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is _always_ pre-mental, non-mental. Not even the most knowing man that ever lived would know how he would be feeling next week; whether some new and utterly shattering impulse would have arisen in him and laid his nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and conventions. The savage in a state of nature is one of the most conventional of creatures. So is a child. Only through fine delicate knowledge can we recognize and release our impulses. Now our whole aim has been to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, and mental consciousness. Our poor little plans of children are put into horrible forcing-beds, called schools, and the young idea is there forced to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in a warm cellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas and ideals. And no root, no life. The ideas shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but they shoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stops their living. Our business, at the present, is to prevent at all cost the young idea from shooting. The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly an original thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sickly repetition of stale, stale ideas. Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical training establishments, nothing more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two generations at least. Let no child learn to read, unless it learns by itself, out of its own individual persistent desire. That is my serious admonition, gentle reader. But I am not so flighty as to imagine you will pay any heed. But if I thought you would, I should feel my hope surge up. And if you _don't_ pay any heed, calamity will at length shut your schools for you, sure enough. The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But this we _can_ say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals the natural degree is very low. The process of transfer from primary consciousness is called sublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge with the definite reality of the idea. And with this process we have identified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word _education_ shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth of each nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is the leading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic consciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static. Now before we set out so gayly to lead our children _en bloc_ out of the dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider a moment what we are doing. A child in the womb can have no _idea_ of the mother. I think orthodox psychology will allow us so much. And yet the child in the womb must be dynamically conscious of the mother. Otherwise how could it maintain a definite and progressively developing relation to her? This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purely dynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vital vibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are never translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no need to be. It is a dynamic polarized intercourse between the great primary nuclei in the foetus and the corresponding nuclei in the dynamic maternal psyche. This form of consciousness is established at conception, and continues long after birth. Nay, it continues all life long. But the particular interchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange. The idea does not intervene at all. Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our object begins to loom in the formless mind of the infant. The idea of the mother is, as it were, gradually photographed on the cerebral plasm. It begins with the faintest shadow--but the figure is gradually developed through years of experience. It is never quite completed. How does the figure of the mother gradually develop as a _conception_ in the child mind? It develops as the result of the positive and negative reaction from the primary centers of consciousness. From the first great center of sympathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneing with the mother. From the first great center of will comes the independent self-assertion which locates the mother as something outside, something objective. And as a result of this twofold notion, a twofold increase in the child. First, the dynamic establishment of the individual consciousness in the infant: and then the first shadow of a mental conception of the mother, in the infant brain. The development of the _original_ mind in every child and every man always and only follows from the dual fulfillment in the dynamic consciousness. But mark further. Each time, after the fourfold interchange between two dynamic polarized lives, there results a development in the individuality and a sublimation into consciousness, both simultaneously in each party: _and this dual development causes at once a diminution in the dynamic polarity between the two parties_. That is, as its individuality and its mental concept of the mother develop in the child, there is a corresponding _waning_ of the dynamic relation between the child and the mother. And this is the natural progression of all love. As we have said before, the accomplishment of individuality never finally exhausts the dynamic flow between parents and child. In the same way, a child can never have a finite conception of either of its parents. It can have a very much more finite, finished conception of its aunts or its friends. The portrait of the parent can never be quite completed in the mind of the son or daughter. As long as time lasts it must be left unfinished. Nevertheless, the inevitable photography of time upon the mental plasm does print at last a very substantial portrait of the parent, a very well-filled concept in the child mind. And the nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know, is to lose. When I have a finished mental concept of a beloved, or a friend, then the love and the friendship is dead. It falls to the level of an acquaintance. As soon as I have a finished mental conception, a full idea even of myself, then dynamically I am dead. To know is to die. But knowledge and death are part of our natural development. Only, of course, most things can never be known by us in full. Which means we do never absolutely die, even to our parents. So that Jesus' question to His mother, "Woman, what have I to do with thee!"--while expressing a major truth, still has an exaggerated sound, which comes from its denial of the minor truth. This progression from dynamic relationship towards a finished individuality and a finished mental concept is carried on from the four great primary centers through the correspondence medium of all the senses and sensibilities. First of all, the child knows the mother only through touch--perfect and immediate contact. And yet, from the moment of conception, the egg-cell repudiated complete adhesion and even communication, and asserted its individual integrity. The child in the womb, perfect a contact though it may have with the mother, is all the time also dynamically polarized against this contact. From the first moment, this relation in touch has a dual polarity, and, no doubt, a dual mode. It is a fourfold interchange of consciousness, the moment the egg-cell has made its two spontaneous divisions. As soon as the child is born, there is a real severance. The contact of touch is interrupted, it now becomes occasional only. True, the dynamic flow between mother and child is not severed when simple physical contact is missing. Though mother and child may not touch, still the dynamic flow continues between them. The mother knows her child, feels her bowels and her breast drawn to it, even if it be a hundred miles away. But if the severance continue long, the dynamic flow begins to die, both in mother and child. It wanes fairly quickly--and perhaps can never be fully revived. The dynamic relation between parent and child may fairly easily fall into quiescence, a static condition. For a full dynamic relationship it is necessary that there be actual contact. The nerves run from the four primary dynamos, and end with live ends all over the body. And it is necessary to bring the live ends of the nerves of the child into contact with the live ends of corresponding nerves in the mother, so that a pure circuit is established. Wherever a pure circuit is established, there occurs a pure development in the individual creation, and this is inevitably accompanied by sensation; and sensation is the first term of mental knowledge. So, from the field of the breast and arms, the upper circuit, and from the field of the knees and feet and belly, the lower circuit. And then, the moment a child is born, the face is alive. And the face communicates direct with both planes of primary consciousness. The moment a child is born, it begins to grope for the breast. And suddenly a new great circuit is established, the four poles all working at once, as the child sucks. There is the profound desirousness of the lower center of sympathy, and the superior avidity of the center of will, and at the same time, the cleaving yearning to the nipple, and the tiny curiosity of lips and gums. The nipple of the mother's breast is one of the great gates of the body, hence of the living psyche. In the nipple terminate vivid nerves which flash their very powerful vibrations through the mouth of the child and deep into its four great poles of being and knowing. Even the nipples of the man are gateways to the great dynamic flow: still gateways. Touch, taste, and smell are now active in the baby. And these senses, so-called, are strictly sensations. They are the first term of the child's mental knowledge. And on these three _cerebral_ reactions the foundation of the future mind is laid. The moment there is a perfect polarized circuit between the first four poles of dynamic consciousness, at that moment does the mind, the terminal station, flash into cognition. The first cognition is merely sensation: sensation and the remembrance of sensation being the first element in all knowing and in all conception. The circuit of touch, taste, and smell must be well established, before the eyes begin actually to see. All mental knowledge is built up of sensation and of memory. It is the continually recurring sensation of the touch of the mother which forms the basis of the first conception of the mother. After that, the gradually discriminated taste of the mother, and scent of the mother. Till gradually sight and hearing develop and largely usurp the first three senses, as medium of correspondence and of knowledge. And while, of course, the sensational _knowledge_ is being secreted in the brain, in some much more mysterious way the living individuality of the child is being developed in the four first nuclei, the four great nerve-centers of the primary field of consciousness and being. As time goes on, the child learns to see the mother. At first he sees her face as a blur, and though he knows her, knows her by a direct glow of communication, as if her face were a warm glowing life-lamp which rejoiced him. But gradually, as the circuit of touch, taste, and smell become powerfully established; gradually, as the individual develops in the child, and so retreats towards isolation; gradually, as the child stands more immune from the mother, the circuit of correspondence extends, and the eyes now communicate across space, the ears begin to discriminate sounds. Last of all develops discriminate hearing. Now gradually the picture of the mother is transferred to the child's mind, and the sound of the first baby-words is imprinted. And as the child learns to discriminate visually, objectively, between the mother and the nurse, he learns to choose, and becomes individually free. And still, the dynamic correspondence is not finished. It only changes its circuit. While the brain is registering sensations, the four dynamic centers are coming into perfect relation. Or rather, as we see, the reverse is the case. As the dynamic centers come into perfect relation, the mind registers and remembers sensations, and begins consciously to know. But the great field of activity is still and always the dynamic field. When a child learns to walk, it learns almost entirely from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion balancing the upper body. There is a perfected circuit of polarity. The two lower centers are the positive, the two upper the negative poles. And so the child strikes out with his feet for the earth, presses, and strikes away again from the earth, the two upper centers meanwhile corresponding implicitly in the balance of the upper body. It is a chain of spontaneous activity in the four primary centers, establishing a circuit through the whole body. But the positive poles are the lower centers. And the brain has probably nothing at all to do with it. Even the _desire_ to walk is not born in the brain, but in the primary nuclei. The same with the use of the hands and arms. It means the establishment of a pure circuit between the four centers, the two upper poles now being the positive, the lower the negative poles, and the hands the live end of the wire. Again the brain is not concerned. Probably, even in the first deliberate grasping of an object, the brain is not concerned. Not until there is an element of recognition and sensation-memory. All our primal activity originates and circulates purely in the four great nerve centers. All our active desire, our genuine impulse, our love, our hope, our yearning, everything originates mysteriously at these four great centers or well-heads of our existence: everything vital and dynamic. The mind can only register that which results from the emanation of the dynamic impulse and the collision or communion of this impulse with its object. So now we see that we can never know ourselves. Knowledge is to consciousness what the signpost is to the traveler: just an indication of the way which has been traveled before. Knowledge is not even in direct proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistry in a man who is a rather poor _being_: and those who _know_, even in wisdom like Solomon, are often at the end of the matter of living, not at the beginning. As a matter of fact, David did the living, the dynamic achievement. To Solomon was left the consummation and the finish, and the dying down. Yet we _must_ know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how _not to know_. That is, how not to _interfere_. That is, how to live dynamically, from the great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and principles from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire. At last, knowledge must be put into its true place in the living activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that. So a new conception of the meaning of education. Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can't do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal. That which sublimates from the dynamic consciousness into the mental consciousness has alone any value. This, in most individuals, is very little indeed. So that most individuals, under a wise government, would be most carefully protected from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous ideas into them. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamic consciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. For the mass of people, knowledge _must_ be symbolical, mythical, dynamic. This means, you must have a higher, responsible, conscious class: and then in varying degrees the lower classes, varying in their degree of consciousness. Symbols must be true from top to bottom. But the interpretation of the symbols must rest, degree after degree, in the higher, responsible, conscious classes. To _those who cannot divest_ themselves again of mental consciousness and definite ideas, mentality and ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet. CHAPTER VII FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION The first process of education is obviously not a mental process. When a mother talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little mind to think. When she is coaxing her child to walk, she is not making a theoretic exposition of the science of equilibration. She crouches before the child, at a little distance, and spreads her hands. "Come, baby--come to mother. Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to mother! Come along. A little walk to its mother. Come! Come then! Why yes, a pretty baby! Oh, he can toddle! Yes--yes--No, don't be frightened, a dear. No--Come to mother--" and she catches his little pinafore by the tip--and the infant lurches forward. "There! There! A beautiful walk! A beautiful walker, yes! Walked all the way to mother, baby did. Yes, he did--" Now who will tell me that this talk has any rhyme or reason? Not a spark of reason. Yet a real rhyme: or rhythm, much more important. The song and the urge of the mother's voice plays direct on the affective centers of the child, a wonderful stimulus and tuition. The words hardly matter. True, this constant repetition in the end forms a mental association. At the moment they have no mental significance at all for the baby. But they ring with a strange palpitating music in his fluttering soul, and lift him into motion. And this is the way to educate children: the instinctive way of mothers. There should be no effort made to teach children to think, to have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. The voice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damn understanding. Gestures, and touch, and expression of the face, not theory. Never have ideas about children--and never have ideas _for_ them. If we are going to teach children we must teach them first to move. And not by rule or mental dictation. Horror! But by playing and teasing and anger, and amusement. A child must learn to move blithe and free and proud. It must learn the fullness of spontaneous motion. And this it can only learn by continuous reaction from all the centers, through all the emotions. A child must learn to contain itself. It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the first phase of education is the learning to stay still and be physically self-contained. Then a child must learn to be alone, and to adventure alone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging should be quite roughly rebuffed. From the very first day, throw a child back on its own resources--even a little cruelly sometimes. But don't neglect it, don't have a negative attitude to it. Play with it, tease it and roll it over as a dog her puppy, mock it when it is too timorous, laugh at it, scold it when it really bothers you--for a child must learn not to bother another person--and when it makes you genuinely angry, spank it soundly. But always remember that it is a single little soul by itself; and that the responsibility for the wise, warm relationship is yours, the adult's. Then always watch its deportment. Above all things encourage a straight backbone and proud shoulders. Above all things despise a slovenly movement, an ugly bearing and unpleasing manner. And make a mock of petulance and of too much timidity. We are imbeciles to start bothering about love and so forth in a child. Forget utterly that there is such a thing as emotional reciprocity. But never forget your own honor as an adult individual towards a small individual. It is a question of honor, not of love. A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled. Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Also morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its deportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, a superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of the great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintain its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or both. And viciousness or crime are the result of a derangement in the primary system. Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes in every circumstance, adjusting one thing to another livingly, delicately, sensitively. There can be no law. Therefore, at every cost and charge keep the first four centers alive and alert, active, and vivid in reaction. And then you need fear no perversion. What we have done, in our era, is, first, we have tried as far as possible to suppress or subordinate the two sensual centers. We have so unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spiritual or selfless mode--the living in the other person and through the other person--that we have caused already a dangerous over-balance in the natural psyche. To correct this we go one worse, and try to rule ourselves more and more by the old ideas of sympathy and benevolence. We think that love and benevolence will cure anything. Whereas love and benevolence are our poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to the receiver. Poison only because there is practically _no_ spontaneous love left in the world. It is all _will_, the fatal love-will and insatiable morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode of love long ago broke down. There is now only deadly, exaggerated volition. This is also why general education should be suppressed as soon as possible. We have fallen into a state of fixed, deadly will. Everything we do and say to our children in school tends simply to fix in them the same deadly will, under the pretence of pure love. Our idealism is the clue to our fixed will. Love, beauty, benevolence, progress, these are the words we use. But the principle we evoke is a principle of barren, sanctified compulsion of all life. We want to put all life under compulsion. "How to outwit the nerves," for example.--And therefore, to save the children as far as possible, elementary education should be stopped at once. No child should be sent to any sort of public institution before the age of ten years. If I could but advise, I would advise that this notice should be sent through the length and breadth of the land. "Parents, the State can no longer be responsible for the mind and character of your children. From the first day of the coming year, all schools will be closed for an indefinite period. Fathers, see that your boys are trained to be men. Mothers, see that your daughters are trained to be women. "All schools will shortly be converted either into public workshops or into gymnasia. No child will be admitted into the workshops under ten years of age. Active training in primitive modes of fighting and gymnastics will be compulsory for all boys over ten years of age. "All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical industry, or of art. Admission for three months' probation. "All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical industry, or of art. A boy may choose, with his parents' consent, his school of labor, or technical industry or art, but the directors reserve the right to transfer him to a more suitable department, if necessary, after a three months' probation. "It is the intention of this State to form a body of active, energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous, news-paper-reading population is universally recognized. "All elementary education is left in the hands of the parents, save such as is necessary to the different branches of industry. "Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. "Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree." The fact is, our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amount of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls. The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Toboso beckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumps on and off tram-cars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one mad chase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolates and feeling very, very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils to stop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and more chivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fame of these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails. That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for a wage. Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from going quite mad. To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery to-day. Instead of living from the spontaneous centers, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people--and not we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are raving. And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the Ideal. The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be. No idea should ever be raised to a governing throne. This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head and try to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this: that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly expressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and that to continue to put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of _ennui_, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a collapsing psyche. The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead. Then let us leave off hanging ourselves and our children from its branches like medlars. The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, ever displaced, like the leaves of a tree, from out of the quickness of the sap, and according to the forever incalculable effluence of the great dynamic centers of life. The tree of life is a gay kind of tree that is forever dropping its leaves and budding out afresh, quite different ones. If the last lot were thistle leaves, the next lot may be vine. You never can tell with the Tree of Life. So we come back to that precious child who costs us such a lot of ink. By what right, I ask you, are we going to inject into him our own disease-germs of ideas and infallible motives? By the right of the diseased, who want to infect everybody. There are _few, few people_ in whom the living impulse and reaction develops and sublimates into mental consciousness. There are all kinds of trees in the forest. But few of them indeed bear the apples of knowledge. The modern world insists, however, that every individual shall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go through the forest of mankind, cut back every tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree. A nice wood of monsters we make by so doing. It is not the _nature_ of most men to know and to understand and to reason very far. Therefore, why should they make a pretense of it? It is the nature of some few men to reason, then let them reason. Those whose nature it is to be rational will instinctively ask why and wherefore, and wrestle with themselves for an answer. But why every Tom, Dick and Harry should have the why and wherefore of the universe rammed into him, and should be allowed to draw the conclusion hence that he is the ideal person and responsible for the universe, I don't know. It is a lie anyway--for neither the whys nor the wherefores are his own, and he is but a parrot with his nut of a universe. Why should we cram the mind of a child with facts that have nothing to do with his own experiences, and have no relation to his own dynamic activity? Let us realize that every extraneous idea effectually introduced into a man's mind is a direct obstruction of his dynamic activity. Every idea which is introduced from outside into a man's mind, and which does not correspond to his own dynamic nature, is a fatal stumbling-block for that man: is a cause of arrest for his true individual activity, and a derangement to his psychic being. For instance, if I teach a man the idea that all men are equal. Now this idea has no foundation in experience, but is logically deduced from certain ethical or philosophic principles. But there is a disease of idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. Particularly teachers are born with it. So they seize on the idea of equality, and proceed to instil it. With what result? Your man is no longer a man, living his own life from his own spontaneous centers. He is a theoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and dislocate all life. It is the death of all life to force a pure _idea_ into practice. Life must be lived from the deep, self-responsible spontaneous centers of every individual, in a vital, _non-ideal_ circuit of dynamic relation between individuals. The passions or desires which are thought-born are deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire which receives an exclusive ideal sanction at once becomes poisonous. If this is true for men, it is much more true for women. Teach a woman to act from an idea, and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make a woman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as a sandbag. Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got our sex into our head. When Eve ate that particular apple, she became aware of her own womanhood, mentally. And mentally she began to experiment with it. She has been experimenting ever since. So has man. To the rage and horror of both of them. These sexual experiments are really anathema. But once a woman is sexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is born with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another, in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she is the noble spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a _Mater Dolorosa_: then a ministering Angel: then a competent social unit, a Member of Parliament or a Lady Doctor or a platform speaker: and all the while, as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, or the Guinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata Morgana of all men--in her own idea. She can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't get herself out of her own head. And there she is, functioning away from her own head and her own consciousness of herself and her own automatic self-will, till the whole man and woman game has become just a hell, and men with any backbone would rather kill themselves than go on with it--or kill somebody else. Yet we are going to inculcate more and more self-consciousness, teach every little Mary to be more and more a nice little Mary out of her own head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself up to the scratch. And the point lies here. There will _have_ to come an end. Every race which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has perished. And then it has all started afresh, in a different way, with another race. And man has never learnt any better. We are really far, far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the lost Etruscans. Our day is pretty short, and closing fast. We can pass, and another race can follow later. But there is another alternative. We still have in us the power to discriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will, and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly we are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can't get well in a minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once we recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit," the disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf and good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, like lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of self-conscious idealism. And we really can make a move on our children's behalf. We really can refrain from thrusting our children any more into those hot-beds of the self-conscious disease, schools. We really can prevent their eating much more of the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. For a time, there should be no compulsory teaching to read and write at all. _The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write_--_never_. And instead of this gnawing, gnawing disease of mental consciousness and awful, unhealthy craving for stimulus and for action, we must substitute genuine action. The war was really not a bad beginning. But we went out under the banners of idealism, and now the men are home again, the virus is more active than ever, rotting their very souls. The mass of the people will never _mentally understand_. But they will soon instinctively fall into line. Let us substitute action, all kinds of action, for the mass of people, in place of mental activity. Even twelve hours' work a day is better than a newspaper at four in the afternoon and a grievance for the rest of the evening. But particularly let us take care of the children. At all cost, try to prevent a girl's mind from dwelling on herself, Make her act, work, play: assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learn the domestic arts in their perfection. Let us even artificially set her to spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to prevent her reading and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as soon as possible to the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell of death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the very things of the home. Then keep the girls apart from any familiarity or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible. The same with the boys. First and foremost establish a rule over them, a proud, harsh, manly rule. Make them _know_ that at every moment they are in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult authority. Let them be soldiers, but as individuals not machine units. There are wars in the future, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but the free, indomitable life spirit. No more wars under the banners of the ideal, and in the spirit of sacrifice. But wars in the strength of individual men. And then, pure individualistic training to fight, and preparation for a whole new way of life, a new society. Put money into its place, and science and industry. The leaders must stand for life, and they must not ask the simple followers to point out the direction. When the leaders assume responsibility they relieve the followers forever of the burden of finding a way. Relieved of this hateful incubus of responsibility for general affairs, the populace can again become free and happy and spontaneous, leaving matters to their superiors. No newspapers--the mass of the people never learning to read. The evolving once more of the great spontaneous gestures of life. We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting our lives away and hating to die because we have never lived. The secret is, to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibility which now lies like torture on the mass. Let the few, the leaders, be increasingly responsible for the whole. And let the mass be free: free, save for the choice of leaders. Leaders--this is what mankind is craving for. But men must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosen the leader. And let them choose the leader for life's sake only. Begin then--there is a beginning. CHAPTER VIII EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD The one thing we have to avoid, then, even while we carry on our own old process of education, is this development of the powers of so-called self-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulating his self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do is to pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, making him affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The moment the least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-by to everything except falsity. Much better just pound away at the ABC and simple arithmetic and so on. The modern methods do make children sharp, give them a sort of slick finesse, but it is the beginning of the mischief. It ends in the great "unrest" of a nervous, hysterical proletariat. Begin to teach a child of five to "understand." To understand the sun and moon and daisy and the secrets of procreation, bless your soul. Understanding all the way.--And when the child is twenty he'll have a hysterical understanding of his own invented grievance, and there's an end of him. Understanding is the devil. A child mustn't understand things. He must have them his own way. His vision isn't ours. When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite right. Because he does _not_ see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is _not_ the image of his consciousness. The image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. And to _force_ the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his inward seeing. We don't _want_ him to see a proper horse. The child is _not_ a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic _rapport_ with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Ark tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flat Noah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than even a Cuyp cow. The mode of vision is not one and final. The mode of vision is manifold. And the optical image is a mere vibrating blur to a child--and, indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating blur the soul sees its own true correspondent. It sees, in a cow, horns and squareness, and a long tail. It sees, for a horse, a mane, and a long face, round nose, and four legs. And in each case a darkly vital presence. Now horns and squareness and a long thin ox-tail, these are the fearful and wonderful elements of the cow-form, which the dynamic soul perfectly perceives. The ideal-image is just outside nature, for a child--something false. In a picture, a child wants elemental recognition, and not correctness or expression, or least of all, what we call understanding. The child distorts inevitably and dynamically. But the dynamic abstraction is more than mental. If a huge eye sits in the middle of the cheek, in a child's drawing, this shows that the deep dynamic consciousness of the eye, its relative exaggeration, is the life-truth, even if it is a scientific falsehood. On the other hand, what on earth is the good of saying to a child, "The world is a flattened sphere, like an orange." It is simply pernicious. You had much better say the world is a poached egg in a frying pan. _That_ might have some dynamic meaning. The only thing about the flattened orange is that the child just sees this orange disporting itself in blue air, and never bothers to associate it with the earth he treads on. And yet it would be so much better for the mass of mankind if they never heard of the flattened sphere. They should never be told that the earth is round. It only makes everything unreal to them. They are balked in their impression of the flat good earth, they can't get over this sphere business, they live in a fog of abstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for purposes of abstraction, the earth is a great plain, with hills and valleys. Why force abstractions and kill the reality, when there's no need? As for children, will we never realize that their abstractions are never based on observations, but on subjective exaggerations? If there is an eye in the face, the face is all eye. It is the child soul which cannot get over the mystery of the eye. If there is a tree in a landscape, the landscape is all tree. Always this partial focus. The attempt to make a child focus for a whole view--which is really a generalization and an adult abstraction--is simply wicked. Yet the first thing we do is to set a child making relief-maps in clay, for example: of his own district. Imbecility! He has not even the faintest impression of the total hill on which his home stands. A steepness going up to a door--and front garden railings--and perhaps windows. That's the lot. The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a child anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children together and teach them through the head. It causes absolute starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at all. The children of the lower classes do better, because they escape into the streets. But even the children of the proletariat are now infected. And, of course, as my critics point out, under all the school-smarm and newspaper-cant, man is to-day as savage as a cannibal, and more dangerous. The living dynamic self is denaturalized instead of being educated. We talk about education--leading forth the natural intelligence of a child. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming in of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion, suffocation, and starvation of the primary centers of consciousness. A nice day of reckoning we've got in front of us. Let us lead forth, by all means. But let us not have mental knowledge before us as the goal of the leading. Much less let us make of it a vicious circle in which we lead the unhappy child-mind, like a cow in a ring at a fair. We don't want to educate children so that they may understand. Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. I don't even want my child to know, much less to understand. _I_ don't want my child to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more than I want my child to wear my hat or my boots. I _don't_ want my child to _know_. If he wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. As for his little mind, give it a rest, and let his dynamic self be alert. He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often asks why the sun shines, or why men have mustaches, or why grass is green, than anything sensible. Most of a child's questions are, and should be, unanswerable. They are not questions at all. They are exclamations of wonder, they are _remarks_ half-sceptically addressed. When a child says, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, or is it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate about chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls! The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamic centers, and is basically non-mental. To introduce mental activity is to arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development. By the age of twenty-one our young people are helpless, hopeless, selfless, floundering mental entities, with nothing in front of them, because they have been starved from the roots, systematically, for twenty-one years, and fed through the head. They have had all their mental excitements, sex and everything, all through the head, and when it comes to the actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. _Blasé._ The affective centers have been exhausted from the head. Before the age of fourteen, children should be taught only to move, to act, to _do_. And they should be taught as little as possible even of this. Adults simply cannot and do not know any more what the mode of childish intelligence is. Adults _always_ interfere. They _always_ force the adult mental mode. Therefore children must be preserved from adult instructions. Make a child work--yes. Make it do little jobs. Keep a fine and delicate and fierce discipline, so that the little jobs are performed as perfectly as is consistent with the child's nature. Make the child alert, proud, and becoming in its movements. Make it know very definitely that it shall not and must not trespass on other people's privacy or patience. Teach it songs, tell it tales. But _never_ instruct it school-wise. And mostly, leave it alone, send it away to be with other children and to get in and out of mischief, and in and out of danger. Forget your child altogether as much as possible. All this is the active and strenuous business of parents, and must not be shelved off on to strangers. It is the business of parents _mentally_ to forget but dynamically never to forsake their children. It is no use expecting parents to know _why_ schools are closed, and _why_ they, the parents, must be quite responsible for their own children during the first ten years. If it is quite useless to expect parents to understand a theory of relativity, much less will they understand the development of the dynamic consciousness. But why should they understand? It is the business of very few to understand and for the mass, it is their business to believe and not to bother, but to be honorable and humanly to fulfill their human responsibilities. To give active obedience to their leaders, and to possess their own souls in natural pride. Some must understand why a child is not to be mentally educated. Some must have a faint inkling of the processes of consciousness during the first fourteen years. Some must know what a child beholds, when it looks at a horse, and what it means when it says, "Why is grass green?" The answer to this question, by the way, is "Because it is." The interplay of the four dynamic centers follows no one conceivable law. Mental activity continues according to a law of co-relation. But there is no logical or rational co-relation in the dynamic consciousness. It pulses on inconsequential, and it would be impossible to determine any sequence. Out of the very lack of sequence in dynamic consciousness does the individual himself develop. The dynamic abstraction of a child's precepts follows no mental law, and even no law which can ever be mentally propounded. And this is why it is utterly pernicious to set a child making a clay relief-map of its own district, or to ask a child to draw conclusions from given observations. Dynamically, a child draws no conclusions. All things still remain dynamically possible. A conclusion drawn is a nail in the coffin of a child's developing being. Let a child make a clay landscape, if it likes. But entirely according to its own fancy, and without conclusions drawn. Only, let the landscape be vividly made--always the discipline of the soul's full attention. "Oh, but where are the factory chimneys?"--or else--"Why have you left out the gas-works?" or "Do you call that sloppy thing a church?" The particular focus should be vivid, and the record in some way true. The soul must give earnest attention, that is all. And so actively disciplined, the child develops for the first ten years. We need not be afraid of letting children see the passions and reactions of adult life. Only we must not strain the _sympathies_ of a child, in _any_ direction, particularly the direction of love and pity. Nor must we introduce the fallacy of right and wrong. Spontaneous distaste should take the place of right and wrong. And least of all must there be a cry: "You see, dear, you don't understand. When you are older--" A child's sagacity is better than an adult understanding, anyhow. Of course it is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a kind of dream act--quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and good. It _should_ see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the _mental_ consciousness of these shadowy dynamic realities. In the same way, to talk to a child about an adult is vile. Let adults keep their adult feelings and communications for people of their own age. But if a child sees its parents violently quarrel, all the better. There must be storms. And a child's dynamic understanding is far deeper and more penetrating than our sophisticated interpretation. But _never_ make a child a party to adult affairs. Never drag the child in. Refuse its sympathy on such occasions. Always treat it as if it had _no_ business to hear, even if it is present and _must_ hear. Truly, it has no business mentally to hear. And the dynamic soul will always weigh things up and dispose of them properly, if there be no interference of adult comment or adult desire for sympathy. It is despicable for any one parent to accept a child's sympathy against the other parent. And the one who _received_ the sympathy is always more contemptible than the one who is hated. Of course so many children are born to-day unnaturally mentally awake and alive to adult affairs, that there is nothing left but to tell them everything, crudely: or else, much better, to say: "Ah, get out, you know too much, you make me sick." To return to the question of sex. A child is born sexed. A child is either male or female, in the whole of its psyche and physique is either male or female. Every single living cell is either male or female, and will remain either male or female as long as life lasts. And every single cell in every male child is male, and every cell in every female child is female. The talk about a third sex, or about the indeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue. Biologically, it is true, the rudimentary formation of both sexes is found in every individual. That doesn't mean that every individual is a bit of both, or either, _ad lib._ After a sufficient period of idealism, men become hopelessly self-conscious. That is, the great affective centers no longer act spontaneously, but always wait for control from the head. This always breeds a great fluster in the psyche, and the poor self-conscious individual cannot help posing and posturing. Our ideal has taught us to be gentle and wistful: rather girlish and yielding, and _very_ yielding in our sympathies. In fact, many young men feel so very like what they imagine a girl must feel, that hence they draw the conclusion that they must have a large share of female sex inside them. False conclusion. These girlish men have often, to-day, the finest maleness, once it is put to the test. How is it then that they feel, and look, so girlish? It is largely a question of the direction of the polarized flow. Our ideal has taught us to be _so_ loving and _so_ submissive and _so_ yielding in our sympathy, that the mode has become automatic in many men. Now in what we will call the "natural" mode, man has his positivity in the volitional centers, and women in the sympathetic. In fulfilling the Christian love ideal, however, men have reversed this. Man has assumed the gentle, all-sympathetic rôle, and woman has become the energetic party, with the authority in her hands. The male is the sensitive, sympathetic nature, the woman the active, effective, authoritative. So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. The woman is now the initiator, man the responder. They seem to play each other's parts. But man is purely male, playing woman's part, and woman is purely female, however manly. The gulf between Heliogabalus, or the most womanly man on earth, and the most manly woman, is just the same as ever: just the same old gulf between the sexes. The man is male, the woman is female. Only they are playing one another's parts, as they must at certain periods. The dynamic polarity has swung around. If we look a little closer, we can define this positive and negative business better. As a matter of fact, positive and negative, passive and active cuts both ways. If the man, as thinker and doer, is active, or positive, and the woman negative, then, on the other hand, as the initiator of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic understanding the woman is positive, the man negative. The man may be the initiator in action, but the woman is initiator in emotion. The man has the initiative as far as voluntary activity goes, and the woman the initiative as far as sympathetic activity goes. In love, it is the woman naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In love, woman is the positive, man the negative. It is woman who asks, in love, and man who answers. In life, the reverse is the case. In knowing and in doing, man is positive and woman negative: man initiates, and woman lives up to it. Naturally this nicely arranged order of things may be reversed. Action and utterance, which are male, are polarized against feeling, emotion, which are female. And which is positive, which negative? Was man, the eternal protagonist, born of woman, from her womb of fathomless emotion? Or was woman, with her deep womb of emotion, born from the rib of active man, the first created? Man, the doer, the knower, the original in _being_, is he lord of life? Or is woman, the great Mother, who bore us from the womb of love, is she the supreme Goddess? This is the question of all time. And as long as man and woman endure, so will the answer be given, first one way, then the other. Man, as the utterer, usually claims that Eve was created out of his spare rib: from the field of the creative, upper dynamic consciousness, that is. But woman, as soon as she gets a word in, points to the fact that man inevitably, poor darling, is the issue of his mother's womb. So the battle rages. But some men always agree with the woman. Some men always yield to woman the creative positivity. And in certain periods, such as the present, the majority of men concur in regarding woman as the source of life, the first term in creation: woman, the mother, the prime being. And then, the whole polarity shifts over. Man still remains the doer and thinker. But he is so only in the service of emotional and procreative woman. His highest moment is now the emotional moment when he gives himself up to the woman, when he forms the perfect answer for her great emotional and procreative asking. All his thinking, all his activity in the world only contributes to this great moment, when he is fulfilled in the emotional passion of the woman, the birth of rebirth, as Whitman calls it. In his consummation in the emotional passion of a woman, man is reborn, which is quite true. And there is the point at which we all now stick. Life, thought, and activity, all are devoted truly to the great end of Woman, wife and mother. Man has now entered on to his negative mode. Now, his consummation is in feeling, not in action. Now, his activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, the crucified, and the reborn of woman. This being so, the whole tendency of his nature changes. Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings--nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original rôle of woman. Woman meanwhile becomes the fearless, inwardly relentless, determined positive party. She grips the responsibility. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Nay, she makes man discover that cradles should not be rocked, in order that her hands may be left free. She is now a queen of the earth, and inwardly a fearsome tyrant. She keeps pity and tenderness emblazoned on her banners. But God help the man whom she pities. Ultimately she tears him to bits. Therefore we see the reversal of the old poles. Man becomes the emotional party, woman the positive and active. Man begins to show strong signs of the peculiarly strong passive sex desire, the desire to be taken, which is considered characteristic of woman. Man begins to have all the feelings of woman--or all the feelings which he attributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, and worships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, he begins to exhibit all signs of sexual complexity. He begins to imagine he really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So the hermaphrodite fallacy revives again. But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, is still male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue in Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is still completely female. They are only playing each other's rôles, because the poles have swung into reversion. The compass is reversed. But that doesn't mean that the north pole has become the south pole, or that each is a bit of both. Of course a woman should stick to her own natural emotional positivity. But then man must stick to his own positivity of _being_, of action, _disinterested, non-domestic, male_ action, which is not devoted to the increase of the female. Once man vacates his camp of sincere, passionate positivity in disinterested being, his supreme responsibility to fulfill his own profoundest impulses, with reference to none but God or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all, in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once man vacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious, divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins to conduct a rag-time band. Man remains man, however he may put on wistfulness and tenderness like petticoats, and sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sensitive little big-eyed boy, so much more gentle and loving than his harder sister, is male for all that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, so mothers may learn to their cost: and wives still more. Of course there should be a great balance between the sexes. Man, in the daytime, must follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and give himself to life-work and risk himself to death. It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone. He may not pause to remember that he has a life to lose, or a wife and children to leave. He must carry forward the banner of life, though seven worlds perish, with all the wives and mothers and children in them. Hence Jesus, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" Every man that lives has to say it again to his wife or mother, once he has any work or mission in hand, that comes from his soul. But again, no man is a blooming marvel for twenty-four hours a day. Jesus or Napoleon or any other of them ought to have been man enough to be able to come home at tea-time and put his slippers on and sit under the spell of his wife. For there you are, the woman has her world, her positivity: the world of love, of emotion, of sympathy. And it behooves every man in his hour to take off his shoes and relax and give himself up to his woman and her world. Not to give up his purpose. But to give up himself for a time to her who is his mate.--And so it is one detests the clock-work Kant, and the petit-bourgeois Napoleon divorcing his Josephine for a Hapsburg--or even Jesus, with his "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--He might have added "just now."--They were all failures. CHAPTER IX THE BIRTH OF SEX The last chapter was a chapter of semi-digression. We now return to the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well, it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, and remains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only a great change of rôles is possible. But man in the female rôle is still male. Sex--that is to say, maleness and femaleness--is present from the moment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. But sex in the real sense of dynamic sexual relationship, this does not exist in a child, and cannot exist until puberty and after. True, children have a sort of sex consciousness. Little boys and little girls may even commit indecencies together. And still it is nothing vital. It is a sort of shadow activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no very profound effect. But still, boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally. We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do. Man, acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is still man, and he doesn't have one single unmanly feeling. And women, when they speak and write, utter not one single word that men have not taught them. Men learn their feelings from women, women learn their mental consciousness from men. And so it will ever be. Meanwhile, women live forever by feeling, and men live forever from an inherent sense of _purpose_. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to a woman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in the Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to it--like Maupassant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will _never_ understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other's game, but they will remain apart. The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man and woman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are pure and virgin in themselves. On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being "pals," they lose their own male and female integrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital sex polarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamism rests on _otherness_. For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses into action, as we know, at puberty. And how? As we know, a child lives from the great field of dynamic consciousness established between the four poles of the dynamic psyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great poles of will. The solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, great nerve-centers below the diaphragm, act as the dynamic origin of all consciousness in man, and are immediately polarized by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion above the diaphragm. At these four poles the whole flow, both within the individual and from without him, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic creative relationship is centered. These four first poles constitute the first field of dynamic consciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of every child. And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually and inevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control. The living soul is unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis. What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers of consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body the great sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus has been acting all the time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding voluntary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two centers begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force that changes the whole constitution of the life of the individual. And as these two centers, the sympathetic center of the deeper abdomen, and the voluntary center of the loins, gradually sparkle into wakeful, _conscious_ activity, their corresponding poles are roused in the upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-called cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity. We have now another field of dawning dynamic consciousness, that will extend far beyond the first. And now various things happen to us. First of all actual sex establishes its strange and troublesome presence within us. This is the massive wakening of the lower body. And then, in the upper body, the breasts of a woman begin to develop, her throat changes its form. And in the man, the voice breaks, the beard begins to grow round the lips and on to the throat. There are the obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting into free activity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, in the lower body, and of the cervical plexuses and ganglia of the neck, in the upper body. Why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympathetic regions we cannot say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to preserve these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changes in temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sake of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for a screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps from the centers of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort of annunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Perhaps all these things, and perhaps others. But with the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamic consciousness and being, change takes place in everything, the features now begin to take individual form, the limbs develop out of the soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself into distinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. The child before puberty is quite another thing from the child after puberty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea of childhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear. And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now new relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence. Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period of _Schwärmerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships. A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends and enemies. A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never dies. It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul. And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality. All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be responsible for it. Now sex comes into active being. Until puberty, sex is submerged, nascent, incipient only. After puberty, it is a tremendous factor. What is sex, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and a circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoanalyst is right so far. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sexual in nature? This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, in its obvious manifestation. The _sexual_ relation between man and woman consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We know its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all our experience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreative purpose of sex is, to the individual man and woman, just a side-show. To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individual experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends. But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We know that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man, acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, so say "electricity," by analogy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and then the tension passes. The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the blood of man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, like prostitution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration. But after coition, the actual chemical constitution of the blood is so changed, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time for chemical, biological readjustment through the whole system. So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated, like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living blood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic centers of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, new being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood. And so individual life goes on. Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychic individual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing together of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarized electric blood of the female, with the result of a tremendous flashing interchange, which alters the constitution of the blood, and the very quality of _being_, in both. And this, surely, is sex. But is this the whole of sex? That is the question. After coition, we say the blood is renewed. We say that from the new, finely sparkling blood new thrills pass into the great affective centers of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of impulse, of energy.--And what about these new thrills? Now, a new story. The new thrills are passed on to the great upper centers of the dynamic body. The individual polarity now changes, within the individual system. The upper centers, cardiac plexus and cervical plexuses, thoracic ganglion and cervical ganglia now assume positivity. These, the upper polarized centers, have now the positive rôle to play, the solar and the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar and the sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, negative rôle for the time being. And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active in positivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision in the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speech on the lips. Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought, the heart craves for new activity. The heart craves for new activity. For new _collective_ activity. That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men. Is this new craving for polarized communion with others, this craving for a new unison, is it sexual, like the original craving for the woman? Not at all. The whole polarity is different. Now, the positive poles are the poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the poles of activity and full consciousness. Men, being themselves made new after the act of coition, wish to make the world new. A new, passionate polarity springs up between men who are bent on the same activity, the polarity between man and woman sinks to passivity. It is now daytime, and time to forget sex, time to be busy making a new world. Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades and co-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized passion. Is it hence sex? It is not. Because what are the poles of positive connection?--the upper, busy poles. What is the dynamic contact?--a unison in spirit, in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great _work_. A mingling of the individual passion into one great _purpose_. Now this is also a grand consummation for men, this mingling of many with one great impassioned purpose. But is this sex? Knowing what sex is, can we call this other also sex? We cannot. This meeting of many in one great passionate purpose is not sex, and should never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in the opposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desire in men is this desire for great _purposive_ activity. When man loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is lost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his _secret_ soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair. Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as the creative vanguard of life. And he must also have the courage to go home to his woman and become a perfect answer to her deep sexual call. But he must never confuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely man is _always_ the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers. The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always, do us infinite damage. We have to break away, back to the great unison of manhood in some passionate _purpose_. Now this is not like sex. Sex is always individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else's. And sexually he goes as a single individual; he can mingle only singly. So that to make sex a general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You can't get people and talk to them about their sex, as if it were a common interest. We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionate unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many. And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the commingling of sex we are alone with _one_ partner. It is an individual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in the commingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandons his individual. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his individuality to the great urge which is upon him. He may have to surrender his name, his fame, his fortune, his life, everything. But once a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, _believes_, he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one of a united body. He knows what he does. He makes the surrender honorably, in agreement with his own soul's deepest desire. But he surrenders, and remains responsible for the purity of his surrender. But what if he believes that his sexual consummation is his supreme consummation? Then he serves the great purpose to which he pledges himself only as long as it pleases him. After which he turns it down, and goes back to sex. With sex as the one accepted prime motive, the world drifts into despair and anarchy. Of all countries, America has most to fear from anarchy, even from one single moment's lapse into anarchy. The old nations are _organically_ fixed into classes, but America not. You can shake Europe to atoms. And yet peasants fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial labor, upper classes to their control--inevitably. But can you say the same of America? America must not lapse for one single moment into anarchy. It would be the end of her. She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is near enough. Well, then, Americans must make a choice. It is a choice between belief in man's creative, spontaneous soul, and man's automatic power of production and reproduction. It is a choice between serving _man_, or woman. It is a choice between yielding the soul to a leader, leaders, or yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress, or mother. The great collective passion of belief which brings men together, comrades and co-workers, passionately obeying their soul-chosen leader or leaders, this is not a sex passion. Not in any sense. Sex holds any _two_ people together, but it tends to disintegrate society, unless it is subordinated to the great dominating male passion of collective _purpose_. But when the sex passion submits to the great purposive passion, then you have fulness. And no great purposive passion can endure long unless it is established upon the fulfillment in the vast majority of individuals of the true sexual passion. No great motive or ideal or social principle can endure for any length of time unless based upon the sexual fulfillment of the vast majority of individuals concerned. It cuts both ways. Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert _purposiveness_ as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our political life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. And so there you are. You have got to base your great purposive activity upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That was how Egypt endured. But you have got to keep your sexual fulfillment even then subordinate, just subordinate to the great passion of purpose: subordinate by a hair's breadth only: but still, by that hair's breadth, subordinate. Perhaps we can see now a little better--to go back to the child--where Freud is wrong in attributing a sexual motive to all human activity. It is obvious there is no real sexual motive in a child, for example. The great sexual centers are not even awake. True, even in a child of three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall, in its approach from the distance. But these are only an uneasy intrusion from the as-yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The great sexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, and the immensely powerful sacral ganglion are slowly prepared, developed in a kind of prenatal gestation during childhood before puberty. But even an unborn child kicks in the womb. So do the great sex-centers give occasional blind kicks in a child. It is part of the phenomenon of childhood. But we must be most careful not to charge these rather unpleasant apparitions or phenomena against the individual boy or girl. We must be _very_ careful not to drag the matter into mental consciousness. Shoo it away. Reprimand it with a pah! and a faugh! and a bit of contempt. But do not get into any heat or any fear. Do not startle a passional attention. Drive the whole thing away like the shadow it is, and be _very_ careful not to drive it into the consciousness. Be very careful to plant no seed of burning shame or horror. Throw over it merely the cold water of contemptuous indifference, dismissal. After puberty, a child may as well be told the simple and necessary facts of sex. As things stand, the parent may as well do it. But briefly, coldly, and with as cold a dismissal as possible.--"Look here, you're not a child any more; you know it, don't you? You're going to be a man. And you know what that means. It means you're going to marry a woman later on, and get children. You know it, and I know it. But in the meantime, leave yourself alone. I know you'll have a lot of bother with yourself, and your feelings. I know what is happening to you. And I know you get excited about it. But you needn't. Other men have all gone through it. So don't you go creeping off by yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't do you any good.--I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. I know the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that I know. Remember. And remember that I want you to leave yourself alone. I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. You've got to go through these years, before you find a woman you want to marry, and whom you can marry. I went through them myself, and got myself worked up a good deal more than was good for me.--Try to contain yourself. Always try to contain yourself, and be a man. That's the only thing. Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself. Remember I know what it is. I've been the same, in the same state that you are in. And probably I've behaved more foolishly and perniciously than ever you will. So come to me if anything _really_ bothers you. And don't feel sly and secret. I do know just what you've got and what you haven't. I've been as bad and perhaps worse than you. And the only thing I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in yourself." That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty. You have to be _very_ careful what you do: especially if you are a parent. To translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact of it is death. As a matter of fact there should be some sort of initiation into true adult consciousness. Boys should be taken away from their mothers and sisters as much as possible at adolescence. They should be given into some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy die again, symbolically, and pull him forth through some narrow aperture, to be born again, and make him suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges emaciated, but cut off forever from childhood, entered into the serious, responsible pale of manhood. And with his whole consciousness convulsed by a great change, as his dynamic psyche actually is convulsed.--And something in the same way, to initiate girls into womanhood. There should be the intense dynamic reaction: the physical suffering and the physical realization sinking deep into the soul, changing the soul for ever. Sex should come upon us as a terrible thing of suffering and privilege and mystery: a mysterious metamorphosis come upon us, and a new terrible power given us, and a new responsibility. Telling?--What's the good of telling?--The mystery, the terror, and the tremendous power of sex should never be explained away. The mass of mankind should _never_ be acquainted with the scientific biological facts of sex: _never_. The mystery must remain in its dark secrecy, and its dark, powerful dynamism. The reality of sex lies in the great dynamic convulsions in the soul. And as such it should be realized, a great creative-convulsive seizure upon the soul.--To make it a matter of test-tube mixtures, chemical demonstrations and trashy lock-and-key symbols is just blasting. Even more sickening is the line: "You see, dear, one day you'll love a man as I love Daddy, more than anything else in the _whole_ world. And then, dear, I hope you'll marry him. Because if you do you'll be happy, and I want you to be happy, my love. And so I hope you'll marry the man you really love (kisses the child).--And then, darling, there will come a lot of things you know nothing about now. You'll want to have a dear little baby, won't you, darling? Your own dear little baby. And your husband's as well. Because it'll be his, too. You know that, don't you, dear? It will be born from both of you. And you don't know how, do you? Well, it will come from right inside you, dear, out of your own inside. You came out of mother's inside, etc., etc." But I suppose there's really nothing else to be done, given the world and society as we've got them now. The mother is doing her best. But it is all wrong. It is wrong to make sex appear as if it were part of the dear-darling-love smarm: the spiritual love. It is even worse to take the scientific test-tube line. It all kills the great effective dynamism of life, and substitutes the mere ash of mental ideas and tricks. The scientific fact of sex is no more sex than a skeleton is a man. Yet you'd think twice before you stock a skeleton in front of a lad and said, "You see, my boy, this is what you are when you come to know yourself."--And the ideal, lovey-dovey "explanation" of sex as something wonderful and extra lovey-dovey, a bill-and-coo process of obtaining a sweet little baby--or else "God made us so that we must do this, to bring another dear little baby to life"--well, it just makes one sick. It is disastrous to the deep sexual life. But perhaps that is what we want. When humanity comes to its senses it will realize what a fearful Sodom apple our understanding is. What terrible mouths and stomachs full of bitter ash we've all got. And then we shall take away "knowledge" and "understanding," and lock them up along with the rest of poisons, to be administered in small doses only by competent people. We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with _understanding_. The period of actual death and race-extermination is not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding," our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees the skeleton grinning through the flesh. Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man. And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books, so I shan't hurt him that way. But oh, I would like to save him alive, in his living, spontaneous, original being. I can't help it. It is my passionate instinct. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for general affairs, a responsibility which he can't acquit, and which saps his life. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for the future. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for thought, for direction. I wish we could take hope and belief together. I would undertake my share of the responsibility, if he gave me his belief. I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. CHAPTER X PARENT LOVE In the serious hour of puberty, the individual passes into his second phase of accomplishment. But there cannot be a perfect transition unless all the activity is in full play in all the first four poles of the psyche. Childhood is a chrysalis from which each must extricate himself. And the struggling youth or maid cannot emerge unless by the energy of all powers; he can never emerge if the whole mass of the world and the tradition of love hold him back. Now we come to the greater peril of our particular form of idealism. It is the idealism of love and of the spirit: the idealism of yearning, outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion and "understanding." And this idealism recognizes as the highest earthly love, the love of mother and child. And what does this mean? It means, for every delicately brought up child, indeed for all the children who matter, a steady and persistent pressure upon the upper sympathetic centers, and a steady and persistent starving of the lower centers, particularly the great voluntary center of the lower body. The center of sensual, manly independence, of exultation in the sturdy, defiant self, willfulness and masterfulness and pride, this center is steadily suppressed. The warm, swift, sensual self is steadily and persistently denied, damped, weakened, throughout all the period of childhood. And by sensual we do not mean greedy or ugly, we mean the deeper, more impulsive reckless nature. Life must be always refined and superior. Love and happiness must be the watchword. The willful, critical element of the spiritual mode is never absent, the silent, if forbearing disapproval and distaste is always ready. Vile bullying forbearance. With what result? The center of upper sympathy is abnormally, inflamedly excited; and the centers of will are so deranged that they operate in jerks and spasms. The true polarity of the sympathetic-voluntary system within the child is so disturbed as to be almost deranged. Then we have an exaggerated sensitiveness alternating with a sort of helpless fury: and we have delicate frail children with nerves or with strange whims. And we have the strange cold obstinacy of the spiritual will, cold as hell, fixed in a child. Then one parent, usually the mother, is the object of blind devotion, whilst the other parent, usually the father, is an object of resistance. The child is taught, however, that both parents should be loved, and only loved: and that love, gentleness, pity, charity, and all "higher" emotions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the rest are false, to be rejected. With what result? The upper centers are developed to a degree of unnatural acuteness and reaction--or again they fall numbed and barren. And then between parents and children a painfully false relation grows up: a relation as of two adults, either of two pure lovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bully one another. Instead of leaving the child with its own limited but deep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved in the sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will, stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it, on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness and freedom on the other plane. And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration and an intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centers of sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is an irreparable disaster. Instead of seeing as a child should see, through a glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympathetic cognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins, at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake after adolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and cognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personal love-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child, sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity. Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far as possible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of the activity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper or spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we will call the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers of sensual comprehension below the diaphragm. And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious, so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain utterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions with whom? With the parent or parents. Which is man devouring his own offspring. For to the parents belongs, once and for all, the dynamic reaction on the first plane of consciousness only, the reaction and relationship at the first four poles of dynamic consciousness. When the second, the farther plane of consciousness rouses into action, the relationship is with strangers. All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. What sex-instinct there is in a child is always _adverse_ to the parents. But also, the parents are all too quick. They all proceed to swallow their children before the children can get out of their clutches. And even if parents do send away their children at the age of puberty--to school or elsewhere--it is not much good. The mischief has been done before. For the first twelve years the parents and the whole community forcibly insist on the child's living from the upper centers only, and particularly the upper sympathetic centers, without the balance of the warm, deep sensual self. Parents and community alike insist on rousing an adult sympathetic response, and a mental answer in the child-schools, Sunday-schools, books, home-influence--all works in this one pernicious way. But it is the home, the parents, that work most effectively and intensely. There is the most intimate mesh of love, love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a child is entangled. So that a child arrives at the age of puberty already stripped of its childhood's darkness, bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking now to a whole new field of consciousness, a whole vast and wonderful new dynamic impulse towards new connections, it finds itself fatally bound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour of sex strikes. But there is your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it the dynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have already established between your child and yourself the dynamic relation in the further plane of consciousness. You have got your child as sure as if you had woven its flesh again with your own. You have done what it is vicious for any parent to do: you have established between your child and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man, woman for woman, or man for woman. All your tenderness, your cherishing will not excuse you. It only deepens your guilt. You have established between your child and yourself the bond of further sympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak of pure sympathy, sacred love. The parents establish between themselves and their child the bond of the higher love, the further spiritual love, the sympathy of the adult soul. And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic _spiritual_ incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more intangible and less instinctively repugnant. But let psychoanalysis fall into what discredit it may, it has done us this great service of proving to us that the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamic relation either of love-will or love-sympathy, between parent and child, upon the upper plane, inevitably involves us in a conclusion of incest. For although it is our aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamic relation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitable polarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same time a dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensual plane. We may be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this will and must inevitably happen. When Mrs. Ruskin said that John Ruskin should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He _was_ married to his mother. For in spite of all our intention, all our creed, all our purity, all our desire and all our will, once we arouse the dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitably evoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual love. And then what? Of course, parents can reply that their love, however intense, is pure, and has absolutely no sensual element. Maybe--and maybe not. But admit that it is so. It does not help. The intense excitement of the upper centers of sympathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. It arouses them to activity, even if it denies them any expression or any polarized connection. Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused on one plane provokes activity on the corresponding plane, automatically. So the intense _pure_ love-relation between parent and child inevitably arouses the lower centers in the child, the centers of sex. Now the deeper sensual centers, once aroused, should find response from the sensual body of some other, some friend or lover. The response is impossible between parent and child. Myself, I believe that biologically there is radical sex-aversion between parent and child, at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual circuit _cannot_ adjust itself spontaneously between the two. So what have you? Child and parent intensely linked in adult love-sympathy and love-will, on the upper plane, and in the child, the deeper sensual centers aroused, but finding no correspondent, no objective, no polarized connection with another person. There they are, the powerful centers of sex, acting spasmodically, without balance. They must be polarized somehow. So they are polarized to the active upper centers within the child, and you get an introvert. This is how introversion begins. The lower sexual centers are aroused. They find no sympathy, no connection, no response from outside, no expression. They are dynamically polarized by the upper centers within the individual. That is, the whole of the sexual or deeper sensual flow goes on upwards in the individual, to his own upper, from his own lower centers. The upper centers hold the lower in positive polarity. The flow goes on upwards. There _must_ be some reaction. And so you get, first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousness in the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Then you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self. You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get the absolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you get various mild sex perversions, such as masturbation, and so on. What does all this mean? It means that the activity of the lower psyche and lower body is polarized by the upper body. Eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex: and always, in an introvert, of his _own_ sex. If we examine the apparent extroverts, like the flaunting Italian, we shall see the same thing. It is his own sex which obsesses him. And to-day what have we but this? Almost inevitably we find in a child now an intense, precocious, secret sexual preoccupation. The upper self is rabidly engaged in exploiting the lower self. A child and its own roused, inflamed sex, its own shame and masturbation, its own cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex _curiosity_, this is the greatest tragedy of our day. The child does not so much want to _act_ as to _know_. The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to _know_, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the _upper_ channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion to-day. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than the merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease. And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. But the tragedy of our children, in their inflamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses us beyond any blame. It is time to drop the word love, and more than time to drop the ideal of love. Every frenzied individual is told to find fulfillment in love. So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half of our fulfillment comes _through_ love, through strong, sensual love. But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his own soul in strength within him, deep and alone. The deep, rich aloneness, reached and perfected through love. And the passing beyond any further _quest_ of love. This central fullness of self-possession is our goal, if goal there be any. But there are two great _ways_ of fulfillment. The first, the way of fulfillment through complete love, complete, passionate, deep love. And the second, the greater, the fulfillment through the accomplishment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest purpose. We work the love way falsely, from the upper self, and work it to death. The second way, of active unison in strong purpose, and in faith, this we only sneer at. But to return to the child and the parent. The coming to the fulfillment of single aloneness, through love, is made impossible for us by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very _âge dangereuse_, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new lover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a state of pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidly against rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form, and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will "understand" her. And as often as not she turns to her son. It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfillment through feeling. But through being "understood" she reaches nowhere, unless the lover understands what a vice it is for a woman to get herself and her sex into her head. A woman reaches her fulfillment through love, deep sensual love, and exquisite sensitive communion. But once she reaches the point of fulfillment, she should not break off to ask for more excitements. She should take the beauty of maturity and peace and quiet faithfulness upon her. This she won't do, however, unless the man, her husband, goes on beyond her. When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and the fulfillment of his individual self, about the age of thirty-five, then is not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled through marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertake the responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now give himself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposive activity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness and singleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence and central appeasedness of maturity; and _then, after this_, assumes a sacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future, there is no rest. The great resolution of aloneness and appeasedness, and the further deep assumption of responsibility in purpose--this is necessary to every parent, every father, every husband, at a certain point. If the resolution is never made, the responsibility never embraced, then the love-craving will run on into frenzy, and lay waste to the family. In the woman particularly the love-craving will run on to frenzy and disaster. Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep passional self; diseased with self-consciousness and sex in the head, foiled by the very loving weakness of the husband who has not the courage to withdraw into his own stillness and singleness, and put the wife under the spell of his fulfilled decision; the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiable satisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns to her child. Here she provokes what she wants. Here, in her own son who belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which she is craving. He is a medium to her, she provokes from him her own answer. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, a final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and strength of her husband and is poison to her boy. The husband, irresolute, never accepting his own higher responsibility, bows and accepts. And the fatal round of introversion and "complex" starts once more. If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled. "_On revient toujours à son premier amour._" It sounds like a cynicism to-day. As if we really meant: "_On ne revient jamais à son premier amour._" But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and the higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full circuit is established, however, this can never break down. Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are "pals." The sex is a rather nasty fiasco. We keep up a pretense of "pals"--and nice love. Sex spins wilder in the head than ever. There is either a family of children whom the dissatisfied parents can devote themselves to, thereby perverting the miserable little creatures: or else there is a divorce. And at the great dynamic centers nothing has happened at all. Blank nothing. There has been no vital interchange at all in the whole of this beautiful marriage affair. Establish between yourself and another individual a dynamic connection at only _two_ of the four further poles, and you will have the devil of a job to break the connection. Especially if it be the first connection you have made. Especially if the other individual be the first in the field. This is the case of the parents. Parents are first in the field of the child's further consciousness. They are criminal trespassers in that field. But that makes no matter. They are first in the field. They establish a dynamic connection between the two upper centers, the centers of the throat, the centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and cognition. They establish this circuit. And break it if you can. Very often not even death can break it. And as we see, the establishment of the upper love-and-cognition circuit inevitably provokes the lower sex-sensual centers into action, even though there be no correspondence on the sensual plane between the two individuals concerned. Then see what happens. If you want to see the real desirable wife-spirit, look at a mother with her boy of eighteen. How she serves him, how she stimulates him, how her true female self is his, is wife-submissive to him as never, never it could be to a husband. This is the quiescent, flowering love of a mature woman. It is the very flower of a woman's love: sexually asking nothing, asking nothing of the beloved, save that he shall be himself, and that for his living he shall accept the gift of her love. This is the perfect flower of married love, which a husband should put in his cap as he goes forward into the future in his supreme activity. For the husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For the son also it seems wonderful. The woman now feels for the first time as a true wife might feel. And her feeling is towards her son. Or, instead of mother and son, read father and daughter. And then what? The son gets on swimmingly for a time, till he is faced with the actual fact of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits his adolescence and the world at large, without an obstacle in his way, mother-supported, mother-loved. Everything comes to him in glamour, he feels he sees wondrous much, understands a whole heaven, mother-stimulated. Think of the power which a mature woman thus infuses into her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. No wonder they say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates. And then?--and then, with this glamorous youth? What is he actually to do with his sensual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort with a stranger? For he is taught, even by his mother, that his manhood must not forego sex. Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best he will ever know. No woman will give to a stranger that which she gives to her son, her father or her brother: that beautiful and glamorous submission which is truly the wife-submission. To a stranger, a husband, a woman insists on being queen, goddess, mistress, the positive, the adored, the first and foremost and the one and only. This she will not ask from her near blood-kin. Of her blood-kin, there is always one she will love devotedly. And so, the charming young girl who adores her father, or one of her brothers, is sought in marriage by the attractive young man who loves his mother devotedly. And a pretty business the marriage is. We can't think of it. Of course they may be good pals. It's the only thing left. And there we are. The game is spoilt before it is begun. Within the circle of the family, owing to our creed of insatiable love, intense adult sympathies are provoked in quite young children. In Italy, the Italian stimulates adult sex-consciousness and sex-sympathy in his child, almost deliberately. But with us, it is usually spiritual sympathy and spiritual criticism. The adult experiences are provoked, the adult devotional sympathies are linked up, prematurely, as far as the child is concerned. We have the heart-wringing spectacle of intense parent-child love, a love intense as the love of man and woman, but not sexual; or else the great brother-sister devotion. And thus, the great love-experience which should lie in the future is forestalled. Within the family, the love-bond forms quickly, without the shocks and ruptures inevitable between strangers. And so, it is easiest, intensest--and seems the best. It seems the highest. You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he felt for his mother or sister. The cream is licked off from life before the boy or the girl is twenty. Afterwards--repetition, disillusion, and barrenness. And the cause?--always the same. That parents will not make the great resolution to come to rest within themselves, to possess their own souls in quiet and fullness. The man has not the courage to withdraw at last into his own soul's stillness and aloneness, and _then_, passionately and faithfully, to strive for the living future. The woman has not the courage to give up her hopeless insistence on love and her endless demand for love, demand of being loved. She has not the greatness of soul to relinquish her own self-assertion, and believe in the man who believes in himself and in his own soul's efforts:--if there _are_ any such men nowadays, which is very doubtful. Alas, alas, the future! Your son, who has tasted the real beauty of wife-response in his mother or sister. Your daughter, who adores her brother, and who marries some woman's son. They are so charming to look at, such a lovely couple. And at first it is all such a good game, such good sport. Then each one begins to fret for the beauty of the lost, non-sexual, partial relationship. The sexual part of marriage has proved so--so empty. While that other loveliest thing--the poignant touch of devotion felt for mother or father or brother--why, this is missing altogether. The best is missing. The rest isn't worth much. Ah well, such is life. Settle down to it, and bring up the children carefully to more of the same.--The future!--You've had all your good days by the time you're twenty. And, I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis do you in this state of affairs? Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and make you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then--it all goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams: pah, when we've had the little excitement out of them we shall forget them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words. And we shall be just where we were before: unless we are worse, with _more_ sex in the head, and more introversion, only more brazen. CHAPTER XI THE VICIOUS CIRCLE Here is a very vicious circle. And how to get out of it? In the first place, we have to break the love-ideal, once and for all. Love, as we see, is not the only dynamic. Taking love in its greatest sense, and making it embrace every form of sympathy, every flow from the great sympathetic centers of the human body, still it is not the whole of the dynamic flow, it is only the one-half. There is always the other voluntary flow to reckon with, the intense motion of independence and singleness of self, the pride of isolation, and the profound fulfillment through power. The very first thing of all to be recognized is the danger of idealism. It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means the fall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity. We know that life issues spontaneously at the great nodes of the psyche, the great nerve-centers. At first these are four only: then, after puberty, they become eight: later there may still be an extension of the dynamic consciousness, a further polarization. But eight is enough at the moment. First at four, and then at eight dynamic centers of the human body, the human nervous system, life starts spontaneously into being. The soul bursts day by day into fresh impulses, fresh desire, fresh purpose, at these our polar centers. And from these dynamic generative centers issue the vital currents which put us into connection with our object. We have really no will and no choice, in the first place. It is our soul which acts within us, day by day unfolding us according to our own nature. From the objective circuits and from the subjective circuits which establish and fulfill themselves at the first four centers of consciousness we derive our first being, our child-being, and also our first mind, our child-mind. By the objective circuits we mean those circuits which are established between the self and some external object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant, or even further still, some particular place, some particular inanimate object, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a wooden horse. For we must insist that every object which really enters effectively into our lives does so by direct connection. If I love my mother, it is because there is established between me and her a direct, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will, but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse. I will not call this vital flow a _force_, because it depends on the incomprehensible initiative and control of the individual soul or self. Force is that which is directed only from some universal will or law. Life is _always_ individual, and therefore never controlled by one law, one God. And therefore, since the living really sway the universe, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universal law, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sun depends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the soul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregate heartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sort of worlds, that the sun rests stable. Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, although it is quite as valid or even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which law still remains a law, even if not quite so absolute as heretofore. But this is a digression. The argument is, that between an individual and any external object with which he has an affective connection, there exists a definite vital flow, as definite and concrete as the electric current whose polarized circuit sets our tram-cars running and our lamps shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. Whether this object be human, or animal, or plant, or quite inanimate, there is still a circuit. My dog, my canary has a polarized connection with me. Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I loved as a child had a dynamic vibratory connection with the nuclei in my own centers of primary consciousness. And further still, the boots I have worn are so saturated with my own magnetism, my own vital activity, that if anyone else wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost as if another man used my hand to knock away a fly. I doubt very much if a blood-hound, when it takes a scent, _smells_, in our sense of the word. It receives at the infinitely sensitive telegraphic center of the dog's nostrils the vital vibration which remains in the inanimate object from the individual with whom the object was associated. I should like to know if a dog would trace a pair of quite new shoes which had merely been dragged at the end of a string. That is, does he follow the smell of the leather itself, or the vibration track of the individual whose vitality is communicated to the leather? So, there is a definite vibratory rapport between a man and his surroundings, once he definitely gets into contact with these surroundings. Any particular locality, any house which has been lived in has a vibration, a transferred vitality of its own. This is either sympathetic or antipathetic to the succeeding individual in varying degree. But certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot of Etna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic to the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. And old houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree of indecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense, means the continuing of the same peculiar pitch of vital vibration. Such is the objective dynamic flow between the psychic poles of the individual and the substance of the external object, animate or inanimate. The subjective dynamic flow is established between the four primary poles within the individual. Every dynamic connection begins from one or the other of the sympathetic centers: is, or should be, almost immediately polarized from the corresponding voluntary center. Then a complete flow is set up, in one plane. But this always rouses the activity on the other, corresponding plane, more or less intense. There is a whole field of consciousness established, with positive polarity of the first plane, negative polarity of the second. Which being so, a whole fourfold field of dynamic consciousness now working within the individual, direct cognition takes place. The mind begins to know, and to strive to know. The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing and comprehending the pure joy of consciousness. The second business is to act as medium, as interpreter, as agent between the individual and his object. The mind should _not_ act as a director or controller of the spontaneous centers. These the soul alone must control: the soul being that forever unknowable reality which causes us to rise into being. There is continual conflict between the soul, which is for ever sending forth incalculable impulses, and the psyche, which is conservative, and wishes to persist in its old motions, and the mind, which wishes to have "freedom," that is spasmodic, idea-driven control. Mind, and conservative psyche, and the incalculable soul, these three are a trinity of powers in every human being. But there is something even beyond these. It is the individual in his pure singleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being: the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we may not deny. When I say to myself: "I am wrong," knowing with sudden insight that I _am_ wrong, then this is the whole self speaking, the Holy Ghost. It is no piece of mental inference. It is not just the soul sending forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in one voice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured into oneness. This voice of my being I may _never_ deny. When at last, in all my storms, my whole self speaks, then there is a pause. The soul collects itself into pure silence and isolation--perhaps after much pain. The mind suspends its knowledge, and waits. The psyche becomes strangely still. And then, after the pause, there is fresh beginning, a new life adjustment. Conscience is the being's consciousness, when the individual is conscious _in toto_, when he knows in full. It is something which includes and which far surpasses mental consciousness. Every man must live as far as he can by his own soul's conscience. But not according to any ideal. To submit the conscience to a creed, or an idea, or a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin. To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good as making a Cook's tourist-interpreter a king and a god, because he can speak several languages, and make an Arab understand that an Englishman wants fish for supper. And to make an ideal a ruling principle is about as stupid as if a bunch of travelers should never cease giving each other and their dragoman sixpence, because the dragoman's main idea of virtue is the virtue of sixpence-giving. In the same way, we _know_ we cannot live purely by impulse. Neither can we live solely by tradition. We must live by all three, ideal, impulse, and tradition, each in its hour. But the real guide is the pure conscience, the voice of the self in its wholeness, the Holy Ghost. We have fallen now into the mistake of idealism. Man always falls into one of the three mistakes. In China, it is tradition. And in the South Seas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours is idealism. Each of the three modes is a true life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant, brings us to destruction. We must depend on the wholeness of our being, ultimately only on that, which is our Holy Ghost within us. Whereas, in an ideal of love and benevolence, we have tried to automatize ourselves into little love-engines always stoked with the sorrows or beauties of other people, so that we can get up steam of charity or righteous wrath. A great trick is to pour on the fire the oil of our indignation at somebody else's wickedness, and then, when we've got up steam like hell, back the engine and run bish! smash! against the belly of the offender. Because he said he didn't want to love any more, we hate him for evermore, and try to run over him, every bit of him, with our love-tanks. And all the time we yell at him: "Will you deny love, you villain? Will you?" And by the time he faintly squeaks, "I want to be loved! I want to be loved!" we have got so used to running over him with our love-tanks that we don't feel in a hurry to leave off. "_Sois mon frère, ou je te tue._" "_Sois mon frère, ou je me tue._" There are the two parrot-threats of love, on which our loving centuries have run as on a pair of railway-lines. Excuse me if I want to get out of the train. Excuse me if I can't get up any love-steam any more. My boilers are burst. We have made a mistake, laying down love like the permanent way of a great emotional transport system. There we are, however, running on wheels on the lines of our love. And of course we have only two directions, forwards and backwards. "Onward, Christian soldiers, towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are planted in a man's mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then in a spirit of universal love--" That is the forward direction of the English-speaking race. The Germans unwisely backed their engine. "We have a city of light. But instead of lying ahead it lies direct behind us. So reverse engines. Reverse engines, and away, away to our city, where the sterilized milk is delivered by noiseless aeroplanes, _at the very precise minute when our great doctors of the Fatherland have diagnosed that it is good for you_: where the teeth are not only so painlessly planted that they grow like living rock, but where their composition is such that the friction of eating stimulates the cells of the jaw-bone and develops the _superman strength of will which makes us gods_: and where not only is twilight sleep serene, but into the sleeper are inculcated the most useful and instructive dreams, calculated to perfect the character of the young citizen at this crucial period, and to enlighten permanently the mind of the happy mother, with regard to her new duties towards her child and towards our great Fatherland--" Here you see we are, on the railway, with New Jerusalem ahead, and New Jerusalem away behind us. But of course it was very wrong of the Germans to reverse their engines, and cause one long collision all along the line. Why should we go _their_ way to the New Jerusalem, when of course they might so easily have kept on going our way. And now there's wreckage all along the line! But clear the way is our motto--or make the Germans clear it. Because get on we will. Meanwhile we sit rather in the cold, waiting for the train to get a start. People keep on signaling with green lights and red lights. And it's all very bewildering. As for me, I'm off. I'm damned if I'll be shunted along any more. And I'm thrice damned if I'll go another yard towards that sterilized New Jerusalem, either forwards or backwards. New Jerusalem may rot, if it waits for me. I'm not going. So good-by! There we leave humanity, encamped in an appalling mess beside the railway-smash of love, sitting down, however, and having not a bad time, some of 'em, feeding themselves fat on the plunder: others, further down the line, with mouths green from eating grass. But all grossly, stupidly, automatically gabbling about getting the love-service running again, the trains booked for the New Jerusalem well on the way once more. And occasionally a good engine gives a screech of love, and something seems to be about to happen. And sometimes there is enough steam to set the indignation-whistles whistling. But never any more will there be enough love-steam to get the system properly running. It is done. Good-by, then! You may have laid your line from one end to the other of the infinite. But still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go. Good-by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not to see you, not to smell you, humanity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom. Good-by! To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be alone without my own soul, mind you. But to be alone with one's own soul! This, and the joy of it, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and myself. Not my ego, my conceit of myself. But my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Not to be questing any more. Not to be yearning, seeking, hoping, desiring, aspiring. But to pause, and be alone. And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig one in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peace means being two people together. Two people who can be silent together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs if one gets too vague or self-sufficient. They say it is better to travel than to arrive. It's not been my experience, at least. The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a nice place under the trees, with your "amiable spouse" who has at last learned to hold her tongue and not to bother about rights and wrongs: her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit, and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel all the clamor lapse. That is the best I know. I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies and agonies of love, the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-drop fulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships, love and marital relationships especially. Because we all make a very, very bad start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, and our sex in our head as well. All the fight till one is bled of one's self-consciousness and sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of the conflict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who has got herself so stuck in her own head. It is terrible to be young.--But one fights one's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness and sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the self whole again, and at last free. The best thing I have known is the stillness of accomplished marriage, when one possesses one's own soul in silence, side by side with the amiable spouse, and has left off craving and raving and being only half one's self. But I must say, I know a great deal more about the craving and raving and sore ribs, than about the accomplishment. And I must confess that I feel this self-same "accomplishment" of the fulfilled being is only a preparation for new responsibilities ahead, new unison in effort and conflict, the effort to make, with other men, a little new way into the future, and to break through the hedge of the many. But--to your tents, my Israel. And to that precious baby you've left slumbering there. What I meant to say was, in each phase of life you have a great circuit of human relationship to establish and fulfill. In childhood, it is the circuit of family love, established at the first four consciousness centers, and gradually fulfilling itself, completing itself. At adolescence, the first circuit of family love should be completed, dynamically finished. And then, it falls into quiescence. After puberty, family love should fall quiescent in a child. The love never breaks. It continues static and basic, the basis of the emotional psyche, the foundation of the self. It is like the moon when the moon at last subsides into her eternal orbit, round the earth. She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she forgets, and becomes unaware. She only knits her brows over the earth's greater aberrations in space. The circuit of parental love, once fulfilled, is not done away with, but only established into silence. The child is then free to establish the new connections, in which he surpasses his parents. And let us repeat, parents should never try to establish adult relations, of sympathy or interest or anything else, between themselves and their children. The attempt to do so only deranges the deep primary circuit which is the dynamic basis of our living. It is a clambering upwards only by means of a broken foundation. Parents should remain parents, children children, for ever, and the great gulf preserved between the two. Honor thy father and thy mother should always be a leading commandment. But this can only take place when father and mother keep their true parental distances, dignity, reserve, and limitation. As soon as father and mother try to become the _friends_ and _companions_ of their children, they break the root of life, they rupture the deepest dynamic circuit of living, they derange the whole flow of life for themselves and their children. For let us reiterate and reiterate: you cannot mingle and confuse the various modes of dynamic love. If you try, you produce horrors. You cannot plant the heart below the diaphragm or put an ocular eye in the navel. No more can you transfer parent love into friend love or adult love. Parent love is established at the great primary centers, where man is father and child, playmate and brother, but where he _cannot_ be comrade or lover. Comrade and lover, this is the dynamic activity of the further centers, the second four centers. And these second four centers must be active in the parent, their intense circuit established even if not fulfilled, long before the child is born. The circuit of friendship, of personal companionship, of sexual love must needs be established before the child is begotten, or at least before it attains to adolescence. These circuits of the extended field are already fully established in the parent before the centers of correspondence in the child are even formed. When therefore the four great centers of the extended consciousness arouses in a child, at adolescence, they must needs seek a strange complement, a foreign conjunction. Not only is this the case, but the actual dynamic impulse of the new life which rouses at puberty is _alien_ to the original dynamic flow. The new wave-length by no means corresponds. The new vibration by no means harmonizes. Force the two together, and you cause a terrible frictional excitement and jarring. It is this instinctive recognition of the different dynamic vibrations from different centers, in different modes, and in different directions of positive and negative, which lies at the base of savage taboo. After puberty, members of one family should be taboo to one another. There should be the most definite limits to the degree of contact. And mothers-in-law should be taboo to their daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law to their sons' wives. We must again begin to learn the great laws of the first dynamic life-circuits. These laws we now make havoc of, and consequently we make havoc of our own soul, psyche, mind and health. This book is written primarily concerning the child's consciousness. It is not intended to enter the field of the post-puberty consciousness. But yet, the dynamic relation of the child is established so directly with the physical and psychical soul of the parent, that to get any inkling of dynamic child-consciousness we must understand something of parent-consciousness. We assert that the parent-child love-mode excludes the possibility of the man-and-woman, or friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that the polarity of the first four poles is inconsistent with the polarity of the second four poles. Nay, between the two great fields is a certain dynamic opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that in the natural course of life there is no possibility of confusing parent love and adult love. But we are mental creatures, and with the explosive and mechanistic aid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a destructive degree, not in a positive or constructive. Let us return then. In the ordinary course of development, by the time that the child is born and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul of the mother is engaged: first, with the children, and second, on the further, higher plane, with the husband, and with her own friends. So that when the child reaches adolescence it must inevitably cast abroad for connection. But now let us remember the actual state of affairs to-day, when the poles are reversed between the sexes. The woman is now the responsible party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. She is the conscious guide and director of the man. She bears his soul between her two hands. And her sex is just a function or an instrument of power. This being so, the man is really the servant and the fount of emotion, love and otherwise. Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all perverted processes, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving an exhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverter of life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pity which is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, a true modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be. Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looks abroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothing more. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got her children. A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_ parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate, and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new rôle of idealist and life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and she shoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice, till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its own feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all the stages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves his test-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object is his mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providential days, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will she pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows one moment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent, idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of the mother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of human kindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is no mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders of sea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the breast. Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from the mother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proud recoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence. Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly forgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly, click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers, and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young. Our miserable infants never know this joy and richness and pang of real maternal warmth. Our wonderful mothers never let us out of their minds for one single moment. Not for a second do they allow us to escape from their ideal benevolence. Not one single breath does a baby draw, free from the imposition of the pure, unselfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable _love-will_ of the mother. Always the _will_, the will, the love-will, the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. Always this stone, this scorpion of maternal nourishment. Always this infernal self-conscious Madonna starving our living guts and bullying us to death with her love. We have made the idea supplant both impulse and tradition. We have no spark of wholeness. And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the great spontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no lovely great flux of vital sympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence. There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there is substitute for everything--life-substitute--just as we have butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute. We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity, and poisonous ideals. The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into life by an effort of will, and shoved up towards manhood by every appliance that can be applied to it, especially the appliance of the maternal will, it is really too pathetic to contemplate. The only thing that prevents us wringing our hands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and beget other similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes and hospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. The problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle. There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breaking the circle. And since the mother-child relationship is to-day the viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results of the poison-gas competition presumably. Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and despicable you are! And how you deserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your own stink. It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, born out of the mental-conscious love-will, born to be another unit of self-conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little entity with a devil's own will of its own, benevolent, of course, and a Satan's own seraphic self-consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat. Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will, we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed to have invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, and London is a Pompeii in five minutes! Or was the American only bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it in the newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes the gods look silly! CHAPTER XII LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter. The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious circle. And it ended in poison-gas. Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not silenced me yet, for all that. We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making a careful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost long ago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it is wonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and _much_ more ideal. So we ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas. London a Pompeii in five minutes! How to outdo Vesuvius!--title of a new book by American authors. There is only one single other thing to do. And it's more difficult than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. It is to leave off benevolenting and having a good will. It is to cease utterly. Just leave off. Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners and clean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain, and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners and leave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leave them alone, to find their own way out. Wives, don't love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the great babies! Sing: "I've had enough of that old sauce." And leave off loving them or caring for them one single bit. Don't even hate them or dislike them. Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil the eggs and fill the salt-cellars and be quite nice, and in your own soul, be alone and be still. Be alone, and be still, preserving all the human decencies, and abandoning the indecency of desires and benevolencies and devotions, those beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine of the love-will. Wives, don't love your husbands nor your children nor anybody. Sit still, and say Hush! And while you shake the duster out of the drawing-room window, say to yourself--"In the sweetness of solitude." And when your husband comes in and says he's afraid he's got a cold and is going to have double pneumonia, say quietly "surely not." And if he wants the ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't get it for himself. But don't let him drive you out of your solitude, your singleness within yourself. And if your little boy falls down the steps and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort him, but say to yourself, even while you tremble with the shock: "Alone. Alone. Be alone, my soul." And if the servant smashes three electric-light bulbs in three minutes, say to her: "How very inconsiderate and careless of you!" But say to yourself: "Don't hear it, my soul. Don't take fright at the pop of a light-bulb." Husbands, don't love your wives any more. If they flirt with men younger or older than yourselves, let your blood not stir. If you can go away, go away. But if you must stay and see her, then say to her, "I would rather you didn't flirt in my presence, Eleanora." Then, when she goes red and loosens torrents of indignation, don't answer any more. And when she floods into tears, say quietly in your own self, "My soul is my own"; and go away, be alone as much as possible. And when she works herself up, and says she must have love or she will die, then say: "Not my love, however." And to all her threats, her tears, her entreaties, her reproaches, her cajolements, her winsomenesses, answer nothing, but say to yourself: "Shall I be implicated in this display of the love-will? Shall I be blasted by this false lightning?" And though you tremble in every fiber, and feel sick, vomit-sick with the scene, still contain yourself, and say, "My soul is my own. It shall not be violated." And learn, learn, learn the one and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in the sweetness of the possession of your own soul. And whether your wife weeps as she takes off her amber beads at night, or whether your neighbor in the train sits in your coat bottoms, or whether your superior in the office makes supercilious remarks, or your inferior is familiar and impudent; or whether you read in the newspaper that Lloyd George is performing another iniquity, or the Germans plotting another plot, say to yourself: "My soul is my own. My soul is with myself, and beyond implication." And wait, quietly, in possession of your own soul, till you meet another man who has made the choice, and kept it. Then you will know him by the look on his face: half a dangerous look, a look of Cain, and half a look of gathered beauty. Then you two will make the nucleus of a new society--Ooray! Bis! Bis!! But if you should never meet such a man: and if your wife should torture you every day with her love-will: and even if she should force herself into a consumption, like Catherine Linton in "Wuthering Heights," owing to her obstinate and determined love-will (which is quite another matter than love): and if you see the world inventing poison-gas and falling into its poisoned grave: never give in, but be alone, and utterly alone with your own soul, in the stillness and sweet possession of your own soul. And don't even be angry. And _never_ be sad. Why should you? It's not your affair. But if your wife should accomplish for herself the sweetness of her own soul's possession, then gently, delicately let the new mode assert itself, the new mode of relation between you, with something of spontaneous paradise in it, the apple of knowledge at last digested. But, my word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple is harder to digest than a lead gun-cartridge. CHAPTER XIII COSMOLOGICAL Well, dear reader, Chapter XII was short, and I hope you found it sweet. But remember, this is an essay on Child Consciousness, not a tract on Salvation. It isn't my fault that I am led at moments into exhortation. Well, then, what about it? One fact now seems very clear--at any rate to me. We've got to pause. We haven't got to gird our loins with a new frenzy and our larynxes with a new Glory Song. Not a bit of it. Before you dash off to put salt on the tail of a new religion or of a new Leader of Men, dear reader, sit down quietly and pull yourself together. Say to yourself: "Come now, what is it all about?" And you'll realize, dear reader, that you're all in a fluster, inwardly. Then say to yourself: "Why am I in such a fluster?" And you'll see you've no reason at all to be so: except that it's rather exciting to be in a fluster, and it may seem rather stale eggs to be in no fluster at all about anything. And yet, dear little reader, once you consider it quietly, it's _so_ much nicer _not_ to be in a fluster. It's so much nicer not to feel one's deeper innards storming like the Bay of Biscay. It is so much better to get up and say to the waters of one's own troubled spirit: Peace, be still ...! And they will be still ... perhaps. And then one realizes that all the wild storms of anxiety and frenzy were only so much breaking of eggs. It isn't our business to live anybody's life, or to die anybody's death, except our own. Nor to save anybody's soul, nor to put anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong, which is more the point to-day. But to be still, and to ignore the false fine frenzy of the seething world. To turn away, now, each one into the stillness and solitude of his own soul. And there to remain in the quiet with the Holy Ghost which is to each man his own true soul. This is the way out of the vicious circle. Not to rush round on the periphery, like a rabbit in a ring, trying to break through. But to retreat to the very center, and there to be filled with a new strange stability, polarized in unfathomable richness with the center of centers. We are so silly, trying to invent devices and machines for flying off from the surface of the earth. Instead of realizing that for us the deep satisfaction lies not in escaping, but in getting into the perfect circuit of the earth's terrestrial magnetism. Not in breaking away. What is the good of trying to break away from one's own? What is the good of a tree desiring to fly like a bird in the sky, when a bird is rooted in the earth as surely as a tree is? Nay, the bird is only the topmost leaf of the tree, fluttering in the high air, but attached as close to the tree as any other leaf. Mr. Einstein's Theory of Relativity does not supersede the Newtonian Law of Gravitation or of Inertia. It only says, "Beware! The Law of Inertia is not the simple ideal proposition you would like to make of it. It is a vast complexity. Gravitation is not one elemental uncouth force. It is a strange, infinitely complex, subtle aggregate of forces." And yet, however much it may waggle, a stone does fall to earth if you drop it. We should like, vulgarly, to rejoice and say that the new Theory of Relativity releases us from the old obligation of centrality. It does no such thing. It only makes the old centrality much more strange, subtle, complex, and vital. It only robs us of the nice old ideal simplicity. Which ideal simplicity and logicalness has become such a fish-bone stuck in our throats. The universe is once more in the mental melting-pot. And you can melt it down as long as you like, and mutter all the jargon and abracadabra, _aldeboronti fosco fornio_ of science that mental monkey-tricks can teach you, you won't get anything in the end but a formula and a lie. The atom? Why, the moment you discover the atom it will explode under your nose. The moment you discover the ether it will evaporate. The moment you get down to the real basis of anything, it will dissolve into a thousand problematic constituents. And the more problems you solve, the more will spring up with their fingers at their nose, making a fool of you. There is only one clue to the universe. And that is the individual soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and moons and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death-result of living individuals. There is a great polarity in life itself. Life itself is dual. And the duality is life and death. And death is not just shadow or mystery. It is the negative reality of life. It is what we call Matter and Force, among other things. Life is individual, always was individual and always will be. Life consists of living individuals, and always did so consist, in the beginning of everything. There never was any universe, any cosmos, of which the first reality was anything but living, incorporate individuals. I don't say the individuals were exactly like you and me. And they were never wildly different. And therefore it is time for the idealist and the scientist--they are one and the same, really--to stop his monkey-jargon about the atom and the origin of life and the mechanical clue to the universe. There isn't any such thing. I might as well say: "Then they took the cart, and rubbed it all over with grease. Then they sprayed it with white wine, and spun round the right wheel five hundred revolutions to the minute and the left wheel, in the opposite direction, seven hundred and seventy-seven revolutions to the minute. Then a burning torch was applied to each axle. And lo, the footboard of the cart began to swell, and suddenly as the cart groaned and writhed, the horse was born, and lay panting between the shafts." The whole scientific theory of the universe is not worth such a tale: that the cart conceived and gave birth to the horse. I do not believe one-fifth of what science can tell me about the sun. I do not believe for one second that the moon is a dead world spelched off from our globe. I do not believe that the stars came flying off from the sun like drops of water when you spin your wet hanky. I have believed it for twenty years, because it seemed so ideally plausible. Now I don't accept any ideal plausibilities at all. I look at the moon and the stars, and I know I don't believe anything that I am told about them. Except that I like their names, Aldebaran and Cassiopeia, and so on. I have tried, and even brought myself to believe in a clue to the outer universe. And in the process I have swallowed such a lot of jargon that I would rather listen now to a negro witch-doctor than to Science. There is nothing in the world that is true except empiric discoveries which work in actual appliances. I know that the sun is hot. But I won't be told that the sun is a ball of blazing gas which spins round and fizzes. No, thank you. At length, for _my_ part, I know that life, and life only is the clue to the universe. And that the living individual is the clue to life. And that it always was so, and always will be so. When the living individual dies, then is the realm of death established. Then you get Matter and Elements and atoms and forces and sun and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In short, the outer universe, the Cosmos. The Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the dead bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. The dead bodies decompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat and radiant energy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts. The dead souls likewise decompose--or else they don't decompose. But if they _do_ decompose, then it is not into any elements of Matter and physical energy. They decompose into some psychic reality, and into some potential will. They reënter into the living psyche of living individuals. The living soul partakes of the dead souls, as the living breast partakes of the outer air, and the blood partakes of the sun. The soul, the individuality, never resolves itself through death into physical constituents. The dead soul remains always soul, and always retains its individual quality. And it does not disappear, but reënters into the soul of the living, of some living individual or individuals. And there it continues its part in life, as a death-witness and a life-agent. But it does not, ordinarily, have any separate existence there, but is incorporate in the living individual soul. But in some extraordinary cases, the dead soul may really act separately in a living individual. How this all is, and what are the laws of the relation between life and death, the living and the dead, I don't know. But that this relation exists, and exists in a manner as I describe it, for my own part I know. And I am fully aware that once we direct our living attention this way, instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then we have a whole _living_ universe of knowledge before us. The universe of life and death, of which we, whose business it is to live and to die, know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without. It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals. And life means nothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is our central reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is the clue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived. How it is contrived that the individual soul in the living sways the very sun in its centrality, I do not know. But it is so. It is the peculiar dynamic polarity of the living soul in every weed or bug or beast, each one separately and individually polarized with the great returning pole of the sun, that maintains the sun alive. For I take it that the sun is the great sympathetic center of our inanimate universe. I take it that the sun breathes in the effluence of all that fades and dies. Across space fly the innumerable vibrations which are the basis of all matter. They fly, breathed out from the dying and the dead, from all that which is passing away, even in the living. These vibrations, these elements pass away across space, and are breathed back again. The sun itself is invisible as the soul. The sun itself is the soul of the inanimate universe, the aggregate clue to the substantial death, if we may call it so. The sun is the great active pole of the sympathetic death-activity. To the sun fly the vibrations or the molecules in the great sympathy-mode of death, and in the sun they are renewed, they turn again as the great gift back again from the sympathetic death-center towards life, towards the living. But it is not even the dead which _really_ sustain the sun. It is the dynamic relation between the solar plexus of individuals and the sun's core, a perfect circuit. The sun is materially composed of all the effluence of the dead. But the _quick_ of the sun is polarized with the living, the sun's quick is polarized in dynamic relation with the quick of life in all living things, that is, with the solar plexus in mankind. A direct dynamic connection between my solar plexus and the sun. Likewise, as the sun is the great fiery, vivifying pole of the inanimate universe, the moon is the other pole, cold and keen and vivifying, corresponding in some way to a _voluntary_ pole. We live between the polarized circuit of sun and moon. And the moon is polarized with the lumbar ganglion, primarily, in man. Sun and moon are dynamically polarized to our actual tissue, they affect this tissue all the time. The moon is, as it were, the pole of our particular terrestrial _volition_, in the universe. What holds the earth swinging in space is first, the great dynamic attraction to the sun, and then counterposing assertion of independence, singleness, which is polarized in the moon. The moon is the clue to our earth's individual identity, in the wide universe. The moon is an immense magnetic center. It is quite wrong to say she is a dead snowy world with craters and so on. I should say she is composed of some very intense element, like phosphorus or radium, some element or elements which have very powerful chemical and kinetic activity, and magnetic activity, affecting us through space. It is not the sun which we see in heaven. It is the rushing thither and the rushing thence of the vibrations expelled by death from the body of life, and returned back again to the body of life. Possibly even a dead soul makes its journey to the sun and back, before we receive it again in our breast. Just as the breath we breathe out flies to the sun and back, before we breathe it in again. And as the water that evaporates rises right to the sun, and returns here. What we see is the great golden rushing thither, from the death exhalation, towards the sun, as a great cloud of bees flying to swarm upon the invisible queen, circling round, and loosing again. This is what we see of the sun. The center is invisible for ever. And of the moon the same. The moon has her back to us for ever. Not her face, as we like to think. The moon also pulls the water, as the sun does. But not in evaporation. The moon pulls by the magnetic force we call gravitation. Gravitation not being quite such a Newtonian simple apple as we are accustomed to find it, we are perhaps farther off from understanding the tides of the ocean than we were before the fruit of the tree fell to Sir Isaac's head. It is certainly not simple little-things tumble-towards-big-things gravitation. In the moon's pull there is peculiar, quite special force exerted over those water-born substances, phosphorus, salt, and lime. The dynamic energy of salt water is something quite different from that of fresh water. And it is this dynamic energy which the sea gives off, and which connects it with the moon. And the moon is some strange coagulation of substance such as salt, phosphorus, soda. It certainly isn't a snowy cold world, like a world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is a globe of dynamic substance like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a certain vivid pole of energy, which pole of energy is directly polarized with our earth, in opposition with the sun. The moon is born from the death of individuals. All things, in their oneing, their unification into the pure, universal oneness, evaporate and fly like an imitation breath towards the sun. Even the crumbling rocks breathe themselves off in this rocky death, to the sun of heaven, during the day. But at the same time, during the night they breathe themselves off to the moon. If we come to think of it, light and dark are a question both of the third body, the intervening body, what we will call, by stretching a point, the individual. As we all know, apart from the existence of molecules of individual matter, there is neither light nor dark. A universe utterly without matter, we don't know whether it is light or dark. Even the pure space between the sun and moon, the blue space, we don't know whether, in itself, it is light or dark. We can say it is light, we can say it is dark. But light and dark are terms which apply only to ourselves, the third, the intermediate, the substantial, the individual. If we come to think of it, light and dark only mean whether we have our face or our back towards the sun. If we have our face to the sun, then we establish the circuit of cosmic or universal or material or infinite sympathy. These four adjectives, cosmic, universal, material, and infinite are almost interchangeable, and apply, as we see, to that realm of the non-individual existence which we call the realm of the substantial death. It is the universe which has resulted from the death of individuals. And to this universe alone belongs the quality of infinity: to the universe of death. Living individuals have no infinity save in this relation to the total death-substance and death-being, the summed-up cosmos. Light and dark, these great wonders, are relative to us alone. These are two vast poles of the cosmic energy and of material existence. These are the vast poles of cosmic sympathy, which we call the sun, and the other white pole of cosmic volition, which we call the moon. To the sun belong the great forces of heat and radiant energy, to the moon belong the great forces of magnetism and electricity, radium-energy, and so on. The sun is not, in any sense, a material body. It is an invariable intense pole of cosmic energy, and what we see are the particles of our terrestrial decomposition flying thither and returning, as fine grains of iron would fly to an intense magnet, or better, as the draught in a room veers towards the fire, attracted infallibly, as a moth towards a candle. The moth is drawn to the candle as the draught is drawn to the fire, in the absolute spell of the material polarity of fire. And air escapes again, hot and different, from the fire. So is the sun. Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is that it is _that which happens_ when matter is raised to a certain temperature--and so forth and so forth. You might as well say, a word is that which happens when I open my mouth and squeeze my larynx and make various tricks with my throat muscles. All these explanations are so senseless. They describe the apparatus, and think they have described the event. Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is not necessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And therefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical with combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may say that fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn't. You might as well tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulging eyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs and wings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A fly is not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of the sum are still fly. So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamic polar principle. Establish a certain polarity between the moon-principle and the sun-principle, between the positive and negative, or sympathetic and volitional dynamism in any piece of matter, and you have fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is the sudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, the material sympathetic mode. Correspondingly, establish an opposite polarity between the sun-principle and the water-principle, and you have decomposition into water, or towards watery dissolution. There are two sheer dynamic principles in our universe, the sun-principle and the moon-principle. And these principles are known to us in immediate contact as fire and water. The sun is not fire. But the principle of fire is the sun-principle. That is, fire is the sudden swoop towards the sun, of matter which is suddenly sun-polarized. Fire is the sudden sun-assertion, the release towards the one pole only. It is the sudden revelation of the cosmic One Polarity, One Identity. But there is another pole. There is the moon. And there is another absolute and visible principle, the principle of water. The moon is not water. But it is the soul of water, the invisible clue to all the waters. So that we begin to realize our visible universe as a vast dual polarity between sun and moon. Two vast poles in space, invisible in themselves, but visible owing to the circuit which swoops between them, round them, the circuit of the universe, established at the cosmic poles of the sun and moon. This then is the infinite, the positive infinite of the positive pole, the sun-pole, negative infinite of the negative pole, the moon-pole. And between the two infinites all existence takes place. But wait. Existence is truly a matter of propagation between the two infinites. But it needs a third presence. Sun-principle and moon-principle, embracing through the æons, could never by themselves propagate one molecule of matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dust for its core. So does the universe. Midway between the two cosmic infinites lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is the Holy Ghost Life, individual life. It is so easy to imagine that between them, the two infinites of the cosmos propagated life. But one single moment of pause and silence, one single moment of gathering the whole soul into knowledge, will tell us that it is a falsity. It was the living individual soul which, dying, flung into space the two wings of the infinite, the two poles of the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternal death-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the result of death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individuals decomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sand of the sun and the moon. When time began, the first individual died, the poles of the sun and moon were flung into space, and between the two, in a strange chaos and battle, the dead body was torn and melted and smelted, and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So the world was formed, always under the feet of the living. And so we have a clue to gravitation. We, mankind, are all one family. In our individual bodies burns the positive quick of all things. But beneath our feet, in our own earth, lies the intense center of our human, individual death, our grave. The earth has one center, to which we are all polarized. The circuit of our life is balanced on the living soul within us, as the positive center, and on the earth's dark center, the center of our abiding and eternal and substantial death, our great negative center, away below. This is the circuit of our immediate individual existence. We stand upon our own grave, with our death fire, the sun, on our right hand, and our death-damp, the moon, on our left. The earth's center is no accident. It is the great individual pole of us who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the first germ-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of the sun and the moon. To this center of our earth we, as humans, are eternally polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall to earth. And the clue of us sinks to the earth's center, the clue of our death, of our _weight_. And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun and moon: or as the death-germ dividing into two nuclei. So from the earth our radiance is flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, when we die. We fall into the earth. But our rising was not from the earth. We rose from the earthless quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and moon are born only of our death. But it is only their polarized dynamic connection with us who live which sustains them all in their place and maintains them all in their own activities. The inanimate universe rests absolutely on the life-circuit of living creatures, is built upon the arch which spans the duality of living beings. CHAPTER XIV SLEEP AND DREAMS This is going rather far, for a book--nay, a booklet--on the child consciousness. But it can't be helped. Child-consciousness it is. And we have to roll away the stone of a scientific cosmos from the tomb-mouth of that imprisoned consciousness. Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. First of all, we are ourselves--which is the refrain of all my chants. We are ourselves. We are living individuals. And as living individuals we are the one, pure clue to our own cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals _have always_ been the clue, since time began, and _will always_ be the clue, while time lasts. I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden evolving of life, somewhere, somewhen and somehow, out of force and matter with a pop. But that pop never popped, dear reader. The boot was on the other leg. And I wish I could mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs and boots, just to annoy you. Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force and matter, dear reader. There is no such thing as evolution, anyhow. There is only development. Man was man in the very first plasm-speck which was his own individual origin, and is still his own individual origin. As for the origin, I don't know much about it. I only know there is but one origin, and that is the individual soul. The individual soul originated everything, and has itself no origin. So that time is a matter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just a mental trick. Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has its own individual soul. And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, here individually located. Our own individual being is our own single reality. But the single reality of the individual being is dynamically and directly polarized to the earth's center, which is the aggregate negative center of all terrestrial existence. In short, the center which in life we thrust away from, and towards which we fall, in death. For, our individual existence being positive, we must have a negative pole to thrust away from. And when our positive individual existence breaks, and we fall into death, our wonderful individual gravitation-center succumbs to the earth's gravitation-center. So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, life-living, yet all the while poised and polarized to the aggregate center of our substantial death, our earth's quick, powerful center-clue. There may be other individuals, alive, and having other worlds under their feet, polarized to their own globe's center. But the very sacredness of my own individuality prevents my pronouncing about them, lest I, in attributing qualities to them, transgress against the pure individuality which is theirs, beyond me. If, however, there be truly other people, with their own world under their feet, then I think it is fair to say that we all have our infinite identity in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death we pass through fiery ways to the same sun. And from the sun, can the spores of souls pass to the various worlds? And to the worlds of the cosmos seed across space, through the wild beams of the sun? Is there seed of Mars in my veins? And is astrology not altogether nonsense? But if the sun is the center of our infinite oneing in death with all the other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great central station of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains for the stars: then ought we to assume that the moon is likewise a meeting-place of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting-place of cold, dead, angry souls. But from our own globe only. The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos. She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for the intense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards the sun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world individual in space. She is the fierce center of retraction, of frictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly stands with her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is who burns white with the intense friction of her withdrawal into separation, that cold, proud white fire of furious, almost malignant apartness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separation. Her white fire is the frictional fire of the last strange, intense watery matter, as this matter fights its way out of combination and out of combustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure polarity of the moon fly the essential waters of our universe. Which essential waters, at the moon's clue, are only an intense invisible energy, a polarity of the moon. There are only three great energies in the universal life, which is always individual and which yet sways all the physical forces as well as the vital energy; and then the two great dynamisms of the sun and the moon. To the dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion-force, and all that range. To the dynamism of the moon the _essential_ watery forces: not just gravitation, but electricity, magnetism, radium-energy, and so on. The moon likewise is the pole of our night activities, as the sun is the pole of our day activities. Remember that the sun and moon are but great self-abandons which individual life has thrown out, to the right hand and to the left. When individual life dies, it flings itself on the right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the moon, in the dual polarity, and sinks to earth. When any man dies, his soul divides in death; as in life, in the first germ, it was united from two germs. It divides into two dark germs, flung asunder: the sun-germ and the moon-germ. Then the material body sinks to earth. And so we have the cosmic universe such as we know it. What is the exact relationship between us and the death-realm of the afterwards we shall never know. But this relation is none the less active every moment of our lives. There is a pure polarity between life and death, between the living and the dead, between each living individual and the outer cosmos. Between each living individual and the earth's center passes a never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It is a circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the left side of the body, to the earth's center. It never ceases. But while we are awake it is entirely under the control and spell of the total consciousness, the individual consciousness, the soul, or self. When we sleep, however, then this individual consciousness of the soul is suspended for the time, and we lie completely within the circuit of the earth's magnetism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of the earth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue removing or arranging the dead body of our past day. For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death-circuit, while we sleep. As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streets of a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day's spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion. This earth-current actively sweeping through us is really the death-activity busy in the service of life. It behooves us to know nothing of it. And as it sweeps it stimulates in the primary centers of consciousness vibrations which flash images upon the mind. Usually, in deep sleep, these images pass unrecorded; but as we pass towards the twilight of dawn and wakefulness, we begin to retain some impression, some record of the dream-images. Usually also the images that are accidentally swept into the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the city gutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers, piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, prophetic of the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so, although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only an accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn envelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and they have no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanical arrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And the same with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them. It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols and fetishes. Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only occasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_ us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. When anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it. But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakes for supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of the mechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that it affects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organs affect the primary conscious-centers. Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real living consciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centers control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place. The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at last with violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash images to the brain. These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying, of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to creep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcripts from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is the directly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its action by the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its established circuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, or plunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe, according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralytic inability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes directly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrown off its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swings left and right in the pure circuit of the earth's polarity. Hinder this swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas from the stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from any obstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift the feet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart to over-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying or of falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction, which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow passages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood through constricted arteries or heart chambers. Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper, elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when we have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep the transfer is made through the dream-images which are mechanical phenomena like mirages. Nightmares which have purely mechanical images may terrify us, give us a great shock, but the shock does not enter our souls. We are surprised, in the morning, to find that the bristling horror of the night seems now just nothing--dwindled to nothing. And this is because what was a purely material obstruction in the physical flow, temporary only, is indeed a nothingness to the living, integral soul. We are subject to such accidents--if we will eat pancakes for supper. And that is the end of it. But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These are true soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions and interrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I may start a chain of connection from one center, which inevitably stimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I may develop a profound and passional love for my mother, in my days of adolescence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole activity of adult love at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper, spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers. Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish the circuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you will get a corresponding activity in the lower, passional centers of adult love. The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime. There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberates the repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of the mother figures in passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams. The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire. The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept a dream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are given over to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not forget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psyche possesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy who dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached sex plunging in sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of the mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of the dream-process immediately unites the sex-sensation to the great stock image, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressed incest desire? On the contrary. The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process will persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies a man. Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reason of simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first great emotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-process mechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intense sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only to the upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic. Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of the upper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of the lower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is _not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it. But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object of great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons who, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once a man is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, then the dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic _rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken. And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically applied to the disturbance of the lower plane. Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its own automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is so flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soul really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism. For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process. The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ the automatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-process invariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, plays a triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almost invariably just the _reverse_ of the soul's desire, in any distress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronounced that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will dream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that the desire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms an arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present you with his wedding. Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies most often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature. So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic conclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this may sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the dream-trick.--That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism as it fears death: death being automatic. It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the two most important: the principle of automatism and the principle of inversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will help a great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It is really a sin against ourselves to prostitute the living spontaneous soul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, or any of the processes of the automatic sphere. Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally. Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of some arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is another principle. But if the image is a symbol, then the only safe way to explain the symbol is to proceed from the quality of emotion connected with the symbol. For example, a man has a persistent passionate fear-dream about horses. He suddenly finds himself among great, physical horses, which may suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge madly round him, they rear above him, threatening to destroy him. At any minute he may be trampled down. Now a psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. Examining the emotional reference we find that the feeling is sensual, there is a great impression of the powerful, almost beautiful physical bodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded haunches, the rearing. Is the dynamic passion in a horse the danger-passion? It is a great sensual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction of intense, sensual, dominant volition. The horse which rears and kicks and neighs madly acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. But this intense activity from the sacral ganglion is male: the sacral ganglion is at its highest intensity in the male. So that the horse-dream refers to some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male. The horse is presented as an object of terror, which means that to the man's automatic dream-soul, which loves automatism, the great sensual male activity is the greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, which has got the sensual nature repressed, would like to keep it repressed. Whereas the greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is that this very male sensual nature, represented as a menace, shall be actually accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretly yearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and most powerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex. The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father. The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who is his father. But it has nothing to do with _incest_. The love is probably a just love. The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the bull the centers of power are in the breast and shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols of this vast power in the upper self. The woman's fear of the bull is a great terror of the dynamic _upper_ centers in man. The bull's horns, instead of being phallic, represent the enormous potency of the upper centers. A woman whose most positive dynamism is in the breast and shoulders is fascinated by the bull. Her dream-fear of the bull and his horns which may run into her may be reversed to a significance of desire for connection, not from the centers of the lower, sensual self, but from the intense physical centers of the upper body: the phallus polarized from the upper centers, and directed towards the great breast center of the woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of the great breast-and-shoulder, _upper_ rage and power of man, which may pierce her defenseless lower self. The terror and the desire are near together--and go with an admiration of the slender, abstracted bull loins. Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impressions, may be almost imageless. They may be a great terror, for example, of a purely geometric figure--a figure from pure geometry, or an example of pure mathematics. Or they may have no image, but only a sensation of smell, or of color, or of sound. These are the dream-fears of the soul which is falling out of human integrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almost only, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation with another being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamic relationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to the mechanical world, of force and matter, sensation and law. So that in dream-activity sensation or abstraction, abstract law or calculation occurs as the predominant or exclusive image. In the dream there may be a sensation of admiration or delight. The waking sensation is fear. Because the soul fears above all things its fall from individual integrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is the automatic death-world. And this is our danger to-day. We tend, through deliberate idealism or deliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first nature of spontaneous, integral being, and to substitute the second nature, the automatic nature of the mechanical universe. For this purpose we stay up late at night, and we rise late in the morning. To stay up late into the night is always bad. Let us be as ideal as we may, when the sun goes down the natural mode of life changes in us. The mind changes its activity. As the soul gradually goes passive, before yielding up its sway, the mind falls into its second phase of activity. It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness, lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past. Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all of which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over, that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or bitterly. Evening is the time for this. But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for passion. Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflames into life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by a process of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived, by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation, consciousness, energy and passion, and live it out. It is a liberation from the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of control and fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturally the course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction: sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deeper sensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual. The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form of retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of _dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness is blood-consciousness. And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When the blood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first the lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to the great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep swaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep. The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with its first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate purely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual polarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal. And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They fall apart and sleep in their transmutation. But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of mankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one, more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. The blood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous. But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect dark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from the fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition, or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in sex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in the second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. That is, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic sexual connection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstanding fact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need a corresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The more individual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a non-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the more does our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individual woman, blood-polarized with us. We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And we force it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks as we do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. The dynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not like me in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper than thought-mode, that it may result in very different expression, verbally. We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into the day. We have made love and sex a matter of seeing and hearing and of day-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty--their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration. We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. It is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. By provoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the sex-reaction, from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness of conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies. We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it from coming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its own fundamental being. No matter how we work our sex, from the upper or outer consciousness, we don't achieve anything but the falsification and impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either we must withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate. We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day. Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well up our sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep. When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The half-hour's sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the morning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we persist from bad to worse. With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious, because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good, glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our day-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin to come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased. CHAPTER XV THE LOWER SELF So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical. The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single individual is dependent upon the moon. The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals. Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp. It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium. The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her. Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every force relative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative to other existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast, and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in another manner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life of herb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the life of individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life of individuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly, because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do not know what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But our life alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of our single terrestrial individuality. Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual being exists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directly upon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life of individuals. But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon the moon? The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the active darkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness. Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life is polarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind which sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lower body act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flow upwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and thought--we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to know all things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spirit seeking to bring all the universe into the range of our conscious individuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this old world, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree would die if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old world of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a more rusé intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals, the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder. Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance out a little further. But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls. So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so. If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions of benevolence be what they will. But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and denudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. For there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse, maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to the next civilization. It's no good thinking we can leave it to China or Japan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms. And here we are, we don't look much like carrying through to a new era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr. Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion, which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see, Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one absolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces may be referred. There is no one single absolute central principle governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate all mechanical forces of the universe. I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It is what I understand of the Einstein theory. What I doubt is the equation formula. It seems to me, also, that the velocity of light through space is the _deus ex machina_ in Einstein's physics. Somebody will some day put salt on the tail of light as it travels through space, and then its simple velocity will split up into something complex, and the Relativity formula will fall to bits.--But I am a confirmed outsider, so I'll hold my tongue. All I know is that people have got the word Relativity into their heads, and catch-words always refer to some latent idea or conception in the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock the last center-pin out of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence for centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system--scientific and sociological. Very good thing for us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad to say, has pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is how the vulgar mind understands it. The equation formula doesn't count.--So now, the universe, according to the popular mind, can wobble about without being pinned down.--Really, an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewish mind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. We are glad to be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we are driven right on to nihilism we may find a way through. So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. Lord Haldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt. But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and always relative to the thing known and to the knower. I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute principle in the universe. I think everything is relative. But I also feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature is absolute: in its own being. And that all things in the universe are just relative to the individual living creature. And that individual living creatures are relative to each other. And what about a goal? There is no final goal. But every step taken has its own little relative goal. So what about the next step? Well, first and foremost, that every individual creature shall come to its own particular and individual fullness of being.--Very nice, very pretty--but _how_? Well, through a living dynamic relation to other creatures.--Very nice again, pretty little adjectives. But what _sort_ of a living dynamic relation?--Well, _not_ the relation of love, that's one thing, nor of brotherhood, nor equality. The next relation has got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership, obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders, and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader. All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all the vital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit and democracy we can found our new order. We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Because we just _aren't_ all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn't work. Because whether we want it or not, we've got night-time selves. And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her natural functions just like anybody else. We must _always_ keep in line with this fact. Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the very basis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can _stay_ at the source. Nor even make a _goal_ of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood. When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I am and know myself to be." And when you rise in the morning you have to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself." The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of the passionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the next society. And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the individual towards life, and towards leader, this must be the dynamic of the next civilization. The intense, passionate yearning of the soul towards the soul of a stronger, greater individual, and the passionate blood-belief in the fulfillment of this yearning will give men the next motive for life. We have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousness of the blood. And from this rise again. But there is no rising until the bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished. As social units, as civilized men we have to do what we do as physical organisms. Every day, the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls, and every day, when this happens, the tide of life turns in us. Instead of flowing upwards and outwards towards mental consciousness and activity, it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards towards the digestion processes, downwards further to the great sexual conjunctions, downwards to sleep. This is the soul now retreating, back from the outer life of day, back to the origins. And so, it stays its hour at the first great sensual stations, the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But the tide ebbs on, down to the immense, almost inhuman passionate darkness of sex, the strange and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past the last great station of the darkest psyche, down to the earth's center. Then we sleep. And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic pole which calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through the moonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is the moon that sways the blood, and sways us back into the extinction of the blood.--And as the soul retreats back into the sea of its own darkness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental consciousness that belongs to this retreat back into the sensual deeps; and then it goes extinguished. There is sleep. And so we resolve back towards our elementals. We dissolve back, out of the upper consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, back, down into the deep and massive, swaying consciousness of the dark, living blood. At the last hour of sex I am no more than a powerful wave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge and join with the answering sea in the other individual. When the sea of individual blood which I am at that hour heaves and finds its pure contact with the sea of individual blood which is the woman at that hour, then each of us enters into the wholeness of our deeper infinitude, our profound fullness of being, in the ocean of our oneness and our consciousness. This is under the spell of the moon, of sea-born Aphrodite, mother and bitter goddess. For I am carried away from my sunny day-self into this other tremendous self, where knowledge will not save me, but where I must obey as the sea obeys the tides. Yet however much I go, I know that I am all the while myself, in my going. This then is the duality of my day and my night being: a duality so bitter to an adolescent. For the adolescent thinks with shame and terror of his night. He would wish to have no night-self. But it is Moloch, and he cannot escape it. The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And we of our days and our nights. Without the night-consummation we are trees without roots. And the night-consummation takes place under the spell of the moon. It is one pure motion of meeting and oneing. But even so, it is a circuit, not a straight line. One pure motion of meeting and oneing, until the flash breaks forth, when the two are one. And this, this flashing moment of the ignition of two seas of blood, this is the moment of begetting. But the begetting of a child is less than the begetting of the man and the woman. Woman is begotten of man at that moment, into her greater self: and man is begotten of woman. This is the main. And that which cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the two individuals, that which cannot take fire into individual life, this trickles down and is the seed of a new life, destined ultimately to fulfill that which the parents could not fulfill. So it is for ever. Sex then is a polarization of the individual blood in man towards the individual blood in woman. It is more, also. But in its prime functional reality it is this. And sex union means bringing into connection the dynamic poles of sex in man and woman. In sex we have our basic, most elemental being. Here we have our most elemental contact. It is from the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion that the dark forces of manhood and womanhood sparkle. From the dark plexus of sympathy run out the acute, intense sympathetic vibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or so it should be, in genuine passionate love. There is no mental interference. There is even no interference of the upper centers. Love is supposed to be blind. Though modern love wears strong spectacles. But love is really blind. Without sight or scent or hearing the powerful magnetic current vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in the female, vibrating on to the air like some intense wireless message. And there is immediate response from the sacral ganglion in some male. And then sight and day-consciousness begin to fade. In the lower animals apparently any male can receive the vibration of any female: and if need be, even across long distances of space. But the higher the development the more individual the attunement. Every wireless station can only receive those messages which are in its own vibration key. So with sex in specialized individuals. From the powerful dynamic center the female sends out her dark summons, the intense dark vibration of sex. And according to her nature, she receives her responses from the males. The male enters the magnetic field of the female. He vibrates helplessly in response. There is established at once a dynamic circuit, more or less powerful. It would seem as if, while ever life remains free and wild and independent, the sex-circuit, while it lasts, is omnipotent. There is one electric flow which encompasses one male and one female, or one male and one particular group of females all polarized in the same key of vibration. This circuit of vital sex magnetism, at first loose and wide, gradually closes and becomes more powerful, contracts and grows more intense, until the two individuals arrive into contact. And even then the pulse and flow of attraction and recoil varies. In free wild life, each touch brings about an intense recoil, and each recoil causes an intense sympathetic attraction. So goes on the strange battle of desire, until the consummation is reached. It is the precise parallel of what happens in a thunder-storm, when the dynamic forces of the moon and the sun come into collision. The result is threefold: first, the electric flash, then the birth of pure water, new water. So it is in sex relation. There is a threefold result. First, the flash of pure sensation and of real electricity. Then there is the birth of an entirely new state of blood in each partner. And then there is the liberation. But the main thing, as in the thunder-storm, is the absolute renewal of the atmosphere: in this case, the blood. It would no doubt be found that the electro-dynamic condition of the white and red corpuscles of the blood was quite different after sex union, and that the chemical composition of the fluid of the blood was quite changed. And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of an individual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as a matter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in the nerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broods there with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of relief and renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be a pure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite in some great creative or religious or constructive activity, or as when they fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative or constructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, _must_ always be the goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goal arises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the blood in an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit. A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive, constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the hope of passionate, purposive _destructive_ activity: the two amount religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in itself is a disaster: a vice. But an ideal purpose which has no roots in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow humiliation and sterility. The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And by pure we don't mean an ideal sterile innocence and similarity between boy and girl. We mean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the center of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is polarized upwards, towards the sun and the day's activity. Women and men are dynamically different, in everything. Even in the mind, where we seem to meet, we are really utter strangers. We may speak the same verbal language, men and women: as Turk and German might both speak Latin. But _whatever_ a man says, his meaning is something quite different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes, still the difference is the same. The _apparent_ mutual understanding, in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion, and always breaks down in the end. Woman can polarize her consciousness upwards. She can obtain a hand even over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasm of coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which the snake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whose consciousness is _only_ dynamic, and non-cerebral. The snake, who has no mental life, but only an intensely vivid dynamic mind, he envied the human race its mental consciousness. And he knew, this intensely wise snake, that the one way to make humanity pay more than the price of mental consciousness was to pervert woman into mentality: to stimulate her into the upper flow of consciousness. For the true polarity of consciousness in woman is downwards. Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted, it is so. The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet. Pervert this, and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and head, and you get a race of "intelligent" women, delightful companions, tricky courtesans, clever prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends, interesting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant managers, women as good as men at all the manly tricks: and better, because they are so very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. But then, after a while, pop it all goes. The moment woman has got man's ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world--there's an end of it. She's had enough. She's had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes absolutely perverse, and her one end is to prostitute herself and her ideals to sex. Which is her business at the present moment. We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But his revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don't find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams cross the great gulf which is between them. So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Instead of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our intimate relationships, there should be the most intense open antagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it, say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won't have it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so, angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never mind about being justified. If you hate anything she does, turn on her in a fury. Harry her, and make her life a hell, so long as the real hot rage is in you. Don't silently hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty trick, so mean and ungenerous. If you feel a burning rage, turn on her and give it to her, and _never_ repent. It'll probably hurt you much more than it hurts her. But never repent for your real hot rages, whether they're "justifiable" or not. If you care one sweet straw for the woman, and if she makes you that you can't bear any more, give it to her, and if your heart weeps tears of blood afterwards, tell her you're thankful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it worse. The same with wives and their husbands. If a woman's husband gets on her nerves, she should fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet and smarmy with other people, she should let him have it to his nose, straight out. She should lead him a dog's life, and never swallow her bile. With wife or husband, you should never swallow your bile. It makes you go all wrong inside. Always let fly, tooth and nail, and never repent, no matter what sort of a figure you make. We have a vice of love, of softness and sweetness and smarminess and intimacy and promiscuous kindness and all that sort of thing. We think it's so awfully nice of us to be like that, in ourselves. But in our wives or our husbands it gets on our nerves horribly. Yet we think it oughtn't to, so we swallow our spleen. We shouldn't. When Jesus said "if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," he was beside the point. The eye doesn't really offend us. We are rather fond of our own squint eye. It only offends the person who cares for us. And it's up to this person to pluck it out. This holds particularly good of the love and intimacy vice. It'll never offend us in ourselves. While it will be gall and wormwood to our wife or husband. And it is on this promiscuous love and intimacy and kindness and sweetness, all a vice, that our self-consciousness really rests. If we are battered out of this, we shall be battered out of self-consciousness. And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes. Wives, do the same to your husbands. But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying. Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she's got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious. And then you've got a harder thing still to do. Stop her from looking on you as her "lover." Cure her of that, if you haven't cured her before. Put the fear of the Lord into her that way. And make her know she's got to believe in you again, and in the deep purpose you stand for. But before you can do that, you've got to _stand_ for some deep purpose. It's no good faking one up. You won't take a woman in, not really. Even when she _chooses_ to be taken in, for prettiness' sake, it won't do you any good. But combat her. Combat her in her sexual pertinacity, and in her secret glory or arrogance in the sexual goal. Combat her in her cock-sure belief that she "knows" and that she is "right." Take it all out of her. Make her yield once more to the male leadership: if you've got anywhere to lead to. If you haven't, best leave the woman alone; she has _one_ goal of her own, anyhow, and it's better than your nullity and emptiness. You've got to take a new resolution into your soul, and break off from the old way. You've got to know that you're a man, and being a man means you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way through the old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. And you've got to start off ahead. And if you don't know which direction to take, look round for the man your heart will point out to you. And follow--and never look back. Because if Lot's wife, looking back, was turned to a pillar of salt, these miserable men, for ever looking back to their women for guidance, they are miserable pillars of half-rotten tears. You'll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a real pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You'll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. The moon, the planet of women, sways us back from our day-self, sways us back from our real social unison, sways us back, like a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism and separation and social disintegration. That is woman's inevitable mode, let her words be what they will. Her goal is the deep, sensual individualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hostile, with guarded doors. And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, _believe_ in your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go. She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. She may of course already love you, and love you for yourself. But the love will be a nest of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a little fear or awe of your further purpose, a living _belief_ in your going beyond her, into futurity. But when once a woman _does_ believe in her man, in the pioneer which he is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in front, and who may be lost to her for ever in this darkness; when once she knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that the loneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so; ah, then, how wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back to her, at evening, as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it is to come home to her! How good it is then when the night falls! How richly the evening passes! And then, for her, at last, all that she has lost during the day to have it again between her arms, all that she has missed, to have it poured out for her, and a richness and a wonder she had never expected. It is her hour, her goal. That's what it is to have a wife. Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she _believes_ in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. Then, how wonderful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, with all the burden of the day in your veins, turning home! Then you too turn to your other goal: to the splendor of darkness between her arms. And you know the goal is there for you: how rich that feeling is. And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That's what it is to have a wife. But no man ever had a wife unless he served a great predominant purpose. Otherwise, he has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much she may be married to him, unless his days have a living purpose, constructive or destructive, but a purpose beyond her and all she stands for; unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is really committed to his purpose, she will not be a wife, she will be only a mistress and he will be her lover. If the man has no purpose for his days, then to the woman alone remains the goal of her nights: the great sex goal. And this goal is no goal, but always cries for the something beyond: for the rising in the morning and the going forth beyond, the man disappearing ahead into the distance of futurity, that which his purpose stands for, the future. The sex goal needs, absolutely needs, this further departure. And if there _be_ no further departure, no great way of belief on ahead: and if sex is the starting point and the goal as well: then sex becomes like the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last the departure into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or like Anna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning point both, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in "Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," and is the theme of almost _all_ modern tragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies of love, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let it be so." And one is always tempted to say "Let it be so." But no, let it be not so. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, rather than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" to the passion and the death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a false conclusion. His books were better than his life. Better the woman's goal, sex and death, than some _false_ goal of man's. Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha and that porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple tried so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As a man I am a ruin"--better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that beastly peasant blouse the old man wore. Better passion and death than any more of these "isms." No more of the old purpose done up in aspic. Better passion and death. But still--we _might_ live, mightn't we? For heaven's sake answer plainly "No," if you feel like it. No good temporizing. EPILOGUE "_Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria._" All the psalms wind up with the Gloria.--"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end. Amen." Well, then, Amen. I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear little reader: if there be any dear little reader who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all by myself.--But don't you think the show is all over. I've got another volume up my sleeve, and after a year or two years, when I have shaken it down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at the foot of your Liberty statue, oh Columbia, as I do this one. I suppose Columbia means the States.--"Hail Columbia!"--I suppose, etymologically, it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. _columba_, a dove. Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don't roar me like the sucking doves of the critics of my "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue, that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: "Do you see any green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. I only see the reflection of that torch--or is it a carrot?--which you are holding up to light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayed across the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dear lady. And I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice little carrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an extraordinarily inexhaustible long time. And innumerable asses can collect themselves nice little heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up their heads and brag over them with fairly pan-demoniac yells of gratification. Of course I don't see any green in your eye, dear Libertas, unless it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. The gleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia! Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots this here little ass and makes you a nice present of this pretty book. You needn't sniff, and glance at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn't throw down the thinnest carrot-paring you can pare off, and then say: "Why should I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting nonsense!" You can't pay for it, darling. If I didn't make you a present of it you could never buy it. So don't shake your carrot-sceptre and feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Missis. You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn't bite you.--No, you needn't bother to put your carrot behind your back, nobody wants to snatch it. How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought you a posy: this nice little posy of words and wisdom which I made for you in the woods of Ebersteinburg, on the borders of the Black Forest, near Baden Baden, in Germany, in this summer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made it specially for you--Whitman, for whom I have an immense regard, says "These States." I suppose I ought to say: "Those States." If the publisher would let me, I'd dedicate this book to you, to "Those States." Because I wrote this book entirely for you, Columbia. You may not take it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny bit of Schwarzwald sap in it, and be finally disgusted. I admit that trees ought to think twice before they flourish in such a disgraced place as the Fatherland. "_Chi va coi zoppi, all' anno zoppica._" But you've not only to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but _where_ ye may. And so, as I said before, the Black Forest, etc. I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take my posy and put your carrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: "I'm sure, Mr. Lawrence, it is a _long_ time since I had such a perfectly beautiful bunch of ideas brought me." And I shall blush and look sheepish and say: "So glad you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep fresh quite a long time, if you put them in water." Whereupon you, Columbia, with real American gallantry: "Oh, they'll keep for _ever_, Mr. Lawrence. They _couldn't_ be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectly lovely-colored ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much." Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we shall be with one another: and how much nicer it will be than if you snorted "High-falutin' Nonsense"--or "Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish." When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it in the oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them a triumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he had short legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump of philoprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. And down either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large, well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don't know what the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king's appetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturally it looked as if Naples had done it on purpose. As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant _Italia Una_! "Italy shall be one." Ask Don Sturzo. Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!"--and "Jump! Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap! Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely and sensibly. I don't like you as a _carotaia_, precious. Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements of Professor Pickering of Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert that there's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there's life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor bases his assertions on photographs--hundreds of photographs--of a crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied. I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over me with the triteness of these round numbers. "Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably the springing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields of foliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and which disappear in a maximum period of eleven days."--Again I'm not satisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, cress, mustard, or marigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And _blossom_! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, you might have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are good to eat, or if they're purely for ornament. I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to land on one of these fields of foliage and find a donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw! "The plates moreover show that great blizzards, snow-storms, and volcanic eruptions are also frequent." So no doubt the blossoms are edelweiss. "We find," says the professor, "a living world at our very doors where life in some respects resembles that of Mars." All I can say is: "Pray come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin Signor Martian?" Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs and observations are really wonderful. But his _explanations_! Come now, Columbia, where is your High-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage which spring up at dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as quickly (!!!!) are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth is stranger than fiction. I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow. So long, Columbia. _A riverderci._ 
37206	----	SEA AND SARDINIA BY D. H. LAWRENCE WITH EIGHT PICTURES IN COLOR BY Jan Juta [Illustration] NEW YORK THOMAS SELTZER 1921 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THOMAS SELTZER, INC. _All rights reserved_ _Printed in the United States of America_ [Illustration: OROSEI] CONTENTS I. AS FAR AS PALERMO 11 II. THE SEA 44 III. CAGLIARI 99 IV. MANDAS 127 V. TO SORGONO 154 VI. TO NUORO 212 VII. TO TERRANOVA AND THE STEAMER 260 VIII. BACK 312 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS OROSEI _Frontispiece_ MAP--BY D. H. LAWRENCE 44 ISILI 100 TONARA 148 SORGONO 180 FONNI 204 GAVOI 236 NUORO 268 TERRANOVA 300 SEA AND SARDINIA I. AS FAR AS PALERMO. Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither. Why can't one sit still? Here in Sicily it is so pleasant: the sunny Ionian sea, the changing jewel of Calabria, like a fire-opal moved in the light; Italy and the panorama of Christmas clouds, night with the dog-star laying a long, luminous gleam across the sea, as if baying at us, Orion marching above; how the dog-star Sirius looks at one, looks at one! he is the hound of heaven, green, glamorous and fierce!--and then oh regal evening star, hung westward flaring over the jagged dark precipices of tall Sicily: then Etna, that wicked witch, resting her thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her orange-coloured smoke. They called her the Pillar of Heaven, the Greeks. It seems wrong at first, for she trails up in a long, magical, flexible line from the sea's edge to her blunt cone, and does not seem tall. She seems rather low, under heaven. But as one knows her better, oh awe and wizardy! Remote under heaven, aloof, so near, yet never with us. The painters try to paint her, and the photographers to photograph her, in vain. Because why? Because the near ridges, with their olives and white houses, these are with us. Because the river-bed, and Naxos under the lemon groves, Greek Naxos deep under dark-leaved, many-fruited lemon groves, Etna's skirts and skirt-bottoms, these still are our world, our own world. Even the high villages among the oaks, on Etna. But Etna herself, Etna of the snow and secret changing winds, she is beyond a crystal wall. When I look at her, low, white, witch-like under heaven, slowly rolling her orange smoke and giving sometimes a breath of rose-red flame, then I must look away from earth, into the ether, into the low empyrean. And there, in that remote region, Etna is alone. If you would see her, you must slowly take off your eyes from the world and go a naked seer to the strange chamber of the empyrean. Pedestal of heaven! The Greeks had a sense of the magic truth of things. Thank goodness one still knows enough about them to find one's kinship at last. There are so many photographs, there are so infinitely many water-colour drawings and oil paintings which purport to render Etna. But pedestal of heaven! You must cross the invisible border. Between the foreground, which is our own, and Etna, pivot of winds in lower heaven, there is a dividing line. You must change your state of mind. A metempsychosis. It is no use thinking you can see and behold Etna and the foreground both at once. Never. One or the other. Foreground and a transcribed Etna. Or Etna, pedestal of heaven. Why, then, must one go? Why not stay? Ah, what a mistress, this Etna! with her strange winds prowling round her like Circe's panthers, some black, some white. With her strange, remote communications and her terrible dynamic exhalations. She makes men mad. Such terrible vibrations of wicked and beautiful electricity she throws about her, like a deadly net! Nay, sometimes, verily, one can feel a new current of her demon magnetism seize one's living tissue and change the peaceful life of one's active cells. She makes a storm in the living plasm and a new adjustment. And sometimes it is like a madness. This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely, so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, without losing their souls. She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she takes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but an elemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almost inspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons, and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ach, horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls. Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and at once. After having come back only at the end of October, already one must dash away. And it is only the third of January. And one cannot afford to move. Yet there you are: at the Etna bidding one goes. * * * * * Where does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There is Tunis at hand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the Greek guarding temples, to make one madder? Never. Neither Syracuse and the madness of its great quarries. Tunis? Africa? Not yet, not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet. Naples, Rome, Florence? No good at all. Where then? Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation. Like the Basque lands. Sure enough, it is Italian now, with its railways and its motor-omnibuses. But there is an uncaptured Sardinia still. It lies within the net of this European civilisation, but it isn't landed yet. And the net is getting old and tattered. A good many fish are slipping through the net of the old European civilisation. Like that great whale of Russia. And probably even Sardinia. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia. * * * * * There is a fortnightly boat sailing from Palermo--next Wednesday, three days ahead. Let us go, then. Away from abhorred Etna, and the Ionian sea, and these great stars in the water, and the almond trees in bud, and the orange trees heavy with red fruit, and these maddening, exasperating, impossible Sicilians, who never knew what truth was and have long lost all notion of what a human being is. A sort of sulphureous demons. _Andiamo!_ But let me confess, in parenthesis, that I am not at all sure whether I don't really prefer these demons to our sanctified humanity. Why does one create such discomfort for oneself! To have to get up in the middle of the night--half past one--to go and look at the clock. Of course this fraud of an American watch has stopped, with its impudent phosphorescent face. Half past one! Half past one, and a dark January night. Ah, well! Half past one! And an uneasy sleep till at last it is five o'clock. Then light a candle and get up. The dreary black morning, the candle-light, the house looking night-dismal. Ah, well, one does all these things for one's pleasure. So light the charcoal fire and put the kettle on. The queen bee shivering round half dressed, fluttering her unhappy candle. "It's fun," she says, shuddering. "Great," say I, grim as death. First fill the thermos with hot tea. Then fry bacon--good English bacon from Malta, a god-send, indeed--and make bacon sandwiches. Make also sandwiches of scrambled eggs. Make also bread and butter. Also a little toast for breakfast--and more tea. But ugh, who wants to eat at this unearthly hour, especially when one is escaping from bewitched Sicily. Fill the little bag we call the kitchenino. Methylated spirit, a small aluminium saucepan, a spirit-lamp, two spoons, two forks, a knife, two aluminium plates, salt, sugar, tea--what else? The thermos flask, the various sandwiches, four apples, and a little tin of butter. So much for the kitchenino, for myself and the queen bee. Then my knapsack and the q-b's handbag. Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim of the Ionian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow the cup of tea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we can find the house decent when we come back. Shut the door-windows of the upper terrace and go down. Lock the door: the upper half of the house made fast. The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape. Looking across from the veranda at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold. The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long red slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalve which has held life between its lips so long. And here, at this house, we are ledged so awfully above the dawn, naked to it. Fasten the door-windows of the lower veranda. One won't fasten at all. The summer heat warped it one way, the masses of autumn rain warped it another. Put a chair against it. Lock the last door and hide the key. Sling the knapsack on one's back, take the kitchenino in one's hand and look round. The dawn-red widening, between the purpling sea and the troubled sky. A light in the capucin convent across there. Cocks crowing and the long, howling, hiccuping, melancholy bray of an ass. "All females are dead, all females--och! och! och!--hoooo! Ahaa!--there's one left." So he ends on a moaning grunt of consolation. This is what the Arabs tell us an ass is howling when he brays. * * * * * Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah, dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far. * * * * * It is full dawn--dawn, not morning, the sun will not have risen. The village is nearly all dark in the red light, and asleep still. No one at the fountain by the capucin gate: too dark still. One man leading a horse round the corner of the Palazzo Corvaia. One or two dark men along the Corso. And so over the brow, down the steep cobble-stone street between the houses, and out to the naked hill front. This is the dawn-coast of Sicily. Nay, the dawn-coast of Europe. Steep, like a vast cliff, dawn-forward. A red dawn, with mingled curdling dark clouds, and some gold. It must be seven o'clock. The station down below, by the sea. And noise of a train. Yes, a train. And we still high on the steep track, winding downwards. But it is the train from Messina to Catania, half an hour before ours, which is from Catania to Messina. * * * * * So jolt, and drop, and jolt down the old road that winds on the cliff face. Etna across there is smothered quite low, quite low in a dense puther of ink-black clouds. Playing some devilry in private, no doubt. The dawn is angry red, and yellow above, the sea takes strange colors. I hate the station, pigmy, drawn out there beside the sea. On this steep face, especially in the windless nooks, the almond blossom is already out. In little puffs and specks and stars, it looks very like bits of snow scattered by winter. Bits of snow, bits of blossom, fourth day of the year 1921. Only blossom. And Etna indescribably cloaked and secretive in her dense black clouds. She has wrapped them quite round her, quite low round her skirts. * * * * * At last we are down. We pass the pits where men are burning lime--red-hot, round pits--and are out on the high-way. Nothing can be more depressing than an Italian high-road. From Syracuse to Airolo it is the same: horrible, dreary, slummy high-roads the moment you approach a village or any human habitation. Here there is an acrid smell of lemon juice. There is a factory for making citrate. The houses flush on the road, under the great lime-stone face of the hill, open their slummy doors, and throw out dirty water and coffee dregs. We walk over the dirty water and coffee dregs. Mules rattle past with carts. Other people are going to the station. We pass the Dazio and are there. * * * * * Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there are insuperable differences. So one sits and thinks, watching the people on the station: like a line of caricatures between oneself and the naked sea and the uneasy, clouding dawn. You would look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline southerner of romance. It might, as far as features are concerned, be an early morning crowd waiting for the train on a north London suburb station. As far as features go. For some are fair and some colorless and none racially typical. The only one that is absolutely like a race caricature is a tall stout elderly fellow with spectacles and a short nose and a bristling moustache, and he is the German of the comic papers of twenty years ago. But he is pure Sicilian. They are mostly young fellows going up the line to Messina to their job: not artizans, lower middle class. And externally, so like any other clerks and shop-men, only rather more shabby, much less _socially_ self-conscious. They are lively, they throw their arms round one another's necks, they all but kiss. One poor chap has had earache, so a black kerchief is tied round his face, and his black hat is perched above, and a comic sight he looks. No one seems to think so, however. Yet they view my arrival with a knapsack on my back with cold disapprobation, as unseemly as if I had arrived riding on a pig. I ought to be in a carriage, and the knapsack ought to be a new suit-case. I know it, but am inflexible. That is how they are. Each one thinks he is as handsome as Adonis, and as "fetching" as Don Juan. Extraordinary! At the same time, all flesh is grass, and if a few trouser-buttons are missing or if a black hat perches above a thick black face-muffle and a long excruciated face, it is all in the course of nature. They seize the black-edged one by the arm, and in profound commiseration: "Do you suffer? Are you suffering?" they ask. And that also is how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other's face. Never in the world have I seen such melting gay tenderness as between casual Sicilians on railway platforms, whether they be young lean-cheeked Sicilians or huge stout Sicilians. There must be something curious about the proximity of a volcano. Naples and Catania alike, the men are hugely fat, with great macaroni paunches, they are expansive and in a perfect drip of casual affection and love. But the Sicilians are even more wildly exuberant and fat and all over one another than the Neapolitans. They never leave off being amorously friendly with almost everybody, emitting a relentless physical familiarity that is quite bewildering to one not brought up near a volcano. This is more true of the middle classes than of the lower. The working men are perforce thinner and less exuberant. But they hang together in clusters, and can never be physically near enough. * * * * * It is only thirty miles to Messina, but the train takes two hours. It winds and hurries and stops beside the lavender grey morning sea. A flock of goats trail over the beach near the lapping wave's edge, dismally. Great wide deserts of stony river-beds run down to the sea, and men on asses are picking their way across, and women are kneeling by the small stream-channel washing clothes. The lemons hang pale and innumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another all round. Solid forests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains and the sea, on the strip of plain. Women, vague in the orchard under-shadow, are picking the lemons, lurking as if in the undersea. There are heaps of pale yellow lemons under the trees. They look like pale, primrose-smouldering fires. Curious how like fires the heaps of lemons look, under the shadow of foliage, seeming to give off a pallid burning amid the suave, naked, greenish trunks. When there comes a cluster of orange trees, the oranges are red like coals among the darker leaves. But lemons, lemons, innumerable, speckled like innumerable tiny stars in the green firmament of leaves. So many lemons! Think of all the lemonade crystals they will be reduced to! Think of America drinking them up next summer. * * * * * I always wonder why such vast wide river-beds of pale boulders come out of the heart of the high-rearing, dramatic stone mountains, a few miles to the sea. A few miles only: and never more than a few threading water-trickles in river-beds wide enough for the Rhine. But that is how it is. The landscape is ancient, and classic--romantic, as if it had known far-off days and fiercer rivers and more verdure. Steep, craggy, wild, the land goes up to its points and precipices, a tangle of heights. But all jammed on top of one another. And in old landscapes, as in old people, the flesh wears away, and the bones become prominent. Rock sticks up fantastically. The jungle of peaks in this old Sicily. * * * * * The sky is all grey. The Straits are grey. Reggio, just across the water, is white looking, under the great dark toe of Calabria, the toe of Italy. On Aspromonte there is grey cloud. It is going to rain. After such marvelous ringing blue days, it is going to rain. What luck! * * * * * Aspromonte! Garibaldi! I could always cover my face when I see it, Aspromonte. I wish Garibaldi had been prouder. Why did he go off so humbly, with his bag of seed-corn and a flea in his ear, when His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel arrived with his little short legs on the scene. Poor Garibaldi! He wanted to be a hero and a dictator of free Sicily. Well, one can't be a dictator and humble at the same time. One must be a hero, which he was, and proud, which he wasn't. Besides people don't nowadays choose proud heroes for governors. Anything but. They prefer constitutional monarchs, who are paid servants and who know it. That is democracy. Democracy admires its own servants and nothing else. And you couldn't make a real servant even of Garibaldi. Only of His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel. So Italy chose Victor Emmanuel, and Garibaldi went off with a corn bag and a whack on the behind like a humble ass. * * * * * It is raining--dismally, dismally raining. And this is Messina coming. Oh horrible Messina, earthquake-shattered and renewing your youth like a vast mining settlement, with rows and streets and miles of concrete shanties, squalor and a big street with shops and gaps and broken houses still, just back of the tram-lines, and a dreary squalid earthquake-hopeless port in a lovely harbor. People don't forget and don't recover. The people of Messina seem to be today what they were nearly twenty years ago, after the earthquake: people who have had a terrible shock, and for whom all life's institutions are really nothing, neither civilization nor purpose. The meaning of everything all came down with a smash in that shuddering earthquake, and nothing remains but money and the throes of some sort of sensation. Messina between the volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness. * * * * * Raining, raining hard. Clambering down on to the wet platform and walking across the wet lines to the cover. Many human beings scurrying across the wet lines, among the wet trains, to get out into the ghastly town beyond. Thank heaven one need not go out into the town. Two convicts chained together among the crowd--and two soldiers. The prisoners wear fawny homespun clothes, of cloth such as the peasants weave, with irregularly occurring brown stripes. Rather nice handmade rough stuff. But linked together, dear God! And those horrid caps on their hairless foreheads. No hair. Probably they are going to a convict station on the Lipari islands. The people take no notice. No, but convicts are horrible creatures: at least, the old one is, with his long, nasty face: his long, clean-shaven, horrible face, without emotions, or with emotions one cannot follow. Something cold, sightless. A sightless, ugly look. I should loathe to have to touch him. Of the other I am not so sure. He is younger, and with dark eyebrows. But a roundish, softish face, with a sort of leer. No, evil is horrible. I used to think there was no absolute evil. Now I know there is a great deal. So much that it threatens life altogether. That ghastly abstractness of criminals. They don't _know_ any more what other people feel. Yet some horrible force drives them. It is a great mistake to abolish the death penalty. If I were dictator, I should order the old one to be hung at once. I should have judges with sensitive, living hearts: not abstract intellects. And because the instinctive heart recognised a man as evil, I would have that man destroyed. Quickly. Because good warm life is now in danger. * * * * * Standing on Messina station--dreary, dreary hole--and watching the winter rain and seeing the pair of convicts, I must remember again Oscar Wilde on Reading platform, a convict. What a terrible mistake, to let oneself be martyred by a lot of canaille. A man must say his say. But _noli me tangere_. Curious these people are. Up and down, up and down go a pair of officials. The young one in a black gold-laced cap talks to the elder in a scarlet gold-laced cap. And he walks, the young one, with a mad little hop, and his fingers fly as if he wanted to scatter them to the four winds of heaven, and his words go off like fireworks, with more than Sicilian speed. On and on, up and down, and his eye is dark and excited and unseeing, like the eye of a fleeing rabbit. Strange and beside itself is humanity. * * * * * What a lot of officials! You know them by their caps. Elegant tubby little officials in kid-and-patent boots and gold-laced caps, tall long-nosed ones in more gold-laced caps, like angels in and out of the gates of heaven they thread in and out of the various doors. As far as I can see, there are three scarlet station-masters, five black-and-gold substation-masters, and a countless number of principalities and powers in more or less broken boots and official caps. They are like bees round a hive, humming in an important _conversazione_, and occasionally looking at some paper or other, and extracting a little official honey. But the _conversazione_ is the affair of affairs. To an Italian official, life seems to be one long and animated conversation--the Italian word is better--interrupted by casual trains and telephones. And besides the angels of heaven's gates, there are the mere ministers, porters, lamp-cleaners, etc. These stand in groups and talk socialism. A lamp-man slashes along, swinging a couple of lamps. Bashes one against a barrow. Smash goes the glass. Looks down as if to say, What do you mean by it? Glances over his shoulder to see if any member of the higher hierarchies is looking. Seven members of higher hierarchies are assiduously not looking. On goes the minister with the lamp, blithely. Another pane or two gone. _Vogue la galère._ Passengers have gathered again, some in hoods, some in nothing. Youths in thin, paltry clothes stand out in the pouring rain as if they did not know it was raining. One sees their coat-shoulders soaked. And yet they do not trouble to keep under shelter. Two large station dogs run about and trot through the standing trains, just like officials. They climb up the footboard, hop into a train and hop out casually when they feel like it. Two or three port-porters, in canvas hats as big as umbrellas, literally, spreading like huge fins over their shoulders, are looking into more empty trains. More and more people appear. More and more official caps stand about. It rains and rains. The train for Palermo and the train for Syracuse are both an hour late already, coming from the port. Flea-bite. Though these are the great connections from Rome. Loose locomotives trundle back and forth, vaguely, like black dogs running and turning back. The port is only four minutes' walk. If it were not raining so hard, we would go down, walk along the lines and get into the waiting train down there. Anybody may please himself. There is the funnel of the great unwieldy ferry-object--she is just edging in. That means the connection from the mainland at last. But it is cold, standing here. We eat a bit of bread and butter from the kitchenino in resignation. After all, what is an hour and a half? It might just as easily be five hours, as it was the last time we came down from Rome. And the _wagon-lit_, booked to Syracuse, calmly left stranded in the station of Messina, to go no further. All get out and find yourselves rooms for the night in vile Messina. Syracuse or no Syracuse, Malta boat or no Malta boat. We are the _Ferrovia dello Stato_. But there, why grumble. Noi Italiani siamo così buoni. Take it from their own mouth. * * * * * Ecco! Finalmente! The crowd is quite joyful as the two express trains surge proudly in, after their half-a-mile creep. Plenty of room, for once. Though the carriage floor is a puddle, and the roof leaks. This is second class. * * * * * Slowly, with two engines, we grunt and chuff and twist to get over the break-neck heights that shut Messina in from the north coast. The windows are opaque with steam and drops of rain. No matter--tea from the thermos flask, to the great interest of the other two passengers who had nervously contemplated the unknown object. "Ha!" says he with joy, seeing the hot tea come out. "It has the appearance of a bomb." "Beautiful hot!" says she, with real admiration. All apprehension at once dissipated, peace reigns in the wet, mist-hidden compartment. We run through miles and miles of tunnel. The Italians have made wonderful roads and railways. * * * * * If one rubs the window and looks out, lemon groves with many wet-white lemons, earthquake-broken houses, new shanties, a grey weary sea on the right hand, and on the left the dim, grey complication of steep heights from which issue stone river-beds of inordinate width, and sometimes a road, a man on a mule. Sometimes near at hand, long-haired, melancholy goats leaning sideways like tilted ships under the eaves of some scabby house. They call the house-eaves the dogs' umbrellas. In town you see the dogs trotting close under the wall out of the wet. Here the goats lean like rock, listing inwards to the plaster wall. Why look out? Sicilian railways are all single line. Hence, the _coincidenza_. A _coincidenza_ is where two trains meet in a loop. You sit in a world of rain and waiting until some silly engine with four trucks puffs alongside. Ecco la coincidenza! Then after a brief _conversazione_ between the two trains, _diretto_ and _merce_, express and goods, the tin horn sounds and away we go, happily, towards the next coincidence. Clerks away ahead joyfully chalk up our hours of lateness on the announcement slate. All adds to the adventurous flavour of the journey, dear heart. We come to a station where we find the other diretto, the express from the other direction, awaiting our coincidential arrival. The two trains run alongside one another, like two dogs meeting in the street and snuffing one another. Every official rushes to greet every other official, as if they were all David and Jonathan meeting after a crisis. They rush into each other's arms and exchange cigarettes. And the trains can't bear to part. And the station can't bear to part with us. The officials tease themselves and us with the word _pronto_, meaning _ready!_ Pronto! And again Pronto! And shrill whistles. Anywhere else a train would go off its tormented head. But no! Here only that angel's trump of an official little horn will do the business. And get them to blow that horn if you can. They can't bear to part. * * * * * Rain, continual rain, a level grey wet sky, a level grey wet sea, a wet and misty train winding round and round the little bays, diving through tunnels. Ghosts of the unpleasant-looking Lipari islands standing a little way out to sea, heaps of shadow deposited like rubbish heaps in the universal greyness. * * * * * Enter more passengers. An enormously large woman with an extraordinarily handsome face: an extraordinarily large man, quite young: and a diminutive servant, a little girl-child of about thirteen, with a beautiful face.--But the Juno--it is she who takes my breath away. She is quite young, in her thirties still. She has that queenly stupid beauty of a classic Hera: a pure brow with level dark brows, large, dark, bridling eyes, a straight nose, a chiselled mouth, an air of remote self-consciousness. She sends one's heart straight back to pagan days. And--and--she is simply enormous, like a house. She wears a black toque with sticking-up wings, and a black rabbit fur spread on her shoulders. She edges her way in carefully: and once seated, is terrified to rise to her feet. She sits with that motionlessness of her type, closed lips, face muted and expressionless. And she expects me to admire her: I can see that. She expects me to pay homage to her beauty: just to that: not homage to herself, but to her as a _bel pezzo_. She casts little aloof glances at me under her eyelids. It is evident she is a country beauty become a _bourgeoise_. She speaks unwillingly to the other squint-eyed passenger, a young woman who also wears a black-rabbit fur, but without pretensions. The husband of Juno is a fresh-faced bourgeois young fellow, and he also is simply huge. His waistcoat would almost make the overcoat of the fourth passenger, the unshaven companion of the squinting young woman. The young Jupiter wears kid gloves: a significant fact here. He, too, has pretensions. But he is quite affable with the unshaven one, and speaks Italian unaffectedly. Whereas Juno speaks the dialect with affectation. No one takes any notice of the little maid. She has a gentle, virgin moon-face, and those lovely grey Sicilian eyes that are translucent, and into which the light sinks and becomes black sometimes, sometimes dark blue. She carries the bag and the extra coat of the huge Juno, and sits on the edge of the seat between me and the unshaven, Juno having motioned her there with a regal inclination of the head. The little maid is rather frightened. Perhaps she is an orphan child--probably. Her nut-brown hair is smoothly parted and done in two pigtails. She wears no hat, as is proper for her class. On her shoulders one of those little knitted grey shoulder-capes that one associates with orphanages. Her stuff dress is dark grey, her boots are strong. The smooth, moon-like, expressionless virgin face, rather pale and touching, rather frightened, of the girl-child. A perfect face from a mediaeval picture. It moves one strangely. Why? It is so unconscious, as we are conscious. Like a little muted animal it sits there, in distress. She is going to be sick. She goes into the corridor and is sick--very sick, leaning her head like a sick dog on the window-ledge. Jupiter towers above her--not unkind, and apparently feeling no repugnance. The physical convulsion of the girl does not affect him as it affects us. He looks on unmoved, merely venturing to remark that she had eaten too much before coming on to the train. An obviously true remark. After which he comes and talks a few common-places to me. By and by the girl-child creeps in again and sits on the edge of the seat facing Juno. But no, says Juno, if she is sick she will be sick over me. So Jupiter accommodatingly changes places with the girl-child, who is thus next to me. She sits on the edge of the seat with folded little red hands, her face pale and expressionless. Beautiful the thin line of her nut-brown eyebrows, the dark lashes of the silent, pellucid dark eyes. Silent, motionless, like a sick animal. But Juno tells her to wipe her splashed boots. The child gropes for a piece of paper. Juno tells her to take her pocket handkerchief. Feebly the sick girl-child wipes her boots, then leans back. But no good. She has to go in the corridor and be sick again. After a while they all get out. Queer to see people so natural. Neither Juno nor Jupiter is in the least unkind. He even seems kind. But they are just not upset. Not half as upset as we are--the q-b wanting to administer tea, and so on. We should have to hold the child's head. They just quite naturally leave it alone to its convulsions, and are neither distressed nor repelled. It just is so. Their naturalness seems unnatural to us. Yet I am sure it is best. Sympathy would only complicate matters, and spoil that strange, remote virginal quality. The q-b says it is largely stupidity. * * * * * Nobody washes out the corner of the corridor, though we stop at stations long enough, and there are two more hours journey. Train officials go by and stare, passengers step over and stare, new-comers stare and step over. Somebody asks _who_? Nobody thinks of just throwing a pail of water. Why should they? It is all in the course of nature.--One begins to be a bit chary of this same "nature", in the south. * * * * * Enter two fresh passengers: a black-eyed, round-faced, bright-sharp man in corduroys and with a gun, and a long-faced, fresh-colored man with thick snowy hair, and a new hat and a long black overcoat of smooth black cloth, lined with rather ancient, once expensive fur. He is extremely proud of this long black coat and ancient fur lining. Childishly proud he wraps it again over his knee, and gloats. The beady black-eyes of the hunter look round with pleased alertness. He sits facing the one in the overcoat, who looks like the last sprout of some Norman blood. The hunter in corduroys beams abroad, with beady black eyes in a round red face, curious. And the other tucks his fur-lined long coat between his legs and gloats to himself: all to himself gloating, and looking as if he were deaf. But no, he's not. He wears muddy high-low boots. At Termini it is already lamp-light. Business men crowd in. We get five business men: all stout, respected Palermitans. The one opposite me has whiskers, and a many-colored, patched traveling rug over his fat knees. Queer how they bring that feeling of physical intimacy with them. You are never surprised if they begin to take off their boots, or their collar-and-tie. The whole world is a sort of bedroom to them. One shrinks, but in vain. There is some conversation between the black-eyed, beady hunter and the business men. Also the young white-haired one, the aristocrat, tries to stammer out, at great length, a few words. As far as I can gather the young one is mad--or deranged--and the other, the hunter, is his keeper. They are traveling over Europe together. There is some talk of "the Count". And the hunter says the unfortunate "has had an accident." But that is a southern gentleness presumably, a form of speech. Anyhow it is queer: and the hunter in his corduroys, with his round, ruddy face and strange black-bright eyes and thin black hair is a puzzle to me, even more than the albino, long-coated, long-faced, fresh-complexioned, queer last remnant of a baron as he is. They are both muddy from the land, and pleased in a little mad way of their own. But it is half-past six. We are at Palermo, capital of Sicily. The hunter slings his gun over his shoulder, I my knapsack, and in the throng we all disappear, into the Via Maqueda. * * * * * Palermo has two great streets, the Via Maqueda, and the Corso, which cross each other at right-angles. The Via Maqueda is narrow, with narrow little pavements, and is always choked with carriages and foot-passengers. It had ceased raining. But the narrow road was paved with large, convex slabs of hard stone, inexpressibly greasy. To cross the Via Maqueda therefore was a feat. However, once accomplished, it was done. The near end of the street was rather dark, and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables--piles of white-and-green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-colored artichokes, nodding their buds, piles of big radishes, scarlet and bluey purple, carrots, long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a last slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colors and vegetable freshnesses. A mountain of black-purple cauliflowers, like niggers' heads, and a mountain of snow-white ones next to them. How the dark, greasy, night-stricken street seems to beam with these vegetables, all this fresh delicate flesh of luminous vegetables piled there in the air, and in the recesses of the windowless little caverns of the shops, and gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps. The q-b at once wants to buy vegetables. "Look! Look at the snow-white broccoli. Look at the huge finocchi. Why don't we get them? I _must_ have some. Look at those great clusters of dates--ten francs a kilo, and we pay sixteen. It's monstrous. Our place is simply monstrous." For all that, one doesn't buy vegetables to take to Sardinia. Cross the Corso at that decorated maelstrom and death-trap of the Quattro Canti. I, of course, am nearly knocked down and killed. Somebody is nearly knocked down and killed every two minutes. But there--the carriages are light, and the horses curiously aware creatures. They would never tread on one. The second part of the Via Maqueda is the swell part: silks and plumes, and an infinite number of shirts and ties and cuff-links and mufflers and men's fancies. One realises here that man-drapery and man-underwear is quite as important as woman's, if not more. I, of course, in a rage. The q-b stares at every rag and stitch, and crosses and re-crosses this infernal dark stream of a Via Maqueda, which, as I have said, is choked solid with strollers and carriages. Be it remembered that I have on my back the brown knapsack, and the q-b carries the kitchenino. This is enough to make a travelling menagerie of us. If I had my shirt sticking out behind, and if the q-b had happened merely to catch up the table-cloth and wrap it round her as she came out, all well and good. But a big brown knapsack! And a basket with thermos flask, etc! No, one could not expect such things to pass in a southern capital. But I am case-hardened. And I am sick of shops. True, we have not been in a town for three months. But _can_ I care for the innumerable _fantasias_ in the drapery line? Every wretched bit of would-be-extra chic is called a fantasia. The word goes lugubriously to my bowels. Suddenly I am aware of the q-b darting past me like a storm. Suddenly I see her pouncing on three giggling young hussies just in front--the inevitable black velveteen tam, the inevitable white curly muffler, the inevitable lower-class flappers. "Did you want something? Have you something to say? Is there something that amuses you? Oh-h! You must laugh, must you? Oh--laugh! Oh-h! Why? Why? You ask why? Haven't I heard you! Oh--you spik Ingleesh! You spik Ingleesh! Yes--why! That's why! Yes, that's why." The three giggling young hussies shrink together as if they would all hide behind one another, after a vain uprearing and a demand why? Madam tells them why. So they uncomfortably squeeze together under the unexpected strokes of the q-b's sledge-hammer Italian and more than sledge-hammer retaliation, there full in the Via Maqueda. They edge round one another, each attempting to get back of the other, away from the looming q-b. I perceive that this rotary motion is equivalent to a standstill, so feel called upon to say something in the manly line. "Beastly Palermo bad-manners," I say, and throw a nonchalant "Ignoranti" at the end, in a tone of dismissal. Which does it. Off they go down-stream, still huddling and shrinking like boats that are taking sails in, and peeping to see if we are coming. Yes, my dears, we are coming. "Why do you bother?" say I to the q-b, who is towering with rage. "They've followed us the whole length of the street--with their _sacco militario_ and their _parlano inglese_ and their _you spik Ingleesh_, and their jeering insolence. But the English are fools. They always put up with this Italian impudence." Which is perhaps true.--But this knapsack! It might be full of bronze-roaring geese, it would not attract more attention! However, and however, it is seven o'clock, and the shops are beginning to shut. No more shop-gazing. Only one lovely place: raw ham, boiled ham, chickens in aspic, chicken vol-au-vents, sweet curds, curd-cheese, rustic cheese-cake, smoked sausages, beautiful fresh mortadella, huge Mediterranean red lobsters, and those lobsters without claws. "So good! So good!" We stand and cry it aloud. But this shop too is shutting. I ask a man for the Hotel Pantechnico. And treating me in that gentle, strangely tender southern manner, he takes me and shows me. He makes me feel such a poor, frail, helpless leaf. A foreigner, you know. A bit of an imbecile, poor dear. Hold his hand and show him the way. * * * * * To sit in the room of this young American woman, with its blue hangings, and talk and drink tea till midnght! Ah these naïve Americans--they are a good deal older and shrewder than we, once it nears the point. And they all seem to feel as if the world were coming to an end. And they are so truly generous of their hospitality, in this cold world. II. THE SEA. The fat old porter knocks. Ah me, once more it is dark. Get up again before dawn. A dark sky outside, cloudy. The thrilling tinkle of innumerable goat-bells as the first flock enters the city, such a rippling sound. Well, it must be morning, even if one shivers at it. And at least it does not rain. * * * * * That pale, bluish, theatrical light outside, of the first dawn. And a cold wind. We come on to the wide, desolate quay, the curve of the harbour Panormus. That horrible dawn-pallor of a cold sea out there. And here, port mud, greasy: and fish: and refuse. The American girl is with us, wrapped in her sweater. A coarse, cold, black-slimy world, she seems as if she would melt away before it. But these frail creatures, what a lot they can go through! [Illustration: MAP FOR SEA AND SARDINIA] Across the great, wide, badly paved, mud-greasy, despairing road of the quay side, and to the sea. There lies our steamer, over there in the dawn-dusk of the basin, half visible. "That one who is smoking her cigarette," says the porter. She looks little, beside the huge _City of Trieste_ who is lying up next her. * * * * * Our row-boat is hemmed in by many empty boats, huddled to the side of the quay. She works her way out like a sheepdog working his way out of a flock of sheep, or like a boat through pack-ice. We are on the open basin. The rower stands up and pushes the oars from him. He gives a long, melancholy cry to someone on the quay. The water goes chock-chock against the urging bows. The wind is chill. The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant to come. Our steamer still smokes her cigarette--meaning the funnel-smoke--across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-dark water. Masts of sailing-ships, and spars, cluster on the left, on the undarkening sky. * * * * * Climb up, climb up, this is our ship. Up we go, up the ladder. "Oh but!" says the American girl. "Isn't she small! Isn't she impossibly small! Oh my, will you go in such a little thing? Oh dear! Thirty two hours in such a little boat? Why no, I wouldn't care for it at all." A bunch of stewards, cooks, waiters, engineers, pan-cleaners and what-not, mostly in black canvas jackets. Nobody else on the ship. A little black bunch of loutish crew with nothing to do, and we the first passengers served up to be jeered at. There you are, in the grey light. "Who is going?" "We two--the signorina is not going." "Tickets!" These are casual proletarian manners. We are taken into the one long room with a long table and many maple-golden doors, alternate panels having a wedge-wood blue-and-white picture inserted--a would-be Goddess of white marble on a blue ground, like a health-salts Hygeia advertisement. One of the plain panels opens--our cabin. "Oh dear! Why it isn't as big as a china-closet. However will you get in!" cries the American girl. "One at a time," say I. "But it's the tiniest place I _ever_ saw." It really was tiny. One had to get into a bunk to shut the door. That did not matter to me, I am no Titanic American. I pitched the knapsack on one bunk, the kitchenino on the other, and we shut the door. The cabin disappeared into a maple-wood panel of the long, subterranean state-room. "Why, is this the only place you've got to sit in?" cried the American girl. "But how perfectly awful! No air, and so dark, and smelly. Why I never saw such a boat! Will you really go? Will you really!" The state-room was truly rather subterranean and stuffy, with nothing but a long table and an uncanny company of screw-pin chairs seated thereat, and no outlet to the air at all, but it was not so bad otherwise, to me who have never been out of Europe. Those maple-wood panels and ebony curves--and those Hygeias! They went all round, even round the curve at the dim, distant end, and back up the near side. Yet how beautiful old, gold-coloured maple-wood is! how very lovely, with the ebony curves of the door arch! There was a wonderful old-fashioned, Victorian glow in it, and a certain splendour. Even one could bear the Hygeias let in under glass--the colour was right, that wedge-wood and white, in such lovely gold lustre. There was a certain homely grandeur still in the days when this ship was built: a richness of choice material. And health-salts Hygeias, wedge-wood Greek goddesses on advertisement placards! Yet they _weren't_ advertisements. That was what really worried me. They never had been. Perhaps Weego's Health Salts stole her later. * * * * * We have no coffee--that goes without saying. Nothing doing so early. The crew still stands in a gang, exactly like a gang of louts at a street-corner. And they've got the street all to themselves--this ship. We climb to the upper deck. * * * * * She is a long, slender, old steamer with one little funnel. And she seems so deserted, now that one can't see the street-corner gang of the casual crew. They are just below. Our ship is deserted. The dawn is wanly blueing. The sky is a curdle of cloud, there is a bit of pale gold eastwards, beyond Monte Pellegrino. The wind blows across the harbour. The hills behind Palermo prick up their ears on the sky-line. The city lies unseen, near us and level. There--a big ship is coming in: the Naples boat. And the little boats keep putting off from the near quay, and coming to us. We watch. A stout officer, cavalry, in grayey-green, with a big dark-blue cloak lined with scarlet. The scarlet lining keeps flashing. He has a little beard, and his uniform is not quite clean. He has big wooden chests, tied with rope, for luggage. Poor and of no class. Yet that scarlet, splendid lining, and the spurs. It seems a pity they must go second-class. Yet so it is, he goes forward when the dock porter has hoisted those wooden boxes. No fellow-passenger yet. Boats still keep coming. Ha-ha! Here is the commissariat! Various sides of kid, ready for roasting: various chickens: fennel like celery: wine in a bottiglione: new bread: packages! Hand them up, hand them up. "Good food!" cries the q-b in anticipation. It must be getting near time to go. Two more passengers--young thick men in black broad-cloth standing up in the stern of a little boat, their hands in their pockets, looking a little cold about the chin. Not quite Italian, too sturdy and manly. Sardinians from Cagliari, as a matter of fact. * * * * * We go down from the chill upper-deck. It is growing full day. Bits of pale gold are flying among delicate but cold flakes of cloud from the east, over Monte Pellegrino, bits of very new turquoise sky come out. Palermo on the left crouches upon her all-harbour--a little desolate, disorderly, end-of-the-world, end-of-the-sea, along her quay front. Even from here we can see the yellow carts rattling slowly, the mules nodding their high weird plumes of scarlet along the broad weary harbour-side. Oh painted carts of Sicily, with all history on your panels! * * * * * Arrives an individual at our side. "The captain fears it will not be possible to start. There is much wind outside. Much wind!" How they _love_ to come up with alarming, disquieting, or annoying news! The joy it gives them. What satisfaction on all the faces: of course all the other loafers are watching us, the street-corner loungers of this deck. But we have been many times bitten. "Ah ma!" say I, looking at the sky, "not so much wind as all that." An air of quiet, shrugging indifference is most effectual: as if you knew all about it, a good deal more than they knew. "Ah si! Molto vento! Molto vento! Outside! Outside!" With a long face and a dramatic gesture he points out of the harbour, to the grey sea. I too look out of the harbour at the pale line of sea beyond the mole. But I do not trouble to answer, and my eye is calm. So he goes away, only half triumphant. * * * * * "Things seem to get worse and worse!" cries the American friend. "What will you do on such a boat if you have an awful time out in the Mediterranean here? Oh no--will you risk it, really? Won't you go from Cività Vecchia?" "How awful it will be!" cries the q-b, looking round the grey harbour, the many masts clustering in the grey sky on the right: the big Naples boat turning her posterior to the quay-side a little way off, and cautiously budging backwards: the almost entirely shut-in harbour: the bits of blue and flying white cloud overhead: the little boats like beetles scuttling hither and thither across the basin: the thick crowd on the quay come to meet the Naples boat. * * * * * Time! Time! The American friend must go. She bids us goodbye, more than sympathetically. "I shall be awfully interested to hear how you get on." So down the side she goes. The boatman wants twenty francs--wants more--but doesn't get it. He gets ten, which is five too much. And so, sitting rather small and pinched and cold-looking, huddled in her sweater, she bibbles over the ripply water to the distant stone steps. We wave farewell. But other traffic comes between us. And the q-b, feeling nervous, is rather cross because the American friend's ideas of luxury have put us in such a poor light. We feel like the poorest of poor sea-faring relations. * * * * * Our ship is hooting for all she's worth. An important last-minuter comes surging up. The rope hawsers are being wound clankily in. Seagulls--they are never very many in the Mediterranean--seagulls whirl like a few flakes of snow in the upper chill air. Clouds spin. And without knowing it we are evaporating away from the shore, from our mooring, between the great _City of Trieste_ and another big black steamer that lies like a wall. We breathe towards this second black wall of steamer: distinctly. And of course an individual in an official cap is standing on the bottom of our departure ladder just above the water, yelling Barca! Barca!--shouting for a boat. And an old man on the sea stands up to his oars and comes pushing his clumsy boat with gathering speed between us and the other black wall. There he stands away below there, small, firing his clumsy boat along, remote as if in a picture on the dark green water. And our black side insidiously and evilly aspires to the other huge black wall. He rows in the canyon between, and is nearly here. When lo, the individual on the bottom step turns in the other direction. Another boat from the open basin is sweeping up: it is a race: she is near, she is nearer, she is up. With a curvet the boat from the open rounds up at the ladder. The boat between the gulf backs its oars. The official individual shouts and waves, the old man backing his oars in the gulf below yells expostulation, the boat from the open carries off its prey, our ship begins slowly to puddle-puddle-puddle, working her screw, the man in the gulf of green water rows for his life--we are floating into the open basin. Slowly, slowly we turn round: and as the ship turns, our hearts turn. Palermo fades from our consciousness: the Naples boat, the disembarking crowds, the rattling carriages to the land--the great _City of Trieste_--all fades from our heart. We see only the open gap of the harbour entrance, and the level, pale-grey void of the sea beyond. There are wisps of gleamy light--out there. And out there our heart watches--though Palermo is near us, just behind. We look round, and see it all behind us--but already it is gone, gone from our heart. The fresh wind, the gleamy wisps of light, the running, open sea beyond the harbour bars. * * * * * And so we steam out. And almost at once the ship begins to take a long, slow, dizzy dip, and a fainting swoon upwards, and a long, slow, dizzy dip, slipping away from beneath one. The q-b turns pale. Up comes the deck in that fainting swoon backwards--then down it fades in that indescribable slither forwards. It is all quite gentle--quite, quite gentle. But oh, so long, and so slow, and so dizzy. "Rather pleasant!" say I to the q-b. "Yes. Rather lovely _really_," she answers wistfully. To tell the truth there is something in the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long, slow slide forwards which makes my heart beat with joy. It is the motion of freedom. To feel her come up--then slide slowly forward, with a sound of the smashing of waters, is like the magic gallop of the sky, the magic gallop of elemental space. That long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her nostrils, oh God what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul. One is free at last--and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging outwards. Oh God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life--the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence. The agony which a train is to me, really. And the long-drawn-out agony of a life among tense, resistant people on land. And then to feel the long, slow lift and drop of this almost empty ship, as she took the waters. Ah God, liberty, liberty, elemental liberty. I wished in my soul the voyage might last forever, that the sea had no end, that one might float in this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back, even. * * * * * The ship was almost empty--save of course for the street-corner louts who hung about just below, on the deck itself. We stood alone on the weather-faded little promenade deck, which has old oak seats with old, carved little lions at the ends, for arm-rests--and a little cabin mysteriously shut, which much peeping determined as the wireless office and the operator's little curtained bed-niche. * * * * * Cold, fresh wind, a black-blue, translucent, rolling sea on which the wake rose in snapping foam, and Sicily on the left: Monte Pellegrino, a huge, inordinate mass of pinkish rock, hardly crisped with the faintest vegetation, looming up to heaven from the sea. Strangely large in mass and bulk Monte Pellegrino looks: and bare, like a Sahara in heaven: and old-looking. These coasts of Sicily are very imposing, terrific, fortifying the interior. And again one gets the feeling that age has worn them bare: as if old, old civilisations had worn away and exhausted the soil, leaving a terrifying blankness of rock, as at Syracuse in plateaus, and here in a great mass. * * * * * There seems hardly any one on board but ourselves: we alone on the little promenade deck. Strangely lonely, floating on a bare old ship past the great bare shores, on a rolling sea, stooping and rising in the wind. The wood of the fittings is all bare and weather-silvered, the cabin, the seats, even the little lions of the seats. The paint wore away long ago: and this timber will never see paint any more. Strange to put one's hand on the old oaken wood, so sea-fibred. Good old delicate-threaded oak: I swear it grew in England. And everything so carefully done, so solidly and everlastingly. I look at the lions, with the perfect-fitting oaken pins through their paws clinching them down, and their little mouths open. They are as solid as they were in Victorian days, as immovable. They will never wear away. What a joy in the careful, thorough, manly, everlasting work put into a ship: at least into this sixty-year-old vessel. Every bit of this old oak wood so sound, so beautiful: and the whole welded together with joints and wooden pins far more beautifully and livingly than iron welds. Rustless, life-born, living-tissued old wood: rustless as flesh is rustless, and happy-seeming as iron never can be. She rides so well, she takes the sea so beautifully, as a matter of course. * * * * * Various members of the crew wander past to look at us. This little promenade deck is over the first-class quarters, full in the stern. So we see first one head then another come up the ladder--mostly bare heads: and one figure after another slouches past, smoking a cigarette. All crew. At last the q-b stops one of them--it is what they are all waiting for, an opportunity to talk--and asks if the weird object on the top of Pellegrino is a ruin. Could there be a more touristy question! No, it is the semaphore station. Slap in the eye for the q-b! She doesn't mind, however, and the member of the crew proceeds to converse. He is a weedy, hollow-cheeked town-product: a Palermitan. He wears faded blue over-alls and informs us he is the ship's carpenter: happily unemployed for the rest of his life, apparently, and taking it as rather less than his dues. The ship once did the Naples-Palermo course--a very important course--in the old days of the General Navigation Company. The General Navigation Company sold her for eighty thousand liras years ago, and now she was worth two million. We pretend to believe: but I make a poor show. I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras. No man can overhear ten words of Italian today without two thousand or two million or ten or twenty or two liras flying like venomous mosquitoes round his ears. Liras--liras--liras--nothing else. Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable Lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog. Behind this greasy fog some people may still see the Italian sun. I find it hard work. Through this murk of Liras you peer at Michael Angelo and at Botticelli and the rest, and see them all as through a glass, darkly. For heavy around you is Italy's after-the-war atmosphere, darkly pressing you, squeezing you, milling you into dirty paper notes. King Harry was lucky that they only wanted to coin him into gold. Italy wants to mill you into filthy paper Liras. * * * * * Another head--and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time--to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too. We go down into the subterranean state-room and sit on the screw-pin chairs, while the ship does the slide-and-slope trot under us, and we drink a couple of cups of coffee-and-milk, and eat a piece of bread and butter. At least one of the innumerable members of the crew gives me one cup, then casts me off. It is most obviously his intention that I shall get no more: because of course the innumerable members of the crew could all just do with another coffee and milk. However, though the ship heaves and the alpaca coats cluster menacingly in the doorway, I balance my way to the tin buffet and seize the coffee pot and the milk pot, and am quite successful in administering to the q-b and myself. Having restored the said vessels to their tin altar, I resume my spin chair at the long and desert board. The q-b and I are alone--save that in the distance a very fat back with gold-braid collar sits sideways and a fat hand disposes of various papers--he is part of the one-and-only table, of course. The tall lean alpaca jacket, with a face of yellow stone and a big black moustache moves from the outer doorway, glowers at our filled cups, and goes to the tin altar and touches the handles of the two vessels: just touches them to an arrangement: as one who should say: These are mine. What dirty foreigner dares help himself! * * * * * As quickly as possible we stagger up from the long dungeon where the alpaca jackets are swooping like blue-bottles upon the coffee pots, into the air. There the carpenter is waiting for us, like a spider. "Isn't the sea a little quieter?" says the q-b wistfully. She is growing paler. "No, Signora--how should it be?" says the gaunt-faced carpenter. "The wind is waiting for us behind Cape Gallo. You see that cape?" he points to a tall black cliff-front in the sea ahead. "When we get to that cape we get the wind and the sea. Here--" he makes a gesture--"it is moderate." "Ugh!" says the q-b, turning paler. "I'm going to lie down." She disappears. The carpenter, finding me stony ground, goes forward, and I see him melting into the crowd of the innumerable crew, that hovers on the lower-deck passage by the kitchen and the engines. * * * * * The clouds are flying fast overhead: and sharp and isolated come drops of rain, so that one thinks it must be spray. But no, it is a handful of rain. The ship swishes and sinks forward, gives a hollow thudding and rears slowly backward, along this pinkish lofty coast of Sicily that is just retreating into a bay. From the open sea comes the rain, come the long waves. * * * * * No shelter. One must go down. The q-b lies quietly in her bunk. The state-room is stale like a passage on the underground railway. No shelter, save near the kitchen and the engines, where there is a bit of warmth. The cook is busy cleaning fish, making the whiting bite their tails venomously at a little board just outside his kitchen-hole. A slow stream of kitchen-filth swilkers back and forth along the ship's side. A gang of the crew leans near me--a larger gang further down. Heaven knows what they can all be--but they never do anything but stand in gangs and talk and eat and smoke cigarettes. They are mostly young--mostly Palermitan--with a couple of unmistakable Neapolitans, having the peculiar Neapolitan hang-dog good looks, the chiselled cheek, the little black moustache, the large eyes. But they chew with their cheeks bulged out, and laugh with their fine, semi-sarcastic noses. The whole gang looks continually sideways. Nobody ever commands them--there seems to be absolutely no control. Only the fat engineer in grey linen looks as clean and as competent as his own machinery. Queer how machine-control puts the pride and self-respect into a man. * * * * * The rain over, I go and squat against the canvas that is spread over the arched sky-lights on the small promenade deck, sitting on the seat that is fixed to the sky-light sides. The wind is cold: there are snatches of sun and spits of rain. The big cape has come and is being left behind: we are heading for a far-off cape like a cloud in the grey air. A dimness comes over one's mind: a sort of stupefaction owing to the wind and the relentless slither-and-rearing of the ship. Not a sickness, but a sort of dim faintness. So much motion, such moving, powerful air. And withal a constant triumph in the long, slow sea-gallop of the ship. * * * * * A great loud bell: midday and the crew going to eat, rushing to eat. After some time we are summoned. "The Signora isn't eating?" asks the waiter eagerly: hoping she is not. "Yes, she is eating," say I. I fetch the q-b from her berth. Rather wanly she comes and gets into her spin chair. Bash comes a huge plate of thick, oily cabbage soup, very full, swilkering over the sides. We do what we can with it. So does the third passenger: a young woman who never wears a hat, thereby admitting herself simply as one of "the people," but who has an expensive complicated dress, nigger-coloured thin silk stockings, and suede high-heeled shoes. She is handsome, sturdy, with large dark eyes and a robust, frank manner: far too robustly downright for Italy. She is from Cagliari--and can't do much with the cabbage soup: and tells the waiter so, in her deep, hail-fellow-well-met voice. In the doorway hovers a little cloud of alpaca jackets grinning faintly with malignant anticipation of food, hoping, like blow-flies, we shall be too ill to eat. Away goes the soup and appears a massive yellow omelette, like some log of bilious wood. It is hard, and heavy, and cooked in the usual rank-tasting olive oil. The young woman doesn't have much truck with it: neither do we. To the triumph of the blow-flies, who see the yellow monster borne to their altar. After which a long long slab of the inevitable meat cut into innumerable slices, tasting of dead nothingness and having a thick sauce of brown neutrality: sufficient for twelve people at least. This, with masses of strong-tasting greenish cauliflower liberally weighted with oil, on a ship that was already heaving its heart out, made up the dinner. Accumulating malevolent triumph among the blow-flies in the passage. So on to a dessert of oranges, pears with wooden hearts and thick yellowish wash-leather flesh, and apples. Then coffee. And we had sat through it, which is something. The alpaca blue-bottles buzzed over the masses of food that went back on the dishes to the tin altar. Surely it had been made deliberately so that we should not eat it! The Cagliarese young woman talked to us. Yes, she broke into that awful language which the Italians--the quite ordinary ones--call French, and which they insist on speaking for their own glorification: yea, when they get to heaven's gate they will ask St. Peter for: "OOn bigliay pour ung--trozzième classe." Fortunately or unfortunately her inquisitiveness got the better of her, and she fell into her native Italian. What were we, where did we come from, where were we going, _why_ were we going, had we any children, did we want any, etc. After every answer she nodded her head and said Ahu! and watched us with energetic dark eyes. Then she ruminated over our nationalities and said, to the unseeing witnesses: Una bella coppia, a fine couple. As at the moment we felt neither beautiful nor coupled, we only looked greener. The grim man-at-arms coming up to ask us again if we weren't going to have a little wine, she lapsed into her ten-pounder French, which was most difficult to follow. And she said that on a sea-voyage one must eat, one must eat, if only a little. But--and she lapsed into Italian--one must by no means drink wine--no--no! One didn't want to, said I sadly. Whereupon the grim man-at-arms, whom, of course, we had cheated out of the bottle we refused to have opened for us, said with a lost sarcasm that wine made a man of a man, etc., etc. I was too weary of that underground, however. All I knew was that he wanted wine, wine, wine, and we hadn't ordered any. He didn't care for food. The Cagliarese told us she came now from Naples, and her husband was following in a few days. He was doing business in Naples. I nearly asked if he was a little dog-fish--this being the Italian for profiteer, but refrained in time. So the two ladies retired to lie down, I went and sat under my tarpaulin. * * * * * I felt very dim, and only a bit of myself. And I dozed blankly. The afternoon grew more sunny. The ship turned southwards, and with the wind and waves behind, it became much warmer, much smoother. The sun had the lovely strong winey warmth, golden over the dark-blue sea. The old oak-wood looked almost white, the afternoon was sweet upon the sea. And in the sunshine and the swishing of the sea, the speedier running of the empty ship, I slept a warm, sweet hour away, and awoke new. To see ahead pale, uplooming islands upon the right: the windy Egades: and on the right a mountain or high conical hill, with buildings on the summit: and in front against the sea, still rather far away, buildings rising upon a quay, within a harbor: and a mole, and a castle forward to sea, all small and far away, like a view. The buildings were square and fine. There was something impressive--magical under the far sunshine and the keen wind, the square and well-proportioned buildings waiting far off, waiting like a lost city in a story, a Rip van Winkle city. I knew it was Trapani, the western port of Sicily, under the western sun. * * * * * And the hill near us was Mount Eryx. I had never seen it before. So I had imagined a mountain in the sky. But it was only a hill, with undistinguishable cluster of a village on the summit, where even now cold wisps of vapour caught. They say it is 2,500 feet high. Still it looks only a hill. But why in the name of heaven should my heart stand still as I watch that hill which rises above the sea? It is the Etna of the west: but only a town-crowned hill. To men it must have had a magic almost greater than Etna's. Watching Africa! Africa, showing her coast on clear days. Africa the dreaded. And the great watch-temple of the summit, world-sacred, world-mystic in the world that was. Venus of the aborigines, older than Greek Aphrodite. Venus of the aborigines, from her watch-temple looking at Africa, beyond the Egatian isles. The world-mystery, the smiling Astarte. This, one of the world centres, older than old! and the woman-goddess watching Africa! _Erycina ridens._ Laughing, the woman-goddess, at this centre of an ancient, quite-lost world. I confess my heart stood still. But is mere historical fact so strong, that what one learns in bits from books can move one so? Or does the very word call an echo out of the dark blood? It seems so to me. It seems to me from the darkest recesses of my blood comes a terrible echo at the name of Mount Eryx: something quite unaccountable. The name of Athens hardly moves me. At Eryx--my darkness quivers. Eryx, looking west into Africa's sunset. _Erycina ridens._ There is a tick-tocking in the little cabin against which I lean. The wireless operator is busy communicating with Trapani, no doubt. He is a fat young man with fairish curly hair and an important bearing. Give a man control of some machine, and at once his air of importance and more-than-human dignity develops. One of the unaccountable members of the crew lounges in the little doorway, like a chicken on one foot, having nothing to do. The girl from Cagliari comes up with two young men--also Sardinians by their thick-set, independent look, and the touch of pride in their dark eyes. She has no wraps at all: just her elegant fine-cloth dress, her bare head from which the wisps of hair blow across her brow, and the transparent "nigger" silk stockings. Yet she does not seem cold. She talks with great animation, sitting between the two young men. And she holds the hand of the one in the overcoat affectionately. She is always holding the hand of one or other of the two young men: and wiping wisps of wind-blown hair from her brow: and talking in her strong, nonchalant voice, rapidly, ceaselessly, with massive energy. Heaven knows if the two young men--they are third-class passengers--were previous acquaintances. But they hold her hand like brothers--quite simply and nicely, not at all sticky and libidinous. It all has an air of "Why not?" She shouts at me as I pass, in her powerful, extraordinary French: "Madame votre femme, elle est au lit?" I say she is lying down. "Ah!" she nods. "Elle a le mal de mer?" No, she is not sea-sick, just lying down. The two young men, between whom she is sitting as between two pillows, watch with the curious Sardinian dark eyes that seem alert and show the white all round. They are pleasant--a bit like seals. And they have a numb look for the moment, impressed by this strange language. She proceeds energetically to translate into Sardinian, as I pass on. We do not seem to be going to Trapani. There lies the town on the left, under the hill, the square buildings that suggest to me the factories of the East India Company shining in the sun along the curious, closed-in harbour, beyond the running, dark blue sea. We seem to be making for the island bulk of Levanzo. Perhaps we shall steer away to Sardinia without putting in to Trapani. On and on we run--and always as if we were going to steer between the pale blue, heaped-up islands, leaving Trapani behind us on our left. The town has been in sight for an hour or more: and still we run out to sea towards Levanzo. And the wireless-operator busily tick-tocks and throbs in his little cabin on this upper deck. Peeping in, one sees his bed and chair behind a curtain, screened off from his little office. And all so tidy and pleased-looking. From the islands one of the Mediterranean sailing ships is beating her way, across our track, to Trapani. I don't know the name of ships but the carpenter says she is a schooner: he says it with that Italian misgiving which doesn't really know but which can't bear not to know. Anyhow on she comes, with her tall ladder of square sails white in the afternoon light, and her lovely prow, curved in with a perfect hollow, running like a wild animal on a scent across the waters. There--the scent leads her north again. She changes her tack from the harbour mouth, and goes coursing away, passing behind us. Lovely she is, nimble and quick and palpitating, with all her sails white and bright and eager. We are changing our course. We have all the time been heading for the south of Levanzo. Now I see the island slowly edging back, as if clearing out of the way for us, like a man in the street. The island edges and turns aside: and walks away. And clearly we are making for the harbour mouth. We have all this time been running, out at sea, round the back of the harbour. Now I see the fortress-castle, an old thing, out forward to sea: and a little lighthouse and the way in. And beyond, the town-front with great palm trees and other curious dark trees, and behind these the large square buildings of the south rising imposingly, as if severe, big palaces upon the promenade. It all has a stately, southern, imposing appearance, withal remote from our modern centuries: standing back from the tides of our industrial life. I remember the Crusaders, how they called here so often on their way to the East. And Trapani seems waiting for them still, with its palm trees and its silence, full in the afternoon sun. It has not much to do but wait, apparently. The q-b emerges into the sun, crying out how lovely! And the sea is quieter: we are already in the lea of the harbour-curve. From the north the many-sailed ship from the islands is running down towards us, with the wind. And away on the south, on the sea-level, numerous short windmills are turning their sails briskly, windmill after windmill, rather stumpy, spinning gaily in the blue, silent afternoon, among the salt-lagoons stretching away towards Marsala. But there is a whole legion of windmills, and Don Quixote would have gone off his head. There they spin, hither and thither, upon the pale-blue sea-levels. And perhaps one catches a glitter of white salt-heaps. For these are the great salt-lagoons which make Trapani rich. * * * * * We are entering the harbour-basin, however, past the old castle out on the spit, past the little lighthouse, then through the entrance, slipping quietly on the now tranquil water. Oh, and how pleasant the fulness of the afternoon sun flooding this round, fast-sleeping harbour, along whose side the tall palms drowse, and whose waters are fast asleep. It seems quite a small, cosy harbour, with the great buildings warm-colored in the sun behind the dark tree-avenue of the marina. The same silent, sleeping, endlessly sun-warmed stateliness. In the midst of this tranquillity we slowly turn round upon the shining water, and in a few moments are moored. There are other ships moored away to the right: all asleep, apparently, in the flooding of the afternoon sun. Beyond the harbour entrance runs the great sea and the wind. Here all is still and hot and forgotten. "Vous descendez en terre?" shouts the young woman, in her energetic French--she leaves off holding the young men's hands for the moment. We are not quite sure: and we don't want her to come with us, anyhow, for her French is not our French. The land sleeps on: nobody takes any notice of us: but just one boat paddles out the dozen yards to our side. We decide to set foot on shore. * * * * * One should not, and we knew it. One should never enter into these southern towns that look so nice, so lovely, from the outside. However, we thought we would buy some cakes. So we crossed the avenue which looks so beautiful from the sea, and which, when you get into it, is a cross between an outside place where you throw rubbish and a humpy unmade road in a raw suburb, with a few iron seats, and litter of old straw and rag. Indescribably dreary in itself: yet with noble trees, and lovely sunshine, and the sea and the islands gleaming magic beyond the harbour mouth, and the sun, the eternal sun full focussed. A few mangy, nothing-to-do people stand disconsolately about, in southern fashion, as if they had been left there, water-logged, by the last flood, and were waiting for the next flood to wash them further. Round the corner along the quay a Norwegian steamer dreams that she is being loaded, in the muddle of the small port. * * * * * We looked at the cakes--heavy and wan they appeared to our sea-rolled stomachs. So we strolled into a main street, dark and dank like a sewer. A tram bumped to a standstill, as if now at last was the end of the world. Children coming from school ecstatically ran at our heels, with bated breath, to hear the vocal horrors of our foreign speech. We turned down a dark side alley, about forty paces deep: and were on the northern bay, and on a black stench that seemed like the perpetual sewer, a bank of mud. So we got to the end of the black main street, and turned in haste to the sun. Ah--in a moment we were in it. There rose the palms, there lay our ship in the shining, curving basin--and there focussed the sun, so that in a moment we were drunk or dazed by it. Dazed. We sat on an iron seat in the rubbish-desolate, sun-stricken avenue. A ragged and dirty girl was nursing a fat and moist and immovable baby and tending to a grimy fat infant boy. She stood a yard away and gazed at us as one would gaze at a pig one was going to buy. She came nearer, and examined the q-b. I had my big hat down over my eyes. But no, she had taken her seat at my side, and poked her face right under my hat brim, so that her towzled hair touched me, and I thought she would kiss me. But again no. With her breath on my cheek she only gazed on my face as if it were a wax mystery. I got up hastily. "Too much for me," said I to the q-b. She laughed, and asked what the baby was called. The baby was called Beppina, as most babies are. Driven forth, we wandered down the desolate avenue of shade and sun towards the ship, and turned once more into the town. We had not been on shore more than ten minutes. This time we went to the right, and found more shops. The streets were dark and sunless and cold. And Trapani seemed to me to sell only two commodities: cured rabbit skins and cat-skins, and great, hideous, modern bed-spread arrangements of heavy flowered silk and fabulous price. They seem to think nothing of thousands of liras, in Trapani. But most remarkable was bunny and pussy. Bunny and pussy, flattened out like pressed leaves, dangling in clusters everywhere. Furs! white bunny, black bunny in great abundance, piebald bunny, grey bunny:--then pussy, tabby pussy, and tortoiseshell pussy, but mostly black pussy, in a ghastly semblance of life, all flat, of course. Just single furs. Clusters, bunches, heaps, and dangling arrays of plain-superficies puss and bun-bun! Puss and bun by the dozen and the twenty, like dried leaves, for your choice. If a cat from a ship should chance to find itself in Trapani streets, it would give a mortal yell, and go mad, I am sure. We strolled for ten more minutes in this narrow, tortuous, unreal town, that seemed to have plenty of flourishing inhabitants, and a fair number of Socialists, if one was to judge by the great scrawlings on the walls: W. LENIN and ABASSO LA BORGHESIA. Don't imagine, by the way, that Lenin is another Wille on the list. The apparent initial stands for _Evviva_, the double V. * * * * * Cakes one dared not buy, after looking at them. But we found macaroon biscuits, and a sort of flat plaster-casts of the Infant Jesus under a dove, of which we bought two. The q-b ate her macaroon biscuits all through the streets, and we went towards the ship. The fat boatman hailed us to take us back. It was just about eight yards of water to row, the ship being moored on the quay: one could have jumped it. I gave the fat boatman two liras, two francs. He immediately put on the socialist-workman indignation, and thrust the note back at me. Sixty centimes more! The fee was thirteen sous each way! In Venice or Syracuse it would be two sous. I looked at him and gave him the money and said: "Per Dio, we are in Trapani!" He muttered back something about foreigners. But the hateful, unmanly insolence of these lords of toil, now they have their various "unions" behind them and their "rights" as working men, sends my blood black. They are ordinary men no more: the human, happy Italian is most marvellously vanished. New honors come upon them, etc. The dignity of human labour is on its hind legs, busy giving every poor innocent who isn't ready for it a kick in the mouth. * * * * * But, once more in parenthesis, let me remind myself that it is our own English fault. We have slobbered about the nobility of toil, till at last the nobles naturally insist on eating the cake. And more than that, we have set forth, politically, on such a high and Galahad quest of holy liberty, and been caught so shamelessly filling our pockets, that no wonder the naïve and idealistic south turns us down with a bang. * * * * * Well, we are back on the ship. And we want tea. On the list by the door it says we are to have coffee, milk and butter at 8.30: luncheon at 11.30: tea, coffee or chocolate at 3.00: and dinner at 6.30. And moreover: "The company will feed the passengers for the normal duration of the voyage only." Very well--very well. Then where is tea? Not any signs! and the alpaca jackets giving us a wide berth. But we find our man, and demand our rights: at least the q-b does. The tickets from Palermo to Cagliari cost, together, 583 liras. Of this, 250 liras was for the ticket, and 40 liras each for the food. This, for two tickets, would make 580 liras. The odd three for usual stamps. The voyage was supposed to last about thirty or thirty-two hours: from eight of the morning of departure to two or four of the following afternoon. Surely we pay for our tea. The other passengers have emerged: a large, pale, fat, "handsome" Palermitan who is going to be professor at Cagliari: his large, fat, but high-coloured wife: and three children, a boy of fourteen like a thin, frail, fatherly girl, a little boy in a rabbit-skin overcoat, coming rather unfluffed, and a girl-child on the mother's knee. The one-year-old girl-child being, of course, the only man in the party. They have all been sick all day, and look washed out. We sympathise. They lament the cruelties of the journey--and _senza servizio! senza servizio!_ without any maid servant. The mother asks for coffee, and a cup of milk for the children: then, seeing our tea with lemon, and knowing it by repute, she will have tea. But the rabbit-boy will have coffee--coffee and milk--and nothing else. And an orange. And the baby will have lemon, pieces of lemon. And the fatherly young "miss" of an adolescent brother laughs indulgently at all the whims of these two young ones: the father laughs and thinks it all adorable and expects us to adore. He is almost too washed-out to attend properly, to give the full body of his attention. So the mother gets her cup of tea--and puts a piece of lemon in--and then milk on top of that. The rabbit boy sucks an orange, slobbers in the tea, insists on coffee and milk, tries a piece of lemon, and gets a biscuit. The baby, with weird faces, chews pieces of lemon: and drops them in the family cup: and fishes them out with a little sugar, and dribbles them across the table to her mouth, throws them away and reaches for a new sour piece. They all think it humorous and adorable. Arrives the milk, to be treated as another loving cup, mingled with orange, lemon, sugar, tea, biscuit, chocolate, and cake. Father, mother, and elder brother partake of nothing, they haven't the stomach. But they are charmed, of course, by the pretty pranks and messes of the infants. They have extraordinary amiable patience, and find the young ones a perpetual source of charming amusement. They look at one another, the elder ones, and laugh and comment, while the two young ones mix themselves and the table into a lemon-milk-orange-tea-sugar-biscuit-cake-chocolate mess. This inordinate Italian amiable patience with their young monkeys is astonishing. It makes the monkeys more monkey-like, and self-conscious incredibly, so that a baby has all the tricks of a Babylonian harlot, making eyes and trying new pranks. Till at last one sees the southern Holy Family as an unholy triad of imbecility. Meanwhile I munched my Infant-Jesus-and-Dove arrangement, which was rather like eating thin glass, so hard and sharp. It was made of almond and white of egg presumably, and was not so bad if you could eat it at all. It was a Christmas relic.--And I watched the Holy Family across the narrow board, and tried not to look all I felt. * * * * * Going on deck as soon as possible, we watched the loading of barrels of wine into the hold--a mild and happy-go-lucky process. The ship seemed to be almost as empty of cargo as of passengers. Of the latter, we were apparently twelve adults, all told, and the three children. And as for cargo, there were the wooden chests of the officer, and these fourteen barrels of wine from Trapani. The last were at length settled more or less firm, the owner, or the responsible landsman seeing to it. No one on the ship seemed to be responsible for anything. And four of the innumerable crew were replacing the big planks over the hold. It was curious how forlorn the ship seemed to feel, now she was ready for sea again. Her innumerable crew did not succeed in making her alive. She ran her course like a lost soul across the Mid-Mediterranean. * * * * * Outside the harbour the sun was sinking, gorgeous gold and red the sky, and vast, beyond the darkening islands of the Egades group. Coming as we did from the east side of the island, where dawn beyond the Ionian sea is the day's great and familiar event: so decisive an event, that as the light appears along the sea's rim, so do my eyes invariably open and look at it, and know it is dawn, and as the night-purple is fused back, and a little scarlet thrills towards the zenith, invariably, day by day, I feel I must get up: coming from the east, shut off hermetically from the west by the steep spikes of the mountains at our back, we felt this sunset in the African sea terrible and dramatic. It seemed much more magnificent and tragic than our Ionian dawn, which has always a suggestion of a flower opening. But this great red, trumpet-flaring sunset had something African, half-sinister, upon the sea: and it seemed so far off, in an unknown land. Whereas our Ionian dawn always seems near and familiar and happy. A different goddess the Eryx Astarte, the woman Ashtaroth, _Erycina ridens_ must have been, in her prehstoric dark smiling, watching the fearful sunsets beyond the Egades, from our gold-lighted Apollo of the Ionian east. She is a strange goddess to me, this Erycina Venus, and the west is strange and unfamiliar and a little fearful, be it Africa or be it America. Slowly at sunset we moved out of the harbour. And almost as we passed the bar, away in front we saw, among the islands, the pricking of a quick pointed light. Looking back, we saw the light at the harbour entrance twitching: and the remote, lost town beginning to glimmer. And night was settling down upon the sea, through the crimsoned purple of the last afterglow. The islands loomed big as we drew nearer, dark in the thickening darkness. Overhead a magnificent evening-star blazed above the open sea, giving me a pang at the heart, for I was so used to see her hang just above the spikes of the mountains, that I felt she might fall, having the space beneath. Levanzo and the other large island were quite dark: absolutely dark, save for one beam of a lighthouse low down in the distance. The wind was again strong and cold: the ship had commenced her old slither and heave, slither and heave, which mercifully we had forgotten. Overhead were innumerable great stars active as if they were alive in the sky. I saw Orion high behind us, and the dog-star glaring. And _swish!_ went the sea as we took the waves, then after a long trough, _swish!_ This curious rhythmic swishing and hollow drumming of a steamer at sea has a narcotic, almost maddening effect on the spirit, a long, hissing burst of waters, then the hollow roll, and again the upheaval to a sudden hiss-ss-ss! A bell had clanged and we knew the crew were once more feeding. At every moment of the day and presumably of the night, feeding was going on--or coffee-drinking. * * * * * We were summoned to dinner. Our young woman was already seated: and a fat uniformed mate or purser or official of some sort was finishing off in the distance. The pale professor also appeared: and at a certain distance down the table sat a little hard-headed grey man in a long grey alpaca travelling coat. Appeared the beloved macaroni with tomato sauce: no food for the sea. I put my hopes on the fish. Had I not seen the cook making whiting bite their own tails viciously?--The fish appeared. And what was it? Fried ink-pots. A _calamaio_ is an ink-pot: also it is a polyp, a little octopus which, alas, frequents the Mediterranean and squirts ink if offended. This polyp with its tentacles is cut up and fried, and reduced to the consistency of boiled celluloid. It is esteemed a delicacy: but is tougher than indiarubber, gristly through and through. I have a peculiar aversion to these ink-pots. Once in Liguria we had a boat of our own and paddled with the peasant paddlers. Alessandro caught ink-pots: and like this. He tied up a female by a string in a cave--the string going through a convenient hole in her end. There she lived, like an Amphitrite's wire-haired terrier tied up, till Alessandro went a-fishing. Then he towed her, like a poodle behind. And thus, like a poodly-bitch, she attracted hangers-on in the briny seas. And these poor polyp inamorati were the victims. They were lifted as prey on board, where I looked with horror on their grey, translucent tentacles and large, cold, stony eyes. The she-polyp was towed behind again. But after a few days she died. And I think, even for creatures so awful-looking, this method is indescribably base, and shows how much lower than an octopus even, is lordly man. Well, we chewed a few ends of oil-fried ink-pots, and gave it up. The Cagliari girl gave up too: the professor had not even tried. Only the hard-headed grey man in the alpaca coat chewed animatedly, with bouncing jaws. Mountains of calamaio remained for the joyous blue-bottles. Arrived the inevitable meat--this long piece of completely tasteless undercut in innumerable grey-brown slices. Oh, Italy! The professor fled. Arrived the wash-leather pears, the apples, the oranges--we saved an apple for a happier hour. Arrived coffee, and, as a magnificent treat, a few well-known pastries. They all taste wearily alike. The young woman shakes her head. I shake mine, but the q-b, like a child, is pleased. Most pleased of all, however, are the blue-bottles, who dart in a black-alpaca bunch to the tin altar, and there loudly buzz, wildly, above the sallow cakes. The citron-cheeked, dry one, however, cares darkly nothing for cakes. He comes once more to twit us about wine. So much so that the Cagliari girl orders a glass of Marsala: and I must second her. So there we are, three little glasses of brown liquid. The Cagliari girl sips hers and suddenly flees. The q-b sips hers with infinite caution, and quietly retires. I finish the q-b's little glass, and my own, and the voracious blow-flies buzz derisively and excited. The yellow-cheeked one has disappeared with the bottle. From the professorial cabin faint wails, sometimes almost fierce, as one or another is going to be ill. Only a thin door is between this state-room and them. The most down-trodden frayed ancient rag of a man goes discreetly with basins, trying not to let out glimpses of the awful within. I climb up to look at the vivid, drenching stars, to breathe the cold wind, to see the dark sea sliding. Then I too go to the cabin, and watch the sea run past the porthole for a minute, and insert myself like the meat in a sandwich into the tight lower bunk. Oh, infinitesimal cabin, where we sway like two matches in a match box! Oh strange, but even yet excellent gallop of a ship at sea. * * * * * I slept not so badly through the stifled, rolling night--in fact later on slept soundly. And the day was growing bright when I peered through the porthle, the sea was much smoother. It was a brilliant clear morning. I made haste and washed myself cursorily in the saucer that dribbled into a pail in a corner: there was not space even for one chair, this saucer was by my bunk-head. And I went on deck. Ah the lovely morning! Away behind us the sun was just coming above the sea's horizon, and the sky all golden, all a joyous, fire-heated gold, and the sea was glassy bright, the wind gone still, the waves sunk into long, low undulations, the foam of the wake was pale ice-blue in the yellow air. Sweet, sweet wide morning on the sea, with the sun coming, swimming up, and a tall sailing bark, with her flat fore-ladder of sails delicately across the light, and a far-far steamer on the electric vivid morning horizon. The lovely dawn: the lovely pure, wide morning in the mid-sea, so golden-aired and delighted, with the sea like sequins shaking, and the sky far, far, far above, unfathomably clear. How glad to be on a ship! What a golden hour for the heart of man! Ah if one could sail for ever, on a small quiet, lonely ship, from land to land and isle to isle, and saunter through the spaces of this lovely world, always through the spaces of this lovely world. Sweet it would be sometimes to come to the opaque earth, to block oneself against the stiff land, to annul the vibration of one's flight against the inertia of our _terra firma!_ but life itself would be in the flight, the tremble of space. Ah the trembling of never-ended space, as one moves in flight! Space, and the frail vibration of space, the glad lonely wringing of the heart. Not to be clogged to the land any more. Not to be any more like a donkey with a log on its leg, fastened to weary earth that has no answer now. But to be off. To find three masculine, world-lost souls, and world-lost saunter, and saunter on along with them, across the dithering space, as long as life lasts! Why come to anchor? There is nothing to anchor for. Land has no answer to the soul any more. It has gone inert. Give me a little ship, kind gods, and three world-lost comrades. Hear me! And let me wander aimless across this vivid outer world, the world empty of man, where space flies happily. * * * * * The lovely, celandine-yellow morning of the open sea, paling towards a rare, sweet blue! The sun stood above the horizon, like the great burning stigma of the sacred flower of day. Mediterranean sailing-ships, so mediaeval, hovered on the faint morning wind, as if uncertain which way to go, curious, odd-winged insects of the flower. The steamer, hull-down, was sinking towards Spain. Space rang clear about us: the level sea! Appeared the Cagliari young woman and her two friends. She was looking handsome and restored now the sea was easy. Her two male friends stood touching her, one at either shoulder. "Bonjour, Monsieur!" she barked across at me. "Vous avez pris le café?" "Pas encore. Et vous?" "Non! Madame votre femme...." She roared like a mastiff dog: and then translated with unction to her two uninitiated friends. How it was they did not understand her French I do not know, it was so like travestied Italian. I went below to find the q-b. * * * * * When we came up, the faint shape of land appeared ahead, more transparent than thin pearl. Already Sardinia. Magic are high lands seen from the sea, when they are far, far off, and ghostly translucent like ice-bergs. This was Sardinia, looming like fascinating shadows in mid-sea. And the sailing ships, as if cut out of frailest pearl translucency, were wafting away towards Naples. I wanted to count their sails--five square ones which I call the ladder, one above the other--but how many wing-blades? That remained yet to be seen. * * * * * Our friend the carpenter spied us out: at least, he was not my friend. He didn't find me _simpatico_, I am sure. But up he came, and proceeded to entertain us with weary banality. Again the young woman called, had we had coffee? We said we were just going down. And then she said that whatever we had today we had to pay for: our food ended with the one day. At which the q-b was angry, feeling swindled. But I had known before. * * * * * We went down and had our coffee notwithstanding. The young woman came down, and made eyes at one of the alpaca blue-bottles. After which we saw a cup of coffee and milk and two biscuits being taken to her into her cabin, discreetly. When Italians are being discreet and on the sly, the very air about them becomes tell-tale, and seems to shout with a thousand tongues. So with a thousand invisible tongues clamouring the fact, the young woman had her coffee secretly and _gratis_, in her cabin. * * * * * But the morning was lovely. The q-b and I crept round the bench at the very stern of the ship and sat out of the wind and out of sight, just above the foaming of the wake. Before us was the open morning--and the glisten of our ship's track, like a snail's path, trailing across the sea: straight for a little while, then giving a bend to the left, always a bend towards the left: and coming at us from the pure horizon, like a bright snail-path. Happy it was to sit there in the stillness, with nothing but the humanless sea to shine about us. But no, we were found out. Arrived the carpenter. "Ah, you have found a fine place--!" "Molto bello!" This from the q-b. I could not bear the irruption. He proceeded to talk--and as is inevitable, the war. Ah, the war--it was a terrible thing. He had become ill--very ill. Because, you see, not only do you go without proper food, without proper rest and warmth, but, you see, you are in an agony of fear for your life all the time. An agony of fear for your life. And that's what does it. Six months in hospital--! The q-b, of course, was sympathetic. The Sicilians are quite simple about it. They just tell you they were frightened to death, and it made them ill. The q-b, woman-like, loves them for being so simple about it. I feel angry somewhere. For they _expect_ a full-blown sympathy. And however the great god Mars may have shrunk and gone wizened in the world, it still annoys me to hear him _so_ blasphemed. * * * * * Near us the automatic log was spinning, the thin rope trailing behind us in the sea. Erratically it jerked and spun, with spasmodic torsion. He explained that the little screw at the end of the line spun to the speed of travelling. We were going from ten to twelve Italian miles to the hour. Ah, yes, we _could_ go twenty. But we went no faster than ten or twelve, to save the coal. The coal--il carbone! I knew we were in for it. England--l'Inghilterra she has the coal. And what does she do? She sells it very dear. Particularly to Italy. Italy won the war and now can't even have coal. Because why! The price. The exchange! _Il cambio._ Now I am doubly in for it. Two countries had been able to keep their money high--England and America. The English sovereign--la sterlina--and the American dollar--_sa_, these were money. The English and the Americans flocked to Italy, with their _sterline_ and their _dollari_, and they bought what they wanted for nothing, for nothing. Ecco! Whereas we poor Italians--we are in a state of ruination--proper ruination. The allies, etc., etc. I am so used to it--I am so wearily used to it. I can't walk a stride without having this wretched _cambio_, the exchange, thrown at my head. And this with an injured petulant spitefulness which turns my blood. For I assure them, whatever I have in Italy I pay for: and I am not England. I am not the British Isles on two legs. Germany--La Germania--she did wrong to make the war. But--there you are, that was war. Italy and Germany--l'Italia e la Germania--they had always been friends. In Palermo.... My God, I felt I could not stand it another second. To sit above the foam and have this miserable creature stuffing wads of chewed newspaper into my ear--no, I could not bear it. In Italy, there is no escape. Say two words, and the individual starts chewing old newspaper and stuffing it into you. No escape. You become--if you are English--_l'Inghilterra_, _il carbone_, and _il cambio_; and as England, coal and exchange you are treated. It is more than useless to try to be human about it. You are a State usury system, a coal fiend and an exchange thief. Every Englishman has disappeared into this triple abstraction, in the eyes of the Italian, of the proletariat particularly. Try and get them to be human, try and get them to see that you are simply an individual, if you can. After all, I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way across these years. But no--to an Italian I am a perfected abstraction, England--coal--exchange. The Germans were once devils for inhuman theoretic abstracting of living beings. But now the Italians beat them. I am a walking column of statistics, which adds up badly for Italy. Only this and nothing more. Which being so, I shut my mouth and walk away. * * * * * For the moment the carpenter is shaken off. But I am in a rage, fool that I am. It is like being pestered by their mosquitoes. The sailing ships are near--and I count fifteen sails. Beautiful they look! Yet if I were on board somebody would be chewing newspaper at me, and addressing me as England--coal--exchange. The mosquito hovers--and hovers. But the stony blank of the side of my cheek keeps him away. Yet he hovers. And the q-b feels sympathetic towards him: quite sympathetic. Because of course he treats her--a _bel pezzo_--as if he would lick her boots, or anything else that she would let him lick. * * * * * Meanwhile we eat the apples from yesterday's dessert, and the remains of the q-b's Infant-Jesus-and-dove cake. The land is drawing nearer--we can see the shape of the end promontory and peninsula--and a white speck like a church. The bulk of the land is forlorn and rather shapeless, coming towards us: but attractive. Looking ahead towards the land gives us away. The mosquito swoops on us. Yes--he is not sure--he thinks the white speck is a church--or a lighthouse. When you pass the cape on the right, and enter the wide bay between Cape Spartivento and Cape Carbonara, then you have two hours sail to Cagliari. We shall arrive between two and three o'clock. It is now eleven. Yes, the sailing ships are probably going to Naples. There is not much wind for them now. When there is wind they go fast, faster than our steamer. Ah Naples--bella, bella, eh? A little dirty, say I. But what do you want? says he. A great city! Palermo of course is better. Ah--the Neapolitan women--he says, à propos or not. They do their hair so fine, so neat and beautiful--but underneath--sotto--sotto--they are dirty. This being received in cold silence, he continues: _Noi giriamo il mondo! Noi, chi giriamo, conosciamo il mondo._ _We_ travel about, and _we_ know the world. Who _we_ are, I do not know: his highness the Palermitan carpenter lout, no doubt. But _we_, who travel, know the world. He is preparing his shot. The Neapolitan women, and the English women, in this are equal: that they are dirty underneath. Underneath, they are dirty. The women of London-- But it is getting too much for me. "You who look for dirty women," say I, "find dirty women everywhere." He stops short and watches me. "No! No! You have not understood me. No! I don't mean that. I mean that the Neapolitan women and the English women have dirty underclothing--" To which he gets no answer but a cold look and a cold cheek. Whereupon he turns to the q-b, and proceeds to be _simpatica_. And after a few moments he turns again to me: "Il signore is offended! He is offended with me." But I turn the other way. And at last he clears out: in triumph, I must admit: like a mosquito that has bitten one in the neck. As a matter of fact one should _never_ let these fellows get into conversation nowadays. They are no longer human beings. They hate one's Englishness, and leave out the individual. * * * * * We walk forward, towards the fore-deck, where the captain's lookout cabin is. The captain is an elderly man, silent and crushed: with the look of a gentleman. But he looks beaten down. Another, still another member of the tray-carrying department is just creeping up his ladder with a cup of black coffee. Returning, we peep down the sky-light into the kitchen. And there we see roast chicken and sausages--roast chicken and sausages! Ah, this is where the sides of kid and the chickens and the good things go: all down the throats of the crew. There is no more food for us, until we land. * * * * * We have passed the cape--and the white thing is a lighthouse. And the fattish, handsome professor has come up carrying the little girl-child, while the femalish elder brother leads the rabbit-fluffy small boy by the hand. So _en famille_: so terribly _en famille_. They deposit themselves near us, and it threatens another conversation. But not for anything, my dears! The sailors--not sailors, some of the street-corner loafers, are hoisting the flag, the red-white-and-green Italian tricolor. It floats at the mast-head, and the femalish brother, in a fine burst of feeling, takes off his funny hat with a flourish and cries: "Ecco la bandiera italiana!" Ach, the hateful sentimentalism of these days. The land passes slowly, very slowly. It is hilly, but barren looking, with few trees. And it is not spikey and rather splendid, like Sicily. Sicily has style. We keep along the east side of the bay--away in the west is Cape Spartivento. And still no sight of Cagliari. "Two hours yet!" cries the Cagliari girl. "Two hours before we eat. Ah, when I get on land, what a good meal I shall eat." The men haul in the automatic log. The sky is clouding over with that icy curd which comes after midday when the bitter north wind is blowing. It is no longer warm. * * * * * Slowly, slowly we creep along the formless shore. An hour passes. We see a little fort ahead, done in enormous black-and-white checks, like a fragment of gigantic chess-board. It stands at the end of a long spit of land--a long, barish peninsula that has no houses and looks as if it might be golf-links. But it is not golf-links. And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish, illuminated missal. One wonders how it ever got there. And it seems like Spain--or Malta: not Italy. It is a steep and lonely city, treeless, as in some old illumination. Yet withal rather jewel-like: like a sudden rose-cut amber jewel naked at the depth of the vast indenture. The air is cold, blowing bleak and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is Cagliari. It has that curious look, as if it could be seen, but not entered. It is like some vision, some memory, something that has passed away. Impossible that one can actually _walk_ in that city: set foot there and eat and laugh there. Ah, no! Yet the ship drifts nearer, nearer, and we are looking for the actual harbour. * * * * * The usual sea-front with dark trees for a promenade and palatial buildings behind, but here not so pink and gay, more reticent, more sombre of yellow stone. The harbour itself a little basin of water, into which we are slipping carefully, while three salt-barges laden with salt as white as snow creep round from the left, drawn by an infinitesimal tug. There are only two other forlorn ships in the basin. It is cold on deck. The ship turns slowly round, and is being hauled to the quay side. I go down for the knapsack, and a fat blue-bottle pounces at me. "You pay nine francs fifty." I pay them, and we get off that ship. III. CAGLIARI. There is a very little crowd waiting on the quay: mostly men with their hands in their pockets. But, thank Heaven, they have a certain aloofness and reserve. They are not like the tourist-parasites of these post-war days, who move to the attack with a terrifying cold vindictiveness the moment one emerges from any vehicle. And some of these men look really poor. There are no poor Italians any more: at least, loafers. Strange the feeling round the harbour: as if everybody had gone away. Yet there are people about. It is "festa" however, Epiphany. But it is so different from Sicily: none of the suave Greek-Italian charms, none of the airs and graces, none of the glamour. Rather bare, rather stark, rather cold and yellow--somehow like Malta, without Malta's foreign liveliness. Thank Goodness no one wants to carry my knapsack. Thank Goodness no one has a fit at the sight of it. Thank Heaven no one takes any notice. They stand cold and aloof, and don't move. We make our way through the Customs: then through the Dazio, the City Customs-house. Then we are free. We set off up a steep, new, broad road, with little trees on either side. But stone, arid, new, wide stone, yellowish under the cold sky--and abandoned-seeming. Though, of course, there are people about. The north wind blows bitingly. We climb a broad flight of steps, always upwards, up the wide, precipitous, dreary boulevard with sprouts of trees. Looking for the Hotel, and dying with hunger. * * * * * At last we find it, the Scala di Ferro: through a courtyard with green plants. And at last a little man with lank, black hair, like an esquimo, comes smiling. He is one brand of Sardinian--esquimo looking. There is no room with two beds: only single rooms. And thus we are led off, if you please, to the "bagnio": the bathing-establishment wing, on the dank ground floor. Cubicles on either side a stone passage, and in every cubicle a dark stone bath, and a little bed. We can have each a little bath cubicle. If there's nothing else for it, there isn't: but it seems dank and cold and horrid, underground. And one thinks of all the unsavory "assignations" at these old bagnio places. True, at the end of the passage are seated two carabinieri. But whether to ensure respectibility or not, Heaven knows. We are in the baths, that's all. [Illustration: ISILI] The esquimo returns after five minutes, however. There _is_ a bedroom in the house. He is pleased, because he didn't like putting us into the bagnio. Where he found the bedroom I don't know. But there it was, large, sombre, cold, and over the kitchen fumes of a small inner court like a well. But perfectly clean and all right. And the people seemed warm and good-natured, like human beings. One has got so used to the non-human ancient-souled Sicilians, who are suave and so completely callous. * * * * * After a really good meal we went out to see the town. It was after three o'clock and everywhere was shut up like an English Sunday. Cold, stony Cagliari: in summer you must be sizzling hot, Cagliari, like a kiln. The men stood about in groups, but without the intimate Italian watchfulness that never leaves a passer-by alone. Strange, stony Cagliari. We climbed up a street like a corkscrew stairway. And we saw announcements of a children's fancy-dress ball. Cagliari is very steep. Half-way up there is a strange place called the bastions, a large, level space like a drill-ground with trees, curiously suspended over the town, and sending off a long shoot like a wide viaduct, across above the corkscrew street that comes climbing up. Above this bastion place the town still rises steeply to the Cathedral and the fort. What is so curious is that this terrace or bastion is so large, like some big recreation ground, that it is almost dreary, and one cannot understand its being suspended in mid-air. Down below is the little circle of the harbour. To the left a low, malarial-looking sea plain, with tufts of palm trees and Arab-looking houses. From this runs out the long spit of land towards that black-and-white watch-fort, the white road trailing forth. On the right, most curiously, a long strange spit of sand runs in a causeway far across the shallows of the bay, with the open sea on one hand, and vast, end-of-the-world lagoons on the other. There are peaky, dark mountains beyond this--just as across the vast bay are gloomy hills. It is a strange, strange landscape: as if here the world left off. The bay is vast in itself; and all these curious things happening at its head: this curious, craggy-studded town, like a great stud of house-covered rock jutting up out of the bay flats: around it on one side the weary, Arab-looking palm-desolated malarial plain, and on the other side great salt lagoons, dead beyond the sand-bar: these backed again by serried, clustered mountains, suddenly, while away beyond the plain, hills rise to sea again. Land and sea both seem to give out, exhausted, at the bay head: the world's end. And into this world's end starts up Cagliari, and on either side, sudden, serpent-crest hills. But it still reminds me of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history. The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens, and all that we think the real thing will go off with a pop, and we shall be left staring. * * * * * On the great parapet above the Municipal Hall and above the corkscrew high-street a thick fringe of people is hanging, looking down. We go to look too: and behold, below there is the entrance to the ball. Yes, there is a china shepherdess in pale blue and powdered hair, crook, ribbons, Marie Antoinette satin daintiness and all, slowly and haughtily walking up the road, and gazing superbly round. She is not more than twelve years old, moreover. Two servants accompany her. She gazes supremely from right to left as she goes, mincingly, and I would give her the prize for haughtiness. She is perfect--a little too haughty for Watteau, but "marquise" to a T. The people watch in silence. There is no yelling and screaming and running. They watch in a suitable silence. Comes a carriage with two fat bay horses slithering, almost swimming up the corkscrew high-street. That in itself is a "tour-de-force": for Cagliari doesn't have carriages. Imagine a street like a corkscrew stair, paved with slippery stone. And imagine two bay horses rowing their way up it: they did not walk a single stride. But they arrived. And there fluttered out three strangely exquisite children, two frail, white satin Pierrots and a white satin Pierrette. They were like fragile winter butterflies with black spots. They had a curious, indefinable remote elegance, something conventional and "fin-de-siècle". But not our century. The wonderful artificial delicacy of the eighteenth. The boys had big, perfect ruffs round their necks: and behind were slung old, cream-colored Spanish shawls, for warmth. They were frail as tobacco flowers, and with remote, cold elegance they fluttered by the carriage, from which emerged a large black-satin Mama. Fluttering their queer little butterfly feet on the pavement, hovering round the large Mama like three frail-tissued ghosts, they found their way past the solid, seated Carabinieri into the hall. Arrived a primrose-brocade beau, with ruffles, and his hat under his arm: about twelve years old. Walking statelily, without a qualm up the steep twist of the street. Or perhaps so perfect in his self-consciousness that it became an elegant "aplomb" in him. He was a genuine eighteenth-century exquisite, rather stiffer than the French, maybe, but completely in the spirit. Curious, curious children! They had a certain stand-offish superbness, and not a single trace of misgiving. For them, their "noblesse" was indisputable. For the first time in my life I recognized the true cold superbness of the old "noblesse". They had not a single qualm about their own perfect representing of the higher order of being. Followed another white satin "marquise", with a maid-servant. They are strong on the eighteenth century in Cagliari. Perhaps it is the last bright reality to them. The nineteenth hardly counts. * * * * * Curious the children in Cagliari. The poor seem thoroughly poor-bare-footed urchins, gay and wild in the narrow dark streets. But the more well-to-do children are so fine: so extraordinarily elegantly dressed. It quite strikes one of a heap. Not so much the grown-ups. The children. All the "chic," all the fashion, all the originality is expended on the children. And with a great deal of success. Better than Kensington Gardens very often. And they promenade with Papa and Mama with such alert assurance, having quite brought it off, their fashionable get-up. Who would have expected it? * * * * * Oh narrow, dark, and humid streets going up to the Cathedral, like crevices. I narrowly miss a huge pail of slop-water which comes crashing down from heaven. A small boy who was playing in the street, and whose miss is not quite a clean miss, looks up with that naïve, impersonal wonder with which children stare at a star or a lamp-lighter. The Cathedral must have been a fine old pagan stone fortress once. Now it has come, as it were, through the mincing machine of the ages, and oozed out baroque and sausagey, a bit like the horrible baldachins in St. Peter's at Rome. None the less it is homely and hole-and-cornery, with a rather ragged high mass trailing across the pavement towards the high altar, since it is almost sunset, and Epiphany. It feels as if one might squat in a corner and play marbles and eat bread and cheese and be at home: a comfortable old-time churchey feel. There is some striking filet lace on the various altar-cloths. And St. Joseph must be a prime saint. He has an altar and a verse of invocation praying for the dying. "Oh, St. Joseph, true potential father of Our Lord." What can it profit a man, I wonder, to be the potential father of anybody! For the rest I am not Baedeker. * * * * * The top of Cagliari is the fortress: the old gate, the old ramparts, of honey-combed, fine yellowish sandstone. Up in a great sweep goes the rampart wall, Spanish and splendid, dizzy. And the road creeping down again at the foot, down the back of the hill. There lies the country: that dead plain with its bunch of palms and a fainting sea, and inland again, hills. Cagliari must be on a single, loose, lost bluff of rock. From the terrace just below the fortress, above the town, not behind it, we stand and look at the sunset. It is all terrible, taking place beyond the knotted, serpent-crested hills that lie, bluey and velvety, beyond the waste lagoons. Dark, sultry, heavy crimson the west is, hanging sinisterly, with those gloomy blue cloud-bars and cloud-banks drawn across. All behind the blue-gloomy peaks stretches the curtain of sinister, smouldering red, and away to the sea. Deep below lie the sea-meres. They seem miles and miles, and utterly waste. But the sand-bar crosses like a bridge, and has a road. All the air is dark, a sombre bluish tone. The great west burns inwardly, sullenly, and gives no glow, yet a deep red. It is cold. We go down the steep streets, smelly, dark, dank, and very cold. No wheeled vehicle can scramble up them, presumably. People live in one room. Men are combing their hair or fastening their collars in the doorways. Evening is here, and it is a feast day. * * * * * At the bottom of the street we come to a little bunch of masked youths, one in a long yellow frock and a frilled bonnet, another like an old woman, another in red twill. They are arm in arm and are accosting the passers-by. The q-b gives a cry, and looks for escape. She has a terror of maskers, a terror that comes from childhood. To say the truth, so have I. We hasten invisibly down the far side of the street, and come out under the bastions. Then we go down our own familiar wide, short, cold boulevard to the sea. At the bottom, again, is a carriage with more maskers. Carnival is beginning. A man dressed as a peasant woman in native costume is clambering with his great wide skirts and wide strides on to the box, and, flourishing his ribboned whip, is addressing a little crowd of listeners. He opens his mouth wide and goes on with a long yelling harangue of taking a drive with his mother--another man in old-woman's gaudy finery and wig who sits already bobbing on the box. The would-be daughter flourishes, yells, and prances up there on the box of the carriage. The crowd listens attentively and mildly smiles. It all seems real to them. The q-b hovers in the distance, half-fascinated, and watches. With a great flourish of whip and legs--showing his frilled drawers--the masker pulls round to drive along the boulevard by the sea--the only place where one can drive. * * * * * The big street by the sea is the Via Roma. It has the cafés on one side and across the road the thick tufts of trees intervening between the sea and us. Among these thick tufts of sea-front trees the little steam tram, like a little train, bumps to rest, after having wound round the back of the town. The Via Roma is all social Cagliari. Including the cafés with their outdoor tables on the one side of the road, and the avenue strand on the other, it is very wide, and at evening it contains the whole town. Here, and here alone carriages can spank along, very slowly, officers can ride, and the people can promenade "en masse." We were amazed at the sudden crowd we found ourselves amongst--like a short, dense river of people streaming slowly in a mass. There is practically no vehicular traffic--only the steady dense streams of human beings of all sorts, all on a human footing. It must have been something like this in the streets of imperial Rome, where no chariots might drive and humanity was all on foot. Little bunches of maskers, and single maskers danced and strutted along in the thick flow under the trees. If you are a mask you don't walk like a human being: you dance and prance along extraordinarily like the life-size marionettes, conducted by wires from above. That is how you go: with that odd jauntiness as if lifted and propelled by wires from the shoulders. In front of me went a charming coloured harlequin, all in diamond-shaped colours, and beautiful as a piece of china. He tripped with the light, fantastic trip, quite alone in the thick crowd, and quite blithe. Came two little children hand in hand in brilliant scarlet and white costumes, sauntering calmly. They did not do the mask trip. After a while a sky-blue girl with a high hat and full skirts, very short, that went flip-flip-flip, as a ballet dancer's, whilst she strutted; after her a Spanish grandee capering like a monkey. They threaded among the slow stream of the crowd. Appeared Dante and Beatrice, in Paradise apparently, all in white sheet-robes, and with silver wreaths on their heads, arm in arm, and prancing very slowly and majestically, yet with the long lilt as if hitched along by wires from above. They were very good: all the well-known vision come to life, Dante incorporate, and white as a shroud, with his tow-haired, silver-crowned, immortal Beatrice on his arm, strutting the dark avenues. He had the nose and cheek-bones and banded cheek, and the stupid wooden look, and offered a modern criticism on the Inferno. * * * * * It had become quite dark, the lamps were lighted. We crossed the road to the Café Roma, and found a table on the pavement among the crowd. In a moment we had our tea. The evening was cold, with ice in the wind. But the crowd surged on, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. At the tables were seated mostly men, taking coffee or vermouth or aqua vitae, all familiar and easy, without the modern self-consciousness. There was a certain pleasant, natural robustness of spirit, and something of a feudal free-and-easiness. Then arrived a family, with children, and nurse in her native costume. They all sat at table together, perfectly easy with one another, though the marvellous nurse seemed to be seated below the salt. She was bright as a poppy, in a rose-scarlet dress of fine cloth, with a curious little waistcoat of emerald green and purple, and a bodice of soft, homespun linen with great full sleeves. On her head she had a rose-scarlet and white head-dress, and she wore great studs of gold filigree, and similar ear-rings. The feudal-bourgeois family drank its syrup-drinks and watched the crowd. Most remarkable is the complete absence of self-consciousness. They all have a perfect natural "sang-froid," the nurse in her marvellous native costume is as thoroughly at her ease as if she were in her own village street. She moves and speaks and calls to a passer-by without the slightest constraint, and much more, without the slightest presumption. She is below the invisible salt, the invisible but insuperable salt. And it strikes me the salt-barrier is a fine thing for both parties: they both remain natural and human on either side of it, instead of becoming devilish, scrambling and pushing at the barricade. * * * * * The crowd is across the road, under the trees near the sea. On this side stroll occasional pedestrians. And I see my first peasant in costume. He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the black-and-white costume. He wears the full-sleeved white shirt and the close black bodice of thick, native frieze, cut low. From this sticks out a short kilt or frill, of the same black frieze, a band of which goes between the legs, between the full loose drawers of coarse linen. The drawers are banded below the knee into tight black frieze gaiters. On his head he has the long black stocking cap, hanging down behind. How handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white, the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast again, and once more the black cap--what marvellous massing of the contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie.--How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.--And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes. There is another peasant too, a young one with a swift eye and hard cheek and hard, dangerous thighs. He has folded his stocking cap, so that it comes forward to his brow like a phrygian cap. He wears close knee breeches and close sleeved waistcoat of thick brownish stuff that looks like leather. Over the waistcoat a sort of cuirass of black, rusty sheepskin, the curly wool outside. So he strides, talking to a comrade. How fascinating it is, after the soft Italians, to see these limbs in their close knee-breeches, so definite, so manly, with the old fierceness in them still. One realises, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable. But that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have dreamed it: to have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way to something in me--to my past, perhaps. I don't know. But the uneasy sense of blood-familiarity haunts me. I _know_ I have known it before. It is something of the same uneasiness I feel before Mount Eryx: but without the awe this time. * * * * * In the morning the sun was shining from a blue, blue sky, but the shadows were deadly cold, and the wind like a flat blade of ice. We went out running to the sun. The hotel could not give us coffee and milk: only a little black coffee. So we descended to the sea-front again, to the Via Roma, and to our café. It was Friday: people seemed to be bustling in from the country with huge baskets. The Café Roma had coffee and milk, but no butter. We sat and watched the movement outside. Tiny Sardinian donkeys, the tiniest things ever seen, trotted their infinitesimal little paws along the road, drawing little wagons like handcarts. Their proportion is so small, that they make a boy walking at their side look like a tall man, while a natural man looks like a Cyclops stalking hugely and cruelly. It is ridiculous for a grown man to have one of these little creatures, hardly bigger than a fly, hauling his load for him. One is pulling a chest of drawers on a cart, and it seems to have a whole house behind it. Nevertheless it plods bravely, away beneath the load, a wee thing. They tell me there used to be flocks of these donkeys, feeding half wild on the wild, moor-like hills of Sardinia. But the war--and also the imbecile wantonness of the war-masters--consumed these flocks too, so that few are left. The same with the cattle. Sardinia, home of cattle, hilly little Argentine of the Mediterranean, is now almost deserted. It is war, say the Italiana.--And also the wanton, imbecile, foul lavishness of the war-masters. It was not alone the war which exhausted the world. It was the deliberate evil wastefulness of the war-makers in their own countries. Italy ruined Italy. * * * * * Two peasants in black-and-white are strolling in the sun, flashing. And my dream of last evening was not a dream. And my nostalgia for something I know not what was not an illusion. I feel it again, at once, at the sight of the men in frieze and linen, a heart yearning for something I have known, and which I want back again. It is market day. We turn up the Largo Carlo-Felice, the second wide gap of a street, a vast but very short boulevard, like the end of something. Cagliari is like that: all bits and bobs. And by the side of the pavement are many stalls, stalls selling combs and collar-studs, cheap mirrors, handkerchiefs, shoddy Manchester goods, bed-ticking, boot-paste, poor crockery, and so on. But we see also Madame of Cagliari going marketing, with a servant accompanying her, carrying a huge grass-woven basket: or returning from marketing, followed by a small boy supporting one of these huge grass-woven baskets--like huge dishes--on his head, piled with bread, eggs, vegetables, a chicken, and so forth. Therefore we follow Madame going marketing, and find ourselves in the vast market house, and it fairly glows with eggs: eggs in these great round dish-baskets of golden grass: but eggs in piles, in mounds, in heaps, a Sierra Nevada of eggs, glowing warm white. How they glow! I have never noticed it before. But they give off a warm, pearly effulgence into the air, almost a warmth. A pearly-gold heat seems to come out of them. Myriads of eggs, glowing avenues of eggs. And they are marked--60 centimes, 65 centimes. Ah, cries the q-b, I must live in Cagliari--For in Sicily the eggs cost 1.50 each. This is the meat and poultry and bread market. There are stalls of new, various-shaped bread, brown and bright: there are tiny stalls of marvellous native cakes, which I want to taste, there is a great deal of meat and kid: and there are stalls of cheese, all cheeses, all shapes, all whitenesses, all the cream-colours, on into daffodil yellow. Goat cheese, sheeps cheese, Swiss cheese, Parmegiano, stracchino, caciocavallo, torolone, how many cheeses I don't know the names of! But they cost about the same as in Sicily, eighteen francs, twenty francs, twenty-five francs the kilo. And there is lovely ham--thirty and thirty-five francs the kilo. There is a little fresh butter too--thirty or thirty-two francs the kilo. Most of the butter, however, is tinned in Milan. It costs the same as the fresh. There are splendid piles of salted black olives, and huge bowls of green salted olives. There are chickens and ducks and wild-fowl: at eleven and twelve and fourteen francs a kilo. There is mortadella, the enormous Bologna sausage, thick as a church pillar: 16 francs: and there are various sorts of smaller sausage, salami, to be eaten in slices. A wonderful abundance of food, glowing and shining. We are rather late for fish, especially on Friday. But a barefooted man offers us two weird objects from the Mediterranean, which teems with marine monsters. The peasant women sit behind their wares, their home-woven linen skirts, hugely full, and of various colours, ballooning round them. The yellow baskets give off a glow of light. There is a sense of profusion once more. But alas no sense of cheapness: save the eggs. Every month, up goes the price of everything. "I must come and live in Cagliari, to do my shopping here," says the q-b. "I must have one of those big grass baskets." We went down to the little street--but saw more baskets emerging from a broad flight of stone stairs, enclosed. So up we went-and found ourselves in the vegetable market. Here the q-b was happier still. Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower-show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet and blue crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips, in piles. Then the long, slim, grey-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many huge walnuts. Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets: magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white hearts: long, brown-purple onions and then, of course pyramids of big oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny mandarini, the little tangerine orange with their green-black leaves. The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous. And all quite cheap, the one remaining cheapness, except potatoes. Potatoes of any sort are 1.40 or 1.50 the kilo. "Oh!" cried the q-b, "If I don't live at Cagliari and come and do my shopping here, I shall die with one of my wishes unfulfilled." * * * * * But out of the sun it was cold, nevertheless. We went into the streets to try and get warm. The sun was powerful. But alas, as in southern towns generally, the streets are sunless as wells. So the q-b and I creep slowly along the sunny bits, and then perforce are swallowed by shadow. We look at the shops. But there is not much to see. Little, frowsy provincial shops, on the whole. But a fair number of peasants in the streets, and peasant women in rather ordinary costume: tight-bodiced, volume-skirted dresses of hand-woven linen or thickish cotton. The prettiest is of dark-blue-and-red, stripes-and-lines, intermingled, so made that the dark-blue gathers round the waist into one colour, the myriad pleats hiding all the rosy red. But when she walks, the full-petticoated peasant woman, then the red goes flash-flash-flash, like a bird showing its colours. Pretty that looks in the sombre street. She has a plain, light bodice with a peak: sometimes a little vest, and great full white sleeves, and usually a handkerchief or shawl loose knotted. It is charming the way they walk, with quick, short steps. When all is said and done, the most attractive costume for women in my eye, is the tight little bodice and the many-pleated skirt, full and vibrating with movement. It has a charm which modern elegance lacks completely--a bird-like play in movement. * * * * * They are amusing, these peasant girls and women: so brisk and defiant. They have straight backs, like little walls, and decided, well-drawn brows. And they are amusingly on the alert. There is no eastern creeping. Like sharp, brisk birds they dart along the streets, and you feel they would fetch you a bang over the head as leave as look at you. Tenderness, thank heaven, does not seem to be a Sardinian quality. Italy is so tender--like cooked macaroni--yards and yards of soft tenderness ravelled round everything. Here men don't idealise women, by the looks of things. Here they don't make these great leering eyes, the inevitable yours-to-command look of Italian males. When the men from the country look at these women, then it is Mind-yourself, my lady. I should think the grovelling Madonna-worship is not much of a Sardinian feature. These women have to look out for themselves, keep their own back-bone stiff and their knuckles hard. Man is going to be male Lord if he can. And woman isn't going to give him too much of his own way, either. So there you have it, the fine old martial split between the sexes. It is tonic and splendid, really, after so much sticky intermingling and backboneless Madonna-worship. The Sardinian isn't looking for the "noble woman nobly planned." No, thank you. He wants that young madam over there, a young stiff-necked generation that she is. Far better sport than with the nobly-planned sort: hollow frauds that they are. Better sport too than with a Carmen, who gives herself away too much, In these women there is something shy and defiant and un-get-atable. The defiant, splendid split between the sexes, each absolutely determined to defend his side, her side, from assault. So the meeting has a certain wild, salty savour, each the deadly unknown to the other. And at the same time, each his own, her own native pride and courage, taking the dangerous leap and scrambling back. Give me the old, salty way of love. How I am nauseated with sentiment and nobility, the macaroni slithery-slobbery mess of modern adorations. * * * * * One sees a few fascinating faces in Cagliari: those great dark unlighted eyes. There are fascinating dark eyes in Sicily, bright, big, with an impudent point of light, and a curious roll, and long lashes: the eyes of old Greece, surely. But here one sees eyes of soft, blank darkness, all velvet, with no imp looking out of them. And they strike a stranger, older note: before the soul became self-conscious: before the mentality of Greece appeared in the world. Remote, always remote, as if the intelligence lay deep within the cave, and never came forward. One searches into the gloom for one second, while the glance lasts. But without being able to penetrate to the reality. It recedes, like some unknown creature deeper into its lair. There is a creature, dark and potent. But what? Sometimes Velasquez, and sometimes Goya gives us a suggestion of these large, dark, unlighted eyes. And they go with fine, fleecy black hair--almost as fine as fur. I have not seen them north of Cagliari. * * * * * The q-b spies some of the blue-and-red stripe-and-line cotton stuff of which the peasants make their dress: a large roll in the doorway of a dark shop. In we go, and begin to feel it. It is just soft, thickish cotton stuff--twelve francs a metre. Like most peasant patterns, it is much more complicated and subtle than appears: the curious placing of the stripes, the subtle proportion, and a white thread left down one side only of each broad blue block. The stripes, moreover, run _across_ the cloth, not lengthwise with it. But the width would be just long enough for a skirt--though the peasant skirts have almost all a band at the bottom with the stripes running round-ways. The man--he is the esquimo type, simple, frank and aimiable--says the stuff is made in France, and this the first roll since the war. It is the old, old pattern, quite correct--but the material not _quite_ so good. The q-b takes enough for a dress. He shows us also cashmeres, orange, scarlet, sky-blue, royal blue: good, pure-wool cashmeres that were being sent to India, and were captured from a German mercantile sub-marine. So he says. Fifty francs a metre--very, very wide. But they are too much trouble to carry in a knapsack, though their brilliance fascinates. * * * * * So we stroll and look at the shops, at the filigree gold jewelling of the peasants, at a good bookshop. But there is little to see and therefore the question is, shall we go on? Shall we go forward? There are two ways of leaving Cagliari for the north: the State railway that runs up the west side of the island, and the narrow-gauge secondary railway that pierces the centre. But we are too late for the big trains. So we will go by the secondary railway, wherever it goes. There is a train at 2.30, and we can get as far as Mandas, some fifty miles in the interior. When we tell the queer little waiter at the hotel, he says he comes from Mandas, and there are two inns. So after lunch--a strictly fish menu--we pay our bill. It comes to sixty odd francs--for three good meals each, with wine, and the night's lodging, this is cheap, as prices now are in Italy. Pleased with the simple and friendly Scala di Ferre, I shoulder my sack and we walk off to the second station. The sun is shining hot this afternoon--burning hot, by the sea. The road and the buildings look dry and desiccated, the harbour rather weary and end of the world. There is a great crowd of peasants at the little station. And almost every man has a pair of woven saddle-bags--a great flat strip of coarse-woven wool, with flat pockets at either end, stuffed with purchases. These are almost the only carrying bags. The men sling them over their shoulder, so that one great pocket hangs in front, one behind. These saddle bags are most fascinating. They are coarsely woven in bands of raw black-rusty wool, with varying bands of raw white wool or hemp or cotton--the bands and stripes of varying widths going cross-wise. And on the pale bands are woven sometimes flowers in most lovely colours, rose-red and blue and green, peasant patterns--and sometimes fantastic animals, beasts, in dark wool again. So that these striped zebra bags, some wonderful gay with flowery colours on their stripes, some weird with fantastic, griffin-like animals, are a whole landscape in themselves. The train has only first and third class. It costs about thirty francs for the two of us, third class to Mandas, which is some sixty miles. In we crowd with the joyful saddle-bags, into the wooden carriage with its many seats. And, wonder of wonders, punctually to the second, off we go, out of Cagliari. En route again. IV. MANDAS. The coach was fairly full of people, returning from market. On these railways the third class coaches are not divided into compartments. They are left open, so that one sees everybody, as down a room. The attractive saddle-bags, _bercole_, were disposed anywhere, and the bulk of the people settled down to a lively _conversazione_. It is much nicest, on the whole, to travel third class on the railway. There is space, there is air, and it is like being in a lively inn, everybody in good spirits. At our end was plenty of room. Just across the gangway was an elderly couple, like two children, coming home very happily. He was fat, fat all over, with a white moustache and a little not-unamiable frown. She was a tall lean, brown woman, in a brown full-skirted dress and black apron, with huge pocket. She wore no head covering, and her iron grey hair was parted smoothly. They were rather pleased and excited being in the train. She took all her money out of her big pocket, and counted it and gave it to him: all the ten Lira notes, and the five Lira and the two and the one, peering at the dirty scraps of pink-backed one-lira notes to see if they were good. Then she gave him her half-pennies. And he stowed them away in the trouser pocket, standing up to push them down his fat leg. And then one saw, to one's amazement, that the whole of his shirt-tail was left out behind, like a sort of apron worn backwards. Why--a mystery. He was one of those fat, good-natured, unheeding men with a little masterful frown, such as usually have tall, lean, hard-faced, obedient wives. They were very happy. With amazement he watched us taking hot tea from the Thermos flask. I think he too had suspected it might be a bomb. He had blue eyes and standing-up white eyebrows. "Beautiful hot--!" he said, seeing the tea steam. It is the inevitable exclamation. "Does it do you good?" "Yes," said the q-b. "Much good." And they both nodded complacently. They were going home. * * * * * The train was running over the malarial-looking sea-plain--past the down-at-heel palm trees, past the mosque-looking buildings. At a level crossing the woman crossing-keeper darted out vigorously with her red flag. And we rambled into the first village. It was built of sun-dried brick-adobe houses, thick adobe garden-walls, with tile ridges to keep off the rain. In the enclosures were dark orange trees. But the clay-coloured villages, clay-dry, looked foreign: the next thing to mere earth they seem, like fox-holes or coyote colonies. Looking back, one sees Cagliari bluff on her rock, rather fine, with the thin edge of the sea's blade curving round. It is rather hard to believe in the real sea, on this sort of clay-pale plain. * * * * * But soon we begin to climb to the hills. And soon the cultivation begins to be intermittent. Extraordinary how the heathy, moor-like hills come near the sea: extraordinary how scrubby and uninhabited the great spaces of Sardinia are. It is wild, with heath and arbutus scrub and a sort of myrtle, breast-high. Sometimes one sees a few head of cattle. And then again come the greyish arable-patches, where the corn is grown. It is like Cornwall, like the Land's End region. Here and there, in the distance, are peasants working on the lonely landscape. Sometimes it is one man alone in the distance, showing so vividly in his black-and-white costume, small and far-off like a solitary magpie, and curiously distinct. All the strange magic of Sardinia is in this sight. Among the low, moor-like hills, away in a hollow of the wide landscape one solitary figure, small but vivid black-and-white, working alone, as if eternally. There are patches and hollows of grey arable land, good for corn. Sardinia was once a great granary. Usually, however, the peasants of the South have left off the costume. Usually it is the invisible soldiers' grey-green cloth, the Italian khaki. Wherever you go, wherever you be, you see this khaki, this grey-green war-clothing. How many millions of yards of the thick, excellent, but hateful material the Italian government must have provided I don't know: but enough to cover Italy with a felt carpet, I should think. It is everywhere. It cases the tiny children in stiff and neutral frocks and coats, it covers their extinguished fathers, and sometimes it even encloses the women in its warmth. It is symbolic of the universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh democracy! Oh khaki democracy! * * * * * This is very different from Italian landscape. Italy is almost always dramatic, and perhaps invariably romantic. There is drama in the plains of Lombardy, and romance in the Venetian lagoons, and sheer scenic excitement in nearly all the hilly parts of the peninsula. Perhaps it is the natural floridity of lime-stone formations. But Italian landscape is really eighteenth-century landscape, to be represented in that romantic-classic manner which makes everything rather marvelous and very topical: aqueducts, and ruins upon sugar-loaf mountains, and craggy ravines and Wilhelm Meister water-falls: all up and down. Sardinia is another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not up-and-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable ridges of moor-like hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic peaks on the southwest. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking in Italy. Lovely space about one, and traveling distances--nothing finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after the peaky confinement of Sicily. Room--give me room--give me room for my spirit: and you can have all the toppling crags of romance. So we ran on through the gold of the afternoon, across a wide, almost Celtic landscape of hills, our little train winding and puffing away very nimbly. Only the heath and scrub, breast-high, man-high, is too big and brigand-like for a Celtic land. The horns of black, wild-looking cattle show sometimes. After a long pull, we come to a station after a stretch of loneliness. Each time, it looks as if there were nothing beyond--no more habitations. And each time we come to a station. Most of the people have left the train. And as with men driving in a gig, who get down at every public-house, so the passengers usually alight for an airing at each station. Our old fat friend stands up and tucks his shirt-tail comfortably in his trousers, which trousers all the time make one hold one's breath, for they seem at each very moment to be just dropping right down: and he clambers out, followed by the long, brown stalk of a wife. So the train sits comfortably for five or ten minutes, in the way the trains have. At last we hear whistles and horns, and our old fat friend running and clinging like a fat crab to the very end of the train as it sets off. At the same instant a loud shriek and a bunch of shouts from outside. We all jump up. There, down the line, is the long brown stork of a wife. She had just walked back to a house some hundred yards off, for a few words, and has now seen the train moving. Now behold her with her hands thrown to heaven, and hear the wild shriek "Madonna!" through all the hubbub. But she picks up her two skirt-knees, and with her thin legs in grey stockings starts with a mad rush after the train. In vain. The train inexorably pursues its course. Prancing, she reaches one end of the platform as we leave the other end. Then she realizes it is not going to stop for her. And then, oh horror, her long arms thrown out in wild supplication after the retreating train: then flung aloft to God: then brought down in absolute despair on her head. And this is the last sight we have of her, clutching her poor head in agony and doubling forward. She is left--she is abandoned. The poor fat husband has been all the time on the little outside platform at the end of the carriage, holding out his hand to her and shouting frenzied scolding to her and frenzied yells for the train to stop. And the train has not stopped. And she is left--left on that God-forsaken station in the waning light. So, his face all bright, his eyes round and bright as two stars, absolutely transfigured by dismay, chagrin, anger and distress, he comes and sits in his seat, ablaze, stiff, speechless. His face is almost beautiful in its blaze of conflicting emotions. For some time he is as if unconscious in the midst of his feelings. Then anger and resentment crop out of his consternation. He turns with a flash to the long-nosed, insidious, Phoenician-looking guard. Why couldn't they stop the train for her! And immediately, as if someone had set fire to him, off flares the guard. Heh!--the train can't stop for every person's convenience! The train is a train--the time-table is a time-table. What did the old woman want to take her trips down the line for? Heh! She pays the penalty for her own inconsiderateness. Had _she_ paid for the train--heh? And the fat man all the time firing off his unheeding and unheeded answers. One minute--only one minute--if he, the conductor had told the driver! if he, the conductor, had shouted! A poor woman! Not another train! What was she going to do! Her ticket? And no money. A poor woman-- There was a train back to Cagliari that night, said the conductor, at which the fat man nearly burst out of his clothing like a bursting seed-pod. He bounced on his seat. What good was that? What good was a train back to Cagliari, when their home was in Snelli! Making matters worse-- So they bounced and jerked and argued at one another, to their hearts' content. Then the conductor retired, smiling subtly, in a way they have. Our fat friend looked at us with hot, angry, ashamed, grieved eyes and said it was a shame. Yes, we chimed, it _was_ a shame. Whereupon a self-important miss who said she came from some Collegio at Cagliari advanced and asked a number of impertinent questions in a tone of pert sympathy. After which our fat friend, left alone, covered his clouded face with his hand, turned his back on the world, and gloomed. It had all been so dramatic that in spite of ourselves we laughed, even while the q-b shed a few tears. * * * * * Well, the journey lasted hours. We came to a station, and the conductor said we must get out: these coaches went no further. Only two coaches would proceed to Mandas. So we climbed out with our traps, and our fat friend with his saddle-bag, the picture of misery. The one coach into which we clambered was rather crowded. The only other coach was most of it first-class. And the rest of the train was freight. We were two insignificant passenger wagons at the end of a long string of freight-vans and trucks. There was an empty seat, so we sat on it: only to realize after about five minutes, that a thin old woman with two children--her grandchildren--was chuntering her head off because it was _her_ seat--why she had left it she didn't say. And under my legs was her bundle of bread. She nearly went off her head. And over my head, on the little rack, was her bercola, her saddle-bag. Fat soldiers laughed at her good-naturedly, but she fluttered and flipped like a tart, featherless old hen. Since she had another seat and was quite comfortable, we smiled and let her chunter. So she clawed her bread bundle from under my legs, and, clutching it and a fat child, sat tense. * * * * * It was getting quite dark. The conductor came and said that there was no more paraffin. If what there was in the lamps gave out, we should have to sit in the dark. There was no more paraffin all along the line.--So he climbed on the seats, and after a long struggle, with various boys striking matches for him, he managed to obtain a light as big as a pea. We sat in this _clair-obscur_, and looked at the sombre-shadowed faces round us: the fat soldier with a gun, the handsome soldier with huge saddle-bags, the weird, dark little man who kept exchanging a baby with a solid woman who had a white cloth tied round her head, a tall peasant-woman in costume, who darted out at a dark station and returned triumphant with a piece of chocolate: a young and interested young man, who told us every station. And the man who spat: there is always one. Gradually the crowd thinned. At a station we saw our fat friend go by, bitterly, like a betrayed soul, his bulging saddle-bag hanging before and after, but no comfort in it now--no comfort. The pea of light from the paraffin lamp grew smaller. We sat in incredible dimness, and the smell of sheeps-wool and peasant, with only our fat and stoic young man to tell us where we were. The other dusky faces began to sink into a dead, gloomy silence. Some took to sleep. And the little train ran on and on, through unknown Sardinian darkness. In despair we drained the last drop of tea and ate the last crusts of bread. We knew we must arrive some time. * * * * * It was not much after seven when we came to Mandas. Mandas is a junction where these little trains sit and have a long happy chat after their arduous scramble over the downs. It had taken us somewhere about five hours to do our fifty miles. No wonder then that when the junction at last heaves in sight everybody bursts out of the train like seeds from an exploding pod, and rushes somewhere for something. To the station restaurant, of course. Hence there is a little station restaurant that does a brisk trade, and where one can have a bed. A quite pleasant woman behind the little bar: a brown woman with brown parted hair and brownish eyes and brownish, tanned complexion and tight brown velveteen bodice. She led us up a narrow winding stone stair, as up a fortress, leading on with her candle, and ushered us into the bedroom. It smelled horrid and sourish, as shutup bedrooms do. We threw open the window. There were big frosty stars snapping ferociously in heaven. The room contained a huge bed, big enough for eight people, and quite clean. And the table on which stood the candle actually had a cloth. But imagine that cloth! I think it had been originally white: now, however, it was such a web of time-eaten holes and mournful black inkstains and poor dead wine stains that it was like some 2000 B.C. mummy-cloth. I wonder if it could have been lifted from that table: or if it was mummified on to it! I for one made no attempt to try. But that table-cover impressed me, as showing degrees I had not imagined.--A table-cloth. We went down the fortress-stair to the eating-room. Here was a long table with soup-plates upside down and a lamp burning an uncanny naked acetylene flame. We sat at the cold table, and the lamp immediately began to wane. The room--in fact the whole of Sardinia--was stone cold, stone, stone cold. Outside the earth was freezing. Inside there was no thought of any sort of warmth: dungeon stone floors, dungeon stone walls and a dead, corpse-like atmosphere, too heavy and icy to move. The lamp went quite out, and the q-b gave a cry. The brown woman poked her head through a hole in the wall. Beyond her we saw the flames of the cooking, and two devil-figures stirring the pots. The brown woman came and shook the lamp--it was like a stodgy porcelain mantelpiece vase--shook it well and stirred up its innards, and started it going once more. Then she appeared with a bowl of smoking cabbage soup, in which were bits of macaroni: and would we have wine? I shuddered at the thought of death-cold red wine of the country, so asked what else there was. There was malvagia--malvoisie, the same old malmsey that did for the Duke of Clarence. So we had a pint of malvagia, and were comforted. At least we were being so, when the lamp went out again. The brown woman came and shook and smacked it, and started it off again. But as if to say "Shan't for you", it whipped out again. Then came the host with a candle and a pin, a large, genial Sicilian with pendulous mustaches. And he thoroughly pricked the wretch with the pin, shook it, and turned little screws. So up flared the flame. We were a little nervous. He asked us where we came from, etc. And suddenly he asked us, with an excited gleam, were we Socialists. Aha, he was going to hail us as citizens and comrades. He thought we were a pair of Bolshevist agents: I could see it. And as such he was prepared to embrace us. But no, the q-b disclaimed the honor. I merely smiled and shook my head. It is a pity to rob people of their exciting illusions. "Ah, there is too much socialism everywhere!" cried the q-b. "Ma--perhaps, perhaps--" said the discreet Sicilian. She saw which way the land lay, and added: "Si vuole un _pocchetino_ di Socialismo: one wants a tiny bit of socialism in the world, a tiny bit. But not much. Not much. At present there is too much." Our host, twinkling at this speech which treated of the sacred creed as if it were a pinch of salt in the broth, believing the q-b was throwing dust in his eyes, and thoroughly intrigued by us as a pair of deep ones, retired. No sooner had he gone than the lamp-flame stood up at its full length, and started to whistle. The q-b drew back. Not satisfied by this, another flame suddenly began to whip round the bottom of the burner, like a lion lashing its tail. Unnerved, we made room: the q-b cried again: in came the host with a subtle smile and a pin and an air of benevolence, and tamed the brute. What else was there to eat? There was a piece of fried pork for me, and boiled eggs for the q-b. As we were proceeding with these, in came the remainder of the night's entertainment: three station officials, two in scarlet peaked caps, one in a black-and-gold peaked cap. They sat down with a clamour, in their caps, as if there was a sort of invisible screen between us and them. They were young. The black cap had a lean and sardonic look: one of the red-caps was little and ruddy, very young, with a little mustache: we called him the _maialino_, the gay little black pig, he was so plump and food-nourished and frisky. The third was rather puffy and pale and had spectacles. They all seemed to present us the blank side of their cheek, and to intimate that no, they were not going to take their hats off, even if it were dinner-table and a strange _signora_. And they made rough quips with one another, still as if we were on the other side of the invisible screen. Determined however, to remove this invisible screen, I said Good-evening, and it was very cold. They muttered Good-evening, and yes, it was fresh. An Italian never says it is cold: it is never more than _fresco_. But this hint that it was cold they took as a hint at their caps, and they became very silent, till the woman came in with the soup-bowl. Then they clamoured at her, particularly the _maialino_, what was there to eat. She told them--beef-steaks of pork. Whereat they pulled faces. Or bits of boiled pork. They sighed, looked gloomy, cheered up, and said beef-steaks, then. And they fell on their soup. And never, from among the steam, have I heard a more joyful trio of soup-swilkering. They sucked it in from their spoons with long, gusto-rich sucks. The _maialino_ was the treble--he trilled his soup into his mouth with a swift, sucking vibration, interrupted by bits of cabbage, which made the lamp start to dither again. Black-cap was the baritone; good, rolling spoon-sucks. And the one in spectacles was the bass: he gave sudden deep gulps. All was led by the long trilling of the _maialino_. Then suddenly, to vary matters, he cocked up his spoon in one hand, chewed a huge mouthful of bread, and swallowed it down with a smack-smack-smack! of his tongue against his palate. As children we used to call this "clapping". "Mother, she's clapping!" I would yell with anger, against my sister. The German word is schmatzen. So the _maialino_ clapped like a pair of cymbals, while baritone and bass rolled on. Then in chimed the swift bright treble. At this rate however, the soup did not last long. Arrived the beef-steaks of pork. And now the trio was a trio of castanet smacks and cymbal claps. Triumphantly the _maialino_ looked around. He out-smacked all. The bread of the country is rather coarse and brown, with a hard, hard crust. A large rock of this is perched on every damp serviette. The _maialino_ tore his rock asunder, and grumbled at the black-cap, who had got a weird sort of three-cornered loaf-roll of pure white bread--starch white. He was a swell with this white bread. Suddenly black-cap turned to me. Where had we come from, where were we going, what for? But in laconic, sardonic tone. "I _like_ Sardinia," cried the q-b. "Why?" he asked sarcastically. And she tried to find out. "Yes, the Sardinians please me more than the Sicilians," said I. "Why?" he asked sarcastically. "They are more open--more honest." He seemed to turn his nose down. "The padrone is a Sicilian," said the _maialino_, stuffing a huge block of bread into his mouth, and rolling his insouciant eyes of a gay, well-fed little black pig towards the background. We weren't making much headway. "You've seen Cagliari?" the black-cap said to me, like a threat. "Yes! oh Cagliari pleases me--Cagliari is beautiful!" cried the q-b, who travels with a vial of melted butter ready for her parsnips. "Yes--Cagliari is _so-so_--Cagliari is very fair," said the black cap. "_Cagliari è discreto._" He was evidently proud of it. "And is Mandas nice?" asked the q-b. "In what way nice?" they asked, with immense sarcasm. "Is there anything to see?" "Hens," said the _maialino_ briefly. They all bristled when one asked if Mandas was nice. "What does one do here?" asked the q-b. "_Niente!_ At Mandas one does _nothing_. At Mandas one goes to bed when it's dark, like a chicken. At Mandas one walks down the road like a pig that is going nowhere. At Mandas a goat understands more than the inhabitants understand. At Mandas one needs socialism...." They all cried out at once. Evidently Mandas was more than flesh and blood could bear for another minute to these three conspirators. "Then you are very bored here?" say I. "Yes." And the quiet intensity of that naked yes spoke more than volumes. "You would like to be in Cagliari?" "Yes." Silence, intense, sardonic silence had intervened. The three looked at one another and made a sour joke about Mandas. Then the black-cap turned to me. "Can you understand Sardinian?" he said. "Somewhat. More than Sicilian, anyhow." "But Sardinian is more difficult than Sicilian. It is full of words utterly unknown to Italian--" "Yes, but," say I, "it is spoken openly, in plain words, and Sicilian is spoken all stuck together, none of the words there at all." He looks at me as if I were an imposter. Yet it is true. I find it quite easy to understand Sardinian. As a matter of fact, it is more a question of human approach than of sound. Sardinian seems open and manly and downright. Sicilian is gluey and evasive, as if the Sicilian didn't want to speak straight to you. As a matter of fact, he doesn't. He is an over-cultured, sensitive, ancient soul, and he has so many sides to his mind that he hasn't got any definite one mind at all. He's got a dozen minds, and uneasily he's aware of it, and to commit himself to anyone of them is merely playing a trick on himself and his interlocutor. The Sardinian, on the other hand, still seems to have one downright mind. I bump up against a downright, smack-out belief in Socialism, for example. The Sicilian is much too old in our culture to swallow Socialism whole: much too ancient and rusé not to be sophisticated about any and every belief. He'll go off like a squib: and then he'll smoulder acridly and sceptically even against his own fire. One sympathizes with him in retrospect. But in daily life it is unbearable. "Where do you find such white bread?" say I to the black cap, because he is proud of it. "It comes from my home." And then he asks about the bread of Sicily. Is it any whiter than _this_--the Mandas rock. Yes, it is a little whiter. At which they gloom again. For it is a very sore point, this bread. Bread means a great deal to an Italian: it is verily his staff of life. He practically lives on bread. And instead of going by taste, he now, like all the world, goes by eye. He has got it into his head that bread should be white, so that every time he fancies a darker shade in the loaf a shadow falls on his soul. Nor is he altogether wrong. For although, personally, I don't like white bread any more, yet I do like my brown bread to be made of pure, unmixed flour. The peasants in Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and _clean_ their loaf seems, so perfumed as home-bread used all to be before the war. Whereas the bread of the commune, the regulation supply, is hard, and rather coarse and rough, so rough and harsh on the palate. One gets tired to death of it. I suspect myself the maize meal mixed in. But I don't know. And finally the bread varies immensely from town to town, from commune to commune. The so-called just and equal distribution is all my-eye. One place has abundance of good sweet bread, another scrapes along, always stinted, on an allowance of harsh coarse stuff. And the poor suffer bitterly, really, from the bread-stinting, because they depend so on this one food. They say the inequality and the injustice of distribution comes from the Camorra--la grande Camorra--which is no more nowadays than a profiteering combine, which the poor hate. But for myself, I don't know. I only know that one town--Venice, for example--seems to have an endless supply of pure bread, of sugar, of tobacco, of salt--while Florence is in one continual ferment of irritation over the stinting of these supplies--which are all government monopoly, doled out accordingly. We said Good-night to our three railway friends, and went up to bed. We had only been in the room a minute or two, when the brown woman tapped: and if you please, the black-cap had sent us one of his little white loaves. We were really touched. Such delicate little generosities have almost disappeared from the world. It was a queer little bread--three-cornered, and almost as hard as ships biscuit, made of starch flour. Not strictly bread at all. * * * * * The night was cold, the blankets flat and heavy, but one slept quite well till dawn. At seven o'clock it was a clear, cold morning, the sun not yet up. Standing at the bedroom window looking out, I could hardly believe my eyes it was so like England, like Cornwall in the bleak parts, or Derbyshire uplands. There was a little paddock-garden at the back of the Station, rather tumble-down, with two sheep in it. There were several forlorn-looking out-buildings, very like Cornwall. And then the wide, forlorn country road stretched away between borders of grass and low, drystone walls, towards a grey stone farm with a tuft of trees, and a naked stone village in the distance. The sun came up yellow, the bleak country glimmered bluish and reluctant. The low, green hill-slopes were divided into fields, with low drystone walls and ditches. Here and there a stone barn rose alone, or with a few bare, windy trees attached. Two rough-coated winter horses pastured on the rough grass, a boy came along the naked, wide, grass-bordered high-road with a couple of milk cans, drifting in from nowhere: and it was all so like Cornwall, or a part of Ireland, that the old nostalgia for the Celtic regions began to spring up in me. Ah, those old, drystone walls dividing the fields--pale and granite-blenched! Ah, the dark, sombre grass, the naked sky! the forlorn horses in the wintry morning! Strange is a Celtic landscape, far more moving, disturbing than the lovely glamor of Italy and Greece. Before the curtains of history lifted, one feels the world was like this--this Celtic bareness and sombreness and _air_. But perhaps it is not Celtic at all: Iberian. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than our conception of what is Celtic and what is not Celtic. I believe there never were any Celts, as a race.--As for the Iberians--! [Illustration: TONARA] Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to see the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in cold distance. After two southern winters, with roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad, on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk on the little ridge of grass, the little bank on which the wall is built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings: and it is all so familiar to my _feet_, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if I had made a discovery. And I realize that I hate lime-stone, to live on lime-stone or marble or any of those limey rocks. I hate them. They are dead rocks, they have no life--thrills for the feet. Even sandstone is much better. But granite! Granite is my favorite. It is so live under the feet, it has a deep sparkle of its own. I like its roundnesses--and I hate the jaggy dryness of lime-stone, that burns in the sun, and withers. * * * * * After coming to a deep well in a grassy plot in a wide space of the road, I go back, across the sunny naked upland country, towards the pink station and its out-buildings. An engine is steaming its white clouds in the new light. Away to the left there is even a row of small houses, like a row of railway-mens' dwellings. Strange and familiar sight. And the station precincts are disorderly and rather dilapidated. I think of our Sicilian host. The brown woman gives us coffee, and very strong, rich goats' milk, and bread. After which the q-b and I set off once more along the road to the village. She too is thrilled. She too breathes deep. She too feels _space_ around her, and freedom to move the limbs: such as one does not feel in Italy and Sicily, where all is so classic and fixed. The village itself is just a long, winding, darkish street, in shadow, of houses and shops and a smithy. It might almost be Cornwall: not quite. Something, I don't know what, suggests the stark burning glare of summer. And then, of course, there is none of the cosiness which climbing roses and lilac trees and cottage shops and haystacks would give to an English scene. This is harder, barer, starker, more dreary. An ancient man in the black-and-white costume comes out of a hovel of a cottage. The butcher carries a huge side of meat. The women peer at us--but more furtive and reticent than the howling stares of Italy. So we go on, down the rough-cobbled street through the whole length of the village. And emerging on the other side, past the last cottage, we find ourselves again facing the open country, on the gentle down-slope of the rolling hill. The landscape continues the same: low, rolling upland hills, dim under the yellow sun of the January morning: stone fences, fields, grey-arable land: a man slowly, slowly ploughing with a pony and a dark-red cow: the road trailing empty across the distance: and then, the one violently unfamiliar note, the enclosed cemetery lying outside on the gentle hill-side, closed in all round, very compact, with high walls: and on the inside face of the enclosure wall the marble slabs, like shut drawers of the sepulchres, shining white, the wall being like a chest of drawers, or pigeon holes to hold the dead. Tufts of dark and plumy cypresses rise among the flat graves of the enclosure. In the south, cemeteries are walled off and isolated very tight. The dead, as it were, are kept fast in pound. There is no spreading of graves over the face of the country. They are penned in a tight fold, with cypresses to fatten on the bones. This is the one thoroughly strange note in the landscape. But all-pervading there is a strangeness, that strange feeling as if the _depths_ were barren, which comes in the south and the east, sun-stricken. Sun-stricken, and the heart eaten out by the dryness. "I like it! I like it!" cries the q-b. "But could you live here?" She would like to say yes, but daren't. We stray back. The q-b wants to buy one of those saddle-bag arrangements. I say what for? She says to keep things in. Ach! but peeping in the shops, we see one and go in and examine it. It is quite a sound one, properly made: but plain, quite plain. On the white cross-stripes there are no lovely colored flowers of rose and green and magenta: the three favorite Sardinian colors: nor are there any of the fantastic and griffin-like beasts. So it won't do. How much does it cost? Forty-five francs. There is nothing to do in Mandas. So we will take the morning train and go to the terminus, to Sorgono. Thus, we shall cross the lower slopes of the great central knot of Sardinia, the mountain knot called Gennargentu. And Sorgono we feel will be lovely. Back at the station we make tea on the spirit lamp, fill the thermos, pack the knapsack and the kitchenino, and come out into the sun of the platform. The q-b goes to thank the black-cap for the white bread, whilst I settle the bill and ask for food for the journey. The brown woman fishes out from a huge black pot in the background sundry hunks of coarse boiled pork, and gives me two of these, hot, with bread and salt. This is the luncheon. I pay the bill: which amounts to twenty-four francs, for everything. (One says francs or liras, irrespective, in Italy.) At that moment arrives the train from Cagliari, and men rush in, roaring for the soup--or rather, for the broth. "Ready, ready!" she cries, going to the black pot. V. TO SORGONO. The various trains in the junction squatted side by side and had long, long talks before at last we were off. It was wonderful to be running in the bright morning towards the heart of Sardinia, in the little train that seemed so familiar. We were still going third class, rather to the disgust of the railway officials at Mandas. At first the country was rather open: always the long spurs of hills, steep-sided, but not high. And from our little train we looked across the country, across hill and dale. In the distance was a little town, on a low slope. But for its compact, fortified look it might have been a town on the English downs. A man in the carriage leaned out of the window holding out a white cloth, as a signal to someone in the far off town that he was coming. The wind blew the white cloth, the town in the distance glimmered small and alone in its hollow. And the little train pelted along. It was rather comical to see it. We were always climbing. And the line curved in great loops. So that as one looked out of the window, time and again one started, seeing a little train running in front of us, in a diverging direction, making big puffs of steam. But lo, it was our own little engine pelting off around a loop away ahead. We were quite a long train, but all trucks in front, only our two passenger coaches hitched on behind. And for this reason our own engine was always running fussily into sight, like some dog scampering in front and swerving about us, while we followed at the tail end of the thin string of trucks. I was surprised how well the small engine took the continuous steep slopes, how bravely it emerged on the sky-line. It is a queer railway. I would like to know who made it. It pelts up hill and down dale and round sudden bends in the most unconcerned fashion, not as proper big railways do, grunting inside deep cuttings and stinking their way through tunnels, but running up the hill like a panting, small dog, and having a look round, and starting off in another direction, whisking us behind unconcernedly. This is much more fun than the tunnel-and-cutting system. They told me that Sardinia mines her own coal: and quite enough for her own needs: but very soft, not fit for steam-purposes. I saw heaps of it: small, dull, dirty-looking stuff. Truck-loads of it too. And truck-loads of grain. At every station we were left ignominiously planted, while the little engines--they had gay gold names on their black little bodies--strolled about along the side-lines, and snuffed at the various trucks. There we sat, at every station, while some truck was discarded and some other sorted out like a branded sheep, from the sidings and hitched on to us. It took a long time, this did. * * * * * All the stations so far had had wire netting over the windows. This means malaria-mosquitoes. The malaria climbs very high in Sardinia. The shallow upland valleys, moorland with their intense summer sun and the riverless, boggy behaviour of the water breed the pest inevitably. But not very terribly, as far as one can make out: August and September being the danger months. The natives don't like to admit there is any malaria: a tiny bit, they say, a tiny bit. As soon as you come to the _trees_ there is no more. So they say. For many miles the landscape is moorland and down-like, with no trees. But wait for the trees. Ah, the woods and forests of Gennargentu: the woods and forests higher up: no malaria there! The little engine whisks up and up, around its loopy curves as if it were going to bite its own tail: we being the tail: then suddenly dives over the sky-line out of sight. And the landscape changes. The famous woods begin to appear. At first it is only hazel-thickets, miles of hazel-thickets, all wild, with a few black cattle trying to peep at us out of the green myrtle and arbutus scrub which forms the undergrowth; and a couple of rare, wild peasants peering at the train. They wear the black sheepskin tunic, with the wool outside, and the long stocking caps. Like cattle they too peer out from between deep bushes. The myrtle scrub here rises man-high, and cattle and men are smothered in it. The big hazels rise bare above. It must be difficult getting about in these parts. Sometimes, in the distance one sees a black-and-white peasant riding lonely across a more open place, a tiny vivid figure. I like so much the proud instinct which makes a living creature distinguish itself from its background. I hate the rabbity khaki protection-colouration. A black-and-white peasant on his pony, only a dot in the distance beyond the foliage, still flashes and dominates the landscape. Ha-ha! proud mankind! There you ride! But alas, most of the men are still khaki-muffled, rabbit-indistinguishable, ignominious. The Italians look curiously rabbity in the grey-green uniform: just as our sand-colored khaki men look doggy. They seem to scuffle rather abased, ignominious on the earth. Give us back the scarlet and gold, and devil take the hindmost. * * * * * The landscape really begins to change. The hillsides tilt sharper and sharper. A man is ploughing with two small red cattle on a craggy, tree-hanging slope as sharp as a roof-side. He stoops at the small wooden plough, and jerks the ploughlines. The oxen lift their noses to heaven, with a strange and beseeching snake-like movement, and taking tiny little steps with their frail feet, move slantingly across the slope-face, between rocks and tree-roots. Little, frail, jerky steps the bullocks take, and again they put their horns back and lift their muzzles snakily to heaven, as the man pulls the line. And he skids his wooden plough round another scoop of earth. It is marvellous how they hang upon that steep, craggy slope. An English labourer's eyes would bolt out of his head at the sight. There is a stream: actually a long tress of a water-fall pouring into a little gorge, and a stream-bed that opens a little, and shows a marvellous cluster of naked poplars away below. They are like ghosts. They have a ghostly, almost phosphorescent luminousness in the shadow of the valley, by the stream of water. If not phosphorescent, then incandescent: a grey, goldish-pale incandescence of naked limbs and myriad cold-glowing twigs, gleaming strangely. If I were a painter I would paint them: for they seem to have living, sentient flesh. And the shadow envelopes them. Another naked tree I would paint is the gleaming mauve-silver fig, which burns its cold incandescence, tangled, like some sensitive creature emerged from the rock. A fig tree come forth in its nudity gleaming over the dark winter-earth is a sight to behold. Like some white, tangled sea anemone. Ah, if it could but answer! or if we had tree-speech! * * * * * Yes, the steep valley sides become almost gorges, and there are trees. Not forests such as I had imagined, but scattered, grey, smallish oaks, and some lithe chestnuts. Chestnuts with their long whips, and oaks with their stubby boughs, scattered on steep hillsides where rocks crop out. The train perilously winding round, half way up. Then suddenly bolting over a bridge and into a completely unexpected station. What is more, men crowd in--the station is connected with the main railway by a post motor-omnibus. An unexpected irruption of men--they may be miners or navvies or land-workers. They all have huge sacks: some lovely saddle-bags with rose-coloured flowers across the darkness. One old man is in full black-and-white costume, but very dirty and coming to pieces. The others wear the tight madder-brown breeches and sleeved waistcoats. Some have the sheepskin tunic, and all wear the long stocking cap. And how they smell! of sheep-wool and of men and goat. A rank scent fills the carriage. They talk and are very lively. And they have mediaeval faces, _rusé_, never really abandoning their defences for a moment, as a badger or a pole-cat never abandons its defences. There is none of the brotherliness and civilised simplicity. Each man knows he must guard himself and his own: each man knows the devil is behind the next bush. They have never known the post-Renaissance Jesus. Which is rather an eye-opener. Not that they are suspicious or uneasy. On the contrary, noisy, assertive, vigorous presences. But with none of that implicit belief that everybody will be and ought to be good to them, which is the mark of our era. They don't expect people to be good to them: they don't want it. They remind me of half-wild dogs that will love and obey, but which won't be handled. They won't have their heads touched. And they won't be fondled. One can almost hear the half-savage growl. The long stocking caps they wear as a sort of crest, as a lizard wears his crest at mating time. They are always moving them, settling them on their heads. One fat fellow, young, with sly brown eyes and a young beard round his face folds his stocking-foot in three, so that it rises over his brow martial and handsome. The old boy brings his stocking-foot over the left ear. A handsome fellow with a jaw of massive teeth pushes his cap back and lets it hang a long way down his back. Then he shifts it forward over his nose, and makes it have two sticking-out points, like fox-ears, above his temples. It is marvellous how much expression these caps can take on. They say that only those born to them can wear them. They seem to be just long bags, nearly a yard long, of black stockinette stuff. The conductor comes to issue them their tickets. And they all take out rolls of paper money. Even a little mothy rat of a man who sits opposite me has quite a pad of ten-franc notes. Nobody seems short of a hundred francs nowadays: nobody. They shout and expostulate with the conductor. Full of coarse life they are: but so coarse! The handsome fellow has his sleeved waistcoat open, and his shirt-breast has come unbuttoned. Not looking, it seems as if he wears a black undervest. Then suddenly, one sees it is his own hair. He is quite black inside his shirt, like a black goat. But there is a gulf between oneself and them. They have no inkling of our crucifixion, our universal consciousness. Each of them is pivoted and limited to himself, as the wild animals are. They look out, and they see other objects, objects to ridicule or mistrust or to sniff curiously at. But "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" has never entered their souls at all, not even the thin end of it. They might love their neighbour, with a hot, dark, unquestioning love. But the love would probably leave off abruptly. The fascination of what is beyond them has not seized on them. Their neighbour is a mere external. Their life is centripetal, pivoted inside itself, and does not run out towards others and mankind. One feels for the first time the real old mediaeval life, which is enclosed in itself and has no interest in the world outside. And so they lie about on the seats, play a game, shout, and sleep, and settle their long stocking-caps: and spit. It is wonderful in them that at this time of day they still wear the long stocking-caps as part of their inevitable selves. It is a sign of obstinate and powerful tenacity. They are not going to be broken in upon by world-consciousness. They are not going into the world's common clothes. Coarse, vigorous, determined, they will stick to their own coarse dark stupidity and let the big world find its own way to its own enlightened hell. Their hell is their own hell, they prefer it unenlightened. And one cannot help wondering whether Sardinia will resist right through. Will the last waves of enlightenment and world-unity break over them and wash away the stocking-caps? Or is the tide of enlightenment and world-unity already receding fast enough? Certainly a reaction is setting in, away from the old universality, back, away from cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Russia, with her Third International, is at the same time reacting most violently away from all other contact, back, recoiling on herself, into a fierce, unapproachable Russianism. Which motion will conquer? The workman's International, or the centripetal movement into national isolation? Are we going to merge into one grey proletarian homogeneity?--or are we going to swing back into more-or-less isolated, separate, defiant communities? Probably both. The workman's International movement will finally break the flow towards cosmopolitanism and world-assimilation, and suddenly in a crash the world will fly back into intense separations. The moment has come when America, that extremist in world-assimilation and world-oneness, is reacting into violent egocentricity, a truly Amerindian egocentricity. As sure as fate we are on the brink of American empire. For myself, I am glad. I am glad that the era of love and oneness is over: hateful homogeneous world-oneness. I am glad that Russia flies back into savage Russianism, Scythism, savagely self-pivoting. I am glad that America is doing the same. I shall be glad when men hate their common, world-alike clothes, when they tear them up and clothe themselves fiercely for distinction, savage distinction, savage distinction against the rest of the creeping world: when America kicks the billy-cock and the collar-and-tie into limbo, and takes to her own national costume: when men fiercely react against looking all alike and being all alike, and betake themselves into vivid clan or nation-distinctions. The era of love and oneness is over. The era of world-alike should be at an end. The other tide has set in. Men will set their bonnets at one another now, and fight themselves into separation and sharp distinction. The day of peace and oneness is over, the day of the great fight into multifariousness is at hand. Hasten the day, and save us from proletarian homogeneity and khaki all-alikeness. I love my indomitable coarse men from mountain Sardinia, for their stocking-caps and their splendid, animal-bright stupidity. If only the last wave of all-alikeness won't wash those superb crests, those caps, away. * * * * * We are struggling now among the Gennargentu spurs. There is no single peak--no Etna of Sardinia. The train, like the plough, balances on the steep, steep sides of the hill-spurs, and winds around and around. Above and below the steep slopes are all bosky. These are the woods of Gennargentu. But they aren't woods in my sense of the word. They are thin sprinkles of oaks and chestnuts and cork-trees over steep hill-slopes. And cork-trees! I see curious slim oaky-looking trees that are stripped quite naked below the boughs, standing brown-ruddy, curiously distinct among the bluey grey pallor of the others. They remind me, again and again, of glowing, coffee-brown, naked aborigines of the South Seas. They have the naked suavity, skin-bare, and an intense coffee-red colour of unclothed savages. And these are the stripped cork-trees. Some are much stripped, some little. Some have the whole trunk and part of the lower limbs ruddy naked, some only a small part of the trunk. * * * * * It is well on in the afternoon. A peasant in black and white, and his young, handsome woman in rose-red costume, with gorgeous apron bordered deep with grass-green, and a little, dark-purple waistcoat over her white, full bodice, are sitting behind me talking. The workmen peasants are subsiding into sleep. It is well on in the afternoon, we have long ago eaten the meat. Now we finish the white loaf, the gift, and the tea. Suddenly looking out of the window, we see Gennargentu's mass behind us, a thick snow-deep knot-summit, beautiful beyond the long, steep spurs among which we are engaged. We lose the white mountain mass for half an hour: when suddenly it emerges unexpectedly almost in front, the great, snow-heaved shoulder. How different it is from Etna, that lonely, self-conscious wonder of Sicily! This is much more human and knowable, with a deep breast and massive limbs, a powerful mountain-body. It is like the peasants. * * * * * The stations are far between--an hour from one to another. Ah, how weary one gets of these journeys, they last so long. We look across a valley--a stone's throw. But alas, the little train has no wings, and can't jump. So back turns the line, back and back towards Gennargentu, a long rocky way, till it comes at length to the poor valley-head. This it skirts fussily, and sets off to pelt down on its traces again, gaily. And a man who was looking at us doing our round-about has climbed down and crossed the valley in five minutes. The peasants nearly all wear costumes now, even the women in the fields: the little fields in the half-populated valleys. These Gennargentu valleys are all half-populated, more than the moors further south. It is past three o'clock, and cold where there is no sun. At last only one more station before the terminus. And here the peasants wake up, sling the bulging sacks over their shoulders, and get down. We see Tonara away above. We see our old grimy black-and-white peasant greeted by his two women who have come to meet him with the pony--daughters handsome in vivid rose and green costume. Peasants, men in black and white, men in madder-brown, with the close breeches on their compact thighs, women in rose-and-white, ponies with saddle-bags, all begin to trail up the hill-road in silhouette, very handsome, towards the far-off, perched, sun-bright village of Tonara, a big village, shining like a New Jerusalem. * * * * * The train as usual leaves us standing, and shuffles with trucks--water sounds in the valley: there are stacks of cork on the station, and coal. An idiot girl in a great full skirt entirely made of coloured patches mops and mows. Her little waistcoat thing is also incredibly old, and shows faint signs of having once been a lovely purple and black brocade. The valley and steep slopes are open about us. An old shepherd has a lovely flock of delicate merino sheep. And at last we move. In one hour we shall be there. As we travel among the tree slopes, many brown cork-trees, we come upon a flock of sheep. Two peasants in our carriage looking out, give the most weird, unnatural, high-pitched shrieks, entirely unproduceable by any ordinary being. The sheep know, however, and scatter. And after ten minutes the shrieks start again, for three young cattle. Whether the peasants do it for love, I don't know. But it is the wildest and weirdest inhuman shepherd noise I have ever heard. * * * * * It is Saturday afternoon and four o'clock. The country is wild and uninhabited, the train almost empty, yet there is the leaving-off-work feeling in the atmosphere. Oh twisty, wooded, steep slopes, oh glimpses of Gennargentu, oh nigger-stripped cork-trees, oh smell of peasants, oh wooden, wearisome railway carriage, we are so sick of you! Nearly seven hours of this journey already: and a distance of sixty miles. But we are almost there--look, look, Sorgono, nestling beautifully among the wooded slopes in front. Oh magic little town. Ah, you terminus and ganglion of the inland roads, we hope in you for a pleasant inn and happy company. Perhaps we will stay a day or two at Sorgono. The train gives a last sigh, and draws to a last standstill in the tiny terminus station. An old fellow fluttering with rags as a hen in the wind flutters, asked me if I wanted the _Albergo_, the inn. I said yes, and let him take my knapsack. Pretty Sorgono! As we went down the brief muddy lane between hedges, to the village high-road, we seemed almost to have come to some little town in the English west-country, or in Hardy's country. There were glades of stripling oaks, and big slopes with oak trees, and on the right a saw-mill buzzing, and on the left the town, white and close, nestling round a baroque church-tower. And the little lane was muddy. Three minutes brought us to the high-road, and a great, pink-washed building blank on the road facing the station lane, and labelled in huge letters: RISTORANTE RISVEGLIO: the letter N being printed backwards. _Risveglio_ if you please: which means waking up or rousing, like the word _reveille_. Into the doorway of the Risveglio bolted the flutterer. "Half a minute," said I. "Where is the Albergo d'Italia?" I was relying on Baedeker. "Non c'è più," replied my rag-feather. "There isn't it any more." This answer, being very frequent nowadays, is always most disconcerting. "Well then, what other hotel?" "There is no other." Risveglio or nothing. In we go. We pass into a big, dreary bar, where are innumerable bottles behind a tin counter. Flutter-jack yells: and at length appears mine host, a youngish fellow of the Esquimo type, but rather bigger, in a dreary black suit and a cutaway waistcoat suggesting a dinner-waistcoat, and innumerable wine-stains on his shirt front. I instantly hated him for the filthy appearance he made. He wore a battered hat and his face was long unwashed. Was there a bedroom? Yes. And he led the way down the passage, just as dirty as the road outside, up the hollow, wooden stairs also just as clean as the passage, along a hollow, drum-rearing dirty corridor, and into a bedroom. Well, it contained a large bed, thin and flat with a grey-white counterpane, like a large, poor, marble-slabbed tomb in the room's sordid emptiness; one dilapidated chair on which stood the miserablest weed of a candle I have ever seen: a broken wash-saucer in a wire ring: and for the rest, an expanse of wooden floor as dirty-grey-black as it could be, and an expanse of wall charted with the bloody deaths of mosquitoes. The window was about two feet above the level of a sort of stable-yard outside, with a fowl-house just by the sash. There, at the window flew lousy feathers and dirty straw, the ground was thick with chicken-droppings. An ass and two oxen comfortably chewed hay in an open shed just across, and plump in the middle of the yard lay a bristly black pig taking the last of the sun. Smells of course were varied. The knapsack and the kitchenino were dropped on the repulsive floor, which I hated to touch with my boots even. I turned back the sheets and looked at other people's stains. "There is nothing else?" "Niente," said he of the lank, low forehead and beastly shirt-breast. And he sullenly departed. I gave the flutterer his tip and he too ducked and fled. Then the queen-bee and I took a few mere sniffs. "Dirty, disgusting swine!" said I, and I was in a rage. I could have forgiven him anything, I think, except his horrible shirt-breast, his personal shamelessness. We strolled round--saw various other bedrooms, some worse, one really better. But this showed signs of being occupied. All the doors were open: the place was quite deserted, and open to the road. The one thing that seemed definite was honesty. It must be a very honest place, for every footed beast, man or animal, could walk in at random and nobody to take the slightest regard. So we went downstairs. The only other apartment was the open public bar, which seemed like part of the road. A muleteer, leaving his mules at the corner of the Risveglio, was drinking at the counter. * * * * * This famous inn was at the end of the village. We strolled along the road between the houses, down-hill. A dreary hole! a cold, hopeless, lifeless, Saturday afternoon-weary village, rather sordid, with nothing to say for itself. No real shops at all. A weary-looking church, and a clutch of disconsolate houses. We walked right through the village. In the middle was a sort of open space where stood a great, grey motor-omnibus. And a bus-driver looking rather weary. Where did the bus go? It went to join the main railway. When? At half-past seven in the morning. Only then? Only then. "Thank God we can get out, anyhow," said I. We passed on, and emerged beyond the village, still on the descending great high-road that was mended with loose stones pitched on it. This wasn't good enough. Besides, we were out of the sun, and the place being at a considerable elevation, it was very cold. So we turned back, to climb quickly uphill into the sun. * * * * * We went up a little side-turning past a bunch of poor houses towards a steep little lane between banks. And before we knew where we were, we were in the thick of the public lavatory. In these villages, as I knew, there are no sanitary arrangements of any sort whatever. Every villager and villageress just betook himself at need to one of the side-roads. It is the immemorial Italian custom. Why bother about privacy? The most socially-constituted people on earth, they even like to relieve themselves in company. We found ourselves in the full thick of one of these meeting-places. To get out at any price! So we scrambled up the steep earthen banks to a stubble field above. And by this time I was in a greater rage. * * * * * Evening was falling, the sun declining. Below us clustered the Sodom-apple of this vile village. Around were fair, tree-clad hills and dales, already bluish with the frost-shadows. The air bit cold and strong. In a very little time the sun would be down. We were at an elevation of about 2,500 feet above the sea. No denying it was beautiful, with the oak-slopes and the wistfulness and the far-off feeling of loneliness and evening. But I was in too great a temper to admit it. We clambered frenziedly to get warm. And the sun immediately went right down, and the ice-heavy blue shadow fell over us all. The village began to send forth blue wood-smoke, and it seemed more than ever like the twilit West Country. But thank you--we had to get back. And run the gauntlet of that stinking, stinking lane? Never. Towering with fury--quite unreasonable, but there you are--I marched the q-b down a declivity through a wood, over a ploughed field, along a cart-track, and so to the great high-road above the village and above the inn. It was cold, and evening was falling into dusk. Down the high-road came wild half-ragged men on ponies, in all degrees of costume and not-costume: came four wide-eyed cows stepping down-hill round the corner, and three delicate, beautiful merino sheep which stared at us with their prominent, gold-curious eyes: came an ancient, ancient man with a stick: came a stout-chested peasant carrying a long wood-pole: came a straggle of alert and triumphant goats, long-horned, long-haired, jingling their bells. Everybody greeted us hesitatingly. And everything came to a halt at the Risveglio corner, while the men had a nip. I attacked the spotty-breast again. Could I have milk? No. Perhaps in an hour there would be milk. Perhaps not. Was there anything to eat? No--at half past seven there would be something to eat. Was there a fire? No--the man hadn't made the fire. Nothing to do but to go to that foul bedroom or walk the high-road. We turned up the high-road again. Animals stood about the road in the frost-heavy air, with heads sunk passively, waiting for the men to finish their drinks in the beastly bar--we walked slowly up the hill. In a field on the right a flock of merino sheep moved mistily, uneasily, climbing at the gaps in the broken road bank, and sounding their innumerable small fine bells with a frosty ripple of sound. A figure which in the dusk I had really thought was something inanimate broke into movement in the field. It was an old shepherd, very old, in very ragged dirty black-and-white, who had been standing like a stone there in the open field-end for heaven knows how long, utterly motionless, leaning on his stick. Now he broke into a dream-motion and hobbled after the wistful, feminine, inquisitive sheep. The red was fading from the far-off west. At the corner, climbing slowly and wearily, we almost ran into a grey and lonely bull, who came stepping down-hill in his measured fashion like some god. He swerved his head and went round us. We reached a place which we couldn't make out: then saw it was a cork-shed. There were stacks and stacks of cork-bark in the dusk, like crumpled hides. "Now I'm going back," said the q-b flatly, and she swung round. The last red was smouldering beyond the lost, thin-wooded hills of this interior. A fleece of blue, half-luminous smoke floated over the obscure village. The high-way wound down-hill at our feet, pale and blue. And the q-b was angry with me for my fury. "Why are you so indignant! Anyone would think your moral self had been outraged! Why take it morally? You petrify that man at the inn by the very way you speak to him, _such_ condemnation! Why don't you take it as it comes? It's all life." But no, my rage is black, black, black. Why, heaven knows. But I think it was because Sorgono had seemed so fascinating to me, when I imagined it beforehand. Oh so fascinating! If I had expected nothing I should not have been so hit. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed. I cursed the degenerate aborigines, the dirty-breasted host who _dared_ to keep such an inn, the sordid villagers who had the baseness to squat their beastly human nastiness in this upland valley. All my praise of the long stocking-cap--you remember?--vanished from my mouth. I cursed them all, and the q-b for an interfering female.... * * * * * In the bar a wretched candle was weeping light--uneasy, gloomy men were drinking their Saturday-evening-home-coming dram. Cattle lay down in the road, in the cold air as if hopeless. Had the milk come? No. When would it come. He didn't know. Well, what were we to do? Was there no room? Was there nowhere where we could sit? Yes, there was the _stanza_ now. _Now!_ Taking the only weed of a candle, and leaving the drinkers in the dark, he led us down a dark and stumbly earthen passage, over loose stones and an odd plank, as it would seem underground, to the stanza: the room. The stanza! It was pitch dark--But suddenly I saw a big fire of oak-root, a brilliant, flamy, rich fire, and my rage in that second disappeared. The host, and the candle, forsook us at the door. The stanza would have been in complete darkness, save for that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney, like fresh flowers. By this firelight we saw the room. It was like a dungeon, absolutely empty, with an uneven, earthen floor, quite dry, and high bare walls, gloomy, with a handbreadth of window high up. There was no furniture at all, save a little wooden bench, a foot high, before the fire, and several home-made-looking rush mats rolled up and leaning against the walls. Furthermore a chair before the fire on which hung wet table-napkins. Apart from this, it was a high, dark, naked prison-dungeon. But it was quite dry, it had an open chimney, and a gorgeous new fire rushing like a water-fall upwards among the craggy stubs of a pile of dry oak roots. I hastily put the chair and the wet corpse-cloths to one side. We sat on the low bench side by side in the dark, in front of this rippling rich fire, in front of the cavern of the open chimney, and we did not care any more about the dungeon and the darkness. Man can live without food, but he can't live without fire. It is an Italian proverb. We had found the fire, like new gold. And we sat in front of it, a little way back, side by side on the low form, our feet on the uneven earthen floor, and felt the flame-light rippling upwards over our faces, as if we were bathing in some gorgeous stream of fieriness. I forgave the dirty-breasted host everything and was as glad as if I had come into a kingdom. So we sat alone for half an hour, smiling into the flames, bathing our faces in the glow. From time to time I was aware of steps in the tunnel-like passage outside, and of presences peering. But no one came. I was aware too of the faint steaming of the beastly table-napkins, the only other occupants of the room. * * * * * In dithers a candle, and an elderly, bearded man in gold-coloured corduroys, and an amazing object on a long, long spear. He put the candle on the mantel-ledge, and crouched at the side of the fire, arranging the oak-roots. He peered strangely and fixedly in the fire. And he held up the speared object before our faces. It was a kid that he had come to roast. But it was a kid opened out, made quite flat, and speared like a flat fan on a long iron stalk. It was a really curious sight. And it must have taken some doing. The whole of the skinned kid was there, the head curled in against a shoulder, the stubby cut ears, the eyes, the teeth, the few hairs of the nostrils: and the feet curled curiously round, like an animal that puts its fore-paw over its ducked head: and the hind-legs twisted indescribably up: and all skewered flat-wise upon the long iron rod, so that it was a complete flat pattern. It reminded me intensely of those distorted, slim-limbed, dog-like animals which figure on the old Lombard ornaments, distorted and curiously infolded upon themselves. Celtic illuminations also have these distorted, involuted creatures. The old man flourished the flat kid like a bannerette, whilst he arranged the fire. Then, in one side of the fire-place wall he poked the point of the rod. He himself crouched on the hearth-end, in the half-shadow at the other side of the fire-place, holding the further end of the long iron rod. The kid was thus extended before the fire, like a hand-screen. And he could spin it round at will. [Illustration: SORONGO] But the hole in the masonry of the chimney-piece was not satisfactory. The point of the rod kept slipping, and the kid came down against the fire. He muttered and muttered to himself, and tried again. Then at length he reared up the kid-banner whilst he got large stones from a dark corner. He arranged these stones so that the iron point rested on them. He himself sat away on the opposite side of the fire-place, on the shadowy hearth-end, and with queer, spell-bound black eyes and completely immovable face, he watched the flames and the kid, and held the handle end of the rod. We asked him if the kid was for the evening meal--and he said it was. It would be good! And he said yes, and looked with chagrin at the bit of ash on the meat, where it had slipped. It is a point of honour that it should never touch the ash. Did they do all their meat this way? He said they did. And wasn't it difficult to put the kid thus on the iron rod? He said it was not easy, and he eyed the joint closely, and felt one of the forelegs, and muttered that was not fixed properly. He spoke with a very soft mutter, hard to catch, and sideways, never to us direct. But his manner was gentle, soft, muttering, reticent, sensitive. He asked us where we came from, and where we were going: always in his soft mutter. And what nation were we, were we French? Then he went on to say there was a war--but he thought it was finished. There was a war because the Austrians wanted to come into Italy again. But the French and the English came to help Italy. A lot of Sardinians had gone to it. But let us hope it is all finished. He thought it was--young men of Sorgono had been killed. He hoped it was finished. Then he reached for the candle and peered at the kid. It was evident he was the born roaster. He held the candle and looked for a long time at the sizzling side of the meat, as if he would read portents. Then he held his spit to the fire again. And it was as if time immemorial were roasting itself another meal. I sat holding the candle. * * * * * A young woman appeared, hearing voices. Her head was swathed in a shawl, one side of which was brought across, right over the mouth, so that only her two eyes and her nose showed. The q-b thought she must have toothache--but she laughed and said no. As a matter of fact that is the way a head-dress is worn in Sardinia, even by both sexes. It is something like the folding of the Arab's burnoose. The point seems to be that the mouth and chin are thickly covered, also the ears and brow, leaving only the nose and eyes exposed. They say it keeps off the malaria. The men swathe shawls round their heads in the same way. It seems to me they want to keep their heads warm, dark and hidden: they feel secure inside. She wore the workaday costume: a full, dark-brown skirt, the full white bodice, and a little waistcoat or corset. This little waistcoat in her case had become no more than a shaped belt, sending up graceful, stiffened points under the breasts, like long leaves standing up. It was pretty--but all dirty. She too was pretty, but with an impudent, not quite pleasant manner. She fiddled with the wet napkins, asked us various questions, and addressed herself rather jerkily to the old man, who answered hardly at all--Then she departed again. The women are self-conscious in a rather smirky way, bouncy. When she was gone I asked the old man if she was his daughter. He said very brusquely, in his soft mutter, No. She came from a village some miles away. He did not belong to the inn. He was, as far as I understood, the postman. But I may have been mistaken about the word. But he seemed laconic, unwilling to speak about the inn and its keepers. There seemed to be something queer. And again he asked where we were going. He told me there were now two motor-buses: a new one which ran over the mountains to Nuoro. Much better go to Nuoro than to Abbasanta. Nuoro was evidently the town towards which these villages looked, as a sort of capital. * * * * * The kid-roasting proceeded very slowly, the meat never being very near the fire. From time to time the roaster arranged the cavern of red-hot roots. Then he threw on more roots. It was very hot. And he turned the long spit, and still I held the candle. Other people came strolling in, to look at us. But they hovered behind us in the dark, so I could not make out at all clearly. They strolled in the gloom of the dungeon-like room, and watched us. One came forward--a fat, fat young soldier in uniform. I made place for him on the bench--but he put out his hand and disclaimed the attention. Then he went away again. The old man propped up the roast, and then he too disappeared for a time. The thin candle guttered, the fire was no longer flamy but red. The roaster reappeared with a new, shorter spear, thinner, and a great lump of raw hog-fat spitted on it. This he thrust into the red fire. It sizzled and smoked and spit fat, and I wondered. He told me he wanted it to catch fire. It refused. He groped in the hearth for the bits of twigs with which the fire had been started. These twig-stumps he stuck in the fat, like an orange stuck with cloves, then he held it in the fire again. Now at last it caught, and it was a flaming torch running downwards with a thin shower of flaming fat. And now he was satisfied. He held the fat-torch with its yellow flares over the browning kid, which he turned horizontal for the occasion. All over the roast fell the flaming drops, till the meat was all shiny and browny. He put it to the fire again, holding the diminishing fat, still burning bluish, over it all the time in the upper air. * * * * * While this was in process a man entered with a loud _Good evening_. We replied Good-evening--and evidently he caught a strange note. He came and bent down and peered under my hat-brim, then under the q-b's hat-brim, we still wore hats and overcoats, as did everybody. Then he stood up suddenly and touched his cap and said _Scusi_--excuse me. I said _Niente_, which one always says, and he addressed a few jovial words to the crouching roaster: who again would hardly answer him. The omnibus was arrived from Oristano, I made out--with few passengers. This man brought with him a new breezy atmosphere, which the roaster did not like. However, I made place on the low bench, and the attention this time was accepted. Sitting down at the extreme end, he came into the light, and I saw a burly man in the prime of life, dressed in dark brown velvet, with a blond little moustache and twinkling blue eyes and a tipsy look. I thought he might be some local tradesman or farmer. He asked a few questions, in a boisterous familiar fashion, then went out again. He appeared with a small iron spit, a slim rod, in one hand, and in the other hand two joints of kid and a handful of sausages. He stuck his joints on his rod. But our roaster still held the interminable flat kid before the now red, flameless fire. The fat-torch was burnt out, the cinder pushed in the fire. A moment's spurt of flame, then red, intense redness again, and our kid before it like a big, dark hand. "Eh," said the newcomer, whom I will call the girovago, "it's done. The kid's done. It's done." The roaster slowly shook his head, but did not answer. He sat like time and eternity at the hearth-end, his face flame-flushed, his dark eyes still fire-abstract, still sacredly intent on the roast. "Na-na-na!" said the girovago. "Let another body see the fire." And with his pieces of meat awkwardly skewered on his iron stick he tried to poke under the authorised kid and get at the fire. In his soft mutter, the old man bade him wait for the fire till the fire was ready for him. But the girovago poked impudently and good humouredly, and said testily that the authorised kid was done. "Yes, surely it is done," said I, for it was already a quarter to eight. The old roasting priest muttered, and took out his knife from his pocket. He pressed the blade slowly, slowly deep into the meat: as far as a knife will go in a piece of kid. He seemed to be feeling the meat inwardly. And he said it was not done. He shook his head, and remained there like time and eternity at the end of the rod. The girovago said _Sangue di Dio_, but couldn't roast his meat! And he tried to poke his skewer near the coals. So doing his pieces fell off into the ashes, and the invisible onlookers behind raised a shout of laughter. However, he raked it out and wiped it with his hand and said No matter, nothing lost. Then he turned to me and asked the usual whence and whither questions. These answered, he said wasn't I German. I said No, I was English. He looked at me many times, shrewdly, as if he wanted to make out something. Then he asked, where were we domiciled--and I said Sicily. And then, very pertinently, why had we come to Sardinia. I said for pleasure, and to see the island. "Ah, per divertimento!" he repeated, half-musingly, not believing me in the least. Various men had now come into the room, though they all remained indistinct in the background. The girovago talked and jested abroad in the company, and the half-visible men laughed in a rather hostile manner. At last the old roaster decided the kid was done. He lifted it from the fire and scrutinised it thoroughly, holding the candle to it, as if it were some wonderful epistle from the flames. To be sure it looked marvellous, and smelled so good: brown, and crisp, and hot, and savoury, not burnt in any place whatever. It was eight o'clock. "It's done! It's done! Go away with it! Go," said the girovago, pushing the old roaster with his hand. And at last the old man consented to depart, holding the kid like a banner. "It looks so _good_!" cried the q-b. "And I am so hungry." "Ha-ha! It makes one hungry to see good meat, Signora. Now it is my turn. Heh--Gino--" the girovago flourished his arm. And a handsome, unwashed man with a black moustache came forward rather sheepishly. He was dressed in soldier's clothes, neutral grey, and was a big, robust, handsome fellow with dark eyes and Mediterranean sheepishness. "Here, take it thou," said the girovago, pressing the long spit into his hand. "It is thy business, cook the supper, thou art the woman.--But I'll keep the sausages and do them." The so-called woman sat at the end of the hearth, where the old roaster had sat, and with his brown, nervous hand piled the remaining coals together. The fire was no longer flamy: and it was sinking. The dark-browed man arranged it so that he could cook the meat. He held the spit negligently over the red mass. A joint fell off. The men laughed. "It's lost nothing," said the dark-browed man, as the girovago had said before, and he skewered it on again and thrust it to the fire. But meanwhile he was looking up from under his dark lashes at the girovago and at us. The girovago talked continually. He turned to me, holding the handful of sausages. "This makes the tasty bit," he said. "Oh yes--good salsiccia," said I. "You are eating the kid? You are eating at the inn?" he said. I replied that I was. "No," he said. "You stay and eat with me. You eat with me. The sausage is good, the kid will soon be done, the fire is grateful." I laughed, not quite understanding him. He was certainly a bit tipsy. "Signora," he said, turning to the q-b. She did not like him, he was impudent, and she shut a deaf ear to him as far as she could. "Signora," he said, "do you understand me what I say?" She replied that she did. "Signora," he said, "I sell things to the women. I sell them things." "What do you sell?" she asked in astonishment. "Saints," he said. "Saints!" she cried in more astonishment. "Yes, saints," he said with tipsy gravity. She turned in confusion to the company in the background. The fat soldier came forward, he was the chief of the carabinieri. "Also combs and bits of soap and little mirrors," he explained sarcastically. "Saints!" said the girovago once more. "And also _ragazzini_--also youngsters--Wherever I go there is a little one comes running calling Babbo! Babbo! Daddy! Daddy! Wherever I go--youngsters. And I'm the babbo." All this was received with a kind of silent sneer from the invisible assembly in the background. The candle was burning low, the fire was sinking too. In vain the dark-browed man tried to build it up. The q-b became impatient for the food. She got up wrathfully and stumbled into the dark passage, exclaiming--"Don't we eat yet?" "Eh--Patience! Patience, Signora. It takes time in this house," said the man in the background. The dark-browed man looked up at the girovago and said: "Are you going to cook the sausages with your fingers?" He too was trying to be assertive and jesting, but he was the kind of person no one takes any notice of. The girovago rattled on in dialect, poking fun at us and at our being there in this inn. I did not quite follow. "Signora!" said the girovago. "Do you understand Sardinian?" "I understand Italian--and some Sardinian," she replied rather hotly. "And I know that you are trying to laugh at us--to make fun of us." He laughed fatly and comfortably. "Ah Signora," he said. "We have a language that you wouldn't understand--not one word. Nobody here would understand it but me and him--" he pointed to the black-browed one. "Everybody would want an interpreter--everybody." But he did not say interpreter--he said _intreprete_, with the accent on the penultimate, as if it were some sort of priest. "A what?" said I. He repeated with tipsy unction, and I saw what he meant. "Why?" said I. "Is it a dialect? What is your dialect?" "My dialect," he said, "is Sassari. I come from Sassari. If I spoke my dialect they would understand something. But if I speak this language they would want an interpreter." "What language is it then?" He leaned up to me, laughing. "It is the language we use when the women are buying things and we don't want them to know what we say: me and him--" "Oh," said I. "I know. We have that language in England. It is called thieves Latin--_Latino dei furbi_." The men at the back suddenly laughed, glad to turn the joke against the forward girovago. He looked down his nose at me. But seeing I was laughing without malice, he leaned to me and said softly, secretly: "What is your affair then? What affair is it, yours?" "How? What?" I exclaimed, not understanding. "_Che genere di affari?_ What sort of business?" "How--_affari_?" said I, still not grasping. "What do you _sell_?" he said, flatly and rather spitefully. "What goods?" "I don't sell anything," replied I, laughing to think he took us for some sort of strolling quacks or commercial travellers. "Cloth--or something," he said cajolingly, slyly, as if to worm my secret out of me. "But nothing at all. Nothing at all," said I. "We have come to Sardinia to see the peasant costumes--" I thought that might sound satisfactory. "Ah, the costumes!" he said, evidently thinking I was a deep one. And he turned bandying words with his dark-browed mate, who was still poking the meat at the embers and crouching on the hearth. The room was almost quite dark. The mate answered him back, and tried to seem witty too. But the girovago was the commanding personality! rather too much so: too impudent for the q-b, though rather after my own secret heart. The mate was one of those handsome, passive, stupid men. "Him!" said the girovago, turning suddenly to me and pointing at the mate. "He's my wife." "Your wife!" said I. "Yes. He's my wife, because we're always together." There had become a sudden dead silence in the background. In spite of it the mate looked up under his black lashes and said, with a half smile: "Don't talk, or I shall give thee a good _bacio_ to-night." There was an instant's fatal pause, then the girovago continued: "Tomorrow is festa of Sant 'Antonio at Tonara. Tomorrow we are going to Tonara. Where are you going?" "To Abbasanta," said I. "Ah Abbasanta! You should come to Tonara. At Tonara there is a brisk trade--and there are costumes. You should come to Tonara. Come with him and me to Tonara tomorrow, and we will do business together." I laughed, but did not answer. "Come," said he. "You will like Tonara! Ah, Tonara is a fine place. There is an inn: you can eat well, sleep well. I tell you, because to you ten francs don't matter. Isn't that so? Ten francs don't matter to you. Well, then come to Tonara. What? What do you say?" I shook my head and laughed, but did not answer. To tell the truth I should have liked to go to Tonara with him and his mate and do the brisk trade: if only I knew what trade it would be. "You are sleeping upstairs?" he said to me. I nodded. "This is my bed," he said, taking one of the home-made rush mats from against the wall. I did not take him seriously at any point. "Do they make those in Sorgono?" I said. "Yes, in Sorgono--they are the beds, you see! And you roll up this end a bit--so! and that is the pillow." He laid his cheek sideways. "Not really," said I. He came and sat down again next to me, and my attention wandered. The q-b was raging for her dinner. It must be quite half-past eight. The kid, the perfect kid would be cold and ruined. Both fire and candle were burning low. Someone had been out for a new candle, but there was evidently no means of replenishing the fire. The mate still crouched on the hearth, the dull red fire-glow on his handsome face, patiently trying to roast the kid and poking it against the embers. He had heavy, strong limbs in his khaki clothes, but his hand that held the spit was brown and tender and sensitive, a real Mediterranean hand. The girovago, blond, round-faced, mature and aggressive with all his liveliness, was more like a northerner. In the background were four or five other men, of whom I had distinguished none but a stout soldier, probably chief carabiniere. * * * * * Just as the q-b was working up to the rage I had at last calmed down from, appeared the shawl-swathed girl announcing "Pronto!" "Pronto! Pronto!" said everybody. "High time, too," said the q-b, springing from the low bench before the fire. "Where do we eat? Is there another room?" "There is another room, Signora," said the carabiniere. So we trooped out of the fire-warmed dungeon, leaving the girovago and his mate and two other men, muleteers from the road, behind us. I could see that it irked my girovago to be left behind. He was by far the strongest personality in the place, and he had the keenest intelligence. So he hated having to fall into the background, when he had been dragging all the lime-light on to himself all the evening. To me, too, he was something of a kindred soul that night. But there we are: fate, in the guise of that mysterious division between a respectable life and a scamp's life divided us. There was a gulf between me and him, between my way and his. He was a kindred spirit--but with a hopeless difference. There was something a bit sordid about him--and he knew it. That is why he was always tipsy. Yet I like the lone wolf souls best--better than the sheep. If only they didn't feel mongrel inside themselves. Presumably a scamp is bound to be mongrel. It is a pity the untamable, lone-wolf souls should always become pariahs, almost of choice: mere scamps. Top and bottom of it is, I regretted my girovago, though I knew it was no good thinking of him. His way was _not_ my way. Yet I regretted him, I did. * * * * * We found ourselves in a dining room with a long white table and inverted soup-plates, tomb-cold, lighted by an acetylene flare. Three men had accompanied us: the carabiniere, a little dark youth with a small black moustache, in a soldier's short, wool-lined great-coat: and a young man who looked tired round his blue eyes, and who wore a dark-blue overcoat, quite smart. The be-shawled damsel came in with the inevitable bowl of minestrone, soup with cabbage and cauliflower and other things. We helped ourselves, and the fat carabiniere started the conversation with the usual questions--and where were we going tomorrow? I asked about buses. Then the responsible-looking, tired-eyed youth told me he was the bus-driver. He had come from Oristano, on the main line, that day. It is a distance of some forty miles. Next morning he was going on over the mountains to Nuoro--about the same distance again. The youth with the little black moustache and the Greek, large eyes, was his mate, the conductor. This was their run, from Oristano to Nuoro--a course of ninety miles or more. And every day on, on, on. No wonder he looked nerve-tired. Yet he had that kind of dignity, the wistful seriousness and pride of a man in machine control: the only god-like ones today, those who pull the iron levers and are the gods in the machine. They repeated what the old roaster said: much nicer for us to go to Nuoro than to Abbasanta. So to Nuoro we decided to go, leaving at half-past nine in the morning. * * * * * Every other night the driver and his mate spent in this benighted Risveglio inn. It must have been their bedroom we saw, clean and tidy. I said was the food always so late, was everything always as bad as today. Always--if not worse, they said, making light of it, with sarcastic humor against the Risveglio. You spent your whole life at the Risveglio sitting, waiting, and going block-cold: unless you were content to drink _aqua vitae_, like those in there. The driver jerked his head towards the dungeon. "Who were those in there?" said I. The one who did all the talking was a mercante, a mercante girovago, a wandering peddler. This was my girovago: a wandering peddler selling saints and youngsters! The other was his mate, who helped carry the pack. They went about together. Oh, my girovago was a known figure all over the country.--And where would they sleep? There, in the room where the fire was dying. They would unroll the mats and lie with their feet to the hearth. For this they paid threepence, or at most fourpence. And they had the privilege of cooking their own food. The Risveglio supplied them with nothing but the fire, the roof, and the rush mat.--And, of course, the drink. Oh, we need have no sympathy with the girovago and his sort. _They_ lacked for nothing. They had everything they wanted: everything: and money in abundance. _They_ lived for the _aqua vitae_ they drank. That was all they wanted: their continual allowance of _aqua vitae_. And they got it. Ah, they were not cold. If the room became cold during the night: if they had no coverings at all: pah, they waited for morning, and as soon as it was light they drank a large glass of _aqua vitae_. That was their fire, their hearth and their home: drink. _Aqua vitae_, was hearth and home to them. I was surprised at the contempt, tolerant and yet profound, with which these three men in the dining-room spoke of the others in the _stanza_. How contemptuous, almost bitter, the driver was against alcohol. It was evident he hated it. And though we all had our bottles of dead-cold dark wine, and though we all drank: still, the feeling of the three youths against actual intoxication was deep and hostile, with a certain burning _moral_ dislike that is more northern than Italian. And they curled their lip with real dislike of the girovago: his forwardness, his impudent aggressiveness. * * * * * As for the inn, yes, it was very bad. It had been quite good under the previous proprietors. But now--they shrugged their shoulders. The dirty-breast and the shawled girl were not the owners. They were merely conductors of the hotel: here a sarcastic curl of the lip. The owner was a man in the village--a young man. A week or two back, at Christmas time, there had been a roomful of men sitting drinking and roistering at this very table. When in had come the proprietor, mad-drunk, swinging a litre bottle round his head and yelling: "Out! Out! Out, all of you! Out every one of you! I am proprietor here. And when I want to clear my house I clear my house. Every man obeys--who doesn't obey has his brains knocked out with this bottle. Out, out, I say--Out, everyone!" And the men all cleared out. "But," said the bus-driver, "I told him that when I had paid for my bed I was going to sleep in it. I was not going to be turned out by him or anybody. And so he came down." * * * * * There was a little silence from everybody after this story. Evidently there was more to it, that we were not to be told. Especially the carabiniere was silent. He was a fat, not very brave fellow, though quite nice. Ah, but--said the little dark bus-conductor, with his small-featured swarthy Greek face--you must not be angry with them. True the inn was very bad. Very bad--but you must pity them, for they are only ignorant. Poor things, they are _ignoranti_! Why be angry? The other two men nodded their heads in agreement and repeated _ignoranti_. They are _ignoranti_. It is true. Why be angry? And here the modern Italian spirit came out: the endless pity for the ignorant. It is only slackness. The pity makes the ignorant more ignorant, and makes the Risveglio daily more impossible. If somebody let a bottle buzz round the ears of the dirty-breast, and whipped the shawl from the head of the pert young madam and sent her flying down the tunnel with a flea in her ear, we might get some attention and they might find a little self-respect. But no: pity them, poor _ignoranti_, while they pull life down and devour it like vermin. Pity them! What they need is not pity but prods: they and all their myriad of likes. * * * * * The be-shawled appeared with a dish of kid. Needless to say, the _ignoranti_ had kept all the best portions for themselves. What arrived was five pieces of cold roast, one for each of us. Mine was a sort of large comb of ribs with a thin web of meat: perhaps an ounce. That was all we got, after watching the whole process. There was moreover a dish of strong boiled cauliflower, which one ate, with the coarse bread, out of sheer hunger. After this a bilious orange. Simply one is not _fed_ nowadays. In the good hotels and in the bad, one is given paltry portions of unnourishing food, and one goes unfed. * * * * * The bus-driver, the only one with an earnest soul, was talking of the Sardinians. Ah, the Sardinians! They were hopeless. Why--because they did not know how to strike. They, too, were _ignoranti_. But this form of ignorance he found more annoying. They simply did not know what a strike was. If you offered them one day ten francs a stint--he was speaking now of the miners of the Iglesias region.--No, no, no, they would not take it, they wanted twelve francs. Go to them the next day and offer them four francs for half a stint, and yes, yes, yes, they would take it. And there they were: ignorant: ignorant Sardinians. They absolutely did not know how to strike. He was quite sarcastically hot about it. The whole tone of these three young men was the tone of sceptical irony common to the young people of our day the world over. Only they had--or at least the driver had--some little fervour for his strikes and his socialism. But it was a pathetic fervour: a _pis-aller_ fervour. * * * * * We talked about the land. The war has practically gutted Sardinia of her cattle: so they said. And now the land is being deserted, the arable land is going back to fallow. Why? Why, says the driver, because the owners of the land won't spend any capital. They have got the capital locked up, and the land is dead. They find it cheaper to let all the arable go back to fallow, and raise a few head of cattle, rather than to pay high wages, grow corn, and get small returns. Yes, and also, chimes in the carabiniere, the peasants don't want to work the land. They hate the land. They'll do anything to get off the land. They want regular wages, short hours, and devil take the rest. So they will go into France as navvies, by the hundred. They flock to Rome, they besiege the Labor bureaus, they will do the artificial Government navvy-work at a miserable five francs a day--a railway shunter having at least eighteen francs a day--anything, anything rather than work the land. Yes, and what does the Government do! replies the bus-driver. They pull the roads to pieces in order to find work for the unemployed, remaking them, across the campagna. But in Sardinia, where roads and bridges are absolutely wanting, will they do anything? No! There it is, however. The bus-driver, with dark shadows under his eyes, represents the intelligent portion of the conversation. The carabiniere is soft and will go any way, though always with some interest. The little Greek-looking conductor just does not care. * * * * * Enters another belated traveller, and takes a seat at the end of the table. The be-shawled brings him soup and a skinny bit of kid. He eyes this last with contempt, and fetches out of his bag a large hunk of roast pork, and bread, and black olives, thus proceeding to make a proper meal. [Illustration: FONNI] We being without cigarettes, the bus-driver and his companion press them on us: their beloved Macedonia cigarettes. The driver says they are _squisitissimi_--most, most exquisite--so exquisite that all foreigners want them. In truth I believe they are exported to Germany now. And they are quite good, when they really have tobacco in them. Usually they are hollow tubes of paper which just flare away under one's nose and are done. We decide to have a round drink: they choose the precious _aqua vitae_: the white sort I think. At last it arrives--when the little dark-eyed one has fetched it. And it tastes rather like sweetened petroleum, with a dash of aniseed: filthy. Most Italian liquors are now sweet and filthy. At length we rise to go to bed. We shall all meet in the morning. And this room is dead cold, with frost outside. Going out, we glance into the famous stanza. One figure alone lies stretched on the floor in the almost complete darkness. A few embers still glow. The other men no doubt are in the bar. Ah, the filthy bedroom. The q-b ties up her head in a large, clean white kerchief, to avoid contact with the unsavory pillow. It is a cold, hard, flat bed, with two cold, hard, flat blankets. But we are very tired. Just as we are going to sleep, however, weird, high-pitched singing starts below, very uncanny--with a refrain that is a yelp-yelp-yelp! almost like a dog in angry pain. Weird, almost gruesome this singing goes on, first one voice and then another and then a tangle of voices. Again we are roused by the pounding of heavy feet on the corridor outside, which is as hollow and resonant as a drum. And then in the infernal crew-yard outside a cock crows. Throughout the night--yea, through all the black and frosty hours this demoniac bird screams its demon griefs. * * * * * However, it is morning. I gingerly wash a bit of myself in the broken basin, and dry that bit on a muslin veil which masquerades upon the chair as a towel. The q-b contents herself with a dry wipe. And we go downstairs in hopes of the last-night's milk. There is no one to be seen. It is a cold, frost-strong, clear morning. There is no one in the bar. We stumble down the dark tunnel passage. The stanza is as if no man had ever set foot in it: very dark, the mats against the wall, the fire-place grey with a handful of long dead ash. Just like a dungeon. The dining-room has the same long table and eternal table-cloth--and our serviettes, still wet, lying where we shovelled them aside. So back again to the bar. And this time a man is drinking _aqua vitae_, and the dirty-shirt is officiating. He has no hat on: and extraordinary, he has no brow at all: just flat, straight black hair slanting to his eyebrows, no forehead at all. Is there coffee? No, there is no coffee. Why? Because they can't get sugar. Ho! laughs the peasant drinking _aqua vitae_. You make coffee with sugar! Here, say I, they make it with nothing.--Is there milk? No. No milk at all? No. Why not? Nobody brings it. Yes, yes--there is milk if they like to get it, puts in the peasant. But they want you to drink _aqua vitae_. I see myself drinking _aqua vitae_. My yesterday's rage towers up again suddenly, till it quite suffocates me. There is something in this unsavoury, black, wine-dabbled, thick, greasy young man that does for me. "Why," say I, lapsing into the Italian rhetorical manner, "why do you keep an inn? Why do you write the word Ristorante so large, when you have nothing to offer people, and don't intend to have anything. Why do you have the impudence to take in travellers? What does it mean, that this is an inn? What, say, what does it mean? Say then--what does it mean? What does it mean, your Ristorante Risveglio, written so large?" Getting all this out in one breath, my indignation now stifled me. Him of the shirt said nothing at all. The peasant laughed. I demanded the bill. It was twenty-five francs odd. I picked up every farthing of the change. "Won't you leave any tip at all?" asks the q-b. "Tip!" say I, speechless. So we march upstairs and make tea to fill the thermos flask. Then, with sack over my shoulder, I make my way out of the Risveglio. * * * * * It is Sunday morning. The frozen village street is almost empty. We march down to the wider space where the bus stands: I hope they haven't the impudence to call it a Piazza. "Is this the Nuoro bus?" I ask of a bunch of urchins. And even they begin to jeer. But my sudden up-starting flare quenches them at once. One answers yes, and they edge away. I stow the sack and the kitchenino in the first-class part. The first-class is in front: we shall see better. There are men standing about, with their hands in their pockets,--those who are not in costume. Some wear the black-and-white. All wear the stocking caps. And all have the wide shirt-breasts, white, their waistcoats being just like evening dress waistcoats. Imagine one of these soft white shirt fronts well slobbered, and you have mine host of the Risveglio. But these lounging, static, white-breasted men are snowily clean, this being Sunday morning. They smoke their pipes on the frosty air, and are none too friendly. * * * * * The bus starts at half-past nine. The campanile is clanging nine. Two or three girls go down the road in their Sunday costume of purplish brown. We go up the road, into the clear, ringing frosty air, to find the lane. And again, from above, how beautiful it is in the sharp morning! The whole village lies in bluish shadow, the hills with their thin pale oak trees are in bluish shadow still, only in the distance the frost-glowing sun makes a wonderful, jewel-like radiance on the pleasant hills, wild and thinly-wooded, of this interior region. Real fresh wonder-beauty all around. And such humanity. Returning to the village we find a little shop and get biscuits and cigarettes. And we find our friends the bus-men. They are shy this morning. They are ready for us when we are ready. So in we get, joyfully, to leave Sorgono. One thing I say for it, it must be an honest place. For people leave their sacks about without a qualm. * * * * * Up we go, up the road. Only to stop, alas, at the Risveglio. The little conductor goes down the lane towards the station. The driver goes and has a little drink with a comrade. There is quite a crowd round the dreary entrances of the inn. And quite a little bunch of people to clamber up into the second class, behind us. We wait and wait. Then in climbs an old peasant, in full black-and-white costume, smiling in the pleased, naïve way of the old. After him climbs a fresh-faced young man with a suit-case. "Na!" said the young man. "Now you are in the automobile." And the old man gazes round with the wondering, vacant, naïve smile. "One is all right here, eh?" the young citizen persists, patronizing. But the old man is too excited to answer. He gazes hither and thither. Then he suddenly remembers he had a parcel, and looks for it in fear. The bright-faced young man picks it from the floor and hands it him. Ah, it is all right. I see the little conductor in his dashing, sheep-lined, short military overcoat striding briskly down the little lane with the post-bag. The driver climbs to his seat in front of me. He has a muffler round his neck and his hat pulled down to his ears. He pips at the horn, and our old peasant cranes forward to look how he does it. And so, with a jerk and a spurt, we start uphill. "Eh--what's that?" said the peasant, frightened. "We're starting," explained the bright-faced young man. "Starting! Didn't we start before?" The bright face laughs pleasedly. "No," he said. "Did you think we had been going ever since you got in?" "Yes," says the old man, simply, "since the door was shut." The young citizen looks at us for our joyful approval. VI. TO NUORO. These automobiles in Italy are splendid. They take the steep, looping roads so easily, they seem to run so naturally. And this one was comfortable, too. The roads of Italy always impress me. They run undaunted over the most precipitous regions, and with curious ease. In England almost any such road, among the mountains at least, would be labelled three times dangerous and would be famous throughout the land as an impossible climb. Here it is nothing. Up and down they go, swinging about with complete sang-froid. There seems to have been no effort in their construction. They are so good, naturally, that one hardly notices what splendid gestures they represent. Of course, the surface is now often intolerably bad. And they are most of them roads which, with ten years' neglect, will become ruins. For they are cut through overhanging rock and scooped out of the sides of hills. But I think it is marvellous how the Italians have penetrated all their inaccessible regions, of which they have so many, with great high-roads: and how along these high-roads the omnibuses now keep up a perfect communication. The precipitous and craggily-involved land is threaded through and through with roads. There seems to be a passion for high-roads and for constant communication. In this the Italians have a real Roman instinct, _now_. For the roads are new. The railways too go piercing through rock for miles and miles, and nobody thinks anything of it. The coast railway of Calabria, down to Reggio, would make us stand on our heads if we had it in England. Here it is a matter of course. In the same way I always have a profound admiration for their driving--whether of a great omnibus or of a motor-car. It all seems so easy, as if the man were part of the car. There is none of that beastly grinding, uneasy feeling one has in the north. A car behaves like a smooth, live thing, sensibly. All the peasants have a passion for a high-road. They want their land opening out, opening out. They seem to hate the ancient Italian remoteness. They all want to be able to get out at a moment's notice, to get away--quick, quick. A village which is two miles off the high-road, even if it is perched like a hawk's nest on a peak, still chafes and chafes for the great road to come to it, chafes and chafes for the daily motor-bus connection with the railway. There is no placidity, no rest in the heart of the land. There is a fever of restless irritation all the time. And yet the permanent way of almost every railway is falling into bad disrepair, the roads are shocking. And nothing seems to be done. Is our marvellous, mechanical era going to have so short a bloom? Is the marvellous openness, the opened-out wonder of the land going to collapse quite soon, and the remote places lapse back into inaccessibility again? Who knows! I rather hope so. * * * * * The automobile took us rushing and winding up the hill, sometimes through cold, solid-seeming shadow, sometimes across a patch of sun. There was thin, bright ice in the ruts, and deep grey hoar-frost on the grass. I cannot tell how the sight of the grass and bushes heavy with frost, and wild--in their own primitive wildness charmed me. The slopes of the steep wild hills came down shaggy and bushy, with a few berries lingering, and the long grass-stalks sere with the frost. Again the dark valley sank below like a ravine, but shaggy, bosky, unbroken. It came upon me how I loved the sight of the blue-shadowed, tawny-tangled winter with its frosty standstill. The young oaks keep their brown leaves. And doing so, surely they are best with a thin edge of rime. One begins to realize how old the real Italy is, how man-gripped, and how withered. England is far more wild and savage and lonely, in her country parts. Here since endless centuries man has tamed the impossible mountain side into terraces, he has quarried the rock, he has fed his sheep among the thin woods, he has cut his boughs and burnt his charcoal, he has been half domesticated even among the wildest fastnesses. This is what is so attractive about the remote places, the Abruzzi, for example. Life is so primitive, so pagan, so strangely heathen and half-savage. And yet it is human life. And the wildest country is half humanized, half brought under. It is all conscious. Wherever one is in Italy, either one is conscious of the present, or of the mediaeval influences, or of the far, mysterious gods of the early Mediterranean. Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genus. Man has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and, really, finished it. The expression may be Proserpine, or Pan, or even the strange "shrouded gods" of the Etruscans or the Sikels, none the less it is an expression. The land has been humanised, through and through: and we in our own tissued consciousness bear the results of this humanisation. So that for us to go to Italy and to _penetrate_ into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery--back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness. And then--and then--there is a final feeling of sterility. It is all worked out. It is all known: _connu, connu!_ This Sunday morning, seeing the frost among the tangled, still savage bushes of Sardinia, my soul thrilled again. This was not all known. This was not all worked out. Life was not only a process of rediscovering backwards. It is that, also: and it is that intensely. Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has found for me so much that was lost: like a restored Osiris. But this morning in the omnibus I realize that, apart from the great rediscovery backwards, which one _must_ make before one can be whole at all, there is a move forwards. There are unknown, unworked lands where the salt has not lost its savour. But one must have perfected oneself in the great past first. * * * * * If one travels one eats. We immediately began to munch biscuits, and the old peasant in his white, baggy breeches and black cuirass, his old face smiling wonderingly under his old stocking cap, although he was only going to Tonara, some seven or eight miles, began to peel himself a hard-boiled egg, which he got out of his parcel. With calm wastefulness he peeled away the biggest part of the white of the egg with the shell--because it came away so. The citizen of Nuoro, for such the bright-faced young man was, said to him--"But see how you waste it."--"Ha!" said the old peasant, with a reckless indifferent wave of the hand. What did he care how much he wasted, since he was _en voyage_ and riding for the first time in his life in an automobile. The citizen of Nuoro told us he had some sort of business in Sorgono, so he came back and forth constantly. The peasant did some work or other for him--or brought him something down from Tonara. He was a pleasant, bright-eyed young man, and he made nothing of eight hours in a motor-bus. He told us there was still game among these hills: wild boars which were hunted in big hunts, and many hares. It was a curious and beautiful sight, he said, to see a hare at night fascinated by the flare of the lamps of the automobile, racing ahead with its ears back, always keeping in front, inside the beam, and flying like mad, on and on ahead, till at some hill it gathered speed and melted into the dark. * * * * * We descended into a deep, narrow valley to the road-junction and the canteen-house, then up again, up and up sharp to Tonara, our village we had seen in the sun yesterday. But we were approaching it from the back. As we swerved into the sunlight, the road took a long curve on to the open ridge between two valleys. And there in front we saw a glitter of scarlet and white. It was in slow motion. It was a far-off procession, scarlet figures of women, and a tall image moving away from us, slowly, in the Sunday morning. It was passing along the level sunlit ridge above a deep, hollow valley. A close procession of women glittering in scarlet, white and black, moving slowly in the distance beneath the grey-yellow buildings of the village on the crest, towards an isolated old church: and all along this narrow upland saddle as on a bridge of sunshine itself. Were we not going to see any more? The bus turned again and rushed along the now level road and then veered. And there beyond, a little below, we saw the procession _coming_. The bus faded to a standstill, and we climbed out. Above us, old and mellowed among the smooth rocks and the bits of flat grass was the church, tanging its bell. Just in front, above, were old, half-broken houses of stone. The road came gently winding up to us, from what was evidently two villages ledged one above the other upon the steep summit of the south slope. Far below was the south valley, with a white puff of engine steam. And slowly chanting in the near distance, curving slowly up to us on the white road between the grass came the procession. The high morning was still. We stood all on this ridge above the world, with the deeps of silence below on the right. And in a strange, brief, staccato monody chanted the men, and in quick, light rustle of women's voices came the responses. Again the men's voices! The white was mostly men, not women. The priest in his robes, his boys near him, was leading the chanting. Immediately behind him came a small cluster of bare-headed, tall, sunburnt men, all in golden-velveteen corduroy, mountain-peasants, bowing beneath a great life-size seated image of Saint Anthony of Padua. After these a number of men in the costume, but with the white linen breeches hanging wide and loose almost to the ankles, instead of being tucked into the black gaiters. So they seemed very white beneath the back kilt frill. The black frieze body-vest was cut low, like an evening suit, and the stocking caps were variously perched. The men chanted in low, hollow, melodic tones. Then came the rustling chime of the women. And the procession crept slowly, aimlessly forward in time with the chant. The great image rode rigid, and rather foolish. After the men was a little gap--and then the brilliant wedge of the women. They were packed two by two, close on each other's heels, chanting inadvertently when their turn came, and all in brilliant, beautiful costume. In front were the little girl-children, two by two, immediately following the tall men in peasant black-and-white. Children, demure and conventional, in vermilion, white and green--little girl-children with long skirts of scarlet cloth down to their feet, green-banded near the bottom: with white aprons bordered with vivid green and mingled colour: having little scarlet, purple-bound, open boleros over the full white shirts: and black head-cloths folded across their little chins, just leaving the lips clear, the face framed in black. Wonderful little girl-children, perfect and demure in the stiffish, brilliant costume, with black head-dress! Stiff as Velasquez princesses! The bigger girls followed, and then the mature women, a close procession. The long vermilion skirts with their green bands at the bottom flashed a solid moving mass of colour, softly swinging, and the white aprons with their band of brilliant mingled green seemed to gleam. At the throat the full-bosomed white shirts were fastened with big studs of gold filigree, two linked filigree globes: and the great white sleeves billowed from the scarlet, purplish-and-green-edged boleros. The faces came nearer to us, framed all round in the dark cloths. All the lips still sang responses, but all the eyes watched us. So the softly-swaying coloured body of the procession came up to us. The poppy-scarlet smooth cloth rocked in fusion, the bands and bars of emerald green seemed to burn across the red and the showy white, the dark eyes peered and stared at us from under the black snood, gazed back at us with raging curiosity, while the lips moved automatically in chant. The bus had run into the inner side of the road, and the procession had to press round it, towards the sky-line, the great valley lying below. The priest stared, hideous St. Anthony cockled a bit as he passed the butt end of the big grey automobile, the peasant men in gold-coloured corduroy, old, washed soft, were sweating under the load and still singing with opened lips, the loose white breeches of the men waggled as they walked on with their hands behind their backs, turning again, to look at us. The big, hard hands, folded behind black kilt-frill! The women, too, shuffled slowly past, rocking the scarlet and the bars of green, and all twisting as they sang, to look at us still more. And so the procession edged past the bus, and was trailing upwards, curved solid against the sky-line towards the old church. From behind, the geranium scarlet was intense, one saw the careful, curiously cut backs of the shapen boleros, poppy-red, edged with mauve-purple and green, and the white of the shirt just showing at the waist. The full sleeves billowed out, the black head-cloths hung down to a point. The pleated skirts swing slowly, the broad band of green accentuating the motion. Indeed that is what it must be for, this thick, rich band of jewel green, to throw the wonderful horizontal motion back and forth, back and forth, of the suave vermilion, and give that static, Demeta splendor to a peasant motion, so magnificent in colour, geranium and malachite. All the costumes were not exactly alike. Some had more green, some had less. In some the sleeveless boleros were of a darker red, and some had poorer aprons, without such gorgeous bands at the bottom. And some were evidently old: probably thirty years old: still perfect and in keeping, reserved for Sunday and high holidays. A few were darker, ruddier than the true vermilion. This varying of the tone intensified the beauty of the shuffling woman-host. * * * * * When they had filed into the grey, forlorn little church on the ridge-top just above us, the bus started silently to run on to the rest-point below, whilst we climbed back up the little rock-track to the church. When we came to the side-door we found the church quite full. Level with us as we stood in the open side doorway, we saw kneeling on the bare stoneflags the little girl-children, and behind them all the women clustered kneeling upon their aprons, with hands negligently folded, filling the church to the further doorway, where the sun shone: the bigger west-end doorway. In the shadow of the whitewashed, bare church all these kneeling women with their colour and their black head-cloths looked like some thick bed of flowers, geranium, black hooded above. They all knelt on the naked, solid stone of the pavement. There was a space in front of the geranium little girl-children, then the men in corduroys, gold-soft, with dark round heads, kneeling awkwardly in reverence; and then the queer, black cuirasses and full white sleeves of grey-headed peasant men, many bearded. Then just in front of them the priest in his white vestment, standing exposed, and just baldly beginning an address. At the side of the altar was seated large and important the modern, simpering, black-gowned Anthony of Padua, nursing a boy-child. He looked a sort of male Madonna. "Now," the priest was saying, "blessed Saint Anthony shows you in what way you can be Christians. It is not enough that you are not Turks. Some think they are Christians because they are not Turks. It is true you are none of you Turks. But you have still to learn how to be good Christians. And this you can learn from our blessed Saint Anthony. Saint Anthony, etc., etc...." The contrast between Turks and Christians is still forceful in the Mediterranean, where the Mohammedans have left such a mark. But how the word _cristiani_, _cristiani_, spoken with a peculiar priestly unction, gets on my nerves. The voice is barren in its homily. And the women are all intensely watching the q-b and me in the doorway, their folded hands are very negligently held together. "Come away!" say I. "Come away, and let them listen." * * * * * We left the church crowded with its kneeling host, and dropped down past the broken houses towards the omnibus, which stood on a sort of level out-look place, a levelled terrace with a few trees, standing silent over the valley. It should be picketed with soldiers having arquebuses. And I should have welcomed a few thorough-paced infidels, as a leaven to this dreary Christianity of ours. But it was a wonderful place. Usually, the life-level is reckoned as sea-level. But here, in the heart of Sardinia, the life-level is high as the golden-lit plateau, and the sea-level is somewhere far away, below, in the gloom, it does not signify. The life-level is high up, high and sun-sweetened and among rocks. We stood and looked below, at the puff of steam, far down the wooded valley where we had come yesterday. There was an old, low house on this eagle-perching piazza. I would like to live there. The real village--or rather two villages, like an ear-ring and its pendant--lay still beyond, in front, ledging near the summit of the long, long, steep wooded slope, that never ended till it ran flush to the depths away below there in shadow. And yesterday, up this slope the old peasant had come with his two brilliant daughters and the pack-pony. And somewhere in those ledging, pearly villages in front must be my girovago and his "wife". I wish I could see their stall and drink aqua vitae with them. "How beautiful the procession!" says the q-b to the driver. "Ah yes--one of the most beautiful costumes of Sardinia, this of Tonara," he replied wistfully. * * * * * The bus sets off again--minus the old peasant. We retrace our road. A woman is leading a bay pony past the church, striding with long strides, so that her maroon skirt swings like a fan, and hauling the halter rope. Apparently the geranium red costume is Sunday only, the week-day is this maroon, or puce, or madder-brown. Quickly and easily the bus slips down the hill into the valley. Wild, narrow valleys, with trees, and brown-legged cork trees. Across the other side a black and white peasant is working alone on a tiny terrace of the hill-side, a small, solitary figure, for all the world like a magpie in the distance. These people like being alone--solitary--one sees a single creature so often isolated among the wilds. This is different from Sicily and Italy, where the people simply cannot be alone. They _must_ be in twos and threes. But it is Sunday morning, and the worker is exceptional. Along the road we pass various pedestrians, men in their black sheepskins, boys in their soldiers' remains. They are trudging from one village to another, across the wild valleys. And there is a sense of Sunday morning freedom, of roving, as in an English countryside. Only the one old peasant works alone: and a goatherd watching his long-haired, white goats. Beautiful the goats are: and so swift. They fly like white shadows along the road from us, then dart down-hill. I see one standing on a bough of an oak-tree, right in the tree, an enormous white tree-creature complacently munching up aloft, then rearing on her hind legs, so lengthy, and putting her slim paws far away on an upper, forward branch. * * * * * Whenever we come to a village we stop and get down, and our little conductor disappears into the post-office for the post-bag. This last is usually a limp affair, containing about three letters. The people crowd round--and many of them in very ragged costume. They look poor, and not attractive: perhaps a bit degenerate. It would seem as if the Italian instinct to get into rapid touch with the world were the healthy instinct after all. For in these isolated villages, which have been since time began far from any life-centre, there is an almost sordid look on the faces of the people. We must remember that the motor-bus is a great innovation. It has been running for five weeks only. I wonder for how many months it will continue. For I am sure it cannot pay. Our first-class tickets cost, I believe, about twenty-seven francs each. The second class costs about three-quarters the first. Some parts of the journey we were very few passengers. The distance covered is so great, the population so thin, that even granted the passion for getting out of their own villages, which possesses all people now, still the bus cannot earn much more than an average of two hundred to three hundred francs a day. Which, with two men's wages, and petrol at its enormous price, and the cost of wear-and-tear, cannot possibly pay. I asked the driver. He did not tell me what his wages were: I did not ask him. But he said the company paid for the keep and lodging for himself and mate at the stopping-places. This being Sunday, fewer people were travelling: a statement hard to believe. Once he had carried fifty people all the way from Tonara to Nuoro. Once! But it was in vain he protested. Ah well, he said, the bus carried the post, and the government paid a subsidy of so many thousands of lire a year: a goodly number. Apparently then the government was the loser, as usual. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of these omnibuses running the lonely districts of Italy and Sicily--Sardinia had a network of systems. They are splendid--and they are perhaps an absolute necessity for a nervous restless population which simply cannot keep still, and which finds some relief in being whirled about even on the _autovie_, as the bus-system is called. The autovie are run by private companies, only subsidised by the government. * * * * * On we rush, through the morning--and at length see a large village, high on the summit beyond, stony on the high upland. But it has a magical look, as these tiny summit-cities have from the distance. They recall to me always my childish visions of Jerusalem, high against the air, and seeming to sparkle, and built in sharp cubes. It is curious what a difference there is between the high, fresh, proud villages and the valley villages. Those that crown the world have a bright, flashing air, as Tonara had. Those that lie down below, infolded in the shadow, have a gloomy, sordid feeling and a repellent population, like Sorgono and other places at which we had halted. The judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got. We were now at the highest point of the journey. The men we saw on the road were in their sheepskins, and some were even walking with their faces shawl-muffled. Glancing back, we saw up the valley clefts the snow of Gennargentu once more, a white mantle on broad shoulders, the very core of Sardinia. The bus slid to a standstill in a high valley, beside a stream where the road from Fonni joined ours. There was waiting a youth with a bicycle. I would like to go to Fonni. They say it is the highest village in Sardinia. * * * * * In front, on the broad summit, reared the towers of Gavoi. This was the half-way halt, where the buses had their _coincidenza_, and where we would stay for an hour and eat. We wound up and up the looping road, and at last entered the village. Women came to the doors to look. They were wearing the dark madder-brown costume. Men were hastening, smoking their pipes, towards our stopping place. We saw the other bus--a little crowd of people--and we drew up at last. We were tired and hungry. We were at the door of the inn, and we entered quickly. And in an instant, what a difference! At the clean little bar, men were drinking cheerfully. A side door led into the common room. And how charming it was. In a very wide chimney, white and stone-clean, with a lovely shallow curve above, was burning a fire of long, clean-split faggots, laid horizontally on the dogs. A clean, clear bright fire, with odd little chairs in front, very low, for us to sit on. The funny, low little chairs seem a specialty of this region. The floor of this room was paved with round dark pebbles, beautifully clean. On the walls hung brilliant copper fans, glittering against the whitewash. And under the long, horizontal window that looked on the street was a stone slab with sockets for little charcoal fires. The curve of the chimney arch was wide and shallow, the curve above the window was still wider, and of a similar delicate shallowness, the white roof rose delicately vaulted. With the glitter of copper, the expanse of dark, rose-coloured, pebbled floor, the space, the few low, clean-gleaming faggots, it was really beautiful. We sat and warmed ourselves, welcomed by a plump hostess and a pleasant daughter, both in madder-brown dress and full white shirt. People strayed in and out, through the various doors. The houses are built without any plan at all, the rooms just happening, here or there. A bitch came from an inner darkness and stood looking at the fire, then looked up at me, smiling in her bitch-like, complacent fashion. * * * * * But we were dying with hunger. What was there to eat?--and was it nearly ready? There was _cinghiale_, the pleasant, hard-cheeked girl told us, and it was nearly ready. _Cinghiale_ being wild boar, we sniffed the air. The girl kept tramping rather fecklessly back and forth, with a plate or a serviette: and at last it was served. We went through the dark inner place, which was apparently the windowless bit left over, inside, when the hap-hazard rooms were made round about, and from thence into a large, bare, darkish pebbled room with a white table and inverted soup-plates. It was deathly cold. The window looked north over the wintry landscape of the highlands, fields, stone walls, and rocks. Ah, the cold, motionless air of the room. But we were quite a party: the second bus-driver and his mate, a bearded traveller on the second bus, with his daughter, ourselves, the bright-faced citizen from Nuoro, and our driver. Our little dark-eyed conductor did not come. It dawned on me later he could not afford to pay for this meal, which was not included in his wage. The Nuoro citizen conferred with our driver--who looked tired round the eyes--and made the girl produce a tin of sardines. These were opened at table with a large pocket-knife belonging to the second conductor. He was a reckless, odd, hot-foot fellow whom I liked very much. But I was terrified at the way he carved the sardine-box with his jack-knife. However, we could eat and drink. Then came the _brodo_, the broth, in a great bowl. This was boiling hot, and very, very strong. It was perfectly plain, strong meat-stock, without vegetables. But how good and invigorating it was, and what an abundance! We drank it down, and ate the good, cold bread. Then came the boar itself. Alas, it was a bowl of hunks of dark, rather coarse boiled meat, from which the broth had been made. It was quite dry, without fat. I should have been very puzzled to know what meat it was, if I had not been told. Sad that the wild boar should have received so little culinary attention. However, we ate the hunks of hot, dry meat with bread, and were glad to get them. They were filling, at least. And there was a bowl of rather bitter green olives for a condiment. The Nuoro citizen now produced a huge bottle of wine, which he said was _finissimo_, and refused to let us go on with the dark wine on the table, of which every guest was served with a bottle. So we drank up, and were replenished with the redder, lighter, finer Sorgono wine. It was very good. The second bus-conductor also did not eat the inn meal. He produced a vast piece of bread, good, home-made bread, and at least half of a roast lamb, and a large paper of olives. This lamb he insisted on sending round the table, waving his knife and fork with dramatic gestures at every guest, insisting that every guest should take a hunk. So one by one we all helped ourselves to the extraordinarily good cold roast lamb, and to the olives. Then the bus-conductor fell to as well. There was a mass of meat still left to him. It is extraordinary how generous and, from the inside, well-bred these men were. To be sure the second conductor waved his knife and fork and made bitter faces if one of us took only a little bit of the lamb. He wanted us to take more. But the _essential_ courtesy in all of them was quite perfect, so manly and utterly simple. Just the same with the q-b. They treated her with a sensitive, manly simplicity, which one could not but be thankful for. They made none of the odious politenesses which are so detestable in well-brought-up people. They made no advances and did none of the hateful homage of the adulating male. They were quiet, and kind, and sensitive to the natural flow of life, and quite without airs. I liked them extremely. Men who can be quietly kind and simple to a woman, without wanting to show off or to make an impression, they are men still. They were neither humble nor conceited. They did not show off. And oh God, what a blessed relief, to be with people who don't bother to show off. We sat at that table quietly and naturally as if we were by ourselves, and talked or listened to their talk, just as it happened. When we did not want to talk, they took no notice of us. And that I call good manners. Middle-class, showing off people would have found them uncouth. I found them almost the only really well-bred people I have met. They did not show off in any way at all, not even a show of simplicity. They knew that in the beginning and in the end a man stands alone, his soul is alone in itself, and all attributes are nothing--and this curious final knowledge preserved them in simplicity. When we had had coffee and were going out, I found our own conductor in a little chair by the fire. He was looking a bit pathetic. I had enough sense to give him a coffee, which brightened him. But it was not till afterwards, putting things together, that I realized he had wanted to be with us all at table, but that his conductor's wages probably did not allow him to spend the money. My bill for the dinner was about fifteen francs, for the two of us. * * * * * In the bus again, we were quite crowded. A peasant girl in Nuoro costume sat facing me, and a dark-bearded, middle-aged man in a brown velveteen suit was next me and glowering at her. He was evidently her husband. I did not like him: one of the jealous, carping sort. She, in her way, was handsome: but a bit of a devil as well, in all probability. There were two village women become fine, in town dress and black silk scarves over their heads, fancying themselves. Then there was a wild scuffle, and three bouncing village lasses were pushed in, laughing and wild with excitement. There were wild farewells, and the bus rolled out of Gavoi between the desolate mountain fields and the rocks, on a sort of table-land. We rolled on for a mile or so: then stopped, and the excited lasses got down. I gathered they had been given a little ride for a Sunday treat. Delighted they were. And they set off, with other bare-headed women in costume, along a bare path between flat, out-cropping rocks and cold fields. * * * * * The girl facing me was a study. She was not more than twenty years old I should say: or was she? Did the delicate and fine complication of lines against her eyes mean thirty-five? But anyhow she was the wife of the velveteen man. He was thick-set and had white hairs in his coarse black beard, and little, irritable brown eyes under his irritable brows. He watched her all the time. Perhaps, she was after all a young, new girl-wife. She sat with that expressionless look of one who is watched and who appears not to know it. She had her back to the engine. [Illustration: GAVOI] She wore her black head-cloth from her brow and her hair was taken tight back from her rather hard, broad, well-shaped forehead. Her dark eyebrows were very finely drawn above her large, dark-grey, pellucid eyes, but they were drawn with a peculiar obstinate and irritating lift. Her nose was straight and small, her mouth well-shut. And her big, rather hostile eyes had a withheld look in them, obstinate. Yet, being newly wed and probably newly-awakened, her eyes looked sometimes at me with a provoking look, curious as to what I was in the husband line, challenging rather defiantly with her new secrets, obstinate in opposition to the male authority, and yet intrigued by the very fact that one was man. The velveteen husband--his velveteens too had gone soft and gold-faded, yet somehow they made him look ugly, common--he watched her with his irritable, yellow-brown eyes, and seemed to fume in his stiff beard. She wore the costume: the full-gathered shirt fastened at the throat with the two gold filigree globes, a little dark, braided, stiff bolero just fastened at the waist, leaving a pretty pattern of white breast, and a dark maroon skirt. As the bus rushed along she turned somewhat pale, with the obstinate pinched look of a woman who is in opposition to her man. At length she flung him a few words which I did not catch--and her forehead seemed to go harder, as she drooped her lashes occasionally over her wide, alert, obstinate, rather treacherous eyes. She must have been a difficult piece of goods to deal with. And she sat with her knees touching mine, rocking against mine as the bus swayed. * * * * * We came to a village on the road: the landscape had now become wider, much more open. At the inn door the bus stopped, and the velveteen husband and the girl got down. It was cold--but in a minute I got down too. The bus conductor came to me and asked anxiously if the q-b were ill. The q-b said no, why? Because there was a signora whom the motion of the bus made ill. This was the girl. There was a crowd and a great row at this inn. In the second dark room, which was bare of furniture, a man sat in a corner playing an accordion. Men in the close breeches were dancing together. Then they fell to wrestling wildly, crashing about among the others, with shouts and yells. Men in the black-and-white, but untidy, with the wide white drawers left hanging out over the black gaiters, surged here and there. All were rowdy with drink. This again was rather a squalid inn but roaring with violent, crude male life. The Nuoro citizen said that here was very good wine, and we must try it. I did not want it, but he insisted. So we drank little glasses of merely moderate red wine. The sky had gone all grey with the afternoon curd-clouds. It was very cold and raw. Wine is no joy, cold, dead wine, in such an atmosphere. The Nuoro citizen insisted on paying. He would let me pay, he said, when he came to England. In him, and in our bus men, the famous Sardinian hospitality and generosity still lingers. * * * * * When the bus ran on again the q-b told the peasant girl who again had the pinched look, to change places with me and sit with her face to the engine. This the young woman did, with that rather hard assurance common to these women. But at the next stop she got down, and made the conductor come with us into the compartment, whilst she sat in front between the driver and the citizen of Nuoro. That was what she wanted all the time. Now she was all right. She had her back to the velveteen husband, she sat close between two strange young men, who were condoling with her. And velveteens eyed her back, and his little eyes went littler and more pin-pointed, and his nose seemed to curl with irritation. The costumes had changed again. There was again the scarlet, but no green. The green had given place to mauve and rose. The women in one cold, stony, rather humbled broken place were most brilliant. They had the geranium skirts, but their sleeveless boleros were made to curl out strangely from the waist, and they were edged with a puckered rose-pink, a broad edge, with lines of mauve and lavender. As they went up between the houses that were dark and grisly under the blank, cold sky, it is amazing how these women of vermilion and rose-pink seemed to melt into an almost impossible blare of colour. What a risky blend of colours! Yet how superb it could look, that dangerous hard assurance of these women as they strode along so blaring. I would not like to tackle one of them. * * * * * Wider and colder the landscape grew. As we topped a hill at the end of a village, we saw a long string of wagons, each with a pair of oxen, and laden with large sacks, curving upwards in the cold, pallid Sunday afternoon. Seeing us, the procession came to a standstill at the curve of the road, and the pale oxen, the pale low wagons, the pale full sacks, all in the blenched light, each one headed by a tall man in shirt-sleeves, trailing a static procession on the hill-side, seemed like a vision: like a Doré drawing. The bus slid past, the man holding the wagon-pole, while some oxen stood like rock, some swayed their horns. The q-b asked the velveteener what they were carrying. For a long time he took no notice of the question. Then he volunteered, in a snappy voice, that it was the government grain being distributed to the communes for bread. On Sunday afternoon too. Oh this government corn! What a problem those sacks represent! * * * * * The country became wider as we dropped lower. But it was bleak and treeless once more. Stones cropped up in the wide, hollow dales. Men on ponies passed forlorn across the distances. Men with bundles waited at the cross-roads to pick up the bus. We were drawing near to Nuoro. It was past three in the afternoon, cold with a blenched light. The landscape seemed bare and stony, wide, different from any before. We came to the valley where the branch-line runs to Nuoro. I saw little pink railway-cabins at once, lonely along the valley bed. Turning sharp to the right, we ran in silence over the moor-land-seeming slopes, and saw the town beyond, clustered beyond, a little below, at the end of the long declivity, with sudden mountains rising around it. There it lay, as if at the end of the world, mountains rising sombre behind. So, we stop at the Dazio, the town's customs hut, and velveteens has to pay for some meat and cheese he is bringing in. After which we slip into the cold high-street of Nuoro. I am thinking that this is the home of Grazia Deledda, the novelist, and I see a barber's shop. De Ledda. And thank heaven we are at the end of the journey. It is past four o'clock. The bus has stopped quite close to the door of the inn: Star of Italy, was it? In we go at the open door. Nobody about, free access to anywhere and everywhere, as usual: testifying again to Sardinian honesty. We peer through a doorway to the left--through a rough little room: ah, there in a dark, biggish room beyond is a white-haired old woman with a long, ivory-coloured face standing at a large table ironing. One sees only the large whiteness of the table, and the long pallid face and the querulous pale-blue eye of the tall old woman as she looks up questioning from the gloom of the inner place. "Is there a room, Signora?" She looks at me with a pale, cold blue eye, and shouts into the dark for somebody. Then she advances into the passage and looks us up and down, the q-b and me. "Are you husband and wife?" she demands, challenge. "Yes, how shouldn't we be," say I. A tiny maid, of about thirteen, but sturdy and brisk-looking, has appeared in answer to the shout. "Take them to number seven," says the old dame, and she turns back to her gloom, and seizes the flat iron grimly. We follow up two flights of cold stone stairs, disheartening narrow staircase with a cold iron rail, and corridors opening off gloomily and rather disorderly. These houses give the effect, inside, of never having been properly finished, as if, long, long ago, the inmates had crowded in, pig-sty fashion, without waiting for anything to be brought into order, and there it had been left, dreary and chaotic. Thumbelina, the little maid, threw open the door of number seven with _eclat_. And we both exclaimed: "How fine!" It seemed to us palatial. Two good, thick white beds, a table, a chest of drawers, two mats on the tiled floor, and gorgeous oleographs on the wall--and two good wash-bowls side by side--and all perfectly clean and nice. What were we coming to! We felt we ought to be impressed. * * * * * We pulled open the latticed window doors, and looked down on the street: the only street. And it was a river of noisy life. A band was playing, rather terribly, round the corner at the end, and up and down the street jigged endless numbers of maskers in their Carnival costume, with girls and young women strolling arm-in-arm to participate. And how frisky they all were, how bubbly and unself-conscious! The maskers were nearly all women--the street was full of women: so we thought at first. Then we saw, looking closer, that most of the women were young men, dressed up. All the maskers were young men, and most of these young men, _of course_, were masquerading as women. As a rule they did not wear face-masks, only little dominoes of black cloth or green cloth or white cloth coming down to the mouth. Which is much better. For the old modelled half-masks with the lace frill, the awful proboscis sticking forward white and ghastly like the beaks of corpse-birds--such as the old Venice masks--these I think are simply horrifying. And the more modern "faces" are usually only repulsive. While the simple little pink half-masks with the end of black or green or white cloth, these just form a human disguise. It was quite a game, sorting out the real women from the false. Some were easy. They had stuffed their bosoms, and stuffed their bustles, and put on hats and very various robes, and they minced along with little jigging steps, like little dolls that dangle from elastic, and they put their heads on one side and dripped their hands, and danced up to flurry the actual young ladies, and sometimes they received a good clout on the head, when they broke into wild and violent gestures, whereat the _actual_ young ladies scuffled wildly. They were very lively and naïve.--But some were more difficult. Every conceivable sort of "woman" was there, broad shouldered and with rather large feet. The most usual was the semi-peasant, with a very full bosom and very full skirt and a very downright bearing. But one was a widow in weeds, drooping on the arm of a robust daughter. And one was an ancient crone in a crochet bed-cover. And one was in an old skirt and blouse and apron, with a broom, wildly sweeping the street from end to end. He was an animated rascal. He swept with very sarcastic assiduity in front of two town-misses in fur coats, who minced very importantly along. He swept their way very humbly, facing them and going backwards, sweeping and bowing, whilst they advanced with their noses in the air. He made his great bow, and they minced past, daughters of dog-fish, pesce-carne, no doubt. Then he skipped with a bold, gambolling flurry behind them, and with a perfectly mad frenzy began to sweep after them, as if to sweep their tracks away. He swept so madly and so blindly with his besom that he swept on to their heels and their ankles. They shrieked and glowered round, but the blind sweeper saw them not. He swept and swept and pricked their thin silk ankles. And they, scarlet with indignation and rage, gave hot skips like cats on hot bricks, and fled discomfited forwards. He bowed once more after them, and started mildly and innocently to sweep the street. A pair of lovers of fifty years ago, she in a half crinoline and poke bonnet and veil, hanging on his arm came very coyly past, oh so simpering, and it took me a long time to be sure that the "girl" was a youth. An old woman in a long nightdress prowled up and down, holding out her candle and peering in the street as if for burglars. She would approach the _real_ young women and put her candle in their faces and peer so hard, as if she suspected them of something. And they blushed and turned their faces away and protested confusedly. This old woman searched so fearfully in the face of one strapping lass in the pink and scarlet costume, who looked for all the world like a bunch of red and rose-pink geraniums, with a bit of white,--a _real_ peasant lass--that the latter in a panic began to beat him with her fist, furiously, quite aroused. And he made off, running comically in his long white nightdress. There were some really beautiful dresses of rich old brocade, and some gleaming old shawls, a shimmer of lavender and silver, or of dark, rich shot colours with deep borders of white silver and primrose gold, very lovely. I believe two of them were actual women--but the q-b says no. There was a Victorian gown of thick green silk, with a creamy blotched cross-over shawl. About her we both were doubtful. There were two wistful, drooping-lily sisters, all in white, with big feet. And there was a very successful tall miss in a narrow hobble-skirt of black satin and a toque with ospreys. The way she minced and wagged her posterior and went on her toes and peered over her shoulder and kept her elbows in was an admirable caricature. Especially the curious sagging heaving movement of "bustle" region, a movement very characteristic of modern feminism, was hit off with a bit of male exaggeration which rejoiced me. At first she even took me in. We stood outside our window, and leaned on the little balcony rail looking down at this flow of life. Directly opposite was the chemist's house: facing our window the best bedroom of the chemist, with a huge white matrimonial bed and muslin curtains. In the balcony sat the chemist's daughters, very elegant in high-heeled shoes and black hair done in the fluffy fashion with a big sweep sideways. Oh very elegant! They eyed us a little and we eyed them. But without interest. The river of life was down below. * * * * * It was very cold and the day was declining. We too were cold. We decided to go into the street and look for the café. In a moment we were out of doors, walking as inconspicuously as possible near the wall. Of course there was no pavement. These maskers were very gentle and whimsical, no touch of brutality at all. Now we were level with them, how odd and funny they were. One youth wore a thin white blouse and a pair of his sister's wide, calico knickers with needlework frills near the ankle, and white stockings. He walked artlessly, and looked almost pretty. Only the q-b winced with pain: not because of the knickers, but because of that awful length, coming well below the knee. Another young man was wound into a sheet, and heavens knows if he could ever get out of it. Another was involved in a complicated entanglement of white crochet antimacassars, very troublesome to contemplate. I did not like him at all, like a fish in a net. But he strode robustly about. We came to the end of the street, where there is a wide, desolate sort of gap. Here the little band stood braying away, there was a thick crowd of people, and on a slanting place just above, a little circle where youths and men, maskers and one or two girls were dancing, so crowded together and such a small ring that they looked like a jiggly set of upright rollers all turning rickettily against one another. They were doing a sort of intense jigging waltz. Why do they look so intense? Perhaps because they were so tight all together, like too many fish in a globe slipping through one another. There was a café in this sort of piazza--not a piazza at all, a formless gap. But young men were drinking little drinks, and I knew it would be hopeless to ask for anything but cold drinks or black coffee: which we did not want. So we continued forwards, up the slope of the village street. These towns soon come to an end. Already we were wandering into the open. On a ledge above, a peasant family was making a huge bonfire, a tower of orange-coloured, rippling flame. Little, impish boys were throwing on more rubbish. Everybody else was in town. Why were these folk at the town-end making this fire alone? We came to the end of the houses and looked over the road-wall at the hollow, deep, interesting valley below. Away on the other side rose a blue mountain, a steep but stumpy cone. High land reared up, dusky and dark-blue, all around. Somewhere far off the sun was setting with a bit of crimson. It was a wild, unusual landscape, of unusual shape. The hills seemed so untouched, dark-blue, virgin-wild, the hollow cradle of the valley was cultivated like a tapestry away below. And there seemed so little outlying life: nothing. No castles even. In Italy and Sicily castles perching everywhere. In Sardinia none--the remote, ungrappled hills rising darkly, standing outside of life. * * * * * As we went back it was growing dark, and the little band was about to leave off its brass noise. But the crowd still surged, the maskers still jigged and frisked unweariedly. Oh the good old energy of the bygone days, before men became so self-conscious. Here it was still on the hop. We found no café that looked any good. Coming to the inn, we asked if there was a fire anywhere. There wasn't. We went up to our room. The chemist-daughters had lighted up opposite, one saw their bedroom as if it were one's own. In the dusk of the street the maskers were still jigging, all the youths still joyfully being women, but a little more roughly now. Away over the house-tops the purple-red of a dying sunset. And it was very cold. There was nothing for it but just to lie in bed. The q-b made a little tea on the spirit-lamp, and we sat in bed and sipped it. Then we covered ourselves up and lay still, to get warm. Outside the noise of the street came unabated. It grew quite dark, the lights reflected into the room. There was the sound of an accordion across the hoarseness of the many voices and movements in the street: and then a solid, strong singing of men's voices, singing a soldier song. "Quando torniamo in casa nostra--" We got up to look. Under the small electric lights the narrow, cobbled street was still running with a river of people, but fewer maskers. Two maskers beating loudly at a heavy closed door. They beat and beat. At last the door opens a crack. They rush to try to get in--but in vain. It had shut the moment it saw them, they are foiled, on they go down the street. The town is full of men, many peasants come in from the outlying parts, the black and white costume now showing in the streets. We retire to bed again out of the cold. Comes a knock, and Thumbelina bursts in, in the darkness. "Siamo qua!" says the q-b. Thumbelina dashes at the window-doors and shuts them and shuts the casement. Then she dashes to my bedhead and turns on the light, looking down at me as if I were a rabbit in the grass. Then she flings a can of water against the wash-bowls--cold water, icy, alas. After which, small and explosive, she explodes her way out of the room again, and leaves us in the glaring light, having replied that it is now a little after six o'clock, and dinner is half past seven. So we lie in bed, warm and in peace, but hungry, waiting for half past seven. * * * * * When the q-b can stand it no more she flounces up, though the clock from the Campanile has struck seven only a few minutes before. Dashing downstairs to reconnoitre, she is back in a breath to say that people are eating their heads off in the long dining room. In the next breath we are downstairs too. The room was brightly lighted, and at many white tables sat diners, all men. It was quite city-like. Everyone was in convivial mood. The q-b spied men opposite having chicken and salad--and she had hopes. But they were brief. When the soup came, the girl announced that there was only bistecca: which meant a bit of fried cow. So it did: a quite, quite small bit of fried beef, a few potatoes and a bit of cauliflower. Really, it was not enough for a child of twelve. But that was the end of it. A few mandarini--tangerine oranges--rolled on a plate for dessert. And there's the long and short of these infernal dinners. Was there any cheese? No, there was no cheese. So we merely masticated bread. There came in three peasants in the black and white costume, and sat at the middle table. They kept on their stocking caps. And queer they looked, coming in with slow, deliberate tread of these elderly men, and sitting rather remote, with a gap of solitude around them. The peculiar ancient loneliness of the Sardinian hills clings to them, and something stiff, static, pre-world. * * * * * All the men at our end of the room were citizens--employees of some sort--and they were all acquaintances. A large dog, very large indeed, with a great muzzle, padded slowly from table to table, and looked at us with big wistful topaz eyes. When the meal was almost over our bus-driver and conductor came in--looking faint with hunger and cold and fatigue. They were quartered at this house. They had eaten nothing since the boar-broth at Gavoi. In a very short time they were through their portions: and was there nothing else? Nothing! But they were half starved. They ordered two eggs each, in padella. I ordered coffee--and asked them to come and take it with us, and a brandy. So they came when their eggs were finished. A diversion was now created at the other side of the room. The red wine, which is good in Sardinia, had been drunk freely. Directly facing us sat a rather stout man with pleasant blue eyes and a nicely shaped head: dressed like any other town man on a Sunday. The dog had waddled up to him and sat down statuesque in front of him. And the fat man, being mellow, began to play with the big, gentle, brindled animal. He took a piece of bread and held it before the dog's nose--and the dog tried to take it. But the man, like a boy now he was ripe with wine, put the mastiff back with a restraining finger, and told him not to snatch. Then he proceeded with a little conversation with the animal. The dog again tried to snatch, gently, and again the man started, saved the bread, and startled the dog, which backed and gave a sharp, sad yelp, as if to say: "Why do you tease me!" "Now," said the man, "you are not to snatch. Come here. Come here. Vieni qua!" And he held up the piece of bread. The animal came near. "Now," said the man, "I put this bread on your nose, and you don't move, un--Ha!!" The dog had tried to snatch the bread, the man had shouted and jerked it away, the animal had recoiled and given another expostulating yelp. The game continued. All the room was watching, smiling. The dog did not understand at all. It came forward again, troubled. The man held the bread near its nose, and held up a warning finger. The beast dropped its head mournfully, cocking up its eye at the bread with varied feelings. "Now--!" said the man, "not until I say three--_Uno--due--_" the dog could bear it no longer, the man in jerking let go the bread and yelled at the top of his voice--"_e tre!_" The dog gulped the piece of bread with a resigned pleasure, and the man pretended it had all happened properly on the word "three." So he started again. "Vieni qua! Vieni qua!" The dog, which had backed away with the bread, came hesitating, cringing forward, dropping its hind-quarters in doubt, as dogs do, advancing towards the new nugget of bread. The man preached it a little sermon. "You sit there and look at this bread. I sit here and look at you, and I hold this bread. And you stop still, and I stop still, while I count three. Now then--uno--" the dog couldn't bear these numerals, with their awful slowness. He snatched desperately. The man yelled and lost the bread, the dog, gulping, turned to creep away. Then it began again. "Come here! Come here! Didn't I tell thee I would count three? Già! I said I would count three. Not one, but three. And to count three you need three numbers. Ha! Steady! Three numbers. Uno--due E TRE!" The last syllables were yelled so that the room rang again. The dog gave a mournful howl of excitement, missed the bread, groped for it, and fled. The man was red with excitement, his eyes shining. He addressed the company at large. "I had a dog," he said, "ah, a dog! And I would put a piece of bread on his nose, and say a verse. And he looked at me so!" The man put his face sideways. "And he looked at me _so_!" He gazed up under his brows. "And he talked to me so--o: Zieu! Zieu!--But he never moved. No, he never moved. If he sat with that bread on his nose for half an hour, and if tears ran down his face, he never moved--not till I said _three_! Then--ah!" The man tossed up his face, snapped the air with his mouth, and gulped an imaginary crust. "AH, that dog was trained...." The man of forty shook his head. "Vieni qua! Come here! Tweet! Come here!" He patted his fat knee, and the dog crept forward. The man held another piece of bread. "Now," he said to the dog, "listen! Listen. I am going to tell you something. Il soldato va alla guerra-- No--no, Not yet. When I say _three_! Il soldato va alla guerra Mangia male, dorme in terra-- Listen. Be still. Quiet now. UNO--DUE--E--TRE!" It came out in one simultaneous yell from the man, the dog in sheer bewilderment opened his jaws and let the bread go down his throat, and wagged his tail in agitated misery. "Ah," said the man, "you are learning. Come! Come here! Come! Now then! Now you know. So! So! Look at me so!" The stout, good-looking man of forty bent forward. His face was flushed, the veins in his neck stood out. He talked to the dog, and imitated the dog. And very well indeed he reproduced something of the big, gentle, wistful subservience of the animal. The dog was his totem--the affectionate, self-mistrustful, warm-hearted hound. So he started the rigmarole again. We put it into English. "Listen now. Listen! Let me tell it you-- So the soldier goes to the war! His food is rotten, he sleeps on the floor-- "Now! Now! No, you are not keeping quiet. Now! Now! Il soldate va alla guerra Mangia male, dorme in terra--" The verses, known to every Italian, were sung out in a sing-song fashion. The audience listened as one man--or as one child--the rhyme chiming in every heart. They waited with excitement for the One--Two--and Three! The last two words were always ripped out with a tearing yell. I shall never forget the force of those syllables--E TRE! But the dog made a poor show--He only gobbled the bread and was uneasy. This game lasted us a full hour: a full hour by the clock sat the whole room in intense silence, watching the man and the dog. * * * * * Our friends told us the man was the bus-inspector--their inspector. But they liked him. "Un brav' uomo! Un bravo uomo! Eh si!" Perhaps they were a little uneasy, seeing him in his cups and hearing him yell so nakedly: AND THREE! We talked rather sadly, wistfully. Young people, especially nice ones like the driver, are too sad and serious these days. The little conductor made big brown eyes at us, wistful too, and sad we were going. For in the morning they were driving back again to Sorgono, over the old road, and we were going on, to Terranova, the port. But we promised to come back in the summer, when it was warmer. Then we should all meet again. "Perhaps you will find us on the same course still. Who knows!" said the driver sadly. VII. TO TERRANOVA AND THE STEAMER. The morning was very clear and blue. We were up betimes. The old dame of the inn very friendly this morning. We were going already! Oh, but we hadn't stayed long in Nuoro. Didn't we like it? Yes, we like it. We would come back in the summer when it was warmer. Ah yes, she said, artists came in the summer. Yes, she agreed, Nuoro was a nice place--_simpatico, molto simpatico_. And really it is. And really she was an awfully nice, capable, human old woman: and I had thought her a beldame when I saw her ironing. She gave us good coffee and milk and bread, and we went out into the town. There was the real Monday morning atmosphere of an old, same-as-ever provincial town: the vacant feeling of work resumed after Sunday, rather reluctantly; nobody buying anything, nobody quite at grips with anything. The doors of the old-fashioned shops stood open: in Nuoro they have hardly reached the stage of window-displays. One must go inside, into the dark caves, to see what the goods are. Near the doorways of the drapers' shops stood rolls of that fine scarlet cloth, for the women's costumes. In a large tailor's window four women sat sewing, tailoring, and looking out of the window with eyes still Sunday-emancipate and mischievous. Detached men, some in the black and white, stood at the street corners, as if obstinately avoiding the current of work. Having had a day off, the salt taste of liberty still lingering on their lips, they were not going to be dragged so easily back into harness. I always sympathise with these rather sulky, forlorn males who insist on making another day of it. It shows a spark of spirit, still holding out against our over-harnessed world. There is nothing to see in Nuoro: which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore. Thank heaven there isn't a bit of Perugino or anything Pisan in the place: that I know of. Happy is the town that has nothing to show. What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves! Life is then life, not museum-stuffing. One could saunter along the rather inert, narrow, Monday-morning street, and see the women having a bit of a gossip, and see an old crone with a basket of bread on her head, and see the unwilling ones hanging back from work, and the whole current of industry disinclined to flow. Life is life and things are things. I am sick of gaping _things_, even Peruginos. I have had my thrills from Carpaccio and Botticelli. But now I've had enough. But I can always look at an old, grey-bearded peasant in his earthy white drawers and his black waist-frill, wearing no coat or over-garment, but just crooking along beside his little ox-wagon. I am sick of "things," even Perugino. * * * * * The sight of the woman with the basket of bread reminded us that we wanted some food. So we searched for bread. None, if you please. It was Monday morning, eaten out. There would be bread at the forno, the oven. Where was the oven? Up the road and down a passage. I thought we should smell it. But no. We wandered back. Our friends had told us to take tickets early, for perhaps the bus would be crowded. So we bought yesterday's pastry and little cakes, and slices of native sausage. And still no bread. I went and asked our old hostess. "There is no fresh bread. It hasn't come in yet," she said. "Never mind, give me stale." So she went and rummaged in a drawer. "Oh dear, Oh dear, the women have eaten it all! But perhaps over there--" she pointed down the street--"they can give you some." They couldn't. I paid the bill--about twenty-eight francs, I think--and went out to look for the bus. There it was. In a dark little hole they gave me the long ticket-strips, first-class to Terranova. They cost some seventy francs the two. The q-b was still vainly, aimlessly looking along the street for bread. "Ready when you are," said our new driver rather snappily. He was a pale, cross-looking young man with brown eyes and fair "ginger" hair. So in we clambered, waved farewell to our old friends, whose bus was ready to roll away in the opposite direction. As we bumped past the "piazza" I saw Velveteens standing there, isolate, and still, apparently, scowling with unabated irritation. I am sure he has money: why the first class, yesterday, otherwise. And I'm sure _she_ married him because he is a townsman with property. * * * * * Out we rolled, on our last Sardinian drive. The morning was of a bell-like beauty, blue and very lovely. Below on the right stretched the concave valley, tapestried with cultivation. Up into the morning light rose the high, humanless hills, with wild, treeless moor-slopes. But there was no glass in the left window of the _coupé_, and the wind came howling in, cold enough. I stretched myself on the front seat, the q-b screwed herself into a corner, and we watched the land flash by. How well this new man drove! the long-nosed, freckled one with his gloomy brown eyes. How cleverly he changed gear, so that the automobile mewed and purred comfortably, like a live thing enjoying itself. And how dead he was to the rest of the world, wrapped in his gloom like a young bus-driving Hamlet. His answers to his mate were monosyllabic--or just no answers at all. He was one of those responsible, capable, morose souls, who do their work with silent perfection and look as if they were driving along the brink of doom, say a word to them and they'll go over the edge. But gentle _au fond_, of course. Fiction used to be fond of them: a sort of ginger-haired, young, mechanic Mr. Rochester who has even lost the Jane illusion. Perhaps it was not fair to watch him so closely from behind. His mate was a bit of a bounder, with one of those rakish military caps whose soft tops cock sideways or backwards. He was in Italian khaki, riding-breeches and puttees. He smoked his cigarette bounderishly: but at the same time, with peculiar gentleness, he handed one to the ginger Hamlet. Hamlet accepted it, and his mate held him a light as the bus swung on. They were like man and wife. The mate was the alert and wide-eyed Jane Eyre whom the ginger Mr. Rochester was not going to spoil in a hurry. * * * * * The landscape was different from yesterday's. As we dropped down the shallow, winding road from Nuoro, quite quickly the moors seemed to spread on either side, treeless, bushy, rocky, desert. How hot they must be in summer! One knows from Grazia Deledda's books. A pony with a low trap was prancing unhappily in the road-side. We slowed down and slid harmlessly past. Then again, on we whizzed down the looped road, which turned back on itself as sharply as a snake that has been wounded. Hamlet darted the bus at the curves; then softly padded round like an angel: then off again for the next parabola. We came out into wide, rather desolate, moorland valley spaces, with low rocks away to the left, and steep slopes, rocky-bushy, on the right. Sometimes groups of black-and-white men were working in the forlorn distances. A woman in the madder costume led a panniered ass along the wastes. The sun shone magnificently, already it was hotter here. The landscape had quite changed. These slopes looked east and south to the sea, they were sun-wild and sea-wild. The first stop was where a wild, rough lane came down the hill to our road. At the corner stood a lonely house--and in the road-side the most battered, life-weary old carriage I have ever seen. The jaunty mate sorted out the post--the boy with the tattered-battered brown carriage and brown pony signed the book as we all stood in the roadway. There was a little wait for a man who was fetching up another parcel. The post-bag and parcels from the tattered carriage were received and stowed and signed for. We walked up and down in the sun to get warm. The landscape was wild and open round about. Pip! goes Mr. Rochester, peremptorily, at the horn. Amazing how obediently we scuffle in. Away goes the bus, rushing towards the sea. Already one felt that peculiar glare in the half-way heavens, that intensification of the light in the lower sky, which is caused by the sea to sunward. Away in front three girls in brown costume are walking along the side of the white high-road, going with panniers towards a village up a slight incline. They hear us, turn round, and instantly go off their heads, exactly like chickens in the road. They fly towards us, crossing the road, and swifter than any rabbits they scuttle, one after another, into a deep side-track, like a deep ditch at right angles to the road. There, as we roll past, they are all crouched, peering out at us fearfully, like creatures from their hole. The bus mate salutes them with a shout, and we roll on towards the village on the low summit. * * * * * It is a small, stony, hen-scratched place of poor people. We roll on to a standstill. There is a group of poor people. The women wear the dark-brown costume, and again the bolero has changed shape. It is a rather fantastic low corset, curiously shapen; and originally, apparently, made of wonderful elaborate brocade. But look at it now. There is an altercation because a man wants to get into the bus with two little black pigs, each of which is wrapped in a little sack, with its face and ears appearing like a flower from a wrapped bouquet. He is told that he must pay the fare for each pig as if it were a Christian. _Cristo del mondo!_ A pig, a little pig, and paid for as if it were a Christian. He dangles the pig-bouquets, one from each hand, and the little pigs open their black mouths and squeal with self-conscious appreciation of the excitement they are causing. _Dio benedetto!_ it is a chorus. But the bus mate is inexorable. Every animal, even if it were a mouse, must be paid for and have a ticket as if it were a Christian. The pig-master recoils stupified with indignation, a pig-bouquet under each arm. "How much do you charge for the fleas you carry?" asks a sarcastic youth. A woman sitting sewing a soldier's tunic into a little jacket for her urchin, and thus beating the sword into a ploughshare, stitches unconcernedly in the sun. Round-cheeked but rather slatternly damsels giggle. The pig-master, speechless with fury, slings the pig-bouquets, like two bottles one on either side the saddle of the ass whose halter is held by a grinning but also malevolent girl: malevolent against pig-prices, that is. The pigs, looking abroad from their new situation, squeal the eternal pig-protest against an insufferable humanity. "Andiamo! Andiamo!" says ginger Mr. Rochester in his quiet but intense voice. The bus-mate scrambles up and we charge once more into the strong light to seaward. * * * * * In we roll, into Orosei, a dilapidated, sun-smitten, god-forsaken little town not far from the sea. We descend in piazza. There is a great, false baroque façade to a church, up a wavering vast mass of steps: and at the side a wonderful jumble of roundnesses with a jumble of round tiled roofs, peaked in the centre. It must have been some sort of convent. But it is eminently what they call a "painter's bit"--that pallid, big baroque face, at the top of the slow incline, and the very curious dark building at the side of it, with its several dark-tiled round roofs, like pointed hats, at varying altitudes. The whole space has a strange Spanish look, neglected, arid, yet with a bigness and a dilapidated dignity and a stoniness which carry one back to the Middle Ages, when life was violent and Orosei was no doubt a port and a considerable place. Probably it had bishops. [Illustration: NUORO ] The sun came hot into the wide piazza; with its pallid heavy façade up on the stony incline on one side, and arches and a dark great courtyard and outer stair-ways of some unknown building away on the other, the road entering down-hill from the inland, and dropping out below to the sea-marshes, and with the impression that once some single power had had the place in grip, had given this centre an architectural unity and splendour, now lost and forgotten, Orosei was truly fascinating. But the inhabitants were churlish. We went into a sort of bar-place, very primitive, and asked for bread. "Bread alone?" said the churl. "If you please." "There isn't any," he answered. "Oh--where can we get some then?" "You can't get any." "Really!" And we couldn't. People stood about glum, not friendly. There was a second great automobile, ready to set off for Tortolì, far to the south, on the east coast. Mandas is the railway junction both for Sorgono and Tortolì. The two buses stood near and communed. We prowled about the dead, almost extinct town--or call it village. Then Mr. Rochester began to pip his horn peremptorily, so we scuffled in. The post was stowed away. A native in black broad-cloth came running and sweating, carrying an ox-blood suit-case, and said we must wait for his brother-in-law, who was a dozen yards away. Ginger Mr. Rochester sat on his driver's throne and glared in the direction whence the brother-in-law must come. His brow knitted irritably, his long, sharp nose did not promise much patience. He made the horn roar like a sea-cow. But no brother-in-law. "I'm going to wait no longer," said he. "Oh, a minute, a minute! That won't do us any harm," expostulated his mate. No answer from the long faced, long-nosed ginger Hamlet. He sat statuesque, but with black eyes looking daggers down the still void road. "_Eh va bene_", he murmured through closed lips, and leaned forward grimly for the starting handle. "Patience--patience--patience a moment--why--" cried the mate. "Per l'amor' di Dio!" cried the black broad-cloth man, simply sizzling and dancing in anguish on the road, round the suit-case, which stood in the dust. "Don't go! God's love, don't start. He's got to catch the boat. He's got to be in Rome tomorrow. He won't be a second. He's here, he's here, he's here!" This startled the fate-fixed, sharp-nosed driver. He released the handle and looked round, with dark and glowering eyes. No one in sight. The few glum natives stood round unmoved. Thunder came into the gloomy dark eyes of the Rochester. Absolutely nobody in sight. Click! went his face into a look of almost seraphic peace, as he pulled off the brakes. We were on an incline, and insidiously, oh most subtly the great bus started to lean forwards and steal into motion. "Oh _ma che!_--what a will you've got!" cried the mate, clambering in to the side of the now seraphic-looking Rochester. "Love of God--God!" yelled the broad-cloth, seeing the bus melt forwards and gather momentum. He put his hands up as if to arrest it, and yelled in a wild howl: "O Beppin'! Bepp_in_--O!" But in vain. Already we had left the little groups of onlookers behind. We were rolling downwards out of the piazza. Broad-cloth had seized the bag and was running beside us in agony. Out of the piazza we rolled, Rochester had not put on the engines and we were just simply rolling down the gentle incline by the will of God. Into the dark outlet-street we melted, towards the still invisible sea. Suddenly a yell--"OO--ahh!!" "� qua! � qua! � qua! � qua!" gasped broad-cloth four times. "He's here!" And then: "Beppin'--she's going, she's going!" Beppin' appeared, a middle-aged man also in black broad-cloth, with a very scrubby chin and a bundle, running _towards_ us on fat legs. He was perspiring, but his face was expressionless and innocent-looking. With a sardonic flicker of a grin, half of spite, half of relief, Rochester put on the brakes again, and we stopped in the street. A woman tottered up panting and holding her breast. Now for farewells. "Andiamo!" said Rochester curtly, looking over his shoulder and making his fine nose curl with malice. And instantly he took off the brakes again. The fat woman shoved Beppin' in, gasping farewells, the brother-in-law handed in the ox-blood-red suit-case, tottering behind, and the bus surged savagely out of Orosei. * * * * * Almost in a moment we had left the town on its slope, and there below us was a river winding through marshy flats to the sea, to where small white surf broke on a flat, isolated beach, a quarter of a mile away. The river ran rapidly between stones and then between belts of high sere reeds, high as a man. These tall reeds advanced almost into the slow, horizontal sea, from which stood up a white glare of light, massive light over the low Mediterranean. Quickly we came down to the river-level, and rolled over a bridge. Before us, between us and the sea rose another hill, almost like a wall with a flat top, running horizontal, perfectly flat, parallel with the sea-edge, a sort of narrow long plateau. For a moment we were in the wide scoop of the river-bed. Orosei stood on the bluff behind us. Away to the right the flat river-marshes with the thick dead reeds met the flat and shining sea, river and sea were one water, the waves rippled tiny and soft-foot into the stream. To the left there was great loveliness. The bed of the river curved upwards and inland, and there was cultivation: but particularly, there were noble almond trees in full blossom. How beautiful they were, their pure, silvery pink gleaming so nobly, like a transfiguration, tall and perfect in that strange cradled river-bed parallel with the sea. Almond trees were in flower beneath grey Orosei, almond trees came near the road, and we could see the hot eyes of the individual blossoms, almond trees stood on the upward slope before us. And they had flowered in such noble beauty there, in that trough where the sun fell magnificent and the sea-glare whitened all the air as with a sort of God-presence, they gleamed in their incandescent sky-rosiness. One could hardly see their iron trunks, in this weird valley. But already we had crossed, and were charging up the great road that was cut straight, slant-wise along the side of the sea-hill, like a stairway outside the side of the house. So the bus turned southward to run up this stairway slant, to get to the top of the sea's long table-land. So, we emerged: and there was the Mediterranean rippling against the black rocks not so very far away below on our right. For, once on the long table-land the road turned due north, a long white dead-straight road running between strips of moorland, wild and bushy. The sea was in the near distance, blue, blue, and beating with light. It seemed more light than watery. And on the left was the wide trough of the valley, where almond trees like clouds in a wind seemed to poise sky-rosy upon the pale, sun-pale land, and beyond which Orosei clustered its lost grey houses on the bluff. Oh wonderful Orosei with your almonds and your reedy river, throbbing, throbbing with light and the sea's nearness, and all so lost, in a world long gone by, lingering as legends linger on. It is hard to believe that it is real. It seems so long since life left it and memory transfigured it into pure glamour, lost away like a lost pearl on the east Sardinian coast. Yet there it is, with a few grumpy inhabitants who won't even give you a crust of bread. And probably there is malaria--almost sure. And it would be hell to have to live there for a month. Yet for a moment, that January morning, how wonderful, oh, the timeless glamour of those Middle Ages when men were lordly and violent and shadowed with death. "Timor mortis conturbat me." The road ran along by the sea, above the sea, swinging gently up and down, and running on to a sea-encroaching hilly promontory in the distance. There were no high lands. The valley was left behind, and moors surrounded us, wild, desolate, uninhabited and uninhabitable moors sweeping up gently on the left, and finishing where the land dropped low and clifflike to the sea on the right. No life was now in sight: even no ship upon the pale blue sea. The great globe of the sky was unblemished and royal in its blueness and its ringing cerulean light. Over the moors a great hawk hovered. Rocks cropped out. It was a savage, dark-bushed, sky-exposed land, forsaken to the sea and the sun. * * * * * We were alone in the _coupé_. The bus-mate had made one or two sets at us, but he rather confused us. He was young--about twenty-two or three. He was quite good-looking, with his rakish military cap and his well-knitted figure in military clothes. But he had dark eyes that seemed to ask too much, and his manner of approach was abrupt, persistent, and disconcerting. Already he had asked us where we were going, where we lived, whence we came, of what nationality we were, and was I a painter. Already he knew so much. Further we rather fought shy of him. We ate those pale Nuoro pastries--they were just flaky pastry, good, but with nothing inside but a breath of air. And we gnawed slices of very highly-flavoured Nuoro sausage. And we drank the tea. And we were very hungry, for it was past noon, and we had eaten as good as nothing. The sun was magnificent in heaven, we rushed at a great, purring speed along that moorland road just above the sea. And then the bus-mate climbed in to share the coupé with us. He put his dark, beseeching and yet persistent eyes on us, sat plumb in front of us, his knees squared, and began to shout awkward questions in a strong curious voice. Of course it was very difficult to hear, for the great rushing bus made much noise. We had to try to yell in our Italian--and he was as awkward as we were. However, although it said "Smoking Forbidden" he offered us both cigarettes, and insisted we should smoke with him. Easiest to submit. He tried to point us out features in the landscape: but there were none to point, except that, where the hill ran to sea out of the moor, and formed a cape, he said there was a house away under the cliffs where coastguards lived. Nothing else. Then, however, he launched. He asked once more was I English and was the q-b German. We said it was so. And then he started the old story. Nations popped up and down again like Punch and Judy. Italy--l'Italia--she had no quarrel with La Germania--never had had--no--no, good friends the two nations. But once the war was started, Italy had to come in. For why. Germany would beat France, occupy her lands, march down and invade Italy. Best then join the war whilst the enemy was only invading somebody else's territory. They are perfectly naïve about it. That's what I like. He went on to say that he was a soldier: he had served eight years in the Italian cavalry. Yes, he was a cavalryman, and had been all through the war. But he had not therefore any quarrel with Germany. No--war was war, and it was over. So let it be over. But France--_ma la Francia!_ Here he sat forward on his seat, with his face near ours, and his pleading-dog's eyes suddenly took a look of quite irrational blazing rage. France! There wasn't a man in Italy who wasn't dying to get at the throat of France. France! Let there be war, and every Italian would leap to arms, even the old. Even the old--_anche i vecchi_. Yes, there must be war--with France. It was coming: it was bound to come. Every Italian was waiting for it. Waiting to fly at the French throat. For why? Why? He had served two years on the French front, and he knew why. Ah, the French! For arrogance, for insolence, Dio!--they were not to be borne. The French--they thought themselves lords of the world--_signori del mondo!_ Lords of the world, and masters of the world. Yes. They thought themselves no less--and what are they? Monkeys! Monkeys! Not better than monkeys. But let there be war, and Italy would show them. Italy would give them _signori del mondo_! Italy was pining for war--all, all, pining for war. With no one, with no one but France. Ah, with no one--Italy loved everybody else--but France! France! We let him shout it all out, till he was at the end of it. The passion and energy of him was amazing. He was like one possessed. I could only wonder. And wonder again. For it is curious what fearful passions these pleading, wistful souls fall into when they feel they have been insulted. It was evident he felt he had been insulted, and he went just beside himself. But dear chap, he shouldn't speak so loudly for all Italy--even the old. The bulk of Italian men are only too anxious to beat their bayonets into cigarette-holders, and smoke the cigarette of eternal and everlasting peace, to coincide at all with our friend. Yet there he was--raging at me in the bus as we dashed along the coast. And then, after a space of silence, he became sad again, wistful, and looked at us once more with those pleading brown eyes, beseeching, beseeching--he knew not what: and I'm sure I didn't know. Perhaps what he really wants is to be back on a horse in a cavalry regiment: even at war. But no, it comes out, what he thinks he wants. When are we going to London? And are there many motor-cars in England?--many, many? In America too? Do they want men in America? I say no, they have unemployment out there: they are going to stop immigration in April: or at least cut it down. Why? he asks sharply. Because they have their own unemployment problem. And the q-b quotes how many millions of Europeans want to emigrate to the United States. His eye becomes gloomy. Are all nations of Europe going to be forbidden? he asks. Yes--and already the Italian Government will give no more passports for America--to emigrants. No passports? then you can't go? You can't go, say I. By this time his hot-souled eagerness and his hot, beseeching eyes have touched the q-b. She asks him what he wants. And from his gloomy face it comes out in a rap. "_Andare fuori dell'Italia._" To go out of Italy. To go out--away--to go away--to go away. It has become a craving, a neurasthenia with them. Where is his home? His home is at a village a few miles ahead--here on this coast. We are coming to it soon. There is his home. And a few miles inland from the village he also has a property: he also has land. But he doesn't want to work it. He doesn't want it. In fact he won't bother with it. He hates the land, he detests looking after vines. He can't even bring himself to try any more. What does he want then? He wants to leave Italy, to go abroad--as a chauffeur. Again the long beseeching look, as of a distraught, pleading animal. He would prefer to be the chauffeur of a gentleman. But he would drive a bus, he would do anything--in England. Now he has launched it. Yes, I say, but in England also we have more men than jobs. Still he looks at me with his beseeching eyes--so desperate too--and so young--and so full of energy--and so longing to _devote_ himself--to devote himself: or else to go off in an unreasonable paroxysm against the French. To my horror I feel he is believing in my goodness of heart. And as for motor-cars, it is all I can do to own a pair of boots, so how am I to set about employing a _chauffeur_? * * * * * We have all gone quiet again. So at last he climbs back and takes his seat with the driver once more. The road is still straight, swinging on through the moorland strip by the sea. And he leans to the silent, nerve-tense Mr. Rochester, pleading again. And at length Mr. Rochester edges aside, and lets him take the driving wheel. And so now we are all in the hands of our friend the bus-mate. He drives--not very well. It is evident he is learning. The bus can't quite keep in the grooves of this wild bare road. And he shuts off when we slip down a hill--and there is a great muddle on the upslope when he tries to change gear. But Mr. Rochester sits squeezed and silently attentive in his corner. He puts out his hand and swings the levers. There is no fear that he will let anything go wrong. I would trust him to drive me down the bottomless pit and up the other side. But still the beseeching mate holds the steering wheel. And on we rush, rather uncertainly and hesitatingly now. And thus we come to the bottom of a hill where the road gives a sudden curve. My heart rises an inch in my breast. I know he can't do it. And he can't, oh Lord--but the quiet hand of the freckled Rochester takes the wheel, we swerve on. And the bus-mate gives up, and the nerve-silent driver resumes control. * * * * * But the bus-mate now feels at home with us. He clambers back into the coupé, and when it is too painfully noisy to talk, he simply sits and looks at us with brown, pleading eyes. Miles and miles and miles goes this coast road, and never a village. Once or twice a sort of lonely watch-house and soldiers lying about by the road. But never a halt. Everywhere moorland and desert, uninhabited. And we are faint with fatigue and hunger and this relentless travelling. When, oh when shall we come to Siniscola, where we are due to eat our midday meal? Oh yes, says the mate. There is an inn at Siniscola where we can eat what we like. Siniscola--Siniscola! We feel we must get down, we must eat, it is past one o'clock and the glaring light and the rushing loneliness are still about us. * * * * * But it is behind the hill in front. We see the hill? Yes. Behind it is Siniscola. And down there on the beach are the Bagni di Siniscola, where many forestieri, strangers, come in the summer. Therefore we set high hopes on Siniscola. From the town to the sea, two miles, the bathers ride on asses. Sweet place. And it is coming near--really near. There are stone-fenced fields--even stretches of moor fenced off. There are vegetables in a little field with a stone wall--there is a strange white track through the moor to a forsaken sea-coast. We are near. Over the brow of the low hill--and there it is, a grey huddle of a village with two towers. There it is, we are there. Over the cobbles we bump, and pull up at the side of the street. This is Siniscola, and here we eat. We drop out of the weary bus. The mate asks a man to show us the inn--the man says he won't, muttering. So a boy is deputed--and he consents. This is the welcome. And I can't say much for Siniscola. It is just a narrow, crude, stony place, hot in the sun, cold in the shade. In a minute or two we were at the inn, where a fat, young man was just dismounting from his brown pony and fastening it to a ring beside the door. The inn did not look promising--the usual cold room opening gloomily on the gloomy street. The usual long table, with this time a foully blotched table-cloth. And two young peasant madams in charge, in the brown costume, rather sordid, and with folded white cloths on their heads. The younger was in attendance. She was a full-bosomed young hussy, and would be very queenly and cocky. She held her nose in the air, and seemed ready to jibe at any order. It takes one some time to get used to this cocky, assertive behaviour of the young damsels, the who'll-tread-on-the-tail-of-my-skirt bearing of the hussies. But it is partly a sort of crude defensiveness and shyness, partly it is barbaric _méfiance_ or mistrust, and partly, without doubt, it is a tradition with Sardinian women that they must hold their own and be ready to hit first. This young sludge-queen was all hit. She flounced her posterior round the table, planking down the lumps of bread on the foul cloth with an air of take-it-as-a-condescension-that-I-wait-on-you, a subdued grin lurking somewhere on her face. It is not meant to be offensive: yet it is so. Truly, it is just uncouthness. But when one is tired and hungry.... We were not the only feeders. There was the man off the pony, and a sort of workman or porter or dazio official with him--and a smart young man: and later our Hamlet driver. Bit by bit the young damsel planked down bread, plates, spoons, glasses, bottles of black wine, whilst we sat at the dirty table in uncouth constraint and looked at the hideous portrait of His reigning Majesty of Italy. And at length came the inevitable soup. And with it the sucking chorus. The little _maialino_ at Mandas had been a good one. But the smart young man in the country beat him. As water clutters and slavers down a choky gutter, so did his soup travel upwards into his mouth with one long sucking stream of noise, intensified as the bits of cabbage, etc., found their way through the orifice. They did all the talking--the young men. They addressed the sludge-queen curtly and disrespectfully, as if to say: "What's she up to?" Her airs were finely thrown away. Still she showed off. What else was there to eat? There was the meat that had been boiled for the soup. We knew what that meant. I had as lief eat the foot of an old worsted stocking. Nothing else, you sludge queen? No, what do you want anything else for?--Beefsteak--what's the good of asking for beefsteak or any other steak on a Monday. Go to the butcher's and see for yourself. The Hamlet, the pony rider, and the porter had the faded and tired chunks of boiled meat. The smart young man ordered eggs in padella--two eggs fried with a little butter. We asked for the same. The smart young man got his first--and of course they were warm and liquid. So he fell upon them with a fork, and once he had got hold of one end of the eggs he just sucked them up in a prolonged and violent suck, like a long, thin, ropy drink being sucked upwards from the little pan. It was a genuine exhibition. Then he fell upon the bread with loud chews. What else was there? A miserable little common orange. So much for the dinner. Was there cheese? No. But the sludge-queen--they are quite good-natured really--held a conversation in dialect with the young men, which I did not try to follow. Our pensive driver translated that there _was_ cheese, but it wasn't good, so they wouldn't offer it us. And the pony man interpolated that they didn't like to offer us anything that was not of the best. He said it in all sincerity--after such a meal. This roused my curiosity, so I asked for the cheese whether or not. And it wasn't so bad after all. This meal cost fifteen francs, for the pair of us. * * * * * We made our way back to the bus, through the uncouth men who stood about. To tell the truth, strangers are not popular nowadays--not anywhere. Everybody has a grudge against them at first sight. This grudge may or may not wear off on acquaintance. The afternoon had become hot--hot as an English June. And we had various other passengers--for one a dark-eyed, long-nosed priest who showed his teeth when he talked. There was not much room in the coupé, so the goods were stowed upon the little rack. With the strength of the sun, and the six or seven people in it, the coupé became stifling. The q-b opened her window. But the priest, one of the loudtalking sort, said that a draught was harmful, very harmful, so he put it up again. He was one of the gregarious sort, a loud talker, nervy really, very familiar with all the passengers. And everything did one harm--_fa male, fa male_. A draught _fa male, fa molto male_. _Non è vero?_ this to all the men from Siniscola. And they all said Yes--yes. The bus-mate clambered into the _coupé_, to take the tickets of the second-class passengers in the rotondo, through the little wicket. There was great squeezing and shouting and reckoning change. And then we stopped at a halt, and he dashed down with the post and the priest got down for a drink with the other men. The Hamlet driver sat stiff in his seat. He pipped the horn. He pipped again, with decision. Men came clambering in. But it looked as if the offensive priest would be left behind. The bus started venomously, the priest came running, his gown flapping, wiping his lips. He dropped into his seat with a cackling laugh, showing his long teeth. And he said that it was as well to take a drink, to fortify the stomach. To travel with the stomach uneasy did one harm: _fa male, fa male--non è vero?_ Chorus of "yes." The bus-mate resumed his taking the tickets through the little wicket, thrusting his rear amongst us. As he stood like this, down fell his sheepskin-lined military overcoat on the q-b's head. He was filled with grief. He folded it and placed it on the seat, as a sort of cushion for her, oh so gently! And how he would love to devote himself to a master and mistress. He sat beside me, facing the q-b, and offered us an acid drop. We took the acid drop. He smiled with zealous yearning at the q-b, and resumed his conversations. Then he offered us cigarettes--insisted on our taking cigarettes. The priest with the long teeth looked sideways at the q-b, seeing her smoking. Then he fished out a long cigar, bit it, and spat. He was offered a cigarette.--But no, cigarettes were harmful: _fanno male_. The paper was bad for the health: oh, very bad. A pipe or a cigar. So he lit his long cigar and spat large spits on the floor, continually. Beside me sat a big, bright-eyed, rather good-looking but foolish man. Hearing me speak to the q-b, he said in confidence to the priest: "Here are two Germans--eh? Look at them. The woman smoking. These are a couple of those that were interned here. Sardinia can do without them now." Germans in Italy at the outbreak of the war were interned in Sardinia, and as far as one hears, they were left very free and happy, and treated very well, the Sardinians having been generous as all proud people are. But now our bright-eyed fool made a great titter through the bus: quite unaware that we understood. He said nothing offensive: but that sort of tittering exultation of common people who think they have you at a disadvantage annoyed me. However, I kept still to hear what they would say. But it was only trivialities about the Germans having nearly all gone now, their being free to travel, their coming back to Sardinia because they liked it better than Germany. Oh yes--they all wanted to come back. They all wanted to come back to Sardinia. Oh yes, they knew where they were well off. They knew their own advantage. Sardinia was this, that, and the other of advantageousness, and the Sardi were decent people. It is just as well to put in a word on one's own behalf occasionally. As for La Germania--she was down, down: bassa. What did one pay for bread in Germany? Five francs a kilo, my boy. * * * * * The bus stopped again, and they trooped out into the hot sun. The priest scuffled round the corner this time. Not to go round the corner was no doubt harmful. We waited. A frown came between the bus Hamlet's brows. He looked nerve-worn and tired. It was about three o'clock. We had to wait for a man from a village, with the post. And he did not appear. "I am going! I won't wait," said the driver. "Wait--wait a minute," said the mate, pouring oil. And he went round to look. But suddenly the bus started, with a vicious lurch. The mate came flying and hung on to the footboard. He had really almost been left. The driver glanced round sardonically to see if he were there. The bus flew on. The mate shook his head in deprecation. "He's a bit _nervoso_, the driver," said the q-b. "A bit out of temper!" "Ah, poor chap!" said the good-looking young mate, leaning forward and making such beseeching eyes of hot tolerance. "One has to be sorry for him. Persons like him, they suffer so much from themselves, how should one be angry with them! _Poverino._ We must have sympathy." Never was such a language of sympathy as the Italian. _Poverino! Poverino!_ They are never happy unless they are sympathising pityingly with somebody. And I rather felt that I was thrown in with the _poverini_ who had to be pitied for being _nervosi_. Which did not improve my temper. However, the bus-mate suddenly sat on the opposite seat between the priest and the q-b. He turned over his official note book, and began to write on the back cover very carefully, in the flourishing Italian hand. Then he tore off what he had written, and with a very bright and zealous look he handed me the paper saying: "You will find me a post in England, when you go in the summer? You will find me a place in London as a chauffeur--!" "If I can," said I. "But it is not easy." He nodded his head at me with the most complete bright confidence, quite sure now that he had settled his case perfectly. On the paper he had written his name and his address, and if anyone would like him as chauffeur they have only to say so. On the back of the scrap of paper the inevitable goodwill: _Auguri infiniti e buon Viaggio_. Infinite good wishes and a good journey. I folded the paper and put it in my waistcoat pocket, feeling a trifle disconcerted by my new responsibility. He was such a dear fellow and such bright trustful eyes. * * * * * This much achieved, there was a moment of silence. And the bus-mate turned to take a ticket of a fat, comfortable man who had got in at the last stop. There was a bit of flying conversation. "Where are they from?" asked the good-looking stupid man next to me, inclining his head in our direction. "Londra," said our friend, with stern satisfaction: and they have said so often to one another that London is the greatest city in the world, that now the very word Londra conveys it all. You should have seen the blank little-boy look come over the face of the big handsome fellow on hearing that we were citizens of the greatest city in the world. "And they understand Italian?" he asked, rather nipped. "Sicuro!" said our friend scornfully. "How shouldn't they?" "Ah!" My large neighbour left his mouth open for a few moments. And then another sort of smile came on to his face. He began to peep at us sideways from his brown eyes, brightly, and was henceforth itching to get into conversation with the citizens of the world's mistress-city. His look of semi-impudence was quite gone, replaced by a look of ingratiating admiration. Now I ask you, is this to be borne? Here I sit, and he talks half-impudently and patronisingly about me. And here I sit, and he is glegging at me as if he saw signs of an aureole under my grey hat. All in ten minutes. And just because, instead of _la Germania_ I turn out to be _l'Inghilterra_. I might as well be a place on a map, or a piece of goods with a trade-mark. So little perception of the actual me! so much going by labels! I now could have kicked him harder. I would have liked to say I was ten times German, to see the fool change his smirk again. * * * * * The priest now chimed up, that he had been to America. He had been to America and hence he dreaded not the crossing from Terranuova di Sardegna to Cività Vecchia. For he had crossed the great Atlantic. Apparently, however, the natives had all heard this song of the raven before, so he spat largely on the floor. Whereupon the new fat neighbour asked him was it true that the Catholic Church was now becoming the one Church in the United States? And the priest said there was no doubt about it. * * * * * The hot afternoon wore on. The coast was rather more inhabited, but we saw practically no villages. The view was rather desolate. From time to time we stopped at a sordid-looking canteen house. From time to time we passed natives riding on their ponies, and sometimes there was an equestrian exhibition as the rough, strong little beasts reared and travelled rapidly backwards, away from the horrors of our great automobile. But the male riders sat heavy and unshakeable, with Sardinian male force. Everybody in the bus laughed, and we passed, looking back to see the pony still corkscrewing, but in vain, in the middle of the lonely, grass-bordered high-road. * * * * * The bus-mate climbed in and out, coming in to sit near us. He was like a dove which has at last found an olive bough to nest in. And we were the olive bough in this world of waste waters. Alas, I felt a broken reed. But he sat so serenely near us, now, like a dog that has found a master. The afternoon was declining, the bus pelted on at a great rate. Ahead we saw the big lump of the island of Tavolara, a magnificient mass of rock which fascinated me by its splendid, weighty form. It looks like a headland, for it apparently touches the land. There it rests at the sea's edge, in this lost afternoon world. Strange how this coast-country does not belong to our present-day world. As we rushed along we saw steamers, two steamers, steering south, and one sailing ship coming from Italy. And instantly, the steamers seemed like our own familiar world. But still this coast-country was forsaken, forgotten, not included. It just is not included. * * * * * How tired one gets of these long, long rides! It seemed we should never come up to Tavolara. But we did. We came right near to it, and saw the beach with the waves rippling undisturbed, saw the narrow waters between the rock-lump and the beach. For now the road was down at sea-level. And we were not very far from Terranova. Yet all seemed still forsaken, outside of the world's life. The sun was going down, very red and strong, away inland. In the bus all were silent, subsiding into the pale travel-sleep. We charged along the flat road, down on a plain now. And dusk was gathering heavily over the land. We saw the high-road curve flat upon the plain. It was the harbour head. We saw a magic, land-locked harbour, with masts and dark land encircling a glowing basin. We even saw a steamer lying at the end of a long, thin bank of land, in the shallow, shining, wide harbour, as if wrecked there. And this was our steamer. But no, it looked in the powerful glow of the sunset like some lonely steamer laid up in some land-locked bay away at Spitzbergen, towards the North Pole: a solemn, mysterious, blue-landed bay, lost, lost to mankind. * * * * * Our bus-mate came and told us we were to sit in the bus till the post-work was done, then we should be driven to the hotel where we could eat, and then he would accompany us on the town omnibus to the boat. We need not be on board till eight o'clock: and now it was something after five. So we sat still while the bus rushed and the road curved and the view of the weird, land-locked harbour changed, though the bare masts of ships in a bunch still pricked the upper glow, and the steamer lay away out, as if wrecked on a sand-bank, and dark, mysterious land with bunchy hills circled round, dark blue and wintry in a golden after-light, while the great, shallow-seeming bay of water shone like a mirror. In we charged, past a railway, along the flat darkening road into a flat God-lost town of dark houses, on the marshy bay-head. It felt more like a settlement than a town. But it was Terranova-Pausanias. And after bumping and rattling down a sombre uncouth, barren-seeming street, we came up with a jerk at a doorway--which was the post-office. Urchins, mudlarks, were screaming for the luggage. Everybody got out and set off towards the sea, the urchins carrying luggage. We sat still. * * * * * Till I couldn't bear it. I did not want to stay in the automobile another moment, and I did not, I did not want to be accompanied by our new-found friend to the steamer. So I burst out, and the q-b followed. She too was relieved to escape the new attachment, though she had a great _tendre_ for him. But in the end one runs away from one's _tendres_ much harder and more precipitately than from one's _durs_. The mudlarking urchins fell upon us. Had we any more luggage--were we going to the steamer? I asked how one went to the steamer--did one walk? I thought perhaps it would be necessary to row out. You go on foot, or in a carriage, or in an aeroplane, said an impudent brat. How far? Ten minutes. Could one go on board at once? Yes, certainly. So, in spite of the q-b's protests, I handed the sack to a wicked urchin, to be led. She wanted us to go alone--but I did not know the way, and am wary of stumbling into entanglements in these parts. I told the bus-Hamlet, who was abstract with nerve fatigue, please to tell his comrade that I would not forget the commission: and I tapped my waistcoat pocket, where the paper lay over my heart. He briefly promised--and we escaped. We escaped any further friendship. * * * * * I bade the mud-lark lead me to the telegraph office: which of course was quite remote from the post-office. Shouldering the sack, and clamouring for the kitchenino which the q-b stuck to, he marched forward. By his height he was ten years old: by his face with its evil mud-lark pallor and good-looks, he was forty. He wore a cut-down soldier's tunic which came nearly to his knees, was barefoot, and sprightly with that alert mudlarking quickness which has its advantages. So we went down a passage and climbed a stair and came to an office where one would expect to register births and deaths. But the urchin said it was the telegraph-office. No sign of life. Peering through the wicket I saw a fat individual seated writing in the distance. Feeble lights relieved the big, barren, official spaces--I wonder the fat official wasn't afraid to be up here alone. He made no move. I banged the shutter and demanded a telegraph blank. His shoulders went up to his ears, and he plainly intimated his intention to let us wait. But I said loudly to the urchin: "Is _that_ the telegraph official?" and the urchin said: "Si signore"--so the fat individual had to come. * * * * * After which considerable delay, we set off again. The bus, thank heaven, had gone, the savage dark street was empty of friends. We turned away to the harbour front. It was dark now. I saw a railway near at hand--a bunch of dark masts--the steamer showing a few lights, far down at the tip of a long spit of land, remote in mid-harbour. And so off we went, the barefoot urchin twinkling a few yards ahead, on the road that followed the spit of land. The spit was wide enough to carry this road, and the railway. On the right was a silent house apparently built on piles in the harbour. Away far down in front leaned our glimmering steamer, and a little train was shunting trucks among the low sheds beside it. Night had fallen, and the great stars flashed. Orion was in the air, and his dog-star after him. We followed on down the dark bar between the silent, lustrous water. The harbour was smooth as glass, and gleaming like a mirror. Hills came round encircling it entirely--dark land ridging up and lying away out, even to seaward. One was not sure which was exactly seaward. The dark encircling of the land seemed stealthy, the hills had a remoteness, guarding the waters in the silence. Perhaps the great mass away beyond was Tavolara again. It seemed like some lumpish berg guarding an arctic, locked-up bay where ships lay dead. [Illustration: TERRANOVA] On and on we followed the urchin, till the town was left behind, until it also twinkled a few meagre lights out of its low, confused blackness at the bay-head, across the waters. We lad left the ship-masts and the settlement. The urchin padded on, only turning now and again and extending a thin, eager hand toward the kitchenino. Especially when some men were advancing down the railway he wanted it: the q-b's carrying it was a slur on his prowess. So the kitchenino was relinquished, and the lark strode on satisfied. * * * * * Till at last we came to the low sheds that squatted between the steamer and the railway-end. The lark led me into one, where a red-cap was writing. The cap let me wait some minutes before informing me that this was the goods office--the ticket office was further on. The lark flew at him and said "Then you've changed it, have you?" And he led me on to another shed, which was just going to shut up. Here they finally had the condescension to give me two tickets--a hundred and fifty francs the two. So we followed the lark who strode like Scipio Africanus up the gangway with the sack. * * * * * It was quite a small ship. The steward put me in number one cabin--the q-b in number seven. Each cabin had four berths. Consequently man and woman must separate rigorously on this ship. Here was a blow for the q-b, who knows what Italian female fellow-passengers can be. However, there we were. All the cabins were down below, and all, for some mysterious reason, inside--no portholes outside. It was hot and close down below already. I pitched the sack on my berth, and there stood the lark on the red carpet at the door. I gave him three francs. He looked at it as if it were my death-warrant. He peered at the paper in the light of the lamp. Then he extended his arm with a gesture of superb insolence, flinging me back my gold without a word. "How!" said I. "Three francs are quite enough." "Three francs--two kilometers--and three pieces of luggage! No signore. No! Five francs. Cinque franchi!" And averting his pallid, old mudlarking face, and flinging his hand out at me, he stood the image of indignant repudiation. And truly, he was no taller than my upper waistcoat pocket. The brat! The brat! He was such an actor, and so impudent, that I wavered between wonder and amusement and a great inclination to kick him up the steps. I decided not to waste my energy being angry. "What a beastly little boy! What a horrid little boy! What a _horrid_ little boy! Really--a little thief. A little swindler!" I mused aloud. "Swindler!" he quavered after me. And he was beaten. "Swindler" doubled him up: that and the quiet mildness of my tone of invocation. Now he would have gone with his three francs. And now, in final contempt, I gave him the other two. He disappeared like a streak of lightning up the gangway, terrified lest the steward should come and catch him at his tricks. For later on I saw the steward send other larks flying for demanding more than one-fifty. The brat. * * * * * The question was now the cabin: for the q-b simply refused to entertain the idea of sharing a cabin with three Italian women, who would all be sick simply for the fuss of it, though the sea was smooth as glass. We hunted up the steward. He said all the first-class cabins had four berths--the second had three, but much smaller. How that was possible I don't know. However, if no one came, he would give us a cabin to ourselves. The ship was clean and civilised, though very poky. And there we were. * * * * * We went on deck. Would we eat on board, asked another person. No, we wouldn't. We went out to a fourth little shed, which was a refreshment stall, and bought bread and sardines and chocolate and apples. Then we went on the upper deck to make our meal. In a sheltered place I lit the spirit lamp, and put on water to boil. The water we had taken from the cabin. Then we sat down alone in the darkness, on a seat which had its back against the deck cabins, now appropriated by the staff. A thin, cold wind was travelling. We wrapped the one plaid round us both and snugged together, waiting for the tea to boil. I could just see the point of the spirit-flame licking up, from where we sat. * * * * * The stars were marvellous in the soundless sky, so big, that one could see them hanging orb-like and alone in their own space, yet all the myriads. Particularly bright the evening-star. And he hung flashing in the lower night with a power that made me hold my breath. Grand and powerful he sent out his flashes, so sparkling that he seemed more intense than any sun or moon. And from the dark, uprising land he sent his way of light to us across the water, a marvellous star-road. So all above us the stars soared and pulsed, over that silent, night-dark, land-locked harbour. * * * * * After a long time the water boiled, and we drank our hot tea and ate our sardines and bread and bits of remaining Nuoro sausage, sitting there alone in the intense starry darkness of that upper deck. I said alone: but no, two ghoulish ship's cats came howling at us for the bits. And even when everything was eaten, and the sardine-tin thrown in the sea, still they circled and prowled and howled. We sat on, resting under the magnificent deep heavens, wrapped together in the old shepherd's shawl for which I have blessed so often a Scottish friend, half sheltered from the cold night wind, and recovering somewhat from the sixty miles bus-ride we had done that day. As yet there was nobody on the ship--we were the very first, at least in the first class. Above, all was silent and deserted. Below, all was lit-up and deserted. But it was a little ship, with accommodation for some thirty first-class and forty second-class passengers. In the low deck forward stood two rows of cattle--eighteen cattle. They stood tied up side by side, and quite motionless, as if stupefied. Only two had lain down. The rest stood motionless, with tails dropped and heads dropped, as if drugged or gone insensible. These cattle on the ship fascinated the q-b. She insisted on going down to them, and examining them minutely. But there they were--stiff almost as Noah's Ark cows. What she could not understand was that they neither cried nor struggled. Motionless--terribly motionless. In her idea cattle are wild and indomitable creatures. She will not realise the horrid strength of passivity and inertia which is almost the preponderant force in domesticated creatures, men and beast alike. There are fowls too in various coops--flappy and agitated these. * * * * * At last, at about half past seven the train from the island arrived, and the people surged out in a mass. We stood hanging over the end of the upper deck, looking down. On they poured, in a thick mass, up the gangway, with all conceivable sorts of luggage: bundles, embroidered carry-alls, bags, saddle-bags--the q-b lamenting she had not bought one--a sudden surging mass of people and goods. There are soldiers too--but these are lined upon the bit of a quay, to wait. Our interest is to see whether there will be any more first-class passengers. Coming up the wide board which serves as gangway each individual hands a ticket to the man at the top, and is shooed away to his own region--usually second class. There are three sorts of tickets--green first-class, white second, and pink third. The second-class passengers go aft, the third class go forward, along the passage past our cabins, into the steerage. And so we watch and watch the excited people come on board and divide. Nearly all are second-class--and a great many are women. We have seen a few first-class men. But as yet no women. And every hat with ospreys gives the q-b a qualm. For a long time we are safe. The women flood to the second-class. One who is third, begs and beseeches to go with her friends in the second. I am glad to say without success. And then, alas, an elderly man with a daughter, first-class. They are very respectable and pleasant looking. But the q-b wails: "I'm sure she will be sick." * * * * * Towards the end come three convicts, chained together. They wear the brownish striped homespun, and do not look evil. They seem to be laughing together, not at all in distress. The two young soldiers who guard them, and who have guns, look nervous. So the convicts go forward to the steerage, past our cabins. * * * * * At last the soldiers are straightened up, and turned on board. There almost at once they start making a tent: drawing a huge tarpaulin over a cross rope in the mid-deck below us, between the first and second class regions. The great tarpaulin is pulled down well on either side and fastened down, and it makes a big dark tent. The soldiers creep in and place their bundles. And now it is the soldiers who fascinate the q-b. She hangs over the bar above, and peers in. The soldiers arrange themselves in two rows. They will sleep with their heads on their bundles on either side of the tent, the two rows of feet coming together inwards. But first they must eat, for it is eight o'clock and more. Out come their suppers: a whole roast fowl, hunks of kid, legs of lamb, huge breads. The fowl is dismembered with a jack-knife in a twinkling, and shared. Everything among the soldiers is shared. There they sit in their pent-house with its open ends, crowded together and happy, chewing with all their might and clapping one another on the shoulder lovingly, and taking swigs at the wine bottles. We envy them their good food. * * * * * At last all are on board--the omnibus has driven up from town and gone back. A last young lout dashes up in a carriage and scuffles aboard. The crew begins to run about. The quay-porters have trotted on board with the last bales and packages--all is stowed safely. The steamer hoots and hoots. Two men and a girl kiss their friends all round and get off the ship. The night re-echoes the steamer's hoots. The sheds have gone all dark. Far off the town twinkles very sparsely. All is night-deserted. And so the gangway is hauled up, and the rope hawsers quickly wound in. We are drifting away from the quay side. The few watchers wave their white handkerchiefs, standing diminutive and forlorn on the dark little quay, in the heart of the dark, deserted harbour. One woman cries and waves and weeps. A man makes exaggerated flag-wagging signals with his white handky, and feels important. We drift--and the engines begin to beat. We are moving in the land-locked harbour. * * * * * Everybody watches. The commander and the crew shout orders. And so, very slowly, and without any fuss at all, like a man wheeling a barrow out of a yard gate, we throb very slowly out of the harbour, past one point, then past another, away from the encircling hills, away from the great lump of Tavolara which is to southward, away from the outreaching land to the north, and over the edge of the open sea. * * * * * And now to try for a cabin to ourselves. I approach the steward. Yes, he says, he has it in mind. But there are eighty second-class passengers, in an accommodation space for forty. The transit-controller is now considering it. Most probably he will transfer some second-class women to the vacant first-class cabins. If he does not do so, then the steward will accommodate us. I know what this means--this equivocation. We decide not to bother any more. So we make a tour of the ship--to look at the soldiers, who have finished eating, sitting yarning to one another, while some are already stretched out in the shadow, for sleep. Then to look at the cattle, which stand rooted to the deck--which is now all messy. To look at the unhappy fowls in their coops. And a peep at the third-class--rather horrifying. And so to bed. Already the other three berths in my cabin are occupied, the lights are switched off. As I enter I hear one young man tenderly enquiring of the berth below: "Dost thou feel ill?" "Er--not much--not much!" says the other faintly. Yet the sea is like glass, so smooth. I am quickly rolled in my lower berth, where I feel the trembling of the machine-impelled ship, and hear the creaking of the berth above me as its occupant rolls over: I listen to the sighs of the others, the wash of dark water. And so, uneasily, rather hot and very airless, uneasy with the machine-throbbing and the sighing of my companions, and with a cock that crows shrilly from one of the coops, imagining the ship's lights to be dawn, the night goes by. One sleeps--but a bad sleep. If only there were cold air, not this lower-berth, inside cabin airlessness. VIII. BACK. The sea being steady as a level road, nobody succeeded in being violently sick. My young men rose at dawn--I was not long in following. It was a gray morning on deck, a gray sea, a gray sky, and a gray, spider-cloth, unimportant coast of Italy not far away. The q-b joined me: and quite delighted with her fellow-passenger: such a nice girl, she said! who, when she let down her ordinary-looking brown hair, it reached rippling right to her feet! Voilà! You never know your luck. The cock that had crowed all night crowed again, hoarsely, with a sore throat. The miserable cattle looked more wearily miserable, but still were motionless, as sponges that grow at the bottom of the sea. The convicts were out for air: grinning. Someone told us they were war-deserters. Considering the light in which these people look on war, desertion seemed to me the only heroism. But the q-b, brought up in a military air, gazed upon them as upon men miraculously alive within the shadow of death. According to her code they had been shot when re-captured. The soldiers had unslung the tarpaulin, their home for the night had melted with the darkness, they were mere fragments of gray transit smoking cigarettes and staring overboard. We drew near to Cività Vecchia: the old, mediaeval looking port, with its castle, and a round fortress-barracks at the entrance. Soldiers aboard shouted and waved to soldiers on the ramparts. We backed insignificantly into the rather scrubby, insignificant harbour. And in five minutes we were out, and walking along the wide, desolate boulevard to the station. The cab-men looked hard at us: but no doubt owing to the knapsack, took us for poor Germans. * * * * * Coffee and milk--and then, only about three-quarters of an hour late, the train from the north. It is the night express from Turin. There was plenty of room--so in we got, followed by half a dozen Sardinians. We found a large, heavy Torinese in the carriage, his eyes dead with fatigue. It seemed quite a new world on the mainland: and at once one breathed again the curious suspense that is in the air. Once more I read the Corriere della Sera from end to end. Once more we knew ourselves in the real active world, where the air seems like a lively wine dissolving the pearl of the old order. I hope, dear reader, you like the metaphor. Yet I cannot forbear repeating how strongly one is sensible of the solvent property of the atmosphere, suddenly arriving on the mainland again. And in an hour one changes one's psyche. The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens. I felt my sound Sardinian soul melting off me, I felt myself evaporating into the real Italian uncertainty and momentaneity. So I perused the Corriere whilst the metamorphosis took place. I like Italian newspapers because they say what they mean, and not merely what is most convenient to say. We call it naïveté--I call it manliness. Italian newspapers read as if they were written by men, and not by calculating eunuchs. * * * * * The train ran very heavily along the Maremma. It began to rain. Then we stopped at a station where we should not stop--somewhere in the Maremma country, the invisible sea not far off, the low country cultivated and yet forlorn. Oh how the Turin man sighed, and wearily shifted his feet as the train stood meaningless. There it sat--in the rain. Oh express! At last on again, till we were winding through the curious long troughs of the Roman Campagna. There the shepherds minded the sheep: the slender-footed merino sheep. In Sardinia the merinos were very white and glistening, so that one thought of the Scriptural "white as wool." And the black sheep among the flock were very black. But these Campagna were no longer white, but dingy. And though the wildness of the Campagna is a real wildness still, it is a historic wildness, familiar in its way as a fireside is familiar. So we approach the hopeless sprawling of modern Rome--over the yellow Tiber, past the famous pyramid tomb, skirting the walls of the city, till at last we plunge in, into the well-known station, out of all the chaos. We are late. It is a quarter to twelve. And I have to go out and change money, and I hope to find my two friends.--The q-b and I dash down the platform--no friends at the barrier. The station moderately empty. We bolt across to the departure platforms. The Naples train stands ready. In we pitch our bags, ask a naval man not to let anyone steal them, then I fly out into town while the q-b buys food and wine at the buffet. It no longer rains, and Rome feels as ever--rather holiday-like and not inclined to care about anything. I get a hundred and three lira for each pound note: pocket my money at two minutes past twelve, and bolt back, out of the Piazza delle Terme. Aha, there are the two missing ones, just descending vaguely from a carriage, the one gazing inquiringly through his monocle across the tram-lines, the other very tall and alert and elegant, looking as if he expected us to appear out of the air for his convenience. Which is exactly what happens. We fly into each other's arms. "Oh there you _are_! Where's the q-b? Why are you here? We've been to the arrival platform--no _sign_ of you. Of course I only got your wire half an hour ago. We _flew_ here. Well, how nice to see you.--Oh, let the man wait.--What, going on at once to Naples? But must you? Oh, but how flighty you are! Birds of passage _veramente_! Then let us find the q-b, quick!--And they won't let us on the platform. No, they're not issuing platform tickets today.--Oh, merely the guests returning from that Savoy-Bavarian wedding in the north, a few royal Duchesses about. Oh well, we must try and wangle him." At the barrier a woman trying in vain to be let on to the station. But what a Roman matron can't do, an elegant young Englishman can. So our two heroes wangle their way in, and fall into the arms of the q-b by the Naples train. Well, now, tell us all about it! So we rush into a four-branched candlestick of conversation. In my ear murmurs he of the monocle about the Sahara--he is back from the Sahara a week ago: the winter sun in the Sahara! He with the smears of paint on his elegant trousers is giving the q-b a sketchy outline of his now _grande passion_. Click goes the exchange, and him of the monocle is detailing to the q-b his trip to Japan, on which he will start in six weeks' time, while him of the paint-smears is expatiating on the thrills of the etching needle, and concocting a plan for a month in Sardinia in May, with me doing the scribbles and he the pictures. What sort of pictures? Out flies the name of Goya.--And well now, a general rush into oneness, and won't they come down to Sicily to us for the almond blossom: in about ten days' time. Yes they will--wire when the almond blossom is just stepping on the stage and making its grand bow, and they will come next day. Somebody has smitten the wheel of a coach two ringing smacks with a hammer. This is a sign to get in. The q-b is terrified the train will slip through her fingers. "I'm frightened, I must get in."--"Very well then! You're sure you have everything you want? Everything? A fiasco of vino? Oh _two_! All the better! Well then--ten days' time. All right--quite sure--how nice to have seen you, if only a _glimpse_.--Yes, yes, poor q-b! Yes, you're quite safe. Good-bye! Good-bye!" The door is shut--we are seated--the train moves out of the station. And quickly on this route Rome disappears. We are out on the wintry Campagna, where crops are going. Away on the left we see the Tivoli hills, and think of the summer that is gone, the heat, the fountains of the Villa D'Este. The train rolls heavily over the Campagna, towards the Alban Mounts, homewards. * * * * * So we fall on our food, and devour the excellent little beef-steaks and rolls and boiled eggs, apples and oranges and dates, and drink the good red wine, and wildly discuss plans and the latest news, and are altogether thrilled about things. So thrilled that we are well away among the romantic mountains of the south-centre before we realise that there are other passengers besides ourselves in the carriage. Half the journey is over. Why, there is the monastery on its high hill! In a wild moment I suggest we shall get down and spend a night up there at Montecassino, and see the other friend, the monk who knows so much about the world, being out of it. But the q-b shudders, thinking of the awful winter coldness of that massive stone monastery, which has no spark of heating apparatus. And therefore the plan subsides, and at Cassino station I only get down to procure coffee and sweet cakes. They always have good things to eat at Cassino station: in summer, big fresh ices and fruits and iced water, in winter toothsome sweet cakes which make an awfully good finish to a meal. * * * * * I count Cassino half way to Naples. After Cassino the excitement of being in the north begins quite to evaporate. The southern heaviness descends upon us. Also the sky begins to darken: and the rain falls. I think of the night before us, on the sea again. And I am vaguely troubled lest we may not get a berth. However, we may spend the night in Naples: or even sit on in this train, which goes forward, all through the long long night, to the Straits of Messina. We must decide as we near Naples. Half dozing, one becomes aware of the people about one. We are travelling second class. Opposite is a little, hold-your-own school-mistressy young person in pince-nez. Next her a hollow-cheeked white soldier with ribbons on his breast. Then a fat man in a corner. Then a naval officer of low rank. The naval officer is coming from Fiume, and is dead with sleep and perhaps mortification. D'Annunzio has just given up. Two compartments away we hear soldiers singing, martial still though bruised with fatigue, the D'Annunzio-bragging songs of Fiume. They are soldiers of the D'Annunzio legion. And one of them, I hear the sick soldier saying, is very hot and republican still. Private soldiers are not allowed, with their reduced tickets, to travel on the express trains. But these legionaries are not penniless: they have paid the excess and come along. For the moment they are sent to their homes. And with heads dropping with fatigue, we hear them still defiantly singing down the carriage for D'Annunzio. A regular officer went along--a captain of the Italian, not the Fiume army. He heard the chants and entered the carriage. The legionaries were quiet, but they lounged and ignored the entry of the officer. "On your feet!" he yelled, Italian fashion. The vehemence did it. Reluctantly as may be, they stood up in the compartment. "Salute!" And though it was bitter, up went their hands in the salute, whilst he stood and watched them. And then, very superb, he sauntered away again. They sat down glowering. Of course they were beaten. Didn't they know it. The men in our carriage smiled curiously: in slow and futile mockery of both parties. The rain was falling outside, the windows were steamed quite dense, so that we were shut in from the world. Throughout the length of the train, which was not very full, could be felt the exhausted weariness and the dispirited dejection of the poor D'Annunzio legionaries. In the afternoon silence of the mist-enclosed, half-empty train the snatches of song broke out again, and faded in sheer dispirited fatigue. We ran on blindly and heavily. But one young fellow was not to be abashed. He was well-built, and his thick black hair was brushed up, like a great fluffy crest upon his head. He came slowly and unabated down the corridor, and on every big, mist-opaque pane he scrawled with his finger W D'ANNUNZIO GABRIELE--W D'ANNUNZIO GABRIELE. The sick soldier laughed thinly, saying to the schoolmistress: "Oh yes, they are fine chaps. But it was folly. D'Annunzio is a world poet--a world wonder--but Fiume was a mistake you know. And these chaps have got to learn a lesson. They got beyond themselves. Oh, they aren't short of money. D'Annunzio had wagon-loads of money there in Fiume, and he wasn't altogether mean with it." The schoolmistress, who was one of the sharp ones, gave a little disquisition to show _why_ it was a mistake, and wherein she knew better than the world's poet and wonder. It always makes me sick to hear people chewing over newspaper pulp. The sick soldier was not a legionary. He had been wounded through the lung. But it was healed, he said. He lifted the flap of his breast pocket, and there hung a little silver medal. It was his wound-medal. He wore it concealed: and over the place of the wound. He and the schoolmistress looked at one another significantly. Then they talked pensions: and soon were on the old topic. The schoolmistress had her figures pat, as a schoolmistress should. Why, the ticket-collector, the man who punches one's tickets on the train, now had twelve thousand Lira a year: twelve thousand Lira. Monstrous! Whilst a fully-qualified _professore_, a schoolmaster who had been through all his training and had all his degrees, was given five thousand. Five thousand for a fully qualified _professore_, and twelve thousand for a ticket puncher. The soldier agreed, and quoted other figures. But the railway was the outstanding grievance. Every boy who left school now, said the schoolmistress, wanted to go on the railway. Oh but--said the soldier--the train-men--! * * * * * The naval officer, who collapsed into the most uncanny positions, blind with sleep, got down at Capua to get into a little train that would carry him back to his own station, where our train had not stopped. At Caserta the sick soldier got out. Down the great avenue of trees the rain was falling. A young man entered. Remained also the schoolmistress and the stout man. Knowing we had been listening, the schoolmistress spoke to us about the soldier. Then--she had said she was catching the night boat for Palermo--I asked her if she thought the ship would be very full. Oh yes, very full, she said. Why, hers was one of the last cabin numbers, and she had got her ticket early that morning. The fat man now joined in. He too was crossing to Palermo. The ship was sure to be quite full by now. Were we depending on booking berths at the port of Naples? We were. Whereupon he and the schoolmistress shook their heads and said it was more than doubtful--nay, it was as good as impossible. For the boat was the renowned _Città di Trieste_, that floating palace, and such was the fame of her gorgeousness that everybody wanted to travel by her. "First and second class alike?" I asked. "Oh yes, also first class," replied the school-marm rather spitefully. So I knew she had a white ticket--second. I cursed the _Città di Trieste_ and her gorgeousness, and looked down my nose. We had now two alternatives: to spend the night in Naples, or to sit on all through the night and next morning, and arrive home, with heaven's aid, in the early afternoon. Though these long-distance trains think nothing of six hours late. But we were tired already. What we should be like after another twenty-four hours' sitting, heaven knows. And yet to struggle for a bed in a Naples hotel this night, in the rain, all the hotels being at present crammed with foreigners, that was no rosy prospect. Oh dear! However, I was not going to take their discouragement so easily. One has been had that way before. They love to make the case look desperate. Were we English? asked the schoolmistress. We were. Ah, a fine thing to be English in Italy now. _Why?_--rather tart from me. Because of the _cambio_, the exchange. You English, with your money exchange, you come here and buy everything for nothing, you take the best of everything, and with your money you pay nothing for it. Whereas we poor Italians we pay heavily for everything at an exaggerated price, and we can have nothing. Ah, it is all very nice to be English in Italy now. You can travel, you go to the hotels, you can see everything and buy everything, and it costs you nothing. What is the exchange today? She whipped it out. A hundred and four, twenty. This she told me to my nose. And the fat man murmured bitterly _già! già!_--ay! ay! Her impertinence and the fat man's quiet bitterness stirred my bile. Has not this song been sung at me once too often, by these people? You are mistaken, said I to the schoolmistress. We don't by any means live in Italy for nothing. Even with the exchange at a hundred and three, we don't live for nothing. We pay, and pay through the nose, for whatever we have in Italy: and you Italians see that we pay. What! You put all the tariff you do on foreigners, and then say we live here for nothing. I tell you I could live in England just as well, on the same money--perhaps better. Compare the cost of things in England with the cost here in Italy, and even considering the exchange, Italy costs nearly as much as England. Some things are cheaper here--the railway comes a little cheaper, and is infinitely more miserable. Travelling is usually a misery. But other things, clothes of all sorts, and a good deal of food is even more expensive here than in England, exchange considered. Oh yes, she said, England had had to bring her prices down this last fortnight. In her own interests indeed. "This last fortnight! This last six months," said I. "Whereas prices rise every single day here." Here a word from the quiet young man who had got in at Caserta. "Yes," he said, "yes. I say, every nation pays in its own money, no matter what the exchange. And it works out about equal." But I felt angry. Am I always to have the exchange flung in my teeth, as if I were a personal thief? But the woman persisted. "Ah," she said, "we Italians, we are so nice, we are so good. Noi, siamo così buoni. We are so good-natured. But others, they are not buoni, they are not good-natured to us." And she nodded her head. And truly, I did not feel at all good-natured towards her: which she knew. And as for the Italian good-nature, it forms a sound and unshakeable basis nowadays for their extortion and self-justification and spite. * * * * * Darkness was falling over the rich flat plains that lie around Naples, over the tall uncanny vines with their brown thongs in the intensely cultivated black earth. It was night by the time we were in that vast and thievish station. About half-past five. We were not very late. Should we sit on in our present carriage, and go down in it to the port, along with the schoolmistress, and risk it? But first look at the coach which was going on to Sicily. So we got down and ran along the train to the Syracuse coach. Hubbub, confusion, a wedge in the corridor, and for sure no room. Certainly no room to lie down a bit. We _could_ not sit tight for twenty-four hours more. So we decided to go to the port--and to walk. Heaven knows when the railway carriage would be shunted down. Back we went therefore for the sack, told the schoolmistress our intention. "You can but try," she said frostily. * * * * * So there we are, with the sack over my shoulder and the kitchenino in the q-b's hand, bursting out of that thrice-damned and annoying station, and running through the black wet gulf of a Naples night, in a slow rain. Cabmen look at us. But my sack saved me. I am weary of that boa-constrictor, a Naples cabman after dark. By day there is more-or-less a tariff. It is about a mile from the station to the quay where the ship lies. We make our way through the deep, gulf-like streets, over the slippery black cobbles. The black houses rise massive to a great height on either side, but the streets are not in this part very narrow. We plunge forwards in the unearthly half-darkness of this great uncontrolled city. There are no lights at all from the buildings--only the small electric lamps of the streets. So we emerge on the harbour front, and hurry past the great storehouses in the rainy night, to where the actual entrances begin. The tram bangs past us. We scuffle along that pavement-ridge which lies like an isthmus down the vast black quicksands of that harbour road. One feels peril all round. But at length we come to a gate by the harbour railway. No, not that. On to the next iron gate of the railway crossing. And so we run out past the great sheds and the buildings of the port station, till we see a ship rearing in front, and the sea all black. But now where is that little hole where one gets the tickets? We are at the back of everywhere in this desert jungle of the harbour darkness. * * * * * A man directs us round the corner--and actually does not demand money. It is the sack again. So--there, I see the knot of men, soldiers chiefly, fighting in a bare room round a tiny wicket. I recognise the place where I have fought before. So while the q-b stands guard over sack and bag, I plunge into the fray. It literally is a fight. Some thirty men all at once want to get at a tiny wicket in a blank wall. There are no queue-rails, there is no order: just a hole in a blank wall, and thirty fellows, mostly military, pressing at it in a mass. But I have done this before. The way is to insert the thin end of oneself, and without any violence, by deadly pressure and pertinacity come at the goal. One hand must be kept fast over the money pocket, and one must be free to clutch the wicket-side when one gets there. And thus one is ground small in those mills of God, Demos struggling for tickets. It isn't very nice--so close, so incomparably crushed. And never for a second must one be off one's guard for one's watch and money and even hanky. When I first came to Italy after the war I was robbed twice in three weeks, floating round in the sweet old innocent confidence in mankind. Since then I have never ceased to be on my guard. Somehow or other, waking and sleeping one's spirit must be on its guard nowadays. Which is really what I prefer, now I have learnt it. Confidence in the goodness of mankind is a very thin protection indeed. _Integer vitae scelerisque purus_ will do nothing for you when it comes to humanity, however efficacious it may be with lions and wolves. Therefore, tight on my guard, like a screw biting into a bit of wood, I bite my way through that knot of fellows, to the wicket, and shout for two first-class. The clerk inside ignores me for some time, serving soldiers. But if you stand like Doomsday you get your way. Two firsts, says the clerk. Husband and wife, say I, in case there is a two-berth cabin. Jokes behind. But I get my tickets. Impossible to put my hand to my pocket. The tickets cost about a hundred and five francs each. Clutching paper change and the green slips, with a last gasp I get out of the knot. So--we've done it. As I sort my money and stow away, I hear another ask for one first-class. Nothing left, says the clerk. So you see how one must fight. I must say for these dense and struggling crowds, they are only intense, not violent, and not in the least brutal. I always feel a certain sympathy with the men in them. * * * * * Bolt through the pouring rain to the ship. And in two minutes we are aboard. And behold, each of us has a deck cabin, I one to myself, the q-b to herself next door. Palatial--not a cabin at all, but a proper little bedroom with a curtained bed under the porthole windows, a comfortable sofa, chairs, table, carpets, big wash-bowls with silver taps--a whole _de luxe_. I dropped the sack on the sofa with a gasp, drew back the yellow curtains of the bed, looked out of the porthole at the lights of Naples, and sighed with relief. One could wash thoroughly, refreshingly, and change one's linen. Wonderful! * * * * * The state-room is like a hotel lounge, many little tables with flowers and periodicals, arm-chairs, warm carpet, bright but soft lights, and people sitting about chatting. A loud group of English people in one corner, very assured: two quiet English ladies: various Italians seeming quite modest. Here one could sit in peace and rest, pretending to look at an illustrated magazine. So we rested. After about an hour there entered a young Englishman and his wife, whom we had seen on our train. So, at last the coach had been shunted down to the port. Where should we have been had we waited! * * * * * The waiters began to flap the white table-cloths and spread the tables nearest the walls. Dinner would begin at half-past seven, immediately the boat started. We sat in silence, till eight or nine tables were spread. Then we let the other people take their choice. After which we chose a table by ourselves, neither of us wanting company. So we sat before the plates and the wine-bottles and sighed in the hopes of a decent meal. Food by the way is not included in the hundred-and-five francs. Alas, we were not to be alone: two young Neapolitans, pleasant, quiet, blond, or semi-blond. They were well-bred, and evidently of northern extraction. Afterwards we found out they were jewellers. But I liked their quiet, gentle manners. The dinner began, and we were through the soup, when up pranced another young fellow, rather strapping and loud, a commercial traveller, for sure. He had those cocky assured manners of one who is not sure of his manners. He had a rather high forehead, and black hair brushed up in a showy wing, and a large ring on his finger. Not that a ring signifies anything. Here most of the men wear several, all massively jewelled. If one believed in all the jewels, why Italy would be more fabulous than fabled India. But our friend the bounder was smart, and smelled of cash. Not money, but cash. I had an inkling of what to expect when he handed the salt and said in English "Salt, thenk you." But I ignored the advance. However, he did not wait long. Through the windows across the room the q-b saw the lights of the harbour slowly moving. "Oh," she cried, "are we going?" And also in Italian: "Partiamo?" All watched the lights, the bounder screwing round. He had one of the fine, bounderish backs. "Yes," he said. "We--_going_." "Oh," cried she. "Do you speak English?" "Ye-es. Some English--I speak." As a matter of fact he spoke about forty disconnected words. But his accent was so good for these forty. He did not speak English, he imitated an English voice making sounds. And the effect was startling. He had served on the Italian front with the Scots Guards--so he told us in Italian. He was Milanese. Oh, he had had a time with the Scots Guards. Wheesky--eh? Wheesky. "Come along _bhoys_!" he shouted. And it was such a Scotch voice shouting, so loud-mouthed and actual, I nearly went under the table. It struck us both like a blow. Afterwards he rattled away without misgiving. He was a traveller for a certain type of machine, and was doing Sicily. Shortly he was going to England--and he asked largely about first-class hotels. Then he asked was the q-b French?--Was she Italian?--No, she was German. Ah--German. And immediately out he came with the German word: "Deutsch! Deutsch, eh? From Deutschland. Oh yes! Deutschland über alles! Ah, I know. No more--what? Deutschland unter alles now? Deutschland unter alles." And he bounced on his seat with gratification of the words. Of German as of English he knew half a dozen phrases. "No," said the q-b, "Not Deutschland unter alles. Not for long, anyhow." "How? Not for long? You think so? I think so too," said the bounder. Then in Italian: "La Germania won't stand under all for long. No, no. At present it is England über alles. _England über alles._ But Germany will rise up again." "Of course," said the q-b. "How shouldn't she?" "Ah," said the bounder, "while England keeps the money in her pocket, we shall none of us rise up. Italy won the war, and Germany lost it. And Italy and Germany they both are down, and England is up. They both are down, and England is up. England and France. Strange, isn't it? Ah, the allies. What are the allies for? To keep England up, and France half way, and Germany and Italy down." "Ah, they won't stay down for ever," said the q-b. "You think not? Ah! We will see. We will see how England goes on now." "England is not going on so marvellously, after all," say I. "How not? You mean Ireland?" "No, not only Ireland. Industry altogether. England is as near to ruin as other countries." "Ma! With all the money, and we others with no money? How will she be ruined?" "And what good would it be to you if she were?" "Oh well--who knows. If England were ruined--" a slow smile of anticipation spread over his face. How he would love it--how they would all love it, if England were ruined. That is, the business part of them, perhaps, would not love it. But the human part would. The human part fairly licks its lips at the thought of England's ruin. The commercial part, however, quite violently disclaims the anticipations of the human part. And there it is. The newspapers chiefly speak with the commercial voice. But individually, when you are got at in a railway carriage or as now on a ship, up speaks the human voice, and you know how they love you. This is no doubt inevitable. When the exchange stands at a hundred and six men go humanly blind, I suppose, however much they may keep the commercial eye open. And having gone humanly blind they bump into one's human self nastily: a nasty jar. You know then how they hate you. Underneath, they hate us, and as human beings we are objects of envy and malice. They hate us, with envy, and despise us, with jealousy. Which perhaps doesn't hurt commercially. Humanly it is to me unpleasant. The dinner was over, and the bounder was lavishing cigarettes--Murattis, if you please. We had all drunk two bottles of wine. Two other commercial travellers had joined the bounder at our table--two smart young fellows, one a bounder and one gentle and nice. Our two jewellers remained quiet, talking their share, but quietly and so sensitively. One could not help liking them. So we were seven people, six men. "Wheesky! Will you drink Wheesky, Mister?" said our original bounder. "Yes, one small Scotch! One Scotch Wheesky." All this in a perfect Scotty voice of a man standing at a bar calling for a drink. It was comical, one could not but laugh: and very impertinent. He called for the waiter, took him by the button-hole, and with a breast-to-breast intimacy asked if there was whisky. The waiter, with the same tone of you-and-I-are-men-who-have-the-same-feelings, said he didn't think there was whisky, but he would look. Our bounder went round the table inviting us all to whiskies, and pressing on us his expensive English cigarettes with great aplomb. The whisky came--and five persons partook. It was fiery, oily stuff from heaven knows where. The bounder rattled away, spouting his bits of English and his four words of German. He was in high feather, wriggling his large haunches on his chair and waving his hands. He had a peculiar manner of wriggling from the bottom of his back, with fussy self-assertiveness. It was my turn to offer whisky. I was able in a moment's lull to peer through the windows and see the dim lights of Capri--the glimmer of Anacapri up on the black shadow--the lighthouse. We had passed the island. In the midst of the babel I sent out a few thoughts to a few people on the island. Then I had to come back. The bounder had once more resumed his theme of l'Inghilterra, l'Italia, la Germania. He swanked England as hard as he could. Of course England was the top dog, and if he could speak some English, if he were talking to English people, and if, as he said, he was going to England in April, why he was so much the more top-doggy than his companions, who could not rise to all these heights. At the same time, my nerves had too much to bear. Where were we going and where had we been and where did we live? And ah, yes, English people lived in Italy. Thousands, thousands of English people lived in Italy. Yes, it was very nice for them. There used to be many Germans, but now the Germans were down. But the English--what could be better for them than Italy now: they had sun, they had warmth, they had abundance of everything, they had a charming people to deal with, and they had the _cambio_! Ecco! The other commercial travellers agreed. They appealed to the q-b if it was not so. And altogether I had enough of it. "Oh yes," said I, "it's very nice to be in Italy: especially if you are not living in an hotel, and you have to attend to things for yourself. It is very nice to be overcharged every time, and then insulted if you say a word. It's very nice to have the _cambio_ thrown in your teeth, if you say two words to any Italian, even a perfect stranger. It's very nice to have waiters and shop-people and railway porters sneering in a bad temper and being insulting in small, mean ways all the time. It's very nice to feel what they all feel against you. And if you understand enough Italian, it's very nice to hear what they say when you've gone by. Oh very nice. Very nice indeed!" I suppose the whisky had kindled this outburst in me. They sat dead silent. And then our bounder began, in his sugary deprecating voice. "Why no! Why no! It is not true, signore. No, it is not true. Why, England is the foremost nation in the world--" "And you want to pay her out for it." "But no, signore. But no. What makes you say so? Why, we Italians are so good-natured. Noi Italiani siamo così buoni. Siamo così buoni." It was the identical words of the schoolmistress. "Buoni," said I. "Yes--perhaps. Buoni when it's not a question of the exchange and of money. But since it is always a question of _cambio_ and _soldi_ now, one is always, in a small way, insulted." I suppose it must have been the whisky. Anyhow Italians can never bear hard bitterness. The jewellers looked distressed, the bounders looked down their noses, half exulting even now, and half sheepish, being caught. The third of the _commis voyageurs_, the gentle one, made large eyes and was terrified that he was going to be sick. He represented a certain Italian liqueur, and he modestly asked us to take a glass of it. He went with the waiter to secure the proper brand. So we drank--and it was good. But he, the giver, sat with large and haunted eyes. Then he said he would go to bed. Our bounder gave him various advice regarding seasickness. There was a mild swell on the sea. So he of the liqueur departed. * * * * * Our bounder thrummed on the table and hummed something, and asked the q-b if she knew the _Rosencavalier_. He always appealed to her. She said she did. And ah, he was passionately fond of music, said he. Then he warbled, in a head voice, a bit more. He only knew classical music, said he. And he mewed a bit of Moussorgsky. The q-b said Moussorgsky was her favourite musician, for opera. Ah, cried the bounder, if there were but a piano!--There is a piano, said his mate.--Yes, he replied, but it is locked up.--Then let us get the key, said his mate, with aplomb. The waiters, being men with the same feelings as our two, would give them anything. So the key was forthcoming. We paid our bills--mine about sixty francs. Then we went along the faintly rolling ship, up the curved staircase to the drawing room. Our bounder unlocked the door of this drawing room, and switched on the lights. It was quite a pleasant room, with deep divans upholstered in pale colours, and palm-trees standing behind little tables, and a black upright piano. Our bounder sat on the piano-stool and gave us an exhibition. He splashed out noise on the piano in splashes, like water splashing out of a pail. He lifted his head and shook his black mop of hair, and yelled out some fragments of opera. And he wriggled his large, bounder's back upon the piano stool, wriggling upon his well-filled haunches. Evidently he had a great deal of feeling for music: but very little prowess. He yelped it out, and wriggled, and splashed the piano. His friend the other bounder, a quiet one in a pale suit, with stout limbs, older than the wriggler, stood by the piano whilst the young one exhibited. Across the space of carpet sat the two brother jewellers, deep in a divan, their lean, semi-blond faces quite inscrutable. The q-b sat next to me, asking for this and that music, none of which the wriggler could supply. He knew four scraps, and a few splashes--not more. The elder bounder stood near him quietly comforting, encouraging, and admiring him, as a lover encouraging and admiring his _ingénue_ betrothed. And the q-b sat bright-eyed and excited, admiring that a man could perform so unself-consciously self-conscious, and give himself away with such generous wriggles. For my part, as you may guess, I did not admire. I had had enough. Rising, I bowed and marched off. The q-b came after me. Good-night, said I, at the head of the corridor. She turned in, and I went round the ship to look at the dark night of the sea. * * * * * Morning came sunny with pieces of cloud: and the Sicilian coast towering pale blue in the distance. How wonderful it must have been to Ulysses to venture into this Mediterranean and open his eyes on all the loveliness of the tall coasts. How marvellous to steal with his ship into these magic harbours. There is something eternally morning-glamourous about these lands as they rise from the sea. And it is always the Odyssey which comes back to one as one looks at them. All the lovely morning-wonder of this world, in Homer's day! Our bounder was dashing about on deck, in one of those rain-coats gathered in at the waist and ballooning out into skirts below the waist. He greeted me with a cry of "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." "Very long," said I. "Good-bye Piccadilly--" he continued. "Ciao," said I, as he dashed jauntily down the steps. Soon we saw the others as well. But it was morning, and I simply did not want to speak to them--except just Good-day. For my life I couldn't say two more words to any of them this morning: except to ask the mild one if he had been sick. He had not. So we waited for the great _Città di Trieste_ to float her way into Palermo harbour. It looked so near--the town there, the great circle of the port, the mass of the hills crowding round. Panormus, the All-harbour. I wished the bulky steamer would hurry up. For I hated her now. I hated her swankiness, she seemed made for commercial travellers with cash. I hated the big picture that filled one end of the state-room: an elegant and ideal peasant-girl, a sort of Italia, strolling on a lovely and ideal cliff's edge, among myriad blooms, and carrying over her arm, in a most sophisticated fashion, a bough of almond blossom and a sheaf of anemones. I hated the waiters, and the cheap elegance, the common _de luxe_. I disliked the people, who all turned their worst, cash-greasy sides outwards on this ship. Vulgar, vulgar post-war commercialism and dog-fish money-stink. I longed to get off. And the bloated boat edged her way so slowly into the port, and then more slowly still edged round her fat stern. And even then we were kept for fifteen minutes waiting for someone to put up the gangway for the first class. The second class, of course, were streaming off and melting like thawed snow into the crowds of onlookers on the quay, long before we were allowed to come off. * * * * * Glad, glad I was to get off that ship: I don't know why, for she was clean and comfortable and the attendants were perfectly civil. Glad, glad I was not to share the deck with any more commercial travellers. Glad I was to be on my own feet, independent. No, I would _not_ take a carriage. I carried my sack on my back to the hotel, looking with a jaundiced eye on the lethargic traffic of the harbour front. It was about nine o'clock. * * * * * Later on, when I had slept, I thought as I have thought before, the Italians are not to blame for their spite against us. We, England, have taken upon ourselves for so long the rôle of leading nation. And if now, in the war or after the war, we have led them all into a real old swinery--which we have, notwithstanding all Entente cant--then they have a legitimate grudge against us. If you take upon yourself to lead, you must expect the mud to be thrown at you if you lead into a nasty morass. Especially if, once in the bog, you think of nothing else but scrambling out over other poor devils' backs. Pretty behaviour of great nations! And still, for all that, I must insist that I am a single human being, an individual, not a mere national unit, a mere chip of l'Inghilterra or la Germania. I am not a chip of any nasty old block. I am myself. * * * * * In the evening the q-b insisted on going to the marionettes, for which she has a sentimental passion. So the three of us--we were with the American friend once more--chased through dark and tortuous side-streets and markets of Palermo in the night, until at last a friendly man led us to the place. The back streets of Palermo felt friendly, not huge and rather horrible, like Naples near the port. The theatre was a little hole opening simply off the street. There was no one in the little ticket box, so we walked past the door-screen. A shabby old man with a long fennel-stalk hurried up and made us places on the back benches, and hushed us when we spoke of tickets. The play was in progress. A serpent-dragon was just having a tussle with a knight in brilliant brass armour, and my heart came into my mouth. The audience consisted mostly of boys, gazing with frantic interest on the bright stage. There was a sprinkling of soldiers and elderly men. The place was packed--about fifty souls crowded on narrow little ribbons of benches, so close one behind the other that the end of the man in front of me continually encroached and sat on my knee. I saw on a notice that the price of entry was forty centimes. We had come in towards the end of the performance, and so sat rather bewildered, unable to follow. The story was the inevitable Paladins of France--one heard the names _Rinaldo!_ _Orlando!_ again and again. But the story was told in dialect, hard to follow. I was charmed by the figures. The scene was very simple, showing the interior of a castle. But the figures, which were about two-thirds of human size, were wonderful in their brilliant, glittering gold armour, and their martial prancing motions. All were knights--even the daughter of the king of Babylon. She was distinguished only by her long hair. All were in the beautiful, glittering armour, with helmets and visors that could be let down at will. I am told this armour has been handed down for many generations. It certainly is lovely. One actor alone was not in armour, the wizard Magicce, or Malvigge, the Merlin of the Paladins. He was in a long scarlet robe, edged with fur, and wore a three-cornered scarlet hat. So we watched the dragon leap and twist and get the knight by the leg: and then perish. We watched the knights burst into the castle. We watched the wonderful armour-clashing embraces of the delivered knights, Orlando and his bosom friend and the little dwarf, clashing their armoured breasts to the breasts of their brothers and deliverers. We watched the would-be tears flow.--And then the statue of the witch suddenly go up in flames, at which a roar of exultation from the boys. Then it was over. The theatre was empty in a moment, but the proprietors and the two men who sat near us would not let us go. We must wait for the next performance. My neighbour, a fat, jolly man, told me all about it. His neighbour, a handsome tipsy man, kept contradicting and saying it wasn't so. But my fat neighbour winked at me, not to take offence. This story of the Paladins of France lasted three nights. We had come on the middle night--of course. But no matter--each night was a complete story. I am sorry I have forgotten the names of the knights. But the story was, that Orlando and his friend and the little dwarf, owing to the tricks of that same dwarf, who belonged to the Paladins, had been captured and immured in the enchanted castle of the ghastly old witch who lived on the blood of Christians. It was now the business of Rinaldo and the rest of the Paladins, by the help of Magicce the _good_ wizard, to release their captured brethren from the ghoulish old witch. So much I made out of the fat man's story, while the theatre was filling. He knew every detail of the whole Paladin cycle. And it is evident the Paladin cycle has lots of versions. For the handsome tipsy neighbour kept saying he was wrong, he was wrong, and giving different stories, and shouting for a jury to come and say who was right, he or my fat friend. A jury gathered, and a storm began to rise. But the stout proprietor with a fennel-wand came and quenched the noise, telling the handsome tipsy man he knew too much and wasn't asked. Whereupon the tipsy one sulked. Ah, said my friend, couldn't I come on Friday. Friday was a great night. On Friday they were giving I Beati Paoli: The Blessed Pauls. He pointed to the walls where were the placards announcing The Blessed Pauls. These Pauls were evidently some awful secret society with masking hoods and daggers and awful eyes looking through the holes. I said were they assassins like the Black Hand. By no means, by no means. The Blessed Pauls were a society for the protection of the poor. Their business was to track down and murder the oppressive rich. Ah, they were a wonderful, a splendid society. Were they, said I, a sort of camorra? Ah, on the contrary--here he lapsed into a tense voice--they hated the camorra. These, the Blest Pauls, were the powerful and terrible enemy of the grand camorra. For the Grand Camorra oppresses the poor. And therefore the Pauls track down in secret the leaders of the Grand Camorra, and assassinate them, or bring them to the fearful hooded tribunal which utters the dread verdict of the Beati Paoli. And when once the Beati Paoli have decreed a man's death--all over. Ah bellissimo, bellissimo! Why don't I come on Friday? It seems to me a queer moral for the urchins thick-packed and gazing at the drop scene. They are all males: urchins or men. I ask my fat friend why there are no women--no girls. Ah, he says, the theatre is so small. But, I say, if there is room for all the boys and men, there is the same room for girls and women. Oh no--not in this small theatre. Besides this is nothing for women. Not that there is anything improper, he hastens to add. Not at all. But what should women and girls be doing at the marionette show? It was an affair for males. I agreed with him really, and was thankful we hadn't a lot of smirking twitching girls and lasses in the audience. This male audience was so tense and pure in its attention. But hist! the play is going to begin. A lad is grinding a broken street-piano under the stage. The padrone yells _Silenzio!_ with a roar, and reaching over, pokes obstreperous boys with his long fennel-stalk, like a beadle in church. When the curtain rises the piano stops, and there is dead silence. On swings a knight, glittering, marching with that curious hippety lilt, and gazing round with fixed and martial eyes. He begins the prologue, telling us where we are. And dramatically he waves his sword and stamps his foot, and wonderfully sounds his male, martial, rather husky voice. Then the Paladins, his companions who are to accompany him, swing one by one onto the stage, till they are five in all, handsome knights, including the Babylonian Princess and the Knight of Britain. They stand in a handsome, glittering line. And then comes Merlin in his red robe. Merlin has a bright, fair, rather chubby face and blue eyes, and seems to typify the northern intelligence. He now tells them, in many words, how to proceed and what is to be done. So then, the glittering knights are ready. Are they ready? Rinaldo flourishes his sword with the wonderful cry "Andiamo!" let us go--and the others respond: "Andiamo". Splendid word. The first enemy were the knights of Spain, in red kirtles and half turbans. With these a terrible fight. First of all rushes in the Knight of Britain. He is the boaster, who always in words, does everything. But in fact, poor knight of Britain, he falls lamed. The four Paladins have stood shoulder to shoulder, glittering, watching the fray. Forth now steps another knight, and the fight recommences. Terrible is the smacking of swords, terrible the gasps from behind the dropped visors. Till at last the knight of Spain falls--and the Paladin stands with his foot on the dead. Then loud acclamations from the Paladins, and yells of joy from the audience. "_Silenzio!_" yells the padrone, flourishing the fennel-stalk. Dead silence, and the story goes on. The Knight of Britain of course claims to have slain the foe: and the audience faintly, jeeringly hisses. "He's always the boaster, and he never does anything, the Knight of Britain," whispers my fat friend. He has forgotten my nationality. I wonder if the Knight of Britain is pure tradition, or if a political touch of today has crept in. However, this fray is over--Merlin comes to advise for the next move. And are we ready? We are ready. _Andiamo!_ Again the word is yelled out, and they set off. At first one is all engaged watching the figures: their brilliance, their blank, martial stare, their sudden, angular, gestures. There is something extremely suggestive in them. How much better they fit the old legend-tales than living people would do. Nay, if we are going to have human beings on the stage, they should be masked and disguised. For in fact drama is enacted by symbolic creatures formed out of human consciousness: puppets if you like: but not human _individuals_. Our stage is all wrong, so boring in its personality. Gradually, however, I found that my eyes were of minor importance. Gradually it was the voice that gained hold of the blood. It is a strong, rather husky, male voice that acts direct on the blood, not on the mind. Again the old male Adam began to stir at the roots of my soul. Again the old, first-hand indifference, the rich, untamed male blood rocked down my veins. What does one care? What does one care for precept and mental dictation? Is there not the massive brilliant, out-flinging recklessness in the male soul, summed up in the sudden word: _Andiamo!_ Andiamo! Let us go on. Andiamo!--let us go hell knows where, but let us go on. The splendid recklessness and passion that knows no precept and no school-teacher, whose very molten spontaneity is its own guide. I loved the voices of the Paladins--Rinaldo's voice, and Orlando's voice: the voice of men once more, men who are not to be tutored. To be sure there was Merlin making his long speeches in rather a chuntering, prosy tone. But who was he? Was he a Paladin and a splendour? Not he. A long-gowned chunterer. It is the reckless blood which achieves all, the piff-piff-piffing of the mental and moral intelligence is but a subsidiary help, a mere instrument. The dragon was splendid: I have seen dragons in Wagner, at Covent Garden and at the Prinz-Regenten Theater in Munich, and they were ridiculous. But this dragon simply frightened me, with his leaping and twisting. And when he seized the knight by the leg, my blood ran cold. With smoke and sulphur leaps in Beelzebub. But he is merely the servant of the great old witch. He is black and grinning, and he flourishes his posterior and his tail. But he is curiously inefficacious: a sort of lackey of wicked powers. The old witch with her grey hair and staring eyes succeeds in being ghastly. With just a touch, she would be a tall, benevolent old lady. But listen to her. Hear her horrible female voice with its scraping yells of evil lustfulness. Yes, she fills me with horror. And I am staggered to find how I believe in her as _the_ evil principle. Beelzebub, poor devil, is only one of her instruments. It is her old, horrible, grinning female soul which locks up the heroes, and which sends forth the awful and almost omnipotent malevolence. This old, ghastly woman-spirit is the very core of mischief. And I felt my heart getting as hot against her as the hearts of the lads in the audience were. Red, deep hate I felt of that symbolic old ghoul-female. Poor male Beelzebub is her loutish slave. And it takes all Merlin's bright-faced intelligence, and all the surging hot urgency of the Paladins, to conquer her. She will never be finally destroyed--she will never finally die, till her statue, which is immured in the vaults of the castle, is burned.--Oh, it was a very psychoanalytic performance altogether, and one could give a very good Freudian analysis of it.--But behold this image of the witch: this white, submerged _idea_ of woman which rules from the deeps of the unconscious. Behold, the reckless, untamable male knights will do for it. As the statue goes up in flame--it is only paper over wires--the audience yells! And yells again. And would God the symbolic act were really achieved. It is only little boys who yell. Men merely smile at the trick. They know well enough the white image endures. So it is over. The knights look at us once more. Orlando, hero of heroes, has a slight inward cast of the eyes. This gives him that look of almost fierce good-nature which these people adore: the look of a man who does not think, but whose heart is all the time red hot with burning, generous blood-passion. This is what they adore. So my knights go. They all have wonderful faces, and are so splendidly glittering and male. I am sorry they will be laid in a box now. There is a great gasp of relief. The piano starts its lame rattle. Somebody looking round laughs. And we all look round. And seated on the top of the ticket office is a fat, solemn urchin of two or three years, hands folded over his stomach, his forehead big and blank, like some queer little Buddha. The audience laughs with that southern sympathy: physical sympathy: that is what they love to feel and to arouse. But there is a little after-scene: in front of the drop-curtain jerks out a little fat flat caricature of a Neapolitan, and from the opposite side jerks the tall caricature of a Sicilian. They jerk towards one another and bump into one another with a smack. And smack goes the Neapolitan, down on his posterior. And the boys howl with joy. It is the eternal collision between the two peoples, Neapolitan and Sicilian. Now goes on a lot of fooling between the two clowns, in the two dialects. Alas, I can hardly understand anything at all. But it sounds comic, and looks very funny. The Neapolitan of course gets most of the knocks. And there seems to be no indecency at all--unless once.--The boys howl and rock with joy, and no one says Silenzio! But it is over. All is over. The theatre empties in a moment. And I shake hands with my fat neighbour, affectionately, and in the right spirit. Truly I loved them all in the theatre: the generous, hot southern blood, so subtle and spontaneous, that asks for blood contact, not for mental communion or spirit sympathy. I was sorry to leave them. FINIS. 
9497	----	TWILIGHT IN ITALY By D. H. Lawrence 1916 CONTENTS THE CRUCIFIX ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS ON THE LAGO DI GARDA 1 _The Spinner and the Monks_ 2 _The Lemon Gardens_ 3 _The Theatre_ 4 _San Gaudenzio_ 5 _The Dance_ 6 _Il Duro_ 7 _John_ ITALIANS IN EXILE THE RETURN JOURNEY _The Crucifix Across the Mountains_ The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany. And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid. Maybe a certain Grössenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature, how much simpler it would all be. The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South. That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But still it is there, and its signs are standing. The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it. As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country, remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial processions. Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of sentimentalism. The soul ignores it. But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointed hood. I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly, invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ. It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down. Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent, carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into the shed, working silent in the soaking rain. The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy, pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve one's arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill, hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with the burden. It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat, a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape. For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains, there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water. And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must needs live under the radiance of his own negation. There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened, the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large, full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off. Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air. Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from the rest of his fellows. Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt. It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic utterance. For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it is not separated, it is kept submerged. At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being. The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal, unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is the eternal issue. Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is all formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope nor becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless, and changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue, which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty and finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant. It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture of wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One realizes with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful, complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead. It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death at once. It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection in the incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark, subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark, powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme. Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand; and he meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him. No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak of red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a wistfulness about him, as if he knew that the whole of things was too much for him. There was no solution, either, in death. Death did not give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not cease to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What is, is. The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be,' this may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is not a question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be or not to be. To persist or not to persist, that is not the question; neither is it to endure or not to endure. The issue, is it eternal not-being? If not, what, then, is being? For overhead the eternal radiance of the snow gleams unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of all life and is unchanged, the issue is bright and immortal, the snowy not-being. What, then, is being? As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the culmination and the southern slope, the influence of the educated world is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in spirit, as yet unattached. Its crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel of the truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white, they are larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later, newer phase, more introspective and self-conscious. But still they are genuine expressions of the people's soul. Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there in a district. In the Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes by one sculptor. He is no longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is an artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is consciously trying to convey a _feeling_, he is no longer striving awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact. The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise. The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up. So that one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below the path, where the pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded villages, in the cold gloom of the pass hangs the large, pale Christ. He is larger than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight of the full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the dead, heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall under its own weight. It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness, and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being, over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion. The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is almost like a constant pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes up the narrow path in the side of the gorge, cringes his sturdy cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the large, pale Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not look up, but keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in the gloom, climbing the steep path after his horses, and the large white Christ hangs extended above. The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy. It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead, the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly One, He is Death incarnate. And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax, his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death, and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain. And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further on, at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was hanging almost lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But in this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death, complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism in its completeness of leaving off. Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain, accident, and sudden death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man, there is nailed up a little memorial of the event, in propitiation of the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist in water, drowning in full stream, his arms in the air. The little painting in its wooden frame is nailed to the tree, the spot is sacred to the accident. Again, another little crude picture fastened to a rock: a tree, falling on a man's leg, smashes it like a stalk, while the blood flies up. Always there is the strange ejaculation of anguish and fear, perpetuated in the little paintings nailed up in the place of the disaster. This is the worship, then, the worship of death and the approaches to death, physical violence, and pain. There is something crude and sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting, turning back along the course of blood by which we have come. Turning the ridge on the great road to the south, the imperial road to Rome, a decisive change takes place. The Christs have been taking on various different characters, all of them more or less realistically conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and brushed and foppish on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred saint. The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention. The elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost imagine the young man had taken up this striking and original position to create a delightful sensation among the ladies. It is quite in the Viennese spirit. There is something brave and keen in it, too. The individual pride of body triumphs over every difficulty in the situation. The pride and satisfaction in the clean, elegant form, the perfectly trimmed hair, the exquisite bearing, are more important than the fact of death or pain. This may be foolish, it is at the same time admirable. But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is to become weak and sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces and roll back their eyes very piteously, in the approved Guido Reni fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are looking to heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others again are beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real, satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit. Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very significant. They are as null as the Christs we see represented in England, just vulgar nothingness. But these figures have gashes of red, a red paint of blood, which is sensational. Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes. There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure, and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of striped red. They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains; a blue and white ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way to St Jakob. So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be. And the red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as the red upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood. I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and dear to me, among all this violence of representation. '_Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle._' Why should it please me so that his cloak is of red flannel? In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the railway, there is a very big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a chapel built in the baroque manner, florid pink and cream outside, with opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling sensational Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He sits sideways, as if the extremity were over, finished, the agitation done with, only the result of the experience remaining. There is some blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather hulked. But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over the hulked, crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of which the body has been killed, is beyond all expectation horrible. The eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they seem to see only their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils, glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished, hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible. He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral with utter hatred. It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque, pink-washed shrine in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking are all flowers and romance, like the picture in the Tate Gallery. 'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of pristine loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by torture and death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical violence, the eyes still looking back bloodshot in consummate hate and misery. The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror. After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or less tainted and vulgar. Only high up, where the crucifix becomes smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old beauty and religion. Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till in the snows it stands out like a post, or a thick arrow stuck barb upwards. The crucifix itself is a small thing under the pointed hood, the barb of the arrow. The snow blows under the tiny shed, upon the little, exposed Christ. All round is the solid whiteness of snow, the awful curves and concaves of pure whiteness of the mountain top, the hollow whiteness between the peaks, where the path crosses the high, extreme ridge of the pass. And here stands the last crucifix, half buried, small and tufted with snow. The guides tramp slowly, heavily past, not observing the presence of the symbol, making no salute. Further down, every mountain peasant lifted his hat. But the guide tramps by without concern. His is a professional importance now. On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a fallen Christus. I was hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind which almost took away my consciousness, and I was looking up at the gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed like blades immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It leaned on the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the upper air. The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with a thicket of lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at the foot of the post was the fallen Christ, armless, who had tumbled down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the desire to convey a religious truth, not a sensational experience. The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they hung on their nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these arms dangled from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles, carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would come and take the broken thing away, and for what purpose. _On the Lago di Garda_ _1_ THE SPINNER AND THE MONKS The Holy Spirit is a Dove, or an Eagle. In the Old Testament it was an Eagle; in the New Testament it is a Dove. And there are, standing over the Christian world, the Churches of the Dove and the Churches of the Eagle. There are, moreover, the Churches which do not belong to the Holy Spirit at all, but which are built to pure fancy and logic; such as the Wren Churches in London. The Churches of the Dove are shy and hidden: they nestle among trees, and their bells sound in the mellowness of Sunday; or they are gathered into a silence of their own in the very midst of the town, so that one passes them by without observing them; they are as if invisible, offering no resistance to the storming of the traffic. But the Churches of the Eagle stand high, with their heads to the skies, as if they challenged the world below. They are the Churches of the Spirit of David, and their bells ring passionately, imperiously, falling on the subservient world below. The Church of San Francesco was a Church of the Dove. I passed it several times in the dark, silent little square, without knowing it was a church. Its pink walls were blind, windowless, unnoticeable, it gave no sign, unless one caught sight of the tan curtain hanging in the door, and the slit of darkness beneath. Yet it was the chief church of the village. But the Church of San Tommaso perched over the village. Coming down the cobbled, submerged street, many a time I looked up between the houses and saw the thin old church standing above in the light, as if it perched on the house-roofs. Its thin grey neck was held up stiffly, beyond was a vision of dark foliage, and the high hillside. I saw it often, and yet for a long time it never occurred to me that it actually existed. It was like a vision, a thing one does not expect to come close to. It was there standing away upon the house-tops, against a glamour of foliaged hillside. I was submerged in the village, on the uneven, cobbled street, between old high walls and cavernous shops and the houses with flights of steps. For a long time I knew how the day went, by the imperious clangour of midday and evening bells striking down upon the houses and the edge of the lake. Yet it did not occur to me to ask where these bells rang. Till at last my everyday trance was broken in upon, and I knew the ringing of the Church of San Tommaso. The church became a living connexion with me. So I set out to find it, I wanted to go to it. It was very near. I could see it from the piazza by the lake. And the village itself had only a few hundreds of inhabitants. The church must be within a stone's throw. Yet I could not find it. I went out of the back door of the house, into the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. I was of another element. The Italian people are called 'Children of the Sun'. They might better be called 'Children of the Shadow'. Their souls are dark and nocturnal. If they are to be easy, they must be able to hide, to be hidden in lairs and caves of darkness. Going through these tiny chaotic backways of the village was like venturing through the labyrinth made by furtive creatures, who watched from out of another element. And I was pale, and clear, and evanescent, like the light, and they were dark, and close, and constant, like the shadow. So I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage before me. And there above me I saw the thin, stiff neck of old San Tommaso, grey and pale in the sun. Yet I could not get up to the church, I found myself again on the piazza. Another day, however, I found a broken staircase, where weeds grew in the gaps the steps had made in falling, and maidenhair hung on the darker side of the wall. I went up unwillingly, because the Italians used this old staircase as a privy, as they will any deep side-passage. But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as by a miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the tremendous sunshine. It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village, and beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my face and breast, the clear, luminous snow of the mountain across the lake, level with me apparently, though really much above. I was in the skies now, looking down from my square terrace of cobbled pavement, that was worn like the threshold of the ancient church. Round the terrace ran a low, broad wall, the coping of the upper heaven where I had climbed. There was a blood-red sail like a butterfly breathing down on the blue water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs. It always remains to me that San Tommaso and its terrace hang suspended above the village, like the lowest step of heaven, of Jacob's ladder. Behind, the land rises in a high sweep. But the terrace of San Tommaso is let down from heaven, and does not touch the earth. I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank. I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distil me into itself. Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great, pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky. Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there. Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down and stayed in a crevice. Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider. She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish, rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the coarse, blackish worsted she was making. All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old, natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the bobbin spun swiftly. Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a sun-worn stone. 'You are spinning,' I said to her. Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention. 'Yes,' she said. She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was slightly more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the motionless caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand of fleece near her breast. 'That is an old way of spinning,' I said. 'What?' She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens. But she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in her turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was my unaccustomed Italian. 'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated. 'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of speech, that was all. She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment. That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there was anything in the universe except _her_ universe. In her universe I was a stranger, a foreign _signore_. That I had a world of my own, other than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care. So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky of our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos, then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But the macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am not. So that there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The universe is bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that which is not me. If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by 'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not. The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had never seen. But what of that! There were parts of her own body which she had never seen, which physiologically she could never see. They were none the less her own because she had never seen them. The lands she had not seen were corporate parts of her own living body, the knowledge she had not attained was only the hidden knowledge of her own self. She _was_ the substance of the knowledge, whether she had the knowledge in her mind or not. There was nothing which was not herself, ultimately. Even the man, the male, was part of herself. He was the mobile, separate part, but he was none the less herself because he was sometimes severed from her. If every apple in the world were cut in two, the apple would not be changed. The reality is the apple, which is just the same in the half-apple as in the whole. And she, the old spinning-woman, was the apple, eternal, unchangeable, whole even in her partiality. It was this which gave the wonderful clear unconsciousness to her eyes. How could she be conscious of herself when all was herself? She was talking to me of a sheep that had died, but I could not understand because of her dialect. It never occurred to her that I could not understand. She only thought me different, stupid. And she talked on. The ewes had lived under the house, and a part was divided off for the he-goat, because the other people brought their she-goats to be covered by the he-goat. But how the ewe came to die I could not make out. Her fingers worked away all the time in a little, half-fretful movement, yet spontaneous as butterflies leaping here and there. She chattered rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. Yet not a feature moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies. Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to dominate me. Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free. She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless. Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to her own world in me. So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence. Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes. 'How long has it taken you to do that much?' I asked. She waited a minute, glanced at her bobbin. 'This much? I don't know. A day or two.' 'But you do it quickly.' She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated. She had cut off her consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away, taking the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was between the walls, climbing upwards, hidden. The schoolmistress had told me I should find snowdrops behind San Tommaso. If she had not asserted such confident knowledge I should have doubted her translation of _perce-neige_. She meant Christmas roses all the while. However, I went looking for snowdrops. The walls broke down suddenly, and I was out in a grassy olive orchard, following a track beside pieces of fallen overgrown masonry. So I came to skirt the brink of a steep little gorge, at the bottom of which a stream was rushing down its steep slant to the lake. Here I stood to look for my snowdrops. The grassy, rocky bank went down steep from my feet. I heard water tittle-tattling away in deep shadow below. There were pale flecks in the dimness, but these, I knew, were primroses. So I scrambled down. Looking up, out of the heavy shadow that lay in the cleft, I could see, right in the sky, grey rocks shining transcendent in the pure empyrean. 'Are they so far up?' I thought. I did not dare to say, 'Am I so far down?' But I was uneasy. Nevertheless it was a lovely place, in the cold shadow, complete; when one forgot the shining rocks far above, it was a complete, shadowless world of shadow. Primroses were everywhere in nests of pale bloom upon the dark, steep face of the cleft, and tongues of fern hanging out, and here and there under the rods and twigs of bushes were tufts of wrecked Christmas roses, nearly over, but still, in the coldest corners, the lovely buds like handfuls of snow. There had been such crowded sumptuous tufts of Christmas roses everywhere in the stream-gullies, during the shadow of winter, that these few remaining flowers were hardly noticeable. I gathered instead the primroses, that smelled of earth and of the weather. There were no snowdrops. I had found the day before a bank of crocuses, pale, fragile, lilac-coloured flowers with dark veins, pricking up keenly like myriad little lilac-coloured flames among the grass, under the olive trees. And I wanted very much to find the snowdrops hanging in the gloom. But there were not any. I gathered a handful of primroses, then I climbed suddenly, quickly out of the deep watercourse, anxious to get back to the sunshine before the evening fell. Up above I saw the olive trees in the sunny golden grass, and sunlit grey rocks immensely high up. I was afraid lest the evening would fall whilst I was groping about like an otter in the damp and the darkness, that the day of sunshine would be over. Soon I was up in the sunshine again, on the turf under the olive trees, reassured. It was the upper world of glowing light, and I was safe again. All the olives were gathered, and the mills were going night and day, making a great, acrid scent of olive oil in preparation, by the lake. The little stream rattled down. A mule driver 'Hued!' to his mules on the Strada Vecchia. High up, on the Strada Nuova, the beautiful, new, military high-road, which winds with beautiful curves up the mountain-side, crossing the same stream several times in clear-leaping bridges, travelling cut out of sheer slope high above the lake, winding beautifully and gracefully forward to the Austrian frontier, where it ends: high up on the lovely swinging road, in the strong evening sunshine, I saw a bullock wagon moving like a vision, though the clanking of the wagon and the crack of the bullock whip responded close in my ears. Everything was clear and sun-coloured up there, clear-grey rocks partaking of the sky, tawny grass and scrub, browny-green spires of cypresses, and then the mist of grey-green olives fuming down to the lake-side. There was no shadow, only clear sun-substance built up to the sky, a bullock wagon moving slowly in the high sunlight, along the uppermost terrace of the military road. It sat in the warm stillness of the transcendent afternoon. The four o'clock steamer was creeping down the lake from the Austrian end, creeping under the cliffs. Far away, the Verona side, beyond the Island, lay fused in dim gold. The mountain opposite was so still, that my heart seemed to fade in its beating as if it too would be still. All was perfectly still, pure substance. The little steamer on the floor of the world below, the mules down the road cast no shadow. They too were pure sun-substance travelling on the surface of the sun-made world. A cricket hopped near me. Then I remembered that it was Saturday afternoon, when a strange suspension comes over the world. And then, just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks, their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their feet strode from under their skirts. It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended, that I felt them talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their sides, hidden in the long sleeves, and the skirts of their robes. They did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could see them. Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass, the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards, talking, in the first undershadow. And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded. And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity. The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the neutral, shadowless light of shadow. Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them, they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward and forward down the line of neutrality. Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above the twilight. But in the monks it was not ecstasy, in them it was neutrality, the under earth. Transcendent, above the shadowed, twilit earth was the rosy snow of ecstasy. But spreading far over us, down below, was the neutrality of the twilight, of the monks. The flesh neutralizing the spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh, the law of the average asserted, this was the monks as they paced backward and forward. The moon climbed higher, away from the snowy, fading ridge, she became gradually herself. Between the roots of the olive tree was a rosy-tipped daisy just going to sleep. I gathered it and put it among the frail, moony little bunch of primroses, so that its sleep should warm the rest. Also I put in some little periwinkles, that were very blue, reminding me of the eyes of the old woman. The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb, quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake. My little old woman was gone. She, all day-sunshine, would have none of the moon. Always she must live like a bird, looking down on all the world at once, so that it lay all subsidiary to herself, herself the wakeful consciousness hovering over the world like a hawk, like a sleep of wakefulness. And, like a bird, she went to sleep as the shadows came. She did not know the yielding up of the senses and the possession of the unknown, through the senses, which happens under a superb moon. The all-glorious sun knows none of these yieldings up. He takes his way. And the daisies at once go to sleep. And the soul of the old spinning-woman also closed up at sunset, the rest was a sleep, a cessation. It is all so strange and varied: the dark-skinned Italians ecstatic in the night and the moon, the blue-eyed old woman ecstatic in the busy sunshine, the monks in the garden below, who are supposed to unite both, passing only in the neutrality of the average. Where, then, is the meeting-point: where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the heavens, like Eurydice in the arms of Orpheus, or Persephone embraced by Pluto? Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range of loneliness or solitude? _2_ THE LEMON GARDENS The padrone came just as we were drinking coffee after dinner. It was two o'clock, because the steamer going down the lake to Desenzano had bustled through the sunshine, and the rocking of the water still made lights that danced up and down upon the wall among the shadows by the piano. The signore was very apologetic. I found him bowing in the hall, cap in one hand, a slip of paper in the other, protesting eagerly, in broken French, against disturbing me. He is a little, shrivelled man, with close-cropped grey hair on his skull, and a protruding jaw, which, with his gesticulations, always makes me think of an ancient, aristocratic monkey. The signore is a gentleman, and the last, shrivelled representative of his race. His only outstanding quality, according to the villagers, is his avarice. _'Mais--mais, monsieur--je crains que--que--que je vous dérange--'_ He spreads wide his hands and bows, looking up at me with implicit brown eyes, so ageless in his wrinkled, monkey's face, like onyx. He loves to speak French, because then he feels grand. He has a queer, naïve, ancient passion to be grand. As the remains of an impoverished family, he is not much better than a well-to-do peasant. But the old spirit is eager and pathetic in him. He loves to speak French to me. He holds his chin and waits, in his anxiety for the phrase to come. Then it stammers forth, a little rush, ending in Italian. But his pride is all on edge: we must continue in French. The hall is cold, yet he will not come into the large room. This is not a courtesy visit. He is not here in his quality of gentleman. He is only an anxious villager. '_Voyez, monsieur--cet--cet--qu'est-ce que--qu'est-ce que veut dire cet--cela?_' He shows me the paper. It is an old scrap of print, the picture of an American patent door-spring, with directions: 'Fasten the spring either end up. Wind it up. Never unwind.' It is laconic and American. The signore watches me anxiously, waiting, holding his chin. He is afraid he ought to understand my English. I stutter off into French, confounded by the laconic phrases of the directions. Nevertheless, I make it clear what the paper says. He cannot believe me. It must say something else as well. He has not done anything contrary to these directions. He is most distressed. '_Mais, monsieur, la porte--la porte--elle ferme_ pas--_elle s'ouvre_--' He skipped to the door and showed me the whole tragic mystery. The door, it is shut--_ecco_! He releases the catch, and pouf!--she flies open. She flies _open_. It is quite final. The brown, expressionless, ageless eyes, that remind me of a monkey's, or of onyx, wait for me. I feel the responsibility devolve upon me. I am anxious. 'Allow me,' I said, 'to come and look at the door.' I feel uncomfortably like Sherlock Holmes. The padrone protests--_non, monsieur, non, cela vous dérange_--that he only wanted me to translate the words, he does not want to disturb me. Nevertheless, we go. I feel I have the honour of mechanical England in my hands. The Casa di Paoli is quite a splendid place. It is large, pink and cream, rising up to a square tower in the centre, throwing off a painted loggia at either extreme of the façade. It stands a little way back from the road, just above the lake, and grass grows on the bay of cobbled pavement in front. When at night the moon shines full on this pale façade, the theatre is far outdone in staginess. The hall is spacious and beautiful, with great glass doors at either end, through which shine the courtyards where bamboos fray the sunlight and geraniums glare red. The floor is of soft red tiles, oiled and polished like glass, the walls are washed grey-white, the ceiling is painted with pink roses and birds. This is half-way between the outer world and the interior world, it partakes of both. The other rooms are dark and ugly. There is no mistake about their being interior. They are like furnished vaults. The red-tiled, polished floor in the drawing-room seems cold and clammy, the carved, cold furniture stands in its tomb, the air has been darkened and starved to death, it is perished. Outside, the sunshine runs like birds singing. Up above, the grey rocks build the sun-substance in heaven, San Tommaso guards the terrace. But inside here is the immemorial shadow. Again I had to think of the Italian soul, how it is dark, cleaving to the eternal night. It seems to have become so, at the Renaissance, after the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of a strong, primitive, animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and the abstraction of Christ. This brought about by itself a great sense of completeness. The two halves were joined by the effort towards the one as yet unrealized. There was a triumphant joy in the Whole. But the movement all the time was in one direction, towards the elimination of the flesh. Man wanted more and more to become purely free and abstract. Pure freedom was in pure abstraction. The Word was absolute. When man became as the Word, a pure law, then he was free. But when this conclusion was reached, the movement broke. Already Botticelli painted Aphrodite, queen of the senses, supreme along with Mary, Queen of Heaven. And Michelangelo suddenly turned back on the whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and god-like, in the oneness of the flesh, in the oneness of our physical being, we are one with God, with the Father. God the Father created man in the flesh, in His own image. Michelangelo swung right back to the old Mosaic position. Christ did not exist. To Michelangelo there was no salvation in the spirit. There was God the Father, the Begetter, the Author of all flesh. And there was the inexorable law of the flesh, the Last Judgement, the fall of the immortal flesh into Hell. This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and does not create. This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense, white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like, destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance. It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position, of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation. They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy. The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid, electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat. Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing to the ecstasy of sensation, which is the end in itself. There is the I, always the I. And the mind is submerged, overcome. But the senses are superbly arrogant. The senses are the absolute, the god-like. For I can never have another man's senses. These are me, my senses absolutely me. And all that is can only come to me through my senses. So that all is me, and is administered unto me. The rest, that is not me, is nothing, it is something which is nothing. So the Italian, through centuries, has avoided our Northern purposive industry, because it has seemed to him a form of nothingness. It is the spirit of the tiger. The tiger is the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute. This is the Tiger, tiger burning bright, In the forests of the night of Blake. It does indeed burn within the darkness. But the _essential_ fate, of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy. It is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed. This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh. Like the tiger in the night, I devour all flesh, I drink all blood, until this fuel blazes up in me to the consummate fire of the Infinite. In the ecstacy I am Infinite, I become again the great Whole, I am a flame of the One White Flame which is the Infinite, the Eternal, the Originator, the Creator, the Everlasting God. In the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite. This is the way of the tiger; the tiger is supreme. His head is flattened as if there were some great weight on the hard skull, pressing, pressing, pressing the mind into a stone, pressing it down under the blood, to serve the blood. It is the subjugate instrument of the blood. The will lies above the loins, as it were at the base of the spinal column, there is the living will, the living mind of the tiger, there in the slender loins. That is the node, there in the spinal cord. So the Italian, so the soldier. This is the spirit of the soldier. He, too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of the spine, his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life into his own life, always his own life supreme, till the ecstasy burst into the white, eternal flame, the Infinite, the Flame of the Infinite. Then he is satisfied, he has been consummated in the Infinite. This is the true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses. This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which is nothingness to it. The eyes of the tiger cannot see, except with the light from within itself, by the light of its own desire. Its own white, cold light is so fierce that the other warm light of day is outshone, it is not, it does not exist. So the white eyes of the tiger gleam to a point of concentrated vision, upon that which does not exist. Hence its terrifying sightlessness. The something which I know I am is hollow space to its vision, offers no resistance to the tiger's looking. It can only see of me that which it knows I am, a scent, a resistance, a voluptuous solid, a struggling warm violence that it holds overcome, a running of hot blood between its Jaws, a delicious pang of live flesh in the mouth. This it sees. The rest is not. And what is the rest, that which is-not the tiger, that which the tiger is-not? What is this? What is that which parted ways with the terrific eagle-like angel of the senses at the Renaissance? The Italians said, 'We are one in the Father: we will go back.' The Northern races said, 'We are one in Christ: we will go on.' What _is_ the consummation in Christ? Man knows satisfaction when he surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does it come to pass in Christ? It is not the mystic ecstasy. The mystic ecstasy is a special sensual ecstasy, it is the senses satisfying themselves with a self-created object. It is self-projection into the self, the sensuous self satisfied in a projected self. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is this Infinite into which we may be consummated, then, if we are poor in spirit or persecuted for righteousness' sake. Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. To be perfect, to be one with God, to be infinite and eternal, what shall we do? We must turn the other cheek, and love our enemies. Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours. What then, if a man come to me with a sword, to kill me, and I do not resist him, but suffer his sword and the death from his sword, what am I? Am I greater than he, am I stronger than he? Do I know a consummation in the Infinite, I, the prey, beyond the tiger who devours me? By my non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena. I can rob the tiger of his ecstasy, his consummation, his very __my non-resistance. In my non-resistance the tiger is infinitely destroyed. But I, what am I? 'Be ye therefore perfect.' Wherein am I perfect in this submission? Is there an affirmation, behind my negation, other than the tiger's affirmation of his own glorious infinity? What is the Oneness to which I subscribe, I who offer no resistance in the flesh? Have I only the negative ecstasy of being devoured, of becoming thus part of the Lord, the Great Moloch, the superb and terrible God? I have this also, this subject ecstasy of consummation. But is there nothing else? The Word of the tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me. In all the multitude of the others is God, and this is the great God, greater than the God which is Me. God is that which is Not-Me. And this is the Christian truth, a truth complementary to the pagan affirmation: 'God is that which is Me.' God is that which is Not-Me. In realizing the Not-Me I am consummated, I become infinite. In turning the other cheek I submit to God who is greater than I am, other than I am, who is in that which is not me. This is the supreme consummation. To achieve this consummation I love my neighbour as myself. My neighbour is all that is not me. And if I love all this, have I not become one with the Whole, is not my consummation complete, am I not one with God, have I not achieved the Infinite? After the Renaissance the Northern races continued forward to put into practice this religious belief in the God which is Not-Me. Even the idea of the saving of the soul was really negative: it was a question of escaping damnation. The Puritans made the last great attack on the God who is Me. When they beheaded Charles the First, the king by Divine Right, they destroyed, symbolically, for ever, the supremacy of the Me who am the image of God, the Me of the flesh, of the senses, Me, the tiger burning bright, me the king, the Lord, the aristocrat, me who am divine because I am the body of God. After the Puritans, we have been gathering data for the God who is not-me. When Pope said 'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man,' he was stating the proposition: A man is right, he is consummated, when he is seeking to know Man, the great abstract; and the method of knowledge is by the analysis, which is the destruction, of the Self. The proposition up to that time was, a man is the epitome of the universe. He has only to express himself, to fulfil his desires, to satisfy his supreme senses. Now the change has come to pass. The individual man is a limited being, finite in himself. Yet he is capable of apprehending that which is not himself. 'The proper study of mankind is Man.' This is another way of saying, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Which means, a man is consummated in his knowledge of that which is not himself, the abstract Man. Therefore the consummation lies in seeking that other, in knowing that other. Whereas the Stuart proposition was: 'A man is consummated in expressing his own Self.' The new spirit developed into the empirical and ideal systems of philosophy. Everything that is, is consciousness. And in every man's consciousness, Man is great and illimitable, whilst the individual is small and fragmentary. Therefore the individual must sink himself in the great whole of Mankind. This is the spirituality of Shelley, the perfectibility of man. This is the way in which we fulfil the commandment, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' This is Saint Paul's, 'Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.' When a man knows everything and understands everything, then he will be perfect, and life will be blessed. He is capable of knowing everything and understanding everything. Hence he is justified in his hope of infinite freedom and blessedness. The great inspiration of the new religion was the inspiration of freedom. When I have submerged or distilled away my concrete body and my limited desires, when I am like the skylark dissolved in the sky yet filling heaven and earth with song, then I am perfect, consummated in the Infinite. When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty, I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self. It was this religious belief which expressed itself in science. Science was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force. Still we continue to worship that which is not-me, the Selfless world, though we would fain bring in the Self to help us. We are shouting the Shakespearean advice to warriors: 'Then simulate the action of the tiger.' We are trying to become again the tiger, the supreme, imperial, warlike Self. At the same time our ideal is the selfless world of equity. We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it works for all humanity alike. At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell. The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars, lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.' Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring, it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer and doves, or the other tigers. Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We try to say, 'The tiger is the lamb and the lamb is the tiger.' Which is nil, nihil, nought. The padrone took me into a small room almost contained in the thickness of the wall. There the Signora's dark eyes glared with surprise and agitation, seeing me intrude. She is younger than the Signore, a mere village tradesman's daughter, and, alas, childless. It was quite true, the door stood open. Madame put down the screw-driver and drew herself erect. Her eyes were a flame of excitement. This question of a door-spring that made the door fly open when it should make it close roused a vivid spark in her soul. It was she who was wrestling with the angel of mechanism. She was about forty years old, and flame-like and fierily sad. I think she did not know she was sad. But her heart was eaten by some impotence in her life. She subdued her flame of life to the little padrone. He was strange and static, scarcely human, ageless, like a monkey. She supported him with her flame, supported his static, ancient, beautiful form, kept it intact. But she did not believe in him. Now, the Signora Gemma held her husband together whilst he undid the screw that fixed the spring. If they had been alone, she would have done it, pretending to be under his direction. But since I was there, he did it himself; a grey, shaky, highly-bred little gentleman, standing on a chair with a long screw-driver, whilst his wife stood behind him, her hands half-raised to catch him if he should fall. Yet he was strangely absolute, with a strange, intact force in his breeding. They had merely adjusted the strong spring to the shut door, and stretched it slightly in fastening it to the door-jamb, so that it drew together the moment the latch was released, and the door flew open. We soon made it right. There was a moment of anxiety, the screw was fixed. And the door swung to. They were delighted. The Signora Gemma, who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself. '_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice: '_Ecco!_' Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut with a bang. '_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but triumphant. I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all exclaimed with joy. Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink. He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard. It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There were one or two orange-tubs in the light. Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby. It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums. She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly, making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in the sunshine. I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly. 'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice. It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined. The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to us, not acknowledging us, except formally. The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry. The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her old husband. 'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a stranger.' 'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always cries at the men.' She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified. The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant. He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison d'être_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had no _raison d'être_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing. And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness. I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us, this phallic worship. To the Italian the phallus is the symbol of individual creative immortality, to each man his own Godhead. The child is but the evidence of the Godhead. And this is why the Italian is attractive, supple, and beautiful, because he worships the Godhead in the flesh. We envy him, we feel pale and insignificant beside him. Yet at the same time we feel superior to him, as if he were a child and we adult. Wherein are we superior? Only because we went beyond the phallus in the search of the Godhead, the creative origin. And we found the physical forces and the secrets of science. We have exalted Man far above the man who is in each one of us. Our aim is a perfect humanity, a perfect and equable human consciousness, selfless. And we obtain it in the subjection, reduction, analysis, and destruction of the Self. So on we go, active in science and mechanics, and social reform. But we have exhausted ourselves in the process. We have found great treasures, and we are now impotent to use them. So we have said: 'What good are these treasures, they are vulgar nothings.' We have said: 'Let us go back from this adventuring, let us enjoy our own flesh, like the Italian.' But our habit of life, our very constitution, prevents our being quite like the Italian. The phallus will never serve us as a Godhead, because we do not believe in it: no Northern race does. Therefore, either we set ourselves to serve our children, calling them 'the future', or else we turn perverse and destructive, give ourselves joy in the destruction of the flesh. The children are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future. Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future, they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living, growing truth, in advancing fulfilment. But it is no good. Whatever we do, it is within the greater will towards self-reduction and a perfect society, analysis on the one hand, and mechanical construction on the other. This will dominates us as a whole, and until the whole breaks down, the will must persist. So that now, continuing in the old, splendid will for a perfect selfless humanity, we have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves, we are but attributes of the great mechanized society we have created on our way to perfection. And this great mechanized society, being selfless, is pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master and our God. It is past the time to leave off, to cease entirely from what we are doing, and from what we have been doing for hundreds of years. It is past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to eliminate the other. The Infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son, the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in Selflessness. By great retrogression back to the source of darkness in me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original, Creative Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must know both. But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal. Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two are separate and never to be confused. To neutralize the one with the other is unthinkable, an abomination. Confusion is horror and nothingness. The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always related, but they are never identical. They are always opposite, but there exists a relation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity. And it is this, the relation which is established between the two Infinites, the two natures of God, which we have transgressed, forgotten, sinned against. The Father is the Father, and the Son is the Son. I may know the Son and deny the Father, or know the Father and deny the Son. But that which I may never deny, and which I have denied, is the Holy Ghost which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the intervention of the Third, into a Oneness. There are two ways, there is not only One. There are two opposite ways to consummation. But that which relates them, like the base of the triangle, this is the constant, the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites, the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make nullity nihil. '_Mais_,' said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where his wife played with another man's child, '_mais--voulez-vous vous promener dans mes petites terres?_' It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and self-assertion. We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in. I said how I liked the big vine-garden, I asked when it ended. The pride of the padrone came back with a click. He pointed me to the terrace, to the great shut lemon-houses above. They were all his. But--he shrugged his Italian shoulders--it was nothing, just a little garden, _vous savez, monsieur_. I protested it was beautiful, that I loved it, and that it seemed to me _very_ large indeed. He admitted that today, perhaps, it was beautiful. '_Perchè--parce que--il fait un tempo--così--très bell'--très beau, ecco!_' He alighted on the word _beau_ hurriedly, like a bird coming to ground with a little bounce. The terraces of the garden are held up to the sun, the sun falls full upon them, they are like a vessel slanted up, to catch the superb, heavy light. Within the walls we are remote, perfect, moving in heavy spring sunshine, under the bony avenue of vines. The padrone makes little exclamatory noises that mean nothing, and teaches me the names of vegetables. The land is rich and black. Opposite us, looking down on our security, is the long, arched mountain of snow. We climbed one flight of steps, and we could see the little villages on the opposite side of the lake. We climbed again, and could see the water rippling. We came to a great stone building that I had thought was a storehouse, for open-air storage, because the walls are open halfway up, showing the darkness inside and the corner pillar very white and square and distinct in front of it. Entering carelessly into the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly, with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would make. The old Signore gave his little neighing laugh at the idea. Then we climbed into a great loft of leaves, ruddy brown, stored in a great bank under the roof, seeming to give off a little red heat, as they gave off the lovely perfume of the hills. We passed through, and stood at the foot of the lemon-house. The big, blind building rose high in the sunshine before us. All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stands the rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of temples: white, square pillars of masonry, standing forlorn in their colonnades and squares, rising up the mountain-sides here and there, as if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped here. And still, in the winter, some are seen, standing away in lonely places where the sun streams full, grey rows of pillars rising out of a broken wall, tier above tier, naked to the sky, forsaken. They are the lemon plantations, and the pillars are to support the heavy branches of the trees, but finally to act as scaffolding of the great wooden houses that stand blind and ugly, covering the lemon trees in the winter. In November, when cold winds came down and snow had fallen on the mountains, from out of the storehouses the men were carrying timber, and we heard the clang of falling planks. Then, as we walked along the military road on the mountain-side, we saw below, on the top of the lemon gardens, long, thin poles laid from pillar to pillar, and we heard the two men talking and singing as they walked across perilously, placing the poles. In their clumsy zoccoli they strode easily across, though they had twenty or thirty feet to fall if they slipped. But the mountain-side, rising steeply, seemed near, and above their heads the rocks glowed high into the sky, so that the sense of elevation must have been taken away. At any rate, they went easily from pillar-summit to pillar-summit, with a great cave of space below. Then again was the rattle and clang of planks being laid in order, ringing from the mountain-side over the blue lake, till a platform of timber, old and brown, projected from the mountain-side, a floor when seen from above, a hanging roof when seen from below. And we, on the road above, saw the men sitting easily on this flimsy hanging platform, hammering the planks. And all day long the sound of hammering echoed among the rocks and olive woods, and came, a faint, quick concussion, to the men on the boats far out. When the roofs were on they put in the fronts, blocked in between the white pillars withhold, dark wood, in roughly made panels. And here and there, at irregular intervals, was a panel of glass, pane overlapping pane in the long strip of narrow window. So that now these enormous, unsightly buildings bulge out on the mountain-sides, rising in two or three receding tiers, blind, dark, sordid-looking places. In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies dim and milky, the mountains are dark blue at the back, while over them the sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the mountain ridge the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on the hill's rim. It fuses and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it comes, the intense, molten, living light. The mountains melt suddenly, the light steps down, there is a glitter, a spangle, a clutch of spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across the milky lake, and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear the little slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens, a long panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals between the brown wood and the glass stripes. '_Voulez-vous_'--the Signore bows me in with outstretched hand--'_voulez-vous entrer, monsieur?_' I went into the lemon-house, where the poor threes seem to mope in the darkness. It is an immense, dark, cold place. Tall lemon trees, heavy with half-visible fruit, crowd together, and rise in the gloom. They look like ghosts in the darkness of the underworld, stately, and as if in life, but only grand shadows of themselves. And lurking here and there, I see one of the pillars, But he, too, seems a shadow, not one of the dazzling white fellows I knew. Here we are trees, men, pillars, the dark earth, the sad black paths, shut in in this enormous box. It is true, there are long strips of window and slots of space, so that the front is striped, and an occasional beam of light fingers the leaves of an enclosed tree and the sickly round lemons. But it is nevertheless very gloomy. 'But it is much colder in here than outside,' I said. 'Yes,' replied the Signore, 'now. But at night--I _think_--' I almost wished it were night to try. I wanted to imagine the trees cosy. They seemed now in the underworld. Between the lemon trees, beside the path, were little orange trees, and dozens of oranges hanging like hot coals in the twilight. When I warm my hands at them the Signore breaks me off one twig after another, till I have a bunch of burning oranges among dark leaves, a heavy bouquet. Looking down the Hades of the lemon-house, the many ruddy-clustered oranges beside the path remind me of the lights of a village along the lake at night, while the pale lemons above are the stars. There is a subtle, exquisite scent of lemon flowers. Then I notice a citron. He hangs heavy and bloated upon so small a tree, that he seems a dark green enormity. There is a great host of lemons overhead, half-visible, a swarm of ruddy oranges by the paths, and here and there a fat citron. It is almost like being under the sea. At the corners of the path were round little patches of ash and stumps of charred wood, where fires had been kindled inside the house on cold nights. For during the second and third weeks in January the snow came down so low on the mountains that, after climbing for an hour, I found myself in a snow lane, and saw olive orchards on lawns of snow. The padrone says that all lemons and sweet oranges are grafted on a bitter-orange stock. The plants raised from seed, lemon and sweet orange, fell prey to disease, so the cultivators found it safe only to raise the native bitter orange, and then graft upon it. And the maestra--she is the schoolmistress, who wears black gloves while she teaches us Italian--says that the lemon was brought by St Francis of Assisi, who came to the Garda here and founded a church and a monastery. Certainly the church of San Francesco is very old and dilapidated, and its cloisters have some beautiful and original carvings of leaves and fruit upon the pillars, which seem to connect San Francesco with the lemon. I imagine him wandering here with a lemon in his pocket. Perhaps he made lemonade in the hot summer. But Bacchus had been before him in the drink trade. Looking at his lemons, the Signore sighed. I think he hates them. They are leaving him in the lurch. They are sold retail at a halfpenny each all the year round. 'But that is as dear, or dearer, than in England,' I say. 'Ah, but,' says the maestra, 'that is because your lemons are outdoor fruit from Sicily. _Però_--one of our lemons is as good as _two_ from elsewhere.' It is true these lemons have an exquisite fragrance and perfume, but whether their force as lemons is double that of an ordinary fruit is a question. Oranges are sold at fourpence halfpenny the kilo--it comes about five for twopence, small ones. The citrons are sold also by weight in Salò for the making of that liqueur known as 'Cedro'. One citron fetches sometimes a shilling or more, but then the demand is necessarily small. So that it is evident, from these figures, the Lago di Garda cannot afford to grow its lemons much longer. The gardens are already many of them in ruins, and still more 'Da Vendere'. We went out of the shadow of the lemon-house on to the roof of the section below us. When we came to the brink of the roof I sat down. The padrone stood behind me, a shabby, shaky little figure on his roof in the sky, a little figure of dilapidation, dilapidated as the lemon-houses themselves. We were always level with the mountain-snow opposite. A film of pure blue was on the hills to the right and the left. There had been a wind, but it was still now. The water breathed an iridescent dust on the far shore, where the villages were groups of specks. On the low level of the world, on the lake, an orange-sailed boat leaned slim to the dark-blue water, which had flecks of foam. A woman went down-hill quickly, with two goats and a sheep. Among the olives a man was whistling. '_Voyez_,' said the padrone, with distant, perfect melancholy. 'There was once a lemon garden also there--you see the short pillars, cut off to make a pergola for the vine. Once there were twice as many lemons as now. Now we must have vine instead. From that piece of land I had two hundred lire a year, in lemons. From the vine I have only eighty.' 'But wine is a valuable crop,' I said. 'Ah--_così-così_! For a man who grows much. For me--_poco, poco--peu_.' Suddenly his face broke into a smile of profound melancholy, almost a grin, like a gargoyle. It was the real Italian melancholy, very deep, static. '_Vous voyez, monsieur_--the lemon, it is all the year, all the year. But the vine--one crop--?' He lifts his shoulders and spreads his hands with that gesture of finality and fatality, while his face takes the blank, ageless look of misery, like a monkey's. There is no hope. There is the present. Either that is enough, the present, or there is nothing. I sat and looked at the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to be lingering in bygone centuries. 'But it is very beautiful,' I protested. 'In England--' 'Ah, in England,' exclaimed the padrone, the same ageless, monkey-like grin of fatality, tempered by cunning, coming on his face, 'in England you have the wealth--_les richesses_--you have the mineral coal and the machines, _vous savez_. Here we have the sun--' He lifted his withered hand to the sky, to the wonderful source of that blue day, and he smiled, in histrionic triumph. But his triumph was only histrionic. The machines were more to his soul than the sun. He did not know these mechanisms, their great, human-contrived, inhuman power, and he wanted to know them. As for the sun, that is common property, and no man is distinguished by it. He wanted machines, machine production, money, and human power. He wanted to know the joy of man who has got the earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self, into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators, the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed before flesh. But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his mistress, the machine. I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine, and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it, backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more dissonance. I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming, laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality. It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably in the past. Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine, it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of natural life. She was conquering the whole world. And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough. She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self. She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire. If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge, vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared, swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society. _3_ THE THEATRE During carnival a company is playing in the theatre. On Christmas Day the padrone came in with the key of his box, and would we care to see the drama? The theatre was small, a mere nothing, in fact; a mere affair of peasants, you understand; and the Signor Di Paoli spread his hands and put his head on one side, parrot-wise; but we might find a little diversion--_un peu de divertiment_. With this he handed me the key. I made suitable acknowledgements, and was really impressed. To be handed the key of a box at the theatre, so simply and pleasantly, in the large sitting-room looking over the grey lake of Christmas Day; it seemed to me a very graceful event. The key had a chain and a little shield of bronze, on which was beaten out a large figure 8. So the next day we went to see _I Spettri_, expecting some good, crude melodrama. The theatre is an old church. Since that triumph of the deaf and dumb, the cinematograph, has come to give us the nervous excitement of speed--grimace agitation, and speed, as of flying atoms, chaos--many an old church in Italy has taken a new lease of life. This cast-off church made a good theatre. I realized how cleverly it had been constructed for the dramatic presentation of religious ceremonies. The east end is round, the walls are windowless, sound is well distributed. Now everything is theatrical, except the stone floor and two pillars at the back of the auditorium, and the slightly ecclesiastical seats below. There are two tiers of little boxes in the theatre, some forty in all, with fringe and red velvet, and lined with dark red paper, quite like real boxes in a real theatre. And the padrone's is one of the best. It just holds three people. We paid our threepence entrance fee in the stone hall and went upstairs. I opened the door of Number 8, and we were shut in our little cabin, looking down on the world. Then I found the barber, Luigi, bowing profusely in a box opposite. It was necessary to make bows all round: ah, the chemist, on the upper tier, near the barber; how-do-you-do to the padrona of the hotel, who is our good friend, and who sits, wearing a little beaver shoulder-cape, a few boxes off; very cold salutation to the stout village magistrate with the long brown beard, who leans forward in the box facing the stage, while a grouping of faces look out from behind him; a warm smile to the family of the Signora Gemma, across next to the stage. Then we are settled. I cannot tell why I hate the village magistrate. He looks like a family portrait by a Flemish artist, he himself weighing down the front of the picture with his portliness and his long brown beard, whilst the faces of his family are arranged in two groups for the background. I think he is angry at our intrusion. He is very republican and self-important. But we eclipse him easily, with the aid of a large black velvet hat, and black furs, and our Sunday clothes. Downstairs the villagers are crowding, drifting like a heavy current. The women are seated, by church instinct, all together on the left, with perhaps an odd man at the end of a row, beside his wife. On the right, sprawling in the benches, are several groups of bersaglieri, in grey uniforms and slanting cock's-feather hats; then peasants, fishermen, and an odd couple or so of brazen girls taking their places on the men's side. At the back, lounging against the pillars or standing very dark and sombre, are the more reckless spirits of the village. Their black felt hats are pulled down, their cloaks are thrown over their mouths, they stand very dark and isolated in their moments of stillness, they shout and wave to each other when anything occurs. The men are clean, their clothes are all clean washed. The rags of the poorest porter are always well washed. But it is Sunday tomorrow, and they are shaved only on a Sunday. So that they have a week's black growth on their chins. But they have dark, soft eyes, unconscious and vulnerable. They move and balance with loose, heedless motion upon their clattering zoccoli, they lounge with wonderful ease against the wall at the back, or against the two pillars, unconscious of the patches on their clothes or of their bare throats, that are knotted perhaps with a scarlet rag. Loose and abandoned, they lounge and talk, or they watch with wistful absorption the play that is going on. They are strangely isolated in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed. It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their quick, warm senses. The men keep together, as if to support each other, the women also are together; in a hard, strong herd. It is as if the power, the hardness, the triumph, even in this Italian village, were with the women in their relentless, vindictive unity. That which drives men and women together, the indomitable necessity, is like a bondage upon the people. They submit as under compulsion, under constraint. They come together mostly in anger and in violence of destructive passion. There is no comradeship between men and women, none whatsoever, but rather a condition of battle, reserve, hostility. On Sundays the uncomfortable, excited, unwilling youth walks for an hour with his sweetheart, at a little distance from her, on the public highway in the afternoon. This is a concession to the necessity for marriage. There is no real courting, no happiness of being together, only the roused excitement which is based on a fundamental hostility. There is very little flirting, and what there is is of the subtle, cruel kind, like a sex duel. On the whole, the men and women avoid each other, almost shun each other. Husband and wife are brought together in a child, which they both worship. But in each of them there is only the great reverence for the infant, and the reverence for fatherhood or motherhood, as the case may be; there is no spiritual love. In marriage, husband and wife wage the subtle, satisfying war of sex upon each other. It gives a profound satisfaction, a profound intimacy. But it destroys all joy, all unanimity in action. On Sunday afternoons the uncomfortable youth walks by the side of his maiden for an hour in the public highway. Then he escapes; as from a bondage he goes back to his men companions. On Sunday afternoons and evenings the married woman, accompanied by a friend or by a child--she dare not go alone, afraid of the strange, terrible sex-war between her and the drunken man--is seen leading home the wine-drunken, liberated husband. Sometimes she is beaten when she gets home. It is part of the process. But there is no synthetic love between men and women, there is only passion, and passion is fundamental hatred, the act of love is a fight. The child, the outcome, is divine. Here the union, the oneness, is manifest. Though spirit strove with spirit, in mortal conflict, during the sex-passion, yet the flesh united with flesh in oneness. The phallus is still divine. But the spirit, the mind of man, this has become nothing. So the women triumph. They sit down below in the theatre, their perfectly dressed hair gleaming, their backs very straight, their heads carried tensely. They are not very noticeable. They seem held in reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in her maternity is the law-giver, the supreme authority. The authority of the man, in work, in public affairs, is something trivial in comparison. The pathetic ignominy of the village male is complete on Sunday afternoon, on his great day of liberation, when he is accompanied home, drunk but sinister, by the erect, unswerving, slightly cowed woman. His drunken terrorizing is only pitiable, she is so obviously the more constant power. And this is why the men must go away to America. It is not the money. It is the profound desire to rehabilitate themselves, to recover some dignity as men, as producers, as workers, as creators from the spirit, not only from the flesh. It is a profound desire to get away from women altogether, the terrible subjugation to sex, the phallic worship. The company of actors in the little theatre was from a small town away on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still, with that profound, naïve attention which children give. And after a few minutes I realized that _I Spettri_ was Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The peasants and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama unfolded itself. The actors are peasants. The leader is the son of a peasant proprietor. He is qualified as a chemist, but is unsettled, vagrant, prefers play-acting. The Signer Pietro di Paoli shrugs his shoulders and apologizes for their vulgar accent. It is all the same to me. I am trying to get myself to rights with the play, which I have just lately seen in Munich, perfectly produced and detestable. It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants, that I had to wait to adjust myself. The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set, evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the important figure, the play was his. And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did not want. It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will. His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul he was dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear him say, '_Grazia, mamma!_' would have tormented the mother-soul in any woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what? For he was hot-blooded, healthy, almost in his prime, and free as a man can be in his circumstances. He had his own way, he admitted no thwarting. He governed his circumstances pretty much, coming to our village with his little company, playing the plays he chose himself. And yet, that which he would have he did not vitally want, it was only a sort of inflamed obstinacy that made him so insistent, in the masculine way. He was not going to be governed by women, he was not going to be dictated to in the least by any one. And this because he was beaten by his own flesh. His real man's soul, the soul that goes forth and builds up a new world out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses. His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which cried out helplessly in him through the insistent, inflammable flesh. Even this play-acting was a form of physical gratification for him, it had in it neither real mind nor spirit. It was so different from Ibsen, and so much more moving. Ibsen is exciting, nervously sensational. But this was really moving, a real crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it with all one's soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable. They seem to be fingering with the mind the secret places and sources of the blood, impertinent, irreverent, nasty. There is a certain intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped in obscenity. Which is unbearable. The phallus is a symbol of creative divinity. But it represents only part of creative divinity. The Italian has made it represent the whole. Which is now his misery, for he has to destroy his symbol in himself. Which is why the Italian men have the enthusiasm for war, unashamed. Partly it is the true phallic worship, for the phallic principle is to absorb and dominate all life. But also it is a desire to expose themselves to death, to know death, that death may destroy in them this too strong dominion of the blood, may once more liberate the spirit of outgoing, of uniting, of making order out of chaos, in the outer world, as the flesh makes a new order from chaos in begetting a new life, set them free to know and serve a greater idea. The peasants below sat and listened intently, like children who hear and do not understand, yet who are spellbound. The children themselves sit spellbound on the benches till the play is over. They do not fidget or lose interest. They watch with wide, absorbed eyes at the mystery, held in thrall by the sound of emotion. But the villagers do not really care for Ibsen. They let it go. On the feast of Epiphany, as a special treat, was given a poetic drama by D'Annunzio, _La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio_--_The Light under the Bushel_. It is a foolish romantic play of no real significance. There are several murders and a good deal of artificial horror. But it is all a very nice and romantic piece of make-believe, like a charade. So the audience loved it. After the performance of _Ghosts_ I saw the barber, and he had the curious grey clayey look of an Italian who is cold and depressed. The sterile cold inertia, which the so-called passionate nations know so well, had settled on him, and he went obliterating himself in the street, as if he were cold, dead. But after the D'Annunzio play he was like a man who has drunk sweet wine and is warm. '_Ah, bellissimo, bellissimo_!' he said, in tones of intoxicated reverence, when he saw me. 'Better than _I Spettri_?' I said. He half-raised his hands, as if to imply the fatuity of the question. 'Ah, but--' he said, 'it was D'Annunzio. The other....' 'That was Ibsen--a great Norwegian,' I said, 'famous all over the world.' 'But you know--D'Annunzio is a poet--oh, beautiful, beautiful!' There was no going beyond this '_bello--bellissimo_'. It was the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what is meant. But an Italian only cares about the emotion. It is the movement, the physical effect of the language upon the blood which gives him supreme satisfaction. His mind is scarcely engaged at all. He is like a child, hearing and feeling without understanding. It is the sensuous gratification he asks for. Which is why D'Annunzio is a god in Italy. He can control the current of the blood with his words, and although much of what he says is bosh, yet his hearer is satisfied, fulfilled. Carnival ends on the 5th of February, so each Thursday there is a Serata d' Onore of one of the actors. The first, and the only one for which prices were raised--to a fourpence entrance fee instead of threepence--was for the leading lady. The play was _The Wife of the Doctor_, a modern piece, sufficiently uninteresting; the farce that followed made me laugh. Since it was her Evening of Honour, Adelaida was the person to see. She is very popular, though she is no longer young. In fact, she is the mother of the young pert person of _Ghosts_. Nevertheless, Adelaida, stout and blonde and soft and pathetic, is the real heroine of the theatre, the prima. She is very good at sobbing; and afterwards the men exclaim involuntarily, out of their strong emotion, '_bella, bella_!' The women say nothing. They sit stiffly and dangerously as ever. But, no doubt, they quite agree this is the true picture of ill-used, tear-stained woman, the bearer of many wrongs. Therefore they take unto themselves the homage of the men's '_bella, bella_!' that follows the sobs: it is due recognition of their hard wrongs: 'the woman pays.' Nevertheless, they despise in their souls the plump, soft Adelaida. Dear Adelaida, she is irreproachable. In every age, in every clime, she is dear, at any rate to the masculine soul, this soft, tear-blenched, blonde, ill-used thing. She must be ill-used and unfortunate. Dear Gretchen, dear Desdemona, dear Iphigenia, dear Dame aux Camélias, dear Lucy of Lammermoor, dear Mary Magdalene, dear, pathetic, unfortunate soul, in all ages and lands, how we love you. In the theatre she blossoms forth, she is the lily of the stage. Young and inexperienced as I am, I have broken my heart over her several times. I could write a sonnet-sequence to her, yes, the fair, pale, tear-stained thing, white-robed, with her hair down her back; I could call her by a hundred names, in a hundred languages, Melisande, Elizabeth, Juliet, Butterfly, Phèdre, Minnehaha, etc. Each new time I hear her voice, with its faint clang of tears, my heart grows big and hot, and my bones melt. I detest her, but it is no good. My heart begins to swell like a bud under the plangent rain. The last time I saw her was here, on the Garda, at Salò. She was the chalked, thin-armed daughter of Rigoletto. I detested her, her voice had a chalky squeak in it. And yet, by the end, my heart was overripe in my breast, ready to burst with loving affection. I was ready to walk on to the stage, to wipe out the odious, miscreant lover, and to offer her all myself, saying, 'I can see it is real _love_ you want, and you shall have it: _I_ will give it to you.' Of course I know the secret of the Gretchen magic; it is all in the 'Save me, Mr Hercules!' phrase. Her shyness, her timidity, her trustfulness, her tears foster my own strength and grandeur. I am the positive half of the universe. But so I am, if it comes to that, just as positive as the other half. Adelaida is plump, and her voice has just that moist, plangent strength which gives one a real voluptuous thrill. The moment she comes on the stage and looks round--a bit scared--she is _she_, Electra, Isolde, Sieglinde, Marguèrite. She wears a dress of black voile, like the lady who weeps at the trial in the police-court. This is her modern uniform. Her antique garment is of trailing white, with a blonde pigtail and a flower. Realistically, it is black voile and a handkerchief. Adelaida always has a handkerchief. And still I cannot resist it. I say, 'There's the hanky!' Nevertheless, in two minutes it has worked its way with me. She squeezes it in her poor, plump hand as the tears begin to rise; Fate, or man, is inexorable, so cruel. There is a sob, a cry; she presses the fist and the hanky to her eyes, one eye, then the other. She weeps real tears, tears shaken from the depths of her soft, vulnerable, victimized female self. I cannot stand it. There I sit in the padrone's little red box and stifle my emotion, whilst I repeat in my heart: 'What a shame, child, what a shame!' She is twice my age, but what is age in such circumstances? 'Your poor little hanky, it's sopping. There, then, don't cry. It'll be all right. _I'll_ see you're all right. _All_ men are not beasts, you know.' So I cover her protectively in my arms, and soon I shall be kissing her, for comfort, in the heat and prowess of my compassion, kissing her soft, plump cheek and neck closely, bringing my comfort nearer and nearer. It is a pleasant and exciting role for me to play. Robert Burns did the part to perfection: O wert thou in the cauld blast On yonder lea, on yonder lea. How many times does one recite that to all the Ophelias and Gretchens in the world: Thy bield should be my bosom. How one admires one's bosom in that capacity! Looking down at one's shirt-front, one is filled with strength and pride. Why are the women so bad at playing this part in real life, this Ophelia-Gretchen role? Why are they so unwilling to go mad and die for our sakes? They do it regularly on the stage. But perhaps, after all, we write the plays. What a villain I am, what a black-browed, passionate, ruthless, masculine villain I am to the leading lady on the stage; and, on the other hand, dear heart, what a hero, what a fount of chivalrous generosity and faith! I am _anything_ but a dull and law-abiding citizen. I am a Galahad, full of purity and spirituality, I am the Lancelot of valour and lust; I fold my hands, or I cock my hat in one side, as the case may be: I am _myself_. Only, I am not a respectable citizen, not that, in this hour of my glory and my escape. Dear Heaven, how Adelaida wept, her voice plashing like violin music, at my ruthless, masculine cruelty. Dear heart, how she sighed to rest on my sheltering bosom! And how I enjoyed my dual nature! How I admired myself! Adelaida chose _La Moglie del Dottore_ for her Evening of Honour. During the following week came a little storm of coloured bills: 'Great Evening of Honour of Enrico Persevalli.' This is the leader, the actor-manager. What should he choose for his great occasion, this broad, thick-set, ruddy descendant of the peasant proprietors of the plain? No one knew. The title of the play was not revealed. So we were staying at home, it was cold and wet. But the maestra came inflammably on that Thursday evening, and were we not going to the theatre, to see _Amleto_? Poor maestra, she is yellow and bitter-skinned, near fifty, but her dark eyes are still corrosively inflammable. She was engaged to a lieutenant in the cavalry, who got drowned when she was twenty-one. Since then she has hung on the tree unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned, never developing. '_Amleto!_' I say. '_Non lo conosco._' A certain fear comes into her eyes. She is schoolmistress, and has a mortal dread of being wrong. '_Si_,' she cries, wavering, appealing, '_una dramma inglese_.' 'English!' I repeated. 'Yes, an English drama.' 'How do you write it?' Anxiously, she gets a pencil from her reticule, and, with black-gloved scrupulousness, writes _Amleto_. '_Hamlet_!' I exclaim wonderingly. '_Ecco, Amleto!_' cries the maestra, her eyes aflame with thankful justification. Then I knew that Signore Enrico Persevalli was looking to me for an audience. His Evening of Honour would be a bitter occasion to him if the English were not there to see his performance. I hurried to get ready, I ran through the rain. I knew he would take it badly that it rained on his Evening of Honour. He counted himself a man who had fate against him. '_Sono un disgraziato, io._' I was late. The First Act was nearly over. The play was not yet alive, neither in the bosoms of the actors nor in the audience. I closed the door of the box softly, and came forward. The rolling Italian eyes of Hamlet glanced up at me. There came a new impulse over the Court of Denmark. Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close, making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His was the caricature of Hamlet's melancholy self-absorption. I stooped to arrange my footstool and compose my countenance. I was trying not to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a melancholic droop. All the actors alike were out of their element. Their Majesties of Denmark were touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman, was ill at ease in her pink satin. Enrico had had no mercy. He knew she loved to be the scolding servant or housekeeper, with her head tied up in a handkerchief, shrill and vulgar. Yet here she was pranked out in an expanse of satin, la Regina. Regina, indeed! She obediently did her best to be important. Indeed, she rather fancied herself; she looked sideways at the audience, self-consciously, quite ready to be accepted as an imposing and noble person, if they would esteem her such. Her voice sounded hoarse and common, but whether it was the pink satin in contrast, or a cold, I do not know. She was almost childishly afraid to move. Before she began a speech she looked down and kicked her skirt viciously, so that she was sure it was under control. Then she let go. She was a burly, downright little body of sixty, one rather expected her to box Hamlet on the ears. Only she liked being a queen when she sat on the throne. There she perched with great satisfaction, her train splendidly displayed down the steps. She was as proud as a child, and she looked like Queen Victoria of the Jubilee period. The King, her noble consort, also had new honours thrust upon him, as well as new garments. His body was real enough but it had nothing at all to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by themselves. But wherever he went, they went with him, to the confusion of everybody. He was a thin, rather frail-looking peasant, pathetic, and very gentle. There was something pure and fine about him, he was so exceedingly gentle and by natural breeding courteous. But he did not feel kingly, he acted the part with beautiful, simple resignation. Enrico Persevalli had overshot himself in every direction, but worst of all in his own. He had become a hulking fellow, crawling about with his head ducked between his shoulders, pecking and poking, creeping about after other people, sniffing at them, setting traps for them, absorbed by his own self-important self-consciousness. His legs, in their black knee-breeches, had a crawling, slinking look; he always carried the black rag of a cloak, something for him to twist about as he twisted in his own soul, overwhelmed by a sort of inverted perversity. I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a spirit of disintegration. There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike, through much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously. Michelangelo rejects any feeling of corruption, he stands by the flesh, the flesh only. It is the corresponding reaction, but in the opposite direction. But that is all four hundred years ago. Enrico Persevalli has just reached the position. He _is_ Hamlet, and evidently he has great satisfaction in the part. He is the modern Italian, suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, labouring in a sense of physical corruption. But he will not admit it is in himself. He creeps about in self-conceit, transforming his own self-loathing. With what satisfaction did he reveal corruption--corruption in his neighbours he gloated in--letting his mother know he had discovered her incest, her uncleanness, gloated in torturing the incestuous King. Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the uncleanest. But he accused only the others. Except in the 'great' speeches, and there Enrico was betrayed, Hamlet suffered the extremity of physical self-loathing, loathing of his own flesh. The play is the statement of the most significant philosophic position of the Renaissance. Hamlet is far more even than Orestes, his prototype, a mental creature, anti-physical, anti-sensual. The whole drama is the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the mind from the flesh, of the spirit from the self, the reaction from the great aristocratic to the great democratic principle. An ordinary instinctive man, in Hamlet's position, would either have set about murdering his uncle, by reflex action, or else would have gone right away. There would have been no need for Hamlet to murder his mother. It would have been sufficient blood-vengeance if he had killed his uncle. But that is the statement according to the aristocratic principle. Orestes was in the same position, but the same position two thousand years earlier, with two thousand years of experience wanting. So that the question was not so intricate in him as in Hamlet, he was not nearly so conscious. The whole Greek life was based on the idea of the supremacy of the self, and the self was always male. Orestes was his father's child, he would be the same whatever mother he had. The mother was but the vehicle, the soil in which the paternal seed was planted. When Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, it was as if a common individual murdered God, to the Greek. But Agamemnon, King and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible. He had sacrificed Iphigenia for the sake of glory in war, for the fulfilment of the superb idea of self, but on the other hand he had made cruel dissension for the sake of the concubines captured in war. The paternal flesh was fallible, ungodlike. It lusted after meaner pursuits than glory, war, and slaying, it was not faithful to the highest idea of the self. Orestes was driven mad by the furies of his mother, because of the justice that they represented. Nevertheless he was in the end exculpated. The third play of the trilogy is almost foolish, with its prating gods. But it means that, according to the Greek conviction, Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong. But for all that, the infallible King, the infallible male Self, is dead in Orestes, killed by the furies of Clytemnestra. He gains his peace of mind after the revulsion from his own physical fallibility, but he will never be an unquestioned lord, as Agamemnon was. Orestes is left at peace, neutralized. He is the beginning of non-aristocratic Christianity. Hamlet's father, the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But, unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude, like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the supreme male, the ideal Self, the King and Father. This is the tragic position Shakespeare must dwell upon. The woman rejects, repudiates the ideal Self which the male represents to her. The supreme representative, King and Father, is murdered by the Wife and the Daughters. What is the reason? Hamlet goes mad in a revulsion of rage and nausea. Yet the women-murderers only represent some ultimate judgement in his own soul. At the bottom of his own soul Hamlet has decided that the Self in its supremacy, Father and King, must die. It is a suicidal decision for his involuntary soul to have arrived at. Yet it is inevitable. The great religious, philosophic tide, which has been swelling all through the Middle Ages, had brought him there. The question, to be or not to be, which Hamlet puts himself, does not mean, to live or not to live. It is not the simple human being who puts himself the question, it is the supreme I, King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be. It is the inevitable philosophic conclusion of all the Renaissance. The deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, is the desire to be immortal, or infinite, consummated. And this impulse is satisfied in fulfilment of an idea, a steady progression. In this progression man is satisfied, he seems to have reached his goal, this infinity, this immortality, this eternal being, with every step nearer which he takes. And so, according to his idea of fulfilment, man establishes the whole order of life. If my fulfilment is the fulfilment and establishment of the unknown divine Self which I am, then I shall proceed in the realizing of the greatest idea of the self, the highest conception of the I, my order of life will be kingly, imperial, aristocratic. The body politic also will culminate in this divinity of the flesh, this body imbued with glory, invested with divine power and might, the King, the Emperor. In the body politic also I shall desire a king, an emperor, a tyrant, glorious, mighty, in whom I see myself consummated and fulfilled. This is inevitable! But during the Middle Ages, struggling within this pagan, original transport, the transport of the Ego, was a small dissatisfaction, a small contrary desire. Amid the pomp of kings and popes was the Child Jesus and the Madonna. Jesus the King gradually dwindled down. There was Jesus the Child, helpless, at the mercy of all the world. And there was Jesus crucified. The old transport, the old fulfilment of the Ego, the Davidian ecstasy, the assuming of all power and glory unto the self, the becoming infinite through the absorption of all into the Ego, this gradually became unsatisfactory. This was not the infinite, this was not immortality. This was eternal death, this was damnation. The monk rose up with his opposite ecstasy, the Christian ecstasy. There was a death to die: the flesh, the self, must die, so that the spirit should rise again immortal, eternal, infinite. I am dead unto myself, but I live in the Infinite. The finite Me is no more, only the Infinite, the Eternal, is. At the Renaissance this great half-truth overcame the other great half-truth. The Christian Infinite, reached by a process of abnegation, a process of being absorbed, dissolved, diffused into the great Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein the self like a root threw out branches and radicles which embraced the whole universe, became the Whole. There is only one Infinite, the world now cried, there is the great Christian Infinite of renunciation and consummation in the not-self. The other, that old pride, is damnation. The sin of sins is Pride, it is the way to total damnation. Whereas the pagans based their life on pride. And according to this new Infinite, reached through renunciation and dissolving into the Others, the Neighbour, man must build up his actual form of life. With Savonarola and Martin Luther the living Church actually transformed itself, for the Roman Church was still pagan. Henry VIII simply said: 'There is no Church, there is only the State.' But with Shakespeare the transformation had reached the State also. The King, the Father, the representative of the Consummate Self, the maximum of all life, the symbol of the consummate being, the becoming Supreme, Godlike, Infinite, he must perish and pass away. This Infinite was not infinite, this consummation was not consummated, all this was fallible, false. It was rotten, corrupt. It must go. But Shakespeare was also the thing itself. Hence his horror, his frenzy, his self-loathing. The King, the Emperor is killed in the soul of man, the old order of life is over, the old tree is dead at the root. So said Shakespeare. It was finally enacted in Cromwell. Charles I took up the old position of kingship by divine right. Like Hamlet's father, he was blameless otherwise. But as representative of the old form of life, which mankind now hated with frenzy, he must be cut down, removed. It was a symbolic act. The world, our world of Europe, had now really turned, swung round to a new goal, a new idea, the Infinite reached through the omission of Self. God is all that which is Not-Me. I am consummate when my Self, the resistant solid, is reduced and diffused into all that which is Not-Me: my neighbour, my enemy, the great Otherness. Then I am perfect. And from this belief the world began gradually to form a new State, a new body politic, in which the Self should be removed. There should be no king, no lords, no aristocrats. The world continued in its religious belief, beyond the French Revolution, beyond the great movement of Shelley and Godwin. There should be no Self. That which was supreme was that which was Not-Me, the other. The governing factor in the State was the idea of the good of others; that is, the Common Good. And the _vital_ governing idea in the State has been this idea since Cromwell. Before Cromwell the idea was 'For the King', because every man saw himself consummated in the King. After Cromwell the idea was 'For the good of my neighbour', or 'For the good of the people', or 'For the good of the whole'. This has been our ruling idea, by which we have more or less lived. Now this has failed. Now we say that the Christian Infinite is not infinite. We are tempted, like Nietzsche, to return back to the old pagan Infinite, to say that is supreme. Or we are inclined, like the English and the Pragmatist, to say, 'There is no Infinite, there is no Absolute. The only Absolute is expediency, the only reality is sensation and momentariness.' But we may say this, even act on it, _à la Sanine_. But we never believe it. What is really Absolute is the mystic Reason which connects both Infinites, the Holy Ghost that relates both natures of God. If we now wish to make a living State, we must build it up to the idea of the Holy Spirit, the supreme Relationship. We must say, the pagan Infinite is infinite, the Christian Infinite is infinite: these are our two Consummations, in both of these we are consummated. But that which relates them alone is absolute. This Absolute of the Holy Ghost we may call Truth or Justice or Right. These are partial names, indefinite and unsatisfactory unless there be kept the knowledge of the two Infinites, pagan and Christian, which they go between. When both are there, they are like a superb bridge, on which one can stand and know the whole world, my world, the two halves of the universe. '_Essere, o non essere, è qui il punto._' To be or not to be was the question for Hamlet to settle. It is no longer our question, at least, not in the same sense. When it is a question of death, the fashionable young suicide declares that his self-destruction is the final proof of his own incontrovertible being. And as for not-being in our public life, we have achieved it as much as ever we want to, as much as is necessary. Whilst in private life there is a swing back to paltry selfishness as a creed. And in the war there is the position of neutralization and nothingness. It is a question of knowing how _to be_, and how _not to be_, for we must fulfil both. Enrico Persevalli was detestable with his '_Essere, o non essere_'. He whispered it in a hoarse whisper as if it were some melodramatic murder he was about to commit. As a matter of fact, he knows quite well, and has known all his life, that his pagan Infinite, his transport of the flesh and the supremacy of the male in fatherhood, is all unsatisfactory. All his life he has really cringed before the northern Infinite of the Not-Self, although he has continued in the Italian habit of Self. But it is mere habit, sham. How can he know anything about being and not-being when he is only a maudlin compromise between them, and all he wants is to be a maudlin compromise? He is neither one nor the other. He has neither being nor riot-being. He is as equivocal as the monks. He was detestable, mouthing Hamlet's sincere words. He has still to let go, to know what not-being is, before he can _be_. Till he has gone through the Christian negation of himself, and has known the Christian consummation, he is a mere amorphous heap. For the soliloquies of Hamlet are as deep as the soul of man can go, in one direction, and as sincere as the Holy Spirit itself in their essence. But thank heaven, the bog into which Hamlet struggled is almost surpassed. It is a strange thing, if a man covers his face, and speaks with his eyes blinded, how significant and poignant he becomes. The ghost of this Hamlet was very simple. He was wrapped down to the knees in a great white cloth, and over his face was an open-work woollen shawl. But the naïve blind helplessness and verity of his voice was strangely convincing. He seemed the most real thing in the play. From the knees downward he was Laertes, because he had on Laertes' white trousers and patent leather slippers. Yet he was strangely real, a voice out of the dark. The Ghost is really one of the play's failures, it is so trivial and unspiritual and vulgar. And it was spoilt for me from the first. When I was a child I went to the twopenny travelling theatre to see _Hamlet_. The Ghost had on a helmet and a breastplate. I sat in pale transport. ''Amblet, 'Amblet, I _am_ thy father's ghost.' Then came a voice from the dark, silent audience, like a cynical knife to my fond soul: 'Why tha arena, I can tell thy voice.' The peasants loved Ophelia: she was in white with her hair down her back. Poor thing, she was pathetic, demented. And no wonder, after Hamlet's 'O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!' What then of her young breasts and her womb? Hamlet with her was a very disagreeable sight. The peasants loved her. There was a hoarse roar, half of indignation, half of roused passion, at the end of her scene. The graveyard scene, too, was a great success, but I could not bear Hamlet. And the grave-digger in Italian was a mere buffoon. The whole scene was farcical to me because of the Italian, '_Questo cranio, Signore_--'And Enrico, dainty fellow, took the skull in a corner of his black cloak. As an Italian, he would not willingly touch it. It was unclean. But he looked a fool, hulking himself in his lugubriousness. He was as self-important as D'Annunzio. The close fell flat. The peasants had applauded the whole graveyard scene wildly. But at the end of all they got up and crowded to the doors, as if to hurry away: this in spite of Enrico's final feat: he fell backwards, smack down three steps of the throne platform, on to the stage. But planks and braced muscle will bounce, and Signer Amleto bounced quite high again. It was the end of _Amleto_, and I was glad. But I loved the theatre, I loved to look down on the peasants, who were so absorbed. At the end of the scenes the men pushed back their black hats, and rubbed their hair across their brows with a pleased, excited movement. And the women stirred in their seats. Just one man was with his wife and child, and he was of the same race as my old woman at San Tommaso. He was fair, thin, and clear, abstract, of the mountains. He seemed to have gathered his wife and child together into another, finer atmosphere, like the air of the mountains, and to guard them in it. This is the real Joseph, father of the child. He has a fierce, abstract look, wild and untamed as a hawk, but like a hawk at its own nest, fierce with love. He goes out and buys a tiny bottle of lemonade for a penny, and the mother and child sip it in tiny sips, whilst he bends over, like a hawk arching its wings. It is the fierce spirit of the Ego come out of the primal infinite, but detached, isolated, an aristocrat. He is not an Italian, dark-blooded. He is fair, keen as steel, with the blood of the mountaineer in him. He is like my old spinning woman. It is curious how, with his wife and child, he makes a little separate world down there in the theatre, like a hawk's nest, high and arid under the gleaming sky. The Bersaglieri sit close together in groups, so that there is a strange, corporal connexion between them. They have close-cropped, dark, slightly bestial heads, and thick shoulders, and thick brown hands on each other's shoulders. When an act is over they pick up their cherished hats and fling on their cloaks and go into the hall. They are rather rich, the Bersaglieri. They are like young, half-wild oxen, such strong, sturdy, dark lads, thickly built and with strange hard heads, like young male caryatides. They keep close together, as if there were some physical instinct connecting them. And they are quite womanless. There is a curious inter-absorption among themselves, a sort of physical trance that holds them all, and puts their minds to sleep. There is a strange, hypnotic unanimity among them as they put on their plumed hats and go out together, always very close, as if their bodies must touch. Then they feel safe and content in this heavy, physical trance. They are in love with one another, the young men love the young men. They shrink from the world beyond, from the outsiders, from all who are not Bersaglieri of their barracks. One man is a sort of leader. He is very straight and solid, solid like a wall, with a dark, unblemished will. His cock-feathers slither in a profuse, heavy stream from his black oil-cloth hat, almost to his shoulder. He swings round. His feathers slip into a cascade. Then he goes out to the hall, his feather tossing and falling richly. He must be well off. The Bersaglieri buy their own black cock's-plumes, and some pay twenty or thirty francs for the bunch, so the maestra said. The poor ones have only poor, scraggy plumes. There is something very primitive about these men. They remind me really of Agamemnon's soldiers clustered oil the seashore, men, all men, a living, vigorous, physical host of men. But there is a pressure on these Italian soldiers, as if they were men caryatides, with a great weight on their heads, making their brain hard, asleep, stunned. They all look is if their real brain were stunned, as if there were another centre of physical consciousness from which they lived. Separate from them all is Pietro, the young man who lounges on the wharf to carry things from the steamer. He starts up from sleep like a wild-cat as somebody claps him on the shoulder. It is the start of a man who has many enemies. He is almost an outlaw. Will he ever find himself in prison? He is the _gamin_ of the village, well detested. He is twenty-four years old, thin, dark, handsome, with a cat-like lightness and grace, and a certain repulsive, _gamin_ evil in his face. Where everybody is so clean and tidy, he is almost ragged. His week's beard shows very black in his slightly hollow cheeks. He hates the man who has waked him by clapping him on the shoulder. Pietro is already married, yet he behaves as if he were not. He has been carrying on with a loose woman, the wife of the citron-coloured barber, the Siciliano. Then he seats himself on the women's side of the theatre, behind a young person from Bogliaco, who also has no reputation, and makes her talk to him. He leans forward, resting his arms on the seat before him, stretching his slender, cat-like, flexible loins. The padrona of the hotel hates him--'_ein frecher Kerl_,' she says with contempt, and she looks away. Her eyes hate to see him. In the village there is the clerical party, which is the majority; there is the anti-clerical party, and there are the ne'er-do-wells. The clerical people are dark and pious and cold; there is a curious stone-cold, ponderous darkness over them, moral and gloomy. Then the anti-clerical party, with the Syndaco at the head, is bourgeois and respectable as far as the middle-aged people are concerned, banal, respectable, shut off as by a wall from the clerical people. The young anti-clericals are the young bloods of the place, the men who gather every night in the more expensive and less-respectable cafe. These young men are all free-thinkers, great dancers, singers, players of the guitar. They are immoral and slightly cynical. Their leader is the young shopkeeper, who has lived in Vienna, who is a bit of a bounder, with a veneer of sneering irony on an original good nature. He is well-to-do, and gives dances to which only the looser women go, with these reckless young men. He also gets up parties of pleasure, and is chiefly responsible for the coming of the players to the theatre this carnival. These young men are disliked, but they belong to the important class, they are well-to-do, and they have the life of the village in their hands. The clerical peasants are priest-ridden and good, because they are poor and afraid and superstitious. There is, lastly, a sprinkling of loose women, one who keeps the inn where the soldiers drink. These women are a definite set. They know what they are, they pretend nothing else. They are not prostitutes, but just loose women. They keep to their own clique, among men and women, never wanting to compromise anybody else. And beyond all these there are the Franciscan friars in their brown robes, so shy, so silent, so obliterated, as they stand back in the shop, waiting to buy the bread for the monastery, waiting obscure and neutral, till no one shall be in the shop wanting to be served. The village women speak to them in a curious neutral, official, slightly contemptuous voice. They answer neutral and humble, though distinctly. At the theatre, now the play is over, the peasants in their black hats and cloaks crowd the hall. Only Pietro, the wharf-lounger, has no cloak, and a bit of a cap on the side of his head instead of a black felt hat. His clothes are thin and loose on his thin, vigorous, cat-like body, and he is cold, but he takes no notice. His hands are always in his pockets, his shoulders slightly raised. The few women slip away home. In the little theatre bar the well-to-do young atheists are having another drink. Not that they spend much. A tumbler of wine or a glass of vermouth costs a penny. And the wine is horrible new stuff. Yet the little baker, Agostino, sits on a bench with his pale baby on his knee, putting the wine to its lips. And the baby drinks, like a blind fledgeling. Upstairs, the quality has paid its visits and shaken hands: the Syndaco and the well-to-do half-Austrian owners of the woodyard, the Bertolini, have ostentatiously shown their mutual friendship; our padrone, the Signer Pietro Di Paoli, has visited his relatives the Graziani in the box next the stage and has spent two intervals with us in our box; meanwhile, his two peasants standing down below, pathetic, thin contadini of the old school, like worn stones, have looked up at us as if we are the angels in heaven, with a reverential, devotional eye, they themselves far away below, standing in the bay at the back, below all. The chemist and the grocer and the schoolmistress pay calls. They have all sat self-consciously posed in the front of their boxes, like framed photographs of themselves. The second grocer and the baker visit each other. The barber looks in on the carpenter, then drops downstairs among the crowd. Class distinctions are cut very fine. As we pass with the padrona of the hotel, who is a Bavarian, we stop to speak to our own padroni, the Di Paoli. They have a warm handshake and effusive polite conversation for us; for Maria Samuelli, a distant bow. We realize our mistake. The barber--not the Siciliano, but flashy little Luigi with the big tie-ring and the curls--knows all about the theatre. He says that Enrico Persevalli has for his mistress Carina, the servant in _Ghosts_: that the thin, gentle, old-looking king in _Hamlet_ is the husband of Adelaida, and Carina is their daughter: that the old, sharp, fat little body of a queen is Adelaida's mother: that they all like Enrico Persevalli, because he is a very clever man: but that the 'Comic', Il Brillante, Francesco, is unsatisfied. In three performances in Epiphany week, the company took two hundred and sixty-five francs, which was phenomenal. The manager, Enrico Persevalli, and Adelaida pay twenty-four francs for every performance, or every evening on which a performance is given, as rent for the theatre, including light. The company is completely satisfied with its reception on the Lago di Garda. So it is all over. The Bersaglieri go running all the way home, because it is already past half past ten. The night is very dark. About four miles up the lake the searchlights of the Austrian border are swinging, looking for smugglers. Otherwise the darkness is complete. _4_ SAN GAUDENZIO In the autumn the little rosy cyclamens blossom in the shade of this west side of the lake. They are very cold and fragrant, and their scent seems to belong to Greece, to the Bacchae. They are real flowers of the past. They seem to be blossoming in the landscape of Phaedra and Helen. They bend down, they brood like little chill fires. They are little living myths that I cannot understand. After the cyclamens the Christmas roses are in bud. It is at this season that the cacchi are ripe on the trees in the garden, whole naked trees full of lustrous, orange-yellow, paradisal fruit, gleaming against the wintry blue sky. The monthly roses still blossom frail and pink, there are still crimson and yellow roses. But the vines are bare and the lemon-houses shut. And then, mid-winter, the lowest buds of the Christmas roses appear under the hedges and rocks and by the streams. They are very lovely, these first large, cold, pure buds, like violets, like magnolias, but cold, lit up with the light from the snow. The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines. It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine. Meanwhile, the Christmas roses become many. They rise from their budded, intact humbleness near the ground, they rise up, they throw up their crystal, they become handsome, they are heaps of confident, mysterious whiteness in the shadow of a rocky stream. It is almost uncanny to see them. They are the flowers of darkness, white and wonderful beyond belief. Then their radiance becomes soiled and brown, they thaw, break, and scatter and vanish away. Already the primroses are coming out, and the almond is in bud. The winter is passing away. On the mountains the fierce snow gleams apricot gold as evening approaches, golden, apricot, but so bright that it is almost frightening. What can be so fiercely gleaming when all is shadowy? It is something inhuman and unmitigated between heaven and earth. The heavens are strange and proud all the winter, their progress goes on without reference to the dim earth. The dawns come white and translucent, the lake is a moonstone in the dark hills, then across the lake there stretches a vein of fire, then a whole, orange, flashing track over the whiteness. There is the exquisite silent passage of the day, and then at evening the afterglow, a huge incandescence of rose, hanging above and gleaming, as if it were the presence of a host of angels in rapture. It gleams like a rapturous chorus, then passes away, and the stars appear, large and flashing. Meanwhile, the primroses are dawning on the ground, their light is growing stronger, spreading over the banks and under the bushes. Between the olive roots the violets are out, large, white, grave violets, and less serious blue ones. And looking down the bill, among the grey smoke of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and the apricot trees, it is the Spring. Soon the primroses are strong on the ground. There is a bank of small, frail crocuses shooting the lavender into this spring. And then the tussocks and tussocks of primroses are fully out, there is full morning everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream-sides, and around the olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of primrose. The few birds are piping thinly and shyly, the streams sing again, there is a strange flowering shrub full of incense, overturned flowers of crimson and gold, like Bohemian glass. Between the olive roots new grass is coming, day is leaping all clear and coloured from the earth, it is full Spring, full first rapture. Does it pass away, or does it only lose its pristine quality? It deepens and intensifies, like experience. The days seem to be darker and richer, there is a sense of power in the strong air. On the banks by the lake the orchids are out, many, many pale bee-orchids standing clear from the short grass over the lake. And in the hollows are the grape hyacinths, purple as noon, with the heavy, sensual fragrance of noon. They are many-breasted, and full of milk, and ripe, and sun-darkened, like many-breasted Diana. We could not bear to live down in the village any more, now that the days opened large and spacious and the evenings drew out in sunshine. We could not bear the indoors, when above us the mountains shone in clear air. It was time to go up, to climb with the sun. So after Easter we went to San Gaudenzio. It was three miles away, up the winding mule-track that climbed higher and higher along the lake. Leaving the last house of the village, the path wound on the steep, cliff-like side of the lake, curving into the hollow where the landslip had tumbled the rocks in chaos, then out again on to the bluff of a headland that hung over the lake. Thus we came to the tall barred gate of San Gaudenzio, on which was the usual little fire-insurance tablet, and then the advertisements for beer, 'Birra, Verona', which is becoming a more and more popular drink. Through the gate, inside the high wall, is the little Garden of Eden, a property of three or four acres fairly level upon a headland over the lake. The high wall girds it on the land side, and makes it perfectly secluded. On the lake-side it is bounded by the sudden drops of the land, in sharp banks and terraces, overgrown with ilex and with laurel bushes, down to the brink of the cliff, so that the thicket of the first declivities seems to safeguard the property. The pink farm-house stands almost in the centre of the little territory, among the olive trees. It is a solid, six-roomed place, about fifty years old, having been rebuilt by Paolo's uncle. Here we came to live for a time with the Fiori, Maria and Paolo, and their three children, Giovanni and Marco and Felicina. Paolo had inherited, or partly inherited, San Gaudenzio, which had been in his family for generations. He was a peasant of fifty-three, very grey and wrinkled and worn-looking, but at the same time robust, with full strong limbs and a powerful chest. His face was old, but his body was solid and powerful. His eyes were blue like upper ice, beautiful. He had been a fair-haired man, now he was almost white. He, was strangely like the pictures of peasants in the northern Italian pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is seen in Mantegna, an almost jewel-like quality. We all loved Paolo, he was so finished in his being, detached, with an almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness. There was also something concluded and unalterable about him, something inaccessible. Maria Fiori was different. She was from the plain, like Enrico Persevalli and the Bersaglier from the Venetian district. She reminded me again of oxen, broad-boned and massive in physique, dark-skinned, slow in her soul. But, like the oxen of the plain, she knew her work, she knew the other people engaged in the work. Her intelligence was attentive and purposive. She had been a housekeeper, a servant, in Venice and Verona, before her marriage. She had got the hang of this world of commerce and activity, she wanted to master it. But she was weighted down by her heavy animal blood. Paolo and she were the opposite sides of the universe, the light and the dark. Yet they lived together now without friction, detached, each subordinated in their common relationship. With regard to Maria, Paolo omitted himself; Maria omitted herself with regard to Paolo. Their souls were silent and detached, completely apart, and silent, quite silent. They shared the physical relationship of marriage as if it were something beyond them, a third thing. They had suffered very much in the earlier stages of their connexion. Now the storm had gone by, leaving them, as it were, spent. They were both by nature passionate, vehement. But the lines of their passion were opposite. Hers was the primitive, crude, violent flux of the blood, emotional and undiscriminating, but wanting to mix and mingle. His was the hard, clear, invulnerable passion of the bones, finely tempered and unchangeable. She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual striking together they only destroyed each other. The fire was a third thing, belonging to neither of them. She was still heavy and full of desire. She was much younger than he. 'How long did you know your Signora before you were married?' she asked me. 'Six weeks,' I said. '_Il Paolo e me, venti giorni, tre settimane_,' she cried vehemently. Three weeks they had known each other when they married. She still triumphed in the fact. So did Paolo. But it was past, strangely and rather terribly past. What did they want when they came together, Paolo and she? He was a man over thirty, she was a woman of twenty-three. They were both violent in desire and of strong will. They came together at once, like two wrestlers almost matched in strength. Their meetings must have been splendid. Giovanni, the eldest child, was a tall lad of sixteen, with soft brown hair and grey eyes, and a clarity of brow, and the same calm simplicity of bearing which made Paolo so complete; but the son had at the same time a certain brownness of skin, a heaviness of blood, which he had from his mother. Paolo was so clear and translucent. In Giovanni the fusion of the parents was perfect, he was a perfect spark from the flint and steel. There was in Paolo a subtle intelligence in feeling, a delicate appreciation of the other person. But the mind was unintelligent, he could not grasp a new order. Maria Fiori was much sharper and more adaptable to the ways of the world. Paolo had an almost glass-like quality, fine and clear and perfectly tempered; but he was also finished and brittle. Maria was much coarser, more vulgar, but also she was more human, more fertile, with crude potentiality. His passion was too fixed in its motion, hers too loose and overwhelming. But Giovanni was beautiful, gentle, and courtly like Paolo, but warm, like Maria, ready to flush like a girl with anger or confusion. He stood straight and tall, and seemed to look into the far distance with his clear grey eyes. Yet also he could look at one and touch one with his look, he could meet one. Paolo's blue eyes were like the eyes of the old spinning-woman, clear and blue and belonging to the mountains, their vision seemed to end in space, abstract. They reminded me of the eyes of the eagle, which looks into the sun, and which teaches its young to do the same, although they are unwilling. Marco, the second son, was thirteen years old. He was his mother's favourite, Giovanni loved his father best. But Marco was his mother's son, with the same brown-gold and red complexion, like a pomegranate, and coarse black hair, and brown eyes like pebble, like agate, like an animal's eyes. He had the same broad, bovine figure, though he was only a boy. But there was some discrepancy in him. He was not unified, he had no identity. He was strong and full of animal life, but always aimless, as though his wits scarcely controlled him. But he loved his mother with a fundamental, generous, undistinguishing love. Only he always forgot what he was going to do. He was much more sensitive than Maria, more shy and reluctant. But his shyness, his sensitiveness only made him more aimless and awkward, a tiresome clown, slack and uncontrolled, witless. All day long his mother shouted and shrilled and scolded at him, or hit him angrily. He did not mind, he came up like a cork, warm and roguish and curiously appealing. She loved him with a fierce protective love, grounded on pain. There was such a split, a contrariety in his soul, one part reacting against the other, which landed him always into trouble. It was when Marco was a baby that Paolo had gone to America. They were poor on San Gaudenzio. There were the few olive trees, the grapes, and the fruit; there was the one cow. But these scarcely made a living. Neither was Maria content with the real peasants' lot any more, polenta at midday and vegetable soup in the evening, and no way out, nothing to look forward to, no future, only this eternal present. She had been in service, and had eaten bread and drunk coffee, and known the flux and variable chance of life. She had departed from the old static conception. She knew what one might be, given a certain chance. The fixture was the thing she militated against. So Paolo went to America, to California, into the gold mines. Maria wanted the future, the endless possibility of life on earth. She wanted her sons to be freer, to achieve a new plane of living. The peasant's life was a slave's life, she said, railing against the poverty and the drudgery. And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo was even happy so. This was the truth to him. It was the mother who wanted things different. It was she who railed and railed against the miserable life of the peasants. When we were going to throw to the fowls a dry broken penny roll of white bread, Maria said, with anger and shame and resentment in her voice: 'Give it to Marco, he will eat it. It isn't too dry for him.' White bread was a treat for them even now, when everybody eats bread. And Maria Fiori hated it, that bread should be a treat to her children, when it was the meanest food of all the rest of the world. She was in opposition to this order. She did not want her sons to be peasants, fixed and static as posts driven in the earth. She wanted them to be in the great flux of life in the midst of all possibilities. So she at length sent Paolo to America to the gold-mines. Meanwhile, she covered the wall of her parlour with picture postcards, to bring the outer world of cities and industries into her house. Paolo was entirely remote from Maria's world. He had not yet even grasped the fact of money, not thoroughly. He reckoned in land and olive trees. So he had the old fatalistic attitude to his circumstances, even to his food. The earth was the Lord's and the fulness thereof; also the leanness thereof. Paolo could only do his part and leave the rest. If he ate in plenty, having oil and wine and sausage in the house, and plenty of maize-meal, he was glad with the Lord. If he ate meagrely, of poor polenta, that was fate, it was the skies that ruled these things, and no man ruled the skies. He took his fate as it fell from the skies. Maria was exorbitant about money. She would charge us all she could for what we had and for what was done for us. Yet she was not mean in her soul. In her soul she was in a state of anger because of her own closeness. It was a violation to her strong animal nature. Yet her mind had wakened to the value of money. She knew she could alter her position, the position of her children, by virtue of money. She knew it was only money that made the difference between master and servant. And this was all the difference she would acknowledge. So she ruled her life according to money. Her supreme passion was to be mistress rather than servant, her supreme aspiration for her children was that in the end they might be masters and not servants. Paolo was untouched by all this. For him there was some divinity about a master which even America had not destroyed. If we came in for supper whilst the family was still at table he would have the children at once take their plates to the wall, he would have Maria at once set the table for us, though their own meal were never finished. And this was not servility, it was the dignity of a religious conception. Paolo regarded us as belonging to the Signoria, those who are elect, near to God. And this was part of his religious service. His life was a ritual. It was very beautiful, but it made me unhappy, the purity of his spirit was so sacred and the actual facts seemed such a sacrilege to it. Maria was nearer to the actual truth when she said that money was the only distinction. But Paolo had hold of an eternal truth, where hers was temporal. Only Paolo misapplied this eternal truth. He should not have given Giovanni the inferior status and a fat, mean Italian tradesman the superior. That was false, a real falsity. Maria knew it and hated it. But Paolo could not distinguish between the accident of riches and the aristocracy of the spirit. So Maria rejected him altogether, and went to the other extreme. We were all human beings like herself; naked, there was no distinction between us, no higher nor lower. But we were possessed of more money than she. And she had to steer her course between these two conceptions. The money alone made the real distinction, the separation; the being, the life made the common level. Paolo had the curious peasant's avarice also, but it was not meanness. It was a sort of religious conservation of his own power, his own self. Fortunately he could leave all business transactions on our account to Maria, so that his relation with us was purely ritualistic. He would have given me anything, trusting implicitly that I would fulfil my own nature as Signore, one of those more godlike, nearer the light of perfection than himself, a peasant. It was pure bliss to him to bring us the first-fruit of the garden, it was like laying it on an altar. And his fulfilment was in a fine, subtle, exquisite relationship, not of manners, but subtle interappreciation. He worshipped a finer understanding and a subtler tact. A further fineness and dignity and freedom in bearing was to him an approach towards the divine, so he loved men best of all, they fulfilled his soul. A woman was always a woman, and sex was a low level whereon he did not esteem himself. But a man, a doer, the instrument of God, he was really godlike. Paolo was a Conservative. For him the world was established and divine in its establishment. His vision grasped a small circle. A finer nature, a higher understanding, took in a greater circle, comprehended the whole. So that when Paolo was in relation to a man of further vision, he himself was extended towards the whole. Thus he was fulfilled. And his initial assumption was that every signore, every gentleman, was a man of further, purer vision than himself. This assumption was false. But Maria's assumption, that no one had a further vision, no one was more elect than herself, that we are all one flesh and blood and being, was even more false. Paolo was mistaken in actual life, but Maria was ultimately mistaken. Paolo, conservative as he was, believing that a priest must be a priest of God, yet very rarely went to church. And he used the religious oaths that Maria hated, even _Porca-Maria_. He always used oaths, either Bacchus or God or Mary or the Sacrament. Maria was always offended. Yet it was she who, in her soul, jeered at the Church and at religion. She wanted the human society as the absolute, without religious abstractions. So Paolo's oaths enraged her, because of their profanity, she said. But it was really because of their subscribing to another superhuman order. She jeered at the clerical people. She made a loud clamour of derision when the parish priest of the village above went down to the big village on the lake, and across the piazza, the quay, with two pigs in a sack on his shoulder. This was a real picture of the sacred minister to her. One day, when a storm had blown down an olive tree in front of the house, and Paolo and Giovanni were beginning to cut it up, this same priest of Mugiano came to San Gaudenzio. He was an iron-grey, thin, disreputable-looking priest, very talkative and loud and queer. He seemed like an old ne'er-do-well in priests' black, and he talked loudly, almost to himself, as drunken people do. At once _he_ must show the Fiori how to cut up the tree, he must have the axe from Paolo. He shouted to Maria for a glass of wine. She brought it out to him with a sort of insolent deference, insolent contempt of the man and traditional deference to the cloth. The priest drained the tumblerful of wine at one drink, his thin throat with its Adam's apple working. And he did not pay the penny. Then he stripped off his cassock and put away his hat, and, a ludicrous figure in ill-fitting black knee-breeches and a not very clean shirt, a red handkerchief round his neck, he proceeded to give great extravagant blows at the tree. He was like a caricature. In the doorway Maria was encouraging him rather jeeringly, whilst she winked at me. Marco was stifling his hysterical amusement in his mother's apron, and prancing with glee. Paolo and Giovanni stood by the fallen tree, very grave and unmoved, inscrutable, abstract. Then the youth came away to the doorway, with a flush mounting on his face and a grimace distorting its youngness. Only Paolo, unmoved and detached, stood by the tree with unchanging, abstract face, very strange, his eyes fixed in the ageless stare which is so characteristic. Meanwhile the priest swung drunken blows at the tree, his thin buttocks bending in the green-black broadcloth, supported on thin shanks, and thin throat growing dull purple in the red-knotted kerchief. Nevertheless he was doing the job. His face was wet with sweat. He wanted another glass of wine. He took no notice of us. He was strangely a local, even a mountebank figure, but entirely local, an appurtenance of the district. It was Maria who jeeringly told us the story of the priest, who shrugged her shoulders to imply that he was a contemptible figure. Paolo sat with the abstract look on his face, as of one who hears and does not hear, is not really concerned. He never opposed or contradicted her, but stayed apart. It was she who was violent and brutal in her ways. But sometimes Paolo went into a rage, and then Maria, everybody, was afraid. It was a white heavy rage, when his blue eyes shone unearthly, and his mouth opened with a curious drawn blindness of the old Furies. There was something of the cruelty of a falling mass of snow, heavy, horrible. Maria drew away, there was a silence. Then the avalanche was finished. They must have had some cruel fights before they learned to withdraw from each other so completely. They must have begotten Marco in hatred, terrible disintegrated opposition and otherness. And it was after this, after the child of their opposition was born, that Paolo went away to California, leaving his San Gaudenzio, travelling with several companions, like blind beasts, to Havre, and thence to New York, then to California. He stayed five years in the gold-mines, in a wild valley, living with a gang of Italians in a town of corrugated iron. All the while he had never really left San Gaudenzio. I asked him, 'Used you to think of it, the lake, the Monte Baldo, the laurel trees down the slope?' He tried to see what I wanted to know. Yes, he said--but uncertainly. I could see that he had never been really homesick. It had been very wretched on the ship going from Havre to New York. That he told me about. And he told me about the gold-mines, the galleries, the valley, the huts in the valley. But he had never really fretted for San Gaudenzio whilst he was in California. In real truth he was at San Gaudenzio all the time, his fate was riveted there. His going away was an excursion from reality, a kind of sleep-walking. He left his own reality there in the soil above the lake of Garda. That his body was in California, what did it matter? It was merely for a time, and for the sake of his own earth, his land. He would pay off the mortgage. But the gate at home was his gate all the time, his hand was on the latch. As for Maria, he had felt his duty towards her. She was part of his little territory, the rooted centre of the world. He sent her home the money. But it did not occur to him, in his soul, to miss her. He wanted her to be safe with the children, that was all. In his flesh perhaps he missed the woman. But his spirit was even more completely isolated since marriage. Instead of having united with each other, they had made each other more terribly distinct and separate. He could live alone eternally. It was his condition. His sex was functional, like eating and drinking. To take a woman, a prostitute at the camp, or not to take her, was no more vitally important than to get drunk or not to get drunk of a Sunday. And fairly often on Sunday Paolo got drunk. His world remained unaltered. But Maria suffered more bitterly. She was a young, powerful, passionate woman, and she was unsatisfied body and soul. Her soul's satisfaction became a bodily unsatisfaction. Her blood was heavy, violent, anarchic, insisting on the equality of the blood in all, and therefore on her own absolute right to satisfaction. She took a wine licence for San Gaudenzio, and she sold wine. There were many scandals about her. Somehow it did not matter very much, outwardly. The authorities were too divided among themselves to enforce public opinion. Between the clerical party and the radicals and the socialists, what canons were left that were absolute? Besides, these wild villages had always been ungoverned. Yet Maria suffered. Even she, according to her conviction belonged to Paolo. And she felt betrayed, betrayed and deserted. The iron had gone deep into her soul. Paolo had deserted her, she had been betrayed to other men for five years. There was something cruel and implacable in life. She sat sullen and heavy, for all her quick activity. Her soul was sullen and heavy. I could never believe Felicina was Paolo's child. She was an unprepossessing little girl, affected, cold, selfish, foolish. Maria and Paolo, with real Italian greatness, were warm and natural towards the child in her. But they did not love her in their very souls, she was the fruit of ash to them. And this must have been the reason that she was so self-conscious and foolish and affected, small child that she was. Paolo had come back from America a year before she was born--a year before she was born, Maria insisted. The husband and wife lived together in a relationship of complete negation. In his soul he was sad for her, and in her soul she felt annulled. He sat at evening in the chimney-seat, smoking, always pleasant and cheerful, not for a moment thinking he was unhappy. It had all taken place in his subconsciousness. But his eyebrows and eyelids were lifted in a kind of vacancy, his blue eyes were round and somehow finished, though he was so gentle and vigorous in body. But the very quick of him was killed. He was like a ghost in the house, with his loose throat and powerful limbs, his open, blue extinct eyes, and his musical, slightly husky voice, that seemed to sound out of the past. And Maria, stout and strong and handsome like a peasant woman, went about as if there were a weight on her, and her voice was high and strident. She, too, was finished in her life. But she remained unbroken, her will was like a hammer that destroys the old form. Giovanni was patiently labouring to learn a little English. Paolo knew only four or five words, the chief of which were 'a'right', 'boss', 'bread', and 'day'. The youth had these by heart, and was studying a little more. He was very graceful and lovable, but he found it difficult to learn. A confused light, like hot tears, would come into his eyes when he had again forgotten the phrase. But he carried the paper about with him, and he made steady progress. He would go to America, he also. Not for anything would he stay in San Gaudenzio. His dream was to be gone. He would come back. The world was not San Gaudenzio to Giovanni. The old order, the order of Paolo and of Pietro di Paoli, the aristocratic order of the supreme God, God the Father, the Lord, was passing away from the beautiful little territory. The household no longer receives its food, oil and wine and maize, from out of the earth in the motion of fate. The earth is annulled, and money takes its place. The landowner, who is the lieutenant of God and of Fate, like Abraham, he, too, is annulled. There is now the order of the rich, which supersedes the order of the Signoria. It is passing away from Italy as it has passed from England. The peasant is passing away, the workman is taking his place. The stability is gone. Paolo is a ghost, Maria is the living body. And the new order means sorrow for the Italian more even than it has meant for us. But he will have the new order. San Gaudenzio is already becoming a thing of the past. Below the house, where the land drops in sharp slips to the sheer cliff's edge, over which it is Maria's constant fear that Felicina will tumble, there are the deserted lemon gardens of the little territory, snug down below. They are invisible till one descends by tiny paths, sheer down into them. And there they stand, the pillars and walls erect, but a dead emptiness prevailing, lemon trees all dead, gone, a few vines in their place. It is only twenty years since the lemon trees finally perished of a disease and were not renewed. But the deserted terrace, shut between great walls, descending in their openness full to the south, to the lake and the mountain opposite, seem more terrible than Pompeii in their silence and utter seclusion. The grape hyacinths flower in the cracks, the lizards run, this strange place hangs suspended and forgotten, forgotten for ever, its erect pillars utterly meaningless. I used to sit and write in the great loft of the lemon-house, high up, far, far from the ground, the open front giving across the lake and the mountain snow opposite, flush with twilight. The old matting and boards, the old disused implements of lemon culture made shadows in the deserted place. Then there would come the call from the back, away above: '_Venga, venga mangiare_.' We ate in the kitchen, where the olive and laurel wood burned in the open fireplace. It was always soup in the evening. Then we played games or cards, all playing; or there was singing, with the accordion, and sometimes a rough mountain peasant with a guitar. But it is all passing away. Giovanni is in America, unless he has come back to the War. He will not want to live in San Gaudenzio when he is a man, he says. He and Marco will not spend their lives wringing a little oil and wine out of the rocky soil, even if they are not killed in the fighting which is going on at the end of the lake. In my loft by the lemon-houses now I should hear the guns. And Giovanni kissed me with a kind of supplication when I went on to the steamer, as if he were beseeching for a soul. His eyes were bright and clear and lit up with courage. He will make a good fight for the new soul he wants--that is, if they do not kill him in this War. _5_ THE DANCE Maria had no real licence for San Gaudenzio, yet the peasants always called for wine. It is easy to arrange in Italy. The penny is paid another time. The wild old road that skirts the lake-side, scrambling always higher as the precipice becomes steeper, climbing and winding to the villages perched high up, passes under the high boundary-wall of San Gaudenzio, between that and the ruined church. But the road went just as much between the vines and past the house as outside, under the wall; for the high gates were always open, and men or women and mules come into the property to call at the door of the homestead. There was a loud shout, 'Ah--a--a--ah--Mari--a. O--O--Oh Pa'o!' from outside, another wild, inarticulate cry from within, and one of the Fiori appeared in the doorway to hail the newcomer. It was usually a man, sometimes a peasant from Mugiano, high up, sometimes a peasant from the wilds of the mountain, a wood-cutter, or a charcoal-burner. He came in and sat in the house-place, his glass of wine in his hand between his knees, or on the floor between his feet, and he talked in a few wild phrases, very shy, like a hawk indoors, and unintelligible in his dialect. Sometimes we had a dance. Then, for the wine to drink, three men came with mandolines and guitars, and sat in a corner playing their rapid tunes, while all danced on the dusty brick floor of the little parlour. No strange women were invited, only men; the young bloods from the big village on the lake, the wild men from above. They danced the slow, trailing, lilting polka-waltz round and round the small room, the guitars and mandolines twanging rapidly, the dust rising from the soft bricks. There were only the two English women: so men danced with men, as the Italians love to do. They love even better to dance with men, with a dear blood-friend, than with women. 'It's better like this, two men?' Giovanni says to me, his blue eyes hot, his face curiously tender. The wood-cutters and peasants take off their coats, their throats are bare. They dance with strange intentness, particularly if they have for partner an English Signora. Their feet in thick boots are curiously swift and significant. And it is strange to see the Englishwomen, as they dance with the peasants transfigured with a kind of brilliant surprise. All the while the peasants are very courteous, but quiet. They see the women dilate and flash, they think they have found a footing, they are certain. So the male dancers are quiet, but even grandiloquent, their feet nimble, their bodies wild and confident. They are at a loss when the two English Signoras move together and laugh excitedly at the end of the dance. 'Isn't it fine?' 'Fine! Their arms are like iron, carrying you round.' 'Yes! Yes! And the muscles on their shoulders! I never knew there were such muscles! I'm almost frightened.' 'But it's fine, isn't it? I'm getting into the dance.' 'Yes--yes--you've only to let them take you.' Then the glasses are put down, the guitars give their strange, vibrant, almost painful summons, and the dance begins again. It is a strange dance, strange and lilting, and changing as the music changed. But it had always a kind of leisurely dignity, a trailing kind of polka-waltz, intimate, passionate, yet never hurried, never violent in its passion, always becoming more intense. The women's faces changed to a kind of transported wonder, they were in the very rhythm of delight. From the soft bricks of the floor the red ochre rose in a thin cloud of dust, making hazy the shadowy dancers; the three musicians, in their black hats and their cloaks, sat obscurely in the corner, making a music that came quicker and quicker, making a dance that grew swifter and more intense, more subtle, the men seeming to fly and to implicate other strange inter-rhythmic dance into the women, the women drifting and palpitating as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that was subtly rushing upon them, through them; the men worked their feet, their thighs swifter, more vividly, the music came to an almost intolerable climax, there was a moment when the dance passed into a possession, the men caught up the women and swung them from the earth, leapt with them for a second, and then the next phase of the dance had begun, slower again, more subtly interwoven, taking perfect, oh, exquisite delight in every interrelated movement, a rhythm within a rhythm, a subtle approaching and drawing nearer to a climax, nearer, till, oh, there was the surpassing lift and swing of the women, when the woman's body seemed like a boat lifted over the powerful, exquisite wave of the man's body, perfect, for a moment, and then once more the slow, intense, nearer movement of the dance began, always nearer, nearer, always to a more perfect climax. And the women waited as if in transport for the climax, when they would be flung into a movement surpassing all movement. They were flung, borne away, lifted like a boat on a supreme wave, into the zenith and nave of the heavens, consummate. Then suddenly the dance crashed to an end, and the dancers stood stranded, lost, bewildered, on a strange shore. The air was full of red dust, half-lit by the lamp on the wall; the players in the corner were putting down their instruments to take up their glasses. And the dancers sat round the wall, crowding in the little room, faint with the transport of repeated ecstasy. There was a subtle smile on the face of the men, subtle, knowing, so finely sensual that the conscious eyes could scarcely look at it. And the women were dazed, like creatures dazzled by too much light. The light was still on their faces, like a blindness, a reeling, like a transfiguration. The men were bringing wine, on a little tin tray, leaning with their proud, vivid loins, their faces flickering with the same subtle smile. Meanwhile, Maria Fiori was splashing water, much water, on the red floor. There was the smell of water among the glowing, transfigured men and women who sat gleaming in another world, round the walls. The peasants have chosen their women. For the dark, handsome Englishwoman, who looks like a slightly malignant Madonna, comes Il Duro; for the '_bella bionda_', the wood-cutter. But the peasants have always to take their turn after the young well-to-do men from the village below. Nevertheless, they are confident. They cannot understand the middle-class diffidence of the young men who wear collars and ties and finger-rings. The wood-cutter from the mountain is of medium height, dark, thin, and hard as a hatchet, with eyes that are black like the very flaming thrust of night. He is quite a savage. There is something strange about his dancing, the violent way he works one shoulder. He has a wooden leg, from the knee-joint. Yet he dances well, and is inordinately proud. He is fierce as a bird, and hard with energy as a thunderbolt. He will dance with the blonde signora. But he never speaks. He is like some violent natural phenomenon rather than a person. The woman begins to wilt a little in his possession. '_È bello--il ballo?_' he asked at length, one direct, flashing question. '_Si--molto bello_,' cries the woman, glad to have speech again. The eyes of the wood-cutter flash like actual possession. He seems now to have come into his own. With all his senses, he is dominant, sure. He is inconceivably vigorous in body, and his dancing is almost perfect, with a little catch in it, owing to his lameness, which brings almost a pure intoxication. Every muscle in his body is supple as steel, supple, as strong as thunder, and yet so quick, so delicately swift, it is almost unbearable. As he draws near to the swing, the climax, the ecstasy, he seems to lie in wait, there is a sense of a great strength crouching ready. Then it rushes forth, liquid, perfect, transcendent, the woman swoons over in the dance, and it goes on, enjoyment, infinite, incalculable enjoyment. He is like a god, a strange natural phenomenon, most intimate and compelling, wonderful. But he is not a human being. The woman, somewhere shocked in her independent soul, begins to fall away from him. She has another being, which he has not touched, and which she will fall back upon. The dance is over, she will fall back on herself. It is perfect, too perfect. During the next dance, while she is in the power of the educated Ettore, a perfect and calculated voluptuary, who knows how much he can get out of this Northern woman, and only how much, the wood-cutter stands on the edge of the darkness, in the open doorway, and watches. He is fixed upon her, established, perfect. And all the while she is aware of the insistent hawk-like poising of the face of the wood-cutter, poised on the edge of the darkness, in the doorway, in possession, unrelinquishing. And she is angry. There is something stupid, absurd, in the hard, talon-like eyes watching so fiercely and so confidently in the doorway, sure, unmitigated. Has the creature no sense? The woman reacts from him. For some time she will take no notice of him. But he waits, fixed. Then she comes near to him, and his will seems to take hold of her. He looks at her with a strange, proud, inhuman confidence, as if his influence with her was already accomplished. '_Venga--venga un po'_,' he says, jerking his head strangely to the darkness. 'What?' she replies, and passes shaken and dilated and brilliant, consciously ignoring him, passes away among the others, among those who are safe. There is food in the kitchen, great hunks of bread, sliced sausage that Maria has made, wine, and a little coffee. But only the quality come to eat. The peasants may not come in. There is eating and drinking in the little house, the guitars are silent. It is eleven o'clock. Then there is singing, the strange bestial singing of these hills. Sometimes the guitars can play an accompaniment, but usually not. Then the men lift up their heads and send out the high, half-howling music, astounding. The words are in dialect. They argue among themselves for a moment: will the Signoria understand? They sing. The Signoria does not understand in the least. So with a strange, slightly malignant triumph, the men sing all the verses of their song, sitting round the walls of the little parlour. Their throats move, their faces have a slight mocking smile. The boy capers in the doorway like a faun, with glee, his straight black hair falling over his forehead. The elder brother sits straight and flushed, but even his eyes glitter with a kind of yellow light of laughter. Paolo also sits quiet, with the invisible smile on his face.' Only Maria, large and active, prospering now, keeps collected, ready to order a shrill silence in the same way as she orders the peasants, violently, to keep their places. The boy comes to me and says: 'Do you know, Signore, what they are singing?' 'No,' I say. So he capers with furious glee. The men with the watchful eyes, all roused, sit round the wall and sing more distinctly: _Si verrà la primavera Fiorann' le mandoline, Vienn' di basso le Trentine Coi 'taliani far' l'amor._ But the next verses are so improper that I pretend not to understand. The women, with wakened, dilated faces, are listening, listening hard, their two faces beautiful in their attention, as if listening to something magical, a long way off. And the men sitting round the wall sing more plainly, coming nearer to the correct Italian. The song comes loud and vibrating and maliciously from their reedy throats, it penetrates everybody. The foreign women can understand the sound, they can feel the malicious, suggestive mockery. But they cannot catch the words. The smile becomes more dangerous on the faces of the men. Then Maria Fiori sees that I have understood, and she cries, in her loud, overriding voice: '_Basta--basta._ The men get up, straighten their bodies with a curious, offering movement. The guitars and mandolines strike the vibrating strings. But the vague Northern reserve has come over the Englishwomen. They dance again, but without the fusion in the dance. They have had enough. The musicians are thanked, they rise and go into the night. The men pass off in pairs. But the wood-cutter, whose name and whose nickname I could never hear, still hovered on the edge of the darkness. Then Maria sent him also away, complaining that he was too wild, _proprio selvatico_, and only the 'quality' remained, the well-to-do youths from below. There was a little more coffee, and a talking, a story of a man who had fallen over a declivity in a lonely part going home drunk in the evening, and had lain unfound for eighteen hours. Then a story of a donkey who had kicked a youth in the chest and killed him. But the women were tired, they would go to bed. Still the two young men would not go away. We all went out to look at the night. The stars were very bright overhead, the mountain opposite and the mountains behind us faintly outlined themselves on the sky. Below, the lake was a black gulf. A little wind blew cold from the Adige. In the morning the visitors had gone. They had insisted on staying the night. They had eaten eight eggs each and much bread at one o'clock in the morning. Then they had gone to sleep, lying on the floor in the sitting-room. In the early sunshine they had drunk coffee and gone down to the village on the lake. Maria was very pleased. She would have made a good deal of money. The young men were rich. Her cupidity seemed like her very blossom. _6_ IL DURO The first time I saw Il Duro was on a sunny day when there came up a party of pleasure-makers to San Gaudenzio. They were three women and three men. The women were in cotton frocks, one a large, dark, florid woman in pink, the other two rather insignificant. The men I scarcely noticed at first, except that two were young and one elderly. They were a queer party, even on a feast day, coming up purely for pleasure, in the morning, strange, and slightly uncertain, advancing between the vines. They greeted Maria and Paolo in loud, coarse voices. There was something blowsy and uncertain and hesitating about the women in particular, which made one at once notice them. Then a picnic was arranged for them out of doors, on the grass. They sat just in front of the house, under the olive tree, beyond the well. It should have been pretty, the women in their cotton frocks, and their friends, sitting with wine and food in the spring sunshine. But somehow it was not: it was hard and slightly ugly. But since they were picnicking out of doors, we must do so too. We were at once envious. But Maria was a little unwilling, and then she set a table for us. The strange party did not speak to us, they seemed slightly uneasy and angry at our presence. I asked Maria who they were. She lifted her shoulders, and, after a second's cold pause, said they were people from down below, and then, in her rather strident, shrill, slightly bitter, slightly derogatory voice, she added: 'They are not people for you, signore. You don't know them.' She spoke slightly angrily and contemptuously of them, rather protectively of me. So that vaguely I gathered that they were not quite 'respectable'. Only one man came into the house. He was very handsome, beautiful rather, a man of thirty-two or-three, with a clear golden skin, and perfectly turned face, something godlike. But the expression was strange. His hair was jet black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird's wing, his brows were beautifully drawn, calm above his grey eyes, that had long dark lashes. His eyes, however, had a sinister light in them, a pale, slightly repelling gleam, very much like a god's pale-gleaming eyes, with the same vivid pallor. And all his face had the slightly malignant, suffering look of a satyr. Yet he was very beautiful. He walked quickly and surely, with his head rather down, passing from his desire to his object, absorbed, yet curiously indifferent, as if the transit were in a strange world, as if none of what he was doing were worth the while. Yet he did it for his own pleasure, and the light on his face, a pale, strange gleam through his clear skin, remained like a translucent smile, unchanging as time. He seemed familiar with the household, he came and fetched wine at his will. Maria was angry with him. She railed loudly and violently. He was unchanged. He went out with the wine to the party on the grass. Maria regarded them all with some hostility. They drank a good deal out there in the sunshine. The women and the older man talked floridly. Il Duro crouched at the feast in his curious fashion--he had strangely flexible loins, upon which he seemed to crouch forward. But he was separate, like an animal that remains quite single, no matter where it is. The party remained until about two o'clock. Then, slightly flushed, it moved on in a ragged group up to the village beyond. I do not know if they went to one of the inns of the stony village, or to the large strange house which belonged to the rich young grocer of the village below, a house kept only for feasts and riots, uninhabited for the most part. Maria would tell me nothing about them. Only the young well-to-do grocer, who had lived in Vienna, the Bertolotti, came later in the afternoon inquiring for the party. And towards sunset I saw the elderly man of the group stumbling home very drunk down the path, after the two women, who had gone on in front. Then Paolo sent Giovanni to see the drunken one safely past the landslip, which was dangerous. Altogether it was an unsatisfactory business, very much like any other such party in any other country. Then in the evening Il Duro came in. His name is Faustino, but everybody in the village has a nickname, which is almost invariably used. He came in and asked for supper. We had all eaten. So he ate a little food alone at the table, whilst we sat round the fire. Afterwards we played 'Up, Jenkins'. That was the one game we played with the peasants, except that exciting one of theirs, which consists in shouting in rapid succession your guesses at the number of fingers rapidly spread out and shut into the hands again upon the table. Il Duro joined in the game. And that was because he had been in America, and now was rich. He felt he could come near to the strange signori. But he was always inscrutable. It was queer to look at the hands spread on the table: the Englishwomen, having rings on their soft fingers; the large fresh hands of the elder boy, the brown paws of the younger; Paolo's distorted great hard hands of a peasant; and the big, dark brown, animal, shapely hands of Faustino. He had been in America first for two years and then for five years--seven years altogether--but he only spoke a very little English. He was always with Italians. He had served chiefly in a flag factory, and had had very little to do save to push a trolley with flags from the dyeing-room to the drying-room I believe it was this. Then he had come home from America with a fair amount of money, he had taken his uncle's garden, had inherited his uncle's little house, and he lived quite alone. He was rich, Maria said, shouting in her strident voice. He at once disclaimed it, peasant-wise. But before the signori he was glad also to appear rich. He was mean, that was more, Maria cried, half-teasing, half getting at him. He attended to his garden, grew vegetables all the year round, lived in his little house, and in spring made good money as a vine-grafter: he was an expert vine-grafter. After the boys had gone to bed he sat and talked to me. He was curiously attractive and curiously beautiful, but somehow like stone in his clear colouring and his clear-cut face. His temples, with the black hair, were distinct and fine as a work of art. But always his eyes had this strange, half-diabolic, half-tortured pale gleam, like a goat's, and his mouth was shut almost uglily, his cheeks stern. His moustache was brown, his teeth strong and spaced. The women said it was a pity his moustache was brown. '_Peccato!--sa, per bellezza, i baffi neri--ah-h!_' Then a long-drawn exclamation of voluptuous appreciation. 'You live quite alone?' I said to him. He did. And even when he had been ill he was alone. He had been ill two years before. His cheeks seemed to harden like marble and to become pale at the thought. He was afraid, like marble with fear. 'But why,' I said, 'why do you live alone? You are sad--_è triste_.' He looked at me with his queer, pale eyes. I felt a great static misery in him, something very strange. '_Triste!_' he repeated, stiffening up, hostile. I could not understand. '_Vuol' dire che hai l'aria dolorosa_,' cried Maria, like a chorus interpreting. And there was always a sort of loud ring of challenge somewhere in her voice. 'Sad,' I said in English. 'Sad I' he repeated, also in English. And he did not smile or change, only his face seemed to become more stone-like. And he only looked at me, into my eyes, with the long, pale, steady, inscrutable look of a goat, I can only repeat, something stone-like. 'Why,' I said, 'don't you marry? Man doesn't live alone.' 'I don't marry,' he said to me, in his emphatic, deliberate, cold fashion, 'because I've seen too much. _Ho visto troppo._' 'I don't understand,' I said. Yet I could feel that Paolo, sitting silent, like a monolith also, in the chimney opening, he understood: Maria also understood. Il Duro looked again steadily into my eyes. '_Ho visto troppo_,' he repeated, and the words seemed engraved on stone. 'I've seen too much.' 'But you can marry,' I said, 'however much you have seen, if you have seen all the world.' He watched me steadily, like a strange creature looking at me. 'What woman?' he said to me. 'You can find a woman--there are plenty of women,' I said. 'Not for me,' he said. 'I have known too many. I've known too much, I can marry nobody.' 'Do you dislike women?' I said. 'No--quite otherwise. I don't think ill of them.' 'Then why can't you marry? Why must you live alone?' 'Why live with a woman?' he said to me, and he looked mockingly. 'Which woman is it to be?' 'You can find her,' I said. 'There are many women.' Again he shook his head in the stony, final fashion. 'Not for me. I have known too much.' 'But does that prevent you from marrying?' He looked at me steadily, finally. And I could see it was impossible for us to understand each other, or for me to understand him. I could not understand the strange white gleam of his eyes, where it came from. Also I knew he liked me very much, almost loved me, which again was strange and puzzling. It was as if he were a fairy, a faun, and had no soul. But he gave me a feeling of vivid sadness, a sadness that gleamed like phosphorescence. He himself was not sad. There was a completeness about him, about the pallid otherworld he inhabited, which excluded sadness. It was too complete, too final, too defined. There was no yearning, no vague merging off into mistiness.... He was clear and fine as semi-transparent rock, as a substance in moonlight. He seemed like a crystal that has achieved its final shape and has nothing more to achieve. That night he slept on the floor of the sitting-room. In the morning he was gone. But a week after he came again, to graft the vines. All the morning and the afternoon he was among the vines, crouching before them, cutting them back with his sharp, bright knife, amazingly swift and sure, like a god. It filled me with a sort of panic to see him crouched flexibly, like some strange animal god, doubled on his haunches, before the young vines, and swiftly, vividly, without thought, cut, cut, cut at the young budding shoots, which fell unheeded on to the earth. Then again he strode with his curious half-goatlike movement across the garden, to prepare the lime. He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth, carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world, knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself. Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself, moving to the young vines. Quickly, with a few clean cuts of the knife, he prepared the new shoot, which he had picked out of a handful which lay beside him on the ground; he went finely to the quick of the plant, inserted the graft, then bound it up, fast, hard. It was like God grafting the life of man upon the body of the earth, intimately conjuring with his own flesh. All the while Paolo stood by, somehow excluded from the mystery, talking to me, to Faustino. And Il Duro answered easily, as if his mind were disengaged. It was his senses that were absorbed in the sensible life of the plant, and the lime and the cow-dung he handled. Watching him, watching his absorbed, bestial, and yet godlike crouching before the plant, as if he were the god of lower life, I somehow understood his isolation, why he did not marry. Pan and the ministers of Pan do not marry, the sylvan gods. They are single and isolated in their being. It is in the spirit that marriage takes place. In the flesh there is connexion, but only in the spirit is there a new thing created out of two different antithetic things. In the body I am conjoined with the woman. But in the spirit my conjunction with her creates a third thing, an absolute, a Word, which is neither me nor her, nor of me nor of her, but which is absolute. And Faustino had none of this spirit. In him sensation itself was absolute--not spiritual consummation, but physical sensation. So he could not marry, it was not for him. He belonged to the god Pan, to the absolute of the senses. All the while his beauty, so perfect and so defined, fascinated me, a strange static perfection about him. But his movements, whilst they fascinated, also repelled. I can always see him crouched before the vines on his haunches, his haunches doubled together in a complete animal unconsciousness, his face seeming in its strange golden pallor and its hardness of line, with the gleaming black of the fine hair on the brow and temples, like something reflective, like the reflecting surface of a stone that gleams out of the depths of night. It was like darkness revealed in its steady, unchanging pallor. Again he stayed through the evening, having quarrelled once more with the Maria about money. He quarrelled violently, yet coldly. There was something terrifying in it. And as soon as the matter of dispute was settled, all trace of interest or feeling vanished from him. Yet he liked, above all things, to be near the English signori. They seemed to exercise a sort of magnetic attraction over him. It was something of the purely physical world, as a magnetized needle swings towards soft iron. He was quite helpless in the relation. Only by mechanical attraction he gravitated into line with us. But there was nothing between us except our complete difference. It was like night and day flowing together. _7_ JOHN Besides Il Duro, we found another Italian who could speak English, this time quite well. We had walked about four or five miles up the lake, getting higher and higher. Then quite suddenly, on the shoulder of a bluff far up, we came on a village, icy cold, and as if forgotten. We went into the inn to drink something hot. The fire of olive sticks was burning in the open chimney, one or two men were talking at a table, a young woman with a baby stood by the fire watching something boil in a large pot. Another woman was seen in the house-place beyond. In the chimney-seats sat a young mule-driver, who had left his two mules at the door of the inn, and opposite him an elderly stout man. They got down and offered us the seats of honour, which we accepted with due courtesy. The chimneys are like the wide, open chimney-places of old English cottages, but the hearth is raised about a foot and a half or two feet from the floor, so that the fire is almost level with the hands; and those who sit in the chimney-seats are raised above the audience in the room, something like two gods flanking the fire, looking out of the cave of ruddy darkness into the open, lower world of the room. We asked for coffee with milk and rum. The stout landlord took a seat near us below. The comely young woman with the baby took the tin coffee-pot that stood among the grey ashes, put in fresh coffee among the old bottoms, filled it with water, then pushed it more into the fire. The landlord turned to us with the usual naïve, curious deference, and the usual question: 'You are Germans?' 'English.' 'Ah--_Inglesi_.' Then there is a new note of cordiality--or so I always imagine--and the rather rough, cattle-like men who are sitting with their wine round the table look up more amicably. They do not like being intruded upon. Only the landlord is always affable. 'I have a son who speaks English,' he says: he is a handsome, courtly old man, of the Falstaff sort. 'Oh!' 'He has been in America.' 'And where is he now?' 'He is at home. O--Nicoletta, where is the Giovann'?' The comely young woman with the baby came in. 'He is with the band,' she said. The old landlord looked at her with pride. 'This is my daughter-in-law,' he said. She smiled readily to the Signora. 'And the baby?' we asked. '_Mio figlio_,' cried the young woman, in the strong, penetrating voice of these women. And she came forward to show the child to the Signora. It was a bonny baby: the whole company was united in adoration and service of the bambino. There was a moment of suspension, when religious submission seemed to come over the inn-room. Then the Signora began to talk, and it broke upon the Italian child-reverence. 'What is he called?' 'Oscare,' came the ringing note of pride. And the mother talked to the baby in dialect. All, men and women alike, felt themselves glorified by the presence of the child. At last the coffee in the tin coffee-pot was boiling and frothing out of spout and lid. The milk in the little copper pan was also hot, among the ashes. So we had our drink at last. The landlord was anxious for us to see Giovanni, his son. There was a village band performing up the street, in front of the house of a colonel who had come home wounded from Tripoli. Everybody in the village was wildly proud about the colonel and about the brass band, the music of which was execrable. We just looked into the street. The band of uncouth fellows was playing the same tune over and over again before a desolate, newish house. A crowd of desolate, forgotten villagers stood round in the cold upper air. It seemed altogether that the place was forgotten by God and man. But the landlord, burly, courteous, handsome, pointed out with a flourish the Giovanni, standing in the band playing a cornet. The band itself consisted only of five men, rather like beggars in the street. But Giovanni was the strangest! He was tall and thin and somewhat German-looking, wearing shabby American clothes and a very high double collar and a small American crush hat. He looked entirely like a ne'er-do-well who plays a violin in the street, dressed in the most down-at-heel, sordid respectability. 'That is he--you see, Signore--the young one under the balcony.' The father spoke with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the cold, upper afternoon. Then there was a sudden rugged '_Evviva, Evviva_!' from the people, the band stopped playing, somebody valiantly broke into a line of the song: _Tripoli, sarà italiana, Sarà italiana al rombo del cannon'._ The colonel had appeared on the balcony, a smallish man, very yellow in the face, with grizzled black hair and very shabby legs. They all seemed so sordidly, hopelessly shabby. He suddenly began to speak, leaning forward, hot and feverish and yellow, upon the iron rail of the balcony. There was something hot and marshy and sick about him, slightly repulsive, less than human. He told his fellow-villagers how he loved them, how, when he lay uncovered on the sands of Tripoli, week after week, he had known they were watching him from the Alpine height of the village, he could feel that where he was they were all looking. When the Arabs came rushing like things gone mad, and he had received his wound, he had known that in his own village, among his own dear ones, there was recovery. Love would heal the wounds, the home country was a lover who would heal all her sons' wounds with love. Among the grey desolate crowd were sharp, rending 'Bravos!'--the people were in tears--the landlord at my side was repeating softly, abstractedly: '_Caro--caro--Ettore, caro colonello_--' and when it was finished, and the little colonel with shabby, humiliated legs was gone in, he turned to me and said, with challenge that almost frightened me: '_Un brav' uomo_.' '_Bravissimo_,' I said. Then we, too, went indoors. It was all, somehow, grey and hopeless and acrid, unendurable. The colonel, poor devil--we knew him afterwards--is now dead. It is strange that he is dead. There is something repulsive to me in the thought of his lying dead: such a humiliating, somehow degraded corpse. Death has no beauty in Italy, unless it be violent. The death of man or woman through sickness is an occasion of horror, repulsive. They belong entirely to life, they are so limited to life, these people. Soon the Giovanni came home, and took his cornet upstairs. Then he came to see us. He was an ingenuous youth, sordidly shabby and dirty. His fair hair was long and uneven, his very high starched collar made one aware that his neck and his ears were not clean, his American crimson tie was ugly, his clothes looked as if they had been kicking about on the floor for a year. Yet his blue eyes were warm and his manner and speech very gentle. 'You will speak English with us,' I said. 'Oh,' he said, smiling and shaking his head, 'I could speak English very well. But it is two years that I don't speak it now, over two years now, so I don't speak it.' 'But you speak it very well.' 'No. It is two years that I have not spoke, not a word--so, you see, I have--' 'You have forgotten it? No, you haven't. It will quickly come back.' 'If I hear it--when I go to America--then I shall--I shall--' 'You will soon pick it up.' 'Yes--I shall pick it up.' The landlord, who had been watching with pride, now went away. The wife also went away, and we were left with the shy, gentle, dirty, and frowsily-dressed Giovanni. He laughed in his sensitive, quick fashion. 'The women in America, when they came into the store, they said, "Where is John, where is John?" Yes, they liked me.' And he laughed again, glancing with vague, warm blue eyes, very shy, very coiled upon himself with sensitiveness. He had managed a store in America, in a smallish town. I glanced at his reddish, smooth, rather knuckly hands, and thin wrists in the frayed cuff. They were real shopman's hands. The landlord brought some special feast-day cake, so overjoyed he was to have his Giovanni speaking English with the Signoria. When we went away, we asked 'John' to come down to our villa to see us. We scarcely expected him to turn up. Yet one morning he appeared, at about half past nine, just as we were finishing breakfast. It was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we asked him please to come with us picnicking. He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance. And he was transported with shyness. Yet ours was the world he had chosen as his own, so he took his place bravely and simply, a hanger-on. We climbed up the water-course in the mountain-side, up to a smooth little lawn under the olive trees, where daisies were flowering and gladioli were in bud. It was a tiny little lawn of grass in a level crevice, and sitting there we had the world below us--the lake, the distant island, the far-off low Verona shore. Then 'John' began to talk, and he talked continuously, like a foreigner, not saying the things he would have said in Italian, but following the suggestion and scope of his limited English. In the first place, he loved his father--it was 'my father, my father' always. His father had a little shop as well as the inn in the village above. So John had had some education. He had been sent to Brescia and then to Verona to school, and there had taken his examinations to become a civil engineer. He was clever, and could pass his examinations. But he never finished his course. His mother died, and his father, disconsolate, had wanted him at home. Then he had gone back, when he was sixteen or seventeen, to the village beyond the lake, to be with his father and to look after the shop. 'But didn't you mind giving up all your work?' I said. He did not quite understand. 'My father wanted me to come back,' he said. It was evident that Giovanni had had no definite conception of what he was doing or what he wanted to do. His father, wishing to make a gentleman of him, had sent him to school in Verona. By accident he had been moved on into the engineering course. When it all fizzled to an end, and he returned half-baked to the remote, desolate village of the mountain-side, he was not disappointed or chagrined. He had never conceived of a coherent purposive life. Either one stayed in the village, like a lodged stone, or one made random excursions into the world, across the world. It was all aimless and purposeless. So he had stayed a while with his father, then he had gone, just as aimlessly, with a party of men who were emigrating to America. He had taken some money, had drifted about, living in the most comfortless, wretched fashion, then he had found a place somewhere in Pennsylvania, in a dry goods store. This was when he was seventeen or eighteen years old. All this seemed to have happened to him without his being very much affected, at least consciously. His nature was simple and self-complete. Yet not so self-complete as that of Il Duro or Paolo. They had passed through the foreign world and been quite untouched. Their souls were static, it was the world that had flowed unstable by. But John was more sensitive, he had come more into contact with his new surroundings. He had attended night classes almost every evening, and had been taught English like a child. He had loved the American free school, the teachers, the work. But he had suffered very much in America. With his curious, over-sensitive, wincing laugh, he told us how the boys had followed him and jeered at him, calling after him, 'You damn Dago, you damn Dago.' They had stopped him and his friend in the street and taken away their hats, and spat into them. So that at last he had gone mad. They were youths and men who always tortured him, using bad language which startled us very much as he repeated it, there on the little lawn under the olive trees, above the perfect lake: English obscenities and abuse so coarse and startling that we bit our lips, shocked almost into laughter, whilst John, simple and natural, and somehow, for all his long hair and dirty appearance, flower-like in soul, repeated to us these things which may never be repeated in decent company. 'Oh,' he said, 'at last, I get mad. When they come one day, shouting, "You damn Dago, dirty dog," and will take my hat again, oh, I get mad, and I would kill them, I would kill them, I am so mad. I run to them, and throw one to the floor, and I tread on him while I go upon another, the biggest. Though they hit me and kick me all over, I feel nothing, I am mad. I throw the biggest to the floor, a man; he is older than I am, and I hit him so hard I would kill him. When the others see it they are afraid, they throw stones and hit me on the face. But I don't feel it--I don't know nothing. I hit the man on the floor, I almost kill him. I forget everything except I will kill him--' 'But you didn't?' 'No--I don't know--' and he laughed his queer, shaken laugh. 'The other man that was with me, my friend, he came to me and we went away. Oh, I was mad. I was completely mad. I would have killed them.' He was trembling slightly, and his eyes were dilated with a strange greyish-blue fire that was very painful and elemental. He looked beside himself. But he was by no means mad. We were shaken by the vivid, lambent excitement of the youth, we wished him to forget. We were shocked, too, in our souls to see the pure elemental flame shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature. By his slight, crinkled laugh we could see how much he had suffered. He had gone out and faced the world, and he had kept his place, stranger and Dago though he was. 'They never came after me no more, not all the while I was there.' Then he said he became the foreman in the store--at first he was only assistant. It was the best store in the town, and many English ladies came, and some Germans. He liked the English ladies very much: they always wanted him to be in the store. He wore white clothes there, and they would say: 'You look very nice in the white coat, John'; or else: 'Let John come, he can find it'; or else they said: 'John speaks like a born American.' This pleased him very much. In the end, he said, he earned a hundred dollars a month. He lived with the extraordinary frugality of the Italians, and had quite a lot of money. He was not like Il Duro. Faustino had lived in a state of miserliness almost in America, but then he had had his debauches of shows and wine and carousals. John went chiefly to the schools, in one of which he was even asked to teach Italian. His knowledge of his own language was remarkable and most unusual! 'But what,' I asked, 'brought you back?' 'It was my father. You see, if I did not come to have my military service, I must stay till I am forty. So I think perhaps my father will be dead, I shall never see him. So I came.' He had come home when he was twenty to fulfil his military duties. At home he had married. He was very fond of his wife, but he had no conception of love in the old sense. His wife was like the past, to which he was wedded. Out of her he begot his child, as out of the past. But the future was all beyond her, apart from her. He was going away again, now, to America. He had been some nine months at home after his military service was over. He had no more to do. Now he was leaving his wife and child and his father to go to America. 'But why,' I said, 'why? You are not poor, you can manage the shop in your village.' 'Yes,' he said. 'But I will go to America. Perhaps I shall go into the store again, the same.' 'But is it not just the same as managing the shop at home?' 'No--no--it is quite different.' Then he told us how he bought goods in Brescia and in Said for the shop at home, how he had rigged up a funicular with the assistance of the village, an overhead wire by which you could haul the goods up the face of the cliffs right high up, to within a mile of the village. He was very proud of this. And sometimes he himself went down the funicular to the water's edge, to the boat, when he was in a hurry. This also pleased him. But he was going to Brescia this day to see about going again to America. Perhaps in another month he would be gone. It was a great puzzle to me why he would go. He could not say himself. He would stay four or five years, then he would come home again to see his father--and his wife and child. There was a strange, almost frightening destiny upon him, which seemed to take him away, always away from home, from the past, to that great, raw America. He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice, more like a creature under the influence of fate which was disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment inconclusive, into the new chaos. He submitted to it all with a perfect unquestioning simplicity, never even knowing that he suffered, that he must suffer disintegration from the old life. He was moved entirely from within, he never questioned his inevitable impulse. 'They say to me, "Don't go--don't go"--' he shook his head. 'But I say I will go.' And at that it was finished. So we saw him off at the little quay, going down the lake. He would return at evening, and be pulled up in his funicular basket. And in a month's time he would be standing on the same lake steamer going to America. Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded, sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye, belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another, or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting-place. What were wife and child to him?--they were the last steps of the past. His father was the continent behind him; his wife and child the foreshore of the past; but his face was set outwards, away from it all--whither, neither he nor anybody knew, but he called it America. _Italians in Exile_ When I was in Constance the weather was misty and enervating and depressing, it was no pleasure to travel on the big flat desolate lake. When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to Schaffhausen. That was beautiful. Still, the mist hung over the waters, over the wide shallows of the river, and the sun, coming through the morning, made lovely yellow lights beneath the bluish haze, so that it seemed like the beginning of the world. And there was a hawk in the upper air fighting with two crows, or two rooks. Ever they rose higher and higher, the crow flickering above the attacking hawk, the fight going on like some strange symbol in the sky, the Germans on deck watching with pleasure. Then we passed out of sight between wooded banks and under bridges where quaint villages of old romance piled their red and coloured pointed roofs beside the water, very still, remote, lost in the vagueness of the past. It could not be that they were real. Even when the boat put in to shore, and the customs officials came to look, the village remained remote in the romantic past of High Germany, the Germany of fairy tales and minstrels and craftsmen. The poignancy of the past was almost unbearable, floating there in colour upon the haze of the river. We went by some swimmers, whose white shadowy bodies trembled near the side of the steamer under water. One man with a round, fair head lifted his face and one arm from the water and shouted a greeting to us, as if he were a Niebelung, saluting with bright arm lifted from the water, his face laughing, the fair moustache hanging over his mouth. Then his white body swirled in the water, and he was gone, swimming with the side stroke. Schaffhausen the town, half old and bygone, half modern, with breweries and industries, that is not very real. Schaffhausen Falls, with their factory in the midst and their hotel at the bottom, and the general cinematograph effect, they are ugly. It was afternoon when I set out to walk from the Falls to Italy, across Switzerland. I remember the big, fat, rather gloomy fields of this part of Baden, damp and unliving. I remember I found some apples under a tree in a field near a railway embankment, then some mushrooms, and I ate both. Then I came on to a long, desolate high-road, with dreary, withered trees on either side, and flanked by great fields where groups of men and women were working. They looked at me as I went by down the long, long road, alone and exposed and out of the world. I remember nobody came at the border village to examine my pack, I passed through unchallenged. All was quiet and lifeless and hopeless, with big stretches of heavy land. Till sunset came, very red and purple, and suddenly, from the heavy spacious open land I dropped sharply into the Rhine valley again, suddenly, as if into another glamorous world. There was the river rushing along between its high, mysterious, romantic banks, which were high as hills, and covered with vine. And there was the village of tall, quaint houses flickering its lights on to the deep-flowing river, and quite silent, save for the rushing of water. There was a fine covered bridge, very dark. I went to the middle and looked through the opening at the dark water below, at the façade of square lights, the tall village-front towering remote and silent above the river. The hill rose on either side the flood; down here was a small, forgotten, wonderful world that belonged to the date of isolated village communities and wandering minstrels. So I went back to the inn of The Golden Stag, and, climbing some steps, I made a loud noise. A woman came, and I asked for food. She led me through a room where were enormous barrels, ten feet in diameter, lying fatly on their sides; then through a large stone-clean kitchen, with bright pans, ancient as the Meistersinger; then up some steps and into the long guest-room, where a few tables were laid for supper. A few people were eating. I asked for Abendessen, and sat by the window looking at the darkness of the river below, the covered bridge, the dark hill opposite, crested with its few lights. Then I ate a very large quantity of knoedel soup and bread, and drank beer, and was very sleepy. Only one or two village men came in, and these soon went again; the place was dead still. Only at a long table on the opposite side of the room were seated seven or eight men, ragged, disreputable, some impudent--another came in late; the landlady gave them all thick soup with dumplings and bread and meat, serving them in a sort of brief disapprobation. They sat at the long table, eight or nine tramps and beggars and wanderers out of work and they ate with a sort of cheerful callousness and brutality for the most part, and as if ravenously, looking round and grinning sometimes, subdued, cowed, like prisoners, and yet impudent. At the end one shouted to know where he was to sleep. The landlady called to the young serving-woman, and in a classic German severity of disapprobation they were led up the stone stairs to their room. They tramped off in threes and twos, making a bad, mean, humiliated exit. It was not yet eight o'clock. The landlady sat talking to one bearded man, staid and severe, whilst, with her work on the table, she sewed steadily. As the beggars and wanderers went slinking out of the room, some called impudently, cheerfully: '_Nacht, Frau Wirtin--G'Nacht, Wirtin--'te Nacht, Frau_,' to all of which the hostess answered a stereotyped '_Gute Nacht_,' never turning her head from her sewing, or indicating by the faintest movement that she was addressing the men who were filing raggedly to the doorway. So the room was empty, save for the landlady and her sewing, the staid, elderly villager to whom she was talking in the unbeautiful dialect, and the young serving-woman who was clearing away the plates and basins of the tramps and beggars. Then the villager also went. '_Gute Nacht, Frau Seidl_,' to the landlady; '_Gute Nacht_,' at random, to me. So I looked at the newspaper. Then I asked the landlady for a cigarette, not knowing how else to begin. So she came to my table, and we talked. It pleased me to take upon myself a sort of romantic, wandering character; she said my German was '_schön_'; a little goes a long way. So I asked her who were the men who had sat at the long table. She became rather stiff and curt. 'They are the men looking for work,' she said, as if the subject were disagreeable. 'But why do they come here, so many?' I asked. Then she told me that they were going out of the country: this was almost the last village of the border: that the relieving officer in each village was empowered to give to every vagrant a ticket entitling the holder to an evening meal, bed, and bread in the morning, at a certain inn. This was the inn for the vagrants coming to this village. The landlady received fourpence per head, I believe it was, for each of these wanderers. 'Little enough,' I said. 'Nothing,' she replied. She did not like the subject at all. Only her respect for me made her answer. '_Bettler, Lumpen, und Taugenichtse!_' I said cheerfully. 'And men who are out of work, and are going back to their own parish,' she said stiffly. So we talked a little, and I too went to bed. '_Gute Nacht, Frau Wirtin._' '_Gute Nacht, mein Herr._' So I went up more and more stone stairs, attended by the young woman. It was a great, lofty, old deserted house, with many drab doors. At last, in the distant topmost floor, I had my bedroom, with two beds and bare floor and scant furniture. I looked down at the river far below, at the covered bridge, at the far lights on the hill above, opposite. Strange to be here in this lost, forgotten place, sleeping under the roof with tramps and beggars. I debated whether they would steal my boots if I put them out. But I risked it. The door-latch made a loud noise on the deserted landing, everywhere felt abandoned, forgotten. I wondered where the eight tramps and beggars were asleep. There was no way of securing the door. But somehow I felt that, if I were destined to be robbed or murdered, it would not be by tramps and beggars. So I blew out the candle and lay under the big feather bed, listening to the running and whispering of the medieval Rhine. And when I waked up again it was sunny, it was morning on the hill opposite, though the river deep below ran in shadow. The tramps and beggars were all gone: they must be cleared out by seven o'clock in the morning. So I had the inn to myself, I, and the landlady, and the serving-woman. Everywhere was very clean, full of the German morning energy and brightness, which is so different from the Latin morning. The Italians are dead and torpid first thing, the Germans are energetic and cheerful. It was cheerful in the sunny morning, looking down on the swift river, the covered, picturesque bridge, the bank and the hill opposite. Then down the curving road of the facing hill the Swiss cavalry came riding, men in blue uniforms. I went out to watch them. They came thundering romantically through the dark cavern of the roofed-in bridge, and they dismounted at the entrance to the village. There was a fresh morning-cheerful newness everywhere, in the arrival of the troops, in the welcome of the villagers. The Swiss do not look very military, neither in accoutrement nor bearing. This little squad of cavalry seemed more like a party of common men riding out in some business of their own than like an army. They were very republican and very free. The officer who commanded them was one of themselves, his authority was by consent. It was all very pleasant and genuine; there was a sense of ease and peacefulness, quite different from the mechanical, slightly sullen manoeuvring of the Germans. The village baker and his assistant came hot and floury from the bakehouse, bearing between them a great basket of fresh bread. The cavalry were all dismounted by the bridge-head, eating and drinking like business men. Villagers came to greet their friends: one soldier kissed his father, who came wearing a leathern apron. The school bell tang-tang-tanged from above, school children merged timidly through the grouped horses, up the narrow street, passing unwillingly with their books. The river ran swiftly, the soldiers, very haphazard and slack in uniform, real shack-bags, chewed their bread in large mouthfuls; the young lieutenant, who seemed to be an officer only by consent of the men, stood apart by the bridge-head, gravely. They were all serious and self-contented, very unglamorous. It was like a business excursion on horseback, harmless and uninspiring. The uniforms were almost ludicrous, so ill-fitting and casual. So I shouldered my own pack and set off, through the bridge over the Rhine, and up the hill opposite. There is something very dead about this country. I remember I picked apples from the grass by the roadside, and some were very sweet. But for the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired country--uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that it was almost destructive. One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zurich, it was just the same. It was just the same in the tram-car going into Zurich; it was just the same in the town, in the shops, in the restaurant. All was the utmost level of ordinariness and well-being, but so ordinary that it was like a blight. All the picturesqueness of the town is nothing, it is like a most ordinary, average, usual person in an old costume. The place was soul-killing. So after two hours' rest, eating in a restaurant, wandering by the quay and through the market, and sitting on a seat by the lake, I found a steamer that would take me away. That is how I always feel in Switzerland: the only possible living sensation is the sensation of relief in going away, always going away. The horrible average ordinariness of it all, something utterly without flower or soul or transcendence, the horrible vigorous ordinariness, is too much. So I went on a steamer down the long lake, surrounded by low grey hills. It was Saturday afternoon. A thin rain came on. I thought I would rather be in fiery Hell than in this dead level of average life. I landed somewhere on the right bank, about three-quarters of the way down the lake. It was almost dark. Yet I must walk away. I climbed a long hill from the lake, came to the crest, looked down the darkness of the valley, and descended into the deep gloom, down into a soulless village. But it was eight o'clock, and I had had enough. One might as well sleep. I found the Gasthaus zur Post. It was a small, very rough inn, having only one common room, with bare tables, and a short, stout, grim, rather surly landlady, and a landlord whose hair stood up on end, and who was trembling on the edge of delirium tremens. They could only give me boiled ham: so I ate boiled ham and drank beer, and tried to digest the utter cold materialism of Switzerland. As I sat with my back to the wall, staring blankly at the trembling landlord, who was ready at any moment to foam at the mouth, and at the dour landlady, who was quite capable of keeping him in order, there came in one of those dark, showy Italian girls with a man. She wore a blouse and skirt, and no hat. Her hair was perfectly dressed. It was really Italy. The man was soft, dark, he would get stout later, _trapu_, he would have somewhat the figure of Caruso. But as yet he was soft, sensuous, young, handsome. They sat at the long side-table with their beer, and created another country at once within the room. Another Italian came, fair and fat and slow, one from the Venetian province; then another, a little thin young man, who might have been a Swiss save for his vivid movement. This last was the first to speak to the Germans. The others had just said '_Bier._' But the little newcomer entered into a conversation with the landlady. At last there were six Italians sitting talking loudly and warmly at the side-table. The slow, cold German-Swiss at the other tables looked at them occasionally. The landlord, with his crazed, stretched eyes, glared at them with hatred. But they fetched their beer from the bar with easy familiarity, and sat at their table, creating a bonfire of life in the callousness of the inn. At last they finished their beer and trooped off down the passage. The room was painfully empty. I did not know what to do. Then I heard the landlord yelling and screeching and snarling from the kitchen at the back, for all the world like a mad dog. But the Swiss Saturday evening customers at the other tables smoked on and talked in their ugly dialect, without trouble. Then the landlady came in, and soon after the landlord, he collarless, with his waistcoat unbuttoned, showing his loose throat, and accentuating his round pot-belly. His limbs were thin and feverish, the skin of his face hung loose, his eyes glaring, his hands trembled. Then he sat down to talk to a crony. His terrible appearance was a fiasco; nobody heeded him at all, only the landlady was surly. From the back came loud noises of pleasure and excitement and banging about. When the room door was opened I could see down the dark passage opposite another lighted door. Then the fat, fair Italian came in for more beer. 'What is all the noise?' I asked the landlady at last. 'It is the Italians,' she said. 'What are they doing?' 'They are doing a play.' 'Where?' She jerked her head: 'In the room at the back.' 'Can I go and look at them?' 'I should think so.' The landlord glaringly watched me go out. I went down the stone passage and found a great, half-lighted room that might be used to hold meetings, with forms piled at the side. At one end was raised platform or stage. And on this stage was a table and a lamp, and the Italians grouped round the light, gesticulating and laughing. Their beer mugs were on the table and on the floor of the stage; the little sharp youth was intently looking over some papers, the others were bending over the table with him. They looked up as I entered from the distance, looked at me in the distant twilight of the dusky room, as if I were an intruder, as if I should go away when I had seen them. But I said in German: 'May I look?' They were still unwilling to see or to hear me. 'What do you say?' the small one asked in reply. The others stood and watched, slightly at bay, like suspicious animals. 'If I might come and look,' I said in German; then, feeling very uncomfortable, in Italian: 'You are doing a drama, the landlady told me.' The big empty room was behind me, dark, the little company of Italians stood above me in the light of the lamp which was on the table. They all watched with unseeing, unwilling looks: I was merely an intrusion. 'We are only learning it,' said the small youth. They wanted me to go away. But I wanted to stay. 'May I listen?' I said. 'I don't want to stay in there.' And I indicated, with a movement of the head, the inn-room beyond. 'Yes,' said the young intelligent man. 'But we are only reading our parts.' They had all become more friendly to me, they accepted me. 'You are a German?' asked one youth. 'No--English.' 'English? But do you live in Switzerland?' 'No--I am walking to Italy.' 'On foot?' They looked with wakened eyes. 'Yes.' So I told them about my journey. They were puzzled. They did not quite understand why I wanted to walk. But they were delighted with the idea of going to Lugano and Como and then to Milan. 'Where do you come from?' I asked them. They were all from the villages between Verona and Venice. They had seen the Garda. I told them of my living there. 'Those peasants of the mountains,' they said at once, 'they are people of little education. Rather wild folk.' And they spoke with good-humoured contempt. I thought of Paolo, and Il Duro, and the Signor Pietro, our padrone, and I resented these factory-hands for criticizing them. So I sat on the edge of the stage whilst they rehearsed their parts. The little thin intelligent fellow, Giuseppino, was the leader. The others read their parts in the laborious, disjointed fashion of the peasant, who can only see one word at a time, and has then to put the words together, afterwards, to make sense. The play was an amateur melodrama, printed in little penny booklets, for carnival production. This was only the second reading they had given it, and the handsome, dark fellow, who was roused and displaying himself before the girl, a hard, erect piece of callousness, laughed and flushed and stumbled, and understood nothing till it was transferred into him direct through Giuseppino. The fat, fair, slow man was more conscientious. He laboured through his part. The other two men were in the background more or less. The most confidential was the fat, fair, slow man, who was called Alberto. His part was not very important, so he could sit by me and talk to me. He said they were all workers in the factory--silk, I think it was--in the village. They were a whole colony of Italians, thirty or more families. They had all come at different times. Giuseppino had been longest in the village. He had come when he was eleven, with his parents, and had attended the Swiss school. So he spoke perfect German. He was a clever man, was married, and had two children. He himself, Alberto, had been seven years in the valley; the girl, la Maddelena, had been here ten years; the dark man, Alfredo, who was flushed with excitement of her, had been in the village about nine years--he alone of all men was not married. The others had all married Italian wives, and they lived in the great dwelling whose windows shone yellow by the rattling factory. They lived entirely among themselves; none of them could speak German, more than a few words, except the Giuseppino, who was like a native here. It was very strange being among these Italians exiled in Switzerland. Alfredo, the dark one, the unmarried, was in the old tradition. Yet even he was curiously subject to a new purpose, as if there were some greater new will that included him, sensuous, mindless as he was. He seemed to give his consent to something beyond himself. In this he was different from Il Duro, in that he had put himself under the control of the outside conception. It was strange to watch them on the stage, the Italians all lambent, soft, warm, sensuous, yet moving subject round Giuseppino, who was always quiet, always ready, always impersonal. There was a look of purpose, almost of devotion on his face, that singled him out and made him seem the one stable, eternal being among them. They quarrelled, and he let them quarrel up to a certain point; then he called them back. He let them do as they liked so long as they adhered more or less to the central purpose, so long as they got on in some measure with the play. All the while they were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The Alberto was barman: he went out continually with the glasses. The Maddelena had a small glass. In the lamplight of the stage the little party read and smoked and practised, exposed to the empty darkness of the big room. Queer and isolated it seemed, a tiny, pathetic magicland far away from the barrenness of Switzerland. I could believe in the old fairy-tales where, when the rock was opened, a magic underworld was revealed. The Alfredo, flushed, roused, handsome, but very soft and enveloping in his heat, laughed and threw himself into his pose, laughed foolishly, and then gave himself up to his part. The Alberto, slow and laborious, yet with a spark of vividness and natural intensity flashing through, replied and gesticulated; the Maddelena laid her head on the bosom of Alfredo, the other men started into action, and the play proceeded intently for half an hour. Quick, vivid, and sharp, the little Giuseppino was always central. But he seemed almost invisible. When I think back, I can scarcely see him, I can only see the others, the lamplight on their faces and on their full gesticulating limbs. I can see--the Maddelena, rather coarse and hard and repellent, declaiming her words in a loud, half-cynical voice, falling on the breast of the Alfredo, who was soft and sensuous, more like a female, flushing, with his mouth getting wet, his eyes moist, as he was roused. I can see the Alberto, slow, laboured, yet with a kind of pristine simplicity in all his movements, that touched his fat commonplaceness with beauty. Then there were the two other men, shy, inflammable, unintelligent, with their sudden Italian rushes of hot feeling. All their faces are distinct in the lamplight, all their bodies ate palpable and dramatic. But the face of the Giuseppino is like a pale luminousness, a sort of gleam among all the ruddy glow, his body is evanescent, like a shadow. And his being seemed to cast its influence over all the others, except perhaps the woman, who was hard and resistant. The other men seemed all overcast, mitigated, in part transfigured by the will of the little leader. But they were very soft stuff, if inflammable. The young woman of the inn, niece of the landlady, came down and called out across the room. 'We will go away from here now,' said the Giuseppino to me. 'They close at eleven. But we have another inn in the next parish that is open all night. Come with us and drink some wine.' 'But,' I said, 'you would rather be alone.' No; they pressed me to go, they wanted me to go with them, they were eager, they wanted to entertain me. Alfredo, flushed, wet-mouthed, warm, protested I must drink wine, the real Italian red wine, from their own village at home. They would have no nay. So I told the landlady. She said I must be back by twelve o'clock. The night was very dark. Below the road the stream was rushing; there was a great factory on the other side of the water, making faint quivering lights of reflection, and one could see the working of machinery shadowy through the lighted windows. Near by was the tall tenement where the Italians lived. We went on through the straggling, raw village, deep beside the stream, then over the small bridge, and up the steep hill down which I had come earlier in the evening. So we arrived at the café. It was so different inside from the German inn, yet it was not like an Italian café either. It was brilliantly lighted, clean, new, and there were red-and-white cloths on the tables. The host was in the room, and his daughter, a beautiful red-haired girl. Greetings were exchanged with the quick, intimate directness of Italy. But there was another note also, a faint echo of reserve, as though they reserved themselves from the outer world, making a special inner community. Alfredo was hot: he took off his coat. We all sat freely at a long table, whilst the red-haired girl brought a quart of red wine. At other tables men were playing cards, with the odd Neapolitan cards. They too were talking Italian. It was a warm, ruddy bit of Italy within the cold darkness of Switzerland. 'When you come to Italy,' they said to me, 'salute it from us, salute the sun, and the earth, _l'Italia_.' So we drank in salute of Italy. They sent their greeting by me. 'You know in Italy there is the sun, the sun,' said Alfredo to me, profoundly moved, wet-mouthed, tipsy. I was reminded of Enrico Persevalli and his terrifying cry at the end of _Ghosts_: '_Il sole, il sole!_' So we talked for a while of Italy. They had a pained tenderness for it, sad, reserved. 'Don't you want to go back?' I said, pressing them to tell me definitely. 'Won't you go back some time?' 'Yes,' they said, 'we will go back.' But they spoke reservedly, without freedom. We talked about Italy, about songs, and Carnival; about the food, polenta, and salt. They laughed at my pretending to cut the slabs of polenta with a string: that rejoiced them all: it took them back to the Italian mezzo-giorno, the bells jangling in the campanile, the eating after the heavy work on the land. But they laughed with the slight pain and contempt and fondness which every man feels towards his past, when he has struggled away from that past, from the conditions which made it. They loved Italy passionately; but they would not go back. All their blood, all their senses were Italian, needed the Italian sky, the speech, the sensuous life. They could hardly live except through the senses. Their minds were not developed, mentally they were children, lovable, naïve, almost fragile children. But sensually they were men: sensually they were accomplished. Yet a new tiny flower was struggling to open in them, the flower of a new spirit. The substratum of Italy has always been pagan, sensuous, the most potent symbol the sexual symbol. The child is really a non-Christian symbol: it is the symbol of mans's triumph of eternal life in procreation. The worship of the Cross never really held good in Italy. The Christianity of Northern Europe has never had any place there. And now, when Northern Europe is turning back on its own Christianity, denying it all, the Italians are struggling with might and main against the sensuous spirit which still dominates them. When Northern Europe, whether it hates Nietzsche or not, is crying out for the Dionysic ecstasy, practising on itself the Dionysic ecstasy, Southern Europe is breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over death, immortality through procreation. I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and Il Duro broke away only to return. The dominance of the old form was too strong for them. Call it love of country or love of the village, campanilismo, or what not, it was the dominance of the old pagan form, the old affirmation of immortality through procreation, as opposed to the Christian affirmation of immortality through self-death and social love. But 'John' and these Italians in Switzerland were a generation younger, and they would not go back, at least not to the old Italy. Suffer as they might, and they did suffer, wincing in every nerve and fibre from the cold material insentience of the northern countries and of America, still they would endure this for the sake of something else they wanted. They would suffer a death in the flesh, as 'John' had suffered in fighting the street crowd, as these men suffered year after year cramped in their black gloomy cold Swiss valley, working in the factory. But there would come a new spirit out of it. Even Alfredo was submitted to the new process; though he belonged entirely by nature to the sort of Il Duro, he was purely sensuous and mindless. But under the influence of Giuseppino he was thrown down, as fallow to the new spirit that would come. And then, when the others were all partially tipsy, the Giuseppino began to talk to me. In him was a steady flame burning, burning, burning, a flame of the mind, of the spirit, something new and clear, something that held even the soft, sensuous Alfredo in submission, besides all the others, who had some little development of mind. '_Sa signore_,' said the Giuseppino to me, quiet, almost invisible or inaudible, as it seemed, like a spirit addressing me, '_l'uomo non ha patria_--a man has no country. What has the Italian Government to do with us. What does a Government mean? It makes us work, it takes part of our wages away from us, it makes us soldiers--and what for? What is government for?' 'Have you been a soldier?' I interrupted him. He had not, none of them had: that was why they could not really go back to Italy. Now this was out; this explained partly their curious reservation in speaking about their beloved country. They had forfeited parents as well as homeland. 'What does the Government do? It takes taxes; it has an army and police, and it makes roads. But we could do without an army, and we could be our own police, and we could make our own roads. What is this Government? Who wants it? Only those who are unjust, and want to have advantage over somebody else. It is an instrument of injustice and of wrong. 'Why should we have a Government? Here, in this village, there are thirty families of Italians. There is no government for them, no Italian Government. And we live together better than in Italy. We are richer and freer, we have no policemen, no poor laws. We help each other, and there are no poor. 'Why are these Governments always doing what we don't want them to do? We should not be fighting in the Cirenaica if we were all Italians. It is the Government that does it. They talk and talk and do things with us: but we don't want them.' The others, tipsy, sat round the table with the terrified gravity of children who are somehow responsible for things they do not understand. They stirred in their seats, turning aside, with gestures almost of pain, of imprisonment. Only Alfredo, laying his hand on mine, was laughing, loosely, floridly. He would upset all the Government with a jerk of his well-built shoulder, and then he would have a spree--such a spree. He laughed wetly to me. The Giuseppino waited patiently during this tipsy confidence, but his pale clarity and beauty was something constant star-like in comparison with the flushed, soft handsomeness of the other. He waited patiently, looking at me. But I did not want him to go on: I did not want to answer. I could feel a new spirit in him, something strange and pure and slightly frightening. He wanted something which was beyond me. And my soul was somewhere in tears, crying helplessly like an infant in the night. I could not respond: I could not answer. He seemed to look at me, me, an Englishman, an educated man, for corroboration. But I could not corroborate him. I knew the purity and new struggling towards birth of a true star-like spirit. But I could not confirm him in his utterance: my soul could not respond. I did not believe in the perfectibility of man. I did not believe in infinite harmony among men. And this was his star, this belief. It was nearly midnight. A Swiss came in and asked for beer. The Italians gathered round them a curious darkness of reserve. And then I must go. They shook hands with me warmly, truthfully, putting a sort of implicit belief in me, as representative of some further knowledge. But there was a fixed, calm resolve over the face of the Giuseppino, a sort of steady faith, even in disappointment. He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist paper published in Geneva. _L'Anarchista_, I believe it was called. I glanced at it. It was in Italian, naïve, simple, rather rhetorical. So they were all Anarchists, these Italians. I ran down the hill in the thick Swiss darkness to the little bridge, and along the uneven cobbled street. I did not want to think, I did not want to know. I wanted to arrest my activity, to keep it confined to the moment, to the adventure. When I came to the flight of stone steps which led up to the door of the inn, at the side I saw in the darkness two figures. They said a low good night and parted; the girl began to knock at the door, the man disappeared. It was the niece of the landlady parting from her lover. We waited outside the locked door, at the top of the stone steps, in the darkness of midnight. The stream rustled below. Then came a shouting and an insane snarling within the passage; the bolts were not withdrawn. 'It is the gentleman, it is the strange gentleman,' called the girl. Then came again the furious shouting snarls, and the landlord's mad voice: 'Stop out, stop out there. The door won't be opened again.' 'The strange gentleman is here,' repeated the girl. Then more movement was heard, and the door was suddenly opened, and the landlord rushed out upon us, wielding a broom. It was a strange sight, in the half-lighted passage. I stared blankly in the doorway. The landlord dropped the broom he was waving and collapsed as if by magic, looking at me, though he continued to mutter madly, unintelligibly. The girl slipped past me, and the landlord snarled. Then he picked up the brush, at the same time crying: 'You are late, the door was shut, it will not be opened. We shall have the police in the house. We said twelve o'clock; at twelve o'clock the door must be shut, and must not be opened again. If you are late you stay out--' So he went snarling, his voice rising higher and higher, away into the kitchen. 'You are coming to your room?' the landlady said to me coldly. And she led me upstairs. The room was over the road, clean, but rather ugly, with a large tin, that had once contained lard or Swiss-milk, to wash in. But the bed was good enough, which was all that mattered. I heard the landlord yelling, and there was a long and systematic thumping somewhere, thump, thump, thump, and banging. I wondered where it was. I could not locate it at all, because my room lay beyond another large room: I had to go through a large room, by the foot of two beds, to get to my door; so I could not quite tell where anything was. But I went to sleep whilst I was wondering. I woke in the morning and washed in the tin. I could see a few people in the street, walking in the Sunday morning leisure. It felt like Sunday in England, and I shrank from it. I could see none of the Italians. The factory stood there, raw and large and sombre, by the stream, and the drab-coloured stone tenements were close by. Otherwise the village was a straggling Swiss street, almost untouched. The landlord was quiet and reasonable, even friendly, in the morning. He wanted to talk to me: where had I bought my boots, was his first question. I told him in Munich. And how much had they cost? I told him twenty-eight marks. He was much impressed by them: such good boots, of such soft, strong, beautiful leather; he had not seen such boots for a long time. Then I knew it was he who had cleaned my boots. I could see him fingering them and wondering over them. I rather liked him. I could see he had had imagination once, and a certain fineness of nature. Now he was corrupted with drink, too far gone to be even a human being. I hated the village. They set bread and butter and a piece of cheese weighing about five pounds, and large, fresh, sweet cakes for breakfast. I ate and was thankful: the food was good. A couple of village youths came in, in their Sunday clothes. They had the Sunday stiffness. It reminded me of the stiffness and curious self-consciousness that comes over life in England on a Sunday. But the Landlord sat with his waistcoat hanging open over his shirt, pot-bellied, his ruined face leaning forward, talking, always talking, wanting to know. So in a few minutes I was out on the road again, thanking God for the blessing of a road that belongs to no man, and travels away from all men. I did not want to see the Italians. Something had got tied up in me, and I could not bear to see them again. I liked them so much; but, for some reason or other, my mind stopped like clockwork if I wanted to think of them and of what their lives would be, their future. It was as if some curious negative magnetism arrested my mind, prevented it from working, the moment I turned it towards these Italians. I do not know why it was. But I could never write to them, or think of them, or even read the paper they gave me though it lay in my drawer for months, in Italy, and I often glanced over six lines of it. And often, often my mind went back to the group, the play they were rehearsing, the wine in the pleasant café, and the night. But the moment my memory touched them, my whole soul stopped and was null; I could not go on. Even now I cannot really consider them in thought. I shrink involuntarily away. I do not know why this is. _The Return Journey_ When one walks, one must travel west or south. If one turns northward or eastward it is like walking down a cul-de-sac, to the blind end. So it has been since the Crusaders came home satiated, and the Renaissance saw the western sky as an archway into the future. So it is still. We must go westwards and southwards. It is a sad and gloomy thing to travel even from Italy into France. But it is a joyful thing to walk south to Italy, south and west. It is so. And there is a certain exaltation in the thought of going west, even to Cornwall, to Ireland. It is as if the magnetic poles were south-west and north-east, for our spirits, with the south-west, under the sunset, as the positive pole. So whilst I walk through Switzerland, though it is a valley of gloom and depression, a light seems to flash out under every footstep, with the joy of progression. It was Sunday morning when I left the valley where the Italians lived. I went quickly over the stream, heading for Lucerne. It was a good thing to be out of doors, with one's pack on one's back, climbing uphill. But the trees were thick by the roadside; I was not yet free. It was Sunday morning, very still. In two hours I was at the top of the hill, looking out over the intervening valley at the long lake of Zurich, spread there beyond with its girdle of low hills, like a relief-map. I could not bear to look at it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication, like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to hide the real landscape. So I went on, over to the other side of the hill, and I looked out again. Again there were the smoky-looking hills and the lake like a piece of looking-glass. But the hills were higher: that big one was the Rigi. I set off down the hill. There was fat agricultural land and several villages. And church was over. The churchgoers were all coming home: men in black broadcloth and old chimney-pot silk hats, carrying their umbrellas; women in ugly dresses, carrying books and umbrellas. The streets were dotted with these black-clothed men and stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood, that stiff, null 'propriety' which used to come over us, like a sort of deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable, well-to-do, clean, and proper. And my boot was chafing two of my toes. That always happens. I had come down to a wide, shallow valley-bed, marshy. So about a mile out of the village I sat down by a stone bridge, by a stream, and tore up my handkerchief, and bound up the toes. And as I sat binding my toes, two of the elders in black, with umbrellas under their arms, approached from the direction of the village. They made me so furious, I had to hasten to fasten my boot, to hurry on again, before they should come near me. I could not bear the way they walked and talked, so crambling and material and mealy-mouthed. Then it did actually begin to rain. I was just going down a short hill. So I sat under a bush and watched the trees drip. I was so glad to be there, homeless, without place or belonging, crouching under the leaves in the copse by the road, that I felt I had, like the meek, inherited the earth. Some men went by, with their coat-collars turned up, and the rain making still blacker their black broadcloth shoulders. They did not see me. I was as safe and separate as a ghost. So I ate the remains of my food that I had bought in Zurich, and waited for the rain. Later, in the wet Sunday afternoon, I went on to the little lake, past many inert, neutral, material people, down an ugly road where trams ran. The blight of Sunday was almost intolerable near the town. So on I went, by the side of the steamy, reedy lake, walking the length of it. Then suddenly I went in to a little villa by the water for tea. In Switzerland every house is a villa. But this villa, was kept by two old ladies and a delicate dog, who must not get his feet wet. I was very happy there. I had good jam and strange honey-cakes for tea, that I liked, and the little old ladies pattered round in a great stir, always whirling like two dry leaves after the restless dog. 'Why must he not go out?' I said. 'Because it is wet,' they answered, 'and he coughs and sneezes.' 'Without a handkerchief, that is not _angenehm_' I said. So we became bosom friends. 'You are Austrian?' they said to me. I said I was from Graz; that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe. I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering about, and because I did not want to be myself, an Englishman, to these two old ladies. I wanted to be something else. So we exchanged confidences. They told me, in their queer, old, toothless fashion, about their visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks, fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing--nothing at all--still he fished from the boat; and so on, such trivialities. Then they told me of a third sister who had died, a third little old lady. One could feel the gap in the house. They cried; and I, being an Austrian from Graz, to my astonishment felt my tears slip over on to the table. I also _was_ sorry, and I would have kissed the little old ladies to comfort them. 'Only in heaven it is warm, and it doesn't rain, and no one dies,' I said, looking at the wet leaves. Then I went away. I would have stayed the night at this house: I wanted to. But I had developed my Austrian character too far. So I went on to a detestable brutal inn in the town. And the next day I climbed over the back of the detestable Rigi, with its vile hotel, to come to Lucerne. There, on the Rigi, I met a lost young Frenchman who could speak no German, and who said he could not find people to speak French. So we sat on a stone and became close friends, and I promised faithfully to go and visit him in his barracks in Algiers: I was to sail from Naples to Algiers. He wrote me the address on his card, and told me he had friends in the regiment, to whom I should be introduced, and we could have a good time, if I would stay a week or two, down there in Algiers. How much more real Algiers was than the rock on the Rigi where we sat, or the lake beneath, or the mountains beyond. Algiers is very real, though I have never seen it, and my friend is my friend for ever, though I have lost his card and forgotten his name. He was a Government clerk from Lyons, making this his first foreign tour before he began his military service. He showed me his 'circular excursion ticket'. Then at last we parted, for he must get to the top of the Rigi, and I must get to the bottom. Lucerne and its lake were as irritating as ever--like the wrapper round milk chocolate. I could not sleep even one night there: I took the steamer down the lake, to the very last station. There I found a good German inn, and was happy. There was a tall thin young man, whose face was red and inflamed from the sun. I thought he was a German tourist. He had just come in; and he was eating bread and milk. He and I were alone in the eating-room. He was looking at an illustrated paper. 'Does the steamer stop here all night?' I asked him in German, hearing the boat bustling and blowing her steam on the water outside, and glancing round at her lights, red and white, in the pitch darkness. He only shook his head over his bread and milk, and did not lift his face. 'Are you English, then?' I said. No one but an Englishman would have hidden his face in a bowl of milk, and have shaken his red ears in such painful confusion. 'Yes,' he said, 'I am.' And I started almost out of my skin at the unexpected London accent. It was as if one suddenly found oneself in the Tube. 'So am I,' I said. 'Where have you come from?' Then he began, like a general explaining his plans, to tell me. He had walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight's holiday. So he had come over the Rhône Glacier across the Furka and down from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty mountain miles. 'But weren't you tired?' I said, aghast. He was. Under the inflamed redness of his sun- and wind- and snow-burned face he was sick with fatigue. He had done over a hundred miles in the last four days. 'Did you enjoy it?' I asked. 'Oh yes. I wanted to do it all.' He wanted to do it, and he _had_ done it. But God knows what he wanted to do it for. He had now one day at Lucerne, one day at Interlaken and Berne, then London. I was sorry for him in my soul, he was so cruelly tired, so perishingly victorious. 'Why did you do so much?' I said. 'Why did you come on foot all down the valley when you could have taken the train? Was it worth it?' 'I think so,' he said. Yet he was sick with fatigue and over-exhaustion. His eyes were quite dark, sightless: he seemed to have lost the power of seeing, to be virtually blind. He hung his head forward when he had to write a post card, as if he felt his way. But he turned his post card so that I should not see to whom it was addressed; not that I was interested; only I noticed his little, cautious, English movement of privacy. 'What time will you be going on?' I asked. 'When is the first steamer?' he said, and he turned out a guide-book with a time-table. He would leave at about seven. 'But why so early?' I said to him. He must be in Lucerne at a certain hour, and at Interlaken in the evening. 'I suppose you will rest when you get to London?' I said. He looked at me quickly, reservedly. I was drinking beer: I asked him wouldn't he have something. He thought a moment, then said he would have another glass of hot milk. The landlord came--'And bread?' he asked. The Englishman refused. He could not eat, really. Also he was poor; he had to husband his money. The landlord brought the milk and asked me, when would the gentleman want to go away. So I made arrangements between the landlord and the stranger. But the Englishman was slightly uncomfortable at my intervention. He did not like me to know what he would have for breakfast. I could feel so well the machine that had him in its grip. He slaved for a year, mechanically, in London, riding in the Tube, working in the office. Then for a fortnight he was let free. So he rushed to Switzerland, with a tour planned out, and with just enough money to see him through, and to buy presents at Interlaken: bits of the edelweiss pottery: I could see him going home with them. So he arrived, and with amazing, pathetic courage set forth on foot in a strange land, to face strange landlords, with no language but English at his command, and his purse definitely limited. Yet he wanted to go among the mountains, to cross a glacier. So he had walked on and on, like one possessed, ever forward. His name might have been Excelsior, indeed. But then, when he reached his Furka, only to walk along the ridge and to descend on the same side! My God, it was killing to the soul. And here he was, down again from the mountains, beginning his journey home again: steamer and train and steamer and train and Tube, till he was back in the machine. It hadn't let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, alone, on foot! His eyes were dark and deep with unfathomable courage. Yet he was going back in the morning. He was going back. All he had courage for was to go back. He would go back, though he died by inches. Why not? It was killing him, it was like living loaded with irons. But he had the courage to submit, to die that way, since it was the way allotted to him. The way he sank on the table in exhaustion, drinking his milk, his will, nevertheless, so perfect and unblemished, triumphant, though his body was broken and in anguish, was almost too much to bear. My heart was wrung for my countryman, wrung till it bled. I could not bear to understand my countryman, a man who worked for his living, as I had worked, as nearly all my countrymen work. He would not give in. On his holiday he would walk, to fulfil his purpose, walk on; no matter how cruel the effort were, he would not rest, he would not relinquish his purpose nor abate his will, not by one jot or tittle. His body must pay whatever his will demanded, though it were torture. It all seemed to me so foolish. I was almost in tears. He went to bed. I walked by the dark lake, and talked to the girl in the inn. She was a pleasant girl: it was a pleasant inn, a homely place. One could be happy there. In the morning it was sunny, the lake was blue. By night I should be nearly at the crest of my journey. I was glad. The Englishman had gone. I looked for his name in the book. It was written in a fair, clerkly hand. He lived at Streatham. Suddenly I hated him. The dogged fool, to keep his nose on the grindstone like that. What was all his courage but the very tip-top of cowardice? What a vile nature--almost Sadish, proud, like the infamous Red Indians, of being able to stand torture. The landlord came to talk to me. He was fat and comfortable and too respectful. But I had to tell him all the Englishman had done, in the way of a holiday, just to shame his own fat, ponderous, inn-keeper's luxuriousness that was too gross. Then all I got out of his enormous comfortableness was: 'Yes, that's a _very_ long step to take.' So I set off myself, up the valley between the close, snow-topped mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an insect, along the dark, cold valley below. There had been a cattle fair earlier in the morning, so troops of cattle were roving down the road, some with bells tang-tanging, all with soft faces and startled eyes and a sudden swerving of horns. The grass was very green by the roads and by the streams; the shadows of the mountain slopes were very dark on either hand overhead, and the sky with snowy flanks and tips was high up. Here, away from the world, the villages were quiet and obscure--left behind. They had the same fascinating atmosphere of being forgotten, left out of the world, that old English villages have. And buying apples and cheese and bread in a little shop that sold everything and smelled of everything, I felt at home again. But climbing gradually higher, mile after mile, always between the shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps. The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they _must_ gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows, with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right above, on both sides, seemed like little temporary squattings of outcast people. It seemed impossible that they should persist there, with great shadows wielded over them, like a menace, and gleams of brief sunshine, like a window. There was a sense of momentariness and expectation. It seemed as though some dramatic upheaval must take place, the mountains fall down into their own shadows. The valley beds were like deep graves, the sides of the mountains like the collapsing walls of a grave. The very mountain-tops above, bright with transcendent snow, seemed like death, eternal death. There, it seemed, in the glamorous snow, was the source of death, which fell down in great waves of shadow and rock, rushing to the level earth. And all the people of the mountains, on the slopes, in the valleys, seemed to live upon this great, rushing wave of death, of breaking-down, of destruction. The very pure source of breaking-down, decomposition, the very quick of cold death, is the snowy mountain-peak above. There, eternally, goes on the white foregathering of the crystals, out of the deathly cold of the heavens; this is the static nucleus where death meets life in its elementality. And thence, from their white, radiant nucleus of death in life, flows the great flux downwards, towards life and warmth. And we below, we cannot think of the flux upwards, that flows from the needle-point of snow to the unutterable cold and death. The people under the mountains, they seem to live in the flux of death, the last, strange, overshadowed units of life. Big shadows wave over them, there is the eternal noise of water falling icily downwards from the source of death overhead. And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched air, of reproductive life. But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen, this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but tradespeople. So I climbed slowly up, for a whole day, first along the highroad, sometimes above and sometimes below the twisting, serpentine railway, then afterwards along a path on the side of the hill--a path that went through the crew-yards of isolated farms and even through the garden of a village priest. The priest was decorating an archway. He stood on a chair in the sunshine, reaching up with a garland, whilst the serving-woman stood below, talking loudly. The valley here seemed wider, the great flanks of the mountains gave place, the peaks above were further back. So one was happier. I was pleased as I sat by the thin track of single flat stones that dropped swiftly downhill. At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry, or a foundry, some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home among the mountains. It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it. I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the pass to where the tunnel begins. Göschenen, the village at the mouth of the tunnel, is all railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists, post cards, and touts and weedy carriages; disorder and sterile chaos, high up. How should any one stay there! I went on up the pass itself. There were various parties of visitors on the roads and tracks, people from towns incongruously walking and driving. It was drawing on to evening. I climbed slowly, between the great cleft in the rock where are the big iron gates, through which the road winds, winds half-way down the narrow gulley of solid, living rock, the very throat of the path, where hangs a tablet in memory of many Russians killed. Emerging through the dark rocky throat of the pass I came to the upper world, the level upper world. It was evening, livid, cold. On either side spread the sort of moorland of the wide pass-head. I drew near along the high-road, to Andermatt. Everywhere were soldiers moving about the livid, desolate waste of this upper world. I passed the barracks and the first villas for visitors. Darkness was coming on; the straggling, inconclusive street of Andermatt looked as if it were some accident--houses, hotels, barracks, lodging-places tumbled at random as the caravan of civilization crossed this high, cold, arid bridge of the European world. I bought two post cards and wrote them out of doors in the cold, livid twilight. Then I asked a soldier where was the post-office. He directed me. It was something like sending post cards from Skegness or Bognor, there in the post-office. I was trying to make myself agree to stay in Andermatt for the night. But I could not. The whole place was so terribly raw and flat and accidental, as if great pieces of furniture had tumbled out of a pantechnicon and lay discarded by the road. I hovered in the street, in the twilight, trying to make myself stay. I looked at the announcements of lodgings and boarding for visitors. It was no good. I could not go into one of these houses. So I passed on, through the old, low, broad-eaved houses that cringe down to the very street, out into the open again. The air was fierce and savage. On one side was a moorland, level; on the other a sweep of naked hill, curved concave, and sprinkled with snow. I could see how wonderful it would all be, under five or six feet of winter snow, skiing and tobogganing at Christmas. But it needed the snow. In the summer there is to be seen nothing but the winter's broken detritus. The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys our warm being. So I came, in the early darkness, to the little village with the broken castle that stands for ever frozen at the point where the track parts, one way continuing along the ridge, to the Furka Pass, the other swerving over the hill to the left, over the Gotthardt. In this village I must stay. I saw a woman looking hastily, furtively from a doorway. I knew she was looking for visitors. I went on up the hilly street. There were only a few wooden houses and a gaily lighted wooden inn, where men were laughing, and strangers, men, standing talking loudly in the doorway. It was very difficult to go to a house this night. I did not want to approach any of them. I turned back to the house of the peering woman. She had looked hen-like and anxious. She would be glad of a visitor to help her pay her rent. It was a clean, pleasant wooden house, made to keep out the cold. That seemed its one function: to defend the inmates from the cold. It was furnished like a hut, just tables and chairs and bare wooden walls. One felt very close and secure in the room, as in a hut, shut away from the outer world. The hen-like woman came. 'Can I have a bed,' I said, 'for the night?' '_Abendessen, ja!_' she replied. 'Will you have soup and boiled beef and vegetables?' I said I would, so I sat down to wait, in the utter silence. I could scarcely hear the ice-stream, the silence seemed frozen, the house empty. The woman seemed to be flitting aimlessly, scurriedly, in reflex against the silence. One could almost touch the stillness as one could touch the walls, or the stove, or the table with white American oil-cloth. Suddenly she appeared again. 'What will you drink?' She watched my face anxiously, and her voice was pathetic, slightly pleading in its quickness. 'Wine or beer?' she said. I would not trust the coldness of beer. 'A half of red wine,' I said. I knew she was going to keep me an indefinite time. She appeared with the wine and bread. 'Would you like omelette after the beef?' she asked. 'Omelette with cognac--I can make it _very_ good.' I knew I should be spending too much, but I said yes. After all, why should I not eat, after the long walk? So she left me again, whilst I sat in the utter isolation and stillness, eating bread and drinking the wine, which was good. And I listened for any sound: only the faint noise of the stream. And I wondered, Why am I here, on this ridge of the Alps, in the lamp-lit, wooden, close-shut room, alone? Why am I here? Yet somehow I was glad, I was happy even: such splendid silence and coldness and clean isolation. It was something eternal, unbroachable: I was free, in this heavy, ice-cold air, this upper world, alone. London, far away below, beyond, England, Germany, France--they were all so unreal in the night. It was a sort of grief that this continent all beneath was so unreal, false, non-existent in its activity. Out of the silence one looked down on it, and it seemed to have lost all importance, all significance. It was so big, yet it had no significance. The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but wander about? The woman came with my soup. I asked her, did not many people come in the summer. But she was scared away, she did not answer, she went like a leaf in the wind. However, the soup was good and plentiful. She was a long time before she came with the next course. Then she put the tray on the table, and looking at me, then looking away, shrinking, she said: 'You must excuse me if I don't answer you--I don't hear well--I am rather deaf.' I looked at her, and I winced also. She shrank in such simple pain from the fact of her defect. I wondered if she were bullied because of it, or only afraid lest visitors would dislike it. She put the dishes in order, set me my plate, quickly, nervously, and was gone again, like a scared chicken. Being tired, I wanted to weep over her, the nervous, timid hen, so frightened by her own deafness. The house was silent of her, empty. It was perhaps her deafness which created this empty soundlessness. When she came with the omelette, I said to her loudly: 'That was very good, the soup and meat.' So she quivered nervously, and said, 'Thank you,' and I managed to talk to her. She was like most deaf people, in that her terror of not hearing made her six times worse than she actually was. She spoke with a soft, strange accent, so I thought she was perhaps a foreigner. But when I asked her she misunderstood, and I had not the heart to correct her. I can only remember she said her house was always full in the winter, about Christmas-time. People came for the winter sport. There were two young English ladies who always came to her. She spoke of them warmly. Then, suddenly afraid, she drifted off again. I ate the omelette with cognac, which was very good, then I looked in the street. It was very dark, with bright stars, and smelled of snow. Two village men went by. I was tired, I did not want to go to the inn. So I went to bed, in the silent, wooden house. I had a small bedroom, clean and wooden and very cold. Outside, the stream was rushing. I covered myself with a great depth of featherbed, and looked at the stars, and the shadowy upper world, and went to sleep. In the morning I washed in the ice-cold water, and was glad to set out. An icy mist was over the noisy stream, there were a few meagre, shredded pine-trees. I had breakfast and paid my bill: it was seven francs--more than I could afford; but that did not matter, once I was out in the air. The sky was blue and perfect, it was a ringing morning, the village was very still. I went up the hill till I came to the signpost. I looked down the direction of the Furka, and thought of my tired Englishman from Streatham, who would be on his way home. Thank God I need not go home: never, perhaps. I turned up the track to the left, to the Gothard. Standing looking round at the mountain-tops, at the village and the broken castle below me, at the scattered debris of Andermatt on the moor in the distance, I was jumping in my soul with delight. Should one ever go down to the lower world? Then I saw another figure striding along, a youth with knee-breeches and Alpine hat and braces over his shirt, walking manfully, his coat slung in his rucksack behind. I laughed, and waited. He came my way. 'Are you going over the Gothard?' I said. 'Yes,' he replied. 'Are you also?' 'Yes' I said. 'We will go together.' So we set off, climbing a track up the heathy rocks. He was a pale, freckled town youth from Basel, seventeen years old. He was a clerk in a baggage-transport firm--Gondrand Frères, I believe. He had a week's holiday, in which time he was going to make a big circular walk, something like the Englishman's. But he was accustomed to this mountain walking: he belonged to a Sportverein. Manfully he marched in his thick hob-nailed boots, earnestly he scrambled up the rocks. We were in the crest of the pass. Broad snow-patched slopes came down from the pure sky; the defile was full of stones, all bare stones, enormous ones as big as a house, and small ones, pebbles. Through these the road wound in silence, through this upper, transcendent desolation, wherein was only the sound of the stream. Sky and snow-patched slopes, then the stony, rocky bed of the defile, full of morning sunshine: this was all. We were crossing in silence from the northern world to the southern. But he, Emil, was going to take the train back, through the tunnel, in the evening, to resume his circular walk at Göschenen. I, however, was going on, over the ridge of the world, from the north into the south. So I was glad. We climbed up the gradual incline for a long time. The slopes above became lower, they began to recede. The sky was very near, we were walking under the sky. Then the defile widened out, there was an open place before us, the very top of the pass. Also there were low barracks, and soldiers. We heard firing. Standing still, we saw on the slopes of snow, under the radiant blue heaven, tiny puffs of smoke, then some small black figures crossing the snow patch, then another rattle of rifle-fire, rattling dry and unnatural in the upper, skyey air, between the rocks. '_Das ist schön_,' said my companion, in his simple admiration. '_Hübsch_,' I said. 'But that would be splendid, to be firing up there, manoeuvring up in the snow.' And he began to tell me how hard a soldier's life was, how hard the soldier was drilled. 'You don't look forward to it?' I said. 'Oh yes, I do. I want to be a soldier, I want to serve my time.' 'Why?'I said. 'For the exercise, the life, the drilling. One becomes strong.' 'Do all the Swiss want to serve their time in the army?' I asked. 'Yes--they all want to. It is good for every man, and it keeps us all together. Besides, it is only for a year. For a year it is very good. The Germans have three years--that is too long, that is bad.' I told him how the soldiers in Bavaria hated the military service. 'Yes,' he said, 'that is true of Germans. The system is different. Ours is much better; in Switzerland a man enjoys his time as a soldier. I want to go.' So we watched the black dots of soldiers crawling over the high snow, listened to the unnatural dry rattle of guns, up there. Then we were aware of somebody whistling, of soldiers yelling down the road. We were to come on, along the level, over the bridge. So we marched quickly forward, away from the slopes, towards the hotel, once a monastery, that stood in the distance. The light was blue and clear on the reedy lakes of this upper place; it was a strange desolation of water and bog and rocks and road, hedged by the snowy slopes round the rim, under the very sky. The soldier was yelling again. I could not tell what he said. 'He says if we don't run we can't come at all,' said Emil. 'I won't run,' I said. So we hurried forwards, over the bridge, where the soldier on guard was standing. 'Do you want to be shot?' he said angrily, as we came up. 'No, thanks,' I said. Emil was very serious. 'How long should we have had to wait if we hadn't got through now?' he asked the soldier, when we were safely out of danger. 'Till one o'clock,' was the reply. 'Two hours!' said Emil, strangely elated. 'We should have had to wait two hours before we could come on. He was riled that we didn't run,' and he laughed with glee. So we marched over the level to the hotel. We called in for a glass of hot milk. I asked in German. But the maid, a pert hussy, elegant and superior, was French. She served us with great contempt, as two worthless creatures, poverty-stricken. It abashed poor Emil, but we managed to laugh at her. This made her very angry. In the smoking-room she raised up her voice in French: '_Du lait chaud pour les chameaux._' 'Some hot milk for the camels, she says,' I translated for Emil. He was covered with confusion and youthful anger. But I called to her, tapped the table and called: '_Mademoiselle!_' She appeared flouncingly in the doorway. '_Encore du lait pour les chameaux_,' I said. And she whisked our glasses off the table, and flounced out without a word. But she would not come in again with the milk. A German girl brought it. We laughed, and she smiled primly. When we set forth again, Emil rolled up his sleeves and turned back his shirt from his neck and breast, to do the thing thoroughly. Besides, it was midday, and the sun was hot; and, with his bulky pack on his back, he suggested the camel of the French maid more than ever. We were on the downward slope. Only a short way from the hotel, and there was the drop, the great cleft in the mountains running down from this shallow pot among the peaks. The descent on the south side is much more precipitous and wonderful than the ascent from the north. On the south, the rocks are craggy and stupendous; the little river falls headlong down; it is not a stream, it is one broken, panting cascade far away in the gulley below, in the darkness. But on the slopes the sun pours in, the road winds down with its tail in its mouth, always in endless loops returning on itself. The mules that travel upward seem to be treading in a mill. Emil took the narrow tracks, and, like the water, we cascaded down, leaping from level to level, leaping, running, leaping, descending headlong, only resting now and again when we came down on to another level of the high-road. Having begun, we could not help ourselves, we were like two stones bouncing down. Emil was highly elated. He waved his thin, bare, white arms as he leapt, his chest grew pink with the exercise. Now he felt he was doing something that became a member of his Sportverein. Down we went, jumping, running, britching. It was wonderful on this south side, so sunny, with feathery trees and deep black shadows. It reminded me of Goethe, of the romantic period: _Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühen?_ So we went tumbling down into the south, very swiftly, along with the tumbling stream. But it was very tiring. We went at a great pace down the gully, between the sheer rocks. Trees grew in the ledges high over our heads, trees grew down below. And ever we descended. Till gradually the gully opened, then opened into a wide valley-head, and we saw Airolo away below us, the railway emerging from its hole, the whole valley like a cornucopia full of sunshine. Poor Emil was tired, more tired than I was. And his big boots had hurt his feet in the descent. So, having come to the open valley-head, we went more gently. He had become rather quiet. The head of the valley had that half-tamed, ancient aspect that reminded me of the Romans. I could only expect the Roman legions to be encamped down there; and the white goats feeding on the bushes belonged to a Roman camp. But no, we saw again the barracks of the Swiss soldiery, and again we were in the midst of rifle-fire and manoeuvres. But we went evenly, tired now, and hungry. We had nothing to eat. It is strange how different the sun-dried, ancient, southern slopes of the world are, from the northern slopes. It is as if the god Pan really had his home among these sun-bleached stones and tough, sun-dark trees. And one knows it all in one's blood, it is pure, sun-dried memory. So I was content, coming down into Airolo. We found the streets were Italian, the houses sunny outside and dark within, like Italy, there were laurels in the road. Poor Emil was a foreigner all at once. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and fastened his shirt-neck, put on his coat and collar, and became a foreigner in his soul, pale and strange. I saw a shop with vegetables and grapes, a real Italian shop, a dark cave. '_Quanto costa l'uva?_' were my first words in the south. '_Sessanta al chilo_,' said the girl. And it was as pleasant as a drink of wine, the Italian. So Emil and I ate the sweet black grapes as we went to the station. He was very poor. We went into the third-class restaurant at the station. He ordered beer and bread and sausage; I ordered soup and boiled beef and vegetables. They brought me a great quantity, so, whilst the girl was serving coffee-with-rum to the men at the bar, I took another spoon and knife and fork and plates for Emil, and we had two dinners from my one. When the girl--she was a woman of thirty-five--came back, she looked at us sharply. I smiled at her coaxingly; so she gave a small, kindly smile in reply. '_Ja, dies ist reizend_,' said Emil, _sotto voce_, exulting. He was very shy. But we were curiously happy, in that railway restaurant. Then we sat very still, on the platform, and waited for the train. It was like Italy, pleasant and social to wait in the railway station, all the world easy and warm in its activity, with the sun shining. I decided to take a franc's worth of train-journey. So I chose my station. It was one franc twenty, third class. Then my train came, and Emil and I parted, he waving to me till I was out of sight. I was sorry he had to go back, he did so want to venture forth. So I slid for a dozen miles or more, sleepily, down the Ticino valley, sitting opposite two fat priests in their feminine black. When I got out at my station I felt for the first time ill at ease. Why was I getting out at this wayside place, on to the great, raw high-road? I did not know. But I set off walking. It was nearly tea-time. Nothing in the world is more ghastly than these Italian roads, new, mechanical, belonging to a machine life. The old roads are wonderful, skilfully aiming their way. But these new great roads are desolating, more desolating than all the ruins in the world. I walked on and on, down the Ticino valley, towards Bellinzona. The valley was perhaps beautiful: I don't know. I can only remember the road. It was broad and new, and it ran very often beside the railway. It ran also by quarries and by occasional factories, also through villages. And the quality of its sordidness is something that does not bear thinking of, a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not there before. Here and there, where there were quarries or industries, great lodging-houses stood naked by the road, great, grey, desolate places; and squalid children were playing round the steps, and dirty men slouched in. Everything seemed under a weight. Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one feels on the new Italian roads, where these great blind cubes of dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive. It seems to happen when the peasant suddenly leaves his home and becomes a workman. Then an entire change comes over everywhere. Life is now a matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really slave-work, each integer doing his mere labour, and all for no purpose, except to have money, and to get away from the old system. These Italian navvies work all day long, their whole life is engaged in the mere brute labour. And they are the navvies of the world. And whilst they are navvying, they are almost shockingly indifferent to their circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness. It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steel framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between. It is most terrifying to realize; and I have always felt this terror upon a new Italian high-road--more there than anywhere. The remembrance of the Ticino valley is a sort of nightmare to me. But it was better when at last, in the darkness of night, I got into Bellinzona. In the midst of the town one felt the old organism still living. It is only at its extremities that it is falling to pieces, as in dry rot. In the morning, leaving Bellinzona, again I went in terror of the new, evil high-road, with its skirting of huge cubical houses and its seething navvy population. Only the peasants driving in with fruit were consoling. But I was afraid of them: the same spirit had set in in them. I was no longer happy in Switzerland, not even when I was eating great blackberries and looking down at the Lago Maggiore, at Locarno, lying by the lake; the terror of the callous, disintegrating process was too strong in me. At a little inn a man was very good to me. He went into his garden and fetched me the first grapes and apples and peaches, bringing them in amongst leaves, and heaping them before me. He was Italian-Swiss; he had been in a bank in Bern; now he had retired, had bought his paternal home, and was a free man. He was about fifty years old; he spent all his time in his garden; his daughter attended to the inn. He talked to me, as long as I stayed, about Italy and Switzerland and work and life. He was retired, he was free. But he was only nominally free. He had only achieved freedom from labour. He knew that the system he had escaped at last, persisted, and would consume his sons and his grandchildren. He himself had more or less escaped back to the old form; but as he came with me on to the hillside, looking down the high-road at Lugano in the distance, he knew that his old order was collapsing by a slow process of disintegration. Why did he talk to me as if I had any hope, as if I represented any positive truth as against this great negative truth that was advancing up the hill-side. Again I was afraid. I hastened down the high-road, past the houses, the grey, raw crystals of corruption. I saw a girl with handsome bare legs, ankles shining like brass in the sun. She was working in a field, on the edge of a vineyard. I stopped to look at her, suddenly fascinated by her handsome naked flesh that shone like brass. Then she called out to me, in a jargon I could not understand, something mocking and challenging. And her voice was raucous and challenging; I went on, afraid. In Lugano I stayed at a German hotel. I remember sitting on a seat in the darkness by the lake, watching the stream of promenaders patrolling the edge of the water, under the trees and the lamps. I can still see many of their faces: English, German, Italian, French. And it seemed here, here in this holiday-place, was the quick of the disintegration, the dry-rot, in this dry, friable flux of people backwards and forwards on the edge of the lake, men and women from the big hotels, in evening dress, curiously sinister, and ordinary visitors, and tourists, and workmen, youths, men of the town, laughing, jeering. It was curiously and painfully sinister, almost obscene. I sat a long time among them, thinking of the girl with her limbs of glowing brass. Then at last I went up to the hotel, and sat in the lounge looking at the papers. It was the same here as down below, though not so intense, the feeling of horror. So I went to bed. The hotel was on the edge of a steep declivity. I wondered why the whole hills did not slide down, in some great natural catastrophe. In the morning I walked along the side of the Lake of Lugano, to where I could take a steamer to ferry me down to the end. The lake is not beautiful, only picturesque. I liked most to think of the Romans coming to it. So I steamed down to the lower end of the water. When I landed and went along by a sort of railway I saw a group of men. Suddenly they began to whoop and shout. They were hanging on to an immense pale bullock, which was slung up to be shod; and it was lunging and kicking with terrible energy. It was strange to see that mass of pale, soft-looking flesh working with such violent frenzy, convulsed with violent, active frenzy, whilst men and women hung on to it with ropes, hung on and weighed it down. But again it scattered some of them in its terrible convulsion. Human beings scattered into the road, the whole place was covered with hot dung. And when the bullock began to lunge again, the men set up a howl, half of triumph, half of derision. I went on, not wanting to see. I went along a very dusty road. But it was not so terrifying, this road. Perhaps it was older. In dreary little Chiasso I drank coffee, and watched the come and go through the Customs. The Swiss and the Italian Customs officials had their offices within a few yards of each other, and everybody must stop. I went in and showed my rucksack to the Italian, then I mounted a tram, and went to the Lake of Como. In the tram were dressed-up women, fashionable, but business-like. They had come by train to Chiasso, or else had been shopping in the town. When we came to the terminus a young miss, dismounting before me, left behind her parasol. I had been conscious of my dusty, grimy appearance as I sat in the tram, I knew they thought me a workman on the roads. However, I forgot that when it was time to dismount. '_Pardon, Mademoiselle_,' I said to the young miss. She turned and withered me with a rather overdone contempt--'_bourgeoise_,' I said to myself, as I looked at her--'_Vous avez laissé votre parasol_.' She turned, and with a rapacious movement darted upon her parasol. How her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on white kid boots. I thought of the Lake of Como what I had thought of Lugano: it must have been wonderful when the Romans came there. Now it is all villas. I think only the sunrise is still wonderful, sometimes. I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere stinks of mechanical money-pleasure. I dared not risk walking to Milan: I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human mind as well as the body. But always there was the same purpose stinking in it all, the mechanizing, the perfect mechanizing of human life. 
9498	----	THE TRESPASSER By D. H. Lawrence 1912 _Chapter 1_ 'Take off that mute, do!' cried Louisa, snatching her fingers from the piano keys, and turning abruptly to the violinist. Helena looked slowly from her music. 'My dear Louisa,' she replied, 'it would be simply unendurable.' She stood tapping her white skirt with her bow in a kind of a pathetic forbearance. 'But I can't understand it,' cried Louisa, bouncing on her chair with the exaggeration of one who is indignant with a beloved. 'It is only lately you would even submit to muting your violin. At one time you would have refused flatly, and no doubt about it.' 'I have only lately submitted to many things,' replied Helena, who seemed weary and stupefied, but still sententious. Louisa drooped from her bristling defiance. 'At any rate,' she said, scolding in tones too naked with love, I don't like it.' '_Go on from Allegro_,' said Helena, pointing with her bow to the place on Louisa's score of the Mozart sonata. Louisa obediently took the chords, and the music continued. A young man, reclining in one of the wicker arm-chairs by the fire, turned luxuriously from the girls to watch the flames poise and dance with the music. He was evidently at his ease, yet he seemed a stranger in the room. It was the sitting-room of a mean house standing in line with hundreds of others of the same kind, along a wide road in South London. Now and again the trams hummed by, but the room was foreign to the trams and to the sound of the London traffic. It was Helena's room, for which she was responsible. The walls were of the dead-green colour of August foliage; the green carpet, with its border of polished floor, lay like a square of grass in a setting of black loam. Ceiling and frieze and fireplace were smooth white. There was no other colouring. The furniture, excepting the piano, had a transitory look; two light wicker arm-chairs by the fire, the two frail stands of dark, polished wood, the couple of flimsy chairs, and the case of books in the recess--all seemed uneasy, as if they might be tossed out to leave the room clear, with its green floor and walls, and its white rim of skirting-board, serene. On the mantlepiece were white lustres, and a small soapstone Buddha from China, grey, impassive, locked in his renunciation. Besides these, two tablets of translucent stone beautifully clouded with rose and blood, and carved with Chinese symbols; then a litter of mementoes, rock-crystals, and shells and scraps of seaweed. A stranger, entering, felt at a loss. He looked at the bare wall-spaces of dark green, at the scanty furniture, and was assured of his unwelcome. The only objects of sympathy in the room were the white lamp that glowed on a stand near the wall, and the large, beautiful fern, with narrow fronds, which ruffled its cloud of green within the gloom of the window-bay. These only, with the fire, seemed friendly. The three candles on the dark piano burned softly, the music fluttered on, but, like numbed butterflies, stupidly. Helena played mechanically. She broke the music beneath her bow, so that it came lifeless, very hurting to hear. The young man frowned, and pondered. Uneasily, he turned again to the players. The violinist was a girl of twenty-eight. Her white dress, high-waisted, swung as she forced the rhythm, determinedly swaying to the time as if her body were the white stroke of a metronome. It made the young man frown as he watched. Yet he continued to watch. She had a very strong, vigorous body. Her neck, pure white, arched in strength from the fine hollow between her shoulders as she held the violin. The long white lace of her sleeve swung, floated, after the bow. Byrne could not see her face, more than the full curve of her cheek. He watched her hair, which at the back was almost of the colour of the soapstone idol, take the candlelight into its vigorous freedom in front and glisten over her forehead. Suddenly Helena broke off the music, and dropped her arm in irritable resignation. Louisa looked round from the piano, surprised. 'Why,' she cried, 'wasn't it all right?' Helena laughed wearily. 'It was all wrong,' she answered, as she put her violin tenderly to rest. 'Oh, I'm sorry I did so badly,' said Louisa in a huff. She loved Helena passionately. 'You didn't do badly at all,' replied her friend, in the same tired, apathetic tone. 'It was I.' When she had closed the black lid of her violin-case, Helena stood a moment as if at a loss. Louisa looked up with eyes full of affection, like a dog that did not dare to move to her beloved. Getting no response, she drooped over the piano. At length Helena looked at her friend, then slowly closed her eyes. The burden of this excessive affection was too much for her. Smiling faintly, she said, as if she were coaxing a child: 'Play some Chopin, Louisa.' 'I shall only do that all wrong, like everything else,' said the elder plaintively. Louisa was thirty-five. She had been Helena's friend for years. 'Play the mazurkas,' repeated Helena calmly. Louisa rummaged among the music. Helena blew out her violin-candle, and came to sit down on the side of the fire opposite to Byrne. The music began. Helena pressed her arms with her hands, musing. 'They are inflamed still' said the young man. She glanced up suddenly, her blue eyes, usually so heavy and tired, lighting up with a small smile. 'Yes,' she answered, and she pushed back her sleeve, revealing a fine, strong arm, which was scarlet on the outer side from shoulder to wrist, like some long, red-burned fruit. The girl laid her cheek on the smarting soft flesh caressively. 'It is quite hot,' she smiled, again caressing her sun-scalded arm with peculiar joy. 'Funny to see a sunburn like that in mid-winter,' he replied, frowning. 'I can't think why it should last all these months. Don't you ever put anything on to heal it?' She smiled at him again, almost pitying, then put her mouth lovingly on the burn. 'It comes out every evening like this,' she said softly, with curious joy. 'And that was August, and now it's February!' he exclaimed. 'It must be psychological, you know. You make it come--the smart; you invoke it.' She looked up at him, suddenly cold. 'I! I never think of it,' she answered briefly, with a kind of sneer. The young man's blood ran back from her at her acid tone. But the mortification was physical only. Smiling quickly, gently--' 'Never?' he re-echoed. There was silence between them for some moments, whilst Louisa continued to play the piano for their benefit. At last: 'Drat it,' she exclaimed, flouncing round on the piano-stool. The two looked up at her. 'Ye did run well--what hath hindered you?' laughed Byrne. 'You!' cried Louisa. 'Oh, I can't play any more,' she added, dropping her arms along her skirt pathetically. Helena laughed quickly. 'Oh I can't, Helen!' pleaded Louisa. 'My dear,' said Helena, laughing briefly, 'you are really under _no_ obligation _whatever_.' With the little groan of one who yields to a desire contrary to her self-respect, Louisa dropped at the feet of Helena, laid her arm and her head languishingly on the knee of her friend. The latter gave no sign, but continued to gaze in the fire. Byrne, on the other side of the hearth, sprawled in his chair, smoking a reflective cigarette. The room was very quiet, silent even of the tick of a clock. Outside, the traffic swept by, and feet pattered along the pavement. But this vulgar storm of life seemed shut out of Helena's room, that remained indifferent, like a church. Two candles burned dimly as on an altar, glistening yellow on the dark piano. The lamp was blown out, and the flameless fire, a red rubble, dwindled in the grate, so that the yellow glow of the candles seemed to shine even on the embers. Still no one spoke. At last Helena shivered slightly in her chair, though did not change her position. She sat motionless. 'Will you make coffee, Louisa?' she asked. Louisa lifted herself, looked at her friend, and stretched slightly. 'Oh!' she groaned voluptuously. 'This is so comfortable!' 'Don't trouble then, I'll go. No, don't get up,' said Helena, trying to disengage herself. Louisa reached and put her hands on Helena's wrists. 'I will go,' she drawled, almost groaning with voluptuousness and appealing love. Then, as Helena still made movements to rise, the elder woman got up slowly, leaning as she did so all her weight on her friend. 'Where is the coffee?' she asked, affecting the dullness of lethargy. She was full of small affectations, being consumed with uneasy love. 'I think, my dear,' replied Helena, 'it is in its usual place.' 'Oh--o-o-oh!' yawned Louisa, and she dragged herself out. The two had been intimate friends for years, had slept together, and played together and lived together. Now the friendship was coming to an end. 'After all,' said Byrne, when the door was closed, 'if you're alive you've got to live.' Helena burst into a titter of amusement at this sudden remark. 'Wherefore?' she asked indulgently. 'Because there's no such thing as passive existence,' he replied, grinning. She curled her lip in amused indulgence of this very young man. 'I don't see it at all,' she said. 'You can't, he protested, 'any more than a tree can help budding in April--it can't help itself, if it's alive; same with you.' 'Well, then'--and again there was the touch of a sneer--'if I can't help myself, why trouble, my friend?' 'Because--because I suppose _I_ can't help myself--if it bothers me, it does. You see, I'--he smiled brilliantly--'am April.' She paid very little attention to him, but began in a peculiar reedy, metallic tone, that set his nerves quivering: 'But I am not a bare tree. All my dead leaves, they hang to me--and--and go through a kind of _danse macabre_--' 'But you bud underneath--like beech,' he said quickly. 'Really, my friend,' she said coldly, 'I am too tired to bud.' 'No,' he pleaded, 'no!' With his thick brows knitted, he surveyed her anxiously. She had received a great blow in August, and she still was stunned. Her face, white and heavy, was like a mask, almost sullen. She looked in the fire, forgetting him. 'You want March,' he said--he worried endlessly over her--'to rip off your old leaves. I s'll have to be March,' he laughed. She ignored him again because of his presumption. He waited awhile, then broke out once more. 'You must start again--you must. Always you rustle your red leaves of a blasted summer. You are not dead. Even if you want to be, you're not. Even if it's a bitter thing to say, you have to say it: you are not dead....' Smiling a peculiar, painful smile, as if he hurt her, she turned to gaze at a photograph that hung over the piano. It was the profile of a handsome man in the prime of life. He was leaning slightly forward, as if yielding beneath a burden of life, or to the pull of fate. He looked out musingly, and there was no hint of rebellion in the contours of the regular features. The hair was brushed back, soft and thick, straight from his fine brow. His nose was small and shapely, his chin rounded, cleft, rather beautifully moulded. Byrne gazed also at the photo. His look became distressed and helpless. 'You cannot say you are dead with Siegmund,' he cried brutally. She shuddered, clasped her burning arms on her breast, and looked into the fire. 'You are not dead with Siegmund,' he persisted, 'so you can't say you live with him. You may live with his memory. But Siegmund is dead, and his memory is not he--himself,' He made a fierce gesture of impatience. 'Siegmund now--he is not a memory--he is not your dead red leaves--he is Siegmund Dead! And you do not know him, because you are alive, like me, so Siegmund Dead is a stranger to you.' With her head bowed down, cowering like a sulky animal, she looked at him under her brows. He stared fiercely back at her, but beneath her steady, glowering gaze he shrank, then turned aside. 'You stretch your hands blindly to the dead; you look backwards. No, you never touch the thing,' he cried. 'I have the arms of Louisa always round my neck,' came her voice, like the cry of a cat. She put her hands on her throat as if she must relieve an ache. He saw her lip raised in a kind of disgust, a revulsion from life. She was very sick after the tragedy. He frowned, and his eyes dilated. 'Folk are good; they are good for one. You never have looked at them. You would linger hours over a blue weed, and let all the people down the road go by. Folks are better than a garden in full blossom--' She watched him again. A certain beauty in his speech, and his passionate way, roused her when she did not want to be roused, when moving from her torpor was painful. At last-- 'You are merciless, you know, Cecil,' she said. 'And I will be,' protested Byrne, flinging his hand at her. She laughed softly, wearily. For some time they were silent. She gazed once more at the photograph over the piano, and forgot all the present. Byrne, spent for the time being, was busy hunting for some life-interest to give her. He ignored the simplest--that of love--because he was even more faithful than she to the memory of Siegmund, and blinder than most to his own heart. 'I do wish I had Siegmund's violin,' she said quietly, but with great intensity. Byrne glanced at her, then away. His heart beat sulkily. His sanguine, passionate spirit dropped and slouched under her contempt. He, also, felt the jar, heard the discord. She made him sometimes pant with her own horror. He waited, full of hate and tasting of ashes, for the arrival of Louisa with the coffee. _Chapter 2_ Siegmund's violin, desired of Helena, lay in its case beside Siegmund's lean portmanteau in the white dust of the lumber-room in Highgate. It was worth twenty pounds, but Beatrice had not yet roused herself to sell it; she kept the black case out of sight. Siegmund's violin lay in the dark, folded up, as he had placed it for the last time, with hasty, familiar hands, in its red silk shroud. After two dead months the first string had snapped, sharply striking the sensitive body of the instrument. The second string had broken near Christmas, but no one had heard the faint moan of its going. The violin lay mute in the dark, a faint odour of must creeping over the smooth, soft wood. Its twisted, withered strings lay crisped from the anguish of breaking, smothered under the silk folds. The fragrance of Siegmund himself, with which the violin was steeped, slowly changed into an odour of must. Siegmund died out even from his violin. He had infused it with his life, till its fibres had been as the tissue of his own flesh. Grasping his violin, he seemed to have his fingers on the strings of his heart and of the heart of Helena. It was his little beloved that drank his being and turned it into music. And now Siegmund was dead; only an odour of must remained of him in his violin. It lay folded in silk in the dark, waiting. Six months before it had longed for rest; during the last nights of the season, when Siegmund's fingers had pressed too hard, when Siegmund's passion, and joy, and fear had hurt, too, the soft body of his little beloved, the violin had sickened for rest. On that last night of opera, without pity Siegmund had struck the closing phrases from the fiddle, harsh in his impatience, wild in anticipation. The curtain came down, the great singers bowed, and Siegmund felt the spattering roar of applause quicken his pulse. It was hoarse, and savage, and startling on his inflamed soul, making him shiver with anticipation, as if something had brushed his hot nakedness. Quickly, with hands of habitual tenderness, he put his violin away. The theatre-goers were tired, and life drained rapidly out of the opera-house. The members of the orchestra rose, laughing, mingling their weariness with good wishes for the holiday, with sly warning and suggestive advice, pressing hands warmly ere they disbanded. Other years Siegmund had lingered, unwilling to take the long farewell of his associates of the orchestra. Other years he had left the opera-house with a little pain of regret. Now he laughed, and took his comrades' hands, and bade farewells, all distractedly, and with impatience. The theatre, awesome now in its emptiness, he left gladly, hastening like a flame stretched level on the wind. With his black violin-case he hurried down the street, then halted to pity the flowers massed pallid under the gaslight of the market-hall. For himself, the sea and the sunlight opened great spaces tomorrow. The moon was full above the river. He looked at it as a man in abstraction watches some clear thing; then he came to a standstill. It was useless to hurry to his train. The traffic swung past the lamplight shone warm on all the golden faces; but Siegmund had already left the city. His face was silver and shadows to the moon; the river, in its soft grey, shaking golden sequins among the folds of its shadows, fell open like a garment before him, to reveal the white moon-glitter brilliant as living flesh. Mechanically, overcast with the reality of the moonlight, he took his seat in the train, and watched the moving of things. He was in a kind of trance, his consciousness seeming suspended. The train slid out amongst lights and dark places. Siegmund watched the endless movement, fascinated. This was one of the crises of his life. For years he had suppressed his soul, in a kind of mechanical despair doing his duty and enduring the rest. Then his soul had been softly enticed from its bondage. Now he was going to break free altogether, to have at least a few days purely for his own joy. This, to a man of his integrity, meant a breaking of bonds, a severing of blood-ties, a sort of new birth. In the excitement of this last night his life passed out of his control, and he sat at the carriage-window, motionless, watching things move. He felt busy within him a strong activity which he could not help. Slowly the body of his past, the womb which had nourished him in one fashion for so many years, was casting him forth. He was trembling in all his being, though he knew not with what. All he could do now was to watch the lights go by, and to let the translation of himself continue. When at last the train ran out into the full, luminous night, and Siegmund saw the meadows deep in moonlight, he quivered with a low anticipation. The elms, great grey shadows, seemed to loiter in their cloaks across the pale fields. He had not seen them so before. The world was changing. The train stopped, and with a little effort he rose to go home. The night air was cool and sweet. He drank it thirstily. In the road again he lifted his face to the moon. It seemed to help him; in its brilliance amid the blonde heavens it seemed to transcend fretfulness. It would front the waves with silver as they slid to the shore, and Helena, looking along the coast, waiting, would lift her white hands with sudden joy. He laughed, and the moon hurried laughing alongside, through the black masses of the trees. He had forgotten he was going home for this night. The chill wetness of his little white garden-gate reminded him, and a frown came on his face. As he closed the door, and found himself in the darkness of the hall, the sense of his fatigue came fully upon him. It was an effort to go to bed. Nevertheless, he went very quietly into the drawing-room. There the moonlight entered, and he thought the whiteness was Helena. He held his breath and stiffened, then breathed again. 'Tomorrow,' he thought, as he laid his violin-case across the arms of a wicker chair. But he had a physical feeling of the presence of Helena: in his shoulders he seemed to be aware of her. Quickly, half lifting his arms, he turned to the moonshine. 'Tomorrow!' he exclaimed quietly; and he left the room stealthily, for fear of disturbing the children. In the darkness of the kitchen burned a blue bud of light. He quickly turned up the gas to a broad yellow flame, and sat down at table. He was tired, excited, and vexed with misgiving. As he lay in his arm-chair, he looked round with disgust. The table was spread with a dirty cloth that had great brown stains betokening children. In front of him was a cup and saucer, and a small plate with a knife laid across it. The cheese, on another plate, was wrapped in a red-bordered, fringed cloth, to keep off the flies, which even then were crawling round, on the sugar, on the loaf, on the cocoa-tin. Siegmund looked at his cup. It was chipped, and a stain had gone under the glaze, so that it looked like the mark of a dirty mouth. He fetched a glass of water. The room was drab and dreary. The oil-cloth was worn into a hole near the door. Boots and shoes of various sizes were scattered over the floor, while the sofa was littered with children's clothing. In the black stove the ash lay dead; on the range were chips of wood, and newspapers, and rubbish of papers, and crusts of bread, and crusts of bread-and-jam. As Siegmund walked across the floor, he crushed two sweets underfoot. He had to grope under sofa and dresser to find his slippers; and he was in evening dress. It would be the same, while ever Beatrice was Beatrice and Siegmund her husband. He ate his bread and cheese mechanically, wondering why he was miserable, why he was not looking forward with joy to the morrow. As he ate, he closed his eyes, half wishing he had not promised Helena, half wishing he had no tomorrow. Leaning back in his chair, he felt something in the way. It was a small teddy-bear and half of a strong white comb. He grinned to himself. This was the summary of his domestic life--a broken, coarse comb, a child crying because her hair was lugged, a wife who had let the hair go till now, when she had got into a temper to see the job through; and then the teddy-bear, pathetically cocking a black worsted nose, and lifting absurd arms to him. He wondered why Gwen had gone to bed without her pet. She would want the silly thing. The strong feeling of affection for his children came over him, battling with something else. He sank in his chair, and gradually his baffled mind went dark. He sat, overcome with weariness and trouble, staring blankly into the space. His own stifling roused him. Straightening his shoulders, he took a deep breath, then relaxed again. After a while he rose, took the teddy-bear, and went slowly to bed. Gwen and Marjory, aged nine and twelve, slept together in a small room. It was fairly light. He saw his favourite daughter lying quite uncovered, her wilful head thrown back, her mouth half open. Her black hair was tossed across the pillow: he could see the action. Marjory snuggled under the sheet. He placed the teddy-bear between the two girls. As he watched them, he hated the children for being so dear to him. Either he himself must go under, and drag on an existence he hated, or they must suffer. But he had agreed to spend this holiday with Helena, and meant to do so. As he turned, he saw himself like a ghost cross the mirror. He looked back; he peered at himself. His hair still grew thick and dark from his brow: he could not see the grey at the temples. His eyes were dark and tender, and his mouth, under the black moustache, was full of youth. He rose, looked at the children, frowned, and went to his own small room. He was glad to be shut alone in the little cubicle of darkness. Outside the world lay in a glamorous pallor, casting shadows that made the farm, the trees, the bulks of villas, look like live creatures. The same pallor went through all the night, glistening on Helena as she lay curled up asleep at the core of the glamour, like the moon; on the sea rocking backwards and forwards till it rocked her island as she slept. She was so calm and full of her own assurance. It was a great rest to be with her. With her, nothing mattered but love and the beauty of things. He felt parched and starving. She had rest and love, like water and manna for him. She was so strong in her self-possession, in her love of beautiful things and of dreams. The clock downstairs struck two. 'I must get to sleep,' he said. He dragged his portmanteau from beneath the bed and began to pack it. When at last it was finished, he shut it with a snap. The click sounded final. He stood up, stretched himself, and sighed. 'I am fearfully tired,' he said. But that was persuasive. When he was undressed he sat in his pyjamas for some time, rapidly beating his fingers on his knee. 'Thirty-eight years old,' he said to himself, 'and disconsolate as a child!' He began to muse of the morrow. When he seemed to be going to sleep, he woke up to find thoughts labouring over his brain, like bees on a hive. Recollections, swift thoughts, flew in and alighted upon him, as wild geese swing down and take possession of a pond. Phrases from the opera tyrannized over him; he played the rhythm with all his blood. As he turned over in this torture, he sighed, and recognized a movement of the De Beriot concerto which Helena had played for her last lesson. He found himself watching her as he had watched then, felt again the wild impatience when she was wrong, started again as, amid the dipping and sliding of her bow, he realized where his thoughts were going. She was wrong, he was hasty; and he felt her blue eyes looking intently at him. Both started as his daughter Vera entered suddenly. She was a handsome girl of nineteen. Crossing the room, brushing Helena as if she were a piece of furniture in the way, Vera had asked her father a question, in a hard, insulting tone, then had gone out again, just as if Helena had not been in the room. Helena stood fingering the score of _Pelléas_. When Vera had gone, she asked, in the peculiar tone that made Siegmund shiver: 'Why do you consider the music of _Pelléas_ cold?' Siegmund had struggled to answer. So they passed everything off, without mention, after Helena's fashion, ignoring all that might be humiliating; and to her much was humiliating. For years she had come as pupil to Siegmund, first as a friend of the household. Then she and Louisa went occasionally to whatever hall or theatre had Siegmund in the orchestra, so that shortly the three formed the habit of coming home together. Then Helena had invited Siegmund to her home; then the three friends went walks together; then the two went walks together, whilst Louisa sheltered them. Helena had come to read his loneliness and the humiliation of his lot. He had felt her blue eyes, heavily, steadily gazing into his soul, and he had lost himself to her. That day, three weeks before the end of the season, when Vera had so insulted Helena, the latter had said, as she put on her coat, looking at him all the while with heavy blue eyes: 'I think, Siegmund, I cannot come here any more. Your home is not open to me any longer.' He had writhed in confusion and humiliation. As she pressed his hand, closely and for a long time, she said: 'I will write to you.' Then she left him. Siegmund had hated his life that day. Soon she wrote. A week later, when he lay resting his head on her lap in Richmond Park, she said: 'You are so tired, Siegmund.' She stroked his face, and kissed him softly. Siegmund lay in the molten daze of love. But Helena was, if it is not to debase the word, virtuous: an inconsistent virtue, cruel and ugly for Siegmund. 'You are so tired, dear. You must come away with me and rest, the first week in August.' His blood had leapt, and whatever objections he raised, such as having no money, he allowed to be overridden. He was going to Helena, to the Isle of Wight, tomorrow. Helena, with her blue eyes so full of storm, like the sea, but, also like the sea, so eternally self-sufficient, solitary; with her thick white throat, the strongest and most wonderful thing on earth, and her small hands, silken and light as wind-flowers, would be his tomorrow, along with the sea and the downs. He clung to the exquisite flame which flooded him.... But it died out, and he thought of the return to London, to Beatrice, and the children. How would it be? Beatrice, with her furious dark eyes, and her black hair loosely knotted back, came to his mind as she had been the previous day, flaring with temper when he said to her: 'I shall be going away tomorrow for a few days' holiday.' She asked for detail, some of which he gave. Then, dissatisfied and inflamed, she broke forth in her suspicion and her abuse, and her contempt, while two large-eyed children stood listening by. Siegmund hated his wife for drawing on him the grave, cold looks of condemnation from his children. Something he had said touched Beatrice. She came of good family, had been brought up like a lady, educated in a convent school in France. He evoked her old pride. She drew herself up with dignity, and called the children away. He wondered if he could bear a repetition of that degradation. It bled him of his courage and self-respect. In the morning Beatrice was disturbed by the sharp sneck of the hall door. Immediately awake, she heard his quick, firm step hastening down the gravel path. In her impotence, discarded like a worn out object, she lay for the moment stiff with bitterness. 'I am nothing, I am nothing,' she said to herself. She lay quite rigid for a time. There was no sound anywhere. The morning sunlight pierced vividly through the slits of the blind. Beatrice lay rocking herself, breathing hard, her finger-nails pressing into her palm. Then came the sound of a train slowing down in the station, and directly the quick 'chuff-chuff-chuff' of its drawing out. Beatrice imagined the sunlight on the puffs of steam, and the two lovers, her husband and Helena, rushing through the miles of morning sunshine. 'God strike her dead! Mother of God, strike her down!' she said aloud, in a low tone. She hated Helena. Irene, who lay with her mother, woke up and began to question her. _Chapter 3_ In the miles of morning sunshine, Siegmund's shadows, his children, Beatrice, his sorrow, dissipated like mist, and he was elated as a young man setting forth to travel. When he had passed Portsmouth Town everything had vanished but the old gay world of romance. He laughed as he looked out of the carriage window. Below, in the street, a military band passed glittering. A brave sound floated up, and again he laughed, loving the tune, the clash and glitter of the band, the movement of scarlet, blithe soldiers beyond the park. People were drifting brightly from church. How could it be Sunday! It was no time; it was Romance, going back to Tristan. Women, like crocus flowers, in white and blue and lavender, moved gaily. Everywhere fluttered the small flags of holiday. Every form danced lightly in the sunshine. And beyond it all were the silent hillsides of the island, with Helena. It was so wonderful, he could bear to be patient. She would be all in white, with her cool, thick throat left bare to the breeze, her face shining, smiling as she dipped her head because of the sun, which glistened on her uncovered hair. He breathed deeply, stirring at the thought. But he would not grow impatient. The train had halted over the town, where scarlet soldiers, and ludicrous blue sailors, and all the brilliant women from church shook like a kaleidoscope down the street. The train crawled on, drawing near to the sea, for which Siegmund waited breathless. It was so like Helena, blue, beautiful, strong in its reserve. Another moment they were in the dirty station. Then the day flashed out, and Siegmund mated with joy. He felt the sea heaving below him. He looked round, and the sea was blue as a periwinkle flower, while gold and white and blood-red sails lit here and there upon the blueness. Standing on the deck, he gave himself to the breeze and to the sea, feeling like one of the ruddy sails--as if he were part of it all. All his body radiated amid the large, magnificent sea-moon like a piece of colour. The little ship began to pulse, to tremble. White with the softness of a bosom, the water rose up frothing and swaying gently. Ships drew near the inquisitive birds; the old _Victory_ shook her myriad pointed flags of yellow and scarlet; the straight old houses of the quay passed by. Outside the harbour, like fierce creatures of the sea come wildly up to look, the battleships laid their black snouts on the water. Siegmund laughed at them. He felt the foam on his face like a sparkling, felt the blue sea gathering round. On the left stood the round fortress, quaintly chequered, and solidly alone in the walk of water, amid the silent flight of the golden-and crimson-winged boats. Siegmund watched the bluish bulk of the island. Like the beautiful women in the myths, his love hid in its blue haze. It seemed impossible. Behind him, the white wake trailed myriads of daisies. On either hand the grim and wicked battleships watched along their sharp noses. Beneath him the clear green water swung and puckered as if it were laughing. In front, Sieglinde's island drew near and nearer, creeping towards him, bringing him Helena. Meadows and woods appeared, houses crowded down to the shore to meet him; he was in the quay, and the ride was over. Siegmund regretted it. But Helena was on the island, which rode like an anchored ship under the fleets of cloud that had launched whilst Siegmund was on water. As he watched the end of the pier loom higher, large ponderous trains of cloud cast over him the shadows of their bulk, and he shivered in the chill wind. His travelling was very slow. The sky's dark shipping pressed closer and closer, as if all the clouds had come to harbour. Over the flat lands near Newport the wind moaned like the calling of many violoncellos. All the sky was grey. Siegmund waited drearily on Newport station, where the wind swept coldly. It was Sunday, and the station and the island were desolate, having lost their purposes. Siegmund put on his overcoat and sat down. All his morning's blaze of elation was gone, though there still glowed a great hope. He had slept only two hours of the night. An empty man, he had drunk joy, and now the intoxication was dying out. At three o'clock of the afternoon he sat alone in the second-class carriage, looking out. A few raindrops struck the pane, then the blurred dazzle of a shower came in a burst of wind, and hid the downs and the reeds that shivered in the marshy places. Siegmund sat in a chilly torpor. He counted the stations. Beneath his stupor his heart was thudding heavily with excitement, surprising him, for his brain felt dead. The train slowed down: Yarmouth! One more station, then. Siegmund watched the platform, shiny with rain, slide past. On the dry grey under the shelter, one white passenger was waiting. Suddenly Siegmund's heart leaped up, wrenching wildly. He burst open the door, and caught hold of Helena. She dilated, gave a palpitating cry as he dragged her into the carriage. 'You _here_!' he exclaimed, in a strange tone. She was shivering with cold. Her almost naked arms were blue. She could not answer Siegmund's question, but lay clasped against him, shivering away her last chill as his warmth invaded her. He laughed in his heart as she nestled in to him. 'Is it a dream now, dear?' he whispered. Helena clasped him tightly, shuddering because of the delicious suffusing of his warmth through her. Almost immediately they heard the grinding of the brakes. 'Here we are, then!' exclaimed Helena, dropping into her conventional, cheerful manner at once. She put straight her hat, while he gathered his luggage. Until tea-time there was a pause in their progress. Siegmund was tingling with an exquisite vividness, as if he had taken some rare stimulant. He wondered at himself. It seemed that every fibre in his body was surprised with joy, as each tree in a forest at dawn utters astonished cries of delight. When Helena came back, she sat opposite to him to see him. His naïve look of joy was very sweet to her. His eyes were dark blue, showing the fibrils, like a purple-veined flower at twilight, and somehow, mysteriously, joy seemed to quiver in the iris. Helena appreciated him, feature by feature. She liked his clear forehead, with its thick black hair, and his full mouth, and his chin. She loved his hands, that were small, but strong and nervous, and very white. She liked his breast, that breathed so strong and quietly, and his arms, and his thighs, and his knees. For him, Helena was a presence. She was ambushed, fused in an aura of his love. He only saw she was white, and strong, and full fruited, he only knew her blue eyes were rather awful to him. Outside, the sea-mist was travelling thicker and thicker inland. Their lodging was not far from the bay. As they sat together at tea, Siegmund's eyes dilated, and he looked frowning at Helena. 'What is it?' he asked, listening uneasily. Helena looked up at him, from pouring out the tea. His little anxious look of distress amused her. 'The noise, you mean? Merely the fog-horn, dear--not Wotan's wrath, nor Siegfried's dragon....' The fog was white at the window. They sat waiting. After a few seconds the sound came low, swelling, like the mooing of some great sea animal, alone, the last of the monsters. The whole fog gave off the sound for a second or two, then it died down into an intense silence. Siegmund and Helena looked at each other. His eyes were full of trouble. To see a big, strong man anxious-eyed as a child because of a strange sound amused her. But he was tired. 'I assure you, it _is_ only a fog-horn,' she laughed. 'Of course. But it is a depressing sort of sound.' 'Is it?' she said curiously. 'Why? Well--yes--I think I can understand its being so to some people. It's something like the call of the horn across the sea to Tristan.' She hummed softly, then three times she sang the horn-call. Siegmund, with his face expressionless as a mask, sat staring out at the mist. The boom of the siren broke in upon them. To him, the sound was full of fatality. Helena waited till the noise died down, then she repeated her horn-call. 'Yet it is very much like the fog-horn,' she said, curiously interested. 'This time next week, Helena!' he said. She suddenly went heavy, and stretched across to clasp his hand as it lay upon the table. 'I shall be calling to you from Cornwall,' she said. He did not reply. So often she did not take his meaning, but left him alone with his sense of tragedy. She had no idea how his life was wrenched from its roots, and when he tried to tell her, she balked him, leaving him inwardly quite lonely. 'There is _no_ next week,' she declared, with great cheerfulness. 'There is only the present.' At the same moment she rose and slipped across to him. Putting her arms round his neck, she stood holding his head to her bosom, pressing it close, with her hand among his hair. His nostrils and mouth were crushed against her breast. He smelled the silk of her dress and the faint, intoxicating odour of her person. With shut eyes he owned heavily to himself again that she was blind to him. But some other self urged with gladness, no matter how blind she was, so that she pressed his face upon her. She stroked and caressed his hair, tremblingly clasped his head against her breast, as if she would never release him; then she bent to kiss his forehead. He took her in his arms, and they were still for awhile. Now he wanted to blind himself with her, to blaze up all his past and future in a passion worth years of living. After tea they rested by the fire, while she told him all the delightful things she had found. She had a woman's curious passion for details, a woman's peculiar attachment to certain dear trifles. He listened, smiling, revived by her delight, and forgetful of himself. She soothed him like sunshine, and filled him with pleasure; but he hardly attended to her words. 'Shall we go out, or are you too tired? No, you are tired--you are very tired,' said Helena. She stood by his chair, looking down on him tenderly. 'No,' he replied, smiling brilliantly at her, and stretching his handsome limbs in relief--'no, not at all tired now.' Helena continued to look down on him in quiet, covering tenderness. But she quailed before the brilliant, questioning gaze of his eyes. 'You must go to bed early tonight,' she said, turning aside her face, ruffling his soft black hair. He stretched slightly, stiffening his arms, and smiled without answering. It was a very keen pleasure to be thus alone with her and in her charge. He rose, bidding her wrap herself up against the fog. 'You are sure you're not too tired?' she reiterated. He laughed. Outside, the sea-mist was white and woolly. They went hand in hand. It was cold, so she thrust her hand with his into the pocket of his overcoat, while they walked together. 'I like the mist,' he said, pressing her hand in his pocket. 'I don't dislike it,' she replied, shrinking nearer to him. 'It puts us together by ourselves,' he said. She plodded alongside, bowing her head, not replying. He did not mind her silence. 'It couldn't have happened better for us than this mist,' he said. She laughed curiously, almost with a sound of tears. 'Why?' she asked, half tenderly, half bitterly. 'There is nothing else but you, and for you there is nothing else but me--look!' He stood still. They were on the downs, so that Helena found herself quite alone with the man in a world of mist. Suddenly she flung herself sobbing against his breast. He held her closely, tenderly, not knowing what it was all about, but happy and unafraid. In one hollow place the siren from the Needles seemed to bellow full in their ears. Both Siegmund and Helena felt their emotion too intense. They turned from it. 'What is the pitch?' asked Helena. 'Where it is horizontal? It slides up a chromatic scale,' said Siegmund. 'Yes, but the settled pitch--is it about E?' 'E!' exclaimed Siegmund. 'More like F.' 'Nay, listen!' said Helena. They stood still and waited till there came the long booing of the fog-horn. 'There!' exclaimed Siegmund, imitating the sound. 'That is not E.' He repeated the sound. 'It is F.' 'Surely it is E,' persisted Helena. 'Even F sharp,' he rejoined, humming the note. She laughed, and told him to climb the chromatic scale. 'But you agree?' he said. 'I do not,' she replied. The fog was cold. It seemed to rob them of their courage to talk. 'What is the note in _Tristan_?' Helena made an effort to ask. 'That is not the same,' he replied. 'No, dear, that is not the same,' she said in low, comforting tones. He quivered at the caress. She put her arms round him reached up her face yearningly for a kiss. He forgot they were standing in the public footpath, in daylight, till she drew hastily away. She heard footsteps down the fog. As they climbed the path the mist grew thinner, till it was only a grey haze at the top. There they were on the turfy lip of the land. The sky was fairly clear overhead. Below them the sea was singing hoarsely to itself. Helena drew him to the edge of the cliff. He crushed her hand, drawing slightly back. But it pleased her to feel the grip on her hand becoming unbearable. They stood right on the edge, to see the smooth cliff slope into the mist, under which the sea stirred noisily. 'Shall we walk over, then?' said Siegmund, glancing downwards. Helena's heart stood still a moment at the idea, then beat heavily. How could he play with the idea of death, and the five great days in front? She was afraid of him just then. 'Come away, dear,' she pleaded. He would, then, forgo the few consummate days! It was bitterness to her to think so. 'Come away, dear!' she repeated, drawing him slowly to the path. 'You are not afraid?' he asked. 'Not afraid, no....' Her voice had that peculiar, reedy, harsh quality that made him shiver. 'It is too easy a way,' he said satirically. She did not take in his meaning. 'And five days of our own before us, Siegmund!' she scolded. 'The mist is Lethe. It is enough for us if its spell lasts five days.' He laughed, and took her in his arms, kissing her very closely. They walked on joyfully, locking behind them the doors of forgetfulness. As the sun set, the fog dispersed a little. Breaking masses of mist went flying from cliff to cliff, and far away beyond the cliffs the western sky stood dimmed with gold. The lovers wandered aimlessly over the golf-links to where green mounds and turfed banks suggested to Helena that she was tired, and would sit down. They faced the lighted chamber of the west, whence, behind the torn, dull-gold curtains of fog, the sun was departing with pomp. Siegmund sat very still, watching the sunset. It was a splendid, flaming bridal chamber where he had come to Helena. He wondered how to express it; how other men had borne this same glory. 'What is the music of it?' he asked. She glanced at him. His eyelids were half lowered, his mouth slightly open, as if in ironic rhapsody. 'Of what, dear?' 'What music do you think holds the best interpretation of sunset?' His skin was gold, his real mood was intense. She revered him for a moment. 'I do not know,' she said quietly; and she rested her head against his shoulder, looking out west. There was a space of silence, while Siegmund dreamed on. 'A Beethoven symphony--the one--' and he explained to her. She was not satisfied, but leaned against him, making her choice. The sunset hung steady, she could scarcely perceive a change. 'The Grail music in _Lohengrin_,' she decided. 'Yes,' said Siegmund. He found it quite otherwise, but did not trouble to dispute. He dreamed by himself. This displeased her. She wanted him for herself. How could he leave her alone while he watched the sky? She almost put her two hands over his eyes. _Chapter 4_ The gold march of sunset passed quickly, the ragged curtains of mist closed to. Soon Siegmund and Helena were shut alone within the dense wide fog. She shivered with the cold and the damp. Startled, he took her in his arms, where she lay and clung to him. Holding her closely, he bent forward, straight to her lips. His moustache was drenched cold with fog, so that she shuddered slightly after his kiss, and shuddered again. He did not know why the strong tremor passed through her. Thinking it was with fear and with cold, he undid his overcoat, put her close on his breast, and covered her as best he could. That she feared him at that moment was half pleasure, half shame to him. Pleadingly he hid his face on her shoulder, held her very tightly, till his face grew hot, buried against her soft strong throat. 'You are so big I can't hold you,' she whispered plaintively, catching her breath with fear. Her small hands grasped at the breadth of his shoulders ineffectually. 'You will be cold. Put your hands under my coat,' he whispered. He put her inside his overcoat and his coat. She came to his warm breast with a sharp intaking of delight and fear; she tried to make her hands meet in the warmth of his shoulders, tried to clasp him. 'See! I can't,' she whispered. He laughed short, and pressed her closer. Then, tucking her head in his breast, hiding her face, she timidly slid her hands along his sides, pressing softly, to find the contours of his figure. Softly her hands crept over the silky back of his waistcoat, under his coats, and as they stirred, his blood flushed up, and up again, with fire, till all Siegmund was hot blood, and his breast was one great ache. He crushed her to him--crushed her in upon the ache of his chest. His muscles set hard and unyielding; at that moment he was a tense, vivid body of flesh, without a mind; his blood, alive and conscious, running towards her. He remained perfectly still, locked about Helena, conscious of nothing. She was hurt and crushed, but it was pain delicious to her. It was marvellous to her how strong he was, to keep up that grip of her like steel. She swooned in a kind of intense bliss. At length she found herself released, taking a great breath, while Siegmund was moving his mouth over her throat, something like a dog snuffing her, but with his lips. Her heart leaped away in revulsion. His moustache thrilled her strangely. His lips, brushing and pressing her throat beneath the ear, and his warm breath flying rhythmically upon her, made her vibrate through all her body. Like a violin under the bow, she thrilled beneath his mouth, and shuddered from his moustache. Her heart was like fire in her breast. Suddenly she strained madly to him, and, drawing back her head, placed her lips on his, close, till at the mouth they seemed to melt and fuse together. It was the long, supreme kiss, in which man and woman have one being, Two-in-one, the only Hermaphrodite. When Helena drew away her lips, she was exhausted. She belonged to that class of 'dreaming women' with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss. The fire, in heavy flames, had poured through her to Siegmund, from Siegmund to her. It sank, and she felt herself flagging. She had not the man's brightness and vividness of blood. She lay upon his breast, dreaming how beautiful it would be to go to sleep, to swoon unconscious there, on that rare bed. She lay still on Siegmund's breast, listening to his heavily beating heart. With her the dream was always more than the actuality. Her dream of Siegmund was more to her than Siegmund himself. He might be less than her dream, which is as it may be. However, to the real man she was very cruel. He held her close. His dream was melted in his blood, and his blood ran bright for her. His dreams were the flowers of his blood. Hers were more detached and inhuman. For centuries a certain type of woman has been rejecting the 'animal' in humanity, till now her dreams are abstract, and full of fantasy, and her blood runs in bondage, and her kindness is full of cruelty. Helena lay flagging upon the breast of Siegmund. He folded her closely, and his mouth and his breath were warm on her neck. She sank away from his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from him. He was far too sensitive not to be aware of this, and far too much of a man not to yield to the woman. His heart sank, his blood grew sullen at her withdrawal. Still he held her; the two were motionless and silent for some time. She became distressedly conscious that her feet, which lay on the wet grass, were aching with cold. She said softly, gently, as if he was her child whom she must correct and lead: 'I think we ought to go home, Siegmund.' He made a small sound, that might mean anything, but did not stir or release her. His mouth, however, remained motionless on her throat, and the caress went out of it. 'It is cold and wet, dear; we ought to go,' she coaxed determinedly. 'Soon,' he said thickly. She sighed, waited a moment, then said very gently, as if she were loath to take him from his pleasure: 'Siegmund, I am cold.' There was a reproach in this which angered him. 'Cold!' he exclaimed. 'But you are warm with me--' 'But my feet are out on the grass, dear, and they are like wet pebbles.' 'Oh dear!' he said. 'Why didn't you give them me to warm?' He leaned forward, and put his hand on her shoes. 'They are very cold,' he said. 'We must hurry and make them warm.' When they rose, her feet were so numbed she could hardly stand. She clung to Siegmund, laughing. 'I wish you had told me before,' he said. 'I ought to have known....' Vexed with himself, he put his arm round her, and they set off home. _Chapter 5_ They found the fire burning brightly in their room. The only other person in the pretty, stiffly-furnished cottage was their landlady, a charming old lady, who let this sitting-room more for the change, for the sake of having visitors, than for gain. Helena introduced Siegmund as 'My friend'. The old lady smiled upon him. He was big, and good-looking, and embarrassed. She had had a son years back.... And the two were lovers. She hoped they would come to her house for their honeymoon. Siegmund sat in his great horse-hair chair by the fire, while Helena attended to the lamp. Glancing at him over the glowing globe, she found him watching her with a small, peculiar smile of irony, and anger, and bewilderment. He was not quite himself. Her hand trembled so, she could scarcely adjust the wicks. Helena left the room to change her dress. 'I shall be back before Mrs Curtiss brings in the tray. There is the Nietzsche I brought--' He did not answer as he watched her go. Left alone, he sat with his arms along his knees, perfectly still. His heart beat heavily, and all his being felt sullen, watchful, aloof, like a balked animal. Thoughts came up in his brain like bubbles--random, hissing out aimlessly. Once, in the startling inflammability of his blood, his veins ran hot, and he smiled. When Helena entered the room his eyes sought hers swiftly, as sparks lighting on the tinder. But her eyes were only moist with tenderness. His look instantly changed. She wondered at his being so silent, so strange. Coming to him in her unhesitating, womanly way--she was only twenty-six to his thirty-eight--she stood before him, holding both his hands and looking down on him with almost gloomy tenderness. She wore a white dress that showed her throat gathering like a fountain-jet of solid foam to balance her head. He could see the full white arms passing clear through the dripping spume of lace, towards the rise of her breasts. But her eyes bent down upon him with such gloom of tenderness that he dared not reveal the passion burning in him. He could not look at her. He strove almost pitifully to be with her sad, tender, but he could not put out his fire. She held both his hands firm, pressing them in appeal for her dream love. He glanced at her wistfully, then turned away. She waited for him. She wanted his caresses and tenderness. He would not look at her. 'You would like supper now, dear?' she asked, looking where the dark hair ended, and his neck ran smooth, under his collar, to the strong setting of his shoulders. 'Just as you will,' he replied. Still she waited, and still he would not look at her. Something troubled him, she thought. He was foreign to her. 'I will spread the cloth, then,' she said, in deep tones of resignation. She pressed his hands closely, and let them drop. He took no notice, but, still with his arms on his knees, he stared into the fire. In the golden glow of lamplight she set small bowls of white and lavender sweet-peas, and mignonette, upon the round table. He watched her moving, saw the stir of her white, sloping shoulders under the lace, and the hollow of her shoulders firm as marble, and the slight rise and fall of her loins as she walked. He felt as if his breast were scalded. It was a physical pain to him. Supper was very quiet. Helena was sad and gentle; he had a peculiar, enigmatic look in his eyes, between suffering and mockery and love. He was quite intractable; he would not soften to her, but remained there aloof. He was tired, and the look of weariness and suffering was evident to her through his strangeness. In her heart she wept. At last she tinkled the bell for supper to be cleared. Meanwhile, restlessly, she played fragments of Wagner on the piano. 'Will you want anything else?' asked the smiling old landlady. 'Nothing at all, thanks,' said Helena, with decision. 'Oh! then I think I will go to bed when I've washed the dishes. You will put the lamp out, dear?' 'I am well used to a lamp,' smiled Helena. 'We use them always at home.' She had had a day before Siegmund's coming, in which to win Mrs Curtiss' heart, and she had been successful. The old lady took the tray. 'Good-night, dear--good-night, sir. I will leave you. You will not be long, dear?' 'No, we shall not be long. Mr MacNair is very evidently tired out.' 'Yes--yes. It is very tiring, London.' When the door was closed, Helena stood a moment undecided, looking at Siegmund. He was lying in his arm-chair in a dispirited way, and looking in the fire. As she gazed at him with troubled eyes, he happened to glance to her, with the same dark, curiously searching, disappointed eyes. 'Shall I read to you?' she asked bitterly. 'If you will,' he replied. He sounded so indifferent, she could scarcely refrain from crying. She went and stood in front of him, looking down on him heavily. 'What is it, dear?' she said. 'You,' he replied, smiling with a little grimace. 'Why me?' He smiled at her ironically, then closed his eyes. She slid into his arms with a little moan. He took her on his knee, where she curled up like a heavy white cat. She let him caress her with his mouth, and did not move, but lay there curled up and quiet and luxuriously warm. He kissed her hair, which was beautifully fragrant of itself, and time after time drew between his lips one long, keen thread, as if he would ravel out with his mouth her vigorous confusion of hair. His tenderness of love was like a soft flame lapping her voluptuously. After a while they heard the old lady go upstairs. Helena went very still, and seemed to contract. Siegmund himself hesitated in his love-making. All was very quiet. They could hear the faint breathing of the sea. Presently the cat, which had been sleeping in a chair, rose and went to the door. 'Shall I let her out?' said Siegmund. 'Do!' said Helena, slipping from his knee. 'She goes out when the nights are fine.' Siegmund rose to set free the tabby. Hearing the front door open, Mrs Curtiss called from upstairs: 'Is that you, dear?' 'I have just let Kitty out,' said Siegmund. 'Ah, thank you. Good night!' They heard the old lady lock her bedroom door. Helena was kneeling on the hearth. Siegmund softly closed the door, then waited a moment. His heart was beating fast. 'Shall we sit by firelight?' he asked tentatively. 'Yes--If you wish,' she replied, very slowly, as if against her will. He carefully turned down the lamp, then blew out the light. His whole body was burning and surging with desire. The room was black and red with firelight. Helena shone ruddily as she knelt, a bright, bowed figure, full in the glow. Now and then red stripes of firelight leapt across the walls. Siegmund, his face ruddy, advanced out of the shadows. He sat in the chair beside her, leaning forward, his hands hanging like two scarlet flowers listless in the fire glow, near to her, as she knelt on the hearth, with head bowed down. One of the flowers awoke and spread towards her. It asked for her mutely. She was fascinated, scarcely able to move. 'Come,' he pleaded softly. She turned, lifted her hands to him. The lace fell back, and her arms, bare to the shoulder, shone rosily. He saw her breasts raised towards him. Her face was bent between her arms as she looked up at him afraid. Lit by the firelight, in her white, clinging dress, cowering between her uplifted arms, she seemed to be offering him herself to sacrifice. In an instant he was kneeling, and she was lying on his shoulder, abandoned to him. There was a good deal of sorrow in his joy. * * * * * It was eleven o'clock when Helena at last loosened Siegmund's arms, and rose from the armchair where she lay beside him. She was very hot, feverish, and restless. For the last half-hour he had lain absolutely still, with his heavy arms about her, making her hot. If she had not seen his eyes blue and dark, she would have thought him asleep. She tossed in restlessness on his breast. 'Am I not uneasy?' she had said, to make him speak. He had smiled gently. 'It is wonderful to be as still as this,' he said. She had lain tranquil with him, then, for a few moments. To her there was something sacred in his stillness and peace. She wondered at him; he was so different from an hour ago. How could he be the same! Now he was like the sea, blue and hazy in the morning, musing by itself. Before, he was burning, volcanic, as if he would destroy her. She had given him this new soft beauty. She was the earth in which his strange flowers grew. But she herself wondered at the flowers produced of her. He was so strange to her, so different from herself. What next would he ask of her, what new blossom would she rear in him then. He seemed to grow and flower involuntarily. She merely helped to produce him. Helena could not keep still; her body was full of strange sensations, of involuntary recoil from shock. She was tired, but restless. All the time Siegmund lay with his hot arms over her, himself so incomprehensible in his base of blue, open-eyed slumber, she grew more breathless and unbearable to herself. At last she lifted his arm, and drew herself out of the chair. Siegmund looked at her from his tranquillity. She put the damp hair from her forehead, breathed deep, almost panting. Then she glanced hauntingly at her flushed face in the mirror. With the same restlessness, she turned to look at the night. The cool, dark, watery sea called to her. She pushed back the curtain. The moon was wading deliciously through shallows of white cloud. Beyond the trees and the few houses was the great concave of darkness, the sea, and the moonlight. The moon was there to put a cool hand of absolution on her brow. 'Shall we go out a moment, Siegmund?' she asked fretfully. 'Ay, if you wish to,' he answered, altogether willing. He was filled with an easiness that would comply with her every wish. They went out softly, walked in silence to the bay. There they stood at the head of the white, living moonpath, where the water whispered at the casement of the land seductively. 'It's the finest night I have seen,' said Siegmund. Helena's eyes suddenly filled with tears, at his simplicity of happiness. 'I like the moon on the water,' she said. 'I can hardly tell the one from the other,' he replied simply. 'The sea seems to be poured out of the moon, and rocking in the hands of the coast. They are all one, just as your eyes and hands and what you say, are all you.' 'Yes,' she answered, thrilled. This was the Siegmund of her dream, and she had created him. Yet there was a quiver of pain. He was beyond her now, and did not need her. 'I feel at home here,' he said; 'as if I had come home where I was bred.' She pressed his hand hard, clinging to him. 'We go an awful long way round, Helena,' he said, 'just to find we're all right.' He laughed pleasantly. 'I have thought myself such an outcast! How can one be outcast in one's own night, and the moon always naked to us, and the sky half her time in rags? What do we want?' Helena did not know. Nor did she know what he meant. But she felt something of the harmony. 'Whatever I have or haven't from now,' he continued, 'the darkness is a sort of mother, and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and sometimes the sea is a brother: and there's a family in one house, you see.' 'And I, Siegmund?' she said softly, taking him in all seriousness. She looked up at him piteously. He saw the silver of tears among the moonlit ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed, then bent to kiss her. 'The key of the castle,' he said. He put his face against hers, and felt on his cheek the smart of her tears. 'It's all very grandiose,' he said comfortably, 'but it does for tonight, all this that I say.' 'It is true for ever,' she declared. 'In so far as tonight is eternal,' he said. He remained, with the wetness of her cheek smarting on his, looking from under his brows at the white transport of the water beneath the moon. They stood folded together, gazing into the white heart of the night. _Chapter 6_ Siegmund woke with wonder in the morning. 'It is like the magic tales,' he thought, as he realized where he was; 'and I am transported to a new life, to realize my dream! Fairy-tales are true, after all.' He had slept very deeply, so that he felt strangely new. He issued with delight from the dark of sleep into the sunshine. Reaching out his hand, he felt for his watch. It was seven o'clock. The dew of a sleep-drenched night glittered before his eyes. Then he laughed and forgot the night. The creeper was tapping at the window, as a little wind blew up the sunshine. Siegmund put out his hands for the unfolding happiness of the morning. Helena was in the next room, which she kept inviolate. Sparrows in the creeper were shaking shadows of leaves among the sunshine; milk-white shallop of cloud stemmed bravely across the bright sky; the sea would be blossoming with a dewy shimmer of sunshine. Siegmund rose to look, and it was so. Also the houses, like white, and red, and black cattle, were wandering down the bay, with a mist of sunshine between him and them. He leaned with his hands on the window-ledge looking out of the casement. The breeze ruffled his hair, blew down the neck of his sleeping-jacket upon his chest. He laughed, hastily threw on his clothes, and went out. There was no sign of Helena. He strode along, singing to himself, and spinning his towel rhythmically. A small path led him across a field and down a zigzag in front of the cliffs. Some nooks, sheltered from the wind, were warm with sunshine, scented of honeysuckle and of thyme. He took a sprig of woodbine that was coloured of cream and butter. The grass wetted his brown shoes and his flannel trousers. Again, a fresh breeze put the scent of the sea in his uncovered hair. The cliff was a tangle of flowers above and below, with poppies at the lip being blown out like red flame, and scabious leaning inquisitively to look down, and pink and white rest-harrow everywhere, very pretty. Siegmund stood at a bend where heath blossomed in shaggy lilac, where the sunshine but no wind came. He saw the blue bay curl away to the far-off headland. A few birds, white and small, circled, dipped by the thin foam-edge of the water; a few ships dimmed the sea with silent travelling; a few small people, dark or naked-white, moved below the swinging birds. He chose his bathing-place where the incoming tide had half covered a stretch of fair, bright sand that was studded with rocks resembling square altars, hollowed on top. He threw his clothes on a high rock. It delighted him to feel the fresh, soft fingers of the wind touching him and wandering timidly over his nakedness. He ran laughing over the sand to the sea, where he waded in, thrusting his legs noisily through the heavy green water. It was cold, and he shrank. For a moment he found himself thigh-deep, watching the horizontal stealing of a ship through the intolerable glitter, afraid to plunge. Laughing, he went under the clear green water. He was a poor swimmer. Sometimes a choppy wave swamped him, and he rose gasping, wringing the water from his eyes and nostrils, while he heaved and sank with the rocking of the waves that clasped his breast. Then he stooped again to resume his game with the sea. It is splendid to play, even at middle age, and the sea is a fine partner. With his eyes at the shining level of the water, he liked to peer across, taking a seal's view of the cliffs as they confronted the morning. He liked to see the ships standing up on a bright floor; he liked to see the birds come down. But in his playing he drifted towards the spur of rock, where, as he swam, he caught his thigh on a sharp, submerged point. He frowned at the pain, at the sudden cruelty of the sea; then he thought no more of it, but ruffled his way back to the clear water, busily continuing his play. When he ran out on to the fair sand his heart, and brain, and body were in a turmoil. He panted, filling his breast with the air that was sparkled and tasted of the sea. As he shuddered a little, the wilful palpitations of his flesh pleased him, as if birds had fluttered against him. He offered his body to the morning, glowing with the sea's passion. The wind nestled in to him, the sunshine came on his shoulders like warm breath. He delighted in himself. The rock before him was white and wet, like himself; it had a pool of clear water, with shells and one rose anemone. 'She would make so much of this little pool,' he thought. And as he smiled, he saw, very faintly, his own shadow in the water. It made him conscious of himself, seeming to look at him. He glanced at himself, at his handsome, white maturity. As he looked he felt the insidious creeping of blood down his thigh, which was marked with a long red slash. Siegmund watched the blood travel over the bright skin. It wound itself redly round the rise of his knee. 'That is I, that creeping red, and this whiteness I pride myself on is I, and my black hair, and my blue eyes are I. It is a weird thing to be a person. What makes me myself, among all these?' Feeling chill, he wiped himself quickly. 'I am at my best, at my strongest,' he said proudly to himself. 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not; she rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.' He glanced at his whole handsome maturity, the firm plating of his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves. Only he was marred by the long raw scratch, which he regretted deeply. 'If I was giving her myself, I wouldn't want that blemish on me,' he thought. He wiped the blood from the wound. It was nothing. 'She thinks ten thousand times more of that little pool, with a bit of pink anemone and some yellow weed, than of me. But, by Jove! I'd rather see her shoulders and breast than all heaven and earth put together could show.... Why doesn't she like me?' he thought as he dressed. It was his physical self thinking. After dabbling his feet in a warm pool, he returned home. Helena was in the dining-room arranging a bowl of purple pansies. She looked up at him rather heavily as he stood radiant on the threshold. He put her at her ease. It was a gay, handsome boy she had to meet, not a man, strange and insistent. She smiled on him with tender dignity. 'You have bathed?' she said, smiling, and looking at his damp, ruffled black hair. She shrank from his eyes, but he was quite unconscious. 'You have not bathed!' he said; then bent to kiss her. She smelt the brine in his hair. 'No; I bathe later,' she replied. 'But what--' Hesitating, she touched the towel, then looked up at him anxiously. 'It _is_ blood?' she said. 'I grazed my thigh--nothing at all,' he replied. 'Are you sure?' He laughed. 'The towel looks bad enough,' she said. 'It's an alarmist,' he laughed. She looked in concern at him, then turned aside. 'Breakfast is quite ready,' she said. 'And I for breakfast--but shall I do?' She glanced at him. He was without a collar, so his throat was bare above the neck-band of his flannel shirt. Altogether she disapproved of his slovenly appearance. He was usually so smart in his dress. 'I would not trouble,' she said almost sarcastically. Whistling, he threw the towel on a chair. 'How did you sleep?' she asked gravely, as she watched him beginning to eat. 'Like the dead--solid,' he replied'. 'And you?' 'Oh, pretty well, thanks,' she said, rather piqued that he had slept so deeply, whilst she had tossed, and had called his name in a torture of sleeplessness. 'I haven't slept like that for years,' he said enthusiastically. Helena smiled gently on him. The charm of his handsome, healthy zest came over her. She liked his naked throat and his shirt-breast, which suggested the breast of the man beneath it. She was extraordinarily happy, with him so bright. The dark-faced pansies, in a little crowd, seemed gaily winking a golden eye at her. After breakfast, while Siegmund dressed, she went down to the sea. She dwelled, as she passed, on all tiny, pretty things--on the barbaric yellow ragwort, and pink convolvuli; on all the twinkling of flowers, and dew, and snail-tracks drying in the sun. Her walk was one long lingering. More than the spaces, she loved the nooks, and fancy more than imagination. She wanted to see just as she pleased, without any of humanity's previous vision for spectacles. So she knew hardly any flower's name, nor perceived any of the relationships, nor cared a jot about an adaptation or a modification. It pleased her that the lowest browny florets of the clover hung down; she cared no more. She clothed everything in fancy. 'That yellow flower hadn't time to be brushed and combed by the fairies before dawn came. It is tousled ...' so she thought to herself. The pink convolvuli were fairy horns or telephones from the day fairies to the night fairies. The rippling sunlight on the sea was the Rhine maidens spreading their bright hair to the sun. That was her favourite form of thinking. The value of all things was in the fancy they evoked. She did not care for people; they were vulgar, ugly, and stupid, as a rule. Her sense of satisfaction was complete as she leaned on the low sea-wall, spreading her fingers to warm on the stones, concocting magic out of the simple morning. She watched the indolent chasing of wavelets round the small rocks, the curling of the deep blue water round the water-shadowed reefs. 'This is very good,' she said to herself. 'This is eternally cool, and clean and fresh. It could never be spoiled by satiety.' She tried to wash herself with the white and blue morning, to clear away the soiling of the last night's passion. The sea played by itself, intent on its own game. Its aloofness, its self-sufficiency, are its great charm. The sea does not give and take, like the land and the sky. It has no traffic with the world. It spends its passion upon itself. Helena was something like the sea, self-sufficient and careless of the rest. Siegmund came bareheaded, his black hair ruffling to the wind, his eyes shining warmer than the sea-like cornflowers rather, his limbs swinging backward and forward like the water. Together they leaned on the wall, warming the four white hands upon the grey bleached stone as they watched the water playing. When Siegmund had Helena near, he lost the ache, the yearning towards something, which he always felt otherwise. She seemed to connect him with the beauty of things, as if she were the nerve through which he received intelligence of the sun, and wind, and sea, and of the moon and the darkness. Beauty she never felt herself came to him through her. It is that makes love. He could always sympathize with the wistful little flowers, and trees lonely in their crowds, and wild, sad seabirds. In these things he recognized the great yearning, the ache outwards towards something, with which he was ordinarily burdened. But with Helena, in this large sea-morning, he was whole and perfect as the day. 'Will it be fine all day?' he asked, when a cloud came over. 'I don't know,' she replied in her gentle, inattentive manner, as if she did not care at all. 'I think it will be a mixed day--cloud and sun--more sun than cloud.' She looked up gravely to see if he agreed. He turned from frowning at the cloud to smile at her. He seemed so bright, teeming with life. 'I like a bare blue sky,' he said; 'sunshine that you seem to stir about as you walk.' 'It is warm enough here, even for you,' she smiled. 'Ah, here!' he answered, putting his face down to receive the radiation from the stone, letting his fingers creep towards Helena's. She laughed, and captured his fingers, pressing them into her hand. For nearly an hour they remained thus in the still sunshine by the sea-wall, till Helena began to sigh, and to lift her face to the little breeze that wandered down from the west. She fled as soon from warmth as from cold. Physically, she was always so; she shrank from anything extreme. But psychically she was an extremist, and a dangerous one. They climbed the hill to the fresh-breathing west. On the highest point of land stood a tall cross, railed in by a red iron fence. They read the inscription. 'That's all right--but a vilely ugly railing!' exclaimed Siegmund. 'Oh, they'd have to fence in Lord Tennyson's white marble,' said Helena, rather indefinitely. He interpreted her according to his own idea. 'Yes, he did belittle great things, didn't he?' said Siegmund. 'Tennyson!' she exclaimed. 'Not peacocks and princesses, but the bigger things.' 'I shouldn't say so,' she declared. He sounded indeterminate, but was not really so. They wandered over the downs westward, among the wind. As they followed the headland to the Needles, they felt the breeze from the wings of the sea brushing them, and heard restless, poignant voices screaming below the cliffs. Now and again a gull, like a piece of spume flung up, rose over the cliff's edge, and sank again. Now and again, as the path dipped in a hollow, they could see the low, suspended intertwining of the birds passing in and out of the cliff shelter. These savage birds appealed to all the poetry and yearning in Helena. They fascinated her, they almost voiced her. She crept nearer and nearer the edge, feeling she must watch the gulls thread out in flakes of white above the weed-black rocks. Siegmund stood away back, anxiously. He would not dare to tempt Fate now, having too strong a sense of death to risk it. 'Come back, dear. Don't go so near,' he pleaded, following as close as he might. She heard the pain and appeal in his voice. It thrilled her, and she went a little nearer. What was death to her but one of her symbols, the death of which the sagas talk--something grand, and sweeping, and dark. Leaning forward, she could see the line of grey sand and the line of foam broken by black rocks, and over all the gulls, stirring round like froth on a pot, screaming in chorus. She watched the beautiful birds, heard the pleading of Siegmund, and she thrilled with pleasure, toying with his keen anguish. Helena came smiling to Siegmund, saying: 'They look so fine down there.' He fastened his hands upon her, as a relief from his pain. He was filled with a keen, strong anguish of dread, like a presentiment. She laughed as he gripped her. They went searching for a way of descent. At last Siegmund inquired of the coastguard the nearest way down the cliff. He was pointed to the 'Path of the Hundred Steps'. 'When is a hundred not a hundred?' he said sceptically, as they descended the dazzling white chalk. There were sixty-eight steps. Helena laughed at his exactitude. 'It must be a love of round numbers,' he said. 'No doubt,' she laughed. He took the thing so seriously. 'Or of exaggeration,' he added. There was a shelving beach of warm white sand, bleached soft as velvet. A sounding of gulls filled the dark recesses of the headland; a low chatter of shingle came from where the easy water was breaking; the confused, shell-like murmur of the sea between the folded cliffs. Siegmund and Helena lay side by side upon the dry sand, small as two resting birds, while thousands of gulls whirled in a white-flaked storm above them, and the great cliffs towered beyond, and high up over the cliffs the multitudinous clouds were travelling, a vast caravan _en route_. Amidst the journeying of oceans and clouds and the circling flight of heavy spheres, lost to sight in the sky, Siegmund and Helena, two grains of life in the vast movement, were travelling a moment side by side. They lay on the beach like a grey and a white sea-bird together. The lazy ships that were idling down the Solent observed the cliffs and the boulders, but Siegmund and Helena were too little. They lay ignored and insignificant, watching through half-closed fingers the diverse caravan of Day go past. They lay with their latticed fingers over their eyes, looking out at the sailing of ships across their vision of blue water. 'Now, that one with the greyish sails--' Siegmund was saying. 'Like a housewife of forty going placidly round with the duster--yes?' interrupted Helena. 'That is a schooner. You see her four sails, and--' He continued to classify the shipping, until he was interrupted by the wicked laughter of Helena. 'That is right, I am sure,' he protested. 'I won't contradict you,' she laughed, in a tone which showed him he knew even less of the classifying of ships than she did. 'So you have lain there amusing yourself at my expense all the time?' he said, not knowing in the least why she laughed. They turned and looked at one another, blue eyes smiling and wavering as the beach wavers in the heat. Then they closed their eyes with sunshine. Drowsed by the sun, and the white sand, and the foam, their thoughts slept like butterflies on the flowers of delight. But cold shadows startled them up. 'The clouds are coming,' he said regretfully. 'Yes; but the wind is quite strong enough for them,' she answered, 'Look at the shadows--like blots floating away. Don't they devour the sunshine?' 'It is quite warm enough here,' she said, nestling in to him. 'Yes; but the sting is missing. I like to feel the warmth biting in.' 'No, I do not. To be cosy is enough.' 'I like the sunshine on me, real, and manifest, and tangible. I feel like a seed that has been frozen for ages. I want to be bitten by the sunshine.' She leaned over and kissed him. The sun came bright-footed over the water, leaving a shining print on Siegmund's face. He lay, with half-closed eyes, sprawled loosely on the sand. Looking at his limbs, she imagined he must be heavy, like the bounders. She sat over him, with her fingers stroking his eyebrows, that were broad and rather arched. He lay perfectly still, in a half-dream. Presently she laid her head on his breast, and remained so, watching the sea, and listening to his heart-beats. The throb was strong and deep. It seemed to go through the whole island and the whole afternoon, and it fascinated her: so deep, unheard, with its great expulsions of life. Had the world a heart? Was there also deep in the world a great God thudding out waves of life, like a great heart, unconscious? It frightened her. This was the God she knew not, as she knew not this Siegmund. It was so different from the half-shut eyes with black lashes, and the winsome, shapely nose. And the heart of the world, as she heard it, could not be the same as the curling splash of retreat of the little sleepy waves. She listened for Siegmund's soul, but his heart overbeat all other sound, thudding powerfully. _Chapter 7_ Siegmund woke to the muffled firing of guns on the sea. He looked across at the shaggy grey water in wonder. Then he turned to Helena. 'I suppose,' he said, 'they are saluting the Czar. Poor beggar!' 'I was afraid they would wake you,' she smiled. They listened again to the hollow, dull sound of salutes from across the water and the downs. The day had gone grey. They decided to walk, down below, to the next bay. 'The tide is coming in,' said Helena. 'But this broad strip of sand hasn't been wet for months. It's as soft as pepper,' he replied. They laboured along the shore, beside the black, sinuous line of shrivelled fucus. The base of the cliff was piled with chalk debris. On the other side was the level plain of the sea. Hand in hand, alone and overshadowed by huge cliffs, they toiled on. The waves staggered in, and fell, overcome at the end of the race. Siegmund and Helena neared a headland, sheer as the side of a house, its base weighted with a tremendous white mass of boulders, that the green sea broke amongst with a hollow sound, followed by a sharp hiss of withdrawal. The lovers had to cross this desert of white boulders, that glistened in smooth skins uncannily. But Siegmund saw the waves were almost at the wall of the headland. Glancing back, he saw the other headland white-dashed at the base with foam. He and Helena must hurry, or they would be prisoned on the thin crescent of strand still remaining between the great wall and the water. The cliffs overhead oppressed him--made him feel trapped and helpless. He was caught by them in a net of great boulders, while the sea fumbled for him. But he and Helena. She laboured strenuously beside him, blinded by the skin-like glisten of the white rock. 'I think I will rest awhile,' she said. 'No, come along,' he begged. 'My dear,' she laughed, 'there is tons of this shingle to buttress us from the sea.' He looked at the waves curving and driving maliciously at the boulders. It would be ridiculous to be trapped. 'Look at this black wood,' she said. 'Does the sea really char it?' 'Let us get round the corner,' he begged. 'Really, Siegmund, the sea is not so anxious to take us,' she said ironically. When they rounded the first point, they found themselves in a small bay jutted out to sea; the front of the headland was, as usual, grooved. This bay was pure white at the base, from its great heaped mass of shingle. With the huge concave of the cliff behind, the foothold of massed white boulders, and the immense arc of the sea in front, Helena was delighted. 'This is fine, Siegmund!' she said, halting and facing west. Smiling ironically, he sat down on a boulder. They were quite alone, in this great white niche thrust out to sea. Here, he could see, the tide would beat the base of the wall. It came plunging not far from their feet. 'Would you really like to travel beyond the end?' he asked. She looked round quickly, thrilled, then answered as if in rebuke: 'This is a fine place. I should like to stay here an hour.' 'And then where?' 'Then? Oh, then, I suppose, it would be tea-time.' 'Tea on brine and pink anemones, with Daddy Neptune.' She looked sharply at the outjutting capes. The sea did foam perilously near their bases. 'I suppose it _is_ rather risky,' she said; and she turned, began silently to clamber forwards. He followed; she should set the pace. 'I have no doubt there's plenty of room, really,' he said. 'The sea only looks near.' But she toiled on intently. Now it was a question of danger, not of inconvenience, Siegmund felt elated. The waves foamed up, as it seemed, against the exposed headland, from which the massive shingle had been swept back. Supposing they could not get by? He began to smile curiously. He became aware of the tremendous noise of waters, of the slight shudder of the shingle when a wave struck it, and he always laughed to himself. Helena laboured on in silence; he kept just behind her. The point seemed near, but it took longer than they thought. They had against them the tremendous cliff, the enormous weight of shingle, and the swinging sea. The waves struck louder, booming fearfully; wind, sweeping round the corner, wet their faces. Siegmund hoped they were cut off, and hoped anxiously the way was clear. The smile became set on his face. Then he saw there was a ledge or platform at the base of the cliff, and it was against this the waves broke. They climbed the side of this ridge, hurried round to the front. There the wind caught them, wet and furious; the water raged below. Between the two Helena shrank, wilted. She took hold of Siegmund. The great, brutal wave flung itself at the rock, then drew back for another heavy spring. Fume and spray were spun on the wind like smoke. The roaring thud of the waves reminded Helena of a beating heart. She clung closer to him, as her hair was blown out damp, and her white dress flapped in the wet wind. Always, against the rock, came the slow thud of the waves, like a great heart beating under the breast. There was something brutal about it that she could not bear. She had no weapon against brute force. She glanced up at Siegmund. Tiny drops of mist greyed his eyebrows. He was looking out to sea, screwing up his eyes, and smiling brutally. Her face became heavy and sullen. He was like the heart and the brute sea, just here; he was not her Siegmund. She hated the brute in him. Turning suddenly, she plunged over the shingle towards the wide, populous bay. He remained alone, grinning at the smashing turmoil, careless of her departure. He would easily catch her. When at last he turned from the wrestling water, he had spent his savagery, and was sad. He could never take part in the great battle of action. It was beyond him. Many things he had let slip by. His life was whittled down to only a few interests, only a few necessities. Even here, he had but Helena, and through her the rest. After this week--well, that was vague. He left it in the dark, dreading it. And Helena was toiling over the rough beach alone. He saw her small figure bowed as she plunged forward. It smote his heart with the keenest tenderness. She was so winsome, a playmate with beauty and fancy. Why was he cruel to her because she had not his own bitter wisdom of experience? She was young and naïve, and should he be angry with her for that? His heart was tight at the thought of her. She would have to suffer also, because of him. He hurried after her. Not till they had nearly come to a little green mound, where the downs sloped, and the cliffs were gone, did he catch her up. Then he took her hand as they walked. They halted on the green hillock beyond the sand, and, without a word, he folded her in his arms. Both were put of breath. He clasped her close, seeming to rock her with his strong panting. She felt his body lifting into her, and sinking away. It seemed to force a rhythm, a new pulse, in her. Gradually, with a fine, keen thrilling, she melted down on him, like metal sinking on a mould. He was sea and sunlight mixed, heaving, warm, deliciously strong. Siegmund exulted. At last she was moulded to him in pure passion. They stood folded thus for some time. Then Helena raised her burning face, and relaxed. She was throbbing with strange elation and satisfaction. 'It might as well have been the sea as any other way, dear,' she said, startling both of them. The speech went across their thoughtfulness like a star flying into the night, from nowhere. She had no idea why she said it. He pressed his mouth on hers. 'Not for you,' he thought, by reflex. 'You can't go that way yet.' But he said nothing, strained her very tightly, and kept her lips. They were roused by the sound of voices. Unclasping, they went to walk at the fringe of the water. The tide was creeping back. Siegmund stooped, and from among the water's combings picked up an electric-light bulb. It lay in some weed at the base of a rock. He held it in his hand to Helena. Her face lighted with a curious pleasure. She took the thing delicately from his hand, fingered it with her exquisite softness. 'Isn't it remarkable!' she exclaimed joyously. 'The sea must be very, very gentle--and very kind.' 'Sometimes,' smiled Siegmund. 'But I did not think it could be so fine-fingered,' she said. She breathed on the glass bulb till it looked like a dim magnolia bud; she inhaled its fine savour. 'It would not have treated _you_ so well,' he said. She looked at him with heavy eyes. Then she returned to her bulb. Her fingers were very small and very pink. She had the most delicate touch in the world, like a faint feel of silk. As he watched her lifting her fingers from off the glass, then gently stroking it, his blood ran hot. He watched her, waited upon her words and movements attentively. 'It is a graceful act on the sea's part,' she said. 'Wotan is so clumsy--he knocks over the bowl, and flap-flap-flap go the gasping fishes, _pizzicato_!--but the sea--' Helena's speech was often difficult to render into plain terms. She was not lucid. 'But life's so full of anti-climax,' she concluded. Siegmund smiled softly at her. She had him too much in love to disagree or to examine her words. 'There's no reckoning with life, and no reckoning with the sea. The only way to get on with both is to be as near a vacuum as possible, and float,' he jested. It hurt her that he was flippant. She proceeded to forget he had spoken. There were three children on the beach. Helena had handed him back the senseless bauble, not able to throw it away. Being a father: 'I will give it to the children,' he said. She looked up at him, loved him for the thought. Wandering hand in hand, for it pleased them both to own each other publicly, after years of conventional distance, they came to a little girl who was bending over a pool. Her black hair hung in long snakes to the water. She stood up, flung back her locks to see them as they approached. In one hand she clasped some pebbles. 'Would you like this? I found it down there,' said Siegmund, offering her the bulb. She looked at him with grave blue eyes and accepted his gift. Evidently she was not going to say anything. 'The sea brought it all the way from the mainland without breaking it,' said Helena, with the interesting intonation some folk use to children. The girl looked at her. 'The waves put it out of their lap on to some seaweed with such careful fingers--' The child's eyes brightened. 'The tide-line is full of treasures,' said Helena, smiling. The child answered her smile a little. Siegmund had walked away. 'What beautiful eyes she had!' said Helena. 'Yes,' he replied. She looked up at him. He felt her searching him tenderly with her eyes. But he could not look back at her. She took his hand and kissed it, knowing he was thinking of his own youngest child. _Chapter 8_ The way home lay across country, through deep little lanes where the late foxgloves sat seriously, like sad hounds; over open downlands, rough with gorse and ling, and through pocketed hollows of bracken and trees. They came to a small Roman Catholic church in the fields. There the carved Christ looked down on the dead whose sleeping forms made mounds under the coverlet. Helena's heart was swelling with emotion. All the yearning and pathos of Christianity filled her again. The path skirted the churchyard wall, so that she had on the one hand the sleeping dead, and on the other Siegmund, strong and vigorous, but walking in the old, dejected fashion. She felt a rare tenderness and admiration for him. It was unusual for her to be so humble-minded, but this evening she felt she must minister to him, and be submissive. She made him stop to look at the graves. Suddenly, as they stood, she kissed him, clasped him fervently, roused him till his passion burned away his heaviness, and he seemed tipped with life, his face glowing as if soon he would burst alight. Then she was satisfied, and could laugh. As they went through the fir copse, listening to the birds like a family assembled and chattering at home in the evening, listening to the light swish of the wind, she let Siegmund predominate; he set the swing of their motion; she rested on him like a bird on a swaying bough. They argued concerning the way. Siegmund, as usual, submitted to her. They went quite wrong. As they retraced their steps, stealthily, through a poultry farm whose fowls were standing in forlorn groups, once more dismayed by evening, Helena's pride battled with her new subjugation to Siegmund. She walked head down, saying nothing. He also was silent, but his heart was strong in him. Somewhere in the distance a band was playing 'The Watch on the Rhine'. As they passed the beeches and were near home, Helena said, to try him, and to strike a last blow for her pride: 'I wonder what next Monday will bring us.' 'Quick curtain,' he answered joyously. He was looking down and smiling at her with such careless happiness that she loved him. He was wonderful to her. She loved him, was jealous of every particle of him that evaded her. She wanted to sacrifice to him, make herself a burning altar to him, and she wanted to possess him. The hours that would be purely their own came too slowly for her. That night she met his passion with love. It was not his passion she wanted, actually. But she desired that he should want _her_ madly, and that he should have all--everything. It was a wonderful night to him. It restored in him the full 'will to live'. But she felt it destroyed her. Her soul seemed blasted. At seven o'clock in the morning Helena lay in the deliciously cool water, while small waves ran up the beach full and clear and foamless, continuing perfectly in their flicker the rhythm of the night's passion. Nothing, she felt, had ever been so delightful as this cool water running over her. She lay and looked out on the shining sea. All things, it seemed, were made of sunshine more or less soiled. The cliffs rose out of the shining waves like clouds of strong, fine texture, and rocks along the shore were the dapplings of a bright dawn. The coarseness was fused out of the world, so that sunlight showed in the veins of the morning cliffs and the rocks. Yea, everything ran with sunshine, as we are full of blood, and plants are tissued from green-gold, glistening sap. Substance and solidity were shadows that the morning cast round itself to make itself tangible: as she herself was a shadow, cast by that fragment of sunshine, her soul, over its inefficiency. She remembered to have seen the bats flying low over a burnished pool at sunset, and the web of their wings had burned in scarlet flickers, as they stretched across the light. Winged momentarily on bits of tissued flame, threaded with blood, the bats had flickered a secret to her. Now the cliffs were like wings uplifted, and the morning was coming dimly through them. She felt the wings of all the world upraised against the morning in a flashing, multitudinous flight. The world itself was flying. Sunlight poured on the large round world till she fancied it a heavy bee humming on its iridescent atmosphere across a vast air of sunshine. She lay and rode the fine journey. Sunlight liquid in the water made the waves heavy, golden, and rich with a velvety coolness like cowslips. Her feet fluttered in the shadowy underwater. Her breast came out bright as the breast of a white bird. Where was Siegmund? she wondered. He also was somewhere among the sea and the sunshine, white and playing like a bird, shining like a vivid, restless speck of sunlight. She struck the water, smiling, feeling along with him. They two were the owners of this morning, as a pair of wild, large birds inhabiting an empty sea. Siegmund had found a white cave welling with green water, brilliant and full of life as mounting sap. The white rock glimmered through the water, and soon Siegmund shimmered also in the living green of the sea, like pale flowers trembling upward. 'The water,' said Siegmund, 'is as full of life as I am,' and he pressed forward his breast against it. He swam very well that morning; he had more wilful life than the sea, so he mastered it laughingly with his arms, feeling a delight in his triumph over the waves. Venturing recklessly in his new pride, he swam round the corner of the rock, through an archway, lofty and spacious, into a passage where the water ran like a flood of green light over the skin-white bottom. Suddenly he emerged in the brilliant daylight of the next tiny scoop of a bay. There he arrived like a pioneer, for the bay was inaccessible from the land. He waded out of the green, cold water on to sand that was pure as the shoulders of Helena, out of the shadow of the archway into the sunlight, on to the glistening petal of this blossom of a sea-bay. He did not know till he felt the sunlight how the sea had drunk with its cold lips deeply of his warmth. Throwing himself down on the sand that was soft and warm as white fur, he lay glistening wet, panting, swelling with glad pride at having conquered also this small, inaccessible sea-cave, creeping into it like a white bee into a white virgin blossom that had waited, how long, for its bee. The sand was warm to his breast, and his belly, and his arms. It was like a great body he cleaved to. Almost, he fancied, he felt it heaving under him in its breathing. Then he turned his face to the sun, and laughed. All the while, he hugged the warm body of the sea-bay beneath him. He spread his hands upon the sand; he took it in handfuls, and let it run smooth, warm, delightful, through his fingers. 'Surely,' he said to himself, 'it is like Helena;' and he laid his hands again on the warm body of the shore, let them wander, discovering, gathering all the warmth, the softness, the strange wonder of smooth warm pebbles, then shrinking from the deep weight of cold his hand encountered as he burrowed under the surface wrist-deep. In the end he found the cold mystery of the deep sand also thrilling. He pushed in his hands again and deeper, enjoying the almost hurt of the dark, heavy coldness. For the sun and the white flower of the bay were breathing and kissing him dry, were holding him in their warm concave, like a bee in a flower, like himself on the bosom of Helena, and flowing like the warmth of her breath in his hair came the sunshine, breathing near and lovingly; yet, under all, was this deep mass of cold, that the softness and warmth merely floated upon. Siegmund lay and clasped the sand, and tossed it in handfuls till over him he was all hot and cloyed. Then he rose and looked at himself and laughed. The water was swaying reproachfully against the steep pebbles below, murmuring like a child that it was not fair--it was not fair he should abandon his playmate. Siegmund laughed, and began to rub himself free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry and smooth. He tossed more dry sand, and more, over himself, busy and intent like a child playing some absorbing game with itself. Soon his body was dry and warm and smooth as a camomile flower. He was, however, greyed and smeared with sand-dust. Siegmund looked at himself with disapproval, though his body was full of delight and his hands glad with the touch of himself. He wanted himself clean. He felt the sand thick in his hair, even in his moustache. He went painfully over the pebbles till he found himself on the smooth rock bottom. Then he soused himself, and shook his head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his hands assiduously. He must feel perfectly clean and free--fresh, as if he had washed away all the years of soilure in this morning's sea and sun and sand. It was the purification. Siegmund became again a happy priest of the sun. He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out of him, as he might soak clean a soiled garment in the sea, and bleach it white on the sunny shore. So white and sweet and tissue-clean he felt--full of lightness and grace. The garden in front of their house, where Helena was waiting for him, was long and crooked, with a sunken flagstone pavement running up to the door by the side of the lawn. On either hand the high fence of the garden was heavy with wild clematis and honeysuckle. Helena sat sideways, with a map spread out on her bench under the bushy little laburnum tree, tracing the course of their wanderings. It was very still. There was just a murmur of bees going in and out the brilliant little porches of nasturtium flowers. The nasturtium leaf-coins stood cool and grey; in their delicate shade, underneath in the green twilight, a few flowers shone their submerged gold and scarlet. There was a faint scent of mignonette. Helena, like a white butterfly in the shade, her two white arms for antennae stretching firmly to the bench, leaned over her map. She was busy, very busy, out of sheer happiness. She traced word after word, and evoked scene after scene. As she discovered a name, she conjured up the place. As she moved to the next mark she imagined the long path lifting and falling happily. She was waiting for Siegmund, yet his hand upon the latch startled her. She rose suddenly, in agitation. Siegmund was standing in the sunshine at the gate. They greeted each other across the tall roses. When Siegmund was holding her hand, he said, softly laughing: 'You have come out of the water very beautiful this morning.' She laughed. She was not beautiful, but she felt so at that moment. She glanced up at him, full of love and gratefulness. 'And you,' she murmured, in a still tone, as if it were almost sacrilegiously unnecessary to say it. Siegmund was glad. He rejoiced to be told he was beautiful. After a few moments of listening to the bees and breathing the mignonette, he said: 'I found a little white bay, just like you--a virgin bay. I had to swim there.' 'Oh!' she said, very interested in him, not in the fact. 'It seemed just like you. Many things seem like you,' he said. She laughed again in her joyous fashion, and the reed-like vibration came into her voice. 'I saw the sun through the cliffs, and the sea, and you,' she said. He did not understand. He looked at her searchingly. She was white and still and inscrutable. Then she looked up at him; her earnest eyes, that would not flinch, gazed straight into him. He trembled, and things all swept into a blur. After she had taken away her eyes he found himself saying: 'You know, I felt as if I were the first man to discover things: like Adam when he opened the first eyes in the world.' 'I saw the sunshine in you,' repeated Helena quietly, looking at him with her eyes heavy with meaning. He laughed again, not understanding, but feeling she meant love. 'No, but you have altered everything,' he said. The note of wonder, of joy, in his voice touched her almost beyond self-control. She caught his hand and pressed it; then quickly kissed it. He became suddenly grave. 'I feel as if it were right--you and me, Helena--so, even righteous. It is so, isn't it? And the sea and everything, they all seem with us. Do you think so?' Looking at her, he found her eyes full of tears. He bent and kissed her, and she pressed his head to her bosom. He was very glad. _Chapter 9_ The day waxed hot. A few little silver tortoises of cloud had crawled across the desert of sky, and hidden themselves. The chalk roads were white, quivering with heat. Helena and Siegmund walked eastward bareheaded under the sunshine. They felt like two insects in the niche of a hot hearth as they toiled along the deep road. A few poppies here and there among the wild rye floated scarlet in sunshine like blood-drops on green water. Helena recalled Francis Thompson's poems, which Siegmund had never read. She repeated what she knew, and laughed, thinking what an ineffectual pale shadow of a person Thompson must have been. She looked at Siegmund, walking in large easiness beside her. 'Artists are supremely unfortunate persons,' she announced. 'Think of Wagner,' said Siegmund, lifting his face to the hot bright heaven, and drinking the heat with his blinded face. All states seemed meagre, save his own. He recalled people who had loved, and he pitied them--dimly, drowsily, without pain. They came to a place where they might gain access to the shore by a path down a landslip. As they descended through the rockery, yellow with ragwort, they felt themselves dip into the inert, hot air of the bay. The living atmosphere of the uplands was left overhead. Among the rocks of the sand, white as if smelted, the heat glowed and quivered. Helena sat down and took off her shoes. She walked on the hot, glistening sand till her feet were delightfully, almost intoxicatingly scorched. Then she ran into the water to cool them. Siegmund and she paddled in the light water, pensively watching the haste of the ripples, like crystal beetles, running over the white outline of their feet; looking out on the sea that rose so near to them, dwarfing them by its far reach. For a short time they flitted silently in the water's edge. Then there settled down on them a twilight of sleep, the little hush that closes the doors and draws the blinds of the house after a festival. They wandered out across the beach above high-water mark, where they sat down together on the sand, leaning back against a flat brown stone, Siegmund with the sunshine on his forehead, Helena drooping close to him, in his shadow. Then the hours ride by unnoticed, making no sound as they go. The sea creeps nearer, nearer, like a snake which watches two birds asleep. It may not disturb them, but sinks back, ceasing to look at them with its bright eyes. Meanwhile the flowers of their passion were softly shed, as poppies fall at noon, and the seed of beauty ripened rapidly within them. Dreams came like a wind through, their souls, drifting off with the seed-dust of beautiful experience which they had ripened, to fertilize the souls of others withal. In them the sea and the sky and ships had mingled and bred new blossoms of the torrid heat of their love. And the seed of such blossoms was shaken as they slept, into the hand of God, who held it in His palm preciously; then scattered it again, to produce new splendid blooms of beauty. A little breeze came down the cliffs. Sleep lightened the lovers of their experience; new buds were urged in their souls as they lay in a shadowed twilight, at the porch of death. The breeze fanned the face of Helena; a coolness wafted on her throat. As the afternoon wore on she revived. Quick to flag, she was easy to revive, like a white pansy flung into water. She shivered lightly and rose. Strange, it seemed to her, to rise from the brown stone into life again. She felt beautifully refreshed. All around was quick as a garden wet in the early morning of June. She took her hair and loosened it, shook it free from sand, spread, and laughed like a fringed poppy that opens itself to the sun. She let the wind comb through its soft fingers the tangles of her hair. Helena loved the wind. She turned to it, and took its kisses on her face and throat. Siegmund lay still, looking up at her. The changes in him were deeper, like alteration in his tissue. His new buds came slowly, and were of a fresh type. He lay smiling at her. At last he said: 'You look now as if you belonged to the sea.' 'I do; and some day I shall go back to it,' she replied. For to her at that moment the sea was a great lover, like Siegmund, but more impersonal, who would receive her when Siegmund could not. She rejoiced momentarily in the fact. Siegmund looked at her and continued smiling. His happiness was budded firm and secure. 'Come!' said Helena, holding out her hand. He rose somewhat reluctantly from his large, fruitful inertia. _Chapter 10_ Siegmund carried the boots and the shoes while they wandered over the sand to the rocks. There was a delightful sense of risk in scrambling with bare feet over the smooth irregular jumble of rocks. Helena laughed suddenly from fear as she felt herself slipping. Siegmund's heart was leaping like a child's with excitement as he stretched forward, himself very insecure, to succour her. Thus they travelled slowly. Often she called to him to come and look in the lovely little rock-pools, dusky with blossoms of red anemones and brown anemones that seemed nothing but shadows, and curtained with green of finest sea-silk. Siegmund loved to poke the white pebbles, and startle the little ghosts of crabs in a shadowy scuttle through the weed. He would tease the expectant anemones, causing them to close suddenly over his finger. But Helena liked to watch without touching things. Meanwhile the sun was slanting behind the cross far away to the west, and the light was swimming in silver and gold upon the lacquered water. At last Siegmund looked doubtfully at two miles more of glistening, gilded boulders. Helena was seated on a stone, dabbling her feet in a warm pool, delicately feeling the wet sea-velvet of the weeds. 'Don't you think we had better be mounting the cliffs?' he said. She glanced up at him, smiling with irresponsible eyes. Then she lapped the water with her feet, and surveyed her pink toes. She was absurdly, childishly happy. 'Why should we?' she asked lightly. He watched her. Her child-like indifference to consequences touched him with a sense of the distance between them. He himself might play with the delicious warm surface of life, but always he reeked of the relentless mass of cold beneath--the mass of life which has no sympathy with the individual, no cognizance of him. She loved the trifles and the toys, the mystery and the magic of things. She would not own life to be relentless. It was either beautiful, fantastic, or weird, or inscrutable, or else mean and vulgar, below consideration. He had to get a sense of the anemone and a sympathetic knowledge of its experience, into his blood, before he was satisfied. To Helena an anemone was one more fantastic pretty figure in her kaleidoscope. So she sat dabbling her pink feet in the water, quite unconscious of his gravity. He waited on her, since he never could capture her. 'Come,' he said very gently. 'You are only six years old today.' She laughed as she let him take her. Then she nestled up to him, smiling in a brilliant, child-like fashion. He kissed her with all the father in him sadly alive. 'Now put your stockings on,' he said. 'But my feet are wet.' She laughed. He kneeled down and dried her feet on his handkerchief while she sat tossing his hair with her finger-tips. The sunlight grew more and more golden. 'I envy the savages their free feet,' she said. 'There is no broken glass in the wilderness--or there used not to be,' he replied. As they were crossing the sands, a whole family entered by the cliff track. They descended in single file, unequally, like the theatre; two boys, then a little girl, the father, another girl, then the mother. Last of all trotted the dog, warily, suspicious of the descent. The boys emerged into the bay with a shout; the dog rushed, barking, after them. The little one waited for her father, calling shrilly: 'Tiss can't fall now, can she, dadda? Shall I put her down?' 'Ay, let her have a run,' said the father. Very carefully she lowered the kitten which she had carried clasped to her bosom. The mite was bewildered and scared. It turned round pathetically. 'Go on, Tissie; you're all right,' said the child. 'Go on; have a run on the sand.' The kitten stood dubious and unhappy. Then, perceiving the dog some distance ahead, it scampered after him, a fluffy, scurrying mite. But the dog had already raced into the water. The kitten walked a few steps, turning its small face this way and that, and mewing piteously. It looked extraordinarily tiny as it stood, a fluffy handful, staring away from the noisy water, its thin cry floating over the plash of waves. Helena glanced at Siegmund, and her eyes were shining with pity. He was watching the kitten and smiling. 'Crying because things are too big, and it can't take them in,' he said. 'But look how frightened it is,' she said. 'So am I.' He laughed. 'And if there are any gods looking on and laughing at me, at least they won't be kind enough to put me in their pinafores....' She laughed very quickly. 'But why?' she exclaimed. 'Why should you want putting in a pinafore?' 'I don't,' he laughed. On the top of the cliff they were between two bays, with darkening blue water on the left, and on the right gold water smoothing to the sun. Siegmund seemed to stand waist-deep in shadow, with his face bright and glowing. He was watching earnestly. 'I want to absorb it all,' he said. When at last they turned away: 'Yes,' said Helena slowly; 'one can recall the details, but never the atmosphere.' He pondered a moment. 'How strange!' he said. I can recall the atmosphere, but not the detail. It is a moment to me, not a piece of scenery. I should say the picture was in me, not out there.' Without troubling to understand--she was inclined to think it verbiage--she made a small sound of assent. 'That is why you want to go again to a place, and I don't care so much, because I have it with me,' he concluded. _Chapter 11_ They decided to find their way through the lanes to Alum Bay, and then, keeping the cross in sight, to return over the downs, with the moon-path broad on the water before them. For the moon was rising late. Twilight, however, rose more rapidly than they had anticipated. The lane twisted among meadows and wild lands and copses--a wilful little lane, quite incomprehensible. So they lost their distant landmark, the white cross. Darkness filtered through the daylight. When at last they came to a signpost, it was almost too dark to read it. The fingers seemed to withdraw into the dusk the more they looked. 'We must go to the left,' said Helena. To the left rose the downs, smooth and grey near at hand, but higher black with gorse, like a giant lying asleep with a bearskin over his shoulders. Several pale chalk-tracks ran side by side through the turf. Climbing, they came to a disused chalk-pit, which they circumvented. Having passed a lonely farmhouse, they mounted the side of the open down, where was a sense of space and freedom. 'We can steer by the night,' said Siegmund, as they trod upwards pathlessly. Helena did not mind whither they steered. All places in that large fair night were home and welcome to her. They drew nearer to the shaggy cloak of furze. 'There will be a path through it,' said Siegmund. But when they arrived there was no path. They were confronted by a tall, impenetrable growth of gorse, taller than Siegmund. 'Stay here,' said he, 'while I look for a way through. I am afraid you will be tired.' She stood alone by the walls of gorse. The lights that had flickered into being during the dusk grew stronger, so that a little farmhouse down the hill glowed with great importance on the night, while the far-off in visible sea became like a roadway, large and mysterious, its specks of light moving slowly, and its bigger lamps stationed out amid the darkness. Helena wanted the day-wanness to be quite wiped off the west. She asked for the full black night, that would obliterate everything save Siegmund. Siegmund it was that the whole world meant. The darkness, the gorse, the downs, the specks of light, seemed only to bespeak him. She waited for him to come back. She could hardly endure the condition of intense waiting. He came, in his grey clothes almost invisible. But she felt him coming. 'No good,' he said, 'no vestige of a path. Not a rabbit-run.' 'Then we will sit down awhile,' said she calmly. '"Here on this mole-hill,"' he quoted mockingly. They sat down in a small gap in the gorse, where the turf was very soft, and where the darkness seemed deeper. The night was all fragrance, cool odour of darkness, keen, savoury scent of the downs, touched with honeysuckle and gorse and bracken scent. Helena turned to him, leaning her hand on his thigh. 'What day is it, Siegmund?' she asked, in a joyous, wondering tone. He laughed, understanding, and kissed her. 'But really,' she insisted, 'I would not have believed the labels could have fallen off everything like this.' He laughed again. She still leaned towards him, her weight on her hand, stopping the flow in the artery down his thigh. 'The days used to walk in procession like seven marionettes, each in order and costume, going endlessly round.' She laughed, amused at the idea. 'It is very strange,' she continued, 'to have the days and nights smeared into one piece, as if the clock-hand only went round once in a lifetime.' 'That is how it is,' he admitted, touched by her eloquence. 'You have torn the labels off things, and they all are so different. This morning! It does seem absurd to talk about this morning. Why should I be parcelled up into mornings and evenings and nights? _I_ am not made up of sections of time. Now, nights and days go racing over us like cloud-shadows and sunshine over the sea, and all the time we take no notice.' She put her arms round his neck. He was reminded by a sudden pain in his leg how much her hand had been pressing on him. He held his breath from pain. She was kissing him softly over the eyes. They lay cheek to cheek, looking at the stars. He felt a peculiar tingling sense of joy, a keenness of perception, a fine, delicate tingling as of music. 'You know,' he said, repeating himself, 'it is true. You seem to have knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate; they are all in a symphony. They go moving on and on. You are the motive in everything.' Helena lay beside him, half upon him, sad with bliss. 'You must write a symphony of this--of us,' she said, prompted by a disciple's vanity. 'Some time,' he answered. 'Later, when I have time.' 'Later,' she murmured--'later than what?' 'I don't know,' he replied. 'This is so bright we can't see beyond.' He turned his face to hers and through the darkness smiled into her eyes that were so close to his. Then he kissed her long and lovingly. He lay, with her head on his shoulder looking through her hair at the stars. 'I wonder how it is you have such a fine natural perfume,' he said, always in the same abstract, inquiring tone of happiness. 'Haven't all women?' she replied, and the peculiar penetrating twang of a brass reed was again in her voice. 'I don't know,' he said, quite untouched. 'But you are scented like nuts, new kernels of hazel-nuts, and a touch of opium....' He remained abstractedly breathing her with his open mouth, quite absorbed in her. 'You are so strange,' she murmured tenderly, hardly able to control her voice to speak. 'I believe,' he said slowly, 'I can see the stars moving through your hair. No, keep still, _you_ can't see them.' Helena lay obediently very still. 'I thought I could watch them travelling, crawling like gold flies on the ceiling,' he continued in a slow sing-song. 'But now you make your hair tremble, and the stars rush about.' Then, as a new thought struck him: 'Have you noticed that you can't recognize the constellations lying back like this. I can't see one. Where is the north, even?' She laughed at the idea of his questioning her concerning these things. She refused to learn the names of the stars or of the constellations, as of the wayside plants. 'Why should I want to label them?' she would say. 'I prefer to look at them, not to hide them under a name.' So she laughed when he asked her to find Vega or Arcturus. 'How full the sky is!' Siegmund dreamed on--'like a crowded street. Down here it is vastly lonely in comparison. We've found a place far quieter and more private than the stars, Helena. Isn't it fine to be up here, with the sky for nearest neighbour?' 'I did well to ask you to come?' she inquired wistfully. He turned to her. 'As wise as God for the minute,' he replied softly. 'I think a few furtive angels brought us here--smuggled us in.' 'And you are glad?' she asked. He laughed. '_Carpe diem_,' he said. 'We have plucked a beauty, my dear. With this rose in my coat I dare go to hell or anywhere.' 'Why hell, Siegmund?' she asked in displeasure. 'I suppose it is the _postero_. In everything else I'm a failure, Helena. But,' he laughed, 'this day of ours is a rose not many men have plucked.' She kissed him passionately, beginning to cry in a quick, noiseless fashion. 'What does it matter, Helena?' he murmured. 'What does it matter? We are here yet.' The quiet tone of Siegmund moved her with a vivid passion of grief. She felt she should lose him. Clasping him very closely, she burst into uncontrollable sobbing. He did not understand, but he did not interrupt her. He merely held her very close, while he looked through her shaking hair at the motionless stars. He bent his head to hers, he sought her face with his lips, heavy with pity. She grew a little quieter. He felt his cheek all wet with her tears, and, between his cheek and hers, the ravelled roughness of her wet hair that chafed and made his face burn. 'What is it, Helena?' he asked at last. 'Why should you cry?' She pressed her face in his breast, and said in a muffled, unrecognizable voice: 'You won't leave me, will you, Siegmund?' 'How could I? How should I?' he murmured soothingly. She lifted her face suddenly and pressed on him a fierce kiss. 'How could I leave you?' he repeated, and she heard his voice waking, the grip coming into his arms, and she was glad. An intense silence came over everything. Helena almost expected to hear the stars moving, everything below was so still. She had no idea what Siegmund was thinking. He lay with his arms strong around her. Then she heard the beating of his heart, like the muffled sound of salutes, she thought. It gave her the same thrill of dread and excitement, mingled with a sense of triumph. Siegmund had changed again, his mood was gone, so that he was no longer wandering in a night of thoughts, but had become different, incomprehensible to her. She had no idea what she thought or felt. All she knew was that he was strong, and was knocking urgently with his heart on her breast, like a man who wanted something and who dreaded to be sent away. How he came to be so concentratedly urgent she could not understand. It seemed an unreasonable an incomprehensible obsession to her. Yet she was glad, and she smiled in her heart, feeling triumphant and restored. Yet again, dimly, she wondered where was the Siegmund of ten minutes ago, and her heart lifted slightly with yearning, to sink with a dismay. This Siegmund was so incomprehensible. Then again, when he raised his head and found her mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she decided, was supreme, transcendental. The lights of the little farmhouse below had vanished, the yellow specks of ships were gone. Only the pier-light, far away, shone in the black sea like the broken piece of a star. Overhead was a silver-greyness of stars; below was the velvet blackness of the night and the sea. Helena found herself glimmering with fragments of poetry, as she saw the sea, when she looked very closely, glimmered dustily with a reflection of stars. _Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser Ohne Regung ruht das Meer ..._ She was fond of what scraps of German verse she knew. With French verse she had no sympathy; but Goethe and Heine and Uhland seemed to speak her language. _Die Luft ist kühl, und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein._ She liked Heine best of all: _Wie Träume der Kindheit seh' ich es flimmern Auf deinem wogenden Wellengebiet, Und alte Erinnerung erzählt mir auf's Neue Von all dem lieben herrlichen Spielzeug, Von all den blinkenden Weihnachtsgaben...._ As she lay in Siegmund's arms again, and he was very still, dreaming she knew not what, fragments such as these flickered and were gone, like the gleam of a falling star over water. The night moved on imperceptibly across the sky. Unlike the day, it made no sound and gave no sign, but passed unseen, unfelt, over them. Till the moon was ready to step forth. Then the eastern sky blenched, and there was a small gathering of clouds round the opening gates: _Aus alten Märchen winket es Hervor mit weisser Hand, Da singt es und da klingt es Von einem Zauberland._ Helena sang this to herself as the moon lifted herself slowly among the clouds. She found herself repeating them aloud in in a forgetful singsong, as children do. 'What is it?' said Siegmund. They were both of them sunk in their own stillness, therefore it was a moment or two before she repeated her singsong, in a little louder tone. He did not listen to her, having forgotten that he had asked her a question. 'Turn your head,' she told him, when she had finished the verse, 'and look at the moon.' He pressed back his head, so that there was a gleaming pallor on his chin and his forehead and deep black shadow over his eyes and his nostrils. This thrilled Helena with a sense of mystery and magic. '"_Die grossen Blumen schmachten_,"' she said to herself, curiously awake and joyous. 'The big flowers open with black petals and silvery ones, Siegmund. You are the big flowers, Siegmund; yours is the bridegroom face, Siegmund, like a black and glistening flesh-petalled flower, Siegmund, and it blooms in the _Zauberland_, Siegmund--this is the magic land.' Between the phrases of this whispered ecstasy she kissed him swiftly on the throat, in the shadow, and on his faintly gleaming cheeks. He lay still, his heart beating heavily; he was almost afraid of the strange ecstasy she concentrated on him. Meanwhile she whispered over him sharp, breathless phrases in German and English, touching him with her mouth and her cheeks and her forehead. '"_Und Liebesweisen tönen_"-not tonight, Siegmund. They are all still-gorse and the stars and the sea and the trees, are all kissing, Siegmund. The sea has its mouth on the earth, and the gorse and the trees press together, and they all look up at the moon, they put up their faces in a kiss, my darling. But they haven't you-and it all centres in you, my dear, all the wonder-love is in you, more than in them all Siegmund--Siegmund!' He felt the tears falling on him as he lay with heart beating in slow heavy drops under the ecstasy of her love. Then she sank down and lay prone on him, spent, clinging to him, lifted up and down by the beautiful strong motion of his breathing. Rocked thus on his strength, she swooned lightly into unconsciousness. When she came to herself she sighed deeply. She woke to the exquisite heaving of his life beneath her. 'I have been beyond life. I have been a little way into death!' she said to her soul, with wide-eyed delight. She lay dazed, wondering upon it. That she should come back into a marvellous, peaceful happiness astonished her. Suddenly she became aware that she must be slowly weighing down the life of Siegmund. There was a long space between the lift of one breath and the next. Her heart melted with sorrowful pity. Resting herself on her hands, she kissed him--a long, anguished kiss, as if she would fuse her soul into his for ever. Then she rose, sighing, sighing again deeply. She put up her hands to her head and looked at the moon. 'No more,' said her heart, almost as if it sighed too-'no more!' She looked down at Siegmund. He was drawing in great heavy breaths. He lay still on his back, gazing up at her, and she stood motionless at his side, looking down at him. He felt stunned, half-conscious. Yet as he lay helplessly looking up at her some other consciousness inside him murmured; 'Hawwa--Eve--Mother!' She stood compassionate over him. Without touching him she seemed to be yearning over him like a mother. Her compassion, her benignity, seemed so different from his little Helena. This woman, tall and pale, drooping with the strength of her compassion, seemed stable, immortal, not a fragile human being, but a personification of the great motherhood of women. 'I am her child, too,' he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture. 'Come,' she said gently, when she knew he was restored. 'Shall we go?' He rose, with difficulty gathering his strength. _Chapter 12_ Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some distance, very great, it seemed. 'I can't get hold of them,' he said distractedly to himself. He felt detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things; as if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and unsupported, somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous space. He wanted to lie down again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of supporting and controlling his body. If he could lie down again perfectly still he need not struggle to animate the cumbersome matter of his body, and then he would not feel thus sick and outside himself. But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly, joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support. Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious. This pity for her drew him nearer to life. He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not notice it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally. 'What is it?' he asked himself in wonder. His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke verbally to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him. They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became conscious of it. 'Good Lord!' he said to himself. 'I wonder what it is.' He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his body--his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself into another detached phrase. 'There is nothing the matter with me,' he said. Then he continued vaguely wondering, recalling the sensation of wretched sickness which sometimes follows drunkenness, thinking of the times when he had fallen ill. 'But I am not like that,' he said, 'because I don't feel tremulous. I am sure my hand is steady.' Helena stood still to consider the road. He held out his hand before him. It was motionless as a dead flower on this silent night. 'Yes, I think this is the right way,' said Helena, and they set off again, as if gaily. 'It certainly feels rather deathly,' said Siegmund to himself. He remembered distinctly, when he was a child and had diphtheria, he had stretched himself in the horrible sickness, which he felt was--and here he chose the French word--'_l'agonie_'. But his mother had seen and had cried aloud, which suddenly caused him to struggle with all his soul to spare her her suffering. 'Certainly it is like that,' he said. 'Certainly it is rather deathly. I wonder how it is.' Then he reviewed the last hour. 'I believe we are lost!' Helena interrupted him. 'Lost! What matter!' he answered indifferently, and Helena pressed him tighter, hearer to her in a kind of triumph. 'But did we not come this way?' he added. 'No. See'--her voice was reeded with restrained emotion--'we have certainly not been along this bare path which dips up and down.' 'Well, then, we must merely keep due eastward, towards the moon pretty well, as much as we can,' said Siegmund, looking forward over the down, where the moon was wrestling heroically to win free of the pack of clouds which hung on her like wolves on a white deer. As he looked at the moon he felt a sense of companionship. Helena, not understanding, left him so much alone; the moon was nearer. Siegmund continued to review the last hours. He had been so wondrously happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had been wandering in another--a glamorous, primordial world. 'I suppose,' he said to himself, 'I have lived too intensely, I seem to have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now they've gone my house is weak.' So he struggled to diagnose his case of splendour and sickness. He reviewed his hour of passion with Helena. 'Surely,' he told himself, 'I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt my cup. My soul seems to leak out--I am half here, half gone away. That's why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.' Then he came to the hour of Helena's strange ecstasy over him. That, somehow, had filled him with passionate grief. It was happiness concentrated one drop too keen, so that what should have been vivid wine was like a pure poison scathing him. But his consciousness, which had been unnaturally active, now was dulling. He felt the blood flowing vigorously along the limbs again, and stilling has brain, sweeping away his sickness, soothing him. 'I suppose,' he said to himself for the last time, 'I suppose living too intensely kills you, more or less.' Then Siegmund forgot. He opened his eyes and saw the night about him. The moon had escaped from the cloud-pack, and was radiant behind a fine veil which glistened to her rays, and which was broidered with a lustrous halo, very large indeed, the largest halo Siegmund had ever seen. When the little lane turned full towards the moon, it seemed as if Siegmund and Helena would walk through a large Moorish arch of horse-shoe shape, the enormous white halo opening in front of them. They walked on, keeping their faces to the moon, smiling with wonder and a little rapture, until once mote the little lane curved wilfully, and they were walking north. Helena observed three cottages crouching under the hill and under trees to cover themselves from the magic of the moonlight. 'We certainly did not come this way before,' she said triumphantly. The idea of being lost delighted her. Siegmund looked round at the grey hills smeared over with a low, dim glisten of moon-mist. He could not yet fully realize that he was walking along a lane in the Isle of Wight. His surroundings seemed to belong to some state beyond ordinary experience--some place in romance, perhaps, or among the hills where Brünhild lay sleeping in her large bright halo of fire. How could it be that he and Helena were two children of London wandering to find their lodging in Freshwater? He sighed, and looked again over the hills where the moonlight was condensing in mist ethereal, frail, and yet substantial, reminding him of the way the manna must have condensed out of the white moonlit mists of Arabian deserts. 'We may be on the road to Newport,' said Helena presently, 'and the distance is ten miles.' She laughed, not caring in the least whither they wandered, exulting in this wonderful excursion! She and Siegmund alone in a glistening wilderness of night at the back of habited days and nights! Siegmund looked at her. He by no means shared her exultation, though he sympathized with it. He walked on alone in his deep seriousness, of which she was not aware. Yet when he noticed her abandon, he drew her nearer, and his heart softened with protecting tenderness towards her, and grew heavy with responsibility. The fields breathed off a scent as if they were come to life with the night, and were talking with fragrant eagerness. The farms huddled together in sleep, and pulled the dark shadow over them to hide from the supernatural white night; the cottages were locked and darkened. Helena walked on in triumph through this wondrous hinterland of night, actively searching for the spirits, watching the cottages they approached, listening, looking for the dreams of those sleeping inside, in the darkened rooms. She imagined she could see the frail dream-faces at the windows; she fancied they stole out timidly into the gardens, and went running away among the rabbits on the gleamy hill-side. Helena laughed to herself, pleased with her fancy of wayward little dreams playing with weak hands and feet among the large, solemn-sleeping cattle. This was the first time, she told herself, that she had ever been out among the grey-frocked dreams and white-armed fairies. She imagined herself lying asleep in her room, while her own dreams slid out down the moonbeams. She imagined Siegmund sleeping in his room, while his dreams, dark-eyed, their blue eyes very dark and yearning at night-time, came wandering over the grey grass seeking her dreams. So she wove her fancies as she walked, until for very weariness she was fain to remember that it was a long way--a long way. Siegmund's arm was about her to support her; she rested herself upon it. They crossed a stile and recognized, on the right of the path, the graveyard of the Catholic chapel. The moon, which the days were paring smaller with envious keen knife, shone upon the white stones in the burial-ground. The carved Christ upon His cross hung against a silver-grey sky. Helena looked up wearily, bowing to the tragedy. Siegmund also looked, and bowed his head. 'Thirty years of earnest love; three years' life like a passionate ecstasy-and it was finished. He was very great and very wonderful. I am very insignificant, and shall go out ignobly. But we are the same; love, the brief ecstasy, and the end. But mine is one rose, and His all the white beauty in the world.' Siegmund felt his heart very heavy, sad, and at fault, in presence of the Christ. Yet he derived comfort from the knowledge that life was treating him in the same manner as it had treated the Master, though his compared small and despicable with the Christ-tragedy. Siegmund stepped softly into the shadow of the pine copse. 'Let me get under cover,' he thought. 'Let me hide in it; it is good, the sudden intense darkness. I am small and futile: my small, futile tragedy!' Helena shrank in the darkness. It was almost terrible to her, and the silence was like a deep pit. She shrank to Siegmund. He drew her closer, leaning over her as they walked, trying to assure her. His heart was heavy, and heavy with a tenderness approaching grief, for his small, brave Helena. 'Are you sure this is the right way?' he whispered to her. 'Quite, quite sure,' she whispered confidently in reply. And presently they came out into the hazy moonlight, and began stumbling down the steep hill. They were both very tired, both found it difficult to go with ease or surety this sudden way down. Soon they were creeping cautiously across the pasture and the poultry farm. Helena's heart was beating, as she imagined what a merry noise there would be should they wake all the fowls. She dreaded any commotion, any questioning, this night, so she stole carefully along till they issued on the high-road not far from home. _Chapter 13_ In the morning, after bathing, Siegmund leaned upon the seawall in a kind of reverie. It was late, towards nine o'clock, yet he lounged, dreamily looking out on the turquoise blue water, and the white haze of morning, and the small, fair shadows of ships slowly realizing before him. In the bay were two battleships, uncouth monsters, lying as naïve and curious as sea-lions strayed afar. Siegmund was gazing oversea in a half-stupid way, when he heard a voice beside him say: 'Where have they come from; do you know, sir?' He turned, saw a fair, slender man of some thirty-five years standing beside him and smiling faintly at the battleships. 'The men-of-war? There are a good many at Spithead,' said Siegmund. The other glanced negligently into his face. 'They look rather incongruous, don't you think? We left the sea empty and shining, and when we come again, behold, these objects keeping their eye on us!' Siegmund laughed. 'You are not an Anarchist, I hope?' he said jestingly. 'A Nihilist, perhaps,' laughed the other. 'But I am quite fond of the Czar, if pity is akin to love. No; but you can't turn round without finding some policeman or other at your elbow--look at them, abominable ironmongery!--ready to put his hand on your shoulder.' The speaker's grey-blue eyes, always laughing with mockery, glanced from the battleships and lit on the dark blue eyes of Siegmund. The latter felt his heart lift in a convulsive movement. This stranger ran so quickly to a perturbing intimacy. 'I suppose we are in the hands of--God,' something moved Siegmund to say. The stranger contracted his eyes slightly as he gazed deep at the speaker. 'Ah!' he drawled curiously. Then his eyes wandered over the wet hair, the white brow, and the bare throat of Siegmund, after which they returned again to the eyes of his interlocutor. 'Does the Czar sail this way?' he asked at last. 'I do not know,' replied Siegmund, who, troubled by the other's penetrating gaze, had not expected so trivial a question. 'I suppose the newspaper will tell us?' said the man. Sure to,' said Siegmund. 'You haven't seen it this morning?' 'Not since Saturday.' The swift blue eyes of the man dilated. He looked curiously at Siegmund. 'You are not alone on your holiday?' 'No.' Siegmund did not like this--he gazed over the sea in displeasure. 'I live here--at least for the present--name, Hampson--' 'Why, weren't you one of the first violins at the Savoy fifteen years back?' asked Siegmund. They chatted awhile about music. They had known each other, had been fairly intimate, and had since become strangers. Hampson excused himself for having addressed Siegmund: 'I saw you with your nose flattened against the window,' he said, 'and as I had mine in the same position too, I thought we were fit to be re-acquainted.' Siegmund looked at the man in astonishment. 'I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It's a pity to try and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don't you think?' 'Stare beyond it, you mean?' asked Siegmund. 'Exactly!' replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. 'I call a day like this "the blue room". It's the least draughty apartment in all the confoundedly draughty House of Life.' Siegmund looked at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express something in his own soul. 'I mean,' the man explained, 'that after all, the great mass of life that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can't stop it, once we've begun to leak.' 'What do you mean by "leak"?' asked Siegmund. 'Goodness knows--I talk through my hat. But once you've got a bit tired of the house, you glue your nose to the windowpane, and stare for the dark--as you were doing.' 'But, to use your metaphor, I'm not tired of the House--if you mean Life,' said Siegmund. 'Praise God! I've met a poet who's not afraid of having his pocket picked--or his soul, or his brain!' said the stranger, throwing his head back in a brilliant smile, his eyes dilated. 'I don't know what you mean, sir,' said Siegmund, very quietly, with a strong fear and a fascination opposing each other in his heart. 'You're not tired of the House, but of your own particular room-say, suite of rooms--' 'Tomorrow I am turned out of this "blue room",' said Siegmund with a wry smile. The other looked at him seriously. 'Dear Lord!' exclaimed Hampson; then: 'Do you remember Flaubert's saint, who laid naked against a leper? I could _not_ do it.' 'Nor I,' shuddered Siegmund. 'But you've got to-or something near it!' Siegmund looked at the other with frightened, horrified eyes. 'What of yourself?' he said, resentfully. 'I've funked-ran away from my leper, and now am eating my heart out, and staring from the window at the dark.' 'But can't you _do_ something?' said Siegmund. The other man laughed with amusement, throwing his head back and showing his teeth. 'I won't ask you what _your_ intentions are,' he said, with delicate irony in his tone. 'You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five hundred a year by hard work; but it's no good. If you have acquired a liking for intensity in life, you can't do without it. I mean vivid soul experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and physical excitement.' Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes. 'Well, and what then?' he said. 'What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other craving. You become a _concentré_, you feed your normal flame with oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are always semi-transparent.' Siegmund laughed. 'At least, I am quite opaque,' he said. The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat. 'Not altogether,' said Hampson. 'And you, I should think, are one whose flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.' Siegmund glanced again at him, startled. 'You haven't much reserve. You're like a tree that'll flower till it kills itself,' the man continued. 'You'll run till you drop, and then you won't get up again. You've no dispassionate intellect to control you and economize.' 'You're telling me very plainly what I am and am not,' said Siegmund, laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it. 'Oh, it's only what I think,' replied Hampson. 'We're a good deal alike, you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn't; but women have always done as they liked with me.' 'That's hardly so in my case,' said Siegmund. Hampson eyed him critically. 'Say one woman; it's enough,' he replied. Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea. 'The best sort of women--the most interesting--are the worst for us,' Hampson resumed. 'By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and animal in us. Then they are supersensitive--refined a bit beyond humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth; and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of life. In us her force becomes evident. 'She can't live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting women don't want _us_; they want the flowers of the spirit they can gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us--that is, us altogether.' 'You're a bit downright are you not?' asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such statements were arbitrary. 'That's according to my intensity,' laughed Hampson. 'I can open the blue heaven with looking, and push back the doors of day a little, and see--God knows what! One of these days I shall slip through. Oh, I am perfectly sane; I only strive beyond myself!' 'Don't you think it's wrong to get like it?' asked Siegmund. 'Well, I do, and so does everybody; but the crowd profits by us in the end. When they understand my music, it will be an education to them; and the whole aim of mankind is to render life intelligible.' Siegmund pondered a little.... 'You make me feel--as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,' he said slowly. The young man smiled, then looked down at the wall, where his own hands lay white and fragile, showing the blue veins. 'I can scarcely believe they are me,' he said. 'If they rose up and refused me, I should not be surprised. But aren't they beautiful?' He looked, with a faint smile, at Siegmund. Siegmund glanced from the stranger's to his own hands, which lay curved on the sea-wall as if asleep. They were small for a man of his stature, but, lying warm in the sun, they looked particularly secure in life. Instinctively, with a wave of self-love, he closed his fists over his thumbs. 'I wonder,' said Hampson softly, with strange bitterness, 'that she can't see it; I wonder she doesn't cherish you. You are full and beautiful enough in the flesh--why will she help to destroy you, when she loved you to such extremity?' Siegmund looked at him with awe-stricken eyes. The frail, swift man, with his intensely living eyes, laughed suddenly. 'Fools--the fools, these women!' he said. 'Either they smash their own crystal, or it revolts, turns opaque, and leaps out of their hands. Look at me, I am whittled down to the quick; but your neck is thick with compressed life; it is a stem so tense with life that it will hold up by itself. I am very sorry.' All at once he stopped. The bitter despair in his tone was the voice of a heavy feeling of which Siegmund had been vaguely aware for some weeks. Siegmund felt a sense of doom. He laughed, trying to shake it off. 'I wish I didn't go on like this,' said Hampson piteously. 'I wish I could be normal. How hot it is already! You should wear a hat. It is really hot.' He pulled open his flannel shirt. 'I like the heat,' said Siegmund. 'So do I.' Directly, the young man dashed the long hair on his forehead into some sort of order, bowed, and smiling in his gay fashion, walked leisurely to the village. Siegmund stood awhile as if stunned. It seemed to him only a painful dream. Sighing deeply to relieve himself of the pain, he set off to find Helena. _Chapter 14_ In the garden of tall rose trees and nasturtiums Helena was again waiting. It was past nine o'clock, so she was growing impatient. To herself, however, she professed a great interest in a little book of verses she had bought in St Martin's Lane for twopence. A late, harsh blackbird smote him with her wings, As through the glade, dim in the dark, she flew.... So she read. She made a curious, pleased sound, and remarked to herself that she thought these verses very fine. But she watched the road for Siegmund. And now she takes the scissors on her thumb ... Oh then, no more unto my lattice come. 'H'm!' she said, 'I really don't know whether I like that or not.' Therefore she read the piece again before she looked down the road. 'He really is very late. It is absurd to think he may have got drowned; but if he were washing about at the bottom of the sea, his hair loose on the water!' Her heart stood still as she imagined this. 'But what nonsense! I like these verses _very_ much. I will read them as I walk along the side path, where I shall hear the bees, and catch the flutter of a butterfly among the words. That will be a very fitting way to read this poet.' So she strolled to the gate, glancing up now and again. There, sure enough, was Siegmund coming, the towel hanging over his shoulder, his throat bare, and his face bright. She stood in the mottled shade. 'I have kept you waiting,' said Siegmund. 'Well, I was reading, you see.' She would not admit her impatience. 'I have been talking,' he said. 'Talking!' she exclaimed in slight displeasure. 'Have you found an acquaintance even here?' 'A fellow who was quite close friends in Savoy days; he made me feel queer-sort of _Doppelgänger_, he was.' Helena glanced up swiftly and curiously. 'In what way?' she said. 'He talked all the skeletons in the cupboard-such piffle it seems, now! The sea is like a harebell, and there are two battleships lying in the bay. You can hear the voices of the men on deck distinctly. Well, have you made the plans for today?' They went into the house to breakfast. She watched him helping himself to the scarlet and green salad. 'Mrs Curtiss,' she said, in rather reedy tone, 'has been very motherly to me this morning; oh, very motherly!' Siegmund, who was in a warm, gay mood, shrank up. 'What, has she been saying something about last night?' he asked. 'She was very much concerned for me-was afraid something dreadful had happened,' continued Helena, in the same keen, sarcastic tone, which showed she was trying to rid herself of her own mortification. 'Because we weren't in till about eleven?' said Siegmund, also with sarcasm. 'I mustn't do it again. Oh no, I mustn't do it again, really.' 'For fear of alarming the old lady?' he asked. '"You know, dear, it troubles _me_ a good deal ... but if I were your _mother_, I don't know _how_ I should feel,"' she quoted. 'When one engages rooms one doesn't usually stipulate for a stepmother to nourish one's conscience,' said Siegmund. They laughed, making jest of the affair; but they were both too thin-skinned. Siegmund writhed within himself with mortification, while Helena talked as if her teeth were on edge. 'I don't _mind_ in the least,' she said. 'The poor old woman has her opinions, and I mine.' Siegmund brooded a little. 'I know I'm a moral coward,' he said bitterly. 'Nonsense' she replied. Then, with a little heat: 'But you _do_ continue to try so hard to justify yourself, as if _you_ felt you needed justification.' He laughed bitterly. 'I tell you--a little thing like this--it remains tied tight round something inside me, reminding me for hours--well, what everybody else's opinion of me is.' Helena laughed rather plaintively. 'I thought you were so sure we were right,' she said. He winced again. 'In myself I am. But in the eyes of the world--' 'If you feel so in yourself, is not that enough?' she said brutally. He hung his head, and slowly turned his serviette-ring. 'What is myself?' he asked. 'Nothing very definite,' she said, with a bitter laugh. They were silent. After a while she rose, went lovingly over to him, and put her arms round his neck. 'This is our last clear day, dear,' she said. A wave of love came over him, sweeping away all the rest. He took her in his arms.... 'It will be hot today,' said Helena, as they prepared to go out. 'I felt the sun steaming in my hair as I came up,' he replied. 'I shall wear a hat--you had better do so too.' 'No,' he said. 'I told you I wanted a sun-soaking; now I think I shall get one.' She did not urge or compel him. In these matters he was old enough to choose for himself. This morning they were rather silent. Each felt the tarnish on their remaining day. 'I think, dear,' she said, 'we ought to find the little path that escaped us last night.' 'We were lucky to miss it,' he answered. 'You don't get a walk like that twice in a lifetime, in spite of the old ladies.' She glanced up at him with a winsome smile, glad to hear his words. They set off, Siegmund bare-headed. He was dressed in flannels and a loose canvas shirt, but he looked what he was--a Londoner on holiday. He had the appearance, the diffident bearing, and the well-cut clothes of a gentleman. He had a slight stoop, a strong-shouldered stoop, and as he walked he looked unseeing in front of him. Helena belonged to the unclassed. She was not ladylike, nor smart, nor assertive. One could not tell whether she were of independent means or a worker. One thing was obvious about her: she was evidently educated. Rather short, of strong figure, she was much more noticeably a _concentrée_ than was Siegmund. Unless definitely looking at something she always seemed coiled within herself. She wore a white voile dress made with the waist just below her breasts, and the skirt dropping straight and clinging. On her head was a large, simple hat of burnt straw. Through the open-worked sleeves of her dress she could feel the sun bite vigorously. 'I wish you had put on a hat, Siegmund,' she said. 'Why?' he laughed. 'My hair is like a hood,' He ruffled it back with his hand. The sunlight glistened on his forehead. On the higher paths a fresh breeze was energetically chasing the butterflies and driving the few small clouds disconsolate out of the sky. The lovers stood for some time watching the people of the farm in the down below dip their sheep on this sunny morning. There was a ragged noise of bleating from the flock penned in a corner of the yard. Two red-armed men seized a sheep, hauled it to a large bath that stood in the middle of the yard, and there held it, more or less in the bath, whilst a third man baled a dirty yellow liquid over its body. The white legs of the sheep twinkled as it butted this way and that to escape the yellow douche, the blue-shirted men ducked and struggled. There was a faint splashing and shouting to be heard even from a distance. The farmer's wife and children stood by ready to rush in with assistance if necessary. Helena laughed with pleasure. 'That is really a very quaint and primitive proceeding,' she said. 'It is cruder than Theocritus.' 'In an instant it makes me wish I were a farmer,' he laughed. 'I think every man has a passion for farming at the bottom of his blood. It would be fine to be plain-minded, to see no farther than the end of one's nose, and to own cattle and land.' 'Would it?' asked Helena sceptically. 'If I had a red face, and went to sleep as soon as I sat comfortable, I should love it,'he said. 'It amuses me to hear you long to be stupid,' she replied. 'To have a simple, slow-moving mind and an active life is the desideratum.' 'Is it?' she asked ironically. 'I would give anything to be like that,' he said. 'That is, not to be yourself,' she said pointedly. He laughed without much heartiness. 'Don't they seem a long way off?' he said, staring at the bucolic scene. 'They are farther than Theocritus--down there is farther than Sicily, and more than twenty centuries from us. I wish it weren't.' 'Why do you?' she cried, with curious impatience. He laughed. Crossing the down, scattered with dark bushes, they came directly opposite the path through the furze. 'There it is!' she cried, 'How could we miss it?' 'Ascribe it to the fairies,' he replied, whistling the bird music out of _Siegfried_, then pieces of _Tristan_. They talked very little. She was tired. When they arrived at a green, naked hollow near the cliff's edge, she said: 'This shall be our house today.' 'Welcome home!' said Siegmund. He flung himself down on the high, breezy slope of the dip, looking out to sea. Helena sat beside him. It was absolutely still, and the wind was slackening more and more. Though they listened attentively, they could hear only an indistinct breathing sound, quite small, from the water below: no clapping nor hoarse conversation of waves. Siegmund lay with his hands beneath his head, looking over the sparkling sea. To put her page in the shadow, Helena propped her book against him and began to read. Presently the breeze, and Siegmund, dropped asleep. The sun was pouring with dreadful persistence. It beat and beat on Helena, gradually drawing her from her book in a confusion of thought. She closed her eyes wearily, longing for shade. Vaguely she felt a sympathy with Adam in 'Adam Cast Forth'. Her mind traced again the tumultuous, obscure strugglings of the two, forth from Eden through the primitive wildernesses, and she felt sorrowful. Thinking of Adam blackened with struggle, she looked down at Siegmund. The sun was beating him upon the face and upon his glistening brow. His two hands, which lay out on the grass, were full of blood, the veins of his wrists purple and swollen with heat. Yet he slept on, breathing with a slight, panting motion. Helena felt deeply moved. She wanted to kiss him as he lay helpless, abandoned to the charge of the earth and the sky. She wanted to kiss him, and shed a few tears. She did neither, but instead, moved her position so that she shaded his head. Cautiously putting her hand on his hair, she found it warm, quite hot, as when you put your hand under a sitting hen, and feel the hot-feathered bosom. 'It will make him ill,' she whispered to herself, and she bent over to smell the hot hair. She noticed where the sun was scalding his forehead. She felt very pitiful and helpless when she saw his brow becoming inflamed with the sun-scalding. Turning weariedly away, she sought relief in the landscape. But the sea was glittering unbearably, like a scaled dragon wreathing. The houses of Freshwater slept, as cattle sleep motionless in the hollow valley. Green Farringford on the slope, was drawn over with a shadow of heat and sleep. In the bay below the hill the sea was hot and restless. Helena was sick with sunshine and the restless glitter of water. '"And there shall be no more sea,"' she quoted to herself, she knew not wherefrom. 'No more sea, no more anything,' she thought dazedly, as she sat in the midst of this fierce welter of sunshine. It seemed to her as if all the lightness of her fancy and her hope were being burned away in this tremendous furnace, leaving her, Helena, like a heavy piece of slag seamed with metal. She tried to imagine herself resuming the old activities, the old manner of living. 'It is impossible,' she said; 'it is impossible! What shall I be when I come out of this? I shall not come out, except as metal to be cast in another shape. No more the same Siegmund, no more the same life. What will become of us--what will happen?' She was roused from these semi-delirious speculations in the sun furnace by Siegmund's waking. He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked smiling at Helena. 'It is worth while to sleep,' said he, 'for the sake of waking like this. I was dreaming of huge ice-crystals.' She smiled at him. He seemed unconscious of fate, happy and strong. She smiled upon him almost in condescension. 'I should like to realize your dream,' she said. 'This is terrible!' They went to the cliff's edge, to receive the cool up-flow of air from the water. She drank the travelling freshness eagerly with her face, and put forward her sunburnt arms to be refreshed. 'It is really a very fine sun,' said Siegmund lightly. 'I feel as if I were almost satisfied with heat.' Helena felt the chagrin of one whose wretchedness must go unperceived, while she affects a light interest in another's pleasure. This time, when Siegmund 'failed to follow her', as she put it, she felt she must follow him. 'You are having your satisfaction complete this journey,' she said, smiling; 'even a sufficiency of me.' 'Ay!' said Siegmund drowsily. 'I think I am. I think this is about perfect, don't you?' She laughed. 'I want nothing more and nothing different,' he continued; 'and that's the extreme of a decent time, I should think.' 'The extreme of a decent time!' she repeated. But he drawled on lazily: 'I've only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I've got all the cheese--which is you, my dear.' 'I certainly feel eaten up,' she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him lying in a royal ease, his eyes naïve as a boy's, his whole being careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she felt very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a sense of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy, his fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or spoil one minute of his consummate hour. From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them. Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid's chair, wheeling silently over the short dry grass. The invalid, a young man, was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide--'the life tide,' she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her own distress. She was fretted to her soul. 'Come!' she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him. 'We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow--so quiet,' she said to herself. They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her own state, after her own fashion. 'The Mist Spirit,' she said to herself. 'The Mist Spirit draws a curtain round us--it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a thin, torn curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the curtain again, I do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of the outside, and I am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I want to be in our own fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain.' As if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said: 'Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next year, and stay for a whole month?' 'If there be any next year,' said she. Siegmund did not reply. She wondered if he had really spoken in sincerity, or if he, too, were mocking fate. They walked slowly through the broiling sun towards their lodging. 'There will be an end to this,' said Helena, communing with herself. 'And when we come out of the mist-curtain, what will it be? No matter--let come what will. All along Fate has been resolving, from the very beginning, resolving obvious discords, gradually, by unfamiliar progression; and out of original combinations weaving wondrous harmonies with our lives. Really, the working out has been wondrous, is wondrous now. The Master-Fate is too great an artist to suffer an anti-climax. I am sure the Master-Musician is too great an artist to allow a bathetic anti-climax.' _Chapter 15_ The afternoon of the blazing day passed drowsily. Lying close together on the beach, Siegmund and Helena let the day exhale its hours like perfume, unperceived. Siegmund slept, a light evanescent sleep irised with dreams and with suffering: nothing definite, the colour of dreams without shape. Helena, as usual, retained her consciousness much more clearly. She watched the far-off floating of ships, and the near wading of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little waves, rippled forward and broke on the shore of her drowsiness. But each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed, spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was merely aware that the sun was wheeling down, tangling Siegmund and her in the traces, like overthrown charioteers. So the hours passed. After tea they went eastwards on the downs. Siegmund was animated, so that Helena caught his mood. It was very rare that they spoke of the time preceding their acquaintance, Helena knew little or nothing of Siegmund's life up to the age of thirty, whilst he had never learned anything concerning her childhood. Somehow she did not encourage him to self-discovery. Today, however, the painful need of lovers for self-revelation took hold on him. 'It is awfully funny,' he said. 'I was _so_ gone on Beatrice when I married her. She had only just come back from Egypt. Her father was an army officer, a very handsome man, and, I believe, a bit of a rake. Beatrice is really well connected, you know. But old FitzHerbert ran through all his money, and through everything else. He was too hot for the rest of the family, so they dropped him altogether. 'He came to live at Peckham when I was sixteen. I had just left school, and was to go into father's business. Mrs FitzHerbert left cards, and very soon we were acquainted. Beatrice had been a good time in a French convent school. She had only knocked about with the army a little while, but it had brought her out. I remember I thought she was miles above me--which she was. She wasn't bad-looking, either, and you know men all like her. I bet she'd marry again, in spite of the children. 'At first I fluttered round her. I remember I'd got a little, silky moustache. They all said I looked older than sixteen. At that time I was mad on the violin, and she played rather well. Then FitzHerbert went off abroad somewhere, so Beatrice and her mother half lived at our house. The mother was an invalid. 'I remember I nearly stood on my head one day. The conservatory opened off the smoking-room, so when I came in the room, I heard my two sisters and Beatrice talking about good-looking men. '"I consider Bertram will make a handsome man," said my younger sister. '"He's got beautiful eyes," said my other sister. '"And a real darling nose and chin!" cried Beatrice. "If only he was more _solide_! He is like a windmill, all limbs." '"He will fill out. Remember, he's not quite seventeen," said my elder sister. '"Ah, he is _doux_--he is _câlin_," said Beatrice. '"I think he is rather _too_ spoony for his age," said my elder sister. '"But he's a fine boy for all that. See how thick his knees are," my younger sister chimed in. '"Ah, _si, si_!" cried Beatrice. 'I made a row against the door, then walked across. '"Hello, is somebody in here?" I said, as I pushed into the little conservatory. 'I looked straight at Beatrice, and she at me. We seemed to have formed an alliance in that look: she was the other half of my consciousness, I of hers. Ha! Ha! there were a lot of white narcissus, and little white hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, in the conservatory. I can see them now, great white stars, and tangles of little ones, among a bank of green; and I can recall the keen, fresh scent on the warm air; and the look of Beatrice ... her great dark eyes. 'It's funny, but Beatrice is as dead--ay, far more dead--than Dante's. And I am not that young fool, not a bit. 'I was very romantic, fearfully emotional, and the soul of honour. Beatrice said nobody cared a thing about her. FitzHerbert was always jaunting off, the mother was a fretful invalid. So I was seventeen, earning half a guinea a week, and she was eighteen, with no money, when we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it awfully well, I have been a frightful drag on him, you know. 'There's the romance. I wonder how it will all end.' Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit. They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before Helena's day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a thing in a man's life as birth, or adolescence, or death, was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of disillusion. 'Come to think of it,' Siegmund continued, 'I have always shirked. Whenever I've been in a tight corner I've gone to Pater.' 'I think,' she said, 'marriage has been a tight corner you couldn't get out of to go to anybody.' 'Yet I'm here,' he answered simply. The blood suffused her face and neck. 'And some men would have made a better job of it. When it's come to sticking out against Beatrice, and sailing the domestic ship in spite of her, I've always funked. I tell you I'm something of a moral coward.' He had her so much on edge she was inclined to answer, 'So be it.' Instead, she ran back over her own history: it consisted of petty discords in contemptible surroundings, then of her dreams and fancies, finally--Siegmund. 'In my life,' she said, with the fine, grating discord in her tones, 'I might say _always_, the real life has seemed just outside--brownies running and fairies peeping--just beyond the common, ugly place where I am. I seem to have been hedged in by vulgar circumstances, able to glimpse outside now and then, and see the reality.' 'You are so hard to get at,' said Siegmund. 'And so scornful of familiar things.' She smiled, knowing he did not understand. The heat had jaded her, so that physically she was full of discord, of dreariness that set her teeth on edge. Body and soul, she was out of tune. A warm, noiseless twilight was gathering over the downs and rising darkly from the sea. Fate, with wide wings, was hovering just over her. Fate, ashen grey and black, like a carrion crow, had her in its shadow. Yet Siegmund took no notice. He did not understand. He walked beside her whistling to himself, which only distressed her the more. They were alone on the smooth hills to the east. Helena looked at the day melting out of the sky, leaving the permanent structure of the night. It was her turn to suffer the sickening detachment which comes after moments of intense living. The rosiness died out of the sunset as embers fade into thick ash. In herself, too, the ruddy glow sank and went out. The earth was a cold dead heap, coloured drearily, the sky was dark with flocculent grey ash, and she herself an upright mass of soft ash. She shuddered slightly with horror. The whole face of things was to her livid and ghastly. Being a moralist rather than an artist, coming of fervent Wesleyan stock, she began to scourge herself. She had done wrong again. Looking back, no one had she touched without hurting. She had a destructive force; anyone she embraced she injured. Faint voices echoed back from her conscience. The shadows were full of complaint against her. It was all true, she was a harmful force, dragging Fate to petty, mean conclusions. Life and hope were ash in her mouth. She shuddered with discord. Despair grated between her teeth. This dreariness was worse than any her dreary, lonely life had known. She felt she could bear it no longer. Siegmund was there. Surely he could help? He would rekindle her. But he was straying ahead, carelessly whistling the Spring Song from _Die Walküre_. She looked at him, and again shuddered with horror. Was that really Siegmund, that stooping, thick-shouldered, indifferent man? Was that the Siegmund who had seemed to radiate joy into his surroundings, the Siegmund whose coming had always changed the whole weather of her soul? Was that the Siegmund whose touch was keen with bliss for her, whose face was a panorama of passing God? She looked at him again. His radiance was gone, his aura had ceased. She saw him a stooping man, past the buoyancy of youth, walking and whistling rather stupidly--in short, something of the 'clothed animal on end', like the rest of men. She suffered an agony of disillusion. Was this the real Siegmund, and her own only a projection of her soul? She took her breath sharply. Was he the real clay, and that other, her beloved, only the breathing of her soul upon this. There was an awful blank before her. 'Siegmund!' she said in despair. He turned sharply at the sound of her voice. Seeing her face pale and distorted in the twilight, he was filled with dismay. She mutely lifted her arms to him, watching him in despair. Swiftly he took her in his arms, and asked in a troubled voice: 'What is it, dear? Is something wrong?' His voice was nothing to her--it was stupid. She felt his arms round her, felt her face pressed against the cloth of his coat, against the beating of his heart. What was all this? This was not comfort or love. He was not understanding or helping, only chaining her, hurting. She did not want his brute embrace--she was most utterly alone, gripped so in his arms. If he could not save her from herself, he must leave her free to pant her heart out in free air. The secret thud, thud of his heart, the very self of that animal in him she feared and hated, repulsed her. She struggled to escape. 'What is it? Won't you tell me what is the matter?' he pleaded. She began to sob, dry wild sobs, feeling as if she would go mad. He tried to look at her face, for which she hated him. And all the time he held her fast, all the time she was imprisoned in the embrace of this brute, blind creature, whose heart confessed itself in thud, thud, thud. 'Have you heard anything against us? Have I done anything? Have I said anything? Tell me--at any rate tell me, Helena.' Her sobbing was like the chattering of dry leaves. She grew frantic to be free. Stifled in that prison any longer, she would choke and go mad. His coat chafed her face; as she struggled she could see the strong working of his throat. She fought against him; she struggled in panic to be free. 'Let me go!' she cried. 'Let me go! Let me go!' He held her in bewilderment and terror. She thrust her hands in his chest and pushed him apart. Her face, blind to him, was very much distorted by her suffering. She thrust him furiously away with great strength. His heart stood still with wonder. She broke from him and dropped down, sobbing wildly, in the shelter of the tumuli. She was bunched in a small, shaken heap. Siegmund could not bear it. He went on one knee beside her, trying to take her hand in his, and pleading: 'Only tell me, Helena, what it is. Tell me what it is. At least tell me, Helena; tell me what it is. Oh, but this is dreadful!' She had turned convulsively from him. She shook herself, as if beside herself, and at last covered her ears with her hands, to shut out this unreasoning pleading of his voice. Seeing her like this, Siegmund at last gave in. Quite still, he knelt on one knee beside her, staring at the late twilight. The intense silence was crackling with the sound of Helena's dry, hissing sobs. He remained silenced, stunned by the unnatural conflict. After waiting a while, he put his hand on her. She winced convulsively away. Then he rose, saying in his heart, 'It is enough,' He went behind the small hill, and looked at the night. It was all exposed. He wanted to hide, to cover himself from the openness, and there was not even a bush under which he could find cover. He lay down flat on the ground, pressing his face into the wiry turf, trying to hide. Quite stunned, with a death taking place in his soul, he lay still, pressed against the earth. He held his breath for a long time before letting it go, then again he held it. He could scarcely bear, even by breathing, to betray himself. His consciousness was dark. Helena had sobbed and struggled the life animation back into herself. At length, weary but comfortable, she lay still to rest. Almost she could have gone to sleep. But she grew chilly, and a ground insect tickled her face. Was somebody coming? It was dark when she rose. Siegmund was not in sight. She tidied herself, and rather frightened, went to look for him. She saw him like a thick shadow on the earth. Now she was heavy with tears good to shed. She stood in silent sorrow, looking at him. Suddenly she became aware of someone passing and looking curiously at them. 'Dear!' she said softly, stooping and touching his hair. He began to struggle with himself to respond. At that minute he would rather have died than face anyone. His soul was too much uncovered. 'Dear, someone is looking,' she pleaded. He drew himself up from cover. But he kept his face averted. They walked on. 'Forgive me, dear,' she said softly. 'Nay, it's not you,' he answered, and she was silenced. They walked on till the night seemed private. She turned to him, and 'Siegmund!' she said, in a voice of great sorrow and pleading. He took her in his arms, but did not kiss her, though she lifted her face. He put his mouth against her throat, below the ear, as she offered it, and stood looking out through the ravel of her hair, dazed, dreamy. The sea was smoking with darkness under half-luminous heavens. The stars, one after another, were catching alight. Siegmund perceived first one, and then another dimmer one, flicker out in the darkness over the sea. He stood perfectly still, watching them. Gradually he remembered how, in the cathedral, the tapers of the choir-stalls would tremble and set steadily to burn, opening the darkness point after point with yellow drops of flame, as the acolyte touched them, one by one, delicately with his rod. The night was religious, then, with its proper order of worship. Day and night had their ritual, and passed in uncouth worship. Siegmund found himself in an abbey. He looked up the nave of the night, where the sky came down on the sea-like arches, and he watched the stars catch fire. At least it was all sacred, whatever the God might be. Helena herself, the bitter bread, was stuff of the ceremony, which he touched with his lips as part of the service. He had Helena in his arms, which was sweet company, but in spirit he was quite alone. She would have drawn him back to her, and on her woman's breast have hidden him from Fate, and saved him from searching the unknown. But this night he did not want comfort. If he were 'an infant crying in the night', it was crying that a woman could not still. He was abroad seeking courage and faith for his own soul. He, in loneliness, must search the night for faith. 'My fate is finely wrought out,' he thought to himself. 'Even damnation may be finely imagined for me in the night. I have come so far. Now I must get clarity and courage to follow out the theme. I don't want to botch and bungle even damnation.' But he needed to know what was right, what was the proper sequence of his acts. Staring at the darkness, he seemed to feel his course, though he could not see it. He bowed in obedience. The stars seemed to swing softly in token of submission. _Chapter 16_ Feeling him abstract, withdrawn from her, Helena experienced the dread of losing him. She was in his arms, but his spirit ignored her. That was insufferable to her pride. Yet she dared not disturb him--she was afraid. Bitterly she repented her of the giving way to her revulsion a little space before. Why had she not smothered it and pretended? Why had she, a woman, betrayed herself so flagrantly? Now perhaps she had lost him for good. She was consumed with uneasiness. At last she drew back from him, held him her mouth to kiss. As he gently, sadly kissed her she pressed him to her bosom. She must get him back, whatever else she lost. She put her hand tenderly on his brow. 'What are you thinking of?' she asked. 'I?' he replied. 'I really don't know. I suppose I was hardly thinking anything.' She waited a while, clinging to him, then, finding some difficulty in speech, she asked: 'Was I very cruel, dear?' It was so unusual to hear her grieved and filled with humility that he drew her close into him. 'It was pretty bad, I suppose,' he replied. 'But I should think neither of us could help it.' She gave a little sob, pressed her face into his chest, wishing she had helped it. Then, with Madonna love, she clasped his head upon her shoulder, covering her hands over his hair. Twice she kissed him softly in the nape of the neck, with fond, reassuring kisses. All the while, delicately, she fondled and soothed him, till he was child to her Madonna. They remained standing with his head on her shoulder for some time, till at last he raised himself to lay his lips on hers in a long kiss of healing and renewal--long, pale kisses of after-suffering. Someone was coming along the path. Helena let him go, shook herself free, turned sharply aside, and said: 'Shall we go down to the water?' 'If you like,' he replied, putting out his hand to her. They went thus with clasped hands down the cliff path to the beach. There they sat in the shadow of the uprising island, facing the restless water. Around them the sand and shingle were grey; there stretched a long pale line of surf, beyond which the sea was black and smeared with star-reflections. The deep, velvety sky shone with lustrous stars. As yet the moon was not risen. Helena proposed that they should lie on a tuft of sand in a black cleft of the cliff to await its coming. They lay close together without speaking. Each was looking at a low, large star which hung straight in front of them, dripping its brilliance in a thin streamlet of light along the sea almost to their feet. It was a star-path fine and clear, trembling in its brilliance, but certain upon the water. Helena watched it with delight. As Siegmund looked at the star, it seemed to him a lantern hung at the gate to light someone home. He imagined himself following the thread of the star-track. What was behind the gate? They heard the wash of a steamer crossing the bay. The water seemed populous in the night-time, with dark, uncanny comings and goings. Siegmund was considering. 'What _was_ the matter with you?' he asked. She leaned over him, took his head in her lap, holding his face between her two hands as she answered in a low, grave voice, very wise and old in experience: 'Why, you see, dear, you won't understand. But there was such a greyish darkness, and through it--the crying of lives I have touched....' His heart suddenly shrank and sank down. She acknowledged then that she also had helped to injure Beatrice and his children. He coiled with shame. '....A crying of lives against me, and I couldn't silence them, nor escape out of the darkness. I wanted you--I saw you in front, whistling the Spring Song, but I couldn't find you--it was not you--I couldn't find you.' She kissed his eyes and his brows. 'No, I don't see it,' he said. 'You would always be you. I could think of hating you, but you'd still be yourself.' She made a moaning, loving sound. Full of passionate pity, she moved her mouth on his face, as a woman does on her child that has hurt itself. 'Sometimes,' she murmured, in a low, grieved confession, 'you lose me.' He gave a brief laugh. 'I lose you!' he repeated. 'You mean I lose my attraction for you, or my hold over you, and then you--?' He did not finish. She made the same grievous murmuring noise over him. 'It shall not be any more,' she said. 'All right,' he replied, 'since you decide it.' She clasped him round the chest and fondled him, distracted with pity. 'You mustn't be bitter,' she murmured. 'Four days is enough,' he said. 'In a fortnight I should be intolerable to you. I am not masterful.' 'It is not so, Siegmund,' she said sharply. 'I give way always,' he repeated. 'And then--tonight!' 'Tonight, tonight!' she cried in wrath. 'Tonight I have been a fool!' 'And I?' he asked. 'You--what of you?' she cried. Then she became sad. 'I have little perverse feelings,' she lamented. 'And I can't bear to compel anything, for fear of hurting it. So I'm always pushed this way and that, like a fool.' 'You don't know how you hurt me, talking so,' she said. He kissed her. After a moment he said: 'You are not like other folk. "_Ihr Lascheks seid ein anderes Geschlecht_." I thought of you when we read it.' 'Would you rather have me more like the rest, or more unlike, Siegmund? Which is it?' 'Neither,' he said. 'You are _you_.' They were quiet for a space. The only movement in the night was the faint gambolling of starlight on the water. The last person had passed in black silhouette between them and the sea. He was thinking bitterly. She seemed to goad him deeper and deeper into life. He had a sense of despair, a preference of death. The German she read with him--she loved its loose and violent romance--came back to his mind: '_Der Tod geht einem zur Seite, fast sichtbarlich, und jagt einem immer tiefer ins Leben._' Well, the next place he would be hunted to, like a hare run down, was home. It seemed impossible the morrow would take him back to Beatrice. 'This time tomorrow night,' he said. 'Siegmund!' she implored. 'Why not?' he laughed. 'Don't, dear,' she pleaded. 'All right, I won't.' Some large steamer crossing the mouth of the bay made the water dash a little as it broke in accentuated waves. A warm puff of air wandered in on them now and again. 'You won't be tired when you go back?' Helena asked. 'Tired!' he echoed. 'You know how you were when you came,' she reminded him, in tones full of pity. He laughed. 'Oh, that is gone,' he said. With a slow, mechanical rhythm she stroked his cheek. 'And will you be sad?' she said, hesitating. 'Sad!' he repeated. 'But will you be able to fake the old life up, happier, when you go back?' 'The old life will take me up, I suppose,' he said. There was a pause. 'I think, dear,' she said, 'I have done wrong.' 'Good Lord--you have not!' he replied sharply, pressing back his head to look at her, for the first time. 'I shall have to send you back to Beatrice and the babies--tomorrow--as you are now....' '"Take no thought for the morrow." Be quiet, Helena!' he exclaimed as the reality bit him. He sat up suddenly. 'Why?' she asked, afraid. 'Why!' he repeated. He remained sitting, leaning forward on the sand, staring intently at Helena. She looked back in fear at him. The moment terrified her, and she lost courage. With a fluttered motion she put her hand on his, which was pressed hard on the sand as he leaned forward. At once he relaxed his intensity, laughed, then became tender. Helena yielded herself like a forlorn child to his arms, and there lay, half crying, while he smoothed her brow with his fingers, and grains of sand fell from his palm on her cheek. She shook with dry, withered sobs, as a child does when it snatches itself away from the lancet of the doctor and hides in the mother's bosom, refusing to be touched. But she knew the morrow was coming, whether or not, and she cowered down on his breast. She was wild with fear of the parting and the subsequent days. They must drink, after tomorrow, separate cups. She was filled with vague terror of what it would be. The sense of the oneness and unity of their fates was gone. Siegmund also was cowed by the threat of separation. He had more definite knowledge of the next move than had Helena. His heart was certain of calamity, which would overtake him directly. He shrank away. Wildly he beat about to find a means of escape from the next day and its consequences. He did not want to go. Anything rather than go back. In the midst of their passion of fear the moon rose. Siegmund started to see the rim appear ruddily beyond the sea. His struggling suddenly ceased, and he watched, spellbound, the oval horn of fiery gold come up, resolve itself. Some golden liquor dripped and spilled upon the far waves, where it shook in ruddy splashes. The gold-red cup rose higher, looming before him very large, yet still not all discovered. By degrees the horn of gold detached itself from the darkness at back of the waves. It was immense and terrible. When would the tip be placed upon the table of the sea? It stood at last, whole and calm, before him; then the night took up this drinking-cup of fiery gold, lifting it with majestic movement overhead, letting stream forth the wonderful unwasted liquor of gold over the sea--a libation. Siegmund looked at the shaking flood of gold and paling gold spread wider as the night upraised the blanching crystal, poured out farther and farther the immense libation from the whitening cup, till at last the moon looked frail and empty. And there, exhaustless in the night, the white light shook on the floor of the sea. He wondered how it would be gathered up. 'I gather it up into myself,' he said. And the stars and the cliffs and a few trees were watching, too. 'If I have spilled my life,' he thought, 'the unfamiliar eyes of the land and sky will gather it up again.' Turning to Helena, he found her face white and shining as the empty moon. _Chapter 17_ Towards morning, Siegmund went to sleep. For four hours, until seven o'clock, the womb of sleep received him and nourished him again. 'But it is finest of all to wake,' he said, as the bright sunshine of the window, and the lumining green sunshine coming through the lifted hands of the leaves, challenged him into the open. The morning was exceedingly fair, and it looked at him so gently that his blue eyes trembled with self-pity. A fragment of scarlet geranium glanced up at him as he passed, so that amid the vermilion tyranny of the uniform it wore he could see the eyes of the flower, wistful, offering him love, as one sometimes see the eyes of a man beneath the brass helmet of a soldier, and is startled. Everything looked at him with the same eyes of tenderness, offering him, timidly, a little love. 'They are all extraordinarily sweet,' said Siegmund to the full-mouthed scabious and the awkward, downcast ragwort. Three or four butterflies fluttered up and down in agitated little leaps, around him. Instinctively Siegmund put his hand forward to touch them. 'The careless little beggars!' he said. When he came to the cliff tops there was the morning, very bravely dressed, rustling forward with a silken sound and much silken shining to meet him. The battleships had gone; the sea was blue with a _panier_ of diamonds; the sky was full with a misty tenderness like love. Siegmund had never recognized before the affection that existed between him and everything. We do not realize how tremendously dear and indispensable to us are the hosts of common things, till we must leave them, and we break our hearts. 'We have been very happy together,' everything seemed to say. Siegmund looked up into the eyes of the morning with a laugh. 'It is very lovely,' he said, 'whatever happens.' So he went down to the beach; his dark blue eyes, darker from last night's experience, smiled always with the pride of love. He undressed by his usual altar-stone. 'How closely familiar everything is,' he thought. 'It seems almost as if the curves of this stone were rounded to fit in my soul.' He touched the smooth white slope of the stone gently with discovering fingers, in the same way as he touched the cheek of Helena, or of his own babies. He found great pleasure in this feeling of intimacy with things. A very soft wind, shy as a girl, put his arms round him, and seemed to lay its cheek against his chest. He placed his hands beneath his arms, where the wind was caressing him, and his eyes opened with wondering pleasure. 'They find no fault with me,' he said. 'I suppose they are as fallible as I, and so don't judge,' he added, as he waded thigh-deep into the water, thrusting it to hear the mock-angry remonstrance. 'Once more,' he said, and he took the sea in his arms. He swam very quietly. The water buoyed him up, holding him closely clasped. He swam towards the white rocks of the headlands; they rose before him like beautiful buttressed gates, so glistening that he half expected to see fantail pigeons puffing like white irises in the niches, and white peacocks with dark green feet stepping down the terraces, trailing a sheen of silver. 'Helena is right,' he said to himself as he swam, scarcely swimming, but moving upon the bosom of the tide; 'she is right, it is all enchanted. I have got into her magic at last. Let us see what it is like.' He determined to visit again his little bay. He swam carefully round the terraces, whose pale shadows through the swift-spinning emerald facets of the water seemed merest fancy. Siegmund touched them with his foot; they were hard, cold, dangerous. He swam carefully. As he made for the archway, the shadows of the headland chilled the water. There under water, clamouring in a throng at the base of the submerged walls, were sea-women with dark locks, and young sea-girls, with soft hair, vividly green, striving to climb up out of the darkness into the morning, their hair swirling in abandon. Siegmund was half afraid of their frantic efforts. But the tide carried him swiftly through the high gate into the porch. There was exultance in this sweeping entry. The skin-white, full-fleshed walls of the archway were dappled with green lights that danced in and out among themselves. Siegmund was carried along in an invisible chariot, beneath the jewel-stained walls. The tide swerved, threw him as he swam against the inward-curving white rock; his elbow met the rock, and he was sick with pain. He held his breath, trying to get back the joy and magic. He could not believe that the lovely, smooth side of the rock, fair as his own side with its ripple of muscles, could have hurt him thus. He let the water carry him till he might climb out on to the shingle. There he sat upon a warm boulder, and twisted to look at his arm. The skin was grazed, not very badly, merely a ragged scarlet patch no bigger than a carnation petal. The bruise, however, was painful, especially when, a minute or two later, he bent his arm. 'No,' said he pitiably to himself, 'it is impossible it should have hurt me. I suppose I was careless.' Nevertheless, the aspect of the morning changed. He sat on the boulder looking out on the sea. The azure sky and the sea laughed on, holding a bright conversation one with another. The two headlands of the tiny bay gossiped across the street of water. All the boulders and pebbles of the sea-shore played together. 'Surely,' said Siegmund, 'they take no notice of me; they do not care a jot or a tittle for me. I am a fool to think myself one with them.' He contrasted this with the kindness of the morning as he had stood on the cliffs. 'I was mistaken,' he said. 'It was an illusion.' He looked wistfully out again. Like neighbours leaning from opposite windows of an overhanging street, the headlands were occupied one with another. White rocks strayed out to sea, followed closely by other white rocks. Everything was busy, interested, occupied with its own pursuit and with its own comrades. Siegmund alone was without pursuit or comrade. 'They will all go on the same; they will be just as gay. Even Helena, after a while, will laugh and take interest in others. What do I matter?' Siegmund thought of the futility of death: We are not long for music and laughter, Love and desire and hate; I think we have no portion in them after We pass the gate. 'Why should I be turned out of the game?' he asked himself, rebelling. He frowned, and answered: 'Oh, Lord!--the old argument!' But the thought of his own expunging from the picture was very bitter. 'Like the puff from the steamer's funnel, I should be gone.' He looked at himself, at his limbs and his body in the pride of his maturity. He was very beautiful to himself. 'Nothing, in the place where I am,' he said. 'Gone, like a puff of steam that melts on the sunshine.' Again Siegmund looked at the sea. It was glittering with laughter as at a joke. 'And I,' he said, lying down in the warm sand, 'I am nothing. I do not count; I am inconsiderable.' He set his teeth with pain. There were no tears, there was no relief. A convulsive gasping shook him as he lay on the sands. All the while he was arguing with himself. 'Well,' he said, 'if I am nothing dead I am nothing alive.' But the vulgar proverb arose--'Better a live dog than a dead lion,' to answer him. It seemed an ignominy to be dead. It meant, to be overlooked, even by the smallest creature of God's earth. Surely that was a great ignominy. Helena, meanwhile, was bathing, for the last time, by the same sea-shore with him. She was no swimmer. Her endless delight was to explore, to discover small treasures. For her the world was still a great wonder-box which hid innumerable sweet toys for surprises in all its crevices. She had bathed in many rock-pools' tepid baths, trying first one, then another. She had lain on the sand where the cold arms of the ocean lifted her and smothered her impetuously, like an awful lover. 'The sea is a great deal like Siegmund,' she said, as she rose panting, trying to dash her nostrils free from water. It was true; the sea as it flung over her filled her with the same uncontrollable terror as did Siegmund when he sometimes grew silent and strange in a tide of passion. She wandered back to her rock-pools; they were bright and docile; they did not fling her about in a game of terror. She bent over watching the anemone's fleshy petals shrink from the touch of her shadow, and she laughed to think they should be so needlessly fearful. The flowing tide trickled noiselessly among the rocks, widening and deepening insidiously her little pools. Helena retreated towards a large cave round the bend. There the water gurgled under the bladder-wrack of the large stones; the air was cool and clammy. She pursued her way into the gloom, bending, though there was no need, shivering at the coarse feel of the seaweed beneath her naked feet. The water came rustling up beneath the fucus as she crept along on the big stones; it returned with a quiet gurgle which made her shudder, though even that was not disagreeable. It needed, for all that, more courage than was easy to summon before she could step off her stone into the black pool that confronted her. It was festooned thick with weeds that slid under her feet like snakes. She scrambled hastily upwards towards the outlet. Turning, the ragged arch was before heir, brighter than the brightest window. It was easy to believe the light-fairies stood outside in a throng, excited with fine fear, throwing handfuls of light into the dragon's hole. 'How surprised they will be to see me!' said Helena, scrambling forward, laughing. She stood still in the archway, astounded. The sea was blazing with white fire, and glowing with azure as coals glow red with heat below the flames. The sea was transfused with white burning, while over it hung the blue sky in a glory, like the blue smoke of the fire of God. Helena stood still and worshipped. It was a moment of astonishment, when she stood breathless and blinded, involuntarily offering herself for a thank-offering. She felt herself confronting God at home in His white incandescence, His fire settling on her like the Holy Spirit. Her lips were parted in a woman's joy of adoration. The moment passed, and her thoughts hurried forward in confusion. 'It is good,' said Helena; 'it is very good.' She looked again, and saw the waves like a line of children racing hand in hand, the sunlight pursuing, catching hold of them from behind, as they ran wildly till they fell, caught, with the sunshine dancing upon them like a white dog. 'It is really wonderful here!' said she; but the moment had gone, she could not see again the grand burning of God among the waves. After a while she turned away. As she stood dabbling her bathing-dress in a pool, Siegmund came over the beach to her. 'You are not gone, then?' he said. 'Siegmund!' she exclaimed, looking up at him with radiant eyes, as if it could not be possible that he had joined her in this rare place. His face was glowing with the sun's inflaming, but Helena did not notice that his eyes were full of misery. 'I, actually,' he said, smiling. 'I did not expect you,' she said, still looking at him in radiant wonder. 'I could easier have expected'--she hesitated, struggled, and continued--'Eros walking by the sea. But you are like him,' she said, looking radiantly up into Siegmund's face. 'Isn't it beautiful this morning?' she added. Siegmund endured her wide, glad look for a moment, then he stooped and kissed her. He remained moving his hand in the pool, ashamed, and full of contradiction. He was at the bitter point of farewell; could see, beyond the glamour around him, the ugly building of his real life. 'Isn't the sea wonderful this morning?' asked Helena, as she wrung the water from her costume. 'It is very fine,' he answered. He refrained from saying what his heart said: 'It is my last morning; it is not yours. It is my last morning, and the sea is enjoying the joke, and you are full of delight.' 'Yes,' said Siegmund, 'the morning is perfect.' 'It is,' assented Helena warmly. 'Have you noticed the waves? They are like a line of children chased by a white dog.' 'Ay!' said Siegmund. 'Didn't you have a good time?' she asked, touching with her finger-tips the nape of his neck as he stooped beside her. 'I swam to my little bay again,' he replied. 'Did you?' she exclaimed, pleased. She sat down by the pool, in which she washed her feet free from sand, holding them to Siegmund to dry. 'I am very hungry,' she said. 'And I,' he agreed. 'I feel quite established here,' she said gaily, something in his position having reminded her of their departure. He laughed. 'It seems another eternity before the three-forty-five train, doesn't it?' she insisted. 'I wish we might never go back,' he said. Helena sighed. 'It would be too much for life to give. We have had something, Siegmund,' she said. He bowed his head, and did not answer. 'It has been something, dear,' she repeated. He rose and took her in his arms. 'Everything,' he said, his face muffled in the shoulder of her dress. He could smell her fresh and fine from the sea. 'Everything!' he said. She pressed her two hands on his head. 'I did well, didn't I, Siegmund?' she asked. Helena felt the responsibility of this holiday. She had proposed it; when he had withdrawn, she had insisted, refusing to allow him to take back his word, declaring that she should pay the cost. He permitted her at last. 'Wonderfully well, Helena,' he replied. She kissed his forehead. 'You are everything,' he said. She pressed his head on her bosom. _Chapter 18_ Siegmund had shaved and dressed, and come down to breakfast. Mrs Curtiss brought in the coffee. She was a fragile little woman, of delicate, gentle manner. 'The water would be warm this morning,' she said, addressing no one in particular. Siegmund stood on the hearth-rug with his hands behind him, swaying from one leg to the other. He was embarrassed always by the presence of the amiable little woman; he could not feel at ease before strangers, in his capacity of accepted swain of Helena. 'It was,' assented Helena. 'It was as warm as new milk.' 'Ay, it would be,' said the old lady, looking in admiration upon the experience of Siegmund and his beloved. 'And did ye see the ships of war?' she asked. 'No, they had gone,' replied Helena. Siegmund swayed from foot to foot, rhythmically. 'You'll be coming in to dinner today?' asked the old lady. Helena arranged the matter. 'I think ye both look better,' Mrs. Curtiss said. She glanced at Siegmund. He smiled constrainedly. 'I thought ye looked so worn when you came,' she said sympathetically. 'He had been working hard,' said Helena, also glancing at him. He bent his head, and was whistling without making any sound. 'Ay,' sympathized the little woman. 'And it's a very short time for you. What a pity ye can't stop for the fireworks at Cowes on Monday. They are grand, so they say.' Helena raised her eyebrows in polite interest. 'Have you never seen them?' she asked. 'No,' replied Mrs. Curtiss. 'I've never been able to get; but I hope to go yet.' 'I hope you may,' said Siegmund. The little woman beamed on him. Having won a word from him, she was quite satisfied. 'Well,' she said brightly, 'the eggs must be done by now.' She tripped out, to return directly. 'I've brought you,' she said, 'some of the Island cream, and some white currants, if ye'll have them. You must think well of the Island, and come back.' 'How could we help?' laughed Helena. 'We will,' smiled Siegmund. When finally the door was closed on her, Siegmund sat down in relief. Helena looked in amusement at him. She was perfectly self-possessed in presence of the delightful little lady. 'This is one of the few places that has ever felt like home to me,' she said. She lifted a tangled bunch of fine white currants. 'Ah!' exclaimed Siegmund, smiling at her. 'One of the few places where everything is friendly,' she said. 'And everybody.' 'You have made so many enemies?' he asked, with gentle irony. 'Strangers,' she replied. 'I seem to make strangers of all the people I meet.' She laughed in amusement at this _mot_. Siegmund looked at her intently. He was thinking of her left alone amongst strangers. 'Need we go--need we leave this place of friends?' he said, as if ironically. He was very much afraid of tempting her. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and counted: 'One, two, three, four, five hours, thirty-five minutes. It is an age yet,' she laughed. Siegmund laughed too, as he accepted the particularly fine bunch of currants she had extricated for him. _Chapter 19_ The air was warm and sweet in the little lane, remote from the sea, which led them along their last walk. On either side the white path was a grassy margin thickly woven with pink convolvuli. Some of the reckless little flowers, so gay and evanescent, had climbed the trunks of an old yew tree, and were looking up pertly at their rough host. Helena walked along, watching the flowers, and making fancies out of them. 'Who called them "fairies' telephones"?' she said to herself. 'They are tiny children in pinafores. How gay they are! They are children dawdling along the pavement of a morning. How fortunate they are! See how they take a wind-thrill! See how wide they are set to the sunshine! And when they are tired, they will curl daintily to sleep, and some fairies in the dark will gather them away. They won't be here in the morning, shrivelled and dowdy ... If only we could curl up and be gone, after our day....' She looked at Siegmund. He was walking moodily beside her. 'It is good when life holds no anti-climax,' she said. 'Ay!' he answered. Of course, he could not understand her meaning. She strayed into the thick grass, a sturdy white figure that walked with bent head, abstract, but happy. 'What is she thinking?' he asked himself. 'She is sufficient to herself--she doesn't want me. She has her own private way of communing with things, and is friends with them.' 'The dew has been very heavy,' she said, turning, and looking up at him from under her brows, like a smiling witch. 'I see it has,' he answered. Then to himself he said: 'She can't translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can't render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not indispensable....' The lane led up to the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and white flowers brilliant with dew. A stout man in an alpaca jacket and panama hat was seated on the bare lawn, his back to the sun, reading a newspaper. He tried in vain to avoid the glare of the sun on his reading. At last he closed the paper and looked angrily at the house--not at anything in particular. He irritably read a few more lines, then jerked up his head in sudden decision, glared at the open door of the house, and called: 'Amy! Amy!' No answer was forthcoming. He flung down the paper and strode off indoors, his mien one of wrathful resolution. His voice was heard calling curtly from the dining-room. There was a jingle of crockery as he bumped the table leg in sitting down. 'He is in a bad temper,' laughed Siegmund. 'Breakfast is late,' said Helena with contempt. 'Look!' said Siegmund. An elderly lady in black and white striped linen, a young lady in holland, both carrying some wild flowers, hastened towards the garden gate. Their faces were turned anxiously to the house. They were hot with hurrying, and had no breath for words. The girl pressed forward, opened the gate for the lady in striped linen, who hastened over the lawn. Then the daughter followed, and vanished also under the shady veranda. There was a quick sound of women's low, apologetic voices, overridden by the resentful abuse of the man. The lovers moved out of hearing. 'Imagine that breakfast-table!' said Siegmund. 'I feel,' said Helena, with a keen twang of contempt in her voice, 'as if a fussy cock and hens had just scuffled across my path.' 'There are many such roosts,' said Siegmund pertinently. Helena's cold scorn was very disagreeable to him. She talked to him winsomely and very kindly as they crossed the open down to meet the next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of self-esteem tortured him to the end. Helena had rejected him. She gave herself to her fancies only. For some time she had confused Siegmund with her god. Yesterday she had cried to her ideal lover, and found only Siegmund. It was the spear in the side of his tortured self-respect. 'At least,' he said, in mortification of himself--'at least, someone must recognize a strain of God in me--and who does? I don't believe in it myself.' And, moreover, in the intense joy and suffering of his realized passion, the island, with its sea and sky, had fused till, like a brilliant bead, all their beauty ran together out of the common ore, and Siegmund saw it naked, saw the beauty of everything naked in the shifting magic of this bead. The island would be gone tomorrow: he would look for the beauty and find the dirt. What was he to do? 'You know, Domine,' said Helena--it was his old nickname she used--'you look quite stern today.' 'I feel anything but stern,' he laughed. 'Weaker than usual, in fact.' 'Yes, perhaps so, when you talk. Then you are really surprisingly gentle. But when you are silent, I am even afraid of you--you seem so grave.' He laughed. 'And shall I not be brave?' he said. 'Can't you smell _Fumum et opes strepitumque Romae_?' He turned quickly to Helena. 'I wonder if that's right,' he said. 'It's years since I did a line of Latin, and I thought it had all gone.' 'In the first place, what does it mean?' said Helena calmly, 'for I can only half translate. I have thrown overboard all my scrap-books of such stuff.' 'Why,' said Siegmund, rather abashed, 'only "the row and the smoke of Rome". But it is remarkable, Helena'--here the peculiar look of interest came on his face again--'it is really remarkable that I should have said that.' 'Yes, you look surprised,' smiled she. 'But it must be twenty'--he counted--'twenty-two or three years since I learned that, and I forgot it--goodness knows how long ago. Like a drowning man, I have these memories before....' He broke off, smiling mockingly, to tease her. 'Before you go back to London,' said she, in a matter-of-fact, almost ironical tone. She was inscrutable. This morning she could not bear to let any deep emotion come uppermost. She wanted rest. 'No,' she said, with calm distinctness, a few moments after, when they were climbing the rise to the cliff's edge. 'I can't say that I smell the smoke of London. The mist-curtain is thick yet. There it is'--she pointed to the heavy, purple-grey haze that hung like arras on a wall, between the sloping sky and the sea. She thought of yesterday morning's mist-curtain, thick and blazing gold, so heavy that no wind could sway its fringe. They lay down in the dry grass, upon the gold bits of bird's-foot trefoil of the cliff's edge, and looked out to sea. A warm, drowsy calm drooped over everything. 'Six hours,' thought Helena, 'and we shall have passed the mist-curtain. Already it is thinning. I could break it open with waving my hand. I will not wave my hand.' She was exhausted by the suffering of the last night, so she refused to allow any emotion to move her this morning, till she was strong. Siegmund was also exhausted; but his thoughts laboured like ants, in spite of himself, striving towards a conclusion. Helena had rejected him. In his heart he felt that in this love affair also he had been a failure. No matter how he contradicted himself, and said it was absurd to imagine he was a failure as Helena's lover, yet he felt a physical sensation of defeat, a kind of knot in his breast which neither reason, nor dialectics, nor circumstance, not even Helena, could untie. He had failed as lover to Helena. It was not surprising his marriage with Beatrice should prove disastrous. Rushing into wedlock as he had done, at the ripe age of seventeen, he had known nothing of his woman, nor she of him. When his mind and soul set to develop, as Beatrice could not sympathize with his interests, he naturally inclined away from her, so that now, after twenty years, he was almost a stranger to her. That was not very surprising. But why should he have failed with Helena? The bees droned fitfully over the scented grass, aimlessly swinging in the heat. Siegmund watched one gold and amber fellow lazily let go a white clover-head, and boom in a careless curve out to sea, humming softer and softer as he reeled along in the giddy space. 'The little fool!' said Siegmund, watching the black dot swallowed into the light. No ship sailed the curving sea. The light danced in a whirl upon the ripples. Everything else watched with heavy eyes of heat enhancement the wild spinning of the lights. 'Even if I were free,' he continued to think, 'we should only grow apart, Helena and I. She would leave me. This time I should be the laggard. She is young and vigorous; I am beginning to set. 'Is that why I have failed? I ought to have had her in love sufficiently to keep her these few days. I am not quick. I do not follow her or understand her swiftly enough. And I am always timid of compulsion. I cannot compel anybody to follow me. 'So we are here. I am out of my depth. Like the bee, I was mad with the sight of so much joy, such a blue space, and now I shall find no footing to alight on. I have flown out into life beyond my strength to get back. When can I set my feet on when this is gone?' The sun grew stronger. Slower and more slowly went the hawks of Siegmund's mind, after the quarry of conclusion. He lay bare-headed, looking out to sea. The sun was burning deeper into his face and head. 'I feel as if it were burning into me,' thought Siegmund abstractedly. 'It is certainly consuming some part of me. Perhaps it is making me ill.' Meanwhile, perversely, he gave his face and his hot black hair to the sun. Helena lay in what shadow he afforded. The heat put out all her thought-activity. Presently she said: 'This heat is terrible, Siegmund. Shall we go down to the water?' They climbed giddily down the cliff path. Already they were somewhat sun-intoxicated. Siegmund chose the hot sand, where no shade was, on which to lie. 'Shall we not go under the rocks?' said Helena. 'Look!' he said, 'the sun is beating on the cliffs. It is hotter, more suffocating, there.' So they lay down in the glare, Helena watching the foam retreat slowly with a cool splash; Siegmund thinking. The naked body of heat was dreadful. 'My arms, Siegmund,' said she. 'They feel as if they were dipped in fire.' Siegmund took them, without a word, and hid them under his coat. 'Are you sure it is not bad for you--your head, Siegmund? Are you sure?' He laughed stupidly. 'That is all right,' he said. He knew that the sun was burning through him, and doing him harm, but he wanted the intoxication. As he looked wistfully far away over the sea at Helena's mist-curtain, he said: 'I _think_ we should be able to keep together if'--he faltered--'if only I could have you a little longer. I have never had you ...' Some sound of failure, some tone telling her it was too late, some ring of despair in his quietness, made Helena cling to him wildly, with a savage little cry as if she were wounded. She clung to him, almost beside herself. She could not lose him, she could not spare him. She would not let him go. Helena was, for the moment, frantic. He held her safely, saying nothing until she was calmer, when, with his lips on her cheek, he murmured: 'I should be able, shouldn't I, Helena?' 'You are always able!' she cried. 'It is I who play with you at hiding.' 'I have really had you so little,' he said. 'Can't you forget it, Siegmund?' she cried. 'Can't you forget it? It was only a shadow, Siegmund. It was a lie, it was nothing real. Can't you forget it, dear?' 'You can't do without me?' he asked. 'If I lose you I am lost,' answered she with swift decision. She had no knowledge of weeping, yet her tears were wet on his face. He held her safely; her arms were hidden under his coat. 'I will have no mercy on those shadows the next time they come between us,' said Helena to herself. 'They may go back to hell.' She still clung to him, craving so to have him that he could not be reft away. Siegmund felt very peaceful. He lay with his arms about her, listening to the backward-creeping tide. All his thoughts, like bees, were flown out to sea and lost. 'If I had her more, I should understand her through and through. If we were side by side we should grow together. If we could stay here, I should get stronger and more upright.' This was the poor heron of quarry the hawks of his mind had struck. Another hour fell like a foxglove bell from the stalk. There were only two red blossoms left. Then the stem would have set to seed. Helena leaned her head upon the breast of Siegmund, her arms clasping, under his coat, his body, which swelled and sank gently, with the quiet of great power. 'If,' thought she, 'the whole clock of the world could stand still now, and leave us thus, me with the lift and fall of the strong body of Siegmund in my arms....' But the clock ticked on in the heat, the seconds marked off by the falling of the waves, repeated so lightly, and in such fragile rhythm, that it made silence sweet. 'If now,' prayed Siegmund, 'death would wipe the sweat from me, and it were dark....' But the waves softly marked the minutes, retreating farther, leaving the bare rocks to bleach and the weed to shrivel. Gradually, like the shadow on a dial, the knowledge that it was time to rise and go crept upon them. Although they remained silent, each knew that the other felt the same weight of responsibility, the shadow-finger of the sundial travelling over them. The alternative was, not to return, to let the finger travel and be gone. But then ... Helena knew she must not let the time cross her; she must rise before it was too late, and travel before the coming finger. Siegmund hoped she would not get up. He lay in suspense, waiting. At last she sat up abruptly. 'It is time, Siegmund,' she said. He did not answer, he did not look at her, but lay as she had left him. She wiped her face with her handkerchief, waiting. Then she bent over him. He did not look at her. She saw his forehead was swollen and inflamed with the sun. Very gently she wiped from it the glistening sweat. He closed his eyes, and she wiped his cheeks and his mouth. Still he did not look at her. She bent very close to him, feeling her heart crushed with grief for him. 'We must go, Siegmund,' she whispered. 'All right,' he said, but still he did not move. She stood up beside him, shook herself, and tried to get a breath of air. She was dazzled blind by the sunshine. Siegmund lay in the bright light, with his eyes closed, never moving. His face was inflamed, but fixed like a mask. Helena waited, until the terror of the passing of the hour was too strong for her. She lifted his hand, which lay swollen with heat on the sand, and she tried gently to draw him. 'We shall be too late,' she said in distress. He sighed and sat up, looking out over the water. Helena could not bear to see him look so vacant and expressionless. She put her arm round his neck, and pressed his head against her skirt. Siegmund knew he was making it unbearable for her. Pulling himself together, he bent his head from the sea, and said: 'Why, what time is it?' He took out his watch, holding it in his hand. Helena still held his left hand, and had one arm round his neck. 'I can't see the figures,' he said. 'Everything is dimmed, as if it were coming dark.' 'Yes,' replied Helena, in that reedy, painful tone of hers. 'My eyes were the same. It is the strong sunlight.' 'I can't,' he repeated, and he was rather surprised--'I can't see the time. Can you?' She stooped down and looked. 'It is half past one,' she said. Siegmund hated her voice as she spoke. There was still sufficient time to catch the train. He stood up, moved inside his clothing, saying: 'I feel almost stunned by the heat. I can hardly see, and all my feeling in my body is dulled.' 'Yes,' answered Helena, 'I am afraid it will do you harm.' 'At any rate,' he smiled as if sleepily, 'I have had enough. If it's too much--what _is_ too much?' They went unevenly over the sand, their eyes sun-dimmed. 'We are going back--we are going back!' the heart of Helena seemed to run hot, beating these words. They climbed the cliff path toilsomely. Standing at the top, on the edge of the grass, they looked down the cliffs at the beach and over the sea. The strand was wide, forsaken by the sea, forlorn with rocks bleaching in the sun, and sand and seaweed breathing off their painful scent upon the heat. The sea crept smaller, farther away; the sky stood still. Siegmund and Helena looked hopelessly out on their beautiful, incandescent world. They looked hopelessly at each other, Siegmund's mood was gentle and forbearing. He smiled faintly at Helena, then turned, and, lifting his hand to his mouth in a kiss for the beauty he had enjoyed, '_Addio_!' he said. He turned away, and, looking from Helena landwards, he said, smiling peculiarly: 'It reminds me of Traviata--an "_Addio_" at every verse-end.' She smiled with her mouth in acknowledgement of his facetious irony; it jarred on her. He was pricked again by her supercilious reserve. '_Addi-i-i-i-o, Addi-i-i-o_!' he whistled between his teeth, hissing out the Italian's passion-notes in a way that made Helena clench her fists. 'I suppose,' she said, swallowing, and recovering her voice to check this discord--'I suppose we shall have a fairly easy journey--Thursday.' 'I don't know,' said Siegmund. 'There will not be very many people,' she insisted. 'I think,' he said, in a very quiet voice, 'you'd better let me go by the South-Western from Portsmouth while you go on by the Brighton.' 'But why?' she exclaimed in astonishment. 'I don't want to sit looking at you all the way,' he said. 'But why should you?' she exclaimed. He laughed. 'Indeed, no!' she said. 'We shall go together.' 'Very well,' he answered. They walked on in silence towards the village. As they drew near the little post office, he said: 'I suppose I may as well wire them that I shall be home tonight.' 'You haven't sent them any word?' she asked. He laughed. They came to the open door of the little shop. He stood still, not entering. Helena wondered what he was thinking. 'Shall I?' he asked, meaning, should he wire to Beatrice. His manner was rather peculiar. 'Well, I should think so,' faltered Helena, turning away to look at the postcards in the window. Siegmund entered the shop. It was dark and cumbered with views, cheap china ornaments, and toys. He asked for a telegraph form. 'My God!' he said to himself bitterly as he took the pencil. He could not sign the abbreviated name his wife used towards him. He scribbled his surname, as he would have done to a stranger. As he watched the amiable, stout woman counting up his words carefully, pointing with her finger, he felt sick with irony. 'That's right,' she said, picking up the sixpence and taking the form to the instrument. 'What beautiful weather!' she continued. 'It will be making you sorry to leave us.' 'There goes my warrant,' thought Siegmund, watching the flimsy bit of paper under the post-mistress's heavy hand. 'Yes--it is too bad, isn't it,' he replied, bowing and laughing to the woman. 'It is, sir,' she answered pleasantly. 'Good morning.' He came out of the shop still smiling, and when Helena turned from the postcards to look at him, the lines of laughter remained over his face like a mask. She glanced at his eyes for a sign; his facial expression told her nothing; his eyes were just as inscrutable, which made her falter with dismay. 'What is he thinking of?' she asked herself. Her thoughts flashed back. 'And why did he ask me so peculiarly whether he should wire them at home?' 'Well,' said Siegmund, 'are there any postcards?' 'None that I care to take,' she replied. 'Perhaps you would like one of these?' She pointed to some faded-looking cards which proved to be imaginary views of Alum Bay done in variegated sand. Siegmund smiled. 'I wonder if they dribbled the sand on with a fine glass tube,' he said. 'Or a brush,' said Helena. 'She does not understand,' said Siegmund to himself. 'And whatever I do I must not tell her. I should have thought she would understand.' As he walked home beside her there mingled with his other feelings resentment against her. Almost he hated her. _Chapter 20_ At first they had a carriage to themselves. They sat opposite each other with averted faces, looking out of the windows and watching the houses, the downs dead asleep in the sun, the embankments of the railway with exhausted hot flowers go slowly past out of their reach. They felt as if they were being dragged away like criminals. Unable to speak or think, they stared out of the windows, Helena struggling in vain to keep back her tears, Siegmund labouring to breathe normally. At Yarmouth the door was snatched open, and there was a confusion of shouting and running; a swarm of humanity, clamouring, attached itself at the carriage doorway, which was immediately blocked by a stout man who heaved a leather bag in front of him as he cried in German that here was room for all. Faces innumerable--hot, blue-eyed faces--strained to look over his shoulders at the shocked girl and the amazed Siegmund. There entered eight Germans into the second-class compartment, five men and three ladies. When at last the luggage was stowed away they sank into the seats. The last man on either side to be seated lowered himself carefully, like a wedge, between his two neighbours. Siegmund watched the stout man, the one who had led the charge, settling himself between his large lady and the small Helena. The latter crushed herself against the side of the carriage. The German's hips came down tight against her. She strove to lessen herself against the window, to escape the pressure of his flesh, whose heat was transmitted to her. The man squeezed in the opposite direction. 'I am afraid I press you,' he said, smiling in his gentle, chivalric German fashion. Helena glanced swiftly at him. She liked his grey eyes, she liked the agreeable intonation, and the pleasant sound of his words. 'Oh no,' she answered. 'You do not crush me.' Almost before she had finished the words she turned away to the window. The man seemed to hesitate a moment, as if recovering himself from a slight rebuff, before he could address his lady with the good-humoured remark in German: 'Well, and have we not managed it very nicely, eh?' The whole party began to talk in German with great animation. They told each other of the quaint ways of this or the other; they joked loudly over 'Billy'--this being a nickname discovered for the German Emperor--and what he would be saying of the Czar's trip; they questioned each other, and answered each other concerning the places they were going to see, with great interest, displaying admirable knowledge. They were pleased with everything; they extolled things English. Helena's stout neighbour, who, it seemed, was from Dresden, began to tell anecdotes. He was a _raconteur_ of the naïve type: he talked with face, hands, with his whole body. Now and again he would give little spurts in his seat. After one of these he must have become aware of Helena--who felt as if she were enveloped by a soft stove--struggling to escape his compression. He stopped short, lifted his hat, and smiling beseechingly, said in his persuasive way: 'I am sorry. I am sorry. I compress you!' He glanced round in perplexity, seeking some escape or remedy. Finding none, he turned to her again, after having squeezed hard against his lady to free Helena, and said: 'Forgive me, I am sorry.' 'You are forgiven,' replied Helena, suddenly smiling into his face with her rare winsomeness. The whole party, attentive, relaxed into a smile at this. The good humour was complete. 'Thank you,' said the German gratefully. Helena turned away. The talk began again like the popping of corn; the _raconteur_ resumed his anecdote. Everybody was waiting to laugh. Helena rapidly wearied of trying to follow the tale. Siegmund had made no attempt. He had watched, with the others, the German's apologies, and the sight of his lover's face had moved him more than he could tell. She had a peculiar, childish wistfulness at times, and with this an intangible aloofness that pierced his heart. It seemed to him he should never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown race that never can tell its own story. This feeling always moved Siegmund's pity to its deepest, leaving him poignantly helpless. This same foreignness, revealed in other ways, sometimes made him hate her. It was as if she would sacrifice him rather than renounce her foreign birth. There was something in her he could never understand, so that never, never could he say he was master of her as she was of him the mistress. As she smiled and turned away from the German, mute, uncomplaining, like a child wise in sorrow beyond its years, Siegmund's resentment against her suddenly took fire, and blazed him with sheer pain of pity. She was very small. Her quiet ways, and sometimes her impetuous clinging made her seem small; for she was very strong. But Siegmund saw her now, small, quiet, uncomplaining, living for him who sat and looked at her. But what would become of her when he had left her, when she was alone, little foreigner as she was, in this world, which apologizes when it has done the hurt, too blind to see beforehand? Helena would be left behind; death was no way for her. She could not escape thus with him from this house of strangers which she called 'life'. She had to go on alone, like a foreigner who cannot learn the strange language. 'What will she do?' Siegmund asked himself, 'when her loneliness comes upon her like a horror, and she has no one to go to. She will come to the memory of me for a while, and that will take her over till her strength is established. But what then?' Siegmund could find no answer. He tried to imagine her life. It would go on, after his death, just in the same way, for a while, and then? He had not the faintest knowledge of how she would develop. What would she do when she was thirty-eight, and as old as himself? He could not conceive. Yet she would not die, of that he was certain. Siegmund suddenly realized that he knew nothing of her life, her real inner life. She was a book written in characters unintelligible to him and to everybody. He was tortured with the problem of her till it became acute, and he felt as if his heart would burst inside him. As a boy he had experienced the same sort of feeling after wrestling for an hour with a problem in Euclid, for he was capable of great concentration. He felt Helena looking at him. Turning, he found her steady, unswerving eyes fixed on him, so that he shrank confused from them. She smiled: by an instinctive movement she made him know that she wanted him to hold her hand. He leaned forward and put his hand over hers. She had peculiar hands, small, with a strange, delightful silkiness. Often they were cool or cold; generally they lay unmoved within his clasp, but then they were instinct with life, not inert. Sometimes he would feel a peculiar jerking in his pulse, very much like electricity, when he held her hand. Occasionally it was almost painful, and felt as if a little virtue were passing out of his blood. But that he dismissed as nonsense. The Germans were still rattling away, perspiring freely, wiping their faces with their handkerchiefs as they laughed, moving inside their clothing, which was sticking to their sides. Siegmund had not noticed them for some time, he was so much absorbed. But Helena, though she sympathized with her fellow-passengers, was tormented almost beyond endurance by the noise, the heat of her neighbour's body, the atmosphere of the crowded carriage, and her own emotion. The only thing that could relieve her was the hand of Siegmund soothing her in its hold. She looked at him with the same steadiness which made her eyes feel heavy upon him, and made him shrink. She wanted his strength of nerve to support her, and he submitted at once, his one aim being to give her out of himself whatever she wanted. _Chapter 21_ The tall white yachts in a throng were lounging off the roads of Ryde. It was near the regatta time, so these proud creatures had flown loftily together, and now flitted hither and thither among themselves, like a concourse of tall women, footing the waves with superb touch. To Siegmund they were very beautiful, but removed from him, as dancers crossing the window-lights are removed from the man who looks up from the street. He saw the Solent and the world of glamour flying gay as snow outside, where inside was only Siegmund, tired, dispirited, without any joy. He and Helena had climbed among coils of rope on to the prow of their steamer, so they could catch a little spray of speed on their faces to stimulate them. The sea was very bright and crowded. White sails leaned slightly and filed along the roads; two yachts with sails of amber floated, it seemed, without motion, amid the eclipsed blue of the day; small boats with red and yellow flags fluttered quickly, trailing the sea with colour; a pleasure steamer coming from Cowes swung her soft stout way among the fleeting ships; high in the background were men-of-war, a long line, each one threading tiny triangles of flags through a sky dim with distance. 'It is all very glad,' said Siegmund to himself, 'but it seems to be fanciful.' He was out of it. Already he felt detached from life. He belonged to his destination. It is always so: we have no share in the beauty that lies between us and our goal. Helena watched with poignant sorrow all the agitation of colour on the blue afternoon. 'We must leave it; we must pass out of it,' she lamented, over and over again. Each new charm she caught eagerly. 'I like the steady purpose of that brown-sailed tramp,' she said to herself, watching a laden coaster making for Portsmouth. They were still among the small shipping of Ryde. Siegmund and Helena, as they looked out, became aware of a small motor-launch heading across their course towards a yacht whose tall masts were drawn clean on the sky. The eager launch, its nose up as if to breathe, was racing over the swell like a coursing dog. A lady, in white, and a lad with dark head and white jersey were leaning in the bows; a gentleman was bending over some machinery in the middle of the boat, while the sailor in the low stern was also stooping forward attending to something. The steamer was sweeping onwards, huge above the water; the dog of a boat was coursing straight across her track. The lady saw the danger first. Stretching forward, she seized the arm of the lad and held him firm, making no sound, but watching the forward menace of the looming steamer. 'Look!' cried Helena, catching hold of Siegmund. He was already watching. Suddenly the steamer bell clanged. The gentleman looked up, with startled, sunburned face; then he leaped to the stern. The launch veered. It and the steamer closed together like a pair of scissors. The lady, still holding the boy, looked up with an expressionless face at the high sweeping chisel of the steamer's bows; the husband stood rigid, staring ahead. No sound was to be heard save the rustling of water under the bows. The scissors closed, the launch skelped forward like a dog from in front of the traffic. It escaped by a yard or two. Then, like a dog, it seemed to look round. The gentleman in the stern glanced back quickly. He was a handsome, dark-haired man with dark eyes. His face was as if carven out of oak, set and grey-brown. Then he looked to the steering of his boat. No one had uttered a sound. From the tiny boat coursing low on the water, not a sound, only tense waiting. The launch raced out of danger towards the yacht. The gentleman, with a brief gesture, put his man in charge again, whilst he himself went forward to the lady. He was a handsome man, very proud in his movements; and she, in her bearing, was prouder still. She received him almost with indifference. Helena turned to Siegmund. He took both her hands and pressed them, whilst she looked at him with eyes blind with emotion. She was white to the lips, and heaving like the buoy in the wake of the steamer. The noise of life had suddenly been hushed, and each heart had heard for a moment the noiselessness of death. How everyone was white and gasping! They strove, on every hand, to fill the day with noise and the colour of life again. 'By Jove, that was a near thing!' 'Ah, that has made me feel bad!' said a woman. 'A French yacht,' said somebody. Helena was waiting for the voice of Siegmund. But he did not know what to say. Confused, he repeated: 'That was a close shave.' Helena clung to him, searching his face. She felt his difference from herself. There was something in his experience that made him different, quiet, with a peculiar expression as if he were pained. 'Ah, dear Lord!' he was saying to himself. 'How bright and whole the day is for them! If God had suddenly put His hand over the sun, and swallowed us up in a shadow, they could not have been more startled. That man, with his fine, white-flannelled limbs and his dark head, has no suspicion of the shadow that supports it all. Between the blueness of the sea and the sky he passes easy as a gull, close to the fine white seamew of his mate, amid red flowers of flags, and soft birds of ships, and slow-moving monsters of steamboats. 'For me the day is transparent and shrivelling. I can see the darkness through its petals. But for him it is a fresh bell-flower, in which he fumbles with delights like a bee. 'For me, quivering in the interspaces of the atmosphere, is the darkness the same that fills in my soul. I can see death urging itself into life, the shadow supporting the substance. For my life is burning an invisible flame. The glare of the light of myself, as I burn on the fuel of death, is not enough to hide from me the source and the issue. For what is a life but a flame that bursts off the surface of darkness, and tapers into the darkness again? But the death that issues differs from the death that was the source. At least, I shall enrich death with a potent shadow, if I do not enrich life.' 'Wasn't that woman fine!' said Helena. 'So perfectly still,' he answered. 'The child realized nothing,' she said. Siegmund laughed, then leaned forward impulsively to her. 'I am always so sorry,' he said, 'that the human race is urged inevitably into a deeper and deeper realization of life.' She looked at him, wondering what provoked such a remark. 'I guess,' she said slowly, after a while, 'that the man, the sailor, will have a bad time. He was abominably careless.' 'He was careful of something else just then,' said Siegmund, who hated to hear her speak in cold condemnation. 'He was attending to the machinery or something.' 'That was scarcely his first business,' said she, rather sarcastic. Siegmund looked at her. She seemed very hard in judgement--very blind. Sometimes his soul surged against her in hatred. 'Do you think the man _wanted_ to drown the boat?' he asked. 'He nearly succeeded,' she replied. There was antagonism between them. Siegmund recognized in Helena the world sitting in judgement, and he hated it. 'But, after all,' he thought, I suppose it is the only way to get along, to judge the event and not the person. I have a disease of sympathy, a vice of exoneration.' Nevertheless, he did not love Helena as a judge. He thought rather of the woman in the boat. She was evidently one who watched the sources of life, saw it great and impersonal. 'Would the woman cry, or hug and kiss the boy when she got on board?' he asked. 'I rather think not. Why?' she replied. 'I hope she didn't,' he said. Helena sat watching the water spurt back from the bows. She was very much in love with Siegmund. He was suggestive; he stimulated her. But to her mind he had not her own dark eyes of hesitation; he was swift and proud as the wind. She never realized his helplessness. Siegmund was gathering strength from the thought of that other woman's courage. If she had so much restraint as not to cry out, or alarm the boy, if she had so much grace not to complain to her husband, surely he himself might refrain from revealing his own fear of Helena, and from lamenting his hard fate. They sailed on past the chequered round towers. The sea opened, and they looked out to eastward into the sea-space. Siegmund wanted to flee. He yearned to escape down the open ways before him. Yet he knew he would be carried on to London. He watched the sea-ways closing up. The shore came round. The high old houses stood flat on the right hand. The shore swept round in a sickle, reaping them into the harbour. There the old _Victory_, gay with myriad pointed pennons, was harvested, saved for a trophy. 'It is a dreadful thing,' thought Siegmund, 'to remain as a trophy when there is nothing more to do.' He watched the landing-stages swooping nearer. There were the trains drawn up in readiness. At the other end of the train was London. He could scarcely bear to have Helena before him for another two hours. The suspense of that protracted farewell, while he sat opposite her in the beating train, would cost too much. He longed to be released from her. They had got their luggage, and were standing at the foot of the ladder, in the heat of the engines and the smell of hot oil, waiting for the crowd to pass on, so that they might ascend and step off the ship on to the mainland. 'Won't you let me go by the South-Western, and you by the Brighton?' asked Siegmund, hesitating, repeating the morning's question. Helena looked at him, knitting her brows with misgiving and perplexity. 'No,' she replied. 'Let us go together.' Siegmund followed her up the iron ladder to the quay. There was no great crowd on the train. They easily found a second-class compartment without occupants. He swung the luggage on the rack and sat down, facing Helena. 'Now,' said he to himself, 'I wish I were alone.' He wanted to think and prepare himself. Helena, who was thinking actively, leaned forward to him to say: 'Shall I not go down to Cornwall?' By her soothing willingness to do anything for him, Siegmund knew that she was dogging him closely. He could not bear to have his anxiety protracted. 'But you have promised Louisa, have you not?' he replied. 'Oh, well!' she said, in the peculiar slighting tone she had when she wished to convey the unimportance of affairs not touching him. 'Then you must go,' he said. 'But,' she began, with harsh petulance, 'I do not want to go down to Cornwall with _Louisa and Olive_'--she accentuated the two names--'after _this_,' she added. 'Then Louisa will have no holiday--and you have promised,' he said gravely. Helena looked at him. She saw he had decided that she should go. 'Is my promise so _very_ important?' she asked. She glanced angrily at the three ladies who were hesitating in the doorway. Nevertheless, the ladies entered, and seated themselves at the opposite end of the carriage. Siegmund did not know whether he were displeased or relieved by their intrusion. If they had stayed out, he might have held Helena in his arms for still another hour. As it was, she could not harass him with words. He tried not to look at her, but to think. The train at last moved out of the station. As it passed through Portsmouth, Siegmund remembered his coming down, on the Sunday. It seemed an indefinite age ago. He was thankful that he sat on the side of the carriage opposite from the one he had occupied five days before. The afternoon of the flawless sky was ripening into evening. The chimneys and the sides of the houses of Portsmouth took on that radiant appearance which transfigures the end of day in town. A rich bloom of light appears on the surfaces of brick and stone. 'It will go on,' thought Siegmund, 'being gay of an evening, for ever. And I shall miss it all!' But as soon as the train moved into the gloom of the Town station, he began again: 'Beatrice will be proud, and silent as steel when I get home. She will say nothing, thank God--nor shall I. That will expedite matters: there will be no interruptions.... 'But we cannot continue together after this. Why should I discuss reasons for and against? We cannot. She goes to a cottage in the country. Already I have spoken of it to her. I allow her all I can of my money, and on the rest I manage for myself in lodgings in London. Very good. 'But when I am comparatively free I cannot live alone. I shall want Helena; I shall remember the children. If I have the one, I shall be damned by the thought of the other. This bruise on my mind will never get better. Helena says she would never come to me; but she would, out of pity for me. I know she would. 'But then, what then? Beatrice and the children in the country, and me not looking after the children. Beatrice is thriftless. She would be in endless difficulty. It would be a degradation to me. She would keep a red sore inflamed against me; I should be a shameful thing in her mouth. Besides, there would go all her strength. She would not make any efforts. "He has brought it on us," she would say; "let him see what the result is." And things would go from bad to worse with them. It would be a gangrene of shame. 'And Helena--I should have nothing but mortification. When she was asleep I could not look at her. She is such a strange, incongruous creature. But I should be responsible for her. She believes in me as if I had the power of God. What should I think of myself?' Siegmund leaned with his head against the window, watching the country whirl past, but seeing nothing. He thought imaginatively, and his imagination destroyed him. He pictured Beatrice in the country. He sketched the morning--breakfast haphazard at a late hour; the elder children rushing off without food, miserable and untidy, the youngest bewildered under her swift, indifferent preparations for school. He thought of Beatrice in the evening, worried and irritable, her bills unpaid, the work undone, declaiming lamentably against the cruelty of her husband, who had abandoned her to such a burden of care while he took his pleasure elsewhere. This line exhausted or intolerable, Siegmund switched off to the consideration of his own life in town. He would go to America; the agreement was signed with the theatre manager. But America would be only a brief shutting of the eyes and closing of the mouth. He would wait for the home-coming to Helena, and she would wait for him. It was inevitable; then would begin--what? He would never have enough money to keep Helena, even if he managed to keep himself. Their meetings would then be occasional and clandestine. Ah, it was intolerable! 'If I were rich,' said Siegmund, 'all would be plain. I would give each of my children enough, and Beatrice, and we would go away; but I am nearly forty; I have no genius; I shall never be rich,' Round and round went his thoughts like oxen over a threshing floor, treading out the grain. Gradually the chaff flew away; gradually the corn of conviction gathered small and hard upon the floor. As he sat thinking, Helena leaned across to him and laid her hand on his knee. 'If I have made things more difficult,' she said, her voice harsh with pain, 'you will forgive me.' He started. This was one of the cruel cuts of pain that love gives, filling the eyes with blood. Siegmund stiffened himself; slowly he smiled, as he looked at her childish, plaintive lips, and her large eyes haunted with pain. 'Forgive you?' he repeated. 'Forgive you for five days of perfect happiness; the only real happiness I have ever known!' Helena tightened her fingers on his knee. She felt herself stinging with painful joy; but one of the ladies was looking her curiously. She leaned back in her place, and turned to watch at the shocks of corn strike swiftly, in long rows, across her vision. Siegmund, also quivering, turned his face to the window, where the rotation of the wide sea-flat helped the movement of his thought. Helena had interrupted him. She had bewildered his thoughts from their hawking, so that they struck here and there, wildly, among small, pitiful prey that was useless, conclusions which only hindered the bringing home of the final convictions. 'What will she do?' cried Siegmund, 'What will she do when I am gone? What will become of her? Already she has no aim in life; then she will have no object. Is it any good my going if I leave her behind? What an inextricable knot this is! But what will she do?' It was a question she had aroused before, a question which he could never answer; indeed, it was not for him to answer. They wound through the pass of the South Downs. As Siegmund, looking backward, saw the northern slope of the downs swooping smoothly, in a great, broad bosom of sward, down to the body of the land, he warmed with sudden love for the earth; there the great downs were, naked like a breast, leaning kindly to him. The earth is always kind; it loves us, and would foster us like a nurse. The downs were big and tender and simple. Siegmund looked at the farm, folded in a hollow, and he wondered what fortunate folk were there, nourished and quiet, hearing the vague roar of the train that was carrying him home. Up towards Arundel the cornfields of red wheat were heavy with gold. It was evening, when the green of the trees went out, leaving dark shapes proud upon the sky; but the red wheat was forged in the sunset, hot and magnificent. Siegmund almost gloated as he smelled the ripe corn, and opened his eyes to its powerful radiation. For a moment he forgot everything, amid the forging of red fields of gold in the smithy of the sunset. Like sparks, poppies blew along the railway-banks, a crimson train. Siegmund waited, through the meadows, for the next wheat-field. It came like the lifting of yellow-hot metal out of the gloom of darkened grass-lands. Helena was reassured by the glamour of evening over ripe Sussex. She breathed the land now and then, while she watched the sky. The sunset was stately. The blue-eyed day, with great limbs, having fought its victory and won, now mounted triumphant on its pyre, and with white arms uplifted took the flames, which leaped like blood about its feet. The day died nobly, so she thought. One gold cloud, as an encouragement tossed to her, followed the train. 'Surely that cloud is for us,' said she, as she watched it anxiously. Dark trees brushed between it and her, while she waited in suspense. It came, unswerving, from behind the trees. 'I am sure it is for us,' she repeated. A gladness came into her eyes. Still the cloud followed the train. She leaned forward to Siegmund and pointed out the cloud to him. She was very eager to give him a little of her faith. 'It has come with us quite a long way. Doesn't it seem to you to be travelling with us? It is the golden hand; it is the good omen.' She then proceeded to tell him the legend from 'Aylwin'. Siegmund listened, and smiled. The sunset was handsome on his face. Helena was almost happy. 'I am right,' said he to himself. I am right in my conclusions, and Helena will manage by herself afterwards. I am right; there is the hand to confirm it.' The heavy train settled down to an easy, unbroken stroke, swinging like a greyhound over the level northwards. All the time Siegmund was mechanically thinking the well-known movement from the Valkyrie Ride, his whole self beating to the rhythm. It seemed to him there was a certain grandeur in this flight, but it hurt him with its heavy insistence of catastrophe. He was afraid; he had to summon his courage to sit quiet. For a time he was reassured; he believed he was going on towards the right end. He hunted through the country and the sky, asking of everything, 'Am I right? Am I right?' He did not mind what happened to him, so long as he felt it was right. What he meant by 'right' he did not trouble to think, but the question remained. For a time he had been reassured; then a dullness came over him, when his thoughts were stupid, and he merely submitted to the rhythm of the train, which stamped him deeper and deeper with a brand of catastrophe. The sun had gone down. Over the west was a gush of brightness as the fountain of light bubbled lower. The stars, like specks of froth from the foaming of the day, clung to the blue ceiling. Like spiders they hung overhead, while the hosts of the gold atmosphere poured out of the hive by the western low door. Soon the hive was empty, a hollow dome of purple, with here and there on the floor a bright brushing of wings--a village; then, overhead, the luminous star-spider began to run. 'Ah, well!' thought Siegmund--he was tired--'if one bee dies in a swarm, what is it, so long as the hive is all right? Apart from the gold light, and the hum and the colour of day, what was I? Nothing! Apart from these rushings out of the hive, along with swarm, into the dark meadows of night, gathering God knows what, I was a pebble. Well, the day will swarm in golden again, with colour on the wings of every bee, and humming in each activity. The gold and the colour and sweet smell and the sound of life, they exist, even if there is no bee; it only happens we see the iridescence on the wings of a bee. It exists whether or not, bee or no bee. Since the iridescence and the humming of life _are_ always, and since it was they who made me, then I am not lost. At least, I do not care. If the spark goes out, the essence of the fire is there in the darkness. What does it matter? Besides, I _have_ burned bright; I have laid up a fine cell of honey somewhere--I wonder where? We can never point to it; but it _is_ so--what does it matter, then!' They had entered the north downs, and were running through Dorking towards Leatherhead. Box Hill stood dark in the dusky sweetness of the night. Helena remembered that here she and Siegmund had come for their first walk together. She would like to come again. Presently she saw the quick stilettos of stars on the small, baffled river; they ran between high embankments. Siegmund recollected that these were covered with roses of Sharon--the large golden St John's wort of finest silk. He looked, and could just distinguish the full-blown, delicate flowers, ignored by the stars. At last he had something to say to Helena: 'Do you remember,' he asked, 'the roses of Sharon all along here?' 'I do,' replied Helena, glad he spoke so brightly. 'Weren't they pretty?' After a few moments of watching the bank, she said: 'Do you know, I have never gathered one? I think I should like to; I should like to feel them, and they should have an orangy smell.' He smiled, without answering. She glanced up at him, smiling brightly. 'But shall we come down here in the morning, and find some?' she asked. She put the question timidly. 'Would you care to?' she added. Siegmund darkened and frowned. Here was the pain revived again. 'No,' he said gently; 'I think we had better not.' Almost for the first time he did not make apologetic explanation. Helena turned to the window, and remained, looking out at the spinning of the lights of the towns without speaking, until they were near Sutton. Then she rose and pinned on her hat, gathering her gloves and her basket. She was, in spite of herself, slightly angry. Being quite ready to leave the train, she sat down to wait for the station. Siegmund was aware that she was displeased, and again, for the first time, he said to himself, 'Ah, well, it must be so.' She looked at him. He was sad, therefore she softened instantly. 'At least,' she said doubtfully, 'I shall see you at the station.' 'At Waterloo?' he asked. 'No, at Wimbledon,' she replied, in her metallic tone. 'But--' he began. 'It will be the best way for us,' she interrupted, in the calm tone of conviction. 'Much better than crossing London from Victoria to Waterloo.' 'Very well,' he replied. He looked up a train for her in his little time-table. 'You will get in Wimbledon 10.5--leave 10.40--leave Waterloo 11.30,' he said. 'Very good,' she answered. The brakes were grinding. They waited in a burning suspense for the train to stop. 'If only she will soon go!' thought Siegmund. It was an intolerable minute. She rose; everything was a red blur. She stood before him, pressing his hand; then he rose to give her the bag. As he leaned upon the window-frame and she stood below on the platform, looking up at him, he could scarcely breathe. 'How long will it be?' he said to himself, looking at the open carriage doors. He hated intensely the lady who could not get a porter to remove her luggage; he could have killed her; he could have killed the dilatory guard. At last the doors slammed and the whistle went. The train started imperceptibly into motion. 'Now I lose her,' said Siegmund. She looked up at him; her face was white and dismal. 'Good-bye, then!' she said, and she turned away. Siegmund went back to his seat. He was relieved, but he trembled with sickness. We are all glad when intense moments are done with; but why did she fling round in that manner, stopping the keen note short; what would she do? _Chapter 22_ Siegmund went up to Victoria. He was in no hurry to get down to Wimbledon. London was warm and exhausted after the hot day, but this peculiar lukewarmness was not unpleasant to him. He chose to walk from Victoria to Waterloo. The streets were like polished gun-metal glistened over with gold. The taxi-cabs, the wild cats of the town, swept over the gleaming floor swiftly, soon lessening in the distance, as if scornful of the other clumsy-footed traffic. He heard the merry click-clock of the swinging hansoms, then the excited whirring of the motor-buses as they charged full-tilt heavily down the road, their hearts, as it seemed, beating with trepidation; they drew up with a sigh of relief by the kerb, and stood there panting--great, nervous, clumsy things. Siegmund was always amused by the headlong, floundering career of the buses. He was pleased with this scampering of the traffic; anything for distraction. He was glad Helena was not with him, for the streets would have irritated her with their coarse noise. She would stand for a long time to watch the rabbits pop and hobble along on the common at night; but the tearing along of the taxis and the charge of a great motor-bus was painful to her. 'Discords,' she said, 'after the trees and sea.' She liked the glistening of the streets; it seemed a fine alloy of gold laid down for pavement, such pavement as drew near to the pure gold streets of Heaven; but this noise could not be endured near any wonderland. Siegmund did not mind it; it drummed out his own thoughts. He watched the gleaming magic of the road, raced over with shadows, project itself far before him into the night. He watched the people. Soldiers, belted with scarlet, went jauntily on in front. There was a peculiar charm in their movement. There was a soft vividness of life in their carriage; it reminded Siegmund of the soft swaying and lapping of a poised candle-flame. The women went blithely alongside. Occasionally, in passing, one glanced at him; then, in spite of himself, he smiled; he knew not why. The women glanced at him with approval, for he was ruddy; besides, he had that carelessness and abstraction of despair. The eyes of the women said, 'You are comely, you are lovable,' and Siegmund smiled. When the street opened, at Westminster, he noticed the city sky, a lovely deep purple, and the lamps in the square steaming out a vapour of grey-gold light. 'It is a wonderful night,' he said to himself. 'There are not two such in a year.' He went forward to the Embankment, with a feeling of elation in his heart. This purple and gold-grey world, with the fluttering flame-warmth of soldiers and the quick brightness of women, like lights that clip sharply in a draught, was a revelation to him. As he leaned upon the Embankment parapet the wonder did not fade, but rather increased. The trams, one after another, floated loftily over the bridge. They went like great burning bees in an endless file into a hive, past those which were drifting dreamily out, while below, on the black, distorted water, golden serpents flashed and twisted to and fro. 'Ah!' said Siegmund to himself; 'it is far too wonderful for me. Here, as well as by the sea, the night is gorgeous and uncouth. Whatever happens, the world is wonderful.' So he went on amid all the vast miracle of movement in the city night, the swirling of water to the sea, the gradual sweep of the stars, the floating of many lofty, luminous cars through the bridged darkness, like an army of angels filing past on one of God's campaigns, the purring haste of the taxis, the slightly dancing shadows of people. Siegmund went on slowly, like a slow bullet winging into the heart of life. He did not lose this sense of wonder, not in the train, nor as he walked home in the moonless dark. When he closed the door behind him and hung up his hat he frowned. He did not think definitely of anything, but his frown meant to him: 'Now for the beginning of Hell!' He went towards the dining-room, where the light was, and the uneasy murmur. The clock, with its deprecating, suave chime, was striking ten, Siegmund opened the door of the room. Beatrice was sewing, and did not raise her head. Frank, a tall, thin lad of eighteen, was bent over a book. He did not look up. Vera had her fingers thrust in among her hair, and continued to read the magazine that lay on the table before her. Siegmund looked at them all. They gave no sign to show they were aware of his entry; there was only that unnatural tenseness of people who cover their agitation. He glanced round to see where he should go. His wicker arm-chair remained by the fireplace; his slippers were standing under the sideboard, as he had left them. Siegmund sat down in the creaking chair; he began to feel sick and tired. 'I suppose the children are in bed,' he said. His wife sewed on as if she had not heard him; his daughter noisily turned over a leaf and continued to read, as if she were pleasantly interested and had known no interruption. Siegmund waited, with his slipper dangling from his hand, looking from one to another. 'They've been gone two hours,' said Frank at last, still without raising his eyes from his book. His tone was contemptuous, his voice was jarring, not yet having developed a man's fullness. Siegmund put on his slipper, and began to unlace the other boot. The slurring of the lace through the holes and the snacking of the tag seemed unnecessarily loud. It annoyed his wife. She took a breath to speak, then refrained, feeling suddenly her daughter's scornful restraint upon her. Siegmund rested his arms upon his knees, and sat leaning forward, looking into the barren fireplace, which was littered with paper, and orange-peel, and a banana-skin. 'Do you want any supper?' asked Beatrice, and the sudden harshness of her voice startled him into looking at her. She had her face averted, refusing to see him. Siegmund's heart went down with weariness and despair at the sight of her. 'Aren't _you_ having any?' he asked. The table was not laid. Beatrice's work-basket, a little wicker fruit-skep, overflowed scissors, and pins, and scraps of holland, and reels of cotton on the green serge cloth. Vera leaned both her elbows on the table. Instead of replying to him, Beatrice went to the sideboard. She took out a table-cloth, pushing her sewing litter aside, and spread the cloth over one end of the table. Vera gave her magazine a little knock with her hand. 'Have you read this tale of a French convent school in here, Mother?' she asked. 'In where?' In this month's _Nash's_.' 'No,' replied Beatrice. 'What time have I for reading, much less for anything else?' 'You should think more of yourself, and a little less of other people, then,' said Vera, with a sneer at the 'other people'. She rose. 'Let me do this. You sit down; you are tired, Mother,' she said. Her mother, without replying, went out to the kitchen. Vera followed her. Frank, left alone with his father, moved uneasily, and bent his thin shoulders lower over his book. Siegmund remained with his arms on his knees, looking into the grate. From the kitchen came the chinking of crockery, and soon the smell of coffee. All the time Vera was heard chatting with affected brightness to her mother, addressing her in fond tones, using all her wits to recall bright little incidents to retail to her. Beatrice answered rarely, and then with utmost brevity. Presently Vera came in with the tray. She put down a cup of coffee, a plate with boiled ham, pink and thin, such as is bought from a grocer, and some bread-and-butter. Then she sat down, noisily turning over the leaves of her magazine. Frank glanced at the table; it was laid solely for his father. He looked at the bread and the meat, but restrained himself, and went on reading, or pretended to do so. Beatrice came in with the small cruet; it was conspicuously bright. Everything was correct: knife and fork, spoon, cruet, all perfectly clean, the crockery fine, the bread and butter thin--in fact, it was just as it would have been for a perfect stranger. This scrupulous neatness, in a household so slovenly and easy-going, where it was an established tradition that something should be forgotten or wrong, impressed Siegmund. Beatrice put the serving knife and fork by the little dish of ham, saw that all was proper, then went and sat down. Her face showed no emotion; it was calm and proud. She began to sew. 'What do you say, Mother?' said Vera, as if resuming a conversation. 'Shall it be Hampton Court or Richmond on Sunday?' 'I say, as I said before,' replied Beatrice: 'I cannot afford to go out.' 'But you must begin, my dear, and Sunday shall see the beginning. _Dîtes donc_!' 'There are other things to think of,' said Beatrice. 'Now, _maman, nous avons changé tout cela_! We are going out--a jolly little razzle!' Vera, who was rather handsome, lifted up her face and smiled at her mother gaily. 'I am afraid there will be no _razzle_'--Beatrice accented the word, smiling slightly--'for me. You are slangy, Vera.' '_Un doux argot, ma mère_. You look tired.' Beatrice glanced at the clock. 'I will go to bed when I have cleared the table,' she said. Siegmund winced. He was still sitting with his head bent down, looking in the grate. Vera went on to say something more. Presently Frank looked up at the table, and remarked in his grating voice: 'There's your supper, Father.' The women stopped and looked round at this. Siegmund bent his head lower. Vera resumed her talk. It died out, and there was silence. Siegmund was hungry. 'Oh, good Lord, good Lord! bread of humiliation tonight!' he said to himself before he could muster courage to rise and go to the table. He seemed to be shrinking inwards. The women glanced swiftly at him and away from him as his chair creaked and he got up. Frank was watching from under his eyebrows. Siegmund went through the ordeal of eating and drinking in presence of his family. If he had not been hungry, he could not have done it, despite the fact that he was content to receive humiliation this night. He swallowed the coffee with effort. When he had finished he sat irresolute for some time; then he arose and went to the door. 'Good night!' he said. Nobody made any reply. Frank merely stirred in his chair. Siegmund shut the door and went. There was absolute silence in the room till they heard him turn on the tap in the bathroom; then Beatrice began to breathe spasmodically, catching her breath as if she would sob. But she restrained herself. The faces of the two children set hard with hate. 'He is not worth the flicking of your little finger, Mother,' said Vera. Beatrice moved about with pitiful, groping hands, collecting her sewing and her cottons. 'At any rate, he's come back red enough,' said Frank, in his grating tone of contempt. 'He's like boiled salmon.' Beatrice did not answer anything. Frank rose, and stood with his back to the grate, in his father's characteristic attitude. 'He _would_ come slinking back in a funk!' he said, with a young man's sneer. Stretching forward, he put a piece of ham between two pieces of bread, and began to eat the sandwich in large bites. Vera came to the table at this, and began to make herself a more dainty sandwich. Frank watched her with jealous eyes. 'There is a little more ham, if you'd like it,' said Beatrice to him. 'I kept you some.' 'All right, Ma,' he replied. Fetch it in.' Beatrice went out to the kitchen. 'And bring the bread and butter, too, will you?' called Vera after her. 'The damned coward! Ain't he a rotten funker?' said Frank, _sotto voce_, while his mother was out of the room. Vera did not reply, but she seemed tacitly to agree. They petted their mother, while she waited on them. At length Frank yawned. He fidgeted a moment or two, then he went over to his mother, and, putting his hand on her arm--the feel of his mother's round arm under the black silk sleeve made his tears rise--he said, more gratingly than ever: 'Ne'er mind, Ma; we'll be all right to you.' Then he bent and kissed her. 'Good night, Mother,' he said awkwardly, and he went out of the room. Beatrice was crying. _Chapter 23_ 'I shall never re-establish myself,' said Siegmund as he closed behind him the dining-room door and went upstairs in the dark. 'I am a family criminal. Beatrice might come round, but the children's insolent judgement is too much. And I am like a dog that creeps round the house from which it escaped with joy. I have nowhere else to go. Why did I come back? But I am sleepy. I will not bother tonight.' He went into the bathroom and washed himself. Everything he did gave him a grateful sense of pleasure, notwithstanding the misery of his position. He dipped his arms deeper into the cold water, that he might feel the delight of it a little farther. His neck he swilled time after time, and it seemed to him he laughed with pleasure as the water caught him and fell away. The towel reminded him how sore were his forehead and his neck, blistered both to a state of rawness by the sun. He touched them very cautiously to dry them, wincing, and smiling at his own childish touch-and-shrink. Though his bedroom was very dark, he did not light the gas. Instead, he stepped out into the small balcony. His shirt was open at the neck and wrists. He pulled it farther apart, baring his chest to the deliciously soft night. He stood looking out at the darkness for some time. The night was as yet moonless, but luminous with a certain atmosphere of light. The stars were small. Near at hand, large shapes of trees rose up. Farther, lamps like little mushroom groups shone amid an undergrowth of darkness. There was a vague hoarse noise filling the sky, like the whispering in a shell, and this breathing of the summer night occasionally swelled into a restless sigh as a train roared across the distance. 'What a big night!' thought Siegmund. 'The night gathers everything into a oneness. I wonder what is in it.' He leaned forward over the balcony, trying to catch something out of the night. He felt his soul like tendrils stretched out anxiously to grasp a hold. What could he hold to in this great, hoarse breathing night? A star fell. It seemed to burst into sight just across his eyes with a yellow flash. He looked up, unable to make up his mind whether he had seen it or not. There was no gap in the sky. 'It is a good sign--a shooting star,' he said to himself. 'It is a good sign for me. I know I am right. That was my sign.' Having assured himself, he stepped indoors, unpacked his bag, and was soon in bed. 'This is a good bed,' he said. 'And the sheets are very fresh.' He lay for a little while with his head bending forwards, looking from his pillow out at the stars, then he went to sleep. At half past six in the morning he suddenly opened his eyes. 'What is it?' he asked, and almost without interruption answered: 'Well, I've got to go through it.' His sleep had shaped him perfect premonition, which, like a dream, he forgot when he awoke. Only this naïve question and answer betrayed what had taken place in his sleep. Immediately he awoke this subordinate knowledge vanished. Another fine day was striding in triumphant. The first thing Siegmund did was to salute the morning, because of its brightness. The second thing was to call to mind the aspect of that bay in the Isle of Wight. 'What would it just be like now?' said he to himself. He had to give his heart some justification for the peculiar pain left in it from his sleep activity, so he began poignantly to long for the place which had been his during the last mornings. He pictured the garden with roses and nasturtiums; he remembered the sunny way down the shore, and all the expanse of sea hung softly between the tall white cliffs. 'It is impossible it is gone!' he cried to himself. 'It can't be gone. I looked forward to it as if it never would come. It can't be gone now. Helena is not lost to me, surely.' Then he began a long pining for the departed beauty of his life. He turned the jewel of memory, and facet by facet it wounded him with its brilliant loveliness. This pain, though it was keen, was half pleasure. Presently he heard his wife stirring. She opened the door of the room next to his, and he heard her: 'Frank, it's a quarter to eight. You _will_ be late.' 'All right, Mother. Why didn't you call me sooner?' grumbled the lad. 'I didn't wake myself. I didn't go to sleep till morning, and then I slept.' She went downstairs. Siegmund listened for his son to get out of bed. The minutes passed. 'The young donkey, why doesn't he get out?' said Siegmund angrily to himself. He turned over, pressing himself upon the bed in anger and humiliation, because now he had no authority to call to his son and keep him to his duty. Siegmund waited, writhing with anger, shame, and anxiety. When the suave, velvety 'Pan-n-n! pan-n-n-n!' of the clock was heard striking, Frank stepped with a thud on to the floor. He could be heard dressing in clumsy haste. Beatrice called from the bottom of the stairs: 'Do you want any hot water?' 'You know there isn't time for me to shave now,' answered her son, lifting his voice to a kind of broken falsetto. The scent of the cooking of bacon filled the house. Siegmund heard his second daughter, Marjory, aged nine, talking to Vera, who occupied the same room with her. The child was evidently questioning, and the elder girl answered briefly. There was a lull in the household noises, broken suddenly by Marjory, shouting from the top of the stairs: 'Mam!' She wailed. 'Mam!' Still Beatrice did not hear her. 'Mam! Mamma!' Beatrice was in the scullery. 'Mamma-a!' The child was getting impatient. She lifted her voice and shouted: 'Mam? Mamma!' Still no answer. 'Mam-mee-e!' she squealed. Siegmund could hardly contain himself. 'Why don't you go down and ask?' Vera called crossly from the bedroom. And at the same moment Beatrice answered, also crossly: 'What do you want?' 'Where's my stockings?' cried the child at the top of her voice. 'Why do you ask me? Are they down here?' replied her mother. 'What are you shouting for?' The child plodded downstairs. Directly she returned, and as she passed into Vera's room, she grumbled: 'And now they're not mended.' Siegmund heard a sound that made his heart beat. It was the crackling of the sides of the crib, as Gwen, his little girl of five, climbed out. She was silent for a space. He imagined her sitting on the white rug and pulling on her stockings. Then there came the quick little thud of her feet as she went downstairs. 'Mam,' Siegmund heard her say as she went down the hall, 'has dad come?' The answer and the child's further talk were lost in the distance of the kitchen. The small, anxious question, and the quick thudding of Gwen's feet, made Siegmund lie still with torture. He wanted to hear no more. He lay shrinking within himself. It seemed that his soul was sensitive to madness. He felt that he could not, come what might, get up and meet them all. The front door banged, and he heard Frank's hasty call: 'Good-bye!' Evidently the lad was in an ill-humour. Siegmund listened for the sound of the train; it seemed an age; the boy would catch it. Then the water from the wash-hand bowl in the bathroom ran loudly out. That, he suggested, was Vera, who was evidently not going up to town. At the thought of this, Siegmund almost hated her. He listened for her to go downstairs. It was nine o'clock. The footsteps of Beatrice came upstairs. She put something down in the bathroom--his hot water. Siegmund listened intently for her to come to his door. Would she speak? She approached hurriedly, knocked, and waited. Siegmund, startled, for the moment, could not answer. She knocked loudly. 'All right,' said he. Then she went downstairs. He lay probing and torturing himself for another half-hour, till Vera's voice said coldly, beneath his window outside: 'You should clear away, then. We don't want the breakfast things on the table for a week.' Siegmund's heart set hard. He rose, with a shut mouth, and went across to the bathroom. There he started. The quaint figure of Gwen stood at the bowl, her back was towards him; she was sponging her face gingerly. Her hair, all blowsed from the pillow, was tied in a stiff little pigtail, standing out from her slender, childish neck. Her arms were bare to the shoulder. She wore a bodiced petticoat of pink flannelette, which hardly reached her knees. Siegmund felt slightly amused to see her stout little calves planted so firmly close together. She carefully sponged her cheeks, her pursed-up mouth, and her neck, soaping her hair, but not her ears. Then, very deliberately, she squeezed out the sponge and proceeded to wipe away the soap. For some reason or other she glanced round. Her startled eyes met his. She, too, had beautiful dark blue eyes. She stood, with the sponge at her neck, looking full at him. Siegmund felt himself shrinking. The child's look was steady, calm, inscrutable. 'Hello!' said her father. 'Are you here!' The child, without altering her expression in the slightest, turned her back on him, and continued wiping her neck. She dropped the sponge in the water and took the towel from off the side of the bath. Then she turned to look again at Siegmund, who stood in his pyjamas before her, his mouth shut hard, but his eyes shrinking and tender. She seemed to be trying to discover something in him. 'Have you washed your ears?' he said gaily. She paid no heed to this, except that he noticed her face now wore a slight constrained smile as she looked at him. She was shy. Still she continued to regard him curiously. 'There is some chocolate on my dressing-table,' he said. 'Where have you been to?' she asked suddenly. 'To the seaside,' he answered, smiling. 'To Brighton?' she asked. Her tone was still condemning. 'Much farther than that,' he replied. 'To Worthing?' she asked. 'Farther--in a steamer,' he replied. 'But who did you go with?' asked the child. 'Why, I went all by myself,' he answered. 'Twuly?' she asked. 'Weally and twuly,' he answered, laughing. 'Couldn't you take me?' she asked. 'I will next time,' he replied. The child still looked at him, unsatisfied. 'But what did you go for?' she asked, goading him suspiciously. 'To see the sea and the ships and the fighting ships with cannons--' 'You _might_ have taken me,' said the child reproachfully. 'Yes, I ought to have done, oughtn't I?' he said, as if regretful. Gwen still looked full at him. 'You _are_ red,' she said. He glanced quickly in the glass, and replied: 'That is the sun. Hasn't it been hot?' 'Mm! It made my nose all peel. Vera said she would scrape me like a new potato.' The child laughed and turned shyly away. 'Come here,' said Siegmund. 'I believe you've got a tooth out, haven't you?' He was very cautious and gentle. The child drew back. He hesitated, and she drew away from him, unwilling. 'Come and let me look,' he repeated. She drew farther away, and the same constrained smile appeared on her face, shy, suspicious, condemning. 'Aren't you going to get your chocolate?' he asked, as the child hesitated in the doorway. She glanced into his room, and answered: 'I've got to go to mam and have my hair done.' Her awkwardness and her lack of compliance insulted him. She went downstairs without going into his room. Siegmund, rebuffed by the only one in the house from whom he might have expected friendship, proceeded slowly to shave, feeling sick at heart. He was a long time over his toilet. When he stripped himself for the bath, it seemed to him he could smell the sea. He bent his head and licked his shoulder. It tasted decidedly salt. 'A pity to wash it off,' he said. As he got up dripping from the cold bath, he felt for the moment exhilarated. He rubbed himself smooth. Glancing down at himself, he thought: 'I look young. I look as young as twenty-six.' He turned to the mirror. There he saw himself a mature, complete man of forty, with grave years of experience on his countenance. 'I used to think that, when I was forty,' he said to himself, 'I should find everything straight as the nose on my face, walking through my affairs as easily as you like. Now I am no more sure of myself, have no more confidence than a boy of twenty. What can I do? It seems to me a man needs a mother all his life. I don't feel much like a lord of creation.' Having arrived at this cynicism, Siegmund prepared to go downstairs. His sensitiveness had passed off; his nerves had become callous. When he was dressed he went down to the kitchen without hesitation. He was indifferent to his wife and children. No one spoke to him as he sat to the table. That was as he liked it; he wished for nothing to touch him. He ate his breakfast alone, while his wife bustled about upstairs and Vera bustled about in the dining-room. Then he retired to the solitude of the drawing-room. As a reaction against his poetic activity, he felt as if he were gradually becoming more stupid and blind. He remarked nothing, not even the extravagant bowl of grasses placed where he would not have allowed it--on his piano; nor his fiddle, laid cruelly on the cold, polished floor near the window. He merely sat down in an arm-chair, and felt sick. All his unnatural excitement, all the poetic stimulation of the past few days, had vanished. He felt flaccid, while his life struggled slowly through him. After an intoxication of passion and love, and beauty, and of sunshine, he was prostrate. Like a plant that blossoms gorgeously and madly, he had wasted the tissue of his strength, so that now his life struggled in a clogged and broken channel. Siegmund sat with his head between his hands, leaning upon the table. He would have been stupidly quiescent in his feeling of loathing and sickness had not an intense irritability in all his nerves tormented him into consciousness. 'I suppose this is the result of the sun--a sort of sunstroke,' he said, realizing an intolerable stiffness of his brain, a stunned condition in his head. 'This is hideous!' he said. His arms were quivering with intense irritation. He exerted all his will to stop them, and then the hot irritability commenced in his belly. Siegmund fidgeted in his chair without changing his position. He had not the energy to get up and move about. He fidgeted like an insect pinned down. The door opened. He felt violently startled; yet there was no movement perceptible. Vera entered, ostensibly for an autograph-album into which she was going to copy a drawing from the _London Opinion_, really to see what her father was doing. He did not move a muscle. He only longed intensely for his daughter to go out of the room, so that he could let go. Vera went out of the drawing-room humming to herself. Apparently she had not even glanced at her father. In reality, she had observed him closely. 'He is sitting with his head in his hands,' she said to her mother. Beatrice replied: 'I'm glad he's nothing else to do.' 'I should think he's pitying himself,' said Vera. 'He's a good one at it,' answered Beatrice. Gwen came forward and took hold of her mother's skirt, looking up anxiously. 'What is he doing, Mam?' she asked. 'Nothing,' replied her mother--'nothing; only sitting in the drawing-room.' 'But what has he _been_ doing?' persisted the anxious child. 'Nothing--nothing that I can tell _you_. He's only spoilt all our lives.' The little girl stood regarding her mother In the greatest distress and perplexity. 'But what will he do, Mam?' she asked. 'Nothing. Don't bother. Run and play with Marjory now. Do you want a nice plum?' She took a yellow plum from the table. Gwen accepted it without a word. She was too much perplexed. 'What do you say?' asked her mother. 'Thank you,' replied the child, turning away. Siegmund sighed with relief when he was again left alone. He twisted in his chair, and sighed again, trying to drive out the intolerable clawing irritability from his belly. 'Ah, this is horrible!' he said. He stiffened his muscles to quieten them. 'I've never been like this before. What is the matter?' he asked himself. But the question died out immediately. It seemed useless and sickening to try and answer it. He began to cast about for an alleviation. If he could only do something, or have something he wanted, it would be better. 'What do I want?' he asked himself, and he anxiously strove to find this out. Everything he suggested to himself made him sicken with weariness or distaste: the seaside, a foreign land, a fresh life that he had often dreamed of, farming in Canada. 'I should be just the same there,' he answered himself. 'Just the same sickening feeling there that I want nothing.' 'Helena!' he suggested to himself, trembling. But he only felt a deeper horror. The thought of her made him shrink convulsively. 'I can't endure this,' he said. If this is the case, I had better be dead. To have no want, no desire--that is death, to begin with.' He rested awhile after this. The idea of death alone seemed entertaining. Then, 'Is there really nothing I could turn to?' he asked himself. To him, in that state of soul, it seemed there was not. 'Helena!' he suggested again, appealingly testing himself. 'Ah, no!' he cried, drawing sharply back, as from an approaching touch upon a raw place. He groaned slightly as he breathed, with a horrid weight of nausea. There was a fumbling upon the door-knob. Siegmund did not start. He merely pulled himself together. Gwen pushed open the door, and stood holding on to the door-knob looking at him. 'Dad, Mam says dinner's ready,' she announced. Siegmund did not reply. The child waited, at a loss for some moments, before she repeated, in a hesitating tone: 'Dinner's ready.' 'All right,' said Siegmund. 'Go away.' The little girl returned to the kitchen with tears in her eyes, very crestfallen. 'What did he say?' asked Beatrice. 'He shouted at me,' replied the little one, breaking into tears. Beatrice flushed. Tears came into her own eyes. She took the child in her arms and pressed her to her, kissing her forehead. 'Did he?' she said very tenderly. 'Never mind, then, dearie--never mind.' The tears in her mother's voice made the child sob bitterly. Vera and Marjory sat silent at table. The steak and mashed potatoes steamed and grew cold. _Chapter 24_ When Helena arrived home on the Thursday evening she found everything repulsive. All the odours of the sordid street through which she must pass hung about the pavement, having crept out in the heat. The house was bare and narrow. She remembered children sometimes to have brought her moths shut up in matchboxes. As she knocked at the door she felt like a numbed moth which a boy is pushing off its leaf-rest into his box. The door was opened by her mother. She was a woman whose sunken mouth, ruddy cheeks, and quick brown eyes gave her the appearance of a bird which walks about pecking suddenly here and there. As Helena reluctantly entered the mother drew herself up, and immediately relaxed, seeming to peck forwards as she said: 'Well?' 'Well, here we are!' replied the daughter in a matter-of-fact tone. Her mother was inclined to be affectionate, therefore she became proportionately cold. 'So I see,' exclaimed Mrs Verden, tossing her head in a peculiar jocular manner. 'And what sort of a time have you had?' 'Oh, very good,' replied Helena, still more coolly. 'H'm!' Mrs Verden looked keenly at her daughter. She recognized the peculiar sulky, childish look she knew so well, therefore, making an effort, she forbore to question. 'You look well,' she said. Helena smiled ironically. 'And are you ready for your supper?' she asked, in the playful, affectionate manner she had assumed. 'If the supper is ready I will have it,' replied her daughter. 'Well, it's not ready.' The mother shut tight her sunken mouth, and regarded her daughter with playful challenge. 'Because,' she continued, 'I didn't known when you were coming.' She gave a jerk with her arm, like an orator who utters the incontrovertible. 'But,' she added, after a tedious dramatic pause, 'I can soon have it ready. What will you have?' 'The full list of your capacious larder,' replied Helena. Mrs Verden looked at her again, and hesitated. 'Will you have cocoa or lemonade?' she asked, coming to the point curtly. 'Lemonade,' said Helena. Presently Mr Verden entered--a small, white-bearded man with a gentle voice. 'Oh, so you are back, Nellie!' he said, in his quiet, reserved manner. 'As you see, Pater,' she answered. 'H'm!' he murmured, and he moved about at his accounts. Neither of her parents dared to question Helena. They moved about her on tiptoe, stealthily. Yet neither subserved her. Her father's quiet 'H'm!' her mother's curt question, made her draw inwards like a snail which can never retreat far enough from condemning eyes. She made a careless pretence of eating. She was like a child which has done wrong, and will not be punished, but will be left with the humiliating smear of offence upon it. There was a quick, light palpitating of the knocker. Mrs Verden went to the door. 'Has she come?' And there were hasty steps along the passage. Louisa entered. She flung herself upon Helena and kissed her. 'How long have you been in?' she asked, in a voice trembling with affection. 'Ten minutes,' replied Helena. 'Why didn't you send me the time of the train, so that I could come and meet you?' Louisa reproached her. 'Why?' drawled Helena. Louisa looked at her friend without speaking. She was deeply hurt by this sarcasm. As soon as possible Helena went upstairs. Louisa stayed with her that night. On the next day they were going to Cornwall together for their usual midsummer holiday. They were to be accompanied by a third girl--a minor friend of Louisa, a slight acquaintance of Helena. During the night neither of the two friends slept much. Helena made confidences to Louisa, who brooded on these, on the romance and tragedy which enveloped the girl she loved so dearly. Meanwhile, Helena's thoughts went round and round, tethered amid the five days by the sea, pulling forwards as far as the morrow's meeting with Siegmund, but reaching no further. Friday was an intolerable day of silence, broken by little tender advances and playful, affectionate sallies on the part of the mother, all of which were rapidly repulsed. The father said nothing, and avoided his daughter with his eyes. In his humble reserve there was a dignity which made his disapproval far more difficult to bear than the repeated flagrant questionings of the mother's eyes. But the day wore on. Helena pretended to read, and sat thinking. She played her violin a little, mechanically. She went out into the town, and wandered about. At last the night fell. 'Well,' said Helena to her mother, 'I suppose I'd better pack.' 'Haven't you done it?' cried Mrs Verden, exaggerating her surprise. 'You'll never have it done. I'd better help you. What times does the train go?' Helena smiled. 'Ten minutes to ten.' Her mother glanced at the clock. It was only half-past eight. There was ample time for everything. 'Nevertheless, you'd better look sharp,' Mrs Verden said. Helena turned away, weary of this exaggeration. 'I'll come with you to the station,' suggested Mrs Verden. 'I'll see the last of you. We shan't see much of you just now.' Helena turned round in surprise. 'Oh, I wouldn't bother,' she said, fearing to make her disapproval too evident. 'Yes--I will--I'll see you off.' Mrs Verden's animation and indulgence were remarkable. Usually she was curt and undemonstrative. On occasions like these, however, when she was reminded of the ideal relations between mother and daughter, she played the part of the affectionate parent, much to the general distress. Helena lit a candle and went to her bedroom. She quickly packed her dress-basket. As she stood before the mirror to put on her hat, her eyes, gazing heavily, met her heavy eyes in the mirror. She glanced away swiftly as if she had been burned. 'How stupid I look!' she said to herself. 'And Siegmund, how is he, I wonder?' She wondered how Siegmund had passed the day, what had happened to him, how he felt, how he looked. She thought of him protectively. Having strapped her basket, she carried it downstairs. Her mother was ready, with a white lace scarf round her neck. After a short time Louisa came in. She dropped her basket in the passage, and then sank into a chair. 'I don't want to go, Nell,' she said, after a few moments of silence. 'Why, how is that?' asked Helena, not surprised, but condescending, as to a child. 'Oh, I don't know; I'm tired,' said the other petulantly. 'Of course you are. What do you expect, after a day like this?' said Helena. 'And rushing about packing,' exclaimed Mrs Verden, still in an exaggerated manner, this time scolding playfully. 'Oh, I don't know. I don't think I want to go, dear,' repeated Louisa dejectedly. 'Well, it is time we set out,' replied Helena, rising. 'Will you carry the basket or the violin, Mater?' Louisa rose, and with a forlorn expression took up her light luggage. The west opposite the door was smouldering with sunset. Darkness is only smoke that hangs suffocatingly over the low red heat of the sunken day. Such was Helena's longed-for night. The tramcar was crowded. In one corner Olive, the third friend, rose excitedly to greet them. Helena sat mute, while the car swung through the yellow, stale lights of a third-rate street of shops. She heard Olive remarking on her sunburned face and arms; she became aware of the renewed inflammation in her blistered arms; she heard her own curious voice answering. Everything was in a maze. To the beat of the car, while the yellow blur of the shops passed over her eyes, she repeated: 'Two hundred and forty miles--two hundred and forty miles.' _Chapter 25_ Siegmund passed the afternoon in a sort of stupor. At tea-time Beatrice, who had until then kept herself in restraint, gave way to an outburst of angry hysteria. 'When does your engagement at the Comedy Theatre commence?' she had asked him coldly. He knew she was wondering about money. 'Tomorrow--if ever,' he had answered. She was aware that he hated the work. For some reason or other her anger flashed out like sudden lightning at his 'if ever'. 'What do you think you _can_ do?' she cried. 'For I think you have done enough. We can't do as we like altogether--indeed, indeed we cannot. You have had your fling, haven't you? You have had your fling, and you want to keep on. But there's more than one person in the world. Remember that. But there are your children, let me remind you. Whose are they? You talk about shirking the engagement, but who is going to be responsible for your children, do you think?' 'I said nothing about shirking the engagement,' replied Siegmund, very coldly. 'No, there was no need to say. I know what it means. You sit there sulking all day. What do you think _I_ do? I have to see to the children, I have to work and slave, I go on from day to day. I tell you _I'll_ stop, I tell you _I'll_ do as I like. _I'll_ go as well. No, I wouldn't be such a coward, you know that. You know _I_ wouldn't leave little children--to the workhouse or anything. They're my children; they mightn't be yours.' 'There is no need for this,' said Siegmund contemptuously. The pressure in his temples was excruciating, and he felt loathsomely sick. Beatrice's dark eyes flashed with rage. 'Isn't there!' she cried. 'Oh, isn't there? No, there is need for a great deal more. I don't know what you think I am. How much farther do you' think you can go? No, you don't like reminding of us. You sit moping, sulking, because you have to come back to your own children. I wonder how much you think I shall stand? What do you think I am, to put up with it? What do you think I am? Am I a servant to eat out of your hand?' 'Be quiet!' shouted Siegmund. 'Don't I know what you are? Listen to yourself!' Beatrice was suddenly silenced. It was the stillness of white-hot wrath. Even Siegmund was glad to hear her voice again. She spoke low and trembling. 'You coward--you miserable coward! It is I, is it, who am wrong? It is I who am to blame, is it? You miserable thing! I have no doubt you know what I am.' Siegmund looked up at her as her words died off. She looked back at him with dark eyes loathing his cowed, wretched animosity. His eyes were bloodshot and furtive, his mouth was drawn back in a half-grin of hate and misery. She was goading him, in his darkness whither he had withdrawn himself like a sick dog, to die or recover as his strength should prove. She tortured him till his sickness was swallowed by anger, which glared redly at her as he pushed back his chair to rise. He trembled too much, however. His chin dropped again on his chest. Beatrice sat down in her place, hearing footsteps. She was shuddering slightly, and her eyes were fixed. Vera entered with the two children. All three immediately, as if they found themselves confronted by something threatening, stood arrested. Vera tackled the situation. 'Is the table ready to be cleared yet?' she asked in an unpleasant tone. Her father's cup was half emptied. He had come to tea late, after the others had left the table. Evidently he had not finished, but he made no reply, neither did Beatrice. Vera glanced disgustedly at her father. Gwen sidled up to her mother, and tried to break the tension. 'Mam, there was a lady had a dog, and it ran into a shop, and it licked a sheep, Mam, what was hanging up.' Beatrice sat fixed, and paid not the slightest attention. The child looked up at her, waited, then continued softly. 'Mam, there was a lady had a dog--' 'Don't bother!' snapped Vera sharply. The child looked, wondering and resentful, at her sister. Vera was taking the things from the table, snatching them, and thrusting them on the tray. Gwen's eyes rested a moment or two on the bent head of her father; then deliberately she turned again to her mother, and repeated in her softest and most persuasive tones: 'Mam, I saw a dog, and it ran in a butcher's shop and licked a piece of meat. Mam, Mam!' There was no answer. Gwen went forward and put her hand on her mother's knee. 'Mam!' she pleaded timidly. No response. 'Mam!' she whispered. She was desperate. She stood on tiptoe, and pulled with little hands at her mother's breast. 'Mam!' she whispered shrilly. Her mother, with an effort of self-denial, put off her investment of tragedy, and, laying her arm round the child's shoulders, drew her close. Gwen was somewhat reassured, but not satisfied. With an earnest face upturned to the impassive countenance of her mother, she began to whisper, sibilant, coaxing, pleading. 'Mam, there was a lady, she had a dog--' Vera turned sharply to stop this whispering, which was too much for her nerves, but the mother forestalled her. Taking the child in her arms, she averted her face, put her cheek against the baby cheek, and let the tears run freely. Gwen was too much distressed to cry. The tears gathered very slowly in her eyes, and fell without her having moved a muscle in her face. Vera remained in the scullery, weeping tears of rage, and pity, and shame into the towel. The only sound in the room was the occasional sharp breathing of Beatrice. Siegmund sat without the trace of a movement, almost without breathing. His head was ducked low; he dared never lift it, he dared give no sign of his presence. Presently Beatrice put down the child, and went to join Vera in the scullery. There came the low sound of women's talking--an angry, ominous sound. Gwen followed her mother. Her little voice could be heard cautiously asking: 'Mam, is dad cross--is he? What did he do?' 'Don't bother!' snapped Vera. 'You _are_ a little nuisance! Here, take this into the dining-room, and don't drop it.' The child did not obey. She stood looking from her mother to her sister. The latter pushed a dish into her hand. 'Go along,' she said, gently thrusting the child forth. Gwen departed. She hesitated in the kitchen. Her father still remained unmoved. The child wished to go to him, to speak to him, but she was afraid. She crossed the kitchen slowly, hugging the dish; then she came slowly back, hesitating. She sidled into the kitchen; she crept round the table inch by inch, drawing nearer her father. At about a yard from the chair she stopped. He, from under his bent brows, could see her small feet in brown slippers, nearly kicked through at the toes, waiting and moving nervously near him. He pulled himself together, as a man does who watches the surgeon's lancet suspended over his wound. Would the child speak to him? Would she touch him with her small hands? He held his breath, and, it seemed, held his heart from beating. What he should do he did not know. He waited in a daze of suspense. The child shifted from one foot to another. He could just see the edge of her white-frilled drawers. He wanted, above all things, to take her in his arms, to have something against which to hide his face. Yet he was afraid. Often, when all the world was hostile, he had found her full of love, he had hidden his face against her, she had gone to sleep in his arms, she had been like a piece of apple-blossom in his arms. If she should come to him now--his heart halted again in suspense--he knew not what he would do. It would open, perhaps, the tumour of his sickness. He was quivering too fast with suspense to know what he feared, or wanted, or hoped. 'Gwen!' called Vera, wondering why she did not return. 'Gwen!' 'Yes,' answered the child, and slowly Siegmund saw her feet lifted, hesitate, move, then turn away. She had gone. His excitement sank rapidly, and the sickness returned stronger, more horrible and wearying than ever. For a moment it was so bad that he was afraid of losing consciousness. He recovered slightly, pulled himself up, and went upstairs. His fists were tightly clenched, his fingers closed over his thumbs, which were pressed bloodless. He lay down on the bed. For two hours he lay in a dazed condition resembling sleep. At the end of that time the knowledge that he had to meet Helena was actively at work--an activity quite apart from his will or his consciousness, jogging and pulling him awake. At eight o'clock he sat up. A cramped pain in his thumbs made him wonder. He looked at them, and mechanically shut them again under his fingers into the position they sought after two hours of similar constraint. Siegmund opened his hands again, smiling. 'It is said to be the sign of a weak, deceitful character,' he said to himself. His head was peculiarly numbed; at the back it felt heavy, as if weighted with lead. He could think only one detached sentence at intervals. Between-whiles there was a blank, grey sleep or swoon. 'I have got to go and meet Helena at Wimbledon,' he said to himself, and instantly he felt a peculiar joy, as if he had laughed somewhere. 'But I must be getting ready. I can't disappoint her,' said Siegmund. The idea of Helena woke a craving for rest in him. If he should say to her, 'Do not go away from me; come with me somewhere,' then he might lie down somewhere beside her, and she might put her hands on his head. If she could hold his head in her hands--for she had fine, silken hands that adjusted themselves with a rare pressure, wrapping his weakness up in life--then his head would gradually grow healed, and he could rest. This was the one thing that remained for his restoration--that she should with long, unwearying gentleness put him to rest. He longed for it utterly--for the hands and the restfulness of Helena. 'But it is no good,' he said, staring like a drunken man from sleep. 'What time is it?' It was ten minutes to nine. She would be in Wimbledon by 10.10. It was time he should be getting ready. Yet he remained sitting on the bed. 'I am forgetting again,' he said. 'But I do not want to go. What is the good? I have only to tie a mask on for the meeting. It is too much.' He waited and waited; his head dropped forward in a sort of sleep. Suddenly he started awake. The back of his head hurt severely. 'Goodness,' he said, 'it's getting quite dark!' It was twenty minutes to ten. He went bewildered into the bathroom to wash in cold water and bring back his senses. His hands were sore, and his face blazed with sun inflammation. He made himself neat as usual. It was ten minutes to ten. He would be very late. It was practically dark, though these bright days were endless. He wondered whether the children were in bed. It was too late, however, to wonder. Siegmund hurried downstairs and took his hat. He was walking down the path when the door was snatched open behind him, and Vera ran out crying: 'Are you going out? Where are you going?' Siegmund stood still and looked at her. 'She is frightened,' he said to himself, smiling ironically. 'I am only going a walk. I have to go to Wimbledon. I shall not be very long.' 'Wimbledon, at this time!' said Vera sharply, full of suspicion. 'Yes, I am late. I shall be back in an hour.' He was sorry for her. She knew he gave her an honourable promise. 'You need not keep us sitting up,' she said. He did not answer, but hurried to the station. _Chapter 26_ Helena, Louisa, and Olive climbed the steps to go to the South-Western platform. They were laden with dress-baskets, umbrellas, and little packages. Olive and Louisa, at least, were in high spirits. Olive stopped before the indicator. 'The next train for Waterloo,' she announced, in her contralto voice, 'is 10.30. It is now 10.12.' 'We go by the 10.40; it is a better train,' said Helena. Olive turned to her with a heavy-arch manner. 'Very well, dear. There is a parting to be got through, I am told. We sympathize, dear, but we regret it. Starting for a holiday is always a prolonged agony. But I am strong to endure it.' 'You look it. You look as if you could tackle a bull,' cried Louisa, skittish. 'My dear Louisa,' rang out Olive's contralto, 'don't judge me by appearances. You're sure to be taken in. With me it's a case of '"Oh, the gladness of her gladness when she's sad, And the sadness of her sadness when she's glad!"' She looked round to see the effect of this. Helena, expected to say something, chimed in sarcastically: '"They are nothing to her madness--"' 'When she's going for a holiday, dear,' cried Olive. 'Oh, go on being mad,' cried Louisa. 'What, do you like it? I thought you'd be thanking Heaven that sanity was given me in large doses.' 'And holidays in small,' laughed Louisa. 'Good! No, I like your madness, if you call it such. You are always so serious.' '"It's ill talking of halters in the house of the hanged," dear,' boomed Olive. She looked from side to side. She felt triumphant. Helena smiled, acknowledging the sarcasm. 'But,' said Louisa, smiling anxiously, 'I don't quite see it. What's the point?' 'Well, to be explicit, dear,' replied Olive, 'it is hardly safe to accuse me of sadness and seriousness in _this_ trio.' Louisa laughed and shook herself. 'Come to think of it, it isn't,' she said. Helena sighed, and walked down the platform. Her heart was beating thickly; she could hardly breathe. The station lamps hung low, so they made a ceiling of heat and dusty light. She suffocated under them. For a moment she beat with hysteria, feeling, as most of us feel when sick on a hot summer night, as if she must certainly go crazed, smothered under the grey, woolly blanket of heat. Siegmund was late. It was already twenty-five minutes past ten. She went towards the booking-office. At that moment Siegmund came on to the platform. 'Here I am!' he said. 'Where is Louisa?' Helena pointed to the seat without answering. She was looking at Siegmund. He was distracted by the excitement of the moment, so she could not read him. 'Olive is there, too,' she explained. Siegmund stood still, straining his eyes to see the two women seated amidst pale wicker dress-baskets and dark rugs. The stranger made things more complex. 'Does she--your other friend--does she know?' he asked. 'She knows nothing,' replied Helena in a low tone, as she led him forward to be introduced. 'How do you do?' replied Olive in most mellow contralto. 'Behold the dauntless three, with their traps! You will see us forth on our perils?' 'I will, since I may not do more,' replied Siegmund, smiling, continuing: 'And how is Sister Louisa?' 'She is very well, thank you. It is _her_ turn now,' cried Louisa, vindictive, triumphant. There was always a faint animosity in her bearing towards Siegmund. He understood, and smiled at her enmity, for the two were really good friends. 'It is your turn now,' he repeated, smiling, and he turned away. He and Helena walked down the platform. 'How did you find things at home?' he asked her. 'Oh, as usual,' she replied indifferently. 'And you?' 'Just the same,' he answered. He thought for a moment or two, then added: 'The children are happier without me.' 'Oh, you mustn't say that kind of thing protested Helena miserably. 'It's not true.' 'It's all right, dear,' he answered. 'So long as they are happy, it's all right.' After a pause he added: 'But I feel pretty bad tonight.' Helena's hand tightened on his arm. He had reached the end of the platform. There he stood, looking up the line which ran dark under a haze of lights. The high red signal-lamps hung aloft in a scarlet swarm; farther off, like spangles shaking downwards from a burst sky-rocket, was a tangle of brilliant red and green signal-lamps settling. A train with the warm flare on its thick column of smoke came thundering upon the lovers. Dazed, they felt the yellow bar of carriage-windows brush in vibration across their faces. The ground and the air rocked. Then Siegmund turned his head to watch the red and the green lights in the rear of the train swiftly dwindle on the darkness. Still watching the distance where the train had vanished, he said: 'Dear, I want you to promise that, whatever happens to me, you will go on. Remember, dear, two wrongs don't make a right.' Helena swiftly, with a movement of terror, faced him, looking into his eyes. But he was in the shadow, she could not see him. The flat sound of his voice, lacking resonance--the dead, expressionless tone--made her lose her presence of mind. She stared at him blankly. 'What do you mean? What has happened? Something has happened to you. What has happened at home? What are you going to do?' she said sharply. She palpitated with terror. For the first time she felt powerless. Siegmund was beyond her grasp. She was afraid of him. He had shaken away her hold over him. 'There is nothing fresh the matter at home,' he replied wearily. He was to be scourged with emotion again. 'I swear it,' he added. 'And I have not made up my mind. But I can't think of life without you--and life must go on.' 'And I swear,' she said wrathfully, turning at bay, 'that I won't live a day after you.' Siegmund dropped his head. The dead spring of his emotion swelled up scalding hot again. Then he said, almost inaudibly: 'Ah, don't speak to me like that, dear. It is late to be angry. When I have seen your train out tonight there is nothing left.' Helena looked at him, dumb with dismay, stupid, angry. They became aware of the porters shouting loudly that the Waterloo train was to leave from another platform. 'You'd better come,' said Siegmund, and they hurried down towards Louisa and Olive. 'We've got to change platforms,' cried Louisa, running forward and excitedly announcing the news. 'Yes,' replied Helena, pale and impassive. Siegmund picked up the luggage. 'I say,' cried Olive, rushing to catch Helena and Louisa by the arm, 'look--look--both of you--look at that hat!' A lady in front was wearing on her hat a wild and dishevelled array of peacock feathers. 'It's the sight of a lifetime. I wouldn't have you miss it,' added Olive in hoarse _sotto voce_. 'Indeed not!' cried Helena, turning in wild exasperation to look. 'Get a good view of it, Olive. Let's have a good mental impression of it--one that will last.' 'That's right, dear,' said Olive, somewhat nonplussed by this outburst. Siegmund had escaped with the heaviest two bags. They could see him ahead, climbing the steps. Olive readjusted herself from the wildly animated to the calmly ironical. 'After all, dear,' she said, as they hurried in the tail of the crowd, 'it's not half a bad idea to get a man on the job.' Louisa laughed aloud at this vulgar conception of Siegmund. 'Just now, at any rate,' she rejoined. As they reached the platform the train ran in before them. Helena watched anxiously for an empty carriage. There was not one. 'Perhaps it is as well,' she thought. 'We needn't talk. There will be three-quarters of an hour at Waterloo. If we were alone. Olive would make Siegmund talk.' She found a carriage with four people, and hastily took possession. Siegmund followed her with the bags. He swung these on the rack, and then quickly received the rugs, umbrellas, and packages from the other two. These he put on the seats or anywhere, while Helena stowed them. She was very busy for a moment or two; the racks were full. Other people entered; their luggage was troublesome to bestow. When she turned round again she found Louisa and Olive seated, but Siegmund was outside on the platform, and the door was closed. He saw her face move as if she would cry to him. She restrained herself, and immediately called: 'You are coming? Oh, you are coming to Waterloo?' He shook his head. 'I cannot come,' he said. She stood looking blankly at him for some moments, unable to reach the door because of the portmanteau thrust through with umbrellas and sticks, which stood on the floor between the knees of the passengers. She was helpless. Siegmund was repeating deliriously in his mind: 'Oh--go--go--go--when will she go?' He could not bear her piteousness. Her presence made him feel insane. 'Would you like to come to the window?' a man asked of Helena kindly. She smiled suddenly in his direction, without perceiving him. He pulled the portmanteau under his legs, and Helena edged past. She stood by the door, leaning forward with some of her old protective grace, her 'Hawwa' spirit evident. Benign and shielding, she bent forward, looking at Siegmund. But her face was blank with helplessness, with misery of helplessness. She stood looking at Siegmund, saying nothing. His forehead was scorched and swollen, she noticed sorrowfully, and beneath one eye the skin was blistered. His eyes were bloodshot and glazed in a kind of apathy; they filled her with terror. He looked up at her because she wished it. For himself, he could not see her; he could only recoil from her. All he wished was to hide himself in the dark, alone. Yet she wanted him, and so far he yielded. But to go to Waterloo he could not yield. The people in the carriage, made uneasy by this strange farewell, did not speak. There were a few taut moments of silence. No one seems to have strength to interrupt these spaces of irresolute anguish. Finally, the guard's whistle went. Siegmund and Helena clasped hands. A warm flush of love and healthy grief came over Siegmund for the last time. The train began to move, drawing Helena's hand from his. 'Monday,' she whispered--'Monday,' meaning that on Monday she should receive a letter from him. He nodded, turned, hesitated, looked at her, turned and walked away. She remained at the window watching him depart. 'Now, dear, we are manless,' said Olive in a whisper. But her attempt at a joke fell dead. Everybody was silent and uneasy. _Chapter 27_ He hurried down the platform, wincing at every stride, from the memory of Helena's last look of mute, heavy yearning. He gripped his fists till they trembled; his thumbs were again closed under his fingers. Like a picture on a cloth before him he still saw Helena's face, white, rounded, in feature quite mute and expressionless, just made terrible by the heavy eyes, pleading dumbly. He thought of her going on and on, still at the carriage window looking out; all through the night rushing west and west to the land of Isolde. Things began to haunt Siegmund like a delirium. He knew not where he was hurrying. Always in front of him, as on a cloth, was the face of Helena, while somewhere behind the cloth was Cornwall, a far-off lonely place where darkness came on intensely. Sometimes he saw a dim, small phantom in the darkness of Cornwall, very far off. Then the face of Helena, white, inanimate as a mask, with heavy eyes, came between again. He was almost startled to find himself at home, in the porch of his house. The door opened. He remembered to have heard the quick thud of feet. It was Vera. She glanced at him, but said nothing. Instinctively she shrank from him. He passed without noticing her. She stood on the door-mat, fastening the door, striving to find something to say to him. 'You have been over an hour,' she said, still more troubled when she found her voice shaking. She had no idea what alarmed her. 'Ay,' returned Siegmund. He went into the dining-room and dropped into his chair, with his head between his hands. Vera followed him nervously. 'Will you have anything to eat?' she asked. He looked up at the table, as if the supper laid there were curious and incomprehensible. The delirious lifting of his eyelids showed the whole of the dark pupils and the bloodshot white of his eyes. Vera held her breath with fear. He sank his head again and said nothing. Vera sat down and waited. The minutes ticked slowly off. Siegmund neither moved nor spoke. At last the clock struck midnight. She was weary with sleep, querulous with trouble. 'Aren't you going to bed?' she asked. Siegmund heard her without paying any attention. He seemed only to half hear. Vera waited awhile, then repeated plaintively: 'Aren't you going to bed, Father?' Siegmund lifted his head and looked at her. He loathed the idea of having to move. He looked at her confusedly. 'Yes, I'm going,' he said, and his head dropped again. Vera knew he was not asleep. She dared not leave him till he was in his bedroom. Again she sat waiting. 'Father!' she cried at last. He started up, gripping the arms of his chair, trembling. 'Yes, I'm going,' he said. He rose, and went unevenly upstairs. Vera followed him close behind. 'If he reels and falls backwards he will kill me,' she thought, but he did not fall. From habit he went into the bathroom. While trying to brush his teeth he dropped the tooth-brush on to the floor. 'I'll pick it up in the morning,' he said, continuing deliriously: 'I must go to bed--I must go to bed--I am very tired.' He stumbled over the door mat into his own room. Vera was standing behind the unclosed door of her room. She heard the sneck of his lock. She heard the water still running in the bathroom, trickling with the mysterious sound of water at dead of night. Screwing up her courage, she went and turned off the tap. Then she stood again in her own room, to be near the companionable breathing of her sleeping sister, listening. Siegmund undressed quickly. His one thought was to get into bed. 'One must sleep,' he said as he dropped his clothes on the floor. He could not find the way to put on his sleeping-jacket, and that made him pant. Any little thing that roused or thwarted his mechanical action aggravated his sickness till his brain seemed to be bursting. He got things right at last, and was in bed. Immediately he lapsed into a kind of unconsciousness. He would have called it sleep, but such it was not. All the time he could feel his brain working ceaselessly, like a machine running with unslackening rapidity. This went on, interrupted by little flickerings of consciousness, for three or four hours. Each time he had a glimmer of consciousness he wondered if he made any noise. 'What am I doing? What is the matter? Am I unconscious? Do I make any noise? Do I disturb them?' he wondered, and he tried to cast back to find the record of mechanical sense impression. He believed he could remember the sound of inarticulate murmuring in his throat. Immediately he remembered, he could feel his throat producing the sounds. This frightened him. Above all things, he was afraid of disturbing the family. He roused himself to listen. Everything was breathing in silence. As he listened to this silence he relapsed into his sort of sleep. He was awakened finally by his own perspiration. He was terribly hot. The pillow, the bedclothes, his hair, all seemed to be steaming with hot vapour, whilst his body was bathed in sweat. It was coming light. Immediately he shut his eyes again and lay still. He was now conscious, and his brain was irritably active, but his body was a separate thing, a terrible, heavy, hot thing over which he had slight control. Siegmund lay still, with his eyes closed, enduring the exquisite torture of the trickling of drops of sweat. First it would be one gathering and running its irregular, hesitating way into the hollow of his neck. His every nerve thrilled to it, yet he felt he could not move more than to stiffen his throat slightly. While yet the nerves in the track of this drop were quivering, raw with sensitiveness, another drop would start from off the side of his chest, and trickle downwards among the little muscles of his side, to drip on to the bed. It was like the running of a spider over his sensitive, moveless body. Why he did not wipe himself he did not know. He lay still and endured this horrible tickling, which seemed to bite deep into him, rather than make the effort to move, which he loathed to do. The drops ran off his forehead down his temples. Those he did not mind: he was blunt there. But they started again, in tiny, vicious spurts, down the sides of his chest, from under his armpits, down the inner sides of his thighs, till he seemed to have a myriad quivering tracks of a myriad running insects over his hot, wet, highly-sensitized body. His nerves were trembling, one and all, with outrage and vivid suspense. It became unbearable. He felt that, if he endured it another moment, he would cry out, or suffocate and burst. He sat up suddenly, threw away the bedclothes, from which came a puff of hot steam, and began to rub his pyjamas against his sides and his legs. He rubbed madly for a few moments. Then he sighed with relief. He sat on the side of the bed, moving from the hot dampness of the place where he had lain. For a moment he thought he would go to sleep. Then, in an instant his brain seemed to click awake. He was still as loath as ever to move, but his brain was no longer clouded in hot vapour: it was clear. He sat, bowing forward on the side of the bed, his sleeping-jacket open, the dawn stealing into the room, the morning air entering fresh through the wide-flung window-door. He felt a peculiar sense of guilt, of wrongness, in thus having jumped out of bed. It seemed to him as if he ought to have endured the heat of his body, and the infernal trickling of the drops of sweat. But at the thought of it he moved his hands gratefully over his sides, which now were dry, and soft, and smooth; slightly chilled on the surface perhaps, for he felt a sudden tremor of shivering from the warm contact of his hands. Siegmund sat up straight: his body was re-animated. He felt the pillow and the groove where he had lain. It was quite wet and clammy. There was a scent of sweat on the bed, not really unpleasant, but he wanted something fresh and cool. Siegmund sat in the doorway that gave on to the small veranda. The air was beautifully cool. He felt his chest again to make sure it was not clammy. It was smooth as silk. This pleased him very much. He looked out on the night again, and was startled. Somewhere the moon was shining duskily, in a hidden quarter of sky; but straight in front of him, in the northwest, silent lightning was fluttering. He waited breathlessly to see if it were true. Then, again, the pale lightning jumped up into the dome of the fading night. It was like a white bird stirring restlessly on its nest. The night was drenching thinner, greyer. The lightning, like a bird that should have flown before the arm of day, moved on its nest in the boughs of darkness, raised itself, flickered its pale wings rapidly, then sank again, loath to fly. Siegmund watched it with wonder and delight. The day was pushing aside the boughs of darkness, hunting. The poor moon would be caught when the net was flung. Siegmund went out on the balcony to look at it. There it was, like a poor white mouse, a half-moon, crouching on the mound of its course. It would run nimbly over to the western slope, then it would be caught in the net, and the sun would laugh, like a great yellow cat, as it stalked behind playing with its prey, flashing out its bright paws. The moon, before making its last run, lay crouched, palpitating. The sun crept forth, laughing to itself as it saw its prey could not escape. The lightning, however, leaped low off the nest like a bird decided to go, and flew away. Siegmund no longer saw it opening and shutting its wings in hesitation amid the disturbance of the dawn. Instead there came a flush, the white lightning gone. The brief pink butterflies of sunrise and sunset rose up from the mown fields of darkness, and fluttered low in a cloud. Even in the west they flew in a narrow, rosy swarm. They separated, thinned, rising higher. Some, flying up, became golden. Some flew rosy gold across the moon, the mouse-moon motionless with fear. Soon the pink butterflies had gone, leaving a scarlet stretch like a field of poppies in the fens. As a wind, the light of day blew in from the east, puff after puff filling with whiteness the space which had been the night. Siegmund sat watching the last morning blowing in across the mown darkness, till the whole field of the world was exposed, till the moon was like a dead mouse which floats on water. When the few birds had called in the August morning, when the cocks had finished their crowing, when the minute sounds of the early day were astir, Siegmund shivered disconsolate. He felt tired again, yet he knew he could not sleep. The bed was repulsive to him. He sat in his chair at the open door, moving uneasily. What should have been sleep was an ache and a restlessness. He turned and twisted in his chair. 'Where is Helena?' he asked himself, and he looked out on the morning. Everything out of doors was unreal, like a show, like a peepshow. Helena was an actress somewhere in the brightness of this view. He alone was out of the piece. He sighed petulantly, pressing back his shoulders as if they ached. His arms, too, ached with irritation, while his head seemed to be hissing with angry irritability. For a long time he sat with clenched teeth, merely holding himself in check. In his present state of irritability everything that occurred to his mind stirred him with dislike or disgust. Helena, music, the pleasant company of friends, the sunshine of the country, each, as it offered itself to his thoughts, was met by an angry contempt, was rejected scornfully. As nothing could please or distract him, the only thing that remained was to support the discord. He felt as if he were a limb out of joint from the body of life: there occurred to his imagination a disjointed finger, swollen and discoloured, racked with pains. The question was, How should he reset himself into joint? The body of life for him meant Beatrice, his children, Helena, the Comic Opera, his friends of the orchestra. How could he set himself again into joint with these? It was impossible. Towards his family he would henceforward have to bear himself with humility. That was a cynicism. He would have to leave Helena, which he could not do. He would have to play strenuously, night after night, the music of _The Saucy Little Switzer_ which was absurd. In fine, it was all absurd and impossible. Very well, then, that being so, what remained possible? Why, to depart. 'If thine hand offend thee, cut it off.' He could cut himself off from life. It was plain and straightforward. But Beatrice, his young children, without him! He was bound by an agreement which there was no discrediting to provide for them. Very well, he must provide for them. And then what? Humiliation at home, Helena forsaken, musical comedy night after night. That was insufferable--impossible! Like a man tangled up in a rope, he was not strong enough to free himself. He could not break with Helena and return to a degrading life at home; he could not leave his children and go to Helena. Very well, it was impossible! Then there remained only one door which he could open in this prison corridor of life. Siegmund looked round the room. He could get his razor, or he could hang himself. He had thought of the two ways before. Yet now he was unprovided. His portmanteau stood at the foot of the bed, its straps flung loose. A portmanteau strap would do. Then it should be a portmanteau strap! 'Very well!' said Siegmund, 'it is finally settled. I had better write to Helena, and tell her, and say to her she must go on. I'd better tell her.' He sat for a long time with his notebook and a pencil, but he wrote nothing. At last he gave up. 'Perhaps it is just as well,' he said to himself. 'She said she would come with me--perhaps that is just as well. She will go to the sea. When she knows, the sea will take her. She must know.' He took a card, bearing her name and her Cornwall address, from his pocket-book, and laid it on the dressing-table. 'She will come with me,' he said to himself, and his heart rose with elation. 'That is a cowardice,' he added, looking doubtfully at the card, as if wondering whether to destroy it. 'It is in the hands of God. Beatrice may or may not send word to her at Tintagel. It is in the hands of God,' he concluded. Then he sat down again. '"But for that fear of something after-death,"' he quoted to himself. 'It is not fear,' he said. 'The act itself will be horrible and fearsome, but the after-death--it's no more than struggling awake when you're sick with a fright of dreams. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on."' Siegmund sat thinking of the after-death, which to him seemed so wonderfully comforting, full of rest, and reassurance, and renewal. He experienced no mystical ecstasies. He was sure of a wonderful kindness in death, a kindness which really reached right through life, though here he could not avail himself of it. Siegmund had always inwardly held faith that the heart of life beat kindly towards him. When he was cynical and sulky he knew that in reality it was only a waywardness of his. The heart of life is implacable in its kindness. It may not be moved to fluttering of pity; it swings on uninterrupted by cries of anguish or of hate. Siegmund was thankful for this unfaltering sternness of life. There was no futile hesitation between doom and pity. Therefore, he could submit and have faith. If each man by his crying could swerve the slow, sheer universe, what a doom of guilt he might gain. If Life could swerve from its orbit for pity, what terror of vacillation; and who would wish to bear the responsibility of the deflection? Siegmund thanked God that life was pitiless, strong enough to take his treasures out of his hands, and to thrust him out of the room; otherwise, how could he go with any faith to death; otherwise, he would have felt the helpless disillusion of a youth who finds his infallible parents weaker than himself. 'I know the heart of life is kind,' said Siegmund, 'because I feel it. Otherwise I would live in defiance. But Life is greater than me or anybody. We suffer, and we don't know why, often. Life doesn't explain. But I can keep faith in it, as a dog has faith in his master. After all, Life is as kind to me as I am to my dog. I have, proportionally, as much zest. And my purpose towards my dog is good. I need not despair of Life.' It occurred to Siegmund that he was meriting the old gibe of the atheists. He was shirking the responsibility of himself, turning it over to an imaginary god. 'Well,' he said, 'I can't help it. I do not feel altogether self-responsible.' The morning had waxed during these investigations. Siegmund had been vaguely aware of the rousing of the house. He was finally startled into a consciousness of the immediate present by the calling of Vera at his door. 'There are two letters for you. Father.' He looked about him in bewilderment; the hours had passed in a trance, and he had no idea of his time or place. 'Oh, all right,' he said, too much dazed to know what it meant. He heard his daughter going downstairs. Then swiftly returned over him the throbbing ache of his head and his arms, the discordant jarring of his body. 'What made her bring me the letters?' he asked himself. It was a very unusual attention. His heart replied, very sullen and shameful: 'She wanted to know; she wanted to make sure I was all right.' Siegmund forgot all his speculations on a divine benevolence. The discord of his immediate situation overcame every harmony. He did not fetch in the letters. 'Is it so late?' he said. 'Is there no more time for me?' He went to look at his watch. It was a quarter to nine. As he walked across the room he trembled, and a sickness made his bones feel rotten. He sat down on the bed. 'What am I going to do?' he asked himself. By this time he was shuddering rapidly. A peculiar feeling, as if his belly were turned into nothingness, made him want to press his fists into his abdomen. He remained shuddering drunkenly, like a drunken man who is sick, incapable of thought or action. A second knock came at the door. He started with a jolt. 'Here is your shaving-water,' said Beatrice in cold tones. 'It's half past nine.' 'All right,' said Siegmund, rising from the bed, bewildered. 'And what time shall you expect dinner?' asked Beatrice. She was still contemptuous. 'Any time. I'm not going out,' he answered. He was surprised to hear the ordinary cool tone of his own voice, for he was shuddering uncontrollably, and was almost sobbing. In a shaking, bewildered, disordered condition he set about fulfilling his purpose. He was hardly conscious of anything he did; try as he would, he could not keep his hands steady in the violent spasms of shuddering, nor could he call his mind to think. He was one shuddering turmoil. Yet he performed his purpose methodically and exactly. In every particular he was thorough, as if he were the servant of some stern will. It was a mesmeric performance, in which the agent trembled with convulsive sickness. _Chapter 28_ Siegmund's lying late in bed made Beatrice very angry. The later it became, the more wrathful she grew. At half past nine she had taken up his shaving-water. Then she proceeded to tidy the dining-room, leaving the breakfast spread in the kitchen. Vera and Frank were gone up to town; they would both be home for dinner at two o'clock. Marjory was despatched on an errand, taking Gwen with her. The children had no need to return home immediately, therefore it was highly probable they would play in the field or in the lane for an hour or two. Beatrice was alone downstairs. It was a hot, still morning, when everything outdoors shone brightly, and all indoors was dusked with coolness and colour. But Beatrice was angry. She moved rapidly and determinedly about the dining-room, thrusting old newspapers and magazines between the cupboard and the wall, throwing the litter in the grate, which was clear, Friday having been charwoman's day, passing swiftly, lightly over the front of the furniture with the duster. It was Saturday, when she did not spend much time over the work. In the afternoon she was going out with Vera. That was not, however, what occupied her mind as she brushed aside her work. She had determined to have a settlement with Siegmund, as to how matters should continue. She was going to have no more of the past three years' life; things had come to a crisis, and there must be an alteration. Beatrice was going to do battle, therefore she flew at her work, thus stirring herself up to a proper heat of blood. All the time, as she thrust things out of sight, or straightened a cover, she listened for Siegmund to come downstairs. He did not come, so her anger waxed. 'He can lie skulking in bed!' she said to herself. 'Here I've been up since seven, broiling at it. I should think he's pitying himself. He ought to have something else to do. He ought to have to go out to work every morning, like another man, as his son has to do. He has had too little work. He has had too much his own way. But it's come to a stop now. I'll servant-housekeeper him no longer.' Beatrice went to clean the step of the front door. She clanged the bucket loudly, every minute becoming more and more angry. That piece of work finished, she went into the kitchen. It was twenty past ten. Her wrath was at ignition point. She cleared all the things from the table and washed them up. As she was so doing, her anger, having reached full intensity without bursting into flame, began to dissipate in uneasiness. She tried to imagine what Siegmund would do and say to her. As she was wiping a cup, she dropped it, and the smash so unnerved her that her hands trembled almost too much to finish drying the things and putting them away. At last it was done. Her next piece of work was to make the beds. She took her pail and went upstairs. Her heart was beating so heavily in her throat that she had to stop on the landing to recover breath. She dreaded the combat with him. Suddenly controlling herself, she said loudly at Siegmund's door, her voice coldly hostile: 'Aren't you going to get up?' There was not the faintest sound in the house. Beatrice stood in the gloom of the landing, her heart thudding in her ears. 'It's after half past ten--aren't you going to get up?' she called. She waited again. Two letters lay unopened on a small table. Suddenly she put down her pail and went into the bathroom. The pot of shaving-water stood untouched on the shelf, just as she had left it. She returned and knocked swiftly at her husband's door, not speaking. She waited, then she knocked again, loudly, a long time. Something in the sound of her knocking made her afraid to try again. The noise was dull and thudding: it did not resound through the house with a natural ring, so she thought. She ran downstairs in terror, fled out into the front garden, and there looked up at his room. The window-door was open--everything seemed quiet. Beatrice stood vacillating. She picked up a few tiny pebbles and flung them in a handful at his door. Some spattered on the panes sharply; some dropped dully in the room. One clinked on the wash-hand bowl. There was no response. Beatrice was terribly excited. She ran, with her black eyes blazing, and wisps of her black hair flying about her thin temples, out on to the road. By a mercy she saw the window-cleaner just pushing his ladder out of the passage of a house a little farther down the road. She hurried to him. 'Will you come and see if there's anything wrong with my husband?' she asked wildly. 'Why, mum?' answered the window-cleaner, who knew her, and was humbly familiar. 'Is he taken bad or something? Yes, I'll come.' He was a tall thin man with a brown beard. His clothes were all so loose, his trousers so baggy, that he gave one the impression his limbs must be bone, and his body a skeleton. He pushed at his ladders with a will. 'Where is he, Mum?' he asked officiously, as they slowed down at the side passage. 'He's in his bedroom, and I can't get an answer from him.' 'Then I s'll want a ladder,' said the window-cleaner, proceeding to lift one off his trolley. He was in a very great bustle. He knew which was Siegmund's room: he had often seen Siegmund rise from some music he was studying and leave the drawing-room when the window-cleaning began, and afterwards he had found him in the small front bedroom. He also knew there were matrimonial troubles: Beatrice was not reserved. 'Is it the least of the front rooms he's in?' asked the window-cleaner. 'Yes, over the porch,' replied Beatrice. The man bustled with his ladder. 'It's easy enough,' he said. 'The door's open, and we're soon on the balcony.' He set the ladder securely. Beatrice cursed him for a slow, officious fool. He tested the ladder, to see it was safe, then he cautiously clambered up. At the top he stood leaning sideways, bending over the ladder to peer into the room. He could see all sorts of things, for he was frightened. 'I say there!' he called loudly. Beatrice stood below in horrible suspense. 'Go in!' she cried. 'Go in! Is he there?' The man stepped very cautiously with one foot on to the balcony, and peered forward. But the glass door reflected into his eyes. He followed slowly with the other foot, and crept forward, ready at any moment to take flight. 'Hie, hie!' he suddenly cried in terror, and he drew back. Beatrice was opening her mouth to scream, when the window-cleaner exclaimed weakly, as if dubious: 'I believe 'e's 'anged 'imself from the door-'ooks!' 'No!' cried Beatrice. 'No, no, no!' 'I believe 'e 'as!' repeated the man. 'Go in and see if he's dead!' cried Beatrice. The man remained in the doorway, peering fixedly. 'I believe he is,' he said doubtfully. 'No--go and see!' screamed Beatrice. The man went into the room, trembling, hesitating. He approached the body as if fascinated. Shivering, he took it round the loins and tried to lift it down. It was too heavy. 'I know!' he said to himself, once more bustling now he had something to do. He took his clasp-knife from his pocket, jammed the body between himself and the door so that it should not drop, and began to saw his way through the leathern strap. It gave. He started, and clutched the body, dropping his knife. Beatrice, below in the garden, hearing the scuffle and the clatter, began to scream in hysteria. The man hauled the body of Siegmund, with much difficulty, on to the bed, and with trembling fingers tried to unloose the buckle in which the strap ran. It was bedded in Siegmund's neck. The window-cleaner tugged at it frantically, till he got it loose. Then he looked at Siegmund. The dead man lay on the bed with swollen, discoloured face, with his sleeping-jacket pushed up in a bunch under his armpits, leaving his side naked. Beatrice was screaming below. The window-cleaner, quite unnerved, ran from the room and scrambled down the ladder. Siegmund lay heaped on the bed, his sleeping-suit twisted and bunched up about him, his face hardly recognizable. _Chapter 29_ Helena was dozing down in the cove at Tintagel. She and Louisa and Olive lay on the cool sands in the shadow, and steeped themselves in rest, in a cool, sea-fragrant tranquillity. The journey down had been very tedious. After waiting for half an hour in the midnight turmoil of an August Friday in Waterloo station, they had seized an empty carriage, only to be followed by five north-countrymen, all of whom were affected by whisky. Olive, Helena, Louisa, occupied three corners of the carriage. The men were distributed between them. The three women were not alarmed. Their tipsy travelling companions promised to be tiresome, but they had a frank honesty of manner that placed them beyond suspicion. The train drew out westward. Helena began to count the miles that separated her from Siegmund. The north-countrymen began to be jolly: they talked loudly in their uncouth English; they sang the music-hall songs of the day; they furtively drank whisky. Through all this they were polite to the girls. As much could hardly be said in return of Olive and Louisa. They leaned forward whispering one to another. They sat back in their seats laughing, hiding their laughter by turning their backs on the men, who were a trifle disconcerted by this amusement. The train spun on and on. Little homely clusters of lamps, suggesting the quiet of country life, turned slowly round through the darkness. The men dropped into a doze. Olive put a handkerchief over her face and went to sleep. Louisa gradually nodded and jerked into slumber. Helena sat weariedly and watched the rolling of the sleeping travellers and the dull blank of the night sheering off outside. Neither the men nor the women looked well asleep. They lurched and nodded stupidly. She thought of Bazarof in _Fathers and Sons_, endorsing his opinion on the appearance of sleepers: all but Siegmund. Was Siegmund asleep? She imagined him breathing regularly on the pillows; she could see the under arch of his eyebrows, the fine shape of his nostrils, the curve of his lips, as she bent in fancy over his face. The dawn came slowly. It was rather cold. Olive wrapped herself in rugs and went to sleep again. Helena shivered, and stared out of the window. There appeared a wanness in the night, and Helena felt inexpressibly dreary. A rosiness spread out far away. It was like a flock of flamingoes hovering over a dark lake. The world vibrated as the sun came up. Helena waked the tipsy men at Exeter, having heard them say that there they must change. Then she walked the platform, very jaded. The train rushed on again. It was a most, most wearisome journey. The fields were very flowery, the morning was very bright, but what were these to her? She wanted dimness, sleep, forgetfulness. At eight o'clock, breakfast-time, the 'dauntless three' were driving in a waggonette amid blazing, breathless sunshine, over country naked of shelter, ungracious and harsh. 'Why am I doing this?' Helena asked herself. The three friends, washed, dressed, and breakfasted. It was too hot to rest in the house, so they trudged to the coast, silently, each feeling in an ill humour. When Helena was really rested, she took great pleasure in Tintagel. In the first place, she found that the cove was exactly, almost identically the same as the Walhalla scene in _Walküre_; in the second place, _Tristan_ was here, in the tragic country filled with the flowers of a late Cornish summer, an everlasting reality; in the third place, it was a sea of marvellous, portentous sunsets, of sweet morning baths, of pools blossomed with life, of terrible suave swishing of foam which suggested the Anadyomene. In sun it was the enchanted land of divided lovers. Helena for ever hummed fragments of _Tristan_. As she stood on the rocks she sang, in her little, half-articulate way, bits of Isolde's love, bits of Tristan's anguish, to Siegmund. She had not received her letter on Sunday. That had not very much disquieted her, though she was disappointed. On Monday she was miserable because of Siegmund's silence, but there was so much of enchantment in Tintagel, and Olive and Louisa were in such high spirits, that she forgot most whiles. On Monday night, towards two o'clock, there came a violent storm of thunder and lightning. Louisa started up in bed at the first clap, waking Helena. The room palpitated with white light for two seconds; the mirror on the dressing-table glared supernaturally. Louisa clutched her friend. All was dark again, the thunder clapping directly. 'There, wasn't that lovely!' cried Louisa, speaking of the lightning. 'Oo, wasn't it magnificent!--glorious!' The door clicked and opened: Olive entered in her long white nightgown. She hurried to the bed. 'I say, dear!' she exclaimed, 'may I come into the fold? I prefer the shelter of your company, dear, during this little lot.' 'Don't you like it?' cried Louisa. 'I think it's _lovely_--lovely!' There came another slash of lightning. The night seemed to open and shut. It was a pallid vision of a ghost-world between the clanging shutters of darkness. Louisa and Olive clung to each other spasmodically. 'There!' exclaimed the former, breathless. 'That was fine! Helena, did you see that?' She clasped ecstatically the hand of her friend, who was lying down. Helena's answer was extinguished by the burst of thunder. 'There's no accounting for tastes,' said Olive, taking a place in the bed. 'I can't say I'm struck on lightning. What about you, Helena?' 'I'm not struck yet,' replied Helena, with a sarcastic attempt at a jest. 'Thank you, dear,' said Olive; 'you do me the honour of catching hold.' Helena laughed ironically. 'Catching what?' asked Louisa, mystified. 'Why, dear,' answered Olive, heavily condescending to explain, 'I offered Helena the handle of a pun, and she took it. What a flash! You know, it's not that I'm afraid....' The rest of her speech was overwhelmed in thunder. Helena lay on the edge of the bed, listening to the ecstatics of one friend and to the impertinences of the other. In spite of her ironical feeling, the thunder impressed her with a sense of fatality. The night opened, revealing a ghostly landscape, instantly to shut again with blackness. Then the thunder crashed. Helena felt as if some secret were being disclosed too swiftly and violently for her to understand. The thunder exclaimed horribly on the matter. She was sure something had happened. Gradually the storm, drew away. The rain came down with a rush, persisted with a bruising sound upon the earth and the leaves. 'What a deluge!' exclaimed Louisa. No one answered her. Olive was falling asleep, and Helena was in no mood to reply. Louisa, disconsolate, lay looking at the black window, nursing a grievance, until she, too, drifted into sleep. Helena was awake; the storm had left her with a settled sense of calamity. She felt bruised. The sound of the heavy rain bruising the ground outside represented her feeling; she could not get rid of the bruised sense of disaster. She lay wondering what it was, why Siegmund had not written, what could have happened to him. She imagined all of them terrible, and endued with grandeur, for she had kinship with Hedda Gabler. 'But no,' she said to herself, 'it is impossible anything should have happened to him--I should have known. I should have known the moment his spirit left his body; he would have come to me. But I slept without dreams last night, and today I am sure there has been no crisis. It is impossible it should have happened to him: I should have known.' She was very certain that in event of Siegmund's death, she would have received intelligence. She began to consider all the causes which might arise to prevent his writing immediately to her. 'Nevertheless,' she said at last, 'if I don't hear tomorrow I will go and see.' She had written to him on Monday. If she should receive no answer by Wednesday morning she would return to London. As she was deciding this she went to sleep. The next day passed without news. Helena was in a state of distress. Her wistfulness touched the other two women very keenly. Louisa waited upon her, was very tender and solicitous. Olive, who was becoming painful by reason of her unsatisfied curiosity, had to be told in part of the state of affairs. Helena looked up a train. She was quite sure by this time that something fatal awaited her. The next morning she bade her friends a temporary good-bye, saying she would return in the evening. Immediately the train had gone, Louisa rushed into the little waiting-room of the station and wept. Olive shed tears for sympathy and self-pity. She pitied herself that she should be let in for so dismal a holiday. Louisa suddenly stopped crying and sat up: 'Oh, I know I'm a pig, dear, am I not?' she exclaimed. 'Spoiling your holiday. But I couldn't help it, dear, indeed I could not.' 'My dear Lou!' cried Olive in tragic contralto. 'Don't refrain for my sake. The bargain's made; we can't help what's in the bundle.' The two unhappy women trudged the long miles back from the station to their lodging. Helena sat in the swinging express revolving the same thought like a prayer-wheel. It would be difficult to think of anything more trying than thus sitting motionless in the train, which itself is throbbing and bursting its heart with anxiety, while one waits hour after hour for the blow which falls nearer as the distance lessens. All the time Helena's heart and her consciousness were with Siegmund in London, for she believed he was ill and needed her. 'Promise me,' she had said, 'if ever I were sick and wanted you, you would come to me.' 'I would come to you from hell!' Siegmund had replied. 'And if you were ill--you would let me come to you?' she had added. 'I promise,' he answered. Now Helena believed he was ill, perhaps very ill, perhaps she only could be of any avail. The miles of distance were like hot bars of iron across her breast, and against them it was impossible to strive. The train did what it could. That day remains as a smear in the record of Helena's life. In it there is no spacing of hours, no lettering of experience, merely a smear of suspense. Towards six o'clock she alighted, at Surbiton station, deciding that this would be the quickest way of getting to Wimbledon. She paced the platform slowly, as if resigned, but her heart was crying out at the great injustice of delay. Presently the local train came in. She had planned to buy a local paper at Wimbledon, and if from that source she could learn nothing, she would go on to his house and inquire. She had prearranged everything minutely. After turning the newspaper several times she found what she sought. 'The funeral took place, at two o'clock today at Kingston Cemetery, of ----. Deceased was a professor of music, and had just returned from a holiday on the South Coast....' The paragraph, in a bald twelve lines, told her everything. 'Jury returned a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity. Sympathy was expressed for the widow and children.' Helena stood still on the station for some time, looking at the print. Then she dropped the paper and wandered into the town, not knowing where she was going. 'That was what I got,' she said, months afterwards; 'and it was like a brick, it was like a brick.' She wandered on and on, until suddenly she found herself in the grassy lane with only a wire fence bounding her from the open fields on either side, beyond which fields, on the left, she could see Siegmund's house standing florid by the road, catching the western sunlight. Then she stopped, realizing where she had come. For some time she stood looking at the house. It was no use her going there; it was of no use her going anywhere; the whole wide world was opened, but in it she had no destination, and there was no direction for her to take. As if marooned in the world, she stood desolate, looking from the house of Siegmund over the fields and the hills. Siegmund was gone; why had he not taken her with him? The evening was drawing on; it was nearly half past seven when Helena looked at her watch, remembering Louisa, who would be waiting for her to return to Cornwall. 'I must either go to her, or wire to her. She will be in a fever of suspense,' said Helena to herself, and straightway she hurried to catch a tramcar to return to the station. She arrived there at a quarter to eight; there was no train down to Tintagel that night. Therefore she wired the news: 'Siegmund dead. No train tonight. Am going home.' * * * * * This done, she took her ticket and sat down to wait. By the strength of her will everything she did was reasonable and accurate. But her mind was chaotic. 'It was like a brick,' she reiterated, and that brutal simile was the only one she could find, months afterwards, to describe her condition. She felt as if something had crashed into her brain, stunning and maiming her. As she knocked at the door of home she was apparently quite calm. Her mother opened to her. 'What, are you alone?' cried Mrs. Verden. 'Yes. Louisa did not come up,' replied Helena, passing into the dining-room. As if by instinct she glanced on the mantelpiece to see if there was a letter. There was a newspaper cutting. She went forward and took it. It was from one of the London papers. 'Inquest was held today upon the body of ----.' Helena read it, read it again, folded it up and put it in her purse. Her mother stood watching her, consumed with distress and anxiety. 'How did you get to know?' she asked. 'I went to Wimbledon and bought a local paper,' replied the daughter, in her muted, toneless voice. 'Did you go to the house?' asked the mother sharply. 'No,' replied Helena. 'I was wondering whether to send you that paper,' said her mother hesitatingly. Helena did not answer her. She wandered about the house mechanically, looking for something. Her mother followed her, trying very gently to help her. For some time Helena sat at table in the dining-room staring before her. Her parents moved restlessly in silence, trying not to irritate her by watching her, praying for something to change the fixity of her look. They acknowledged themselves helpless; like children, they felt powerless and forlorn, and were very quiet. 'Won't you go to rest, Nellie?' asked the father at last. He was an unobtrusive, obscure man, whose sympathy was very delicate, whose ordinary attitude was one of gentle irony. 'Won't you go to rest, Nellie?' he repeated. Helena shivered slightly. 'Do, my dear,' her mother pleaded. 'Let me take you to bed.' Helena rose. She had a great horror of being fussed or petted, but this night she went dully upstairs, and let her mother help her to undress. When she was in bed the mother stood for some moments looking at her, yearning to beseech her daughter to pray to God; but she dared not. Helena moved with a wild impatience under her mother's gaze. 'Shall I leave you the candle?' said Mrs Verden. 'No, blow it out,' replied the daughter. The mother did so, and immediately left the room, going downstairs to her husband. As she entered the dining-room he glanced up timidly at her. She was a tall, erect woman. Her brown eyes, usually so swift and searching, were haggard with tears that did not fall. He bowed down, obliterating himself. His hands were tightly clasped. 'Will she be all right if you leave her?' he asked. 'We must listen,' replied the mother abruptly. The parents sat silent in their customary places. Presently Mrs. Verden cleared the supper table, sweeping together a few crumbs from the floor in the place where Helena had sat, carefully putting her pieces of broken bread under the loaf to keep moist. Then she sat down again. One could see she was keenly alert to every sound. The father had his hand to his head; he was thinking and praying. Mrs. Verden suddenly rose, took a box of matches from the mantelpiece, and hurrying her stately, heavy tread, went upstairs. Her husband followed in much trepidation, hovering near the door of his daughter's room. The mother tremblingly lit the candle. Helena's aspect distressed and alarmed her. The girl's face was masked as if in sleep, but occasionally it was crossed by a vivid expression of fear or horror. Her wide eyes showed the active insanity of her brain. From time to time she uttered strange, inarticulate sounds. Her mother held her hands and soothed her. Although she was hardly aware of the mother's presence, Helena was more tranquil. The father went downstairs and turned out the light. He brought his wife a large shawl, which he put on the bed-rail, and silently left the room. Then he went and kneeled down by his own bedside, and prayed. Mrs Verden watched her daughter's delirium, and all the time, in a kind of mental chant, invoked the help of God. Once or twice the girl came to herself, drew away her hand on recognizing the situation, and turned from her mother, who patiently waited until, upon relapse, she could soothe her daughter again. Helena was glad of her mother's presence, but she could not bear to be looked at. Towards morning the girl fell naturally asleep. The mother regarded her closely, lightly touched her forehead with her lips, and went away, having blown out the candle. She found her husband kneeling in his nightshirt by the bed. He muttered a few swift syllables, and looked up as she entered. 'She is asleep,' whispered the wife hoarsely. 'Is it a--a natural sleep?' hesitated the husband. 'Yes. I think it is. I think she will be all right.' 'Thank God!' whispered the father, almost inaudibly. He held his wife's hand as she lay by his side. He was the comforter. She felt as if now she might cry and take comfort and sleep. He, the quiet, obliterated man, held her hand, taking the responsibility upon himself. _Chapter 30_ Beatrice was careful not to let the blow of Siegmund's death fall with full impact upon her. As it were, she dodged it. She was afraid to meet the accusation of the dead Siegmund, with the sacred jury of memories. When the event summoned her to stand before the bench of her own soul's understanding, she fled, leaving the verdict upon herself eternally suspended. When the neighbours had come, alarmed by her screaming, she had allowed herself to be taken away from her own house into the home of a neighbour. There the children were brought to her. There she wept, and stared wildly about, as if by instinct seeking to cover her mind with confusion. The good neighbour controlled matters in Siegmund's house, sending for the police, helping to lay out the dead body. Before Vera and Frank came home, and before Beatrice returned to her own place, the bedroom of Siegmund was locked. Beatrice avoided seeing the body of her husband; she gave him one swift glance, blinded by excitement; she never saw him after his death. She was equally careful to avoid thinking of him. Whenever her thoughts wandered towards a consideration of how he must have felt, what his inner life must have been, during the past six years, she felt herself dilate with terror, and she hastened to invoke protection. 'The children!' she said to herself--'the children. I must live for the children; I must think for the children.' This she did, and with much success. All her tears and her wildness rose from terror and dismay rather than from grief. She managed to fend back a grief that would probably have broken her. Vera was too practical-minded, she had too severe a notion of what ought to be and what ought not, ever to put herself in her father's place and try to understand him. She concerned herself with judging him sorrowfully, exonerating him in part because Helena, that other, was so much more to blame. Frank, as a sentimentalist, wept over the situation, not over the personae. The children were acutely distressed by the harassing behaviour of the elders, and longed for a restoration of equanimity. By common consent no word was spoken of Siegmund. As soon as possible after the funeral Beatrice moved from South London to Harrow. The memory of Siegmund began to fade rapidly. Beatrice had had all her life a fancy for a more open, public form of living than that of a domestic circle. She liked strangers about the house; they stimulated her agreeably. Therefore, nine months after the death of her husband, she determined to carry out the scheme of her heart, and take in boarders. She came of a well-to-do family, with whom she had been in disgrace owing to her early romantic but degrading marriage with a young lad who had neither income nor profession. In the tragic, but also sordid, event of his death, the Waltons returned again to the aid of Beatrice. They came hesitatingly, and kept their gloves on. They inquired what she intended to do. She spoke highly and hopefully of her future boarding-house. They found her a couple of hundred pounds, glad to salve their consciences so cheaply. Siegmund's father, a winsome old man with a heart of young gold, was always ready further to diminish his diminished income for the sake of his grandchildren. So Beatrice was set up in a fairly large house in Highgate, was equipped with two maids, and gentlemen were invited to come and board in her house. It was a huge adventure, wherein Beatrice was delighted. Vera was excited and interested; Frank was excited, but doubtful and grudging; the children were excited, elated, wondering. The world was big with promise. Three gentlemen came, before a month was out, to Beatrice's establishment. She hoped shortly to get a fourth or a fifth. Her plan was to play hostess, and thus bestow on her boarders the inestimable blessing of family life. Breakfast was at eight-thirty, and everyone attended. Vera sat opposite Beatrice, Frank sat on the maternal right hand; Mr MacWhirter, who was _superior_, sat on the left hand; next him sat Mr Allport, whose opposite was Mr Holiday. All were young men of less than thirty years. Mr MacWhirter was tall, fair, and stoutish; he was very quietly spoken, was humorous and amiable, yet extraordinarily learned. He never, by any chance, gave himself away, maintaining always an absolute reserve amid all his amiability. Therefore Frank would have done anything to win his esteem, while Beatrice was deferential to him. Mr Allport was tall and broad, and thin as a door; he had also a remarkably small chin. He was naïve, inclined to suffer in the first pangs of disillusionment; nevertheless, he was waywardly humorous, sometimes wistful, sometimes petulant, always gallant. Therefore Vera liked him, whilst Beatrice mothered him. Mr Holiday was short, very stout, very ruddy, with black hair. He had a disagreeable voice, was vulgar in the grain, but officiously helpful if appeal were made to him. Therefore Frank hated him. Vera liked his handsome, lusty appearance, but resented bitterly his behaviour. Beatrice was proud of the superior and skilful way in which she handled him, clipping him into shape without hurting him. One evening in July, eleven months after the burial of Siegmund, Beatrice went into the dining-room and found Mr Allport sitting with his elbow on the window-sill, looking out on the garden. It was half-past seven. The red rents between the foliage of the trees showed the sun was setting; a fragrance of evening-scented stocks filtered into the room through the open window; towards the south the moon was budding out of the twilight. 'What, you here all alone!' exclaimed Beatrice, who had just come from putting the children to bed. 'I thought you had gone out.' 'No--o! What's the use,' replied Mr Allport, turning to look at his landlady, 'of going out? There's nowhere to go.' 'Oh, come! There's the Heath, and the City--and you must join a tennis club. Now I know just the thing--the club to which Vera belongs.' 'Ah, yes! You go down to the City--but there's nothing there--what I mean to say--you want a pal--and even then--well'--he drawled the word--'we-ell, it's merely escaping from yourself--killing time.' 'Oh, don't say that!' exclaimed Beatrice. 'You want to enjoy life.' 'Just so! Ah, just so!' exclaimed Mr Allport. 'But all the same--it's like this--you only get up to the same thing tomorrow. What I mean to say--what's the good, after all? It's merely living because you've got to.' 'You are too pessimistic altogether for a young man. I look at it differently myself; yet I'll be bound I have more cause for grumbling. What's the trouble now?' 'We-ell--you can't lay your finger on a thing like that! What I mean to say--it's nothing very definite. But, after all--what is there to do but to hop out of life as quickly as possible? That's the best way.' Beatrice became suddenly grave. 'You talk in that way, Mr. Allport,' she said. 'You don't think of the others.' 'I don't know,' he drawled. 'What does it matter? Look here--who'd care? What I mean to say--for long?' 'That's all very easy, but it's cowardly,' replied Beatrice gravely. 'Nevertheless,' said Mr. Allport, 'it's true--isn't it?' 'It is not--and I _should_ know,' replied Beatrice, drawing a cloak of reserve ostentatiously over her face. Mr. Allport looked at her and waited. Beatrice relaxed toward the pessimistic young man. 'Yes,' she said, 'I call it very cowardly to want to get out of your difficulties in that way. Think what you inflict on other people. You men, you're all selfish. The burden is always left for the women.' 'Ah, but then,' said Mr. Allport very softly and sympathetically, looking at Beatrice's black dress, 'I've no one depending on _me_.' 'No--you haven't--but you've a mother and sister. The women always have to bear the brunt.' Mr. Allport looked at Beatrice, and found her very pathetic. 'Yes, they do rather,' he replied sadly, tentatively waiting. 'My husband--' began Beatrice. The young man waited. 'My husband was one of your sort: he ran after trouble, and when he'd found it--he couldn't carry it off--and left it--to me.' Mr. Allport looked at her very sympathetically. 'You don't mean it!' he exclaimed softly. 'Surely he didn't--?' Beatrice nodded, and turned aside her face. 'Yes,' she said. 'I know what it is to bear that kind of thing--and it's no light thing, I can assure you.' There was a suspicion of tears in her voice. 'And when was this, then--that he--?' asked Mr. Allport, almost with reverence. 'Only last year,' replied Beatrice. Mr. Allport made a sound expressing astonishment and dismay. Little by little Beatrice told him so much: 'Her husband had got entangled with another woman. She herself had put up with it for a long time. At last she had brought matters to a crisis, declaring what she should do. He had killed himself--hanged himself--and left her penniless. Her people, who were very wealthy, had done for her as much as she would allow them. She and Frank and Vera had done the rest. She did not mind for herself; it was for Frank and Vera, who should be now enjoying their careless youth, that her heart was heavy.' There was silence for a while. Mr. Allport murmured his sympathy, and sat overwhelmed with respect for this little woman who was unbroken by tragedy. The bell rang in the kitchen. Vera entered. 'Oh, what a nice smell! Sitting in the dark, Mother?' 'I was just trying to cheer up Mr. Allport; he is very despondent.' 'Pray do not overlook me,' said Mr. Allport, rising and bowing. 'Well! I did not see you! Fancy your sitting in the twilight chatting with the mater. You must have been an unscrupulous bore, maman.' 'On the contrary,' replied Mr. Allport, 'Mrs. MacNair has been so good as to bear with me making a fool of myself.' 'In what way?' asked Vera sharply. 'Mr. Allport is so despondent. I think he must be in love,' said Beatrice playfully. 'Unfortunately, I am not--or at least I am not yet aware of it,' said Mr. Allport, bowing slightly to Vera. She advanced and stood in the bay of the window, her skirt touching the young man's knees. She was tall and graceful. With her hands clasped behind her back she stood looking up at the moon, now white upon the richly darkening sky. 'Don't look at the moon, Miss MacNair, it's all rind,' said Mr Allport in melancholy mockery. 'Somebody's bitten all the meat out of our slice of moon, and left us nothing but peel.' 'It certainly does look like a piece of melon-shell--one portion,' replied Vera. 'Never mind, Miss MacNair,' he said, 'Whoever got the slice found it raw, I think.' 'Oh, I don't know,' she said. 'But isn't it a beautiful evening? I will just go and see if I can catch the primroses opening.' 'What primroses?' he exclaimed. 'Evening primroses--there are some.' 'Are there?' he said in surprise. Vera smiled to herself. 'Yes, come and look,' she said. The young man rose with alacrity. Mr Holiday came into the dining-room whilst they were down the garden. 'What, nobody in!' they heard him exclaim. 'There is Holiday,' murmured Mr Allport resentfully. Vera did not answer. Holiday came to the open window, attracted by the fragrance. 'Ho! that's where you are!' he cried in his nasal tenor, which annoyed Vera's trained ear. She wished she had not been wearing a white dress to betray herself. 'What have you got?' he asked. 'Nothing in particular,' replied Mr Allport. Mr Holiday sniggered. 'Oh, well, if it's nothing particular and private--' said Mr Holiday, and with that he leaped over the window-sill and went to join them. 'Curst fool!' muttered Mr Allport. 'I beg your pardon,' he added swiftly to Vera. 'Have you ever noticed, Mr Holiday,' asked Vera, as if very friendly, 'how awfully tantalizing these flowers are? They won't open while you're looking.' 'No,' sniggered he, I don't blame 'em. Why should they give themselves away any more than you do? You won't open while you're watched.' He nudged Allport facetiously with his elbow. After supper, which was late and badly served, the young men were in poor spirits. Mr MacWhirter retired to read. Mr Holiday sat picking his teeth; Mr. Allport begged Vera to play the piano. 'Oh, the piano is not my instrument; mine was the violin, but I do not play now,' she replied. 'But you will begin again,' pleaded Mr. Allport. 'No, never!' she said decisively. Allport looked at her closely. The family tragedy had something to do with her decision, he was sure. He watched her interestedly. 'Mother used to play--' she began. 'Vera!' said Beatrice reproachfully. 'Let us have a song,' suggested Mr. Holiday. 'Mr. Holiday wishes to sing, Mother,' said Vera, going to the music-rack. 'Nay--I--it's not me,' Holiday began. '"The Village Blacksmith",' said Vera, pulling out the piece. Holiday advanced. Vera glanced at her mother. 'But I have not touched the piano for--for years, I am sure,' protested Beatrice. 'You can play beautifully,' said Vera. Beatrice accompanied the song. Holiday sang atrociously. Allport glared at him. Vera remained very calm. At the end Beatrice was overcome by the touch of the piano. She went out abruptly. 'Mother has suddenly remembered that tomorrow's jellies are not made,' laughed Vera. Allport looked at her, and was sad. When Beatrice returned, Holiday insisted she should play again. She would have found it more difficult to refuse than to comply. Vera retired early, soon to be followed by Allport and Holiday. At half past ten Mr. MacWhirter came in with his ancient volume. Beatrice was studying a cookery-book. 'You, too, at the midnight lamp!' exclaimed MacWhirter politely. 'Ah, I am only looking for a pudding for tomorrow,' Beatrice replied. 'We shall feel hopelessly in debt if you look after us so well,' smiled the young man ironically. 'I must look after you,' said Beatrice. 'You do--wonderfully. I feel that we owe you large debts of gratitude.' The meals were generally late, and something was always wrong. 'Because I scan a list of puddings?' smiled Beatrice uneasily. 'For the puddings themselves, and all your good things. The piano, for instance. That was very nice indeed.' He bowed to her. 'Did it disturb you? But one does not hear very well in the study.' 'I opened the door,' said MacWhirter, bowing again. 'It is not fair,' said Beatrice. 'I am clumsy now--clumsy. I once could play.' 'You play excellently. Why that "once could"?' said MacWhirter. 'Ah, you are amiable. My old master would have said differently,' she replied. 'We,' said MacWhirter, 'are humble amateurs, and to us you are more than excellent.' 'Good old Monsieur Fannière, how he would scold me! He said I would not take my talent out of the napkin. He would quote me the New Testament. I always think Scripture false in French, do not you?' 'Er--my acquaintance with modern languages is not extensive, I regret to say.' 'No? I was brought up at a convent school near Rouen.' 'Ah--that would be very interesting.' 'Yes, but I was there six years, and the interest wears off everything.' 'Alas!' assented MacWhirter, smiling. 'Those times were very different from these,' said Beatrice. 'I should think so,' said MacWhirter, waxing grave and sympathetic. _Chapter 31_ In the same month of July, not yet a year after Siegmund's death, Helena sat on the top of the tramcar with Cecil Byrne. She was dressed in blue linen, for the day had been hot. Byrne was holding up to her a yellow-backed copy of _Einsame Menschen_, and she was humming the air of the Russian folk-song printed on the front page, frowning, nodding with her head, and beating time with her hand to get the rhythm of the song. She turned suddenly to him, and shook her head, laughing. 'I can't get it--it's no use. I think it's the swinging of the car prevents me getting the time,' she said. 'These little outside things always come a victory over you,' he laughed. 'Do they?' she replied, smiling, bending her head against the wind. It was six o'clock in the evening. The sky was quite overcast, after a dim, warm day. The tramcar was leaping along southwards. Out of the corners of his eyes Byrne watched the crisp morsels of hair shaken on her neck by the wind. 'Do you know,' she said, 'it feels rather like rain.' 'Then,' said he calmly, but turning away to watch the people below on the pavement, 'you certainly ought not to be out.' 'I ought not,' she said, 'for I'm totally unprovided.' Neither, however, had the slightest intention of turning back. Presently they descended from the car, and took a road leading uphill off the highway. Trees hung over one side, whilst on the other side stood a few villas with lawns upraised. Upon one of these lawns two great sheep-dogs rushed and stood at the brink of the, grassy declivity, at some height above the road, barking and urging boisterously. Helena and Byrne stood still to watch them. One dog was grey, as is usual, the other pale fawn. They raved extravagantly at the two pedestrians. Helena laughed at them. 'They are--' she began, in her slow manner. 'Villa sheep-dogs baying us wolves,' he continued. 'No,' she said, 'they remind me of Fafner and Fasolt.' 'Fasolt? They _are_ like that. I wonder if they really dislike us.' 'It appears so,' she laughed. 'Dogs generally chum up to me,' he said. Helena began suddenly to laugh. He looked at her inquiringly. 'I remember,' she said, still laughing, 'at Knockholt--you--a half-grown lamb--a dog--in procession.' She marked the position of the three with her finger. 'What an ass I must have looked!' he said. 'Sort of silent Pied Piper,' she laughed. 'Dogs do follow me like that, though,' he said. 'They did Siegmund,' she said. 'Ah!' he exclaimed. 'I remember they had for a long time a little brown dog that followed him home.' 'Ah!' he exclaimed. 'I remember, too,' she said, 'a little black-and-white kitten that followed me. Mater _would not_ have it in--she would not. And I remember finding it, a few days after, dead in the road. I don't think I ever quite forgave my mater that.' 'More sorrow over one kitten brought to destruction than over all the sufferings of men,' he said. She glanced at him and laughed. He was smiling ironically. 'For the latter, you see,' she replied, 'I am not responsible.' As they neared the top of the hill a few spots of rain fell. 'You know,' said Helena, 'if it begins it will continue all night. Look at that!' She pointed to the great dark reservoir of cloud ahead. 'Had we better go back?' he asked. 'Well, we will go on and find a thick tree; then we can shelter till we see how it turns out. We are not far from the cars here.' They walked on and on. The raindrops fell more thickly, then thinned away. 'It is exactly a year today,' she said, as they-walked on the round shoulder of the down with an oak-wood on the left hand. 'Exactly!' 'What anniversary is it, then?' he inquired. 'Exactly a year today, Siegmund and I walked here--by the day, Thursday. We went through the larch-wood. Have you ever been through the larch-wood?' 'No.' 'We will go, then,' she said. 'History repeats itself,' he remarked. 'How?' she asked calmly. He was pulling at the heads of the cocksfoot grass as he walked. 'I see no repetition,' she added. 'No,' he exclaimed bitingly; 'you are right!' They went on in silence. As they drew near a farm they saw the men unloading a last wagon of hay on to a very brown stack. He sniffed the air. Though he was angry, he spoke. 'They got that hay rather damp,' he said. 'Can't you smell it--like hot tobacco and sandal-wood?' 'What, is that the stack?' she asked. 'Yes, it's always like that when it's picked damp.' The conversation was restarted, but did not flourish. When they turned on to a narrow path by the side of the field he went ahead. Leaning over the hedge, he pulled three sprigs of honeysuckle, yellow as butter, full of scent; then he waited for her. She was hanging her head, looking in the hedge-bottom. He presented her with the flowers without speaking. She bent forward, inhaled the rich fragrance, and looked up at him over the blossoms with her beautiful, beseeching blue eyes. He smiled gently to her. 'Isn't it nice?' he said. 'Aren't they fine bits?' She took them without answering, and put one piece carefully in her dress. It was quite against her rule to wear a flower. He took his place by her side. 'I always like the gold-green of cut fields,' he said. 'They seem to give off sunshine even when the sky's greyer than a tabby cat.' She laughed, instinctively putting out her hand towards the glowing field on her right. They entered the larch-wood. There the chill wind was changed into sound. Like a restless insect he hovered about her, like a butterfly whose antennae flicker and twitch sensitively as they gather intelligence, touching the aura, as it were, of the female. He was exceedingly delicate in his handling of her. The path was cut windingly through the lofty, dark, and closely serried trees, which vibrated like chords under the soft bow of the wind. Now and again he would look down passages between the trees--narrow pillared corridors, dusky as if webbed across with mist. All round was a twilight, thickly populous with slender, silent trunks. Helena stood still, gazing up at the tree-tops where the bow of the wind was drawn, causing slight, perceptible quivering. Byrne walked on without her. At a bend in the path he stood, with his hand on the roundness of a larch-trunk, looking back at her, a blue fleck in the brownness of congregated trees. She moved very slowly down the path. 'I might as well not exist, for all she is aware of me,' he said to himself bitterly. Nevertheless, when she drew near he said brightly: 'Have you noticed how the thousands of dry twigs between the trunks make a brown mist, a brume?' She looked at him suddenly as if interrupted. 'H'm? Yes, I see what you mean.' She smiled at him, because of his bright boyish tone and manner. 'That's the larch fog,' he laughed. 'Yes,' she said, 'you see it in pictures. I had not noticed it before.' He shook the tree on which his hand was laid. 'It laughs through its teeth,' he said, smiling, playing with everything he touched. As they went along she caught swiftly at her hat; then she stooped, picking up a hat-pin of twined silver. She laughed to herself as if pleased by a coincidence. 'Last year,' she said, 'the larch-fingers stole both my pins--the same ones.' He looked at her, wondering how much he was filling the place of a ghost with warmth. He thought of Siegmund, and seemed to see him swinging down the steep bank out of the wood exactly as he himself was doing at the moment, with Helena stepping carefully behind. He always felt a deep sympathy and kinship with Siegmund; sometimes he thought he hated Helena. They had emerged at the head of a shallow valley--one of those wide hollows in the North Downs that are like a great length of tapestry held loosely by four people. It was raining. Byrne looked at the dark blue dots rapidly appearing on the sleeves of Helena's dress. They walked on a little way. The rain increased. Helena looked about for shelter. 'Here,' said Byrne--'here is our tent--a black tartar's--ready pitched.' He stooped under the low boughs of a very large yew tree that stood just back from the path. She crept after him. It was really a very good shelter. Byrne sat on the ledge of a root, Helena beside him. He looked under the flap of the black branches down the valley. The grey rain was falling steadily; the dark hollow under the tree was immersed in the monotonous sound of it. In the open, where the bright young corn shone intense with wet green, was a fold of sheep. Exposed in a large pen on the hillside, they were moving restlessly; now and again came the 'tong-ting-tong' of a sheep-bell. First the grey creatures huddled in the high corner, then one of them descended and took shelter by the growing corn lowest down. The rest followed, bleating and pushing each other in their anxiety to reach the place of desire, which was no whit better than where they stood before. 'That's like us all,' said Byrne whimsically. 'We're all penned out on a wet evening, but we think, if only we could get where someone else is, it would be deliciously cosy.' Helena laughed swiftly, as she always did when he became whimsical and fretful. He sat with his head bent down, smiling with his lips, but his eyes melancholy. She put her hand out to him. He took it without apparently observing it, folding his own hand over it, and unconsciously increasing the pressure. 'You are cold,' he said. 'Only my hands, and they usually are,' she replied gently. 'And mine are generally warm.' 'I know that,' she said. 'It's almost the only warmth I get now--your hands. They really are wonderfully warm and close-touching.' 'As good as a baked potato,' he said. She pressed his hand, scolding him for his mockery. 'So many calories per week--isn't that how we manage it?' he asked. 'On credit?' She put her other hand on his, as if beseeching him to forgo his irony, which hurt her. They sat silent for some time. The sheep broke their cluster, and began to straggle back to the upper side of the pen. 'Tong-tong, tong,' went the forlorn bell. The rain waxed louder. Byrne was thinking of the previous week. He had gone to Helena's home to read German with her as usual. She wanted to understand Wagner in his own language. In each of the arm-chairs, reposing across the arms, was a violin-case. He had sat down on the edge of one seat in front of the sacred fiddle. Helena had come quickly and removed the violin. 'I shan't knock it--it is all right,' he had said, protesting. This was Siegmund's violin, which Helena had managed to purchase, and Byrne was always ready to yield its precedence. 'It was all right,' he repeated. 'But you were not,' she had replied gently. Since that time his heart had beat quick with excitement. Now he sat in a little storm of agitation, of which nothing was betrayed by his gloomy, pondering expression, but some of which was communicated to Helena by the increasing pressure of his hand, which adjusted itself delicately in a stronger and stronger stress over her fingers and palm. By some movement he became aware that her hand was uncomfortable. He relaxed. She sighed, as if restless and dissatisfied. She wondered what he was thinking of. He smiled quietly. 'The Babes in the Wood,' he teased. Helena laughed, with a sound of tears. In the tree overhead some bird began to sing, in spite of the rain, a broken evening song. 'That little beggar sees it's a hopeless case, so he reminds us of heaven. But if he's going to cover us with yew-leaves, he's set himself a job.' Helena laughed again, and shivered. He put his arm round her, drawing her nearer his warmth. After this new and daring move neither spoke for a while. 'The rain continues,' he said. 'And will do,' she added, laughing. 'Quite content,' he said. The bird overhead chirruped loudly again. '"Strew on us roses, roses,"' quoted Byrne, adding after a while, in wistful mockery: '"And never a sprig of yew"--eh?' Helena made a small sound of tenderness and comfort for him, and weariness for herself. She let herself sink a little closer against him. 'Shall it not be so--no yew?' he murmured. He put his left hand, with which he had been breaking larch-twigs, on her chilled wrist. Noticing that his fingers were dirty, he held them up. 'I shall make marks on you,' he said. 'They will come off,' she replied. 'Yes, we come clean after everything. Time scrubs all sorts of scars off us.' 'Some scars don't seem to go,' she smiled. And she held out her other arm, which had been pressed warm against his side. There, just above the wrist, was the red sun-inflammation from last year. Byrne regarded it gravely. 'But it's wearing off--even that,' he said wistfully. Helena put her arms found him under his coat. She was cold. He felt a hot wave of joy suffuse him. Almost immediately she released him, and took off her hat. 'That is better,' he said. 'I was afraid of the pins,' said she. 'I've been dodging them for the last hour,' he said, laughing, as she put her arms under his coat again for warmth. She laughed, and, making a small, moaning noise, as if of weariness and helplessness, she sank her head on his chest. He put down his cheek against hers. 'I want rest and warmth,' she said, in her dull tones. 'All right!' he murmured. 
4520	----	AARON'S ROD by D. H. Lawrence CONTENTS I. THE BLUE BALL II. ROYAL OAK III. “THE LIGHTED TREE” IV. “THE PILLAR OF SALT” V. AT THE OPERA VI. TALK VII. THE DARK SQUARE GARDEN VIII. A PUNCH IN THE WIND IX. LOW-WATER MARK X. THE WAR AGAIN XI. MORE PILLAR OF SALT XII. NOVARA XIII. WIE ES IHNEN GEFAELLT XIV. XX SETTEMBRE XV. A RAILWAY JOURNEY XVI. FLORENCE XVII. HIGH UP OVER THE CATHEDRAL SQUARE XVIII. THE MARCHESA XIX. CLEOPATRA, BUT NOT ANTHONY XX. THE BROKEN ROD XXI. WORDS CHAPTER I. THE BLUE BALL There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air. Also there had been another wrangle among the men on the pit-bank that evening. Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line climbing the hill home from work. He was late because he had attended a meeting of the men on the bank. He was secretary to the Miners Union for his colliery, and had heard a good deal of silly wrangling that left him nettled. He strode over a stile, crossed two fields, strode another stile, and was in the long road of colliers' dwellings. Just across was his own house: he had built it himself. He went through the little gate, up past the side of the house to the back. There he hung a moment, glancing down the dark, wintry garden. “My father--my father's come!” cried a child's excited voice, and two little girls in white pinafores ran out in front of his legs. “Father, shall you set the Christmas Tree?” they cried. “We've got one!” “Afore I have my dinner?” he answered amiably. “Set it now. Set it now.--We got it through Fred Alton.” “Where is it?” The little girls were dragging a rough, dark object out of a corner of the passage into the light of the kitchen door. “It's a beauty!” exclaimed Millicent. “Yes, it is,” said Marjory. “I should think so,” he replied, striding over the dark bough. He went to the back kitchen to take off his coat. “Set it now, Father. Set it now,” clamoured the girls. “You might as well. You've left your dinner so long, you might as well do it now before you have it,” came a woman's plangent voice, out of the brilliant light of the middle room. Aaron Sisson had taken off his coat and waistcoat and his cap. He stood bare-headed in his shirt and braces, contemplating the tree. “What am I to put it in?” he queried. He picked up the tree, and held it erect by the topmost twig. He felt the cold as he stood in the yard coatless, and he twitched his shoulders. “Isn't it a beauty!” repeated Millicent. “Ay!--lop-sided though.” “Put something on, you two!” came the woman's high imperative voice, from the kitchen. “We aren't cold,” protested the girls from the yard. “Come and put something on,” insisted the voice. The man started off down the path, the little girls ran grumbling indoors. The sky was clear, there was still a crystalline, non-luminous light in the under air. Aaron rummaged in his shed at the bottom of the garden, and found a spade and a box that was suitable. Then he came out to his neat, bare, wintry garden. The girls flew towards him, putting the elastic of their hats under their chins as they ran. The tree and the box lay on the frozen earth. The air breathed dark, frosty, electric. “Hold it up straight,” he said to Millicent, as he arranged the tree in the box. She stood silent and held the top bough, he filled in round the roots. When it was done, and pressed in, he went for the wheelbarrow. The girls were hovering excited round the tree. He dropped the barrow and stooped to the box. The girls watched him hold back his face--the boughs pricked him. “Is it very heavy?” asked Millicent. “Ay!” he replied, with a little grunt. Then the procession set off--the trundling wheel-barrow, the swinging hissing tree, the two excited little girls. They arrived at the door. Down went the legs of the wheel-barrow on the yard. The man looked at the box. “Where are you going to have it?” he called. “Put it in the back kitchen,” cried his wife. “You'd better have it where it's going to stop. I don't want to hawk it about.” “Put it on the floor against the dresser, Father. Put it there,” urged Millicent. “You come and put some paper down, then,” called the mother hastily. The two children ran indoors, the man stood contemplative in the cold, shrugging his uncovered shoulders slightly. The open inner door showed a bright linoleum on the floor, and the end of a brown side-board on which stood an aspidistra. Again with a wrench Aaron Sisson lifted the box. The tree pricked and stung. His wife watched him as he entered staggering, with his face averted. “Mind where you make a lot of dirt,” she said. He lowered the box with a little jerk on to the spread-out newspaper on the floor. Soil scattered. “Sweep it up,” he said to Millicent. His ear was lingering over the sudden, clutching hiss of the tree-boughs. A stark white incandescent light filled the room and made everything sharp and hard. In the open fire-place a hot fire burned red. All was scrupulously clean and perfect. A baby was cooing in a rocker-less wicker cradle by the hearth. The mother, a slim, neat woman with dark hair, was sewing a child's frock. She put this aside, rose, and began to take her husband's dinner from the oven. “You stopped confabbing long enough tonight,” she said. “Yes,” he answered, going to the back kitchen to wash his hands. In a few minutes he came and sat down to his dinner. The doors were shut close, but there was a draught, because the settling of the mines under the house made the doors not fit. Aaron moved his chair, to get out of the draught. But he still sat in his shirt and trousers. He was a good-looking man, fair, and pleasant, about thirty-two years old. He did not talk much, but seemed to think about something. His wife resumed her sewing. She was acutely aware of her husband, but he seemed not very much aware of her. “What were they on about today, then?” she said. “About the throw-in.” “And did they settle anything?” “They're going to try it--and they'll come out if it isn't satisfactory.” “The butties won't have it, I know,” she said. He gave a short laugh, and went on with his meal. The two children were squatted on the floor by the tree. They had a wooden box, from which they had taken many little newspaper packets, which they were spreading out like wares. “Don't open any. We won't open any of them till we've taken them all out--and then we'll undo one in our turns. Then we s'll both undo equal,” Millicent was saying. “Yes, we'll take them ALL out first,” re-echoed Marjory. “And what are they going to do about Job Arthur Freer? Do they want him?” A faint smile came on her husband's face. “Nay, I don't know what they want.--Some of 'em want him--whether they're a majority, I don't know.” She watched him closely. “Majority! I'd give 'em majority. They want to get rid of you, and make a fool of you, and you want to break your heart over it. Strikes me you need something to break your heart over.” He laughed silently. “Nay,” he said. “I s'll never break my heart.” “You'll go nearer to it over that, than over anything else: just because a lot of ignorant monkeys want a monkey of their own sort to do the Union work, and jabber to them, they want to get rid of you, and you eat your heart out about it. More fool you, that's all I say--more fool you. If you cared for your wife and children half what you care about your Union, you'd be a lot better pleased in the end. But you care about nothing but a lot of ignorant colliers, who don't know what they want except it's more money just for themselves. Self, self, self--that's all it is with them--and ignorance.” “You'd rather have self without ignorance?” he said, smiling finely. “I would, if I've got to have it. But what I should like to see is a man that has thought for others, and isn't all self and politics.” Her color had risen, her hand trembled with anger as she sewed. A blank look had come over the man's face, as if he did not hear or heed any more. He drank his tea in a long draught, wiped his moustache with two fingers, and sat looking abstractedly at the children. They had laid all the little packets on the floor, and Millicent was saying: “Now I'll undo the first, and you can have the second. I'll take this--” She unwrapped the bit of newspaper and disclosed a silvery ornament for a Christmas tree: a frail thing like a silver plum, with deep rosy indentations on each side. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Isn't it LOVELY!” Her fingers cautiously held the long bubble of silver and glowing rose, cleaving to it with a curious, irritating possession. The man's eyes moved away from her. The lesser child was fumbling with one of the little packets. “Oh!”--a wail went up from Millicent. “You've taken one!--You didn't wait.” Then her voice changed to a motherly admonition, and she began to interfere. “This is the way to do it, look! Let me help you.” But Marjory drew back with resentment. “Don't, Millicent!--Don't!” came the childish cry. But Millicent's fingers itched. At length Marjory had got out her treasure--a little silvery bell with a glass top hanging inside. The bell was made of frail glassy substance, light as air. “Oh, the bell!” rang out Millicent's clanging voice. “The bell! It's my bell. My bell! It's mine! Don't break it, Marjory. Don't break it, will you?” Marjory was shaking the bell against her ear. But it was dumb, it made no sound. “You'll break it, I know you will.--You'll break it. Give it ME--” cried Millicent, and she began to take away the bell. Marjory set up an expostulation. “LET HER ALONE,” said the father. Millicent let go as if she had been stung, but still her brassy, impudent voice persisted: “She'll break it. She'll break it. It's mine--” “You undo another,” said the mother, politic. Millicent began with hasty, itching fingers to unclose another package. “Aw--aw Mother, my peacock--aw, my peacock, my green peacock!” Lavishly she hovered over a sinuous greenish bird, with wings and tail of spun glass, pearly, and body of deep electric green. “It's mine--my green peacock! It's mine, because Marjory's had one wing off, and mine hadn't. My green peacock that I love! I love it!” She swung it softly from the little ring on its back. Then she went to her mother. “Look, Mother, isn't it a beauty?” “Mind the ring doesn't come out,” said her mother. “Yes, it's lovely!” The girl passed on to her father. “Look, Father, don't you love it!” “Love it?” he re-echoed, ironical over the word love. She stood for some moments, trying to force his attention. Then she went back to her place. Marjory had brought forth a golden apple, red on one cheek, rather garish. “Oh!” exclaimed Millicent feverishly, instantly seized with desire for what she had not got, indifferent to what she had. Her eye ran quickly over the packages. She took one. “Now!” she exclaimed loudly, to attract attention. “Now! What's this?--What's this? What will this beauty be?” With finicky fingers she removed the newspaper. Marjory watched her wide-eyed. Millicent was self-important. “The blue ball!” she cried in a climax of rapture. “I've got THE BLUE BALL.” She held it gloating in the cup of her hands. It was a little globe of hardened glass, of a magnificent full dark blue color. She rose and went to her father. “It was your blue ball, wasn't it, father?” “Yes.” “And you had it when you were a little boy, and now I have it when I'm a little girl.” “Ay,” he replied drily. “And it's never been broken all those years.” “No, not yet.” “And perhaps it never will be broken.” To this she received no answer. “Won't it break?” she persisted. “Can't you break it?” “Yes, if you hit it with a hammer,” he said. “Aw!” she cried. “I don't mean that. I mean if you just drop it. It won't break if you drop it, will it?” “I dare say it won't.” “But WILL it?” “I sh'd think not.” “Should I try?” She proceeded gingerly to let the blue ball drop, it bounced dully on the floor-covering. “Oh-h-h!” she cried, catching it up. “I love it.” “Let ME drop it,” cried Marjory, and there was a performance of admonition and demonstration from the elder sister. But Millicent must go further. She became excited. “It won't break,” she said, “even if you toss it up in the air.” She flung it up, it fell safely. But her father's brow knitted slightly. She tossed it wildly: it fell with a little splashing explosion: it had smashed. It had fallen on the sharp edge of the tiles that protruded under the fender. “NOW what have you done!” cried the mother. The child stood with her lip between her teeth, a look, half, of pure misery and dismay, half of satisfaction, on her pretty sharp face. “She wanted to break it,” said the father. “No, she didn't! What do you say that for!” said the mother. And Millicent burst into a flood of tears. He rose to look at the fragments that lay splashed on the floor. “You must mind the bits,” he said, “and pick 'em all up.” He took one of the pieces to examine it. It was fine and thin and hard, lined with pure silver, brilliant. He looked at it closely. So--this was what it was. And this was the end of it. He felt the curious soft explosion of its breaking still in his ears. He threw his piece in the fire. “Pick all the bits up,” he said. “Give over! give over! Don't cry any more.” The good-natured tone of his voice quieted the child, as he intended it should. He went away into the back kitchen to wash himself. As he was bending his head over the sink before the little mirror, lathering to shave, there came from outside the dissonant voices of boys, pouring out the dregs of carol-singing. “While Shep-ep-ep-ep-herds watched--” He held his soapy brush suspended for a minute. They called this singing! His mind flitted back to early carol music. Then again he heard the vocal violence outside. “Aren't you off there!” he called out, in masculine menace. The noise stopped, there was a scuffle. But the feet returned and the voices resumed. Almost immediately the door opened, boys were heard muttering among themselves. Millicent had given them a penny. Feet scraped on the yard, then went thudding along the side of the house, to the street. To Aaron Sisson, this was home, this was Christmas: the unspeakably familiar. The war over, nothing was changed. Yet everything changed. The scullery in which he stood was painted green, quite fresh, very clean, the floor was red tiles. The wash-copper of red bricks was very red, the mangle with its put-up board was white-scrubbed, the American oil-cloth on the table had a gay pattern, there was a warm fire, the water in the boiler hissed faintly. And in front of him, beneath him as he leaned forward shaving, a drop of water fell with strange, incalculable rhythm from the bright brass tap into the white enamelled bowl, which was now half full of pure, quivering water. The war was over, and everything just the same. The acute familiarity of this house, which he had built for his marriage twelve years ago, the changeless pleasantness of it all seemed unthinkable. It prevented his thinking. When he went into the middle room to comb his hair he found the Christmas tree sparkling, his wife was making pastry at the table, the baby was sitting up propped in cushions. “Father,” said Millicent, approaching him with a flat blue-and-white angel of cotton-wool, and two ends of cotton--“tie the angel at the top.” “Tie it at the top?” he said, looking down. “Yes. At the very top--because it's just come down from the sky.” “Ay my word!” he laughed. And he tied the angel. Coming downstairs after changing he went into the icy cold parlour, and took his music and a small handbag. With this he retreated again to the back kitchen. He was still in trousers and shirt and slippers: but now it was a clean white shirt, and his best black trousers, and new pink and white braces. He sat under the gas-jet of the back kitchen, looking through his music. Then he opened the bag, in which were sections of a flute and a piccolo. He took out the flute, and adjusted it. As he sat he was physically aware of the sounds of the night: the bubbling of water in the boiler, the faint sound of the gas, the sudden crying of the baby in the next room, then noises outside, distant boys shouting, distant rags of carols, fragments of voices of men. The whole country was roused and excited. The little room was hot. Aaron rose and opened a square ventilator over the copper, letting in a stream of cold air, which was grateful to him. Then he cocked his eye over the sheet of music spread out on the table before him. He tried his flute. And then at last, with the odd gesture of a diver taking a plunge, he swung his head and began to play. A stream of music, soft and rich and fluid, came out of the flute. He played beautifully. He moved his head and his raised bare arms with slight, intense movements, as the delicate music poured out. It was sixteenth-century Christmas melody, very limpid and delicate. The pure, mindless, exquisite motion and fluidity of the music delighted him with a strange exasperation. There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; and at the same time, the more intense was the maddened exasperation within him. Millicent appeared in the room. She fidgetted at the sink. The music was a bugbear to her, because it prevented her from saying what was on her own mind. At length it ended, her father was turning over the various books and sheets. She looked at him quickly, seizing her opportunity. “Are you going out, Father?” she said. “Eh?” “Are you going out?” She twisted nervously. “What do you want to know for?” He made no other answer, and turned again to the music. His eye went down a sheet--then over it again--then more closely over it again. “Are you?” persisted the child, balancing on one foot. He looked at her, and his eyes were angry under knitted brows. “What are you bothering about?” he said. “I'm not bothering--I only wanted to know if you were going out,” she pouted, quivering to cry. “I expect I am,” he said quietly. She recovered at once, but still with timidity asked: “We haven't got any candles for the Christmas tree--shall you buy some, because mother isn't going out?” “Candles!” he repeated, settling his music and taking up the piccolo. “Yes--shall you buy us some, Father? Shall you?” “Candles!” he repeated, putting the piccolo to his mouth and blowing a few piercing, preparatory notes. “Yes, little Christmas-tree candles--blue ones and red ones, in boxes--Shall you, Father?” “We'll see--if I see any--” “But SHALL you?” she insisted desperately. She wisely mistrusted his vagueness. But he was looking unheeding at the music. Then suddenly the piccolo broke forth, wild, shrill, brilliant. He was playing Mozart. The child's face went pale with anger at the sound. She turned, and went out, closing both doors behind her to shut out the noise. The shrill, rapid movement of the piccolo music seemed to possess the air, it was useless to try to shut it out. The man went on playing to himself, measured and insistent. In the frosty evening the sound carried. People passing down the street hesitated, listening. The neighbours knew it was Aaron practising his piccolo. He was esteemed a good player: was in request at concerts and dances, also at swell balls. So the vivid piping sound tickled the darkness. He played on till about seven o'clock; he did not want to go out too soon, in spite of the early closing of the public houses. He never went with the stream, but made a side current of his own. His wife said he was contrary. When he went into the middle room to put on his collar and tie, the two little girls were having their hair brushed, the baby was in bed, there was a hot smell of mince-pies baking in the oven. “You won't forget our candles, will you, Father?” asked Millicent, with assurance now. “I'll see,” he answered. His wife watched him as he put on his overcoat and hat. He was well-dressed, handsome-looking. She felt there was a curious glamour about him. It made her feel bitter. He had an unfair advantage--he was free to go off, while she must stay at home with the children. “There's no knowing what time you'll be home,” she said. “I shan't be late,” he answered. “It's easy to say so,” she retorted, with some contempt. He took his stick, and turned towards the door. “Bring the children some candles for their tree, and don't be so selfish,” she said. “All right,” he said, going out. “Don't say ALL RIGHT if you never mean to do it,” she cried, with sudden anger, following him to the door. His figure stood large and shadowy in the darkness. “How many do you want?” he said. “A dozen,” she said. “And holders too, if you can get them,” she added, with barren bitterness. “Yes--all right,” he turned and melted into the darkness. She went indoors, worn with a strange and bitter flame. He crossed the fields towards the little town, which once more fumed its lights under the night. The country ran away, rising on his right hand. It was no longer a great bank of darkness. Lights twinkled freely here and there, though forlornly, now that the war-time restrictions were removed. It was no glitter of pre-war nights, pit-heads glittering far-off with electricity. Neither was it the black gulf of the war darkness: instead, this forlorn sporadic twinkling. Everybody seemed to be out of doors. The hollow dark countryside re-echoed like a shell with shouts and calls and excited voices. Restlessness and nervous excitement, nervous hilarity were in the air. There was a sense of electric surcharge everywhere, frictional, a neurasthenic haste for excitement. Every moment Aaron Sisson was greeted with Good-night--Good-night, Aaron--Good-night, Mr. Sisson. People carrying parcels, children, women, thronged home on the dark paths. They were all talking loudly, declaiming loudly about what they could and could not get, and what this or the other had lost. When he got into the main street, the only street of shops, it was crowded. There seemed to have been some violent but quiet contest, a subdued fight, going on all the afternoon and evening: people struggling to buy things, to get things. Money was spent like water, there was a frenzy of money-spending. Though the necessities of life were in abundance, still the people struggled in frenzy for cheese, sweets, raisins, pork-stuff, even for flowers and holly, all of which were scarce, and for toys and knick-knacks, which were sold out. There was a wild grumbling, but a deep satisfaction in the fight, the struggle. The same fight and the same satisfaction in the fight was witnessed whenever a tram-car stopped, or when it heaved its way into sight. Then the struggle to mount on board became desperate and savage, but stimulating. Souls surcharged with hostility found now some outlet for their feelings. As he came near the little market-place he bethought himself of the Christmas-tree candles. He did not intend to trouble himself. And yet, when he glanced in passing into the sweet-shop window, and saw it bare as a board, the very fact that he probably _could not_ buy the things made him hesitate, and try. “Have you got any Christmas-tree candles?” he asked as he entered the shop. “How many do you want?” “A dozen.” “Can't let you have a dozen. You can have two boxes--four in a box--eight. Six-pence a box.” “Got any holders?” “Holders? Don't ask. Haven't seen one this year.” “Got any toffee--?” “Cough-drops--two-pence an ounce--nothing else left.” “Give me four ounces.” He watched her weighing them in the little brass scales. “You've not got much of a Christmas show,” he said. “Don't talk about Christmas, as far as sweets is concerned. They ought to have allowed us six times the quantity--there's plenty of sugar, why didn't they? We s'll have to enjoy ourselves with what we've got. We mean to, anyhow.” “Ay,” he said. “Time we had a bit of enjoyment, THIS Christmas. They ought to have made things more plentiful.” “Yes,” he said, stuffing his package in his pocket. CHAPTER II. ROYAL OAK The war had killed the little market of the town. As he passed the market place on the brow, Aaron noticed that there were only two miserable stalls. But people crowded just the same. There was a loud sound of voices, men's voices. Men pressed round the doorways of the public-houses. But he was going to a pub out of town. He descended the dark hill. A street-lamp here and there shed parsimonious light. In the bottoms, under the trees, it was very dark. But a lamp glimmered in front of the “Royal Oak.” This was a low white house sunk three steps below the highway. It was darkened, but sounded crowded. Opening the door, Sisson found himself in the stone passage. Old Bob, carrying three cans, stopped to see who had entered--then went on into the public bar on the left. The bar itself was a sort of little window-sill on the right: the pub was a small one. In this window-opening stood the landlady, drawing and serving to her husband. Behind the bar was a tiny parlour or den, the landlady's preserve. “Oh, it's you,” she said, bobbing down to look at the newcomer. None entered her bar-parlour unless invited. “Come in,” said the landlady. There was a peculiar intonation in her complacent voice, which showed she had been expecting him, a little irritably. He went across into her bar-parlour. It would not hold more than eight or ten people, all told--just the benches along the walls, the fire between--and two little round tables. “I began to think you weren't coming,” said the landlady, bringing him a whiskey. She was a large, stout, high-coloured woman, with a fine profile, probably Jewish. She had chestnut-coloured eyes, quick, intelligent. Her movements were large and slow, her voice laconic. “I'm not so late, am I?” asked Aaron. “Yes, you are late, I should think.” She Looked up at the little clock. “Close on nine.” “I did some shopping,” said Aaron, with a quick smile. “Did you indeed? That's news, I'm sure. May we ask what you bought?” This he did not like. But he had to answer. “Christmas-tree candles, and toffee.” “For the little children? Well you've done well for once! I must say I recommend you. I didn't think you had so much in you.” She sat herself down in her seat at the end of the bench, and took up her knitting. Aaron sat next to her. He poured water into his glass, and drank. “It's warm in here,” he said, when he had swallowed the liquor. “Yes, it is. You won't want to keep that thick good overcoat on,” replied the landlady. “No,” he said, “I think I'll take it off.” She watched him as he hung up his overcoat. He wore black clothes, as usual. As he reached up to the pegs, she could see the muscles of his shoulders, and the form of his legs. Her reddish-brown eyes seemed to burn, and her nose, that had a subtle, beautiful Hebraic curve, seemed to arch itself. She made a little place for him by herself, as he returned. She carried her head thrown back, with dauntless self-sufficiency. There were several colliers in the room, talking quietly. They were the superior type all, favoured by the landlady, who loved intellectual discussion. Opposite, by the fire, sat a little, greenish man--evidently an oriental. “You're very quiet all at once, Doctor,” said the landlady in her slow, laconic voice. “Yes.--May I have another whiskey, please?” She rose at once, powerfully energetic. “Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. And she went to the bar. “Well,” said the little Hindu doctor, “and how are things going now, with the men?” “The same as ever,” said Aaron. “Yes,” said the stately voice of the landlady. “And I'm afraid they will always be the same as ever. When will they learn wisdom?” “But what do you call wisdom?” asked Sherardy, the Hindu. He spoke with a little, childish lisp. “What do I call wisdom?” repeated the landlady. “Why all acting together for the common good. That is wisdom in my idea.” “Yes, very well, that is so. But what do you call the common good?” replied the little doctor, with childish pertinence. “Ay,” said Aaron, with a laugh, “that's it.” The miners were all stirring now, to take part in the discussion. “What do I call the common good?” repeated the landlady. “That all people should study the welfare of other people, and not only their own.” “They are not to study their own welfare?” said the doctor. “Ah, that I did not say,” replied the landlady. “Let them study their own welfare, and that of others also.” “Well then,” said the doctor, “what is the welfare of a collier?” “The welfare of a collier,” said the landlady, “is that he shall earn sufficient wages to keep himself and his family comfortable, to educate his children, and to educate himself; for that is what he wants, education.” “Ay, happen so,” put in Brewitt, a big, fine, good-humoured collier. “Happen so, Mrs. Houseley. But what if you haven't got much education, to speak of?” “You can always get it,” she said patronizing. “Nay--I'm blest if you can. It's no use tryin' to educate a man over forty--not by book-learning. That isn't saying he's a fool, neither.” “And what better is them that's got education?” put in another man. “What better is the manager, or th' under-manager, than we are?--Pender's yaller enough i' th' face.” “He is that,” assented the men in chorus. “But because he's yellow in the face, as you say, Mr. Kirk,” said the landlady largely, “that doesn't mean he has no advantages higher than what you have got.” “Ay,” said Kirk. “He can ma'e more money than I can--that's about a' as it comes to.” “He can make more money,” said the landlady. “And when he's made it, he knows better how to use it.” “'Appen so, an' a'!--What does he do, more than eat and drink and work?--an' take it out of hisself a sight harder than I do, by th' looks of him.--What's it matter, if he eats a bit more or drinks a bit more--” “No,” reiterated the landlady. “He not only eats and drinks. He can read, and he can converse.” “Me an' a',” said Tom Kirk, and the men burst into a laugh. “I can read--an' I've had many a talk an' conversation with you in this house, Mrs. Houseley--am havin' one at this minute, seemingly.” “SEEMINGLY, you are,” said the landlady ironically. “But do you think there would be no difference between your conversation, and Mr. Pender's, if he were here so that I could enjoy his conversation?” “An' what difference would there be?” asked Tom Kirk. “He'd go home to his bed just the same.” “There, you are mistaken. He would be the better, and so should I, a great deal better, for a little genuine conversation.” “If it's conversation as ma'es his behind drop--” said Tom Kirk. “An' puts th' bile in his face--” said Brewitt. There was a general laugh. “I can see it's no use talking about it any further,” said the landlady, lifting her head dangerously. “But look here, Mrs. Houseley, do you really think it makes much difference to a man, whether he can hold a serious conversation or not?” asked the doctor. “I do indeed, all the difference in the world--To me, there is no greater difference, than between an educated man and an uneducated man.” “And where does it come in?” asked Kirk. “But wait a bit, now,” said Aaron Sisson. “You take an educated man--take Pender. What's his education for? What does he scheme for?--What does he contrive for? What does he talk for?--” “For all the purposes of his life,” replied the landlady. “Ay, an' what's the purpose of his life?” insisted Aaron Sisson. “The purpose of his life,” repeated the landlady, at a loss. “I should think he knows that best himself.” “No better than I know it--and you know it,” said Aaron. “Well,” said the landlady, “if you know, then speak out. What is it?” “To make more money for the firm--and so make his own chance of a rise better.” The landlady was baffled for some moments. Then she said: “Yes, and suppose that he does. Is there any harm in it? Isn't it his duty to do what he can for himself? Don't you try to earn all you can?” “Ay,” said Aaron. “But there's soon a limit to what I can earn.--It's like this. When you work it out, everything comes to money. Reckon it as you like, it's money on both sides. It's money we live for, and money is what our lives is worth--nothing else. Money we live for, and money we are when we're dead: that or nothing. An' it's money as is between the masters and us. There's a few educated ones got hold of one end of the rope, and all the lot of us hanging on to th' other end, an' we s'll go on pulling our guts out, time in, time out--” “But they've got th' long end o' th' rope, th' masters has,” said Brewitt. “For as long as one holds, the other will pull,” concluded Aaron Sisson philosophically. “An' I'm almighty sure o' that,” said Kirk. There was a little pause. “Yes, that's all there is in the minds of you men,” said the landlady. “But what can be done with the money, that you never think of--the education of the children, the improvement of conditions--” “Educate the children, so that they can lay hold of the long end of the rope, instead of the short end,” said the doctor, with a little giggle. “Ay, that's it,” said Brewitt. “I've pulled at th' short end, an' my lads may do th' same.” “A selfish policy,” put in the landlady. “Selfish or not, they may do it.” “Till the crack o' doom,” said Aaron, with a glistening smile. “Or the crack o' th' rope,” said Brewitt. “Yes, and THEN WHAT?” cried the landlady. “Then we all drop on our backsides,” said Kirk. There was a general laugh, and an uneasy silence. “All I can say of you men,” said the landlady, “is that you have a narrow, selfish policy.--Instead of thinking of the children, instead of thinking of improving the world you live in--” “We hang on, British bulldog breed,” said Brewitt. There was a general laugh. “Yes, and little wiser than dogs, wrangling for a bone,” said the landlady. “Are we to let t' other side run off wi' th' bone, then, while we sit on our stunts an' yowl for it?” asked Brewitt. “No indeed. There can be wisdom in everything.--It's what you DO with the money, when you've got it,” said the landlady, “that's where the importance lies.” “It's Missis as gets it,” said Kirk. “It doesn't stop wi' us.” “Ay, it's the wife as gets it, ninety per cent,” they all concurred. “And who SHOULD have the money, indeed, if not your wives? They have everything to do with the money. What idea have you, but to waste it!” “Women waste nothing--they couldn't if they tried,” said Aaron Sisson. There was a lull for some minutes. The men were all stimulated by drink. The landlady kept them going. She herself sipped a glass of brandy--but slowly. She sat near to Sisson--and the great fierce warmth of her presence enveloped him particularly. He loved so to luxuriate, like a cat, in the presence of a violent woman. He knew that tonight she was feeling very nice to him--a female glow that came out of her to him. Sometimes when she put down her knitting, or took it up again from the bench beside him, her fingers just touched his thigh, and the fine electricity ran over his body, as if he were a cat tingling at a caress. And yet he was not happy--nor comfortable. There was a hard, opposing core in him, that neither the whiskey nor the woman could dissolve or soothe, tonight. It remained hard, nay, became harder and more deeply antagonistic to his surroundings, every moment. He recognised it as a secret malady he suffered from: this strained, unacknowledged opposition to his surroundings, a hard core of irrational, exhausting withholding of himself. Irritating, because he still WANTED to give himself. A woman and whiskey, these were usually a remedy--and music. But lately these had begun to fail him. No, there was something in him that would not give in--neither to the whiskey, nor the woman, nor even the music. Even in the midst of his best music, it sat in the middle of him, this invisible black dog, and growled and waited, never to be cajoled. He knew of its presence--and was a little uneasy. For of course he _wanted_ to let himself go, to feel rosy and loving and all that. But at the very thought, the black dog showed its teeth. Still he kept the beast at bay--with all his will he kept himself as it were genial. He wanted to melt and be rosy, happy. He sipped his whiskey with gratification, he luxuriated in the presence of the landlady, very confident of the strength of her liking for him. He glanced at her profile--that fine throw-back of her hostile head, wicked in the midst of her benevolence; that subtle, really very beautiful delicate curve of her nose, that moved him exactly like a piece of pure sound. But tonight it did not overcome him. There was a devilish little cold eye in his brain that was not taken in by what he saw. A terrible obstinacy located itself in him. He saw the fine, rich-coloured, secretive face of the Hebrew woman, so loudly self-righteous, and so dangerous, so destructive, so lustful--and he waited for his blood to melt with passion for her. But not tonight. Tonight his innermost heart was hard and cold as ice. The very danger and lustfulness of her, which had so pricked his senses, now made him colder. He disliked her at her tricks. He saw her once too often. Her and all women. Bah, the love game! And the whiskey that was to help in the game! He had drowned himself once too often in whiskey and in love. Now he floated like a corpse in both, with a cold, hostile eye. And at least half of his inward fume was anger because he could no longer drown. Nothing would have pleased him better than to feel his senses melting and swimming into oneness with the dark. But impossible! Cold, with a white fury inside him, he floated wide eyed and apart as a corpse. He thought of the gentle love of his first married years, and became only whiter and colder, set in more intense obstinacy. A wave of revulsion lifted him. He became aware that he was deadly antagonistic to the landlady, that he disliked his whole circumstances. A cold, diabolical consciousness detached itself from his state of semi-intoxication. “Is it pretty much the same out there in India?” he asked of the doctor, suddenly. The doctor started, and attended to him on his own level. “Probably,” he answered. “It is worse.” “Worse!” exclaimed Aaron Sisson. “How's that?” “Why, because, in a way the people of India have an easier time even than the people of England. Because they have no responsibility. The British Government takes the responsibility. And the people have nothing to do, except their bit of work--and talk perhaps about national rule, just for a pastime.” “They have to earn their living?” said Sisson. “Yes,” said the little doctor, who had lived for some years among the colliers, and become quite familiar with them. “Yes, they have to earn their living--and then no more. That's why the British Government is the worst thing possible for them. It is the worst thing possible. And not because it is a bad government. Really, it is not a bad government. It is a good one--and they know it--much better than they would make for themselves, probably. But for that reason it is so very bad.” The little oriental laughed a queer, sniggering laugh. His eyes were very bright, dilated, completely black. He was looking into the ice-blue, pointed eyes of Aaron Sisson. They were both intoxicated--but grimly so. They looked at each other in elemental difference. The whole room was now attending to this new conversation: which they all accepted as serious. For Aaron was considered a special man, a man of peculiar understanding, even though as a rule he said little. “If it is a good government, doctor, how can it be so bad for the people?” said the landlady. The doctor's eyes quivered for the fraction of a second, as he watched the other man. He did not look at the landlady. “It would not matter what kind of mess they made--and they would make a mess, if they governed themselves, the people of India. They would probably make the greatest muddle possible--and start killing one another. But it wouldn't matter if they exterminated half the population, so long as they did it themselves, and were responsible for it.” Again his eyes dilated, utterly black, to the eyes of the other man, and an arch little smile flickered on his face. “I think it would matter very much indeed,” said the landlady. “They had far better NOT govern themselves.” She was, for some reason, becoming angry. The little greenish doctor emptied his glass, and smiled again. “But what difference does it make,” said Aaron Sisson, “whether they govern themselves or not? They only live till they die, either way.” And he smiled faintly. He had not really listened to the doctor. The terms “British Government,” and “bad for the people--good for the people,” made him malevolently angry. The doctor was nonplussed for a moment. Then he gathered himself together. “It matters,” he said; “it matters.--People should always be responsible for themselves. How can any people be responsible for another race of people, and for a race much older than they are, and not at all children.” Aaron Sisson watched the other's dark face, with its utterly exposed eyes. He was in a state of semi-intoxicated anger and clairvoyance. He saw in the black, void, glistening eyes of the oriental only the same danger, the same menace that he saw in the landlady. Fair, wise, even benevolent words: always the human good speaking, and always underneath, something hateful, something detestable and murderous. Wise speech and good intentions--they were invariably maggoty with these secret inclinations to destroy the man in the man. Whenever he heard anyone holding forth: the landlady, this doctor, the spokesman on the pit bank: or when he read the all-righteous newspaper; his soul curdled with revulsion as from something foul. Even the infernal love and good-will of his wife. To hell with good-will! It was more hateful than ill-will. Self-righteous bullying, like poison gas! The landlady looked at the clock. “Ten minutes to, gentlemen,” she said coldly. For she too knew that Aaron was spoiled for her for that night. The men began to take their leave, shakily. The little doctor seemed to evaporate. The landlady helped Aaron on with his coat. She saw the curious whiteness round his nostrils and his eyes, the fixed hellish look on his face. “You'll eat a mince-pie in the kitchen with us, for luck?” she said to him, detaining him till last. But he turned laughing to her. “Nay,” he said, “I must be getting home.” He turned and went straight out of the house. Watching him, the landlady's face became yellow with passion and rage. “That little poisonous Indian viper,” she said aloud, attributing Aaron's mood to the doctor. Her husband was noisily bolting the door. Outside it was dark and frosty. A gang of men lingered in the road near the closed door. Aaron found himself among them, his heart bitterer than steel. The men were dispersing. He should take the road home. But the devil was in it, if he could take a stride in the homeward direction. There seemed a wall in front of him. He veered. But neither could he take a stride in the opposite direction. So he was destined to veer round, like some sort of weather-cock, there in the middle of the dark road outside the “Royal Oak.” But as he turned, he caught sight of a third exit. Almost opposite was the mouth of Shottle Lane, which led off under trees, at right angles to the highroad, up to New Brunswick Colliery. He veered towards the off-chance of this opening, in a delirium of icy fury, and plunged away into the dark lane, walking slowly, on firm legs. CHAPTER III. “THE LIGHTED TREE” It is remarkable how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England. We hear continual complaints of the stodgy dullness of the English. It would be quite as just to complain of their freakish, unusual characters. Only _en masse_ the metal is all Britannia. In an ugly little mining town we find the odd ones just as distinct as anywhere else. Only it happens that dull people invariably meet dull people, and odd individuals always come across odd individuals, no matter where they may be. So that to each kind society seems all of a piece. At one end of the dark tree-covered Shottle Lane stood the “Royal Oak” public house; and Mrs. Houseley was certainly an odd woman. At the other end of the lane was Shottle House, where the Bricknells lived; the Bricknells were odd, also. Alfred Bricknell, the old man, was one of the partners in the Colliery firm. His English was incorrect, his accent, broad Derbyshire, and he was not a gentleman in the snobbish sense of the word. Yet he was well-to-do, and very stuck-up. His wife was dead. Shottle House stood two hundred yards beyond New Brunswick Colliery. The colliery was imbedded in a plantation, whence its burning pit-hill glowed, fumed, and stank sulphur in the nostrils of the Bricknells. Even war-time efforts had not put out this refuse fire. Apart from this, Shottle House was a pleasant square house, rather old, with shrubberies and lawns. It ended the lane in a dead end. Only a field-path trekked away to the left. On this particular Christmas Eve Alfred Bricknell had only two of his children at home. Of the others, one daughter was unhappily married, and away in India weeping herself thinner; another was nursing her babies in Streatham. Jim, the hope of the house, and Julia, now married to Robert Cunningham, had come home for Christmas. The party was seated in the drawing-room, that the grown-up daughters had made very fine during their periods of courtship. Its walls were hung with fine grey canvas, it had a large, silvery grey, silky carpet, and the furniture was covered with dark green silky material. Into this reticence pieces of futurism, Omega cushions and Van-Gogh-like pictures exploded their colours. Such _chic_ would certainly not have been looked for up Shottle Lane. The old man sat in his high grey arm-chair very near an enormous coal fire. In this house there was no coal-rationing. The finest coal was arranged to obtain a gigantic glow such as a coal-owner may well enjoy, a great, intense mass of pure red fire. At this fire Alfred Bricknell toasted his tan, lambs-wool-lined slippers. He was a large man, wearing a loose grey suit, and sprawling in the large grey arm-chair. The soft lamp-light fell on his clean, bald, Michael-Angelo head, across which a few pure hairs glittered. His chin was sunk on his breast, so that his sparse but strong-haired white beard, in which every strand stood distinct, like spun glass lithe and elastic, curved now upwards and inwards, in a curious curve returning upon him. He seemed to be sunk in stern, prophet-like meditation. As a matter of fact, he was asleep after a heavy meal. Across, seated on a pouffe on the other side of the fire, was a cameo-like girl with neat black hair done tight and bright in the French mode. She had strangely-drawn eyebrows, and her colour was brilliant. She was hot, leaning back behind the shaft of old marble of the mantel-piece, to escape the fire. She wore a simple dress of apple-green satin, with full sleeves and ample skirt and a tiny bodice of green cloth. This was Josephine Ford, the girl Jim was engaged to. Jim Bricknell himself was a tall big fellow of thirty-eight. He sat in a chair in front of the fire, some distance back, and stretched his long legs far in front of him. His chin too was sunk on his breast, his young forehead was bald, and raised in odd wrinkles, he had a silent half-grin on his face, a little tipsy, a little satyr-like. His small moustache was reddish. Behind him a round table was covered with cigarettes, sweets, and bottles. It was evident Jim Bricknell drank beer for choice. He wanted to get fat--that was his idea. But he couldn't bring it off: he was thin, though not too thin, except to his own thinking. His sister Julia was bunched up in a low chair between him and his father. She too was a tall stag of a thing, but she sat bunched up like a witch. She wore a wine-purple dress, her arms seemed to poke out of the sleeves, and she had dragged her brown hair into straight, untidy strands. Yet she had real beauty. She was talking to the young man who was not her husband: a fair, pale, fattish young fellow in pince-nez and dark clothes. This was Cyril Scott, a friend. The only other person stood at the round table pouring out red wine. He was a fresh, stoutish young Englishman in khaki, Julia's husband, Robert Cunningham, a lieutenant about to be demobilised, when he would become a sculptor once more. He drank red wine in large throatfuls, and his eyes grew a little moist. The room was hot and subdued, everyone was silent. “I say,” said Robert suddenly, from the rear--“anybody have a drink? Don't you find it rather hot?” “Is there another bottle of beer there?” said Jim, without moving, too settled even to stir an eye-lid. “Yes--I think there is,” said Robert. “Thanks--don't open it yet,” murmured Jim. “Have a drink, Josephine?” said Robert. “No thank you,” said Josephine, bowing slightly. Finding the drinks did not go, Robert went round with the cigarettes. Josephine Ford looked at the white rolls. “Thank you,” she said, and taking one, suddenly licked her rather full, dry red lips with the rapid tip of her tongue. It was an odd movement, suggesting a snake's flicker. She put her cigarette between her lips, and waited. Her movements were very quiet and well bred; but perhaps too quiet, they had the dangerous impassivity of the Bohemian, Parisian or American rather than English. “Cigarette, Julia?” said Robert to his wife. She seemed to start or twitch, as if dazed. Then she looked up at her husband with a queer smile, puckering the corners of her eyes. He looked at the cigarettes, not at her. His face had the blunt voluptuous gravity of a young lion, a great cat. She kept him standing for some moments impassively. Then suddenly she hung her long, delicate fingers over the box, in doubt, and spasmodically jabbed at the cigarettes, clumsily raking one out at last. “Thank you, dear--thank you,” she cried, rather high, looking up and smiling once more. He turned calmly aside, offering the cigarettes to Scott, who refused. “Oh!” said Julia, sucking the end of her cigarette. “Robert is so happy with all the good things--aren't you dear?” she sang, breaking into a hurried laugh. “We aren't used to such luxurious living, we aren't--ARE WE DEAR--No, we're not such swells as this, we're not. Oh, ROBBIE, isn't it all right, isn't it just all right?” She tailed off into her hurried, wild, repeated laugh. “We're so happy in a land of plenty, AREN'T WE DEAR?” “Do you mean I'm greedy, Julia?” said Robert. “Greedy!--Oh, greedy!--he asks if he's greedy?--no you're not greedy, Robbie, you're not greedy. I want you to be happy.” “I'm quite happy,” he returned. “Oh, he's happy!--Really!--he's happy! Oh, what an accomplishment! Oh, my word!” Julia puckered her eyes and laughed herself into a nervous twitching silence. Robert went round with the matches. Julia sucked her cigarette. “Give us a light, Robbie, if you ARE happy!” she cried. “It's coming,” he answered. Josephine smoked with short, sharp puffs. Julia sucked wildly at her light. Robert returned to his red wine. Jim Bricknell suddenly roused up, looked round on the company, smiling a little vacuously and showing his odd, pointed teeth. “Where's the beer?” he asked, in deep tones, smiling full into Josephine's face, as if she were going to produce it by some sleight of hand. Then he wheeled round to the table, and was soon pouring beer down his throat as down a pipe. Then he dropped supine again. Cyril Scott was silently absorbing gin and water. “I say,” said Jim, from the remote depths of his sprawling. “Isn't there something we could do to while the time away?” Everybody suddenly laughed--it sounded so remote and absurd. “What, play bridge or poker or something conventional of that sort?” said Josephine in her distinct voice, speaking to him as if he were a child. “Oh, damn bridge,” said Jim in his sleep-voice. Then he began pulling his powerful length together. He sat on the edge of his chair-seat, leaning forward, peering into all the faces and grinning. “Don't look at me like that--so long--” said Josephine, in her self-contained voice. “You make me uncomfortable.” She gave an odd little grunt of a laugh, and the tip of her tongue went over her lips as she glanced sharply, half furtively round the room. “I like looking at you,” said Jim, his smile becoming more malicious. “But you shouldn't, when I tell you not,” she returned. Jim twisted round to look at the state of the bottles. The father also came awake. He sat up. “Isn't it time,” he said, “that you all put away your glasses and cigarettes and thought of bed?” Jim rolled slowly round towards his father, sprawling in the long chair. “Ah, Dad,” he said, “tonight's the night! Tonight's some night, Dad.--You can sleep any time--” his grin widened--“but there aren't many nights to sit here--like this--Eh?” He was looking up all the time into the face of his father, full and nakedly lifting his face to the face of his father, and smiling fixedly. The father, who was perfectly sober, except for the contagion from the young people, felt a wild tremor go through his heart as he gazed on the face of his boy. He rose stiffly. “You want to stay?” he said. “You want to stay!--Well then--well then, I'll leave you. But don't be long.” The old man rose to his full height, rather majestic. The four younger people also rose respectfully--only Jim lay still prostrate in his chair, twisting up his face towards his father. “You won't stay long,” said the old man, looking round a little bewildered. He was seeking a responsible eye. Josephine was the only one who had any feeling for him. “No, we won't stay long, Mr. Bricknell,” she said gravely. “Good night, Dad,” said Jim, as his father left the room. Josephine went to the window. She had rather a stiff, _poupee_ walk. “How is the night?” she said, as if to change the whole feeling in the room. She pushed back the thick grey-silk curtains. “Why?” she exclaimed. “What is that light burning? A red light?” “Oh, that's only the pit-bank on fire,” said Robert, who had followed her. “How strange!--Why is it burning now?” “It always burns, unfortunately--it is most consistent at it. It is the refuse from the mines. It has been burning for years, in spite of all efforts to the contrary.” “How very curious! May we look at it?” Josephine now turned the handle of the French windows, and stepped out. “Beautiful!” they heard her voice exclaim from outside. In the room, Julia laid her hand gently, protectively over the hand of Cyril Scott. “Josephine and Robert are admiring the night together!” she said, smiling with subtle tenderness to him. “Naturally! Young people always do these romantic things,” replied Cyril Scott. He was twenty-two years old, so he could afford to be cynical. “Do they?--Don't you think it's nice of them?” she said, gently removing her hand from his. His eyes were shining with pleasure. “I do. I envy them enormously. One only needs to be sufficiently naive,” he said. “One does, doesn't one!” cooed Julia. “I say, do you hear the bells?” said Robert, poking his head into the room. “No, dear! Do you?” replied Julia. “Bells! Hear the bells! Bells!” exclaimed the half-tipsy and self-conscious Jim. And he rolled in his chair in an explosion of sudden, silent laughter, showing his mouthful of pointed teeth, like a dog. Then he gradually gathered himself together, found his feet, smiling fixedly. “Pretty cool night!” he said aloud, when he felt the air on his almost bald head. The darkness smelt of sulphur. Josephine and Robert had moved out of sight. Julia was abstracted, following them with her eyes. With almost supernatural keenness she seemed to catch their voices from the distance. “Yes, Josephine, WOULDN'T that be AWFULLY ROMANTIC!”--she suddenly called shrilly. The pair in the distance started. “What--!” they heard Josephine's sharp exclamation. “What's that?--What would be romantic?” said Jim as he lurched up and caught hold of Cyril Scott's arm. “Josephine wants to make a great illumination of the grounds of the estate,” said Julia, magniloquent. “No--no--I didn't say it,” remonstrated Josephine. “What Josephine said,” explained Robert, “was simply that it would be pretty to put candles on one of the growing trees, instead of having a Christmas-tree indoors.” “Oh, Josephine, how sweet of you!” cried Julia. Cyril Scott giggled. “Good egg! Champion idea, Josey, my lass. Eh? What--!” cried Jim. “Why not carry it out--eh? Why not? Most attractive.” He leaned forward over Josephine, and grinned. “Oh, no!” expostulated Josephine. “It all sounds so silly now. No. Let us go indoors and go to bed.” “NO, Josephine dear--No! It's a LOVELY IDEA!” cried Julia. “Let's get candles and lanterns and things--” “Let's!” grinned Jim. “Let's, everybody--let's.” “Shall we really?” asked Robert. “Shall we illuminate one of the fir-trees by the lawn?” “Yes! How lovely!” cried Julia. “I'll fetch the candles.” “The women must put on warm cloaks,” said Robert. They trooped indoors for coats and wraps and candles and lanterns. Then, lighted by a bicycle lamp, they trooped off to the shed to twist wire round the candles for holders. They clustered round the bench. “I say,” said Julia, “doesn't Cyril look like a pilot on a stormy night! Oh, I say--!” and she went into one of her hurried laughs. They all looked at Cyril Scott, who was standing sheepishly in the background, in a very large overcoat, smoking a large pipe. The young man was uncomfortable, but assumed a stoic air of philosophic indifference. Soon they were busy round a prickly fir-tree at the end of the lawn. Jim stood in the background vaguely staring. The bicycle lamp sent a beam of strong white light deep into the uncanny foliage, heads clustered and hands worked. The night above was silent, dim. There was no wind. In the near distance they could hear the panting of some engine at the colliery. “Shall we light them as we fix them,” asked Robert, “or save them for one grand rocket at the end?” “Oh, as we do them,” said Cyril Scott, who had lacerated his fingers and wanted to see some reward. A match spluttered. One naked little flame sprang alight among the dark foliage. The candle burned tremulously, naked. They all were silent. “We ought to do a ritual dance! We ought to worship the tree,” sang Julia, in her high voice. “Hold on a minute. We'll have a little more illumination,” said Robert. “Why yes. We want more than one candle,” said Josephine. But Julia had dropped the cloak in which she was huddled, and with arms slung asunder was sliding, waving, crouching in a _pas seul_ before the tree, looking like an animated bough herself. Jim, who was hugging his pipe in the background, broke into a short, harsh, cackling laugh. “Aren't we fools!” he cried. “What? Oh, God's love, aren't we fools!” “No--why?” cried Josephine, amused but resentful. But Jim vouchsafed nothing further, only stood like a Red Indian gripping his pipe. The beam of the bicycle-lamp moved and fell upon the hands and faces of the young people, and penetrated the recesses of the secret trees. Several little tongues of flame clipped sensitive and ruddy on the naked air, sending a faint glow over the needle foliage. They gave a strange, perpendicular aspiration in the night. Julia waved slowly in her tree dance. Jim stood apart, with his legs straddled, a motionless figure. The party round the tree became absorbed and excited as more ruddy tongues of flame pricked upward from the dark tree. Pale candles became evident, the air was luminous. The illumination was becoming complete, harmonious. Josephine suddenly looked round. “Why-y-y!” came her long note of alarm. A man in a bowler hat and a black overcoat stood on the edge of the twilight. “What is it?” cried Julia. “_Homo sapiens_!” said Robert, the lieutenant. “Hand the light, Cyril.” He played the beam of light full on the intruder; a man in a bowler hat, with a black overcoat buttoned to his throat, a pale, dazed, blinking face. The hat was tilted at a slightly jaunty angle over the left eye, the man was well-featured. He did not speak. “Did you want anything?” asked Robert, from behind the light. Aaron Sisson blinked, trying to see who addressed him. To him, they were all illusory. He did not answer. “Anything you wanted?” repeated Robert, military, rather peremptory. Jim suddenly doubled himself up and burst into a loud harsh cackle of laughter. Whoop! he went, and doubled himself up with laughter. Whoop! Whoop! he went, and fell on the ground and writhed with laughter. He was in that state of intoxication when he could find no release from maddening self-consciousness. He knew what he was doing, he did it deliberately. And yet he was also beside himself, in a sort of hysterics. He could not help himself in exasperated self-consciousness. The others all began to laugh, unavoidably. It was a contagion. They laughed helplessly and foolishly. Only Robert was anxious. “I'm afraid he'll wake the house,” he said, looking at the doubled up figure of Jim writhing on the grass and whooping loudly. “Or not enough,” put in Cyril Scott. He twigged Jim's condition. “No--no!” cried Josephine, weak with laughing in spite of herself. “No--it's too long--I'm like to die laughing--” Jim embraced the earth in his convulsions. Even Robert shook quite weakly with laughter. His face was red, his eyes full of dancing water. Yet he managed to articulate. “I say, you know, you'll bring the old man down.” Then he went off again into spasms. “Hu! Hu!” whooped Jim, subsiding. “Hu!” He rolled over on to his back, and lay silent. The others also became weakly silent. “What's amiss?” said Aaron Sisson, breaking this spell. They all began to laugh again, except Jim, who lay on his back looking up at the strange sky. “What're you laughing at?” repeated Aaron. “We're laughing at the man on the ground,” replied Josephine. “I think he's drunk a little too much.” “Ay,” said Aaron, standing mute and obstinate. “Did you want anything?” Robert enquired once more. “Eh?” Aaron looked up. “Me? No, not me.” A sort of inertia kept him rooted. The young people looked at one another and began to laugh, rather embarrassed. “Another!” said Cyril Scott cynically. They wished he would go away. There was a pause. “What do you reckon stars are?” asked the sepulchral voice of Jim. He still lay flat on his back on the grass. Josephine went to him and pulled at his coat. “Get up,” she said. “You'll take cold. Get up now, we're going indoors.” “What do you reckon stars are?” he persisted. Aaron Sisson stood on the edge of the light, smilingly staring at the scene, like a boy out of his place, but stubbornly keeping his ground. “Get up now,” said Josephine. “We've had enough.” But Jim would not move. Robert went with the bicycle lamp and stood at Aaron's side. “Shall I show you a light to the road--you're off your track,” he said. “You're in the grounds of Shottle House.” “I can find my road,” said Aaron. “Thank you.” Jim suddenly got up and went to peer at the stranger, poking his face close to Aaron's face. “Right-o,” he replied. “You're not half a bad sort of chap--Cheery-o! What's your drink?” “Mine--whiskey,” said Aaron. “Come in and have one. We're the only sober couple in the bunch--what?” cried Jim. Aaron stood unmoving, static in everything. Jim took him by the arm affectionately. The stranger looked at the flickering tree, with its tiers of lights. “A Christmas tree,” he said, jerking his head and smiling. “That's right, old man,” said Jim, seeming thoroughly sober now. “Come indoors and have a drink.” Aaron Sisson negatively allowed himself to be led off. The others followed in silence, leaving the tree to flicker the night through. The stranger stumbled at the open window-door. “Mind the step,” said Jim affectionately. They crowded to the fire, which was still hot. The newcomer looked round vaguely. Jim took his bowler hat and gave him a chair. He sat without looking round, a remote, abstract look on his face. He was very pale, and seemed-inwardly absorbed. The party threw off their wraps and sat around. Josephine turned to Aaron Sisson, who sat with a glass of whiskey in his hand, rather slack in his chair, in his thickish overcoat. He did not want to drink. His hair was blond, quite tidy, his mouth and chin handsome but a little obstinate, his eyes inscrutable. His pallor was not natural to him. Though he kept the appearance of a smile, underneath he was hard and opposed. He did not wish to be with these people, and yet, mechanically, he stayed. “Do you feel quite well?” Josephine asked him. He looked at her quickly. “Me?” he said. He smiled faintly. “Yes, I'm all right.” Then he dropped his head again and seemed oblivious. “Tell us your name,” said Jim affectionately. The stranger looked up. “My name's Aaron Sisson, if it's anything to you,” he said. Jim began to grin. “It's a name I don't know,” he said. Then he named all the party present. But the stranger hardly heeded, though his eyes looked curiously from one to the other, slow, shrewd, clairvoyant. “Were you on your way home?” asked Robert, huffy. The stranger lifted his head and looked at him. “Home!” he repeated. “No. The other road--” He indicated the direction with his head, and smiled faintly. “Beldover?” inquired Robert. “Yes.” He had dropped his head again, as if he did not want to look at them. To Josephine, the pale, impassive, blank-seeming face, the blue eyes with the smile which wasn't a smile, and the continual dropping of the well-shaped head was curiously affecting. She wanted to cry. “Are you a miner?” Robert asked, _de haute en bas_. “No,” cried Josephine. She had looked at his hands. “Men's checkweighman,” replied Aaron. He had emptied his glass. He put it on the table. “Have another?” said Jim, who was attending fixedly, with curious absorption, to the stranger. “No,” cried Josephine, “no more.” Aaron looked at Jim, then at her, and smiled slowly, with remote bitterness. Then he lowered his head again. His hands were loosely clasped between his knees. “What about the wife?” said Robert--the young lieutenant. “What about the wife and kiddies? You're a married man, aren't you?” The sardonic look of the stranger rested on the subaltern. “Yes,” he said. “Won't they be expecting you?” said Robert, trying to keep his temper and his tone of authority. “I expect they will--” “Then you'd better be getting along, hadn't you?” The eyes of the intruder rested all the time on the flushed subaltern. The look on Aaron's face became slowly satirical. “Oh, dry up the army touch,” said Jim contemptuously, to Robert. “We're all civvies here. We're all right, aren't we?” he said loudly, turning to the stranger with a grin that showed his pointed teeth. Aaron gave a brief laugh of acknowledgement. “How many children have you?” sang Julia from her distance. “Three.” “Girls or boys?” “Girls.” “All girls? Dear little things! How old?” “Oldest eight--youngest nine months--” “So small!” sang Julia, with real tenderness now--Aaron dropped his head. “But you're going home to them, aren't you?” said Josephine, in whose eyes the tears had already risen. He looked up at her, at her tears. His face had the same pale perverse smile. “Not tonight,” he said. “But why? You're wrong!” cried Josephine. He dropped his head and became oblivious. “Well!” said Cyril Scott, rising at last with a bored exclamation. “I think I'll retire.” “Will you?” said Julia, also rising. “You'll find your candle outside.” She went out. Scott bade good night, and followed her. The four people remained in the room, quite silent. Then Robert rose and began to walk about, agitated. “Don't you go back to 'em. Have a night out. You stop here tonight,” Jim said suddenly, in a quiet intimate tone. The stranger turned his head and looked at him, considering. “Yes?” he said. He seemed to be smiling coldly. “Oh, but!” cried Josephine. “Your wife and your children! Won't they be awfully bothered? Isn't it awfully unkind to them?” She rose in her eagerness. He sat turning up his face to her. She could not understand his expression. “Won't you go home to them?” she said, hysterical. “Not tonight,” he replied quietly, again smiling. “You're wrong!” she cried. “You're wrong!” And so she hurried out of the room in tears. “Er--what bed do you propose to put him in?” asked Robert rather officer-like. “Don't propose at all, my lad,” replied Jim, ironically--he did not like Robert. Then to the stranger he said: “You'll be all right on the couch in my room?--it's a good couch, big enough, plenty of rugs--” His voice was easy and intimate. Aaron looked at him, and nodded. They had another drink each, and at last the two set off, rather stumbling, upstairs. Aaron carried his bowler hat with him. Robert remained pacing in the drawing-room for some time. Then he went out, to return in a little while. He extinguished the lamps and saw that the fire was safe. Then he went to fasten the window-doors securely. Outside he saw the uncanny glimmer of candles across the lawn. He had half a mind to go out and extinguish them--but he did not. So he went upstairs and the house was quiet. Faint crumbs of snow were falling outside. When Jim woke in the morning Aaron had gone. Only on the floor were two packets of Christmas-tree candles, fallen from the stranger's pockets. He had gone through the drawing-room door, as he had come. The housemaid said that while she was cleaning the grate in the dining-room she heard someone go into the drawing-room: a parlour-maid had even seen someone come out of Jim's bedroom. But they had both thought it was Jim himself, for he was an unsettled house mate. There was a thin film of snow, a lovely Christmas morning. CHAPTER IV. “THE PILLAR OF SALT” Our story will not yet see daylight. A few days after Christmas, Aaron sat in the open shed at the bottom of his own garden, looking out on the rainy darkness. No one knew he was there. It was some time after six in the evening. From where he sat, he looked straight up the garden to the house. The blind was not drawn in the middle kitchen, he could see the figures of his wife and one child. There was a light also in the upstairs window. His wife was gone upstairs again. He wondered if she had the baby ill. He could see her figure vaguely behind the lace curtains of the bedroom. It was like looking at his home through the wrong end of a telescope. Now the little girls had gone from the middle room: only to return in a moment. His attention strayed. He watched the light falling from the window of the next-door house. Uneasily, he looked along the whole range of houses. The street sloped down-hill, and the backs were open to the fields. So he saw a curious succession of lighted windows, between which jutted the intermediary back premises, scullery and outhouse, in dark little blocks. It was something like the keyboard of a piano: more still, like a succession of musical notes. For the rectangular planes of light were of different intensities, some bright and keen, some soft, warm, like candle-light, and there was one surface of pure red light, one or two were almost invisible, dark green. So the long scale of lights seemed to trill across the darkness, now bright, now dim, swelling and sinking. The effect was strange. And thus the whole private life of the street was threaded in lights. There was a sense of indecent exposure, from so many backs. He felt himself almost in physical contact with this contiguous stretch of back premises. He heard the familiar sound of water gushing from the sink in to the grate, the dropping of a pail outside the door, the clink of a coal shovel, the banging of a door, the sound of voices. So many houses cheek by jowl, so many squirming lives, so many back yards, back doors giving on to the night. It was revolting. Away in the street itself, a boy was calling the newspaper: “--'NING POST! --'NING PO-O-ST!” It was a long, melancholy howl, and seemed to epitomise the whole of the dark, wet, secretive, thickly-inhabited night. A figure passed the window of Aaron's own house, entered, and stood inside the room talking to Mrs. Sisson. It was a young woman in a brown mackintosh and a black hat. She stood under the incandescent light, and her hat nearly knocked the globe. Next door a man had run out in his shirt sleeves: this time a young, dark-headed collier running to the gate for a newspaper, running bare-headed, coatless, slippered in the rain. He had got his news-sheet, and was returning. And just at that moment the young man's wife came out, shading her candle with a lading tin. She was going to the coal-house for some coal. Her husband passed her on the threshold. She could be heard breaking the bits of coal and placing them on the dustpan. The light from her candle fell faintly behind her. Then she went back, blown by a swirl of wind. But again she was at the door, hastily standing her iron shovel against the wall. Then she shut the back door with a bang. These noises seemed to scrape and strike the night. In Aaron's own house, the young person was still talking to Mrs. Sisson. Millicent came out, sheltering a candle with her hand. The candle blew out. She ran indoors, and emerged again, her white pinafore fluttering. This time she performed her little journey safely. He could see the faint glimmer of her candle emerging secretly from the closet. The young person was taking her leave. He could hear her sympathetic--“Well--good night! I hope she'll be no worse. Good night Mrs. Sisson!” She was gone--he heard the windy bang of the street-gate. Presently Millicent emerged again, flitting indoors. So he rose to his feet, balancing, swaying a little before he started into motion, as so many colliers do. Then he moved along the path towards the house, in the rain and darkness, very slowly edging forwards. Suddenly the door opened. His wife emerged with a pail. He stepped quietly aside, on to his side garden, among the sweet herbs. He could smell rosemary and sage and hyssop. A low wall divided his garden from his neighbour's. He put his hand on it, on its wetness, ready to drop over should his wife come forward. But she only threw the contents of her pail on the garden and retired again. She might have seen him had she looked. He remained standing where he was, listening to the trickle of rain in the water-butt. The hollow countryside lay beyond him. Sometimes in the windy darkness he could see the red burn of New Brunswick bank, or the brilliant jewels of light clustered at Bestwood Colliery. Away in the dark hollow, nearer, the glare of the electric power-station disturbed the night. So again the wind swirled the rain across all these hieroglyphs of the countryside, familiar to him as his own breast. A motor-car was labouring up the hill. His trained ear attended to it unconsciously. It stopped with a jar. There was a bang of the yard-gate. A shortish dark figure in a bowler hat passed the window. Millicent was drawing down the blind. It was the doctor. The blind was drawn, he could see no more. Stealthily he began to approach the house. He stood by the climbing rose of the porch, listening. He heard voices upstairs. Perhaps the children would be downstairs. He listened intently. Voices were upstairs only. He quietly opened the door. The room was empty, save for the baby, who was cooing in her cradle. He crossed to the hall. At the foot of the stairs he could hear the voice of the Indian doctor: “Now little girl, you must just keep still and warm in bed, and not cry for the moon.” He said “_de_ moon,” just as ever.--Marjory must be ill. So Aaron quietly entered the parlour. It was a cold, clammy room, dark. He could hear footsteps passing outside on the asphalt pavement below the window, and the wind howling with familiar cadence. He began feeling for something in the darkness of the music-rack beside the piano. He touched and felt--he could not find what he wanted. Perplexed, he turned and looked out of the window. Through the iron railing of the front wall he could see the little motorcar sending its straight beams of light in front of it, up the street. He sat down on the sofa by the window. The energy had suddenly left all his limbs. He sat with his head sunk, listening. The familiar room, the familiar voice of his wife and his children--he felt weak as if he were dying. He felt weak like a drowning man who acquiesces in the waters. His strength was gone, he was sinking back. He would sink back to it all, float henceforth like a drowned man. So he heard voices coming nearer from upstairs, feet moving. They were coming down. “No, Mrs. Sisson, you needn't worry,” he heard the voice of the doctor on the stairs. “If she goes on as she is, she'll be all right. Only she must be kept warm and quiet--warm and quiet--that's the chief thing.” “Oh, when she has those bouts I can't bear it,” Aaron heard his wife's voice. They were downstairs. Their feet click-clicked on the tiled passage. They had gone into the middle room. Aaron sat and listened. “She won't have any more bouts. If she does, give her a few drops from the little bottle, and raise her up. But she won't have any more,” the doctor said. “If she does, I s'll go off my head, I know I shall.” “No, you won't. No, you won't do anything of the sort. You won't go off your head. You'll keep your head on your shoulders, where it ought to be,” protested the doctor. “But it nearly drives me mad.” “Then don't let it. The child won't die, I tell you. She will be all right, with care. Who have you got sitting up with her? You're not to sit up with her tonight, I tell you. Do you hear me?” “Miss Smitham's coming in. But it's no good--I shall have to sit up. I shall HAVE to.” “I tell you you won't. You obey ME. I know what's good for you as well as for her. I am thinking of you as much as of her.” “But I can't bear it--all alone.” This was the beginning of tears. There was a dead silence--then a sound of Millicent weeping with her mother. As a matter of fact, the doctor was weeping too, for he was an emotional sympathetic soul, over forty. “Never mind--never mind--you aren't alone,” came the doctor's matter-of-fact voice, after a loud nose-blowing. “I am here to help you. I will do whatever I can--whatever I can.” “I can't bear it. I can't bear it,” wept the woman. Another silence, another nose-blowing, and again the doctor: “You'll HAVE to bear it--I tell you there's nothing else for it. You'll have to bear it--but we'll do our best for you. I will do my best for you--always--ALWAYS--in sickness or out of sickness--There!” He pronounced _there_ oddly, not quite _dhere_. “You haven't heard from your husband?” he added. “I had a letter--“--sobs--“from the bank this morning.” “FROM DE BANK?” “Telling me they were sending me so much per month, from him, as an allowance, and that he was quite well, but he was travelling.” “Well then, why not let him travel? You can live.” “But to leave me alone,” there was burning indignation in her voice. “To go off and leave me with every responsibility, to leave me with all the burden.” “Well I wouldn't trouble about him. Aren't you better off without him?” “I am. I am,” she cried fiercely. “When I got that letter this morning, I said MAY EVIL BEFALL YOU, YOU SELFISH DEMON. And I hope it may.” “Well-well, well-well, don't fret. Don't be angry, it won't make it any better, I tell you.” “Angry! I AM angry. I'm worse than angry. A week ago I hadn't a grey hair in my head. Now look here--” There was a pause. “Well-well, well-well, never mind. You will be all right, don't you bother. Your hair is beautiful anyhow.” “What makes me so mad is that he should go off like that--never a word--coolly takes his hook. I could kill him for it.” “Were you ever happy together?” “We were all right at first. I know I was fond of him. But he'd kill anything.--He kept himself back, always kept himself back, couldn't give himself--” There was a pause. “Ah well,” sighed the doctor. “Marriage is a mystery. I'm glad I'm not entangled in it.” “Yes, to make some woman's life a misery.--I'm sure it was death to live with him, he seemed to kill everything off inside you. He was a man you couldn't quarrel with, and get it over. Quiet--quiet in his tempers, and selfish through and through. I've lived with him twelve years--I know what it is. Killing! You don't know what he was--” “I think I knew him. A fair man? Yes?” said the doctor. “Fair to look at.--There's a photograph of him in the parlour--taken when he was married--and one of me.--Yes, he's fairhaired.” Aaron guessed that she was getting a candle to come into the parlour. He was tempted to wait and meet them--and accept it all again. Devilishly tempted, he was. Then he thought of her voice, and his heart went cold. Quick as thought, he obeyed his first impulse. He felt behind the couch, on the floor where the curtains fell. Yes--the bag was there. He took it at once. In the next breath he stepped out of the room and tip-toed into the passage. He retreated to the far end, near the street door, and stood behind the coats that hung on the hall-stand. At that moment his wife came into the passage, holding a candle. She was red-eyed with weeping, and looked frail. “Did YOU leave the parlour door open?” she asked of Millicent, suspiciously. “No,” said Millicent from the kitchen. The doctor, with his soft, Oriental tread followed Mrs. Sisson into the parlour. Aaron saw his wife hold up the candle before his portrait and begin to weep. But he knew her. The doctor laid his hand softly on her arm, and left it there, sympathetically. Nor did he remove it when Millicent stole into the room, looking very woe-begone and important. The wife wept silently, and the child joined in. “Yes, I know him,” said the doctor. “If he thinks he will be happier when he's gone away, you must be happier too, Mrs. Sisson. That's all. Don't let him triumph over you by making you miserable. You enjoy yourself as well. You're only a girl---” But a tear came from his eye, and he blew his nose vigorously on a large white silk handkerchief, and began to polish his _pince nez_. Then he turned, and they all bundled out of the room. The doctor took his departure. Mrs. Sisson went almost immediately upstairs, and Millicent shortly crept after her. Then Aaron, who had stood motionless as if turned to a pillar of salt, went quietly down the passage and into the living room. His face was very pale, ghastly-looking. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the mantel, as he passed, and felt weak, as if he were really a criminal. But his heart did not relax, nevertheless. So he hurried into the night, down the garden, climbed the fence into the field, and went away across the field in the rain, towards the highroad. He felt sick in every fibre. He almost hated the little handbag he carried, which held his flute and piccolo. It seemed a burden just then--a millstone round his neck. He hated the scene he had left--and he hated the hard, inviolable heart that stuck unchanging in his own breast. Coming to the high-road, he saw a tall, luminous tram-car roving along through the rain. The trams ran across country from town to town. He dared not board, because people knew him. So he took a side road, and walked in a detour for two miles. Then he came out on the high-road again and waited for a tram-car. The rain blew on his face. He waited a long time for the last car. CHAPTER V. AT THE OPERA A friend had given Josephine Ford a box at the opera for one evening; our story continues by night. The box was large and important, near the stage. Josephine and Julia were there, with Robert and Jim--also two more men. The women sat in the front of the box, conspicuously. They were both poor, they were rather excited. But they belonged to a set which looked on social triumphs as a downfall that one allows oneself. The two men, Lilly and Struthers, were artists, the former literary, the latter a painter. Lilly sat by Josephine in the front of the box: he was her little lion of the evening. Few women can sit in the front of a big box, on a crowded and full-swing opera night, without thrilling and dilating. There is an intoxication in being thus thrust forward, conspicuous and enhanced, right in the eye of the vast crowd that lines the hollow shell of the auditorium. Thus even Josephine and Julia leaned their elbows and poised their heads regally, looking condescendingly down upon the watchful world. They were two poor women, having nothing to do with society. Half bohemians. Josephine was an artist. In Paris she was a friend of a very fashionable dressmaker and decorator, master of modern elegance. Sometimes she designed dresses for him, and sometimes she accepted from him a commission to decorate a room. Usually at her last sou, it gave her pleasure to dispose of costly and exquisite things for other people, and then be rid of them. This evening her dress was a simple, but a marvellously poised thing of black and silver: in the words of the correct journal. With her tight, black, bright hair, her arched brows, her dusky-ruddy face and her bare shoulders; her strange equanimity, her long, slow, slanting looks; she looked foreign and frightening, clear as a cameo, but dark, far off. Julia was the English beauty, in a lovely blue dress. Her hair was becomingly untidy on her low brow, her dark blue eyes wandered and got excited, her nervous mouth twitched. Her high-pitched, sing-song voice and her hurried laugh could be heard in the theatre. She twisted a beautiful little fan that a dead artist had given her. Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began. The opera was Verdi--_Aida_. If it is impossible to be in an important box at the opera without experiencing the strange intoxication of social pre-eminence, it is just as impossible to be there without some feeling of horror at the sight the stage presents. Josephine leaned her elbow and looked down: she knew how arresting that proud, rather stiff bend of her head was. She had some aboriginal American in her blood. But as she looked, she pursed her mouth. The artist in her forgot everything, she was filled with disgust. The sham Egypt of _Aida_ hid from her nothing of its shame. The singers were all colour-washed, deliberately colour-washed to a bright orange tint. The men had oblong dabs of black wool under their lower lip; the beard of the mighty Pharaohs. This oblong dab shook and wagged to the singing. The vulgar bodies of the fleshy women were unendurable. They all looked such good meat. Why were their haunches so prominent? It was a question Josephine could not solve. She scanned their really expensive, brilliant clothing. It was _nearly_ right--nearly splendid. It only lacked that last subtlety which the world always lacks, the last final clinching which puts calm into a sea of fabric, and yet is the opposite pole to machine fixity. But the leading tenor was the chief pain. He was large, stout, swathed in a cummerbund, and looked like a eunuch. This fattish, emasculated look seems common in stage heroes--even the extremely popular. The tenor sang bravely, his mouth made a large, coffin-shaped, yawning gap in his orange face, his little beard fluttered oddly, like a tail. He turned up his eyes to Josephine's box as he sang--that being the regulation direction. Meanwhile his abdomen shook as he caught his breath, the flesh of his fat, naked arms swayed. Josephine looked down with the fixed gravity of a Red Indian, immovable, inscrutable. It was not till the scene was ended that she lifted her head as if breaking a spell, sent the point of her tongue rapidly over her dried lips, and looked round into the box. Her brown eyes expressed shame, fear, and disgust. A curious grimace went over her face--a grimace only to be expressed by the exclamation _Merde!_ But she was mortally afraid of society, and its fixed institutions. Rapidly she scanned the eyes of her friends in the box. She rested on the eyes of Lilly, a dark, ugly man. “Isn't it nasty?” she said. “You shouldn't look so closely,” he said. But he took it calmly, easily, whilst she felt floods of burning disgust, a longing to destroy it all. “Oh-ho-ho!” laughed Julia. “It's so fu-nny--so funny!” “Of course we are too near,” said Robert. “Say you admire that pink fondant over there,” said Struthers, indicating with his eyebrows a blond large woman in white satin with pink edging, who sat in a box opposite, on the upper tier. “Oh, the fondant--exactly--the fondant! Yes, I admire her immensely! Isn't she exactly IT!” sang Julia. Josephine was scanning the auditorium. So many myriads of faces--like beads on a bead-work pattern--all bead-work, in different layers. She bowed to various acquaintances--mostly Americans in uniform, whom she had known in Paris. She smiled to Lady Cochrane, two boxes off--Lady Cochrane had given her the box. But she felt rather coldly towards her. The curtain rose, the opera wound its slow length along. The audience loved it. They cheered with mad enthusiasm. Josephine looked down on the choppy sea of applause, white gloves clapping, heads shaking. The noise was strange and rattling. What a curious multiple object a theatre-audience was! It seemed to have a million heads, a million hands, and one monstrous, unnatural consciousness. The singers appeared before the curtain--the applause rose up like clouds of dust. “Oh, isn't it too wonderful!” cried Julia. “I am wild with excitement. Are you all of you?” “Absolutely wild,” said Lilly laconically. “Where is Scott to-night?” asked Struthers. Julia turned to him and gave him a long, queer look from her dark blue eyes. “He's in the country,” she said, rather enigmatic. “Don't you know, he's got a house down in Dorset,” said Robert, verbally rushing in. “He wants Julia to go down and stay.” “Is she going?” said Lilly. “She hasn't decided,” replied Robert. “Oh! What's the objection?” asked Struthers. “Well, none whatsoever, as far as can be seen, except that she can't make up her mind,” replied Robert. “Julia's got no mind,” said Jim rudely. “Oh! Hear the brotherly verdict!” laughed Julia hurriedly. “You mean to go down to Dorset alone!” said Struthers. “Why not?” replied Robert, answering for her. “And stay how long?” “Oh--as long as it lasts,” said Robert again. “Starting with eternity,” said Lilly, “and working back to a fortnight.” “And what's the matter?--looks bad in the eyes of the world?” “Yes--about that. Afraid of compromising herself--” Lilly looked at them. “Depends what you take the world to mean. Do you mean us in this box, or the crew outside there?” he jerked his head towards the auditorium. “Do you think, Lilly, that we're the world?” said Robert ironically. “Oh, yes, I guess we're shipwrecked in this box, like Robinson Crusoes. And what we do on our own little island matters to us alone. As for the infinite crowds of howling savages outside there in the unspeakable, all you've got to do is mind they don't scrap you.” “But WON'T they?” said Struthers. “Not unless you put your head in their hands,” said Lilly. “I don't know--” said Jim. But the curtain had risen, they hushed him into silence. All through the next scene, Julia puzzled herself, as to whether she should go down to the country and live with Scott. She had carried on a nervous kind of _amour_ with him, based on soul sympathy and emotional excitement. But whether to go and live with him? She didn't know if she wanted to or not: and she couldn't for her life find out. She was in that nervous state when desire seems to evaporate the moment fulfilment is offered. When the curtain dropped she turned. “You see,” she said, screwing up her eyes, “I have to think of Robert.” She cut the word in two, with an odd little hitch in her voice--“ROB-ert.” “My dear Julia, can't you believe that I'm tired of being thought of,” cried Robert, flushing. Julia screwed up her eyes in a slow smile, oddly cogitating. “Well, who AM I to think of?” she asked. “Yourself,” said Lilly. “Oh, yes! Why, yes! I never thought of that!” She gave a hurried little laugh. “But then it's no FUN to think about oneself,” she cried flatly. “I think about ROB-ert, and SCOTT.” She screwed up her eyes and peered oddly at the company. “Which of them will find you the greatest treat,” said Lilly sarcastically. “Anyhow,” interjected Robert nervously, “it will be something new for Scott.” “Stale buns for you, old boy,” said Jim drily. “I don't say so. But--” exclaimed the flushed, full-blooded Robert, who was nothing if not courteous to women. “How long ha' you been married? Eh?” asked Jim. “Six years!” sang Julia sweetly. “Good God!” “You see,” said Robert, “Julia can't decide anything for herself. She waits for someone else to decide, then she puts her spoke in.” “Put it plainly--” began Struthers. “But don't you know, it's no USE putting it plainly,” cried Julia. “But DO you want to be with Scott, out and out, or DON'T you?” said Lilly. “Exactly!” chimed Robert. “That's the question for you to answer Julia.” “I WON'T answer it,” she cried. “Why should I?” And she looked away into the restless hive of the theatre. She spoke so wildly that she attracted attention. But it half pleased her. She stared abstractedly down at the pit. The men looked at one another in some comic consternation. “Oh, damn it all!” said the long Jim, rising and stretching himself. “She's dead nuts on Scott. She's all over him. She'd have eloped with him weeks ago if it hadn't been so easy. She can't stand it that Robert offers to hand her into the taxi.” He gave his malevolent grin round the company, then went out. He did not reappear for the next scene. “Of course, if she loves Scott--” began Struthers. Julia suddenly turned with wild desperation, and cried: “I like him tremendously--tre-men-dous-ly! He DOES understand.” “Which we don't,” said Robert. Julia smiled her long, odd smile in their faces: one might almost say she smiled in their teeth. “What do YOU think, Josephine?” asked Lilly. Josephine was leaning froward. She started. Her tongue went rapidly over her lips. “Who--? I--?” she exclaimed. “Yes.” “I think Julia should go with Scott,” said Josephine. “She'll bother with the idea till she's done it. She loves him, really.” “Of course she does,” cried Robert. Julia, with her chin resting on her arms, in a position which irritated the neighbouring Lady Cochrane sincerely, was gazing with unseeing eyes down upon the stalls. “Well then--” began Struthers. But the music struck up softly. They were all rather bored. Struthers kept on making small, half audible remarks--which was bad form, and displeased Josephine, the hostess of the evening. When the curtain came down for the end of the act, the men got up. Lilly's wife, Tanny, suddenly appeared. She had come on after a dinner engagement. “Would you like tea or anything?” Lilly asked. The women refused. The men filtered out on to the crimson and white, curving corridor. Julia, Josephine and Tanny remained in the box. Tanny was soon hitched on to the conversation in hand. “Of course,” she replied, “one can't decide such a thing like drinking a cup of tea.” “Of course, one can't, dear Tanny,” said Julia. “After all, one doesn't leave one's husband every day, to go and live with another man. Even if one looks on it as an experiment--.” “It's difficult!” cried Julia. “It's difficult! I feel they all want to FORCE me to decide. It's cruel.” “Oh, men with their beastly logic, their either-this-or-that stunt, they are an awful bore.--But of course, Robert can't love you REALLY, or he'd want to keep you. I can see Lilly discussing such a thing for ME. But then you don't love Robert either,” said Tanny. “I do! Oh, I do, Tanny! I DO love him, I love him dearly. I think he's beautiful. Robert's beautiful. And he NEEDS me. And I need him too. I need his support. Yes, I do love him.” “But you like Scott better,” said Tanny. “Only because he--he's different,” sang Julia, in long tones. “You see Scott has his art. His art matters. And ROB-ert--Robert is a dilettante, don't you think--he's dilettante--” She screwed up her eyes at Tanny. Tanny cogitated. “Of course I don't think that matters,” she replied. “But it does, it matters tremendously, dear Tanny, tremendously.” “Of course,” Tanny sheered off. “I can see Scott has great attractions--a great warmth somewhere--” “Exactly!” cried Julia. “He UNDERSTANDS!” “And I believe he's a real artist. You might even work together. You might write his librettos.” “Yes!--Yes!--” Julia spoke with a long, pondering hiss. “It might be AWFULLY nice,” said Tanny rapturously. “Yes!--It might!--It might--!” pondered Julia. Suddenly she gave herself a shake. Then she laughed hurriedly, as if breaking from her line of thought. “And wouldn't Robert be an AWFULLY nice lover for Josephine! Oh, wouldn't that be splendid!” she cried, with her high laugh. Josephine, who had been gazing down into the orchestra, turned now, flushing darkly. “But I don't want a lover, Julia,” she said, hurt. “Josephine dear! Dear old Josephine! Don't you really! Oh, yes, you do.--I want one so BADLY,” cried Julia, with her shaking laugh. “Robert's awfully good to me. But we've been married six years. And it does make a difference, doesn't it, Tanny dear?” “A great difference,” said Tanny. “Yes, it makes a difference, it makes a difference,” mused Julia. “Dear old Rob-ert--I wouldn't hurt him for worlds. I wouldn't. Do you think it would hurt Robert?” She screwed up her eyes, looking at Tanny. “Perhaps it would do Robert good to be hurt a little,” said Tanny. “He's so well-nourished.” “Yes!--Yes!--I see what you mean, Tanny!--Poor old ROB-ert! Oh, poor old Rob-ert, he's so young!” “He DOES seem young,” said Tanny. “One doesn't forgive it.” “He is young,” said Julia. “I'm five years older than he. He's only twenty-seven. Poor Old Robert.” “Robert is young, and inexperienced,” said Josephine, suddenly turning with anger. “But I don't know why you talk about him.” “Is he inexperienced, Josephine dear? IS he?” sang Julia. Josephine flushed darkly, and turned away. “Ah, he's not so innocent as all that,” said Tanny roughly. “Those young young men, who seem so fresh, they're deep enough, really. They're far less innocent really than men who are experienced.” “They are, aren't they, Tanny,” repeated Julia softly. “They're old--older than the Old Man of the Seas, sometimes, aren't they? Incredibly old, like little boys who know too much--aren't they? Yes!” She spoke quietly, seriously, as if it had struck her. Below, the orchestra was coming in. Josephine was watching closely. Julia became aware of this. “Do you see anybody we know, Josephine?” she asked. Josephine started. “No,” she said, looking at her friends quickly and furtively. “Dear old Josephine, she knows all sorts of people,” sang Julia. At that moment the men returned. “Have you actually come back!” exclaimed Tanny to them. They sat down without answering. Jim spread himself as far as he could, in the narrow space. He stared upwards, wrinkling his ugly, queer face. It was evident he was in one of his moods. “If only somebody loved me!” he complained. “If only somebody loved me I should be all right. I'm going to pieces.” He sat up and peered into the faces of the women. “But we ALL love you,” said Josephine, laughing uneasily. “Why aren't you satisfied?” “I'm not satisfied. I'm not satisfied,” murmured Jim. “Would you like to be wrapped in swaddling bands and laid at the breast?” asked Lilly, disagreeably. Jim opened his mouth in a grin, and gazed long and malevolently at his questioner. “Yes,” he said. Then he sprawled his long six foot of limb and body across the box again. “You should try loving somebody, for a change,” said Tanny. “You've been loved too often. Why not try and love somebody?” Jim eyed her narrowly. “I couldn't love YOU,” he said, in vicious tones. “_A la bonne heure_!” said Tanny. But Jim sank his chin on his chest, and repeated obstinately: “I want to be loved.” “How many times have you been loved?” Robert asked him. “It would be rather interesting to know.” Jim looked at Robert long and slow, but did not answer. “Did you ever keep count?” Tanny persisted. Jim looked up at her, malevolent. “I believe I did,” he replied. “Forty is the age when a man should begin to reckon up,” said Lilly. Jim suddenly sprang to his feet, and brandished his fists. “I'll pitch the lot of you over the bloody rail,” he said. He glared at them, from under his bald, wrinkled forehead. Josephine glanced round. She had become a dusky white colour. She was afraid of him, and she disliked him intensely nowadays. “Do you recognise anyone in the orchestra?” she asked. The party in the box had become dead silent. They looked down. The conductor was at his stand. The music began. They all remained silent and motionless during the next scene, each thinking his own thoughts. Jim was uncomfortable. He wanted to make good. He sat with his elbows on his knees, grinning slightly, looking down. At the next interval he stood up suddenly. “It IS the chap--What?” he exclaimed excitedly, looking round at his friends. “Who?” said Tanny. “It IS he?” said Josephine quietly, meeting Jim's eye. “Sure!” he barked. He was leaning forward over the ledge, rattling a programme in his hand, as if trying to attract attention. Then he made signals. “There you are!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “That's the chap.” “Who? Who?” they cried. But neither Jim nor Josephine would vouchsafe an answer. The next was the long interval. Jim and Josephine gazed down at the orchestra. The musicians were laying aside their instruments and rising. The ugly fire-curtain began slowly to descend. Jim suddenly bolted out. “Is it that man Aaron Sisson?” asked Robert. “Where? Where?” cried Julia. “It can't be.” But Josephine's face was closed and silent. She did not answer. The whole party moved out on to the crimson-carpeted gangway. Groups of people stood about chatting, men and women were passing along, to pay visits or to find drinks. Josephine's party stared around, talking desultorily. And at length they perceived Jim stalking along, leading Aaron Sisson by the arm. Jim was grinning, the flautist looked unwilling. He had a comely appearance, in his white shirt--a certain comely blondness and repose. And as much a gentleman as anybody. “Well!” cried Josephine to him. “How do you come here?” “I play the flute,” he answered, as he shook hands. The little crowd stood in the gangway and talked. “How wonderful of you to be here!” cried Julia. He laughed. “Do you think so?” he answered. “Yes, I do.--It seems so FAR from Shottle House and Christmas Eve.--Oh, wasn't it exciting!” cried Julia. Aaron looked at her, but did not answer. “We've heard all about you,” said Tanny playfully. “Oh, yes,” he replied. “Come!” said Josephine, rather irritated. “We crowd up the gangway.” And she led the way inside the box. Aaron stood and looked down at the dishevelled theatre. “You get all the view,” he said. “We do, don't we!” cried Julia. “More than's good for us,” said Lilly. “Tell us what you are doing. You've got a permanent job?” asked Josephine. “Yes--at present.” “Ah! It's more interesting for you than at Beldover.” She had taken her seat. He looked down at her dusky young face. Her voice was always clear and measured. “It's a change,” he said, smiling. “Oh, it must be more than that,” she said. “Why, you must feel a whole difference. It's a whole new life.” He smiled, as if he were laughing at her silently. She flushed. “But isn't it?” she persisted. “Yes. It can be,” he replied. He looked as if he were quietly amused, but dissociated. None of the people in the box were quite real to him. He was not really amused. Julia found him dull, stupid. Tanny also was offended that he could not _perceive her_. The men remained practically silent. “You're a chap I always hoped would turn up again,” said Jim. “Oh, yes!” replied Aaron, smiling as if amused. “But perhaps he doesn't like us! Perhaps he's not glad that we turned up,” said Julia, leaving her sting. The flautist turned and looked at her. “You can't REMEMBER us, can you?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “I can remember you.” “Oh,” she laughed. “You are unflattering.” He was annoyed. He did not know what she was getting at. “How are your wife and children?” she asked spitefully. “All right, I think.” “But you've been back to them?” cried Josephine in dismay. He looked at her, a slow, half smiling look, but did not speak. “Come and have a drink. Damn the women,” said Jim uncouthly, seizing Aaron by the arm and dragging him off. CHAPTER VI. TALK The party stayed to the end of the interminable opera. They had agreed to wait for Aaron. He was to come around to the vestibule for them, after the show. They trooped slowly down-stairs into the crush of the entrance hall. Chattering, swirling people, red carpet, palms green against cream-and-gilt walls, small whirlpools of life at the open, dark doorways, men in opera hats steering decisively about-it was the old scene. But there were no taxis--absolutely no taxis. And it was raining. Fortunately the women had brought shoes. They slipped these on. Jim rocked through the crowd, in his tall hat, looking for the flautist. At last Aaron was found--wearing a bowler hat. Julia groaned in spirit. Josephine's brow knitted. Not that anybody cared, really. But as one must frown at something, why not at the bowler hat? Acquaintances and elegant young men in uniforms insisted on rushing up and bowing and exchanging a few words, either with Josephine, or Jim, or Julia, or Lilly. They were coldly received. The party veered out into the night. The women hugged their wraps about them, and set off sharply, feeling some repugnance for the wet pavements and the crowd. They had not far to go--only to Jim's rooms in Adelphi. Jim was leading Aaron, holding him by the arm and slightly pinching his muscles. It gave him great satisfaction to have between his fingers the arm-muscles of a working-man, one of the common people, the _fons et origo_ of modern life. Jim was talking rather vaguely about Labour and Robert Smillie, and Bolshevism. He was all for revolution and the triumph of labour. So they arrived, mounted a dark stair, and entered a large, handsome room, one of the Adams rooms. Jim had furnished it from Heale's with striped hangings, green and white and yellow and dark purple, and with a green-and-black checked carpet, and great stripe-covered chairs and Chesterfield. A big gas-fire was soon glowing in the handsome old fire-place, the panelled room seemed cosy. While Jim was handing round drinks and sandwiches, and Josephine was making tea, Robert played Bach on the piano--the pianola, rather. The chairs and lounge were in a half-circle round the fire. The party threw off their wraps and sank deep into this expensive comfort of modern bohemia. They needed the Bach to take away the bad taste that _Aida_ had left in their mouths. They needed the whiskey and curacao to rouse their spirits. They needed the profound comfort in which to sink away from the world. All the men, except Aaron, had been through the war in some way or other. But here they were, in the old setting exactly, the old bohemian routine. The bell rang, Jim went downstairs. He returned shortly with a frail, elegant woman--fashionable rather than bohemian. She was cream and auburn, Irish, with a slightly-lifted upper lip that gave her a pathetic look. She dropped her wrap and sat down by Julia, taking her hand delicately. “How are you, darling?” she asked. “Yes--I'm happy,” said Julia, giving her odd, screwed-up smile. The pianola stopped, they all chatted indiscriminately. Jim was watching the new-comer--Mrs. Browning--with a concentrated wolfish grin. “I like her,” he said at last. “I've seen her before, haven't I?--I like her awfully.” “Yes,” said Josephine, with a slight grunt of a laugh. “He wants to be loved.” “Oh,” cried Clariss. “So do I!” “Then there you are!” cried Tanny. “Alas, no, there we aren't,” cried Clariss. She was beautiful too, with her lifted upper-lip. “We both want to be loved, and so we miss each other entirely. We run on in two parallel lines, that can never meet.” She laughed low and half sad. “Doesn't SHE love you?” said Aaron to Jim amused, indicating Josephine. “I thought you were engaged.” “HER!” leered Jim vindictively, glancing at Josephine. “She doesn't love me.” “Is that true?” asked Robert hastily, of Josephine. “Why,” she said, “yes. Why should he make me say out here that I don't love him!” “Got you my girl,” said Jim. “Then it's no engagement?” said Robert. “Listen to the row fools make, rushing in,” said Jim maliciously. “No, the engagement is broken,” said Josephine. “World coming to pieces bit by bit,” said Lilly. Jim was twisting in his chair, and looking like a Chinese dragon, diabolical. The room was uneasy. “What gives you such a belly-ache for love, Jim?” said Lilly, “or for being loved? Why do you want so badly to be loved?” “Because I like it, damn you,” barked Jim. “Because I'm in need of it.” None of them quite knew whether they ought to take it as a joke. It was just a bit too real to be quite pleasant. “Why are you such a baby?” said Lilly. “There you are, six foot in length, have been a cavalry officer and fought in two wars, and you spend your time crying for somebody to love you. You're a comic.” “Am I though?” said Jim. “I'm losing life. I'm getting thin.” “You don't look as if you were losing life,” said Lilly. “Don't I? I am, though. I'm dying.” “What of? Lack of life?” “That's about it, my young cock. Life's leaving me.” “Better sing Tosti's Farewell to it.” Jim who had been sprawling full length in his arm-chair, the centre of interest of all the company, suddenly sprang forward and pushed his face, grinning, in the face of Lilly. “You're a funny customer, you are,” he said. Then he turned round in his chair, and saw Clariss sitting at the feet of Julia, with one white arm over her friend's knee. Jim immediately stuck forward his muzzle and gazed at her. Clariss had loosened her masses of thick, auburn hair, so that it hung half free. Her face was creamy pale, her upper lip lifted with odd pathos! She had rose-rubies in her ears. “I like HER,” said Jim. “What's her name?” “Mrs. Browning. Don't be so rude,” said Josephine. “Browning for gravies. Any relation of Robert?” “Oh, yes! You ask my husband,” came the slow, plangent voice of Clariss. “You've got a husband, have you?” “Rather! Haven't I, Juley?” “Yes,” said Julia, vaguely and wispily. “Yes, dear, you have.” “And two fine children,” put in Robert. “No! You don't mean it!” said Jim. “Who's your husband? Anybody?” “Rather!” came the deep voice of Clariss. “He sees to that.” Jim stared, grinning, showing his pointed teeth, reaching nearer and nearer to Clariss who, in her frail scrap of an evening dress, amethyst and silver, was sitting still in the deep black hearth-rug, her arm over Julia's knee, taking very little notice of Jim, although he amused her. “I like you awfully, I say,” he repeated. “Thanks, I'm sure,” she said. The others were laughing, sprawling in their chairs, and sipping curacao and taking a sandwich or a cigarette. Aaron Sisson alone sat upright, smiling flickeringly. Josephine watched him, and her pointed tongue went from time to time over her lips. “But I'm sure,” she broke in, “this isn't very interesting for the others. Awfully boring! Don't be silly all the time, Jim, or we must go home.” Jim looked at her with narrowed eyes. He hated her voice. She let her eye rest on his for a moment. Then she put her cigarette to her lips. Robert was watching them both. Josephine took her cigarette from her lips again. “Tell us about yourself, Mr. Sisson,” she said. “How do you like being in London?” “I like London,” said Aaron. Where did he live? Bloomsbury. Did he know many people? No--nobody except a man in the orchestra. How had he got his job? Through an agent. Etc. Etc. “What do you make of the miners?” said Jim, suddenly taking a new line. “Me?” said Sisson. “I don't make anything of them.” “Do you think they'll make a stand against the government?” “What for?” “Nationalisation.” “They might, one day.” “Think they'd fight?” “Fight?” “Yes.” Aaron sat laughing. “What have they to fight for?” “Why, everything! What haven't they to fight for?” cried Josephine fiercely. “Freedom, liberty, and escape from this vile system. Won't they fight for that?” Aaron sat smiling, slowly shaking his head. “Nay,” he said, “you mustn't ask me what they'll do--I've only just left them, for good. They'll do a lot of cavilling.” “But won't they ACT?” cried Josephine. “Act?” said Aaron. “How, act?” “Why, defy the government, and take things in their own hands,” said Josephine. “They might, some time,” said Aaron, rather indifferent. “I wish they would!” cried Josephine. “My, wouldn't I love it if they'd make a bloody revolution!” They were all looking now at her. Her black brows were twitching, in her black and silver dress she looked like a symbol of young disaster. “Must it be bloody, Josephine?” said Robert. “Why, yes. I don't believe in revolutions that aren't bloody,” said Josephine. “Wouldn't I love it! I'd go in front with a red flag.” “It would be rather fun,” said Tanny. “Wouldn't it!” cried Josephine. “Oh, Josey, dear!” cried Julia hysterically. “Isn't she a red-hot Bolsher! _I_ should be frightened.” “No!” cried Josephine. “I should love it.” “So should I,” said Jim, in a luscious sort of voice. “What price machine-guns at the end of the Strand! That's a day to live for, what?” “Ha! Ha!” laughed Clariss, with her deep laugh. “We'd all Bolsh together. I'd give the cheers.” “I wouldn't mind getting killed. I'd love it, in a real fight,” said Josephine. “But, Josephine,” said Robert, “don't you think we've had enough of that sort of thing in the war? Don't you think it all works out rather stupid and unsatisfying?” “Ah, but a civil war would be different. I've no interest in fighting Germans. But a civil war would be different.” “That's a fact, it would,” said Jim. “Only rather worse,” said Robert. “No, I don't agree,” cried Josephine. “You'd feel you were doing something, in a civil war.” “Pulling the house down,” said Lilly. “Yes,” she cried. “Don't you hate it, the house we live in--London--England--America! Don't you hate them?” “I don't like them. But I can't get much fire in my hatred. They pall on me rather,” said Lilly. “Ay!” said Aaron, suddenly stirring in his chair. Lilly and he glanced at one another with a look of recognition. “Still,” said Tanny, “there's got to be a clearance some day or other.” “Oh,” drawled Clariss. “I'm all for a clearance. I'm all for pulling the house down. Only while it stands I do want central heating and a good cook.” “May I come to dinner?” said Jim. “Oh, yes. You'd find it rather domestic.” “Where do you live?” “Rather far out now--Amersham.” “Amersham? Where's that--?” “Oh, it's on the map.” There was a little lull. Jim gulped down a drink, standing at the sideboard. He was a tall, fine, soldierly figure, and his face, with its little sandy moustache and bald forehead, was odd. Aaron Sisson sat watching him, unconsciously. “Hello you!” said Jim. “Have one?” Aaron shook his head, and Jim did not press him. It saved the drinks. “You believe in love, don't you?” said Jim, sitting down near Aaron, and grinning at him. “Love!” said Aaron. “LOVE! he says,” mocked Jim, grinning at the company. “What about it, then?” asked Aaron. “It's life! Love is life,” said Jim fiercely. “It's a vice, like drink,” said Lilly. “Eh? A vice!” said Jim. “May be for you, old bird.” “More so still for you,” said Lilly. “It's life. It's life!” reiterated Jim. “Don't you agree?” He turned wolfishly to Clariss. “Oh, yes--every time--” she drawled, nonchalant. “Here, let's write it down,” said Lilly. He found a blue pencil and printed in large letters on the old creamy marble of the mantel-piece panel:--LOVE IS LIFE. Julia suddenly rose and flung her arms asunder wildly. “Oh, I hate love. I hate it,” she protested. Jim watched her sardonically. “Look at her!” he said. “Look at Lesbia who hates love.” “No, but perhaps it is a disease. Perhaps we are all wrong, and we can't love properly,” put in Josephine. “Have another try,” said Jim,--“I know what love is. I've thought about it. Love is the soul's respiration.” “Let's have that down,” said Lilly. LOVE IS THE SOUL'S RESPIRATION. He printed it on the old mantel-piece. Jim eyed the letters. “It's right,” he said. “Quite right. When you love, your soul breathes in. If you don't breathe in, you suffocate.” “What about breathing out?” said Robert. “If you don't breathe out, you asphyxiate.” “Right you are, Mock Turtle--” said Jim maliciously. “Breathing out is a bloody revolution,” said Lilly. “You've hit the nail on the head,” said Jim solemnly. “Let's record it then,” said Lilly. And with the blue pencil he printed: WHEN YOU LOVE, YOUR SOUL BREATHES IN-- WHEN YOUR SOUL BREATHES OUT, IT'S A BLOODY REVOLUTION. “I say Jim,” he said. “You must be busting yourself, trying to breathe in.” “Don't you be too clever. I've thought about it,” said Jim. “When I'm in love, I get a great inrush of energy. I actually feel it rush in--here!” He poked his finger on the pit of his stomach. “It's the soul's expansion. And if I can't get these rushes of energy, I'M DYING, AND I KNOW I AM.” He spoke the last words with sudden ferocity and desperation. “All _I_ know is,” said Tanny, “you don't look it.” “I AM. I am.” Jim protested. “I'm dying. Life's leaving me.” “Maybe you're choking with love,” said Robert. “Perhaps you have breathed in so much, you don't know how to let it go again. Perhaps your soul's got a crick in it, with expanding so much.” “You're a bloody young sucking pig, you are,” said Jim. “Even at that age, I've learned my manners,” replied Robert. Jim looked round the party. Then he turned to Aaron Sisson. “What do you make of 'em, eh?” he said. Aaron shook his head, and laughed. “Me?” he said. But Jim did not wait for an answer. “I've had enough,” said Tanny suddenly rising. “I think you're all silly. Besides, it's getting late.” “She!” said Jim, rising and pointing luridly to Clariss. “She's Love. And HE's the Working People. The hope is these two--” He jerked a thumb at Aaron Sisson, after having indicated Mrs. Browning. “Oh, how awfully interesting. It's quite a long time since I've been a personification.--I suppose you've never been one before?” said Clariss, turning to Aaron in conclusion. “No, I don't think I have,” he answered. “I hope personification is right.--Ought to be _allegory_ or something else?” This from Clariss to Robert. “Or a parable, Clariss,” laughed the young lieutenant. “Goodbye,” said Tanny. “I've been awfully bored.” “Have you?” grinned Jim. “Goodbye! Better luck next time.” “We'd better look sharp,” said Robert, “if we want to get the tube.” The party hurried through the rainy narrow streets down to the Embankment station. Robert and Julia and Clariss were going west, Lilly and his wife were going to Hampstead, Josephine and Aaron Sisson were going both to Bloomsbury. “I suppose,” said Robert, on the stairs--“Mr. Sisson will see you to your door, Josephine. He lives your way.” “There's no need at all,” said Josephine. The four who were going north went down to the low tube level. It was nearly the last train. The station was half deserted, half rowdy, several fellows were drunk, shouting and crowing. Down there in the bowels of London, after midnight, everything seemed horrible and unnatural. “How I hate this London,” said Tanny. She was half Norwegian, and had spent a large part of her life in Norway, before she married Lilly. “Yes, so do I,” said Josephine. “But if one must earn one's living one must stay here. I wish I could get back to Paris. But there's nothing doing for me in France.--When do you go back into the country, both of you?” “Friday,” said Lilly. “How lovely for you!--And when will you go to Norway, Tanny?” “In about a month,” said Tanny. “You must be awfully pleased.” “Oh--thankful--THANKFUL to get out of England--” “I know. That's how I feel. Everything is so awful--so dismal and dreary, I find it--” They crowded into the train. Men were still yelling like wild beasts--others were asleep--soldiers were singing. “Have you really broken your engagement with Jim?” shrilled Tanny in a high voice, as the train roared. “Yes, he's impossible,” said Josephine. “Perfectly hysterical and impossible.” “And SELFISH--” cried Tanny. “Oh terribly--” cried Josephine. “Come up to Hampstead to lunch with us,” said Lilly to Aaron. “Ay--thank you,” said Aaron. Lilly scribbled directions on a card. The hot, jaded midnight underground rattled on. Aaron and Josephine got down to change trains. CHAPTER VII. THE DARK SQUARE GARDEN Josephine had invited Aaron Sisson to dinner at a restaurant in Soho, one Sunday evening. They had a corner to themselves, and with a bottle of Burgundy she was getting his history from him. His father had been a shaft-sinker, earning good money, but had been killed by a fall down the shaft when Aaron was only four years old. The widow had opened a shop: Aaron was her only child. She had done well in her shop. She had wanted Aaron to be a schoolteacher. He had served three years apprenticeship, then suddenly thrown it up and gone to the pit. “But why?” said Josephine. “I couldn't tell you. I felt more like it.” He had a curious quality of an intelligent, almost sophisticated mind, which had repudiated education. On purpose he kept the midland accent in his speech. He understood perfectly what a personification was--and an allegory. But he preferred to be illiterate. Josephine found out what a miner's checkweighman was. She tried to find out what sort of wife Aaron had--but, except that she was the daughter of a publican and was delicate in health, she could learn nothing. “And do you send her money?” she asked. “Ay,” said Aaron. “The house is mine. And I allow her so much a week out of the money in the bank. My mother left me a bit over a thousand when she died.” “You don't mind what I say, do you?” said Josephine. “No I don't mind,” he laughed. He had this pleasant-seeming courteous manner. But he really kept her at a distance. In some things he reminded her of Robert: blond, erect, nicely built, fresh and English-seeming. But there was a curious cold distance to him, which she could not get across. An inward indifference to her--perhaps to everything. Yet his laugh was so handsome. “Will you tell me why you left your wife and children?--Didn't you love them?” Aaron looked at the odd, round, dark muzzle of the girl. She had had her hair bobbed, and it hung in odd dark folds, very black, over her ears. “Why I left her?” he said. “For no particular reason. They're all right without me.” Josephine watched his face. She saw a pallor of suffering under its freshness, and a strange tension in his eyes. “But you couldn't leave your little girls for no reason at all--” “Yes, I did. For no reason--except I wanted to have some free room round me--to loose myself--” “You mean you wanted love?” flashed Josephine, thinking he said _lose_. “No, I wanted fresh air. I don't know what I wanted. Why should I know?” “But we must know: especially when other people will be hurt,” said she. “Ah, well! A breath of fresh air, by myself. I felt forced to feel--I feel if I go back home now, I shall be FORCED--forced to love--or care--or something.” “Perhaps you wanted more than your wife could give you,” she said. “Perhaps less. She's made up her mind she loves me, and she's not going to let me off.” “Did you never love her?” said Josephine. “Oh, yes. I shall never love anybody else. But I'm damned if I want to be a lover any more. To her or to anybody. That's the top and bottom of it. I don't want to CARE, when care isn't in me. And I'm not going to be forced to it.” The fat, aproned French waiter was hovering near. Josephine let him remove the plates and the empty bottle. “Have more wine,” she said to Aaron. But he refused. She liked him because of his dead-level indifference to his surroundings. French waiters and foreign food--he noticed them in his quick, amiable-looking fashion--but he was indifferent. Josephine was piqued. She wanted to pierce this amiable aloofness of his. She ordered coffee and brandies. “But you don't want to get away from EVERYTHING, do you? I myself feel so LOST sometimes--so dreadfully alone: not in a silly sentimental fashion, because men keep telling me they love me, don't you know. But my LIFE seems alone, for some reason--” “Haven't you got relations?” he said. “No one, now mother is dead. Nothing nearer than aunts and cousins in America. I suppose I shall see them all again one day. But they hardly count over here.” “Why don't you get married?” he said. “How old are you?” “I'm twenty-five. How old are you?” “Thirty-three.” “You might almost be any age.--I don't know why I don't get married. In a way, I hate earning my own living--yet I go on--and I like my work--” “What are you doing now?” “I'm painting scenery for a new play--rather fun--I enjoy it. But I often wonder what will become of me.” “In what way?” She was almost affronted. “What becomes of me? Oh, I don't know. And it doesn't matter, not to anybody but myself.” “What becomes of anybody, anyhow? We live till we die. What do you want?” “Why, I keep saying I want to get married and feel sure of something. But I don't know--I feel dreadful sometimes--as if every minute would be the last. I keep going on and on--I don't know what for--and IT keeps going on and on--goodness knows what it's all for.” “You shouldn't bother yourself,” he said. “You should just let it go on and on--” “But I MUST bother,” she said. “I must think and feel--” “You've no occasion,” he said. “How--?” she said, with a sudden grunting, unhappy laugh. Then she lit a cigarette. “No,” she said. “What I should really like more than anything would be an end of the world. I wish the world would come to an end.” He laughed, and poured his drops of brandy down his throat. “It won't, for wishing,” he said. “No, that's the awful part of it. It'll just go on and on-- Doesn't it make you feel you'd go mad?” He looked at her and shook his head. “You see it doesn't concern me,” he said. “So long as I can float by myself.” “But ARE you SATISFIED!” she cried. “I like being by myself--I hate feeling and caring, and being forced into it. I want to be left alone--” “You aren't very polite to your hostess of the evening,” she said, laughing a bit miserably. “Oh, we're all right,” he said. “You know what I mean--” “You like your own company? Do you?--Sometimes I think I'm nothing when I'm alone. Sometimes I think I surely must be nothing--nothingness.” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. I only want to be left alone.” “Not to have anything to do with anybody?” she queried ironically. “Not to any extent.” She watched him--and then she bubbled with a laugh. “I think you're funny,” she said. “You don't mind?” “No--why--It's just as you see it.--Jim Bricknell's a rare comic, to my eye.” “Oh, him!--no, not actually. He's self-conscious and selfish and hysterical. It isn't a bit funny after a while.” “I only know what I've seen,” said Aaron. “You'd both of you like a bloody revolution, though.” “Yes. Only when it came he wouldn't be there.” “Would you?” “Yes, indeed I would. I would give everything to be in it. I'd give heaven and earth for a great big upheaval--and then darkness.” “Perhaps you'll get it, when you die,” said Aaron. “Oh, but I don't want to die and leave all this standing. I hate it so.” “Why do you?” “But don't you?” “No, it doesn't really bother me.” “It makes me feel I can't live.” “I can't see that.” “But you always disagree with one!” said Josephine. “How do you like Lilly? What do you think of him?” “He seems sharp,” said Aaron. “But he's more than sharp.” “Oh, yes! He's got his finger in most pies.” “And doesn't like the plums in any of them,” said Josephine tartly. “What does he do?” “Writes--stories and plays.” “And makes it pay?” “Hardly at all.--They want us to go. Shall we?” She rose from the table. The waiter handed her her cloak, and they went out into the blowy dark night. She folded her wrap round her, and hurried forward with short, sharp steps. There was a certain Parisian _chic_ and mincingness about her, even in her walk: but underneath, a striding, savage suggestion as if she could leg it in great strides, like some savage squaw. Aaron pressed his bowler hat down on his brow. “Would you rather take a bus?” she said in a high voice, because of the wind. “I'd rather walk.” “So would I.” They hurried across the Charing Cross Road, where great buses rolled and rocked, crammed with people. Her heels clicked sharply on the pavement, as they walked east. They crossed Holborn, and passed the Museum. And neither of them said anything. When they came to the corner, she held out her hand. “Look!” she said. “Don't come any further: don't trouble.” “I'll walk round with you: unless you'd rather not.” “No--But do you want to bother?” “It's no bother.” So they pursued their way through the high wind, and turned at last into the old, beautiful square. It seemed dark and deserted, dark like a savage wilderness in the heart of London. The wind was roaring in the great bare trees of the centre, as if it were some wild dark grove deep in a forgotten land. Josephine opened the gate of the square garden with her key, and let it slam to behind him. “How wonderful the wind is!” she shrilled. “Shall we listen to it for a minute?” She led him across the grass past the shrubs to the big tree in the centre. There she climbed up to a seat. He sat beside her. They sat in silence, looking at the darkness. Rain was blowing in the wind. They huddled against the big tree-trunk, for shelter, and watched the scene. Beyond the tall shrubs and the high, heavy railings the wet street gleamed silently. The houses of the Square rose like a cliff on this inner dark sea, dimly lighted at occasional windows. Boughs swayed and sang. A taxi-cab swirled round a corner like a cat, and purred to a standstill. There was a light of an open hall door. But all far away, it seemed, unthinkably far away. Aaron sat still and watched. He was frightened, it all seemed so sinister, this dark, bristling heart of London. Wind boomed and tore like waves ripping a shingle beach. The two white lights of the taxi stared round and departed, leaving the coast at the foot of the cliffs deserted, faintly spilled with light from the high lamp. Beyond there, on the outer rim, a policeman passed solidly. Josephine was weeping steadily all the time, but inaudibly. Occasionally she blew her nose and wiped her face. But he had not realized. She hardly realized herself. She sat near the strange man. He seemed so still and remote--so fascinating. “Give me your hand,” she said to him, subduedly. He took her cold hand in his warm, living grasp. She wept more bitterly. He noticed at last. “Why are you crying?” he said. “I don't know,” she replied, rather matter-of-fact, through her tears. So he let her cry, and said no more, but sat with her cold hand in his warm, easy clasp. “You'll think me a fool,” she said. “I don't know why I cry.” “You can cry for nothing, can't you?” he said. “Why, yes, but it's not very sensible.” He laughed shortly. “Sensible!” he said. “You are a strange man,” she said. But he took no notice. “Did you ever intend to marry Jim Bricknell?” he asked. “Yes, of course.” “I can't imagine it,” he said. “Why not?” Both were watching blankly the roaring night of mid-London, the phantasmagoric old Bloomsbury Square. They were still hand in hand. “Such as you shouldn't marry,” he said. “But why not? I want to.” “You think you do.” “Yes indeed I do.” He did not say any more. “Why shouldn't I?” she persisted. “I don't know--” And again he was silent. “You've known some life, haven't you?” he asked. “Me? Why?” “You seem to.” “Do I? I'm sorry. Do I seem vicious?--No, I'm not vicious.--I've seen some life, perhaps--in Paris mostly. But not much. Why do you ask?” “I wasn't thinking.” “But what do you mean? What are you thinking?” “Nothing. Nothing.” “Don't be so irritating,” said she. But he did not answer, and she became silent also. They sat hand in hand. “Won't you kiss me?” came her voice out of the darkness. He waited some moments, then his voice sounded gently, half mocking, half reproachful. “Nay!” he said. “Why not?” “I don't want to.” “Why not?” she asked. He laughed, but did not reply. She sat perfectly still for some time. She had ceased to cry. In the darkness her face was set and sullen. Sometimes a spray of rain blew across it. She drew her hand from his, and rose to her feet. “Ill go in now,” she said. “You're not offended, are you?” he asked. “No. Why?” They stepped down in the darkness from their perch. “I wondered.” She strode off for some little way. Then she turned and said: “Yes, I think it is rather insulting.” “Nay,” he said. “Not it! Not it!” And he followed her to the gate. She opened with her key, and they crossed the road to her door. “Good-night,” she said, turning and giving him her hand. “You'll come and have dinner with me--or lunch--will you? When shall we make it?” he asked. “Well, I can't say for certain--I'm very busy just now. I'll let you know.” A policeman shed his light on the pair of them as they stood on the step. “All right,” said Aaron, dropping back, and she hastily opened the big door, and entered. CHAPTER VIII. A PUNCH IN THE WIND The Lillys had a labourer's cottage in Hampshire--pleasant enough. They were poor. Lilly was a little, dark, thin, quick fellow, his wife was strong and fair. They had known Robert and Julia for some years, but Josephine and Jim were new acquaintances,--fairly new. One day in early spring Lilly had a telegram, “Coming to see you arrive 4:30--Bricknell.” He was surprised, but he and his wife got the spare room ready. And at four o'clock Lilly went off to the station. He was a few minutes late, and saw Jim's tall, rather elegant figure stalking down the station path. Jim had been an officer in the regular army, and still spent hours with his tailor. But instead of being a soldier he was a sort of socialist, and a red-hot revolutionary of a very ineffectual sort. “Good lad!” he exclaimed, as Lilly came up. “Thought you wouldn't mind.” “Not at all. Let me carry your bag.” Jim had a bag and a knapsack. “I had an inspiration this morning,” said Jim. “I suddenly saw that if there was a man in England who could save me, it was you.” “Save you from what?” asked Lilly, rather abashed. “Eh--?” and Jim stooped, grinning at the smaller man. Lilly was somewhat puzzled, but he had a certain belief in himself as a saviour. The two men tramped rather incongruously through the lanes to the cottage. Tanny was in the doorway as they came up the garden path. “So nice to see you! Are you all right?” she said. “A-one!” said Jim, grinning. “Nice of you to have me.” “Oh, we're awfully pleased.” Jim dropped his knapsack on the broad sofa. “I've brought some food,” he said. “Have you! That's sensible of you. We can't get a great deal here, except just at week-ends,” said Tanny. Jim fished out a pound of sausages and a pot of fish paste. “How lovely the sausages,” said Tanny. “We'll have them for dinner tonight--and we'll have the other for tea now. You'd like a wash?” But Jim had already opened his bag, taken off his coat, and put on an old one. “Thanks,” he said. Lilly made the tea, and at length all sat down. “Well how unexpected this is--and how nice,” said Tanny. “Jolly--eh?” said Jim. He ate rapidly, stuffing his mouth too full. “How is everybody?” asked Tanny. “All right. Julia's gone with Cyril Scott. Can't stand that fellow, can you? What?” “Yes, I think he's rather nice,” said Tanny. “What will Robert do?” “Have a shot at Josephine, apparently.” “Really? Is he in love with her? I thought so. And she likes him too, doesn't she?” said Tanny. “Very likely,” said Jim. “I suppose you're jealous,” laughed Tanny. “Me!” Jim shook his head. “Not a bit. Like to see the ball kept rolling.” “What have you been doing lately?” “Been staying a few days with my wife.” “No, really! I can't believe it.” Jim had a French wife, who had divorced him, and two children. Now he was paying visits to this wife again: purely friendly. Tanny did most of the talking. Jim excited her, with his way of looking in her face and grinning wolfishly, and at the same time asking to be saved. After tea, he wanted to send telegrams, so Lilly took him round to the village post-office. Telegrams were a necessary part of his life. He had to be suddenly starting off to keep sudden appointments, or he felt he was a void in the atmosphere. He talked to Lilly about social reform, and so on. Jim's work in town was merely nominal. He spent his time wavering about and going to various meetings, philandering and weeping. Lilly kept in the back of his mind the Saving which James had come to look for. He intended to do his best. After dinner the three sat cosily round the kitchen fire. “But what do you really think will happen to the world?” Lilly asked Jim, amid much talk. “What? There's something big coming,” said Jim. “Where from?” “Watch Ireland, and watch Japan--they're the two poles of the world,” said Jim. “I thought Russia and America,” said Lilly. “Eh? What? Russia and America! They'll depend on Ireland and Japan. I know it. I've had a vision of it. Ireland on this side and Japan on the other--they'll settle it.” “I don't see how,” said Lilly. “I don't see HOW--But I had a vision of it.” “What sort of vision?” “Couldn't describe it.” “But you don't think much of the Japanese, do you?” asked Lilly. “Don't I! Don't I!” said Jim. “What, don't you think they're wonderful?” “No. I think they're rather unpleasant.” “I think the salvation of the world lies with them.” “Funny salvation,” said Lilly. “I think they're anything but angels.” “Do you though? Now that's funny. Why?” “Looking at them even. I knew a Russian doctor who'd been through the Russo-Japanese war, and who had gone a bit cracked. He said he saw the Japs rush a trench. They threw everything away and flung themselves through the Russian fire and simply dropped in masses. But those that reached the trenches jumped in with bare hands on the Russians and tore their faces apart and bit their throats out--fairly ripped the faces off the bone.--It had sent the doctor a bit cracked. He said the wounded were awful,--their faces torn off and their throats mangled--and dead Japs with flesh between the teeth--God knows if it's true. But that's the impression the Japanese had made on this man. It had affected his mind really.” Jim watched Lilly, and smiled as if he were pleased. “No--really--!” he said. “Anyhow they're more demon than angel, I believe,” said Lilly. “Oh, no, Rawdon, but you always exaggerate,” said Tanny. “Maybe,” said Lilly. “I think Japanese are fascinating--fascinating--so quick, and such FORCE in them--” “Rather!--eh?” said Jim, looking with a quick smile at Tanny. “I think a Japanese lover would be marvellous,” she laughed riskily. “I s'd think he would,” said Jim, screwing up his eyes. “Do you hate the normal British as much as I do?” she asked him. “Hate them! Hate them!” he said, with an intimate grin. “Their beastly virtue,” said she. “And I believe there's nobody more vicious underneath.” “Nobody!” said Jim. “But you're British yourself,” said Lilly to Jim. “No, I'm Irish. Family's Irish--my mother was a Fitz-patrick.” “Anyhow you live in England.” “Because they won't let me go to Ireland.” The talk drifted. Jim finished up all the beer, and they prepared to go to bed. Jim was a bit tipsy, grinning. He asked for bread and cheese to take upstairs. “Will you have supper?” said Lilly. He was surprised, because Jim had eaten strangely much at dinner. “No--where's the loaf?” And he cut himself about half of it. There was no cheese. “Bread'll do,” said Jim. “Sit down and eat it. Have cocoa with it,” said Tanny. “No, I like to have it in my bedroom.” “You don't eat bread in the night?” said Lilly. “I do.” “What a funny thing to do.” The cottage was in darkness. The Lillys slept soundly. Jim woke up and chewed bread and slept again. In the morning at dawn he rose and went downstairs. Lilly heard him roaming about--heard the woman come in to clean--heard them talking. So he got up to look after his visitor, though it was not seven o'clock, and the woman was busy.--But before he went down, he heard Jim come upstairs again. Mrs. Short was busy in the kitchen when Lilly went down. “The other gentleman have been down, Sir,” said Mrs. Short. “He asked me where the bread and butter were, so I said should I cut him a piece. But he wouldn't let me do it. I gave him a knife and he took it for himself, in the pantry.” “I say, Bricknell,” said Lilly at breakfast time, “why do you eat so much bread?” “I've got to feed up. I've been starved during this damned war.” “But hunks of bread won't feed you up.” “Gives the stomach something to work at, and prevents it grinding on the nerves,” said Jim. “But surely you don't want to keep your stomach always full and heavy.” “I do, my boy. I do. It needs keeping solid. I'm losing life, if I don't. I tell you I'm losing life. Let me put something inside me.” “I don't believe bread's any use.” During breakfast Jim talked about the future of the world. “I reckon Christ's the finest thing time has ever produced,” said he; “and will remain it.” “But you don't want crucifixions _ad infinitum_,” said Lilly. “What? Why not?” “Once is enough--and have done.” “Don't you think love and sacrifice are the finest things in life?” said Jim, over his bacon. “Depends WHAT love, and what sacrifice,” said Lilly. “If I really believe in an Almighty God, I am willing to sacrifice for Him. That is, I'm willing to yield my own personal interest to the bigger creative interest.--But it's obvious Almighty God isn't mere Love.” “I think it is. Love and only love,” said Jim. “I think the greatest joy is sacrificing oneself to love.” “To SOMEONE you love, you mean,” said Tanny. “No I don't. I don't mean someone at all. I mean love--love--love. I sacrifice myself to love. I reckon that's the highest man is capable of.” “But you can't sacrifice yourself to an abstract principle,” said Tanny. “That's just what you can do. And that's the beauty of it. Who represents the principle doesn't matter. Christ is the principle of love,” said Jim. “But no!” said Tanny. “It MUST be more individual. It must be SOMEBODY you love, not abstract love in itself. How can you sacrifice yourself to an abstraction.” “Ha, I think Love and your Christ detestable,” said Lilly--“a sheer ignominy.” “Finest thing the world has produced,” said Jim. “No. A thing which sets itself up to be betrayed! No, it's foul. Don't you see it's the Judas principle you really worship. Judas is the real hero. But for Judas the whole show would have been _manque_.” “Oh yes,” said Jim. “Judas was inevitable. I'm not sure that Judas wasn't the greatest of the disciples--and Jesus knew it. I'm not sure Judas wasn't the disciple Jesus loved.” “Jesus certainly encouraged him in his Judas tricks,” said Tanny. Jim grinned knowingly at Lilly. “Then it was a nasty combination. And anything which turns on a Judas climax is a dirty show, to my thinking. I think your Judas is a rotten, dirty worm, just a dirty little self-conscious sentimental twister. And out of all Christianity he is the hero today. When people say Christ they mean Judas. They find him luscious on the palate. And Jesus fostered him--” said Lilly. “He's a profound figure, is Judas. It's taken two thousand years to begin to understand him,” said Jim, pushing the bread and marmalade into his mouth. “A traitor is a traitor--no need to understand any further. And a system which rests all its weight on a piece of treachery makes that treachery not only inevitable but sacred. That's why I'm sick of Christianity.--At any rate this modern Christ-mongery.” “The finest thing the world has produced, or ever will produce--Christ and Judas--” said Jim. “Not to me,” said Lilly. “Foul combination.” It was a lovely morning in early March. Violets were out, and the first wild anemones. The sun was quite warm. The three were about to take out a picnic lunch. Lilly however was suffering from Jim's presence. “Jolly nice here,” said Jim. “Mind if I stay till Saturday?” There was a pause. Lilly felt he was being bullied, almost obscenely bullied. Was he going to agree? Suddenly he looked up at Jim. “I'd rather you went tomorrow,” he said. Tanny, who was sitting opposite Jim, dropped her head in confusion. “What's tomorrow?” said Jim. “Thursday,” said Lilly. “Thursday,” repeated Jim. And he looked up and got Lilly's eye. He wanted to say “Friday then?” “Yes, I'd rather you went Thursday,” repeated Lilly. “But Rawdon--!” broke in Tanny, who was suffering. She stopped, however. “We can walk across country with you some way if you like,” said Lilly to Jim. It was a sort of compromise. “Fine!” said Jim. “We'll do that, then.” It was lovely sunshine, and they wandered through the woods. Between Jim and Tanny was a sort of growing _rapprochement_, which got on Lilly's nerves. “What the hell do you take that beastly personal tone for?” cried Lilly at Tanny, as the three sat under a leafless great beech-tree. “But I'm not personal at all, am I, Mr. Bricknell?” said Tanny. Jim watched Lilly, and grinned pleasedly. “Why shouldn't you be, anyhow?” he said. “Yes!” she retorted. “Why not!” “Not while I'm here. I loathe the slimy creepy personal intimacy.--'Don't you think, Mr. Bricknell, that it's lovely to be able to talk quite simply to somebody? Oh, it's such a relief, after most people---'” Lilly mimicked his wife's last speech savagely. “But I MEAN it,” cried Tanny. “It is lovely.” “Dirty messing,” said Lilly angrily. Jim watched the dark, irascible little man with amusement. They rose, and went to look for an inn, and beer. Tanny still clung rather stickily to Jim's side. But it was a lovely day, the first of all the days of spring, with crocuses and wall-flowers in the cottage gardens, and white cocks crowing in the quiet hamlet. When they got back in the afternoon to the cottage, they found a telegram for Jim. He let the Lillys see it--“Meet you for a walk on your return journey Lois.” At once Tanny wanted to know all about Lois. Lois was a nice girl, well-to-do middle-class, but also an actress, and she would do anything Jim wanted. “I must get a wire to her to meet me tomorrow,” he said. “Where shall I say?” Lilly produced the map, and they decided on time and station at which Lois coming out of London, should meet Jim. Then the happy pair could walk along the Thames valley, spending a night perhaps at Marlowe, or some such place. Off went Jim and Lilly once more to the postoffice. They were quite good friends. Having so inhospitably fixed the hour of departure, Lilly wanted to be nice. Arrived at the postoffice, they found it shut: half-day closing for the little shop. “Well,” said Lilly. “We'll go to the station.” They proceeded to the station--found the station-master--were conducted down to the signal-box. Lilly naturally hung back from people, but Jim was hob-nob with the station-master and the signal man, quite officer-and-my-men kind of thing. Lilly sat out on the steps of the signal-box, rather ashamed, while the long telegram was shouted over the telephone to the junction town--first the young lady and her address, then the message “Meet me X. station 3:40 tomorrow walk back great pleasure Jim.” Anyhow that was done. They went home to tea. After tea, as the evening fell, Lilly suggested a little stroll in the woods, while Tanny prepared the dinner. Jim agreed, and they set out. The two men wandered through the trees in the dusk, till they came to a bank on the farther edge of the wood. There they sat down. And there Lilly said what he had to say. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it's nothing but love and self-sacrifice which makes you feel yourself losing life.” “You're wrong. Only love brings it back--and wine. If I drink a bottle of Burgundy I feel myself restored at the middle--right here! I feel the energy back again. And if I can fall in love--But it's becoming so damned hard--” “What, to fall in love?” asked Lilly. “Yes.” “Then why not leave off trying! What do you want to poke yourself and prod yourself into love, for?” “Because I'm DEAD without it. I'm dead. I'm dying.” “Only because you force yourself. If you drop working yourself up--” “I shall die. I only live when I can fall in love. Otherwise I'm dying by inches. Why, man, you don't know what it was like. I used to get the most grand feelings--like a great rush of force, or light--a great rush--right here, as I've said, at the solar plexus. And it would come any time--anywhere--no matter where I was. And then I was all right. “All right for what?--for making love?” “Yes, man, I was.” “And now you aren't?--Oh, well, leave love alone, as any twopenny doctor would tell you.” “No, you're off it there. It's nothing technical. Technically I can make love as much as you like. It's nothing a doctor has any say in. It's what I feel inside me. I feel the life going. I know it's going. I never get those inrushes now, unless I drink a jolly lot, or if I possibly could fall in love. Technically, I'm potent all right--oh, yes!” “You should leave yourself and your inrushes alone.” “But you can't. It's a sort of ache.” “Then you should stiffen your backbone. It's your backbone that matters. You shouldn't want to abandon yourself. You shouldn't want to fling yourself all loose into a woman's lap. You should stand by yourself and learn to be by yourself. Why don't you be more like the Japanese you talk about? Quiet, aloof little devils. They don't bother about being loved. They keep themselves taut in their own selves--there, at the bottom of the spine--the devil's own power they've got there.” Jim mused a bit. “Think they have?” he laughed. It seemed comic to him. “Sure! Look at them. Why can't you gather yourself there?” “At the tail?” “Yes. Hold yourself firm there.” Jim broke into a cackle of a laugh, and rose. The two went through the dark woods back to the cottage. Jim staggered and stumbled like a drunken man: or worse, like a man with locomotor ataxia: as if he had no power in his lower limbs. “Walk there--!” said Lilly, finding him the smoothest bit of the dark path. But Jim stumbled and shambled, in a state of nauseous weak relaxation. However, they reached the cottage: and food and beer--and Tanny, piqued with curiosity to know what the men had been saying privately to each other. After dinner they sat once more talking round the fire. Lilly sat in a small chair facing the fire, the other two in the armchairs on either side the hearth. “How nice it will be for you, walking with Lois towards London tomorrow,” gushed Tanny sentimentally. “Good God!” said Lilly. “Why the dickens doesn't he walk by himself, without wanting a woman always there, to hold his hand.” “Don't be so spiteful,” said Tanny. “YOU see that you have a woman always there, to hold YOUR hand.” “My hand doesn't need holding,” snapped Lilly. “Doesn't it! More than most men's! But you're so beastly ungrateful and mannish. Because I hold you safe enough all the time you like to pretend you're doing it all yourself.” “All right. Don't drag yourself in,” said Lilly, detesting his wife at that moment. “Anyhow,” and he turned to Jim, “it's time you'd done slobbering yourself over a lot of little women, one after the other.” “Why shouldn't I, if I like it?” said Jim. “Yes, why not?” said Tanny. “Because it makes a fool of you. Look at you, stumbling and staggering with no use in your legs. I'd be ashamed if I were you.” “Would you?” said Jim. “I would. And it's nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees all go rickety.” “Think that's it?” said Jim. “What else is it. You haven't been here a day, but you must telegraph for some female to be ready to hold your hand the moment you go away. And before she lets go, you'll be wiring for another. YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, you want to be loved--a man of your years. It's disgusting--” “I don't see it. I believe in love--” said Jim, watching and grinning oddly. “Bah, love! Messing, that's what it is. It wouldn't matter if it did you no harm. But when you stagger and stumble down a road, out of sheer sloppy relaxation of your will---” At this point Jim suddenly sprang from his chair at Lilly, and gave him two or three hard blows with his fists, upon the front of the body. Then he sat down in his own chair again, saying sheepishly: “I knew I should have to do it, if he said any more.” Lilly sat motionless as a statue, his face like paper. One of the blows had caught him rather low, so that he was almost winded and could not breathe. He sat rigid, paralysed as a winded man is. But he wouldn't let it be seen. With all his will he prevented himself from gasping. Only through his parted lips he drew tiny gasps, controlled, nothing revealed to the other two. He hated them both far too much. For some minutes there was dead silence, whilst Lilly silently and viciously fought for his breath. Tanny opened her eyes wide in a sort of pleased bewilderment, and Jim turned his face aside, and hung his clasped hands between his knees. “There's a great silence, suddenly!” said Tanny. “What is there to say?” ejaculated Lilly rapidly, with a spoonful of breath which he managed to compress and control into speech. Then he sat motionless again, concerned with the business of getting back his wind, and not letting the other two see. Jim jerked in his chair, and looked round. “It isn't that I don't like the man,” he said, in a rather small voice. “But I knew if he went on I should have to do it.” To Lilly, rigid and physically preoccupied, there sounded a sort of self-consciousness in Jim's voice, as if the whole thing had been semi-deliberate. He detected the sort of maudlin deliberateness which goes with hysterics, and he was colder, more icy than ever. Tanny looked at Lilly, puzzled, bewildered, but still rather pleased, as if she demanded an answer. None being forthcoming, she said: “Of course, you mustn't expect to say all those things without rousing a man.” Still Lilly did not answer. Jim glanced at him, then looked at Tanny. “It isn't that I don't like him,” he said, slowly. “I like him better than any man I've ever known, I believe.” He clasped his hands and turned aside his face. “Judas!” flashed through Lilly's mind. Again Tanny looked for her husband's answer. “Yes, Rawdon,” she said. “You can't say the things you do without their having an effect. You really ask for it, you know.” “It's no matter.” Lilly squeezed the words out coldly. “He wanted to do it, and he did it.” A dead silence ensued now. Tanny looked from man to man. “I could feel it coming on me,” said Jim. “Of course!” said Tanny. “Rawdon doesn't know the things he says.” She was pleased that he had had to pay for them, for once. It takes a man a long time to get his breath back, after a sharp blow in the wind. Lilly was managing by degrees. The others no doubt attributed his silence to deep or fierce thoughts. It was nothing of the kind, merely a cold struggle to get his wind back, without letting them know he was struggling: and a sheer, stock-stiff hatred of the pair of them. “I like the man,” said Jim. “Never liked a man more than I like him.” He spoke as if with difficulty. “The man” stuck safely in Lilly's ears. “Oh, well,” he managed to say. “It's nothing. I've done my talking and had an answer, for once.” “Yes, Rawdy, you've had an answer, for once. Usually you don't get an answer, you know--and that's why you go so far--in the things you say. Now you'll know how you make people feel.” “Quite!” said Lilly. “_I_ don't feel anything. I don't mind what he says,” said Jim. “Yes, but he ought to know the things he DOES say,” said Tanny. “He goes on, without considering the person he's talking to. This time it's come back on him. He mustn't say such personal things, if he's not going to risk an answer.” “I don't mind what he says. I don't mind a bit,” said Jim. “Nor do I mind,” said Lilly indifferently. “I say what I feel--You do as you feel--There's an end of it.” A sheepish sort of silence followed this speech. It was broken by a sudden laugh from Tanny. “The things that happen to us!” she said, laughing rather shrilly. “Suddenly, like a thunderbolt, we're all struck into silence!” “Rum game, eh!” said Jim, grinning. “Isn't it funny! Isn't life too funny!” She looked again at her husband. “But, Rawdy, you must admit it was your own fault.” Lilly's stiff face did not change. “Why FAULT!” he said, looking at her coldly. “What is there to talk about?” “Usually there's so much,” she said sarcastically. A few phrases dribbled out of the silence. In vain Jim, tried to get Lilly to thaw, and in vain Tanny gave her digs at her husband. Lilly's stiff, inscrutable face did not change, he was polite and aloof. So they all went to bed. In the morning, the walk was to take place, as arranged, Lilly and Tanny accompanying Jim to the third station across country. The morning was lovely, the country beautiful. Lilly liked the countryside and enjoyed the walk. But a hardness inside himself never relaxed. Jim talked a little again about the future of the world, and a higher state of Christlikeness in man. But Lilly only laughed. Then Tanny managed to get ahead with Jim, sticking to his side and talking sympathetic personalities. But Lilly, feeling it from afar, ran after them and caught them up. They were silent. “What was the interesting topic?” he said cuttingly. “Nothing at all!” said Tanny, nettled. “Why must you interfere?” “Because I intend to,” said Lilly. And the two others fell apart, as if severed with a knife. Jim walked rather sheepishly, as if cut out. So they came at last past the canals to the wayside station: and at last Jim's train came. They all said goodbye. Jim and Tanny were both waiting for Lilly to show some sign of real reconciliation. But none came. He was cheerful and aloof. “Goodbye,” he said to Jim. “Hope Lois will be there all right. Third station on. Goodbye! Goodbye!” “You'll come to Rackham?” said Jim, leaning out of the train. “We should love to,” called Tanny, after the receding train. “All right,” said Lilly, non-committal. But he and his wife never saw Jim again. Lilly never intended to see him: a devil sat in the little man's breast. “You shouldn't play at little Jesus, coming so near to people, wanting to help them,” was Tanny's last word. CHAPTER IX. LOW-WATER MARK Tanny went away to Norway to visit her people, for the first time for three years. Lilly did not go: he did not want to. He came to London and settled in a room over Covent Garden market. The room was high up, a fair size, and stood at the corner of one of the streets and the market itself, looking down on the stalls and the carts and the arcade. Lilly would climb out of the window and sit for hours watching the behaviour of the great draught-horses which brought the mountains of boxes and vegetables. Funny half-human creatures they seemed, so massive and fleshy, yet so Cockney. There was one which could not bear donkeys, and which used to stretch out its great teeth like some massive serpent after every poor diminutive ass that came with a coster's barrow. Another great horse could not endure standing. It would shake itself and give little starts, and back into the heaps of carrots and broccoli, whilst the driver went into a frenzy of rage. There was always something to watch. One minute it was two great loads of empty crates, which in passing had got entangled, and reeled, leaning to fall disastrously. Then the drivers cursed and swore and dismounted and stared at their jeopardised loads: till a thin fellow was persuaded to scramble up the airy mountains of cages, like a monkey. And he actually managed to put them to rights. Great sigh of relief when the vans rocked out of the market. Again there was a particular page-boy in buttons, with a round and perky behind, who nimbly carried a tea-tray from somewhere to somewhere, under the arches beside the market. The great brawny porters would tease him, and he would stop to give them cheek. One afternoon a giant lunged after him: the boy darted gracefully among the heaps of vegetables, still bearing aloft his tea-tray, like some young blue-buttoned acolyte fleeing before a false god. The giant rolled after him--when alas, the acolyte of the tea-tray slipped among the vegetables, and down came the tray. Then tears, and a roar of unfeeling mirth from the giants. Lilly felt they were going to make it up to him. Another afternoon a young swell sauntered persistently among the vegetables, and Lilly, seated in his high little balcony, wondered why. But at last, a taxi, and a very expensive female, in a sort of silver brocade gown and a great fur shawl and ospreys in her bonnet. Evidently an assignation. Yet what could be more conspicuous than this elegant pair, picking their way through the cabbage-leaves? And then, one cold grey afternoon in early April, a man in a black overcoat and a bowler hat, walking uncertainly. Lilly had risen and was just retiring out of the chill, damp air. For some reason he lingered to watch the figure. The man was walking east. He stepped rather insecurely off the pavement, and wavered across the setts between the wheels of the standing vans. And suddenly he went down. Lilly could not see him on the ground, but he saw some van-men go forward, and he saw one of them pick up the man's hat. “I'd better go down,” said Lilly to himself. So he began running down the four long flights of stone stairs, past the many doors of the multifarious business premises, and out into the market. A little crowd had gathered, and a large policeman was just rowing into the centre of the interest. Lilly, always a hoverer on the edge of public commotions, hung now hesitating on the outskirts of the crowd. “What is it?” he said, to a rather sniffy messenger boy. “Drunk,” said the messenger boy: except that, in unblushing cockney, he pronounced it “Drank.” Lilly hung further back on the edge of the little crowd. “Come on here. Where d' you want to go?” he heard the hearty tones of the policeman. “I'm all right. I'm all right,” came the testy drunken answer. “All right, are yer! All right, and then some,--come on, get on your pins.” “I'm all right! I'm all right.” The voice made Lilly peer between the people. And sitting on the granite setts, being hauled up by a burly policeman, he saw our acquaintance Aaron, very pale in the face and a little dishevelled. “Like me to tuck the sheets round you, shouldn't you? Fancy yourself snug in bed, don't you? You won't believe you're right in the way of traffic, will you now, in Covent Garden Market? Come on, we'll see to you.” And the policeman hoisted the bitter and unwilling Aaron. Lilly was quickly at the centre of the affair, unobtrusive like a shadow, different from the other people. “Help him up to my room, will you?” he said to the constable. “Friend of mine.” The large constable looked down on the bare-headed wispy, unobtrusive Lilly with good-humoured suspicion and incredulity. Lilly could not have borne it if the policeman had uttered any of this cockney suspicion, so he watched him. There was a great gulf between the public official and the odd, quiet little individual--yet Lilly had his way. “Which room?” said the policeman, dubious. Lilly pointed quickly round. Then he said to Aaron: “Were you coming to see me, Sisson? You'll come in, won't you?” Aaron nodded rather stupidly and testily. His eyes looked angry. Somebody stuck his hat on his head for him, and made him look a fool. Lilly took it off again, and carried it for him. He turned and the crowd eased. He watched Aaron sharply, and saw that it was with difficulty he could walk. So he caught him by the arm on the other side from the policeman, and they crossed the road to the pavement. “Not so much of this sort of thing these days,” said the policeman. “Not so much opportunity,” said Lilly. “More than there was, though. Coming back to the old days, like. Working round, bit by bit.” They had arrived at the stairs. Aaron stumbled up. “Steady now! Steady does it!” said the policeman, steering his charge. There was a curious breach of distance between Lilly and the constable. At last Lilly opened his own door. The room was pleasant. The fire burned warm, the piano stood open, the sofa was untidy with cushions and papers. Books and papers covered the big writing desk. Beyond the screen made by the bookshelves and the piano were two beds, with washstand by one of the large windows, the one through which Lilly had climbed. The policeman looked round curiously. “More cosy here than in the lock-up, sir!” he said. Lilly laughed. He was hastily clearing the sofa. “Sit on the sofa, Sisson,” he said. The policeman lowered his charge, with a-- “Right we are, then!” Lilly felt in his pocket, and gave the policeman half a crown. But he was watching Aaron, who sat stupidly on the sofa, very pale and semi-conscious. “Do you feel ill, Sisson?” he said sharply. Aaron looked back at him with heavy eyes, and shook his head slightly. “I believe you are,” said Lilly, taking his hand. “Might be a bit o' this flu, you know,” said the policeman. “Yes,” said Lilly. “Where is there a doctor?” he added, on reflection. “The nearest?” said the policeman. And he told him. “Leave a message for you, Sir?” Lilly wrote his address on a card, then changed his mind. “No, I'll run round myself if necessary,” he said. And the policeman departed. “You'll go to bed, won't you?” said Lilly to Aaron, when the door was shut. Aaron shook his head sulkily. “I would if I were you. You can stay here till you're all right. I'm alone, so it doesn't matter.” But Aaron had relapsed into semi-consciousness. Lilly put the big kettle on the gas stove, the little kettle on the fire. Then he hovered in front of the stupefied man. He felt uneasy. Again he took Aaron's hand and felt the pulse. “I'm sure you aren't well. You must go to bed,” he said. And he kneeled and unfastened his visitor's boots. Meanwhile the kettle began to boil, he put a hot-water bottle into the bed. “Let us get your overcoat off,” he said to the stupefied man. “Come along.” And with coaxing and pulling and pushing he got off the overcoat and coat and waistcoat. At last Aaron was undressed and in bed. Lilly brought him tea. With a dim kind of obedience he took the cup and would drink. He looked at Lilly with heavy eyes. “I gave in, I gave in to her, else I should ha' been all right,” he said. “To whom?” said Lilly. “I gave in to her--and afterwards I cried, thinking of Lottie and the children. I felt my heart break, you know. And that's what did it. I should have been all right if I hadn't given in to her--” “To whom?” said Lilly. “Josephine. I felt, the minute I was loving her, I'd done myself. And I had. Everything came back on me. If I hadn't given in to her, I should ha' kept all right.” “Don't bother now. Get warm and still--” “I felt it--I felt it go, inside me, the minute I gave in to her. It's perhaps killed me.” “No, not it. Never mind, be still. Be still, and you'll be all right in the morning.” “It's my own fault, for giving in to her. If I'd kept myself back, my liver wouldn't have broken inside me, and I shouldn't have been sick. And I knew--” “Never mind now. Have you drunk your tea? Lie down. Lie down, and go to sleep.” Lilly pushed Aaron down in the bed, and covered him over. Then he thrust his hands under the bedclothes and felt his feet--still cold. He arranged the water bottle. Then he put another cover on the bed. Aaron lay still, rather grey and peaked-looking, in a stillness that was not healthy. For some time Lilly went about stealthily, glancing at his patient from time to time. Then he sat down to read. He was roused after a time by a moaning of troubled breathing and a fretful stirring in the bed. He went across. Aaron's eyes were open, and dark looking. “Have a little hot milk,” said Lilly. Aaron shook his head faintly, not noticing. “A little Bovril?” The same faint shake. Then Lilly wrote a note for the doctor, went into the office on the same landing, and got a clerk, who would be leaving in a few minutes, to call with the note. When he came back he found Aaron still watching. “Are you here by yourself?” asked the sick man. “Yes. My wife's gone to Norway.” “For good?” “No,” laughed Lilly. “For a couple of months or so. She'll come back here: unless she joins me in Switzerland or somewhere.” Aaron was still for a while. “You've not gone with her,” he said at length. “To see her people? No, I don't think they want me very badly--and I didn't want very badly to go. Why should I? It's better for married people to be separated sometimes.” “Ay!” said Aaron, watching the other man with fever-darkened eyes. “I hate married people who are two in one--stuck together like two jujube lozenges,” said Lilly. “Me an' all. I hate 'em myself,” said Aaron. “Everybody ought to stand by themselves, in the first place--men and women as well. They can come together, in the second place, if they like. But nothing is any good unless each one stands alone, intrinsically.” “I'm with you there,” said Aaron. “If I'd kep' myself to myself I shouldn't be bad now--though I'm not very bad. I s'll be all right in the morning. But I did myself in when I went with another woman. I felt myself go--as if the bile broke inside me, and I was sick.” “Josephine seduced you?” laughed Lilly. “Ay, right enough,” replied Aaron grimly. “She won't be coming here, will she?” “Not unless I ask her.” “You won't ask her, though?” “No, not if you don't want her.” “I don't.” The fever made Aaron naive and communicative, unlike himself. And he knew he was being unlike himself, he knew that he was not in proper control of himself, so he was unhappy, uneasy. “I'll stop here the night then, if you don't mind,” he said. “You'll have to,” said Lilly. “I've sent for the doctor. I believe you've got the flu.” “Think I have?” said Aaron frightened. “Don't be scared,” laughed Lilly. There was a long pause. Lilly stood at the window looking at the darkening market, beneath the street-lamps. “I s'll have to go to the hospital, if I have,” came Aaron's voice. “No, if it's only going to be a week or a fortnight's business, you can stop here. I've nothing to do,” said Lilly. “There's no occasion for you to saddle yourself with me,” said Aaron dejectedly. “You can go to your hospital if you like--or back to your lodging--if you wish to,” said Lilly. “You can make up your mind when you see how you are in the morning.” “No use going back to my lodgings,” said Aaron. “I'll send a telegram to your wife if you like,” said Lilly. Aaron was silent, dead silent, for some time. “Nay,” he said at length, in a decided voice. “Not if I die for it.” Lilly remained still, and the other man lapsed into a sort of semi-sleep, motionless and abandoned. The darkness had fallen over London, and away below the lamps were white. Lilly lit the green-shaded reading lamp over the desk. Then he stood and looked at Aaron, who lay still, looking sick. Rather beautiful the bones of the countenance: but the skull too small for such a heavy jaw and rather coarse mouth. Aaron half-opened his eyes, and writhed feverishly, as if his limbs could not be in the right place. Lilly mended the fire, and sat down to write. Then he got up and went downstairs to unfasten the street door, so that the doctor could walk up. The business people had gone from their various holes, all the lower part of the tall house was in darkness. Lilly waited and waited. He boiled an egg and made himself toast. Aaron said he might eat the same. Lilly cooked another egg and took it to the sick man. Aaron looked at it and pushed it away with nausea. He would have some tea. So Lilly gave him tea. “Not much fun for you, doing this for somebody who is nothing to you,” said Aaron. “I shouldn't if you were unsympathetic to me,” said Lilly. “As it is, it's happened so, and so we'll let be.” “What time is it?” “Nearly eight o'clock.” “Oh, my Lord, the opera.” And Aaron got half out of bed. But as he sat on the bedside he knew he could not safely get to his feet. He remained a picture of dejection. “Perhaps we ought to let them know,” said Lilly. But Aaron, blank with stupid misery, sat huddled there on the bedside without answering. “Ill run round with a note,” said Lilly. “I suppose others have had flu, besides you. Lie down!” But Aaron stupidly and dejectedly sat huddled on the side of the bed, wearing old flannel pyjamas of Lilly's, rather small for him. He felt too sick to move. “Lie down! Lie down!” said Lilly. “And keep still while I'm gone. I shan't be more than ten minutes.” “I don't care if I die,” said Aaron. Lilly laughed. “You're a long way from dying,” said he, “or you wouldn't say it.” But Aaron only looked up at him with queer, far-off, haggard eyes, something like a criminal who is just being executed. “Lie down!” said Lilly, pushing him gently into the bed. “You won't improve yourself sitting there, anyhow.” Aaron lay down, turned away, and was quite still. Lilly quietly left the room on his errand. The doctor did not come until ten o'clock: and worn out with work when he did come. “Isn't there a lift in this establishment?” he said, as he groped his way up the stone stairs. Lilly had heard him, and run down to meet him. The doctor poked the thermometer under Aaron's tongue and felt the pulse. Then he asked a few questions: listened to the heart and breathing. “Yes, it's the flu,” he said curtly. “Nothing to do but to keep warm in bed and not move, and take plenty of milk and liquid nourishment. I'll come round in the morning and give you an injection. Lungs are all right so far.” “How long shall I have to be in bed?” said Aaron. “Oh--depends. A week at least.” Aaron watched him sullenly--and hated him. Lilly laughed to himself. The sick man was like a dog that is ill but which growls from a deep corner, and will bite if you put your hand in. He was in a state of black depression. Lilly settled him down for the night, and himself went to bed. Aaron squirmed with heavy, pained limbs, the night through, and slept and had bad dreams. Lilly got up to give him drinks. The din in the market was terrific before dawn, and Aaron suffered bitterly. In the morning he was worse. The doctor gave him injections against pneumonia. “You wouldn't like me to wire to your wife?” said Lilly. “No,” said Aaron abruptly. “You can send me to the hospital. I'm nothing but a piece of carrion.” “Carrion!” said Lilly. “Why?” “I know it. I feel like it.” “Oh, that's only the sort of nauseated feeling you get with flu.” “I'm only fit to be thrown underground, and made an end of. I can't stand myself--” He had a ghastly, grey look of self-repulsion. “It's the germ that makes you feel like that,” said Lilly. “It poisons the system for a time. But you'll work it off.” At evening he was no better, the fever was still high. Yet there were no complications--except that the heart was irregular. “The one thing I wonder,” said Lilly, “is whether you hadn't better be moved out of the noise of the market. It's fearful for you in the early morning.” “It makes no difference to me,” said Aaron. The next day he was a little worse, if anything. The doctor knew there was nothing to be done. At evening he gave the patient a calomel pill. It was rather strong, and Aaron had a bad time. His burning, parched, poisoned inside was twisted and torn. Meanwhile carts banged, porters shouted, all the hell of the market went on outside, away down on the cobble setts. But this time the two men did not hear. “You'll feel better now,” said Lilly, “after the operation.” “It's done me harm,” cried Aaron fretfully. “Send me to the hospital, or you'll repent it. Get rid of me in time.” “Nay,” said Lilly. “You get better. Damn it, you're only one among a million.” Again over Aaron's face went the ghastly grimace of self-repulsion. “My soul's gone rotten,” he said. “No,” said Lilly. “Only toxin in the blood.” Next day the patient seemed worse, and the heart more irregular. He rested badly. So far, Lilly had got a fair night's rest. Now Aaron was not sleeping, and he seemed to struggle in the bed. “Keep your courage up, man,” said the doctor sharply. “You give way.” Aaron looked at him blackly, and did not answer. In the night Lilly was up time after time. Aaron would slip down on his back, and go semi-conscious. And then he would awake, as if drowning, struggling to move, mentally shouting aloud, yet making no sound for some moments, mentally shouting in frenzy, but unable to stir or make a sound. When at last he got some sort of physical control he cried: “Lift me up! Lift me up!” Lilly hurried and lifted him up, and he sat panting with a sobbing motion, his eyes gloomy and terrified, more than ever like a criminal who is just being executed. He drank brandy, and was laid down on his side. “Don't let me lie on my back,” he said, terrified. “No, I won't,” said Lilly. Aaron frowned curiously on his nurse. “Mind you don't let me,” he said, exacting and really terrified. “No, I won't let you.” And now Lilly was continually crossing over and pulling Aaron on to his side, whenever he found him slipped down on his back. In the morning the doctor was puzzled. Probably it was the toxin in the blood which poisoned the heart. There was no pneumonia. And yet Aaron was clearly growing worse. The doctor agreed to send in a nurse for the coming night. “What's the matter with you, man!” he said sharply to his patient. “You give way! You give way! Can't you pull yourself together?” But Aaron only became more gloomily withheld, retracting from life. And Lilly began to be really troubled. He got a friend to sit with the patient in the afternoon, whilst he himself went out and arranged to sleep in Aaron's room, at his lodging. The next morning, when he came in, he found the patient lying as ever, in a sort of heap in the bed. Nurse had had to lift him up and hold him up again. And now Aaron lay in a sort of semi-stupor of fear, frustrated anger, misery and self-repulsion: a sort of interlocked depression. The doctor frowned when he came. He talked with the nurse, and wrote another prescription. Then he drew Lilly away to the door. “What's the matter with the fellow?” he said. “Can't you rouse his spirit? He seems to be sulking himself out of life. He'll drop out quite suddenly, you know, if he goes on like this. Can't you rouse him up?” “I think it depresses him partly that his bowels won't work. It frightens him. He's never been ill in his life before,” said Lilly. “His bowels won't work if he lets all his spirit go, like an animal dying of the sulks,” said the doctor impatiently. “He might go off quite suddenly--dead before you can turn round--” Lilly was properly troubled. Yet he did not quite know what to do. It was early afternoon, and the sun was shining into the room. There were daffodils and anemones in a jar, and freezias and violets. Down below in the market were two stalls of golden and blue flowers, gay. “The flowers are lovely in the spring sunshine,” said Lilly. “I wish I were in the country, don't you? As soon as you are better we'll go. It's been a terrible cold, wet spring. But now it's going to be nice. Do you like being in the country?” “Yes,” said Aaron. He was thinking of his garden. He loved it. Never in his life had he been away from a garden before. “Make haste and get better, and we'll go.” “Where?” said Aaron. “Hampshire. Or Berkshire. Or perhaps you'd like to go home? Would you?” Aaron lay still, and did not answer. “Perhaps you want to, and you don't want to,” said Lilly. “You can please yourself, anyhow.” There was no getting anything definite out of the sick man--his soul seemed stuck, as if it would not move. Suddenly Lilly rose and went to the dressing-table. “I'm going to rub you with oil,” he said. “I'm going to rub you as mothers do their babies whose bowels don't work.” Aaron frowned slightly as he glanced at the dark, self-possessed face of the little man. “What's the good of that?” he said irritably. “I'd rather be left alone.” “Then you won't be.” Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man's lower body--the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to the feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted. Then Aaron was covered up again, and Lilly sat down in fatigue to look at his patient. He saw a change. The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face. Aaron was regaining himself. But Lilly said nothing. He watched his patient fall into a proper sleep. And he sat and watched him sleep. And he thought to himself: “I wonder why I do it. I wonder why I bother with him.... Jim ought to have taught me my lesson. As soon as this man's really better he'll punch me in the wind, metaphorically if not actually, for having interfered with him. And Tanny would say, he was quite right to do it. She says I want power over them. What if I do? They don't care how much power the mob has over them, the nation, Lloyd George and Northcliffe and the police and money. They'll yield themselves up to that sort of power quickly enough, and immolate themselves _pro bono publico_ by the million. And what's the bonum publicum but a mob power? Why can't they submit to a bit of healthy individual authority? The fool would die, without me: just as that fool Jim will die in hysterics one day. Why does he last so long! “Tanny's the same. She does nothing really but resist me: my authority, or my influence, or just ME. At the bottom of her heart she just blindly and persistently opposes me. God knows what it is she opposes: just me myself. She thinks I want her to submit to me. So I do, in a measure natural to our two selves. Somewhere, she ought to submit to me. But they all prefer to kick against the pricks. Not that THEY get many pricks. I get them. Damn them all, why don't I leave them alone? They only grin and feel triumphant when they've insulted one and punched one in the wind. “This Aaron will do just the same. I like him, and he ought to like me. And he'll be another Jim: he WILL like me, if he can knock the wind out of me. A lot of little Stavrogins coming up to whisper affectionately, and biting one's ear. “But anyhow I can soon see the last of this chap: and him the last of all the rest. I'll be damned for ever if I see their Jims and Roberts and Julias and Scotts any more. Let them dance round their insipid hell-broth. Thin tack it is. “There's a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans. Except, dear God, that they've exterminated all the peoples worth knowing. I can't do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for--they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics--even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers--the American races--and the South Sea Islanders--the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn't frightened. All the rest are craven--Europeans, Asiatics, Africans--everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hate them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases. “Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That's why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable. A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity. He should pivot himself on his own pride. “I suppose really I ought to have packed this Aaron off to the hospital. Instead of which here am I rubbing him with oil to rub the life into him. And I KNOW he'll bite me, like a warmed snake, the moment he recovers. And Tanny will say 'Quite right, too,' I shouldn't have been so intimate. No, I should have left it to mechanical doctors and nurses. “So I should. Everything to its own. And Aaron belongs to this little system, and Jim is waiting to be psychoanalysed, and Tanny is waiting for her own glorification. “All right, Aaron. Last time I break my bread for anybody, this is. So get better, my flautist, so that I can go away. “It was easy for the Red Indians and the Others to take their hook into death. They might have stayed a bit longer to help one to defy the white masses. “I'll make some tea--” Lilly rose softly and went across to the fire. He had to cross a landing to a sort of little lavatory, with a sink and a tap, for water. The clerks peeped out at him from an adjoining office and nodded. He nodded, and disappeared from their sight as quickly as possible, with his kettle. His dark eyes were quick, his dark hair was untidy, there was something silent and withheld about him. People could never approach him quite ordinarily. He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron's feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid. His face was dark and hollow, he seemed frail, sitting there in the London afternoon darning the black woollen socks. His full brow was knitted slightly, there was a tension. At the same time, there was an indomitable stillness about him, as it were in the atmosphere about him. His hands, though small, were not very thin. He bit off the wool as he finished his darn. As he was making the tea he saw Aaron rouse up in bed. “I've been to sleep. I feel better,” said the patient, turning round to look what the other man was doing. And the sight of the water steaming in a jet from the teapot seemed attractive. “Yes,” said Lilly. “You've slept for a good two hours.” “I believe I have,” said Aaron. “Would you like a little tea?” “Ay--and a bit of toast.” “You're not supposed to have solid food. Let me take your temperature.” The temperature was down to a hundred, and Lilly, in spite of the doctor, gave Aaron a piece of toast with his tea, enjoining him not to mention it to the nurse. In the evening the two men talked. “You do everything for yourself, then?” said Aaron. “Yes, I prefer it.” “You like living all alone?” “I don't know about that. I never have lived alone. Tanny and I have been very much alone in various countries: but that's two, not one.” “You miss her then?” “Yes, of course. I missed her horribly in the cottage, when she'd first gone. I felt my heart was broken. But here, where we've never been together, I don't notice it so much.” “She'll come back,” said Aaron. “Yes, she'll come back. But I'd rather meet her abroad than here--and get on a different footing.” “Why?” “Oh, I don't know. There's something with marriage altogether, I think. _Egoisme a deux_--” “What's that mean?” “_Egoisme a deux_? Two people, one egoism. Marriage is a self-conscious egoistic state, it seems to me.” “You've got no children?” said Aaron. “No. Tanny wants children badly. I don't. I'm thankful we have none.” “Why?” “I can't quite say. I think of them as a burden. Besides, there ARE such millions and billions of children in the world. And we know well enough what sort of millions and billions of people they'll grow up into. I don't want to add my quota to the mass--it's against my instinct--” “Ay!” laughed Aaron, with a curt acquiescence. “Tanny's furious. But then, when a woman has got children, she thinks the world wags only for them and her. Nothing else. The whole world wags for the sake of the children--and their sacred mother.” “Ay, that's DAMNED true,” said Aaron. “And myself, I'm sick of the children stunt. Children are all right, so long as you just take them for what they are: young immature things like kittens and half-grown dogs, nuisances, sometimes very charming. But I'll be hanged if I can see anything high and holy about children. I should be sorry, too, it would be so bad for the children. Young brats, tiresome and amusing in turns.” “When they don't give themselves airs,” said Aaron. “Yes, indeed. Which they do half the time. Sacred children, and sacred motherhood, I'm absolutely fed stiff by it. That's why I'm thankful I have no children. Tanny can't come it over me there.” “It's a fact. When a woman's got her children, by God, she's a bitch in the manger. You can starve while she sits on the hay. It's useful to keep her pups warm.” “Yes.” “Why, you know,” Aaron turned excitedly in the bed, “they look on a man as if he was nothing but an instrument to get and rear children. If you have anything to do with a woman, she thinks it's because you want to get children by her. And I'm damned if it is. I want my own pleasure, or nothing: and children be damned.” “Ah, women--THEY must be loved, at any price!” said Lilly. “And if you just don't want to love them--and tell them so--what a crime.” “A crime!” said Aaron. “They make a criminal of you. Them and their children be cursed. Is my life given me for nothing but to get children, and work to bring them up? See them all in hell first. They'd better die while they're children, if childhood's all that important.” “I quite agree,” said Lilly. “If childhood is more important than manhood, then why live to be a man at all? Why not remain an infant?” “Be damned and blasted to women and all their importances,” cried Aaron. “They want to get you under, and children is their chief weapon.” “Men have got to stand up to the fact that manhood is more than childhood--and then force women to admit it,” said Lilly. “But the rotten whiners, they're all grovelling before a baby's napkin and a woman's petticoat.” “It's a fact,” said Aaron. But he glanced at Lilly oddly, as if suspiciously. And Lilly caught the look. But he continued: “And if they think you try to stand on your legs and walk with the feet of manhood, why, there isn't a blooming father and lover among them but will do his best to get you down and suffocate you--either with a baby's napkin or a woman's petticoat.” Lilly's lips were curling; he was dark and bitter. “Ay, it is like that,” said Aaron, rather subduedly. “The man's spirit has gone out of the world. Men can't move an inch unless they can grovel humbly at the end of the journey.” “No,” said Aaron, watching with keen, half-amused eyes. “That's why marriage wants readjusting--or extending--to get men on to their own legs once more, and to give them the adventure again. But men won't stick together and fight for it. Because once a woman has climbed up with her children, she'll find plenty of grovellers ready to support her and suffocate any defiant spirit. And women will sacrifice eleven men, fathers, husbands, brothers and lovers, for one baby--or for her own female self-conceit--” “She will that,” said Aaron. “And can you find two men to stick together, without feeling criminal, and without cringing, and without betraying one another? You can't. One is sure to go fawning round some female, then they both enjoy giving each other away, and doing a new grovel before a woman again.” “Ay,” said Aaron. After which Lilly was silent. CHAPTER X. THE WAR AGAIN “One is a fool,” said Lilly, “to be lachrymose. The thing to do is to get a move on.” Aaron looked up with a glimpse of a smile. The two men were sitting before the fire at the end of a cold, wet April day: Aaron convalescent, somewhat chastened in appearance. “Ay,” he said rather sourly. “A move back to Guilford Street.” “Oh, I meant to tell you,” said Lilly. “I was reading an old Baden history. They made a law in 1528--not a law, but a regulation--that: if a man forsakes his wife and children, as now so often happens, the said wife and children are at once to be dispatched after him. I thought that would please you. Does it?” “Yes,” said Aaron briefly. “They would have arrived the next day, like a forwarded letter.” “I should have had to get a considerable move on, at that rate,” grinned Aaron. “Oh, no. You might quite like them here.” But Lilly saw the white frown of determined revulsion on the convalescent's face. “Wouldn't you?” he asked. Aaron shook his head. “No,” he said. And it was obvious he objected to the topic. “What are you going to do about your move on?” “Me!” said Lilly. “I'm going to sail away next week--or steam dirtily away on a tramp called the _Maud Allen Wing_.” “Where to?” “Malta.” “Where from?” “London Dock. I fixed up my passage this morning for ten pounds. I am cook's assistant, signed on.” Aaron looked at him with a little admiration. “You can take a sudden jump, can't you?” he said. “The difficulty is to refrain from jumping: overboard or anywhere.” Aaron smoked his pipe slowly. “And what good will Malta do you?” he asked, envious. “Heaven knows. I shall cross to Syracuse, and move up Italy.” “Sounds as if you were a millionaire.” “I've got thirty-five pounds in all the world. But something will come along.” “I've got more than that,” said Aaron. “Good for you,” replied Lilly. He rose and went to the cupboard, taking out a bowl and a basket of potatoes. He sat down again, paring the potatoes. His busy activity annoyed Aaron. “But what's the good of going to Malta? Shall YOU be any different in yourself, in another place? You'll be the same there as you are here.” “How am I here?” “Why, you're all the time grinding yourself against something inside you. You're never free. You're never content. You never stop chafing.” Lilly dipped his potato into the water, and cut out the eyes carefully. Then he cut it in two, and dropped it in the clean water of the second bowl. He had not expected this criticism. “Perhaps I don't,” said he. “Then what's the use of going somewhere else? You won't change yourself.” “I may in the end,” said Lilly. “You'll be yourself, whether it's Malta or London,” said Aaron. “There's a doom for me,” laughed Lilly. The water on the fire was boiling. He rose and threw in salt, then dropped in the potatoes with little plops. “There there are lots of mes. I'm not only just one proposition. A new place brings out a new thing in a man. Otherwise you'd have stayed in your old place with your family.” “The man in the middle of you doesn't change,” said Aaron. “Do you find it so?” said Lilly. “Ay. Every time.” “Then what's to be done?” “Nothing, as far as I can see. You get as much amusement out of life as possible, and there's the end of it.” “All right then, I'll get the amusement.” “Ay, all right then,” said Aaron. “But there isn't anything wonderful about it. You talk as if you were doing something special. You aren't. You're no more than a man who drops into a pub for a drink, to liven himself up a bit. Only you give it a lot of names, and make out as if you were looking for the philosopher's stone, or something like that. When you're only killing time like the rest of folks, before time kills you.” Lilly did not answer. It was not yet seven o'clock, but the sky was dark. Aaron sat in the firelight. Even the saucepan on the fire was silent. Darkness, silence, the firelight in the upper room, and the two men together. “It isn't quite true,” said Lilly, leaning on the mantelpiece and staring down into the fire. “Where isn't it? You talk, and you make a man believe you've got something he hasn't got? But where is it, when it comes to? What have you got, more than me or Jim Bricknell! Only a bigger choice of words, it seems to me.” Lilly was motionless and inscrutable like a shadow. “Does it, Aaron!” he said, in a colorless voice. “Yes. What else is there to it?” Aaron sounded testy. “Why,” said Lilly at last, “there's something. I agree, it's true what you say about me. But there's a bit of something else. There's just a bit of something in me, I think, which ISN'T a man running into a pub for a drink--” “And what--?” The question fell into the twilight like a drop of water falling down a deep shaft into a well. “I think a man may come into possession of his own soul at last--as the Buddhists teach--but without ceasing to love, or even to hate. One loves, one hates--but somewhere beyond it all, one understands, and possesses one's soul in patience and in peace--” “Yes,” said Aaron slowly, “while you only stand and talk about it. But when you've got no chance to talk about it--and when you've got to live--you don't possess your soul, neither in patience nor in peace, but any devil that likes possesses you and does what it likes with you, while you fridge yourself and fray yourself out like a worn rag.” “I don't care,” said Lilly, “I'm learning to possess my soul in patience and in peace, and I know it. And it isn't a negative Nirvana either. And if Tanny possesses her own soul in patience and peace as well--and if in this we understand each other at last--then there we are, together and apart at the same time, and free of each other, and eternally inseparable. I have my Nirvana--and I have it all to myself. But more than that. It coincides with her Nirvana.” “Ah, yes,” said Aaron. “But I don't understand all that word-splitting.” “I do, though. You learn to be quite alone, and possess your own soul in isolation--and at the same time, to be perfectly WITH someone else--that's all I ask.” “Sort of sit on a mountain top, back to back with somebody else, like a couple of idols.” “No--because it isn't a case of sitting--or a case of back to back. It's what you get to after a lot of fighting and a lot of sensual fulfilment. And it never does away with the fighting and with the sensual passion. It flowers on top of them, and it would never flower save on top of them.” “What wouldn't?” “The possessing one's own soul--and the being together with someone else in silence, beyond speech.” “And you've got them?” “I've got a BIT of the real quietness inside me.” “So has a dog on a mat.” “So I believe, too.” “Or a man in a pub.” “Which I don't believe.” “You prefer the dog?” “Maybe.” There was silence for a few moments. “And I'm the man in the pub,” said Aaron. “You aren't the dog on the mat, anyhow.” “And you're the idol on the mountain top, worshipping yourself.” “You talk to me like a woman, Aaron.” “How do you talk to ME, do you think?” “How do I?” “Are the potatoes done?” Lilly turned quickly aside, and switched on the electric light. Everything changed. Aaron sat still before the fire, irritated. Lilly went about preparing the supper. The room was pleasant at night. Two tall, dark screens hid the two beds. In front, the piano was littered with music, the desk littered with papers. Lilly went out on to the landing, and set the chops to grill on the gas stove. Hastily he put a small table on the hearth-rug, spread it with a blue-and-white cloth, set plates and glasses. Aaron did not move. It was not his nature to concern himself with domestic matters--and Lilly did it best alone. The two men had an almost uncanny understanding of one another--like brothers. They came from the same district, from the same class. Each might have been born into the other's circumstance. Like brothers, there was a profound hostility between them. But hostility is not antipathy. Lilly's skilful housewifery always irritated Aaron: it was so self-sufficient. But most irritating of all was the little man's unconscious assumption of priority. Lilly was actually unaware that he assumed this quiet predominance over others. He mashed the potatoes, he heated the plates, he warmed the red wine, he whisked eggs into the milk pudding, and served his visitor like a housemaid. But none of this detracted from the silent assurance with which he bore himself, and with which he seemed to domineer over his acquaintance. At last the meal was ready. Lilly drew the curtains, switched off the central light, put the green-shaded electric lamp on the table, and the two men drew up to the meal. It was good food, well cooked and hot. Certainly Lilly's hands were no longer clean: but it was clean dirt, as he said. Aaron sat in the low arm-chair at table. So his face was below, in the full light. Lilly sat high on a small chair, so that his face was in the green shadow. Aaron was handsome, and always had that peculiar well-dressed look of his type. Lilly was indifferent to his own appearance, and his collar was a rag. So the two men ate in silence. They had been together alone for a fortnight only: but it was like a small eternity. Aaron was well now--only he suffered from the depression and the sort of fear that follows influenza. “When are you going?” he asked irritably, looking up at Lilly, whose face hovered in that green shadow above, and worried him. “One day next week. They'll send me a telegram. Not later than Thursday.” “You're looking forward to going?” The question was half bitter. “Yes. I want to get a new tune out of myself.” “Had enough of this?” “Yes.” A flush of anger came on Aaron's face. “You're easily on, and easily off,” he said, rather insulting. “Am I?” said Lilly. “What makes you think so?” “Circumstances,” replied Aaron sourly. To which there was no answer. The host cleared away the plates, and put the pudding on the table. He pushed the bowl to Aaron. “I suppose I shall never see you again, once you've gone,” said Aaron. “It's your choice. I will leave you an address.” After this, the pudding was eaten in silence. “Besides, Aaron,” said Lilly, drinking his last sip of wine, “what do you care whether you see me again or not? What do you care whether you see anybody again or not? You want to be amused. And now you're irritated because you think I am not going to amuse you any more: and you don't know who is going to amuse you. I admit it's a dilemma. But it's a hedonistic dilemma of the commonest sort.” “I don't know hedonistic. And supposing I am as you say--are you any different?” “No, I'm not very different. But I always persuade myself there's a bit of difference. Do you know what Josephine Ford confessed to me? She's had her lovers enough. 'There isn't any such thing as love, Lilly,' she said. 'Men are simply afraid to be alone. That is absolutely all there is in it: fear of being alone.'” “What by that?” said Aaron. “You agree?” “Yes, on the whole.” “So do I--on the whole. And then I asked her what about woman. And then she said with a woman it wasn't fear, it was just boredom. A woman is like a violinist: any fiddle, any instrument rather than empty hands and no tune going.” “Yes--what I said before: getting as much amusement out of life as possible,” said Aaron. “You amuse me--and I'll amuse you.” “Yes--just about that.” “All right, Aaron,” said Lilly. “I'm not going to amuse you, or try to amuse you any more.” “Going to try somebody else; and Malta.” “Malta, anyhow.” “Oh, and somebody else--in the next five minutes.” “Yes--that also.” “Goodbye and good luck to you.” “Goodbye and good luck to you, Aaron.” With which Lilly went aside to wash the dishes. Aaron sat alone under the zone of light, turning over a score of _Pelleas_. Though the noise of London was around them, it was far below, and in the room was a deep silence. Each of the men seemed invested in his own silence. Aaron suddenly took his flute, and began trying little passages from the opera on his knee. He had not played since his illness. The noise came out a little tremulous, but low and sweet. Lilly came forward with a plate and a cloth in his hand. “Aaron's rod is putting forth again,” he said, smiling. “What?” said Aaron, looking up. “I said Aaron's rod is putting forth again.” “What rod?” “Your flute, for the moment.” “It's got to put forth my bread and butter.” “Is that all the buds it's going to have?” “What else!” “Nay--that's for you to show. What flowers do you imagine came out of the rod of Moses's brother?” “Scarlet runners, I should think if he'd got to live on them.” “Scarlet enough, I'll bet.” Aaron turned unnoticing back to his music. Lilly finished the wiping of the dishes, then took a book and sat on the other side of the table. “It's all one to you, then,” said Aaron suddenly, “whether we ever see one another again?” “Not a bit,” said Lilly, looking up over his spectacles. “I very much wish there might be something that held us together.” “Then if you wish it, why isn't there?” “You might wish your flute to put out scarlet-runner flowers at the joints.” “Ay--I might. And it would be all the same.” The moment of silence that followed was extraordinary in its hostility. “Oh, we shall run across one another again some time,” said Aaron. “Sure,” said Lilly. “More than that: I'll write you an address that will always find me. And when you write I will answer you.” He took a bit of paper and scribbled an address. Aaron folded it and put it into his waistcoat pocket. It was an Italian address. “But how can I live in Italy?” he said. “You can shift about. I'm tied to a job.” “You--with your budding rod, your flute--and your charm--you can always do as you like.” “My what?” “Your flute and your charm.” “What charm?” “Just your own. Don't pretend you don't know you've got it. I don't really like charm myself; too much of a trick about it. But whether or not, you've got it.” “It's news to me.” “Not it.” “Fact, it is.” “Ha! Somebody will always take a fancy to you. And you can live on that, as well as on anything else.” “Why do you always speak so despisingly?” “Why shouldn't I?” “Have you any right to despise another man?” “When did it go by rights?” “No, not with you.” “You answer me like a woman, Aaron.” Again there was a space of silence. And again it was Aaron who at last broke it. “We're in different positions, you and me,” he said. “How?” “You can live by your writing--but I've got to have a job.” “Is that all?” said Lilly. “Ay. And plenty. You've got the advantage of me.” “Quite,” said Lilly. “But why? I was a dirty-nosed little boy when you were a clean-nosed little boy. And I always had more patches on my breeches than you: neat patches, too, my poor mother! So what's the good of talking about advantages? You had the start. And at this very moment you could buy me up, lock, stock, and barrel. So don't feel hard done by. It's a lie.” “You've got your freedom.” “I make it and I take it.” “Circumstances make it for you.” “As you like.” “You don't do a man justice,” said Aaron. “Does a man care?” “He might.” “Then he's no man.” “Thanks again, old fellow.” “Welcome,” said Lilly, grimacing. Again Aaron looked at him, baffled, almost with hatred. Lilly grimaced at the blank wall opposite, and seemed to ruminate. Then he went back to his book. And no sooner had he forgotten Aaron, reading the fantasies of a certain Leo Frobenius, than Aaron must stride in again. “You can't say there isn't a difference between your position and mine,” he said pertinently. Lilly looked darkly over his spectacles. “No, by God,” he said. “I should be in a poor way otherwise.” “You can't say you haven't the advantage--your JOB gives you the advantage.” “All right. Then leave it out with my job, and leave me alone.” “That's your way of dodging it.” “My dear Aaron, I agree with you perfectly. There is no difference between us, save the fictitious advantage given to me by my job. Save for my job--which is to write lies--Aaron and I are two identical little men in one and the same little boat. Shall we leave it at that, now?” “Yes,” said Aaron. “That's about it.” “Let us shake hands on it--and go to bed, my dear chap. You are just recovering from influenza, and look paler than I like.” “You mean you want to be rid of me,” said Aaron. “Yes, I do mean that,” said Lilly. “Ay,” said Aaron. And after a few minutes more staring at the score of _Pelleas_, he rose, put the score away on the piano, laid his flute beside it, and retired behind the screen. In silence, the strange dim noise of London sounding from below, Lilly read on about the Kabyles. His soul had the faculty of divesting itself of the moment, and seeking further, deeper interests. These old Africans! And Atlantis! Strange, strange wisdom of the Kabyles! Old, old dark Africa, and the world before the flood! How jealous Aaron seemed! The child of a jealous God. A jealous God! Could any race be anything but despicable, with such an antecedent? But no, persistent as a jealous God himself, Aaron reappeared in his pyjamas, and seated himself in his chair. “What is the difference then between you and me, Lilly?” he said. “Haven't we shaken hands on it--a difference of jobs.” “You don't believe that, though, do you?” “Nay, now I reckon you're trespassing.” “Why am I? I know you don't believe it.” “What do I believe then?” said Lilly. “You believe you know something better than me--and that you are something better than me. Don't you?” “Do YOU believe it?” “What?” “That I AM something better than you, and that I KNOW something better?” “No, because I don't see it,” said Aaron. “Then if you don't see it, it isn't there. So go to bed and sleep the sleep of the just and the convalescent. I am not to be badgered any more.” “Am I badgering you?” said Aaron. “Indeed you are.” “So I'm in the wrong again?” “Once more, my dear.” “You're a God-Almighty in your way, you know.” “So long as I'm not in anybody else's way--Anyhow, you'd be much better sleeping the sleep of the just. And I'm going out for a minute or two. Don't catch cold there with nothing on-- “I want to catch the post,” he added, rising. Aaron looked up at him quickly. But almost before there was time to speak, Lilly had slipped into his hat and coat, seized his letters, and gone. It was a rainy night. Lilly turned down King Street to walk to Charing Cross. He liked being out of doors. He liked to post his letters at Charing Cross post office. He did not want to talk to Aaron any more. He was glad to be alone. He walked quickly down Villiers Street to the river, to see it flowing blackly towards the sea. It had an endless fascination for him: never failed to soothe him and give him a sense of liberty. He liked the night, the dark rain, the river, and even the traffic. He enjoyed the sense of friction he got from the streaming of people who meant nothing to him. It was like a fox slipping alert among unsuspecting cattle. When he got back, he saw in the distance the lights of a taxi standing outside the building where he lived, and heard a thumping and hallooing. He hurried forward. It was a man called Herbertson. “Oh, why, there you are!” exclaimed Herbertson, as Lilly drew near. “Can I come up and have a chat?” “I've got that man who's had flu. I should think he is gone to bed.” “Oh!” The disappointment was plain. “Well, look here I'll just come up for a couple of minutes.” He laid his hand on Lilly's arm. “I heard you were going away. Where are you going?” “Malta.” “Malta! Oh, I know Malta very well. Well now, it'll be all right if I come up for a minute? I'm not going to see much more of you, apparently.” He turned quickly to the taxi. “What is it on the clock?” The taxi was paid, the two men went upstairs. Aaron was in bed, but he called as Lilly entered the room. “Hullo!” said Lilly. “Not asleep? Captain Herbertson has come in for a minute.” “Hope I shan't disturb you,” said Captain Herbertson, laying down his stick and gloves, and his cap. He was in uniform. He was one of the few surviving officers of the Guards, a man of about forty-five, good-looking, getting rather stout. He settled himself in the chair where Aaron had sat, hitching up his trousers. The gold identity plate, with its gold chain, fell conspicuously over his wrist. “Been to 'Rosemary,'” he said. “Rotten play, you know--but passes the time awfully well. Oh, I quite enjoyed it.” Lilly offered him Sauterne--the only thing in the house. “Oh, yes! How awfully nice! Yes, thanks, I shall love it. Can I have it with soda? Thanks! Do you know, I think that's the very best drink in the tropics: sweet white wine, with soda? Yes--well!-- Well--now, why are you going away?” “For a change,” said Lilly. “You're quite right, one needs a change now the damned thing is all over. As soon as I get out of khaki I shall be off. Malta! Yes! I've been in Malta several times. I think Valletta is quite enjoyable, particularly in winter, with the opera. Oh--er--how's your wife? All right? Yes!--glad to see her people again. Bound to be-- Oh, by the way, I met Jim Bricknell. Sends you a message hoping you'll go down and stay--down at Captain Bingham's place in Surrey, you know. Awfully queer lot down there. Not my sort, no. You won't go down? No, I shouldn't. Not the right sort of people.” Herbertson rattled away, rather spasmodic. He had been through the very front hell of the war--and like every man who had, he had the war at the back of his mind, like an obsession. But in the meantime, he skirmished. “Yes. I was on guard one day when the Queen gave one of her tea-parties to the blind. Awful affair. But the children are awfully nice children. Prince of Wales awfully nice, almost too nice. Prince Henry smart boy, too--oh, a smart boy. Queen Mary poured the tea, and I handed round bread and butter. She told me I made a very good waiter. I said, Thank you, Madam. But I like the children. Very different from the Battenbergs. Oh!--” he wrinkled his nose. “I can't stand the Battenbergs.” “Mount Battens,” said Lilly. “Yes! Awful mistake, changing the royal name. They were Guelfs, why not remain it? Why, I'll tell you what Battenberg did. He was in the Guards, too--” The talk flowed on: about royalty and the Guards, Buckingham Palace and St. James. “Rather a nice story about Queen Victoria. Man named Joyce, something or other, often used to dine at the Palace. And he was an awfully good imitator--really clever, you know. Used to imitate the Queen. 'Mr. Joyce,' she said, 'I hear your imitation is very amusing. Will you do it for us now, and let us see what it is like?' 'Oh, no, Madam! I'm afraid I couldn't do it now. I'm afraid I'm not in the humour.' But she would have him do it. And it was really awfully funny. He had to do it. You know what he did. He used to take a table-napkin, and put it on with one corner over his forehead, and the rest hanging down behind, like her veil thing. And then he sent for the kettle-lid. He always had the kettle-lid, for that little crown of hers. And then he impersonated her. But he was awfully good--so clever. 'Mr. Joyce,' she said. 'We are not amused. Please leave the room.' Yes, that is exactly what she said: 'WE are not amused--please leave the room.' I like the WE, don't you? And he a man of sixty or so. However, he left the room and for a fortnight or so he wasn't invited--Wasn't she wonderful--Queen Victoria?” And so, by light transitions, to the Prince of Wales at the front, and thus into the trenches. And then Herbertson was on the subject he was obsessed by. He had come, unconsciously, for this and this only, to talk war to Lilly: or at Lilly. For the latter listened and watched, and said nothing. As a man at night helplessly takes a taxi to find some woman, some prostitute, Herbertson had almost unthinkingly got into a taxi and come battering at the door in Covent Garden, only to talk war to Lilly, whom he knew very little. But it was a driving instinct--to come and get it off his chest. And on and on he talked, over his wine and soda. He was not conceited--he was not showing off--far from it. It was the same thing here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly had sat in a cowshed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn't know where to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by a vision that the soul cannot bear. In this officer, of course, there was a lightness and an appearance of bright diffidence and humour. But underneath it all was the same as in the common men of all the combatant nations: the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved. The experience gradually cooled on top: but only with a surface crust. The soul did not heal, did not recover. “I used to be awfully frightened,” laughed Herbertson. “Now you say, Lilly, you'd never have stood it. But you would. You're nervous--and it was just the nervous ones that did stand it. When nearly all our officers were gone, we had a man come out--a man called Margeritson, from India--big merchant people out there. They all said he was no good--not a bit of good--nervous chap. No good at all. But when you had to get out of the trench and go for the Germans he was perfect--perfect--It all came to him then, at the crisis, and he was perfect. “Some things frighten one man, and some another. Now shells would never frighten me. But I couldn't stand bombs. You could tell the difference between our machines and the Germans. Ours was a steady noise--drrrrrrrr!--but their's was heavy, drrrrRURUrrrrRURU!-- My word, that got on my nerves.... “No I was never hit. The nearest thing was when I was knocked down by an exploding shell--several times that--you know. When you shout like mad for the men to come and dig you out, under all the earth. And my word, you do feel frightened then.” Herbertson laughed with a twinkling motion to Lilly. But between his brows there was a tension like madness. “And a funny thing you know--how you don't notice things. In--let me see--1916, the German guns were a lot better than ours. Ours were old, and when they're old you can't tell where they'll hit: whether they'll go beyond the mark, or whether they'll fall short. Well, this day our guns were firing short, and killing our own men. We'd had the order to charge, and were running forward, and I suddenly felt hot water spurting on my neck--” He put his hand to the back of his neck and glanced round apprehensively. “It was a chap called Innes--Oh, an awfully decent sort--people were in the Argentine. He'd been calling out to me as we were running, and I was just answering. When I felt this hot water on my neck and saw him running past me with no head--he'd got no head, and he went running past me. I don't know how far, but a long way.... Blood, you know--Yes--well-- “Oh, I hated Chelsea--I loathed Chelsea--Chelsea was purgatory to me. I had a corporal called Wallace--he was a fine chap--oh, he was a fine chap--six foot two--and about twenty-four years old. He was my stand-back. Oh, I hated Chelsea, and parades, and drills. You know, when it's drill, and you're giving orders, you forget what order you've just given--in front of the Palace there the crowd don't notice--but it's AWFUL for you. And you know you daren't look round to see what the men are doing. But Wallace was splendid. He was just behind me, and I'd hear him, quite quiet you know, 'It's right wheel, sir.' Always perfect, always perfect--yes--well.... “You know you don't get killed if you don't think you will. Now I never thought I should get killed. And I never knew a man get killed if he hadn't been thinking he would. I said to Wallace I'd rather be out here, at the front, than at Chelsea. I hated Chelsea--I can't tell you how much. 'Oh no, sir!' he said. 'I'd rather be at Chelsea than here. I'd rather be at Chelsea. There isn't hell like this at Chelsea.' We'd had orders that we were to go back to the real camp the next day. 'Never mind, Wallace,' I said. 'We shall be out of this hell-on-earth tomorrow.' And he took my hand. We weren't much for showing feeling or anything in the guards. But he took my hand. And we climbed out to charge--Poor fellow, he was killed--” Herbertson dropped his head, and for some moments seemed to go unconscious, as if struck. Then he lifted his face, and went on in the same animated chatty fashion: “You see, he had a presentiment. I'm sure he had a presentiment. None of the men got killed unless they had a presentiment--like that, you know....” Herbertson nodded keenly at Lilly, with his sharp, twinkling, yet obsessed eyes. Lilly wondered why he made the presentiment responsible for the death--which he obviously did--and not vice versa. Herbertson implied every time, that you'd never get killed if you could keep yourself from having a presentiment. Perhaps there was something in it. Perhaps the soul issues its own ticket of death, when it can stand no more. Surely life controls life: and not accident. “It's a funny thing what shock will do. We had a sergeant and he shouted to me. Both his feet were off--both his feet, clean at the ankle. I gave him morphia. You know officers aren't allowed to use the needle--might give the man blood poisoning. You give those tabloids. They say they act in a few minutes, but they DON'T. It's a quarter of an hour. And nothing is more demoralising than when you have a man, wounded, you know, and crying out. Well, this man I gave him the morphia before he got over the stunning, you know. So he didn't feel the pain. Well, they carried him in. I always used to like to look after my men. So I went next morning and I found he hadn't been removed to the Clearing Station. I got hold of the doctor and I said, 'Look here! Why hasn't this man been taken to the Clearing Station?' I used to get excited. But after some years they'd got used to me. 'Don't get excited, Herbertson, the man's dying.' 'But,' I said, 'he's just been talking to me as strong as you are.' And he had--he'd talk as strong and well as you or me, then go quiet for a bit. I said I gave him the morphia before he came round from the stunning. So he'd felt nothing. But in two hours he was dead. The doctor says that the shock does it like that sometimes. You can do nothing for them. Nothing vital is injured--and yet the life is broken in them. Nothing can be done--funny thing--Must be something in the brain--” “It's obviously not the brain,” said Lilly. “It's deeper than the brain.” “Deeper,” said Herbertson, nodding. “Funny thing where life is. We had a lieutenant. You know we all buried our own dead. Well, he looked as if he was asleep. Most of the chaps looked like that.” Herbertson closed his eyes and laid his face aside, like a man asleep and dead peacefully. “You very rarely see a man dead with any other look on his face--you know the other look.--” And he clenched his teeth with a sudden, momentaneous, ghastly distortion.--“Well, you'd never have known this chap was dead. He had a wound here--in the back of the head--and a bit of blood on his hand--and nothing else, nothing. Well, I said we'd give him a decent burial. He lay there waiting--and they'd wrapped him in a filthy blanket--you know. Well, I said he should have a proper blanket. He'd been dead lying there a day and a half you know. So I went and got a blanket, a beautiful blanket, out of his private kit--his people were Scotch, well-known family--and I got the pins, you know, ready to pin him up properly, for the Scots Guards to bury him. And I thought he'd be stiff, you see. But when I took him by the arms, to lift him on, he sat up. It gave me an awful shock. 'Why he's alive!' I said. But they said he was dead. I couldn't believe it. It gave me an awful shock. He was as flexible as you or me, and looked as if he was asleep. You couldn't believe he was dead. But we pinned him up in his blanket. It was an awful shock to me. I couldn't believe a man could be like that after he'd been dead two days.... “The Germans were wonderful with the machine guns--it's a wicked thing, a machine gun. But they couldn't touch us with the bayonet. Every time the men came back they had bayonet practice, and they got awfully good. You know when you thrust at the Germans--so--if you miss him, you bring your rifle back sharp, with a round swing, so that the butt comes up and hits up under the jaw. It's one movement, following on with the stab, you see, if you miss him. It was too quick for them--But bayonet charge was worst, you know. Because your man cries out when you catch him, when you get him, you know. That's what does you.... “No, oh no, this was no war like other wars. All the machinery of it. No, you couldn't stand it, but for the men. The men are wonderful, you know. They'll be wiped out.... No, it's your men who keep you going, if you're an officer.... But there'll never be another war like this. Because the Germans are the only people who could make a war like this--and I don't think they'll ever do it again, do you? “Oh, they were wonderful, the Germans. They were amazing. It was incredible, what they invented and did. We had to learn from them, in the first two years. But they were too methodical. That's why they lost the war. They were too methodical. They'd fire their guns every ten minutes--regular. Think of it. Of course we knew when to run, and when to lie down. You got so that you knew almost exactly what they'd do--if you'd been out long enough. And then you could time what you wanted to do yourselves. “They were a lot more nervous than we were, at the last. They sent up enough light at night from their trenches--you know, those things that burst in the air like electric light--we had none of that to do--they did it all for us--lit up everything. They were more nervous than we were....” It was nearly two o'clock when Herbertson left. Lilly, depressed, remained before the fire. Aaron got out of bed and came uneasily to the fire. “It gives me the bellyache, that damned war,” he said. “So it does me,” said Lilly. “All unreal.” “Real enough for those that had to go through it.” “No, least of all for them,” said Lilly sullenly. “Not as real as a bad dream. Why the hell don't they wake up and realise it!” “That's a fact,” said Aaron. “They're hypnotised by it.” “And they want to hypnotise me. And I won't be hypnotised. The war was a lie and is a lie and will go on being a lie till somebody busts it.” “It was a fact--you can't bust that. You can't bust the fact that it happened.” “Yes you can. It never happened. It never happened to me. No more than my dreams happen. My dreams don't happen: they only seem.” “But the war did happen, right enough,” smiled Aaron palely. “No, it didn't. Not to me or to any man, in his own self. It took place in the automatic sphere, like dreams do. But the ACTUAL MAN in every man was just absent--asleep--or drugged--inert--dream-logged. That's it.” “You tell 'em so,” said Aaron. “I do. But it's no good. Because they won't wake up now even--perhaps never. They'll all kill themselves in their sleep.” “They wouldn't be any better if they did wake up and be themselves--that is, supposing they are asleep, which I can't see. They are what they are--and they're all alike--and never very different from what they are now.” Lilly stared at Aaron with black eyes. “Do you believe in them less than I do, Aaron?” he asked slowly. “I don't even want to believe in them.” “But in yourself?” Lilly was almost wistful--and Aaron uneasy. “I don't know that I've any more right to believe in myself than in them,” he replied. Lilly watched and pondered. “No,” he said. “That's not true--I KNEW the war was false: humanly quite false. I always knew it was false. The Germans were false, we were false, everybody was false.” “And not you?” asked Aaron shrewishly. “There was a wakeful, self-possessed bit of me which knew that the war and all that horrible movement was false for me. And so I wasn't going to be dragged in. The Germans could have shot my mother or me or what they liked: I wouldn't have joined the WAR. I would like to kill my enemy. But become a bit of that huge obscene machine they called the war, that I never would, no, not if I died ten deaths and had eleven mothers violated. But I would like to kill my enemy: Oh, yes, more than one enemy. But not as a unit in a vast obscene mechanism. That never: no, never.” Poor Lilly was too earnest and vehement. Aaron made a fine nose. It seemed to him like a lot of words and a bit of wriggling out of a hole. “Well,” he said, “you've got men and nations, and you've got the machines of war--so how are you going to get out of it? League of Nations?” “Damn all leagues. Damn all masses and groups, anyhow. All I want is to get MYSELF out of their horrible heap: to get out of the swarm. The swarm to me is nightmare and nullity--horrible helpless writhing in a dream. I want to get myself awake, out of it all--all that mass-consciousness, all that mass-activity--it's the most horrible nightmare to me. No man is awake and himself. No man who was awake and in possession of himself would use poison gases: no man. His own awake self would scorn such a thing. It's only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass-psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene.” “Ha--well,” said Aaron. “It's the wide-awake ones that invent the poison gas, and use it. Where should we be without it?” Lilly started, went stiff and hostile. “Do you mean that, Aaron?” he said, looking into Aaron's face with a hard, inflexible look. Aaron turned aside half sheepishly. “That's how it looks on the face of it, isn't it?” he said. “Look here, my friend, it's too late for you to be talking to me about the face of things. If that's how you feel, put your things on and follow Herbertson. Yes--go out of my room. I don't put up with the face of things here.” Aaron looked at him in cold amazement. “It'll do tomorrow morning, won't it?” he asked rather mocking. “Yes,” said Lilly coldly. “But please go tomorrow morning.” “Oh, I'll go all right,” said Aaron. “Everybody's got to agree with you--that's your price.” But Lilly did not answer. Aaron turned into bed, his satirical smile under his nose. Somewhat surprised, however, at this sudden turn of affairs. As he was just going to sleep, dismissing the matter, Lilly came once more to his bedside, and said, in a hard voice: “I'm NOT going to pretend to have friends on the face of things. No, and I don't have friends who don't fundamentally agree with me. A friend means one who is at one with me in matters of life and death. And if you're at one with all the rest, then you're THEIR friend, not mine. So be their friend. And please leave me in the morning. You owe me nothing, you have nothing more to do with me. I have had enough of these friendships where I pay the piper and the mob calls the tune. “Let me tell you, moreover, your heroic Herbertsons lost us more than ever they won. A brave ant is a damned cowardly individual. Your heroic officers are a sad sight AFTERWARDS, when they come home. Bah, your Herbertson! The only justification for war is what we learn from it. And what have they learnt?--Why did so many of them have presentiments, as he called it? Because they could feel inside them, there was nothing to come after. There was no life-courage: only death-courage. Nothing beyond this hell--only death or love--languishing--” “What could they have seen, anyhow?” said Aaron. “It's not what you see, actually. It's the kind of spirit you keep inside you: the life spirit. When Wallace had presentiments, Herbertson, being officer, should have said: 'None of that, Wallace. You and I, we've got to live and make life smoke.'--Instead of which he let Wallace be killed and his own heart be broken. Always the death-choice-- And we won't, we simply will not face the world as we've made it, and our own souls as we find them, and take the responsibility. We'll never get anywhere till we stand up man to man and face EVERYTHING out, and break the old forms, but never let our own pride and courage of life be broken.” Lilly broke off, and went silently to bed. Aaron turned over to sleep, rather resenting the sound of so many words. What difference did it make, anyhow? In the morning, however, when he saw the other man's pale, closed, rather haughty face, he realised that something _had_ happened. Lilly was courteous and even affable: but with a curious cold space between him and Aaron. Breakfast passed, and Aaron knew that he must leave. There was something in Lilly's bearing which just showed him the door. In some surprise and confusion, and in some anger, not unmingled with humorous irony, he put his things in his bag. He put on his hat and coat. Lilly was seated rather stiffly writing. “Well,” said Aaron. “I suppose we shall meet again.” “Oh, sure to,” said Lilly, rising from his chair. “We are sure to run across one another.” “When are you going?” asked Aaron. “In a few days' time.” “Oh, well, I'll run in and see you before you go, shall I?” “Yes, do.” Lilly escorted his guest to the top of the stairs, shook hands, and then returned into his own room, closing the door on himself. Aaron did not find his friend at home when he called. He took it rather as a slap in the face. But then he knew quite well that Lilly had made a certain call on his, Aaron's soul: a call which he, Aaron, did not at all intend to obey. If in return the soul-caller chose to shut his street-door in the face of the world-friend--well, let it be quits. He was not sure whether he felt superior to his unworldly enemy or not. He rather thought he did. CHAPTER XI. MORE PILLAR OF SALT The opera season ended, Aaron was invited by Cyril Scott to join a group of musical people in a village by the sea. He accepted, and spent a pleasant month. It pleased the young men musically-inclined and bohemian by profession to patronise the flautist, whom they declared marvellous. Bohemians with well-to-do parents, they could already afford to squander a little spasmodic and self-gratifying patronage. And Aaron did not mind being patronised. He had nothing else to do. But the party broke up early in September. The flautist was detained a few days at a country house, for the amusement of the guests. Then he left for London. In London he found himself at a loose end. A certain fretful dislike of the patronage of indifferent young men, younger than himself, and a certain distaste for regular work in the orchestra made him look round. He wanted something else. He wanted to disappear again. Qualms and emotions concerning his abandoned family overcame him. The early, delicate autumn affected him. He took a train to the Midlands. And again, just after dark, he strolled with his little bag across the field which lay at the end of his garden. It had been mown, and the grass was already growing long. He stood and looked at the line of back windows, lighted once more. He smelled the scents of autumn, phlox and moist old vegetation and corn in sheaf. A nostalgia which was half at least revulsion affected him. The place, the home, at once fascinated and revolted him. Sitting in his shed, he scrutinised his garden carefully, in the starlight. There were two rows of beans, rather disshevelled. Near at hand the marrow plants sprawled from their old bed. He could detect the perfume of a few carnations. He wondered who it was had planted the garden, during his long absence. Anyhow, there it was, planted and fruited and waning into autumn. The blind was not drawn. It was eight o'clock. The children were going to bed. Aaron waited in his shed, his bowels stirred with violent but only half-admitted emotions. There was his wife, slim and graceful, holding a little mug to the baby's mouth. And the baby was drinking. She looked lonely. Wild emotions attacked his heart. There was going to be a wild and emotional reconciliation. Was there? It seemed like something fearful and imminent. A passion arose in him, a craving for the violent emotional reconciliation. He waited impatiently for the children to be gone to bed, gnawed with restless desire. He heard the clock strike nine, then half-past, from the village behind. The children would be asleep. His wife was sitting sewing some little frock. He went lingering down the garden path, stooping to lift the fallen carnations, to see how they were. There were many flowers, but small. He broke one off, then threw it away. The golden rod was out. Even in the little lawn there were asters, as of old. His wife started to listen, hearing his step. He was filled with a violent conflict of tenderness, like a sickness. He hesitated, tapping at the door, and entered. His wife started to her feet, at bay. “What have you come for!” was her involuntary ejaculation. But he, with the familiar odd jerk of his head towards the garden, asked with a faint smile: “Who planted the garden?” And he felt himself dropping into the twang of the vernacular, which he had discarded. Lottie only stood and stared at him, objectively. She did not think to answer. He took his hat off, and put it on the dresser. Again the familiar act maddened her. “What have you come for?” she cried again, with a voice full of hate. Or perhaps it was fear and doubt and even hope as well. He heard only hate. This time he turned to look at her. The old dagger was drawn in her. “I wonder,” he said, “myself.” Then she recovered herself, and with trembling hand picked up her sewing again. But she still stood at bay, beyond the table. She said nothing. He, feeling tired, sat down on the chair nearest the door. But he reached for his hat, and kept it on his knee. She, as she stood there unnaturally, went on with her sewing. There was silence for some time. Curious sensations and emotions went through the man's frame seeming to destroy him. They were like electric shocks, which he felt she emitted against him. And an old sickness came in him again. He had forgotten it. It was the sickness of the unrecognised and incomprehensible strain between him and her. After a time she put down her sewing, and sat again in her chair. “Do you know how vilely you've treated me?” she said, staring across the space at him. He averted his face. Yet he answered, not without irony. “I suppose so.” “And why?” she cried. “I should like to know why.” He did not answer. The way she rushed in made him go vague. “Justify yourself. Say why you've been so vile to me. Say what you had against me,” she demanded. “What I HAD against her,” he mused to himself: and he wondered that she used the past tense. He made no answer. “Accuse me,” she insisted. “Say what I've done to make you treat me like this. Say it. You must THINK it hard enough.” “Nay,” he said. “I don't think it.” This speech, by which he merely meant that he did not trouble to formulate any injuries he had against her, puzzled her. “Don't come pretending you love me, NOW. It's too late,” she said with contempt. Yet perhaps also hope. “You might wait till I start pretending,” he said. This enraged her. “You vile creature!” she exclaimed. “Go! What have you come for?” “To look at YOU,” he said sarcastically. After a few minutes she began to cry, sobbing violently into her apron. And again his bowels stirred and boiled. “What have I done! What have I done! I don't know what I've done that he should be like this to me,” she sobbed, into her apron. It was childish, and perhaps true. At least it was true from the childish part of her nature. He sat gloomy and uneasy. She took the apron from her tear-stained face, and looked at him. It was true, in her moments of roused exposure she was a beautiful woman--a beautiful woman. At this moment, with her flushed, tear-stained, wilful distress, she was beautiful. “Tell me,” she challenged. “Tell me! Tell me what I've done. Tell me what you have against me. Tell me.” Watching like a lynx, she saw the puzzled, hurt look in his face. Telling isn't so easy--especially when the trouble goes too deep for conscious comprehension. He couldn't _tell_ what he had against her. And he had not the slightest intention of doing what she would have liked him to do, starting to pile up detailed grievances. He knew the detailed grievances were nothing in themselves. “You CAN'T,” she cried vindictively. “You CAN'T. You CAN'T find anything real to bring against me, though you'd like to. You'd like to be able to accuse me of something, but you CAN'T, because you know there isn't anything.” She watched him, watched. And he sat in the chair near the door, without moving. “You're unnatural, that's what you are,” she cried. “You're unnatural. You're not a man. You haven't got a man's feelings. You're nasty, and cold, and unnatural. And you're a coward. You're a coward. You run away from me, without telling me what you've got against me.” “When you've had enough, you go away and you don't care what you do,” he said, epigrammatic. She paused a moment. “Enough of what?” she said. “What have you had enough of? Of me and your children? It's a nice manly thing to say. Haven't I loved you? Haven't I loved you for twelve years, and worked and slaved for you and tried to keep you right? Heaven knows where you'd have been but for me, evil as you are at the bottom. You're evil, that's what it is--and weak. You're too weak to love a woman and give her what she wants: too weak. Unmanly and cowardly, he runs away.” “No wonder,” he said. “No,” she cried. “It IS no wonder, with a nature like yours: weak and unnatural and evil. It IS no wonder.” She became quiet--and then started to cry again, into her apron. Aaron waited. He felt physically weak. “And who knows what you've been doing all these months?” she wept. “Who knows all the vile things you've been doing? And you're the father of my children--the father of my little girls--and who knows what vile things he's guilty of, all these months?” “I shouldn't let my imagination run away with me,” he answered. “I've been playing the flute in the orchestra of one of the theatres in London.” “Ha!” she cried. “It's more than that. Don't think I'm going to believe you. I know you, with your smooth-sounding lies. You're a liar, as you know. And I know you've been doing other things besides play a flute in an orchestra. You!--as if I don't know you. And then coming crawling back to me with your lies and your pretense. Don't think I'm taken in.” “I should be sorry,” he said. “Coming crawling back to me, and expecting to be forgiven,” she went on. “But no--I don't forgive--and I can't forgive--never--not as long as I live shall I forgive what you've done to me.” “You can wait till you're asked, anyhow,” he said. “And you can wait,” she said. “And you shall wait.” She took up her sewing, and stitched steadily, as if calmly. Anyone glancing in would have imagined a quiet domestic hearth at that moment. He, too, feeling physically weak, remained silent, feeling his soul absent from the scene. Again she suddenly burst into tears, weeping bitterly. “And the children,” she sobbed, rocking herself with grief and chagrin. “What have I been able to say to the children--what have I been able to tell them?” “What HAVE you told them?” he asked coldly. “I told them you'd gone away to work,” she sobbed, laying her head on her arms on the table. “What else could I tell them? I couldn't tell them the vile truth about their father. I couldn't tell THEM how evil you are.” She sobbed and moaned. He wondered what exactly the vile truth would have been, had she _started_ to tell it. And he began to feel, coldly and cynically, that among all her distress there was a luxuriating in the violent emotions of the scene in hand, and the situation altogether. Then again she became quiet, and picked up her sewing. She stitched quietly, wistfully, for some time. Then she looked up at him--a long look of reproach, and sombre accusation, and wifely tenderness. He turned his face aside. “You know you've been wrong to me, don't you?” she said, half wistfully, half menacing. He felt her wistfulness and her menace tearing him in his bowels and loins. “You do know, don't you?” she insisted, still with the wistful appeal, and the veiled threat. “You do, or you would answer,” she said. “You've still got enough that's right in you, for you to know.” She waited. He sat still, as if drawn by hot wires. Then she slipped across to him, put her arms round him, sank on her knees at his side, and sank her face against his thigh. “Say you know how wrong you are. Say you know how cruel you've been to me,” she pleaded. But under her female pleading and appeal he felt the iron of her threat. “You DO know it,” she murmured, looking up into his face as she crouched by his knee. “You DO know it. I can see in your eyes that you know it. And why have you come back to me, if you don't know it! Why have you come back to me? Tell me!” Her arms gave him a sharp, compulsory little clutch round the waist. “Tell me! Tell me!” she murmured, with all her appeal liquid in her throat. But him, it half overcame, and at the same time, horrified. He had a certain horror of her. The strange liquid sound of her appeal seemed to him like the swaying of a serpent which mesmerises the fated, fluttering, helpless bird. She clasped her arms round him, she drew him to her, she half roused his passion. At the same time she coldly horrified and repelled him. He had not the faintest feeling, at the moment, of his own wrong. But she wanted to win his own self-betrayal out of him. He could see himself as the fascinated victim, falling to this cajoling, awful woman, the wife of his bosom. But as well, he had a soul outside himself, which looked on the whole scene with cold revulsion, and which was as unchangeable as time. “No,” he said. “I don't feel wrong.” “You DO!” she said, giving him a sharp, admonitory clutch. “You DO. Only you're silly, and obstinate, babyish and silly and obstinate. An obstinate little boy--you DO feel wrong. And you ARE wrong. And you've got to say it.” But quietly he disengaged himself and got to his feet, his face pale and set, obstinate as she said. He put his hat on, and took his little bag. She watched him curiously, still crouching by his chair. “I'll go,” he said, putting his hand on the latch. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and clutched him by the shirt-neck, her hand inside his soft collar, half strangling him. “You villain,” she said, and her face was transfigured with passion as he had never seen it before, horrible. “You villain!” she said thickly. “What have you come here for?” His soul went black as he looked at her. He broke her hand away from his shirt collar, bursting the stud-holes. She recoiled in silence. And in one black, unconscious movement he was gone, down the garden and over the fence and across the country, swallowed in a black unconsciousness. She, realising, sank upon the hearth-rug and lay there curled upon herself. She was defeated. But she, too, would never yield. She lay quite motionless for some time. Then she got up, feeling the draught on the floor. She closed the door, and drew down the blind. Then she looked at her wrist, which he had gripped, and which pained her. Then she went to the mirror and looked for a long time at her white, strained, determined face. Come life, come death, she, too would never yield. And she realised now that he would never yield. She was faint with weariness, and would be glad to get to bed and sleep. Aaron meanwhile had walked across the country and was looking for a place to rest. He found a cornfield with a half-built stack, and sheaves in stook. Ten to one some tramp would have found the stack. He threw a dozen sheaves together and lay down, looking at the stars in the September sky. He, too, would never yield. The illusion of love was gone for ever. Love was a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other's soul. So far, man had yielded the mastery to woman. Now he was fighting for it back again. And too late, for the woman would never yield. But whether woman yielded or not, he would keep the mastery of his own soul and conscience and actions. He would never yield himself up to her judgment again. He would hold himself forever beyond her jurisdiction. Henceforth, life single, not life double. He looked at the sky, and thanked the universe for the blessedness of being alone in the universe. To be alone, to be oneself, not to be driven or violated into something which is not oneself, surely it is better than anything. He thought of Lottie, and knew how much more truly herself she was when she was alone, with no man to distort her. And he was thankful for the division between them. Such scenes as the last were too horrible and unreal. As for future unions, too soon to think about it. Let there be clean and pure division first, perfected singleness. That is the only way to final, living unison: through sheer, finished singleness. CHAPTER XII. NOVARA Having no job for the autumn, Aaron fidgetted in London. He played at some concerts and some private shows. He was one of an odd quartette, for example, which went to play to Lady Artemis Hooper, when she lay in bed after her famous escapade of falling through the window of her taxi-cab. Aaron had that curious knack, which belongs to some people, of getting into the swim without knowing he was doing it. Lady Artemis thought his flute lovely, and had him again to play for her. Aaron looked at her and she at him. She, as she reclined there in bed in a sort of half-light, well made-up, smoking her cigarettes and talking in a rather raucous voice, making her slightly rasping witty comments to the other men in the room--of course there were other men, the audience--was a shock to the flautist. This was the bride of the moment! Curious how raucous her voice sounded out of the cigarette smoke. Yet he liked her--the reckless note of the modern, social freebooter. In himself was a touch of the same quality. “Do you love playing?” she asked him. “Yes,” he said, with that shadow of irony which seemed like a smile on his face. “Live for it, so to speak,” she said. “I make my living by it,” he said. “But that's not really how you take it?” she said. He eyed her. She watched him over her cigarette. It was a personal moment. “I don't think about it,” he said. “I'm sure you don't. You wouldn't be so good if you did. You're awfully lucky, you know, to be able to pour yourself down your flute.” “You think I go down easy?” he laughed. “Ah!” she replied, flicking her cigarette broadcast. “That's the point. What should you say, Jimmy?” she turned to one of the men. He screwed his eyeglass nervously and stiffened himself to look at her. “I--I shouldn't like to say, off-hand,” came the small-voiced, self-conscious answer. And Jimmy bridled himself and glanced at Aaron. “Do you find it a tight squeeze, then?” she said, turning to Aaron once more. “No, I can't say that,” he answered. “What of me goes down goes down easy enough. It's what doesn't go down.” “And how much is that?” she asked, eying him. “A good bit, maybe,” he said. “Slops over, so to speak,” she retorted sarcastically. “And which do you enjoy more, trickling down your flute or slopping over on to the lap of Mother Earth--of Miss, more probably!” “Depends,” he said. Having got him a few steps too far upon the personal ground, she left him to get off by himself. So he found London got on his nerves. He felt it rubbed him the wrong way. He was flattered, of course, by his own success--and felt at the same time irritated by it. This state of mind was by no means acceptable. Wherever he was he liked to be given, tacitly, the first place--or a place among the first. Among the musical people he frequented, he found himself on a callow kind of equality with everybody, even the stars and aristocrats, at one moment, and a backstairs outsider the next. It was all just as the moment demanded. There was a certain excitement in slithering up and down the social scale, one minute chatting in a personal tete-a-tete with the most famous, or notorious, of the society beauties: and the next walking in the rain, with his flute in a bag, to his grubby lodging in Bloomsbury. Only the excitement roused all the savage sarcasm that lay at the bottom of his soul, and which burned there like an unhealthy bile. Therefore he determined to clear out--to disappear. He had a letter from Lilly, from Novara. Lilly was drifting about. Aaron wrote to Novara, and asked if he should come to Italy, having no money to speak of. “Come if you want to. Bring your flute. And if you've no money, put on a good suit of clothes and a big black hat, and play outside the best cafe in any Italian town, and you'll collect enough to get on with.” It was a sporting chance. Aaron packed his bag and got a passport, and wrote to Lilly to say he would join him, as invited, at Sir William Franks'. He hoped Lilly's answer would arrive before he left London. But it didn't. Therefore behold our hero alighting at Novara, two hours late, on a wet, dark evening. He hoped Lilly would be there: but nobody. With some slight dismay he faced the big, crowded station. The stream of people carried him automatically through the barrier, a porter having seized his bag, and volleyed various unintelligible questions at him. Aaron understood not one word. So he just wandered after the blue blouse of the porter. The porter deposited the bag on the steps of the station front, fired off more questions and gesticulated into the half-illuminated space of darkness outside the station. Aaron decided it meant a cab, so he nodded and said “Yes.” But there were no cabs. So once more the blue-bloused porter slung the big bag and the little bag on the strap over his shoulder, and they plunged into the night, towards some lights and a sort of theatre place. One carriage stood there in the rain--yes, and it was free. “Keb? Yes--orright--sir. Whe'to? Where you go? Sir William Franks? Yes, I know. Long way go--go long way. Sir William Franks.” The cabman spattered his few words of English. Aaron gave the porter an English shilling. The porter let the coin lie in the middle of his palm, as if it were a live beetle, and darted to the light of the carriage to examine the beast, exclaiming volubly. The cabman, wild with interest, peered down from the box into the palm of the porter, and carried on an impassioned dialogue. Aaron stood with one foot on the step. “What you give--he? One franc?” asked the driver. “A shilling,” said Aaron. “One sheeling. Yes. I know that. One sheeling English”--and the driver went off into impassioned exclamations in Torinese. The porter, still muttering and holding his hand as if the coin might sting him, filtered away. “Orright. He know--sheeling--orright. English moneys, eh? Yes, he know. You get up, sir.” And away went Aaron, under the hood of the carriage, clattering down the wide darkness of Novara, over a bridge apparently, past huge rain-wet statues, and through more rainy, half-lit streets. They stopped at last outside a sort of park wall with trees above. The big gates were just beyond. “Sir William Franks--there.” In a mixture of Italian and English the driver told Aaron to get down and ring the bell on the right. Aaron got down and in the darkness was able to read the name on the plate. “How much?” said Aaron to the driver. “Ten franc,” said the fat driver. But it was his turn now to screw down and scrutinise the pink ten-shilling note. He waved it in his hand. “Not good, eh? Not good moneys?” “Yes,” said Aaron, rather indignantly. “Good English money. Ten shillings. Better than ten francs, a good deal. Better--better--” “Good--you say? Ten sheeling--” The driver muttered and muttered, as if dissatisfied. But as a matter of fact he stowed the note in his waistcoat pocket with considerable satisfaction, looked at Aaron curiously, and drove away. Aaron stood there in the dark outside the big gates, and wished himself somewhere else. However, he rang the bell. There was a huge barking of dogs on the other side. Presently a light switched on, and a woman, followed by a man, appeared cautiously, in the half-opened doorway. “Sir William Franks?” said Aaron. “Si, signore.” And Aaron stepped with his two bags inside the gate. Huge dogs jumped round. He stood in the darkness under the trees at the foot of the park. The woman fastened the gate--Aaron saw a door--and through an uncurtained window a man writing at a desk--rather like the clerk in an hotel office. He was going with his two bags to the open door, when the woman stopped him, and began talking to him in Italian. It was evident he must not go on. So he put down the bags. The man stood a few yards away, watchfully. Aaron looked down at the woman and tried to make out something of what she was saying, but could not. The dogs still barked spasmodically, drops fell from the tall, dark trees that rose overhead. “Is Mr. Lilly here? Mr. Lilly?” he asked. “Signor Lillee. No, Signore--” And off the woman went in Italian. But it was evident Lilly was not at the house. Aaron wished more than ever he had not come, but had gone to an hotel. He made out that the woman was asking him for his name--“Meester--? Meester--?” she kept saying, with a note of interrogation. “Sisson. Mr. Sisson,” said Aaron, who was becoming impatient. And he found a visiting card to give her. She seemed appeased--said something about telephone--and left him standing. The rain had ceased, but big drops were shaken from the dark, high trees. Through the uncurtained window he saw the man at the desk reach the telephone. There was a long pause. At length the woman came back and motioned to him to go up--up the drive which curved and disappeared under the dark trees. “Go up there?” said Aaron, pointing. That was evidently the intention. So he picked up his bags and strode forward, from out of the circle of electric light, up the curved drive in the darkness. It was a steep incline. He saw trees and the grass slopes. There was a tang of snow in the air. Suddenly, up ahead, a brilliant light switched on. He continued uphill through the trees along the path, towards it, and at length, emerged at the foot of a great flight of steps, above which was a wide glass entrance, and an Italian manservant in white gloves hovering as if on the brink. Aaron emerged from the drive and climbed the steps. The manservant came down two steps and took the little bag. Then he ushered Aaron and the big bag into a large, pillared hall, with thick Turkish carpet on the floor, and handsome appointments. It was spacious, comfortable and warm; but somewhat pretentious; rather like the imposing hall into which the heroine suddenly enters on the film. Aaron dropped his heavy bag, with relief, and stood there, hat in hand, in his damp overcoat in the circle of light, looking vaguely at the yellow marble pillars, the gilded arches above, the shadowy distances and the great stairs. The butler disappeared--reappeared in another moment--and through an open doorway came the host. Sir William was a small, clean old man with a thin, white beard and a courtly deportment, wearing a black velvet dinner jacket faced with purple silk. “How do you do, Mr. Sisson. You come straight from England?” Sir William held out his hand courteously and benevolently, smiling an old man's smile of hospitality. “Mr. Lilly has gone away?” said Aaron. “Yes. He left us several days ago.” Aaron hesitated. “You didn't expect me, then?” “Yes, oh, yes. Yes, oh, yes. Very glad to see you--well, now, come in and have some dinner--” At this moment Lady Franks appeared--short, rather plump, but erect and definite, in a black silk dress and pearls round her throat. “How do you do? We are just at dinner,” she said. “You haven't eaten? No--well, then--would you like a bath now, or--?” It was evident the Franks had dispensed much hospitality: much of it charitable. Aaron felt it. “No,” he said. “I'll wash my hands and come straight in, shall I?” “Yes, perhaps that would be better--” “I'm afraid I am a nuisance.” “Not at all--Beppe--” and she gave instructions in Italian. Another footman appeared, and took the big bag. Aaron took the little one this time. They climbed the broad, turning stairs, crossed another handsome lounge, gilt and ormolu and yellow silk chairs and scattered copies of _The Graphic_ or of _Country Life_, then they disappeared through a doorway into a much narrower flight of stairs. Man can so rarely keep it up all the way, the grandeur. Two black and white chamber-maids appeared. Aaron found himself in a blue silk bedroom, and a footman unstrapping his bag, which he did not want unstrapped. Next minute he was beckoned and allured by the Italian servants down the corridor, and presented to the handsome, spacious bathroom, which was warm and creamy-coloured and glittering with massive silver and mysterious with up-to-date conveniences. There he was left to his own devices, and felt like a small boy finding out how it works. For even the mere turning on of the taps was a problem in silver mechanics. In spite of all the splendours and the elaborated convenience, he washed himself in good hot water, and wished he were having a bath, chiefly because of the wardrobe of marvellous Turkish towels. Then he clicked his way back to his bedroom, changed his shirt and combed his hair in the blue silk bedroom with the Greuze picture, and felt a little dim and superficial surprise. He had fallen into country house parties before, but never into quite such a plushy sense of riches. He felt he ought to have his breath taken away. But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendours of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. _Connu_! _Connu_! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn't be known better, from the film. So Aaron tied his tie in front of a big Venice mirror, and nothing was a surprise to him. He found a footman hovering to escort him to the dining-room--a real Italian footman, uneasy because milady's dinner was unsettled. He entered the rather small dining-room, and saw the people at table. He was told various names: bowed to a young, slim woman with big blue eyes and dark hair like a photograph, then to a smaller rather colourless young woman with a large nose: then to a stout, rubicund, bald colonel, and to a tall, thin, Oxford-looking major with a black patch over his eye--both these men in khaki: finally to a good-looking, well-nourished young man in a dinner-jacket, and he sat down to his soup, on his hostess' left hand. The colonel sat on her right, and was confidential. Little Sir William, with his hair and his beard white like spun glass, his manner very courteous and animated, the purple facings of his velvet jacket very impressive, sat at the far end of the table jesting with the ladies and showing his teeth in an old man's smile, a little bit affected, but pleasant, wishing everybody to be happy. Aaron ate his soup, trying to catch up. Milady's own confidential Italian butler, fidelity itself, hovered quivering near, spiritually helping the newcomer to catch up. Two nice little entree dishes, specially prepared for Aaron to take the place of the bygone fish and vol au-vents of the proper dinner, testified to the courtesy and charity of his hostess. Well, eating rapidly, he had more or less caught up by the time the sweets came. So he swallowed a glass of wine and looked round. His hostess with her pearls, and her diamond star in her grey hair, was speaking of Lilly and then of music to him. “I hear you are a musician. That's what I should have been if I had had my way.” “What instrument?” asked Aaron. “Oh, the piano. Yours is the flute, Mr. Lilly says. I think the flute can be so attractive. But I feel, of course you have more range with the piano. I love the piano--and orchestra.” At that moment, the colonel and hostess-duties distracted her. But she came back in snatches. She was a woman who reminded him a little of Queen Victoria; so assured in her own room, a large part of her attention always given to the successful issue of her duties, the remainder at the disposal of her guests. It was an old-fashioned, not unpleasant feeling: like retrospect. But she had beautiful, big, smooth emeralds and sapphires on her fingers. Money! What a curious thing it is! Aaron noticed the deference of all the guests at table: a touch of obsequiousness: before the money! And the host and hostess accepted the deference, nay, expected it, as their due. Yet both Sir William and Lady Franks knew that it was only money and success. They had both a certain afterthought, knowing dimly that the game was but a game, and that they were the helpless leaders in the game. They had a certain basic ordinariness which prevented their making any great hits, and which kept them disillusioned all the while. They remembered their poor and insignificant days. “And I hear you were playing in the orchestra at Covent Garden. We came back from London last week. I enjoyed Beecham's operas so much.” “Which do you like best?” said Aaron. “Oh, the Russian. I think _Ivan_. It is such fine music.” “I find _Ivan_ artificial.” “Do you? Oh, I don't think so. No, I don't think you can say that.” Aaron wondered at her assurance. She seemed to put him just a tiny bit in his place, even in an opinion on music. Money gave her that right, too. Curious--the only authority left. And he deferred to her opinion: that is, to her money. He did it almost deliberately. Yes--what did he believe in, besides money? What does any man? He looked at the black patch over the major's eye. What had he given his eye for?--the nation's money. Well, and very necessary, too; otherwise we might be where the wretched Austrians are. Instead of which--how smooth his hostess' sapphires! “Of course I myself prefer Moussorgsky,” said Aaron. “I think he is a greater artist. But perhaps it is just personal preference.” “Yes. _Boris_ is wonderful. Oh, some of the scenes in _Boris_!” “And even more _Kovantchina_,” said Aaron. “I wish we could go back to melody pure and simple. Yet I find _Kovantchina_, which is all mass music practically, gives me more satisfaction than any other opera.” “Do you really? I shouldn't say so: oh, no--but you can't mean that you would like all music to go back to melody pure and simple! Just a flute--just a pipe! Oh, Mr. Sisson, you are bigoted for your instrument. I just LIVE in harmony--chords, chords!” She struck imaginary chords on the white damask, and her sapphires swam blue. But at the same time she was watching to see if Sir William had still got beside his plate the white medicine _cachet_ which he must swallow at every meal. Because if so, she must remind him to swallow it. However, at that very moment, he put it on his tongue. So that she could turn her attention again to Aaron and the imaginary chord on the white damask; the thing she just lived in. But the rubicund bald colonel, more rubicund after wine, most rubicund now the Marsala was going, snatched her attention with a burly homage to her femininity, and shared his fear with her with a boyish gallantry. When the women had gone up, Sir William came near and put his hand on Aaron's shoulder. It was evident the charm was beginning to work. Sir William was a self-made man, and not in the least a snob. He liked the fundamental ordinariness in Aaron, the commonness of the common man. “Well now, Mr. Sisson, we are very glad to see you! Very glad, indeed. I count Mr. Lilly one of the most interesting men it has ever been my good fortune to know. And so for your own sake, and for Mr. Lilly's sake, we are very glad to see you. Arthur, my boy, give Mr. Sisson some Marsala--and take some yourself.” “Thank you, Sir,” said the well-nourished young man in nice evening clothes. “You'll take another glass yourself, Sir?” “Yes, I will, I will. I will drink a glass with Mr. Sisson. Major, where are you wandering off to? Come and take a glass with us, my boy.” “Thanks, Sir William,” drawled the young major with the black patch. “Now, Colonel--I hope you are in good health and spirits.” “Never better, Sir William, never better.” “I'm very glad to hear it; very glad indeed. Try my Marsala--I think it is quite good. Port is beyond us for the moment--for the moment--” And the old man sipped his brown wine, and smiled again. He made quite a handsome picture: but he was frail. “And where are you bound, Mr. Sisson? Towards Rome?” “I came to meet Lilly,” said Aaron. “Ah! But Lilly has fled over the borders by this time. Never was such a man for crossing frontiers. Wonderful person, to be able to do it.” “Where has he gone?” said Aaron. “I think to Geneva for the moment. But he certainly talked of Venice. You yourself have no definite goal?” “No.” “Ah! You have not come to Italy to practice your art?” “I shall HAVE to practice it: or else--no, I haven't come for that.” “Ah, you will HAVE to practice it. Ah, yes! We are all under the necessity to eat. And you have a family in England? Am I not right?” “Quite. I've got a family depending on me.” “Yes, then you must practice your art: you must practice your art. Well--shall we join the ladies? Coffee will no doubt be served.” “Will you take my arm, Sir?” said the well-nourished Arthur. “Thank you, thank you,” the old man motioned him away. So they went upstairs to where the three women were sitting in the library round the fire, chattering not very interested. The entry of Sir William at once made a stir. The girl in white, with the biggish nose, fluttered round him. She was Arthur's wife. The girl in soft blue spread herself on the couch: she was the young Major's wife, and she had a blue band round her hair. The Colonel hovered stout and fidgetty round Lady Franks and the liqueur stand. He and the Major were both in khaki--belonging to the service on duty in Italy still. Coffee appeared--and Sir William doled out _creme de menthe_. There was no conversation--only tedious words. The little party was just commonplace and dull--boring. Yet Sir William, the self-made man, was a study. And the young, Oxford-like Major, with his English diffidence and his one dark, pensive, baffled eye was only waiting to be earnest, poor devil. The girl in white had been a sort of companion to Lady Franks, so that Arthur was more or less a son-in-law. In this capacity, he acted. Aaron strayed round uneasily looking at the books, bought but not read, and at the big pictures above. It was Arthur who fetched out the little boxes containing the orders conferred on Sir William for his war-work: and perhaps more, for the many thousands of pounds he had spent on his war-work. There were three orders: one British, and quite important, a large silver star for the breast: one Italian, smaller, and silver and gold; and one from the State of Ruritania, in silver and red-and-green enamel, smaller than the others. “Come now, William,” said Lady Franks, “you must try them all on. You must try them all on together, and let us see how you look.” The little, frail old man, with his strange old man's blue eyes and his old man's perpetual laugh, swelled out his chest and said: “What, am I to appear in all my vanities?” And he laughed shortly. “Of course you are. We want to see you,” said the white girl. “Indeed we do! We shouldn't mind all appearing in such vanities--what, Lady Franks!” boomed the Colonel. “I should think not,” replied his hostess. “When a man has honours conferred on him, it shows a poor spirit if he isn't proud of them.” “Of course I am proud of them!” said Sir William. “Well then, come and have them pinned on. I think it's wonderful to have got so much in one life-time--wonderful,” said Lady Franks. “Oh, Sir William is a wonderful man,” said the Colonel. “Well--we won't say so before him. But let us look at him in his orders.” Arthur, always ready on these occasions, had taken the large and shining British star from its box, and drew near to Sir William, who stood swelling his chest, pleased, proud, and a little wistful. “This one first, Sir,” said Arthur. Sir William stood very still, half tremulous, like a man undergoing an operation. “And it goes just here--the level of the heart. This is where it goes.” And carefully he pinned the large, radiating ornament on the black velvet dinner-jacket of the old man. “That is the first--and very becoming,” said Lady Franks. “Oh, very becoming! Very becoming!” said the tall wife of the Major--she was a handsome young woman of the tall, frail type. “Do you think so, my dear?” said the old man, with his eternal smile: the curious smile of old people when they are dead. “Not only becoming, Sir,” said the Major, bending his tall, slim figure forwards. “But a reassuring sign that a nation knows how to distinguish her valuable men.” “Quite!” said Lady Franks. “I think it is a very great honour to have got it. The king was most gracious, too-- Now the other. That goes beside it--the Italian--” Sir William stood there undergoing the operation of the pinning-on. The Italian star being somewhat smaller than the British, there was a slight question as to where exactly it should be placed. However, Arthur decided it: and the old man stood before the company with his two stars on his breast. “And now the Ruritanian,” said Lady Franks eagerly. “That doesn't go on the same level with the others, Lady Franks,” said Arthur. “That goes much lower down--about here.” “Are you sure?” said Lady Franks. “Doesn't it go more here?” “No no, no no, not at all. Here! Isn't it so, Sybil?” “Yes, I think so,” said Sybil. Old Sir William stood quite silent, his breast prepared, peering over the facings of his coat to see where the star was going. The Colonel was called in, and though he knew nothing about it, he agreed with Arthur, who apparently did know something. So the star was pinned quite low down. Sir William, peeping down, exclaimed: “Well, that is most curious now! I wear an order over the pit of my stomach! I think that is very curious: a curious place to wear an order.” “Stand up! Stand up and let us look!” said Lady Franks. “There now, isn't it handsome? And isn't it a great deal of honour for one man? Could he have expected so much, in one life-time? I call it wonderful. Come and look at yourself, dear”--and she led him to a mirror. “What's more, all thoroughly deserved,” said Arthur. “I should think so,” said the Colonel, fidgetting. “Ah, yes, nobody has deserved them better,” cooed Sybil. “Nor on more humane and generous grounds,” said the Major, _sotto voce._ “The effort to save life, indeed,” returned the Major's young wife: “splendid!” Sir William stood naively before the mirror and looked at his three stars on his black velvet dinner-jacket. “Almost directly over the pit of my stomach,” he said. “I hope that is not a decoration for my greedy APPETITE.” And he laughed at the young women. “I assure you it is in position, Sir,” said Arthur. “Absolutely correct. I will read it out to you later.” “Aren't you satisfied? Aren't you a proud man! Isn't it wonderful?” said Lady Franks. “Why, what more could a man want from life? He could never EXPECT so much.” “Yes, my dear. I AM a proud man. Three countries have honoured me--” There was a little, breathless pause. “And not more than they ought to have done,” said Sybil. “Well! Well! I shall have my head turned. Let me return to my own humble self. I am too much in the stars at the moment.” Sir William turned to Arthur to have his decorations removed. Aaron, standing in the background, felt the whole scene strange, childish, a little touching. And Lady Franks was so obviously trying to _console_ her husband: to console the frail, excitable old man with his honours. But why console him? Did he need consolation? And did she? It was evident that only the hard-money woman in her put any price on the decorations. Aaron came forward and examined the orders, one after the other. Just metal playthings of curious shiny silver and gilt and enamel. Heavy the British one--but only like some heavy buckle, a piece of metal merely when one turned it over. Somebody dropped the Italian cross, and there was a moment of horror. But the lump of metal took no hurt. Queer to see the things stowed in their boxes again. Aaron had always imagined these mysterious decorations as shining by nature on the breasts of heroes. Pinned-on pieces of metal were a considerable come-down. The orders were put away, the party sat round the fire in the comfortable library, the men sipping more _creme de menthe_, since nothing else offered, and the couple of hours in front promising the tedium of small-talk of tedious people who had really nothing to say and no particular originality in saying it. Aaron, however, had reckoned without his host. Sir William sat upright in his chair, with all the determination of a frail old man who insists on being level with the young. The new guest sat in a lower chair, smoking, that curious glimmer on his face which made him so attractive, and which only meant that he was looking on the whole scene from the outside, as it were, from beyond a fence. Sir William came almost directly to the attack. “And so, Mr. Sisson, you have no definite purpose in coming to Italy?” “No, none,” said Aaron. “I wanted to join Lilly.” “But when you had joined him--?” “Oh, nothing--stay here a time, in this country, if I could earn my keep.” “Ah!--earn your keep? So you hope to earn your keep here? May I ask how?” “By my flute.” “Italy is a poor country.” “I don't want much.” “You have a family to provide for.” “They are provided for--for a couple of years.” “Oh, indeed! Is that so?” The old man got out of Aaron the detailed account of his circumstances--how he had left so much money to be paid over to his wife, and had received only a small amount for himself. “I see you are like Lilly--you trust to Providence,” said Sir William. “Providence or fate,” said Aaron. “Lilly calls it Providence,” said Sir William. “For my own part, I always advise Providence plus a banking account. I have every belief in Providence, plus a banking account. Providence and no banking account I have observed to be almost invariably fatal. Lilly and I have argued it. He believes in casting his bread upon the waters. I sincerely hope he won't have to cast himself after his bread, one of these days. Providence with a banking account. Believe in Providence once you have secured enough to live on. I should consider it disastrous to believe in Providence BEFORE. One can never be SURE of Providence.” “What can you be sure of, then?” said Aaron. “Well, in moderation, I can believe in a little hard cash, and in my own ability to earn a little hard cash.” “Perhaps Lilly believes in his own ability, too.” “No. Not so. Because he will never directly work to earn money. He works--and works quite well, I am told: but only as the spirit moves him, and never with any eye to the market. Now I call that TEMPTING Providence, myself. The spirit may move him in quite an opposite direction to the market--then where is Lilly? I have put it to him more than once.” “The spirit generally does move him dead against the market,” said Aaron. “But he manages to scrape along.” “In a state of jeopardy: all the time in a state of jeopardy,” said the old man. “His whole existence, and that of his wife, is completely precarious. I found, in my youth, the spirit moved me to various things which would have left me and my wife starving. So I realised in time, this was no good. I took my spirit in hand, therefore, and made him pull the cart which mankind is riding in. I harnessed him to the work of productive labour. And so he brought me my reward.” “Yes,” said Aaron. “But every man according to his belief.” “I don't see,” said Sir William, “how a man can BELIEVE in a Providence unless he sets himself definitely to the work of earning his daily bread, and making provision for future needs. That's what Providence means to me--making provision for oneself and one's family. Now, Mr. Lilly--and you yourself--you say you believe in a Providence that does NOT compel you to earn your daily bread, and make provision. I confess myself I cannot see it: and Lilly has never been able to convince me.” “I don't believe in a kind-hearted Providence,” said Aaron, “and I don't believe Lilly does. But I believe in chance. I believe, if I go my own way, without tying my nose to a job, chance will always throw something in my way: enough to get along with.” “But on what do you base such a very unwarrantable belief?” “I just feel like that.” “And if you are ever quite without success--and nothing to fall back on?” “I can work at something.” “In case of illness, for example?” “I can go to a hospital--or die.” “Dear me! However, you are more logical than Lilly. He seems to believe that he has the Invisible--call it Providence if you will--on his side, and that this Invisible will never leave him in the lurch, or let him down, so long as he sticks to his own side of the bargain, and NEVER works for his own ends. I don't quite see how he works. Certainly he seems to me a man who squanders a great deal of talent unworthily. Yet for some reason or other he calls this true, genuine activity, and has a contempt for actual work by which a man makes provision for his years and for his family. In the end, he will have to fall back on charity. But when I say so, he denies it, and says that in the end we, the men who work and make provision, will have to fall back on him. Well, all I can say is, that SO FAR he is in far greater danger of having to fall back on me, than I on him.” The old man sat back in his chair with a little laugh of triumph. But it smote almost devilishly on Aaron's ears, and for the first time in his life he felt that there existed a necessity for taking sides. “I don't suppose he will do much falling back,” he said. “Well, he is young yet. You are both young. You are squandering your youth. I am an old man, and I see the end.” “What end, Sir William?” “Charity--and poverty--and some not very congenial 'job,' as you call it, to put bread in your mouth. No, no, I would not like to trust myself to your Providence, or to your Chance. Though I admit your Chance is a sounder proposition than Lilly's Providence. You speculate with your life and your talent. I admit the nature which is a born speculator. After all, with your flute, you will speculate in other people's taste for luxury, as a man may speculate in theatres or _trains de luxe_. You are the speculator. That may be your way of wisdom. But Lilly does not even speculate. I cannot see his point. I cannot see his point. I cannot see his point. Yet I have the greatest admiration for his mentality.” The old man had fired up during this conversation--and all the others in the room had gone silent. Lady Franks was palpably uneasy. She alone knew how frail the old man was--frailer by far than his years. She alone knew what fear of his own age, what fear of death haunted him now: fear of his own non-existence. His own old age was an agony to him; worse than an agony, a horror. He wanted to be young--to live, to live. And he was old, he was breaking up. The glistening youth of Aaron, the impetuousness of Lilly fascinated him. And both these men seemed calmly to contradict his own wealth and honours. Lady Franks tried to turn off the conversation to the trickles of normal chit-chat. The Colonel was horribly bored--so were all the women--Arthur was indifferent. Only the young Major was implicated, troubled in his earnest and philosophic spirit. “What I can't see,” he said, “is the place that others have in your scheme.” “Is isn't a scheme,” said Aaron. “Well then, your way of life. Isn't it pretty selfish, to marry a woman and then expect her to live on very little indeed, and that always precarious, just because you happen to believe in Providence or in Chance: which I think worse? What I don't see is where others come in. What would the world be like if everybody lived that way?” “Other people can please themselves,” said Aaron. “No, they can't--because you take first choice, it seems to me. Supposing your wife--or Lilly's wife--asks for security and for provision, as Sir William says. Surely she has a right to it.” “If I've no right to it myself--and I HAVE no right to it, if I don't want it--then what right has she?” “Every right, I should say. All the more since you are improvident.” “Then she must manage her rights for herself. It's no good her foisting her rights on to me.” “Isn't that pure selfishness?” “It may be. I shall send my wife money as long as I've money to send.” “And supposing you have none?” “Then I can't send it--and she must look out for herself.” “I call that almost criminal selfishness.” “I can't help it.” The conversation with the young Major broke off. “It is certainly a good thing for society that men like you and Mr. Lilly are not common,” said Sir William, laughing. “Becoming commoner every day, you'll find,” interjaculated the Colonel. “Indeed! Indeed! Well. May we ask you another question, Mr. Sisson? I hope you don't object to our catechism?” “No. Nor your judgment afterwards,” said Aaron, grinning. “Then upon what grounds did you abandon your family? I know it is a tender subject. But Lilly spoke of it to us, and as far I could see....” “There were no grounds,” said Aaron. “No, there weren't I just left them.” “Mere caprice?” “If it's a caprice to be begotten--and a caprice to be born--and a caprice to die--then that was a caprice, for it was the same.” “Like birth or death? I don't follow.” “It happened to me: as birth happened to me once--and death will happen. It was a sort of death, too: or a sort of birth. But as undeniable as either. And without any more grounds.” The old, tremulous man, and the young man were watching one another. “A natural event,” said Sir William. “A natural event,” said Aaron. “Not that you loved any other woman?” “God save me from it.” “You just left off loving?” “Not even that. I went away.” “What from?” “From it all.” “From the woman in particular?” “Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, that.” “And you couldn't go back?” Aaron shook his head. “Yet you can give no reasons?” “Not any reasons that would be any good. It wasn't a question of reasons. It was a question of her and me and what must be. What makes a child be born out of its mother to the pain and trouble of both of them? I don't know.” “But that is a natural process.” “So is this--or nothing.” “No,” interposed the Major. “Because birth is a universal process--and yours is a specific, almost unique event.” “Well, unique or not, it so came about. I didn't ever leave off loving her--not as far as I know. I left her as I shall leave the earth when I die--because it has to be.” “Do you know what I think it is, Mr. Sisson?” put in Lady Franks. “I think you are just in a wicked state of mind: just that. Mr. Lilly, too. And you must be very careful, or some great misfortune will happen to you.” “It may,” said Aaron. “And it will, mark my word, it will.” “You almost wish it might, as a judgment on me,” smiled Aaron. “Oh, no, indeed. I should only be too sorry. But I feel it will, unless you are careful.” “I'll be careful, then.” “Yes, and you can't be too careful.” “You make me frightened.” “I would like to make you very frightened indeed, so that you went back humbly to your wife and family.” “It would HAVE to be a big fright then, I assure you.” “Ah, you are really heartless. It makes me angry.” She turned angrily aside. “Well, well! Well, well! Life! Life! Young men are a new thing to me!” said Sir William, shaking his head. “Well, well! What do you say to whiskey and soda, Colonel?” “Why, delighted, Sir William,” said the Colonel, bouncing up. “A night-cap, and then we retire,” said Lady Franks. Aaron sat thinking. He knew Sir William liked him: and that Lady Franks didn't. One day he might have to seek help from Sir William. So he had better placate milady. Wrinkling the fine, half mischievous smile on his face, and trading on his charm, he turned to his hostess. “You wouldn't mind, Lady Franks, if I said nasty things about my wife and found a lot of fault with her. What makes you angry is that I know it is not a bit more her fault than mine, that we come apart. It can't be helped.” “Oh, yes, indeed. I disapprove of your way of looking at things altogether. It seems to me altogether cold and unmanly and inhuman. Thank goodness my experience of a man has been different.” “We can't all be alike, can we? And if I don't choose to let you see me crying, that doesn't prove I've never had a bad half hour, does it? I've had many--ay, and a many.” “Then why are you so WRONG, so wrong in your behaviour?” “I suppose I've got to have my bout out: and when it's out, I can alter.” “Then I hope you've almost had your bout out,” she said. “So do I,” said he, with a half-repentant, half-depressed look on his attractive face. The corners of his mouth grimaced slightly under his moustache. “The best thing you can do is to go straight back to England, and to her.” “Perhaps I'd better ask her if she wants me, first,” he said drily. “Yes, you might do that, too.” And Lady Franks felt she was quite getting on with her work of reform, and the restoring of woman to her natural throne. Best not go too fast, either. “Say when,” shouted the Colonel, who was manipulating the syphon. “When,” said Aaron. The men stood up to their drinks. “Will you be leaving in the morning, Mr. Sisson?” asked Lady Franks. “May I stay till Monday morning?” said Aaron. They were at Saturday evening. “Certainly. And you will take breakfast in your room: we all do. At what time? Half past eight?” “Thank you very much.” “Then at half past eight the man will bring it in. Goodnight.” Once more in his blue silk bedroom, Aaron grimaced to himself and stood in the middle of the room grimacing. His hostess' admonitions were like vitriol in his ears. He looked out of the window. Through the darkness of trees, the lights of a city below. Italy! The air was cold with snow. He came back into his soft, warm room. Luxurious it was. And luxurious the deep, warm bed. He was still asleep when the man came noiselessly in with the tray: and it was morning. Aaron woke and sat up. He felt that the deep, warm bed, and the soft, warm room had made him sleep too well: robbed him of his night, like a narcotic. He preferred to be more uncomfortable and more aware of the flight of the dark hours. It seemed numbing. The footman in his grey house-jacket was neat and Italian and sympathising. He gave good-morning in Italian--then softly arranged the little table by the bedside, and put out the toast and coffee and butter and boiled egg and honey, with silver and delicate china. Aaron watched the soft, catlike motions of the man. The dark eyes glanced once at the blond man, leaning on his elbow on the pillow. Aaron's face had that watchful, half-amused expression. The man said something in Italian. Aaron shook his head, laughed, and said: “Tell me in English.” The man went softly to the window curtains, and motioned them with his hand. “Yes, do,” said Aaron. So the man drew the buff-coloured silk curtains: and Aaron, sitting in bed, could see away beyond red roofs of a town, and in the further heaven great snowy mountains. “The Alps,” he said in surprise. “Gli Alpi--si, signore.” The man bowed, gathered up Aaron's clothes, and silently retired. Aaron watched through the window. It was a frosty morning at the end of September, with a clear blue morning-sky, Alpine, and the watchful, snow-streaked mountain tops bunched in the distance, as if waiting. There they were, hovering round, circling, waiting. They reminded him of marvellous striped sky-panthers circling round a great camp: the red-roofed city. Aaron looked, and looked again. In the near distance, under the house elm-tree tops were yellowing. He felt himself changing inside his skin. So he turned away to his coffee and eggs. A little silver egg-cup with a curious little frill round it: honey in a frail, iridescent glass bowl, gold-iridescent: the charm of delicate and fine things. He smiled half mockingly to himself. Two instincts played in him: the one, an instinct for fine, delicate things: he had attractive hands; the other, an inclination to throw the dainty little table with all its niceties out of the window. It evoked a sort of devil in him. He took his bath: the man had brought back his things: he dressed and went downstairs. No one in the lounge: he went down to the ground floor: no one in the big hall with its pillars of yellow marble and its gold arches, its enormous, dark, bluey-red carpet. He stood before the great glass doors. Some red flowers still were blooming in the tubs, on the steps, handsome: and beautiful chrysanthemums in the wide portico. Beyond, yellow leaves were already falling on the green grass and the neat drive. Everywhere was silent and empty. He climbed the wide stairs, sat in the long, upper lounge where the papers were. He wanted his hat and coat, and did not know where to find them. The windows looked on to a terraced garden, the hill rising steeply behind the house. He wanted to go out. So he opened more doors, and in a long drawing-room came upon five or six manservants, all in the grey house-jackets, all clean-shaven, neat, with neat black hair, all with dusters or brushes or feather brooms, and all frolicking, chattering, playing like so many monkeys. They were all of the same neat, smallish size. They were all laughing. They rolled back a great rug as if it were some football game, one flew at the curtains. And they merely looked at Aaron and went on chattering, and laughing and dusting. Surprised, and feeling that he trespassed, he stood at the window a moment looking out. The noise went on behind him. So he turned, smiling, and asked for his hat, pointing to his head. They knew at once what he wanted. One of the fellows beckoned him away, down to the hall and to the long cupboard place where hats and coats and sticks were hung. There was his hat; he put it on, while the man chattered to him pleasantly and unintelligibly, and opened for him the back door, into the garden. CHAPTER XIII. WIE ES IHNEN GEFAELLT The fresh morning air comes startling after a central heated house. So Aaron found it. He felt himself dashing up the steps into the garden like a bird dashing out of a trap where it has been caught: that warm and luxurious house. Heaven bless us, we who want to save civilisation. We had better make up our minds what of it we want to save. The kernel may be all well and good. But there is precious little kernel, to a lot of woolly stuffing and poisonous rind. The gardens to Sir William's place were not imposing, and still rather war-neglected. But the pools of water lay smooth in the bright air, the flowers showed their colour beside the walks. Many birds dashed about, rather bewildered, having crossed the Alps in their migration southwards. Aaron noted with gratification a certain big magnificence, a certain reckless powerfulness in the still-blossoming, harsh-coloured, autumn flowers. Distinct satisfaction he derived from it. He wandered upwards, up the succeeding flights of step; till he came to the upper rough hedge, and saw the wild copse on the hill-crest just above. Passing through a space in the hedge, he climbed the steep last bit of Sir William's lane. It was a little vineyard, with small vines and yellowing leaves. Everywhere the place looked neglected--but as if man had just begun to tackle it once more. At the very top, by the wild hedge where spindle-berries hung pink, seats were placed, and from here the view was very beautiful. The hill dropped steep beneath him. A river wound on the near side of the city, crossed by a white bridge. The city lay close clustered, ruddy on the plains, glittering in the clear air with its flat roofs and domes and square towers, strangely naked-seeming in the clear, clean air. And massive in the further nearness, snow-streaked mountains, the tiger-like Alps. Tigers prowling between the north and the south. And this beautiful city lying nearest exposed. The snow-wind brushed her this morning like the icy whiskers of a tiger. And clear in the light lay Novara, wide, fearless, violent Novara. Beautiful the perfect air, the perfect and unblemished Alp-sky. And like the first southern flower, Novara. Aaron sat watching in silence. Only the uneasy birds rustled. He watched the city and the winding river, the bridges, and the imminent Alps. He was on the south side. On the other side of the time barrier. His old, sleepy English nature was startled in its sleep. He felt like a man who knows it is time to wake up, and who doesn't want to wake up, to face the responsibility of another sort of day. To open his darkest eyes and wake up to a new responsibility. Wake up and enter on the responsibility of a new self in himself. Ach, the horror of responsibility! He had all his life slept and shelved the burden. And he wanted to go on sleeping. It was so hateful to have to get a new grip on his own bowels, a new hard recklessness into his heart, a new and responsible consciousness into his mind and soul. He felt some finger prodding, prodding, prodding him awake out of the sleep of pathos and tragedy and spasmodic passion, and he wriggled, unwilling, oh, most unwilling to undertake the new business. In fact he ran away again. He gave a last look at the town and its white-fanged mountains, and descended through the garden, round the way of the kitchen garden and garage and stables and pecking chickens, back to the house again. In the hall still no one. He went upstairs to the long lounge. There sat the rubicund, bald, boy-like Colonel reading the _Graphic_. Aaron sat down opposite him, and made a feeble attempt at conversation. But the Colonel wasn't having any. It was evident he didn't care for the fellow--Mr. Aaron, that is. Aaron therefore dried up, and began to sit him out, with the aid of _The Queen_. Came a servant, however, and said that the Signor Colonello was called up from the hospital, on the telephone. The Colonel once departed, Aaron fled again, this time out of the front doors, and down the steep little park to the gates. Huge dogs and little dogs came bounding forward. Out of the lodge came the woman with the keys, smiling very pleasantly this morning. So, he was in the street. The wide road led him inevitably to the big bridge, with the violent, physical stone statue-groups. Men and women were moving about, and he noticed for the first time the littleness and the momentaneousness of the Italians in the street. Perhaps it was the wideness of the bridge and the subsequent big, open boulevard. But there it was: the people seemed little, upright brisk figures moving in a certain isolation, like tiny figures on a big stage. And he felt himself moving in the space between. All the northern cosiness gone. He was set down with a space round him. Little trams flitted down the boulevard in the bright, sweet light. The barbers' shops were all busy, half the Novarese at that moment ambushed in lather, full in the public gaze. A shave is nothing if not a public act, in the south. At the little outdoor tables of the cafes a very few drinkers sat before empty coffee-cups. Most of the shops were shut. It was too soon after the war for life to be flowing very fast. The feeling of emptiness, of neglect, of lack of supplies was evident everywhere. Aaron strolled on, surprised himself at his gallant feeling of liberty: a feeling of bravado and almost swaggering carelessness which is Italy's best gift to an Englishman. He had crossed the dividing line, and the values of life, though ostensibly and verbally the same, were dynamically different. Alas, however, the verbal and the ostensible, the accursed mechanical ideal gains day by day over the spontaneous life-dynamic, so that Italy becomes as idea-bound and as automatic as England: just a business proposition. Coming to the station, he went inside. There he saw a money-changing window which was open, so he planked down a five-pound note and got two-hundred-and-ten lire. Here was a start. At a bookstall he saw a man buy a big timetable with a large railway map in it. He immediately bought the same. Then he retired to a corner to get his whereabouts. In the morning he must move: where? He looked on the map. The map seemed to offer two alternatives, Milan and Genoa. He chose Milan, because of its musical associations and its cathedral. Milano then. Strolling and still strolling, he found the boards announcing Arrivals and Departures. As far as he could make out, the train for Milan left at 9:00 in the morning. So much achieved, he left the big desolating caravanserai of the station. Soldiers were camped in every corner, lying in heaps asleep. In their grey-green uniform, he was surprised at their sturdy limbs and uniformly short stature. For the first time, he saw the cock-feathers of the Bersaglieri. There seemed a new life-quality everywhere. Many worlds, not one world. But alas, the one world triumphing more and more over the many worlds, the big oneness swallowing up the many small diversities in its insatiable gnawing appetite, leaving a dreary sameness throughout the world, that means at last complete sterility. Aaron, however, was too new to the strangeness, he had no eye for the horrible sameness that was spreading like a disease over Italy from England and the north. He plunged into the space in front of the station, and took a new, wide boulevard. To his surprise he ran towards a big and over-animated statue that stood resolutely with its back to the magnificent snow-domes of the wild Alps. Wolves in the street could not have startled him more than those magnificent fierce-gleaming mountains of snow at the street-end, beyond the statue. He stood and wondered, and never thought to look who the gentleman was. Then he turned right round, and began to walk home. Luncheon was at one o'clock. It was half-past twelve when he rang at the lodge gates. He climbed through the leaves of the little park, on a side-path, rather reluctantly towards the house. In the hall Lady Franks was discussing with Arthur a fat Pekinese who did not seem very well. She was sure the servants did not obey her orders concerning the Pekinese bitch. Arthur, who was more than indifferent, assured her they did. But she seemed to think that the whole of the male human race was in league against the miserable specimen of a she-dog. She almost cried, thinking her Queenie _might_ by some chance meet with, perhaps, a harsh word or look. Queenie apparently fattened on the secret detestation of the male human species. “I can't bear to think that a dumb creature might be ill-treated,” she said to Aaron. “Thank goodness the Italians are better than they used to be.” “Are they better than they used to be?” “Oh, much. They have learnt it from us.” She then enquired if her guest had slept, and if he were rested from his journey. Aaron, into whose face the faint snow-wind and the sun had brought a glow, replied that he had slept well and enjoyed the morning, thank you. Whereupon Lady Franks knitted her brows and said Sir William had had such a bad night. He had not been able to sleep, and had got up and walked about the room. The least excitement, and she dreaded a break-down. He must have absolute calm and restfulness. “There's one for you and your jawing last night, Aaron, my boy!” said our hero to himself. “I thought Sir William seemed so full of life and energy,” he said, aloud. “Ah, did you! No, he WANTS to be. But he can't do it. He's very much upset this morning. I have been very anxious about him.” “I am sorry to hear that.” Lady Franks departed to some duty. Aaron sat alone before the fire. It was a huge fireplace, like a dark chamber shut in by tall, finely-wrought iron gates. Behind these iron gates of curly iron the logs burned and flickered like leopards slumbering and lifting their heads within their cage. Aaron wondered who was the keeper of the savage element, who it was that would open the iron grille and throw on another log, like meat to the lions. To be sure the fire was only to be looked at: like wild beasts in the Zoo. For the house was warm from roof to floor. It was strange to see the blue air of sunlight outside, the yellow-edged leaves falling in the wind, the red flowers shaking. The gong sounded softly through the house. The Colonel came in heartily from the garden, but did not speak to Aaron. The Major and his wife came pallid down the stairs. Lady Franks appeared, talking domestic-secretarial business with the wife of Arthur. Arthur, well-nourished and half at home, called down the stairs. And then Sir William descended, old and frail now in the morning, shaken: still he approached Aaron heartily, and asked him how he did, and how he had spent his morning. The old man who had made a fortune: how he expected homage: and how he got it! Homage, like most things, is just a convention and a social trick. Aaron found himself paying homage, too, to the old man who had made a fortune. But also, exacting a certain deference in return, from the old man who had made a fortune. Getting it, too. On what grounds? Youth, maybe. But mostly, scorn for fortunes and fortune-making. Did he scorn fortunes and fortune-making? Not he, otherwise whence this homage for the old man with much money? Aaron, like everybody else, was rather paralysed by a million sterling, personified in one old man. Paralysed, fascinated, overcome. All those three. Only having no final control over his own make-up, he could not drive himself into the money-making or even into the money-having habit. And he had just wit enough to threaten Sir William's golden king with his own ivory queen and knights of wilful life. And Sir William quaked. “Well, and how have you spent your morning?” asked the host. “I went first to look at the garden.” “Ah, not much to see now. They have been beautiful with flowers, once. But for two and a half years the house has been a hospital for officers--and even tents in the park and garden--as many as two hundred wounded and sick at a time. We are only just returning to civil life. And flowers need time. Yes--yes--British officers--for two and a half years. But did you go up, now, to the belvedere?” “To the top--where the vines are? I never expected the mountains.” “You never expected the mountains? Pray, why not? They are always there!” “But I was never there before. I never knew they were there, round the town. I didn't expect it like that.” “Ah! So you found our city impressive?” “Very! Ah, very! A new world to me. I feel I've come out of myself.” “Yes, it is a wonderful sight--a wonderful sight-- But you have not been INTO the town?” “Yes. I saw the men being shaved, and all the soldiers at the station: and a statue, and mountains behind it. Oh, I've had a full morning.” “A full morning! That is good, that is good!” The old man looked again at the younger man, and seemed to get life from him, to live in him vicariously. “Come,” said the hostess. “Luncheon.” Aaron sat again on his hostess' left hand. The Colonel was more affable now it was meal-time. Sir William was again in a good humour, chaffing the young ladies with an old man's gallantry. But now he insisted on drawing Aaron into the play. And Aaron did not want to be drawn. He did not one bit want to chaffer gallantries with the young women. Between him and Sir William there was a curious rivalry--unconscious on both sides. The old knight had devoted an energetic, adventurous, almost an artistic nature to the making of his fortune and the developing of later philanthropies. He had no children. Aaron was devoting a similar nature to anything but fortune-making and philanthropy. The one held life to be a storing-up of produce and a conservation of energy: the other held life to be a sheer spending of energy and a storing-up of nothing but experience. There they were, in opposition, the old man and the young. Sir William kept calling Aaron into the chaffer at the other end of the table: and Aaron kept on refusing to join. He hated long distance answers, anyhow. And in his mood of the moment he hated the young women. He had a conversation with Arthur about statues: concerning which Aaron knew nothing, and Arthur less than nothing. Then Lady Franks turned the conversation to the soldiers at the station, and said how Sir William had equipped rest-huts for the Italian privates, near the station: but that such was the jealousy and spite of the Italian Red Cross--or some such body, locally--that Sir William's huts had been left empty--standing unused--while the men had slept on the stone floor of the station, night after night, in icy winter. There was evidently much bitter feeling as a result of Sir William's philanthropy. Apparently even the honey of lavish charity had turned to gall in the Italian mouth: at least the official mouth. Which gall had been spat back at the charitable, much to his pain. It is in truth a difficult world, particularly when you have another race to deal with. After which came the beef-olives. “Oh,” said Lady Franks, “I had such a dreadful dream last night, such a dreadful dream. It upset me so much. I have not been able to get over it all day.” “What was it?” said Aaron. “Tell it, and break it.” “Why,” said his hostess, “I dreamed I was asleep in my room--just as I actually was--and that it was night, yet with a terrible sort of light, like the dead light before dawn, so that one could see. And my maid Giuseppina came running into my room, saying: 'Signora! Signora! Si alza! Subito! Signora! Vengono su!'--and I said, 'Chi? Chi sono chi vengono? Chi?'--'I Novaresi! I Novaresi vengono su. Vengono qui!'--I got out of bed and went to the window. And there they were, in the dead light, rushing up to the house, through the trees. It was so awful, I haven't been able to forget it all day.” “Tell me what the words are in English,” said Aaron. “Why,” she said, “get up, get up--the Novaresi, the people of Novara are coming up--vengono su--they are coming up--the Novara people--work-people. I can't forget it. It was so real, I can't believe it didn't actually happen.” “Ah,” said Aaron. “It will never happen. I know, that whatever one foresees, and FEELS has happened, never happens in real life. It sort of works itself off through the imagining of it.” “Well, it was almost more real to me than real life,” said his hostess. “Then it will never happen in real life,” he said. Luncheon passed, and coffee. The party began to disperse--Lady Franks to answer more letters, with the aid of Arthur's wife--some to sleep, some to walk. Aaron escaped once more through the big gates. This time he turned his back on the town and the mountains, and climbed up the hill into the country. So he went between the banks and the bushes, watching for unknown plants and shrubs, hearing the birds, feeling the influence of a new soil. At the top of the hill he saw over into vineyards, and a new strange valley with a winding river, and jumbled, entangled hills. Strange wild country so near the town. It seemed to keep an almost virgin wildness--yet he saw the white houses dotted here and there. Just below him was a peasant house: and on a little loggia in the sun two peasants in white shirtsleeves and black Sunday suits were sitting drinking wine, and talking, talking. Peasant youths in black hats, their sweethearts in dark stuff dresses, wearing no hat, but a black silk or a white silk scarf, passed slowly along the little road just below the ridge. None looked up to see Aaron sitting there alone. From some hidden place somebody was playing an accordion, a jerky sound in the still afternoon. And away beyond lay the unchanging, mysterious valley, and the infolding, mysterious hills of Italy. Returning back again another way, he lost himself at the foot of the hill in new and deserted suburb streets--unfinished streets of seemingly unfinished houses. Then a sort of boulevard where bourgeois families were taking the Sunday afternoon walk: stout papas, stout, pallid mamas in rather cheap black fur, little girls very much dressed, and long lads in short socks and round sailor caps, ribbons fluttering. Alien they felt, alien, alien, as a bourgeois crowd always does, but particularly a foreign, Sunday-best bourgeois crowd. Aaron wandered and wandered, finding the tram terminus and trying blank, unfinished street after street. He had a great disinclination to ask his way. At last he recognised the bank and the little stream of water that ran along the street side. So he was back in time for tea. A hospital nurse was there, and two other strange women. Arthur played the part of host. Sir William came in from a walk with the dogs, but retired to his room without taking tea. And so the evening fell. Aaron sat in the hall at some distance from the fire, which burned behind its wrought iron gates. He was tired now with all his impressions, and dispirited. He thought of his wife and children at home: of the church-bells ringing so loudly across the field beyond his garden end: of the dark-clad people trailing unevenly across the two paths, one to the left, one to the right, forking their way towards the houses of the town, to church or to chapel: mostly to chapel. At this hour he himself would be dressed in his best clothes, tying his bow, ready to go out to the public house. And his wife would be resenting his holiday departure, whilst she was left fastened to the children. Rather tired and dispirited in this alien place, he wondered if he wished himself back. But the moment he actually _realised_ himself at home, and felt the tension of barrenness which it meant, felt the curious and deadly opposition of his wife's will against his own nature, the almost nauseating ache which it amounted to, he pulled himself together and rejoiced again in his new surroundings. Her will, her will, her terrible, implacable, cunning will! What was there in the female will so diabolical, he asked himself, that it could press like a flat sheet of iron against a man all the time? The female will! He realised now that he had a horror of it. It was flat and inflexible as a sheet of iron. But also it was cunning as a snake that could sing treacherous songs. Of two people at a deadlock, he always reminded himself, there is not one only wholly at fault. Both must be at fault. Having a detached and logical soul, he never let himself forget this truth. Take Lottie! He had loved her. He had never loved any other woman. If he had had his other affairs--it was out of spite or defiance or curiosity. They meant nothing. He and Lottie had loved one another. And the love had developed almost at once into a kind of combat. Lottie had been the only child of headstrong, well-to-do parents. He also had been the only child of his widowed mother. Well then, both he and Lottie had been brought up to consider themselves the first in whatsoever company they found themselves. During the early months of the marriage he had, of course, continued the spoiling of the young wife. But this never altered the fact that, by his very nature, he considered himself as first and almost as single in any relationship. First and single he felt, and as such he bore himself. It had taken him years to realise that Lottie also felt herself first and single: under all her whimsicalness and fretfulness was a conviction as firm as steel: that she, as woman, was the centre of creation, the man was but an adjunct. She, as woman, and particularly as mother, was the first great source of life and being, and also of culture. The man was but the instrument and the finisher. She was the source and the substance. Sure enough, Lottie had never formulated this belief inside herself. But it was formulated for her in the whole world. It is the substantial and professed belief of the whole white world. She did but inevitably represent what the whole world around her asserted: the life-centrality of woman. Woman, the life-bearer, the life-source. Nearly all men agree to the assertion. Practically all men, even while demanding their selfish rights as superior males, tacitly agree to the fact of the sacred life-bearing priority of woman. Tacitly, they yield the worship to that which is female. Tacitly, they conspire to agree that all that is productive, all that is fine and sensitive and most essentially noble, is woman. This, in their productive and religious souls, they believe. And however much they may react against the belief, loathing their women, running to prostitutes, or beer or _anything_, out of reaction against this great and ignominious dogma of the sacred priority of women, still they do but profane the god they worship. Profaning woman, they still inversely worship her. But in Aaron was planted another seed. He did not know it. He started off on the good old tack of worshipping his woman while his heart was honest, and profaning her in his fits of temper and revolt. But he made a bad show. Born in him was a spirit which could not worship woman: no, and would not. Could not and would not. It was not in him. In early days, he tried to pretend it was in him. But through his plaintive and homage-rendering love of a young husband was always, for the woman, discernible the arrogance of self-unyielding male. He never yielded himself: never. All his mad loving was only an effort. Afterwards, he was as devilishly unyielded as ever. And it was an instinct in her, that her man must yield to her, so that she should envelop him yielding, in her all-beneficent love. She was quite sure that her love was all-beneficent. Of this no shadow of doubt. She was quite sure that the highest her man could ever know or ever reach, was to be perfectly enveloped in her all-beneficent love. This was her idea of marriage. She held it not as an idea, but as a profound impulse and instinct: an instinct developed in her by the age in which she lived. All that was deepest and most sacred in he feeling centred in this belief. And he outraged her! Oh, from the first day and the first night, she felt he outraged her. True, for some time she had been taken in by his manifest love. But though you can deceive the conscious mind, you can never deceive the deep, unconscious instinct. She could never understand whence arose in her, almost from the first days of marriage with him, her terrible paroxysms of hatred for him. She was in love with him: ah, heaven, how maddeningly she was in love with him: a certain unseizable beauty that was his, and which fascinated her as a snake a bird. But in revulsion, how she hated him! How she abhorred him! How she despised and shuddered at him! He seemed a horrible thing to her. And then again, oh, God, the agony of her desire for him. The agony of her long, long desire for him. He was a passionate lover. He gave her, ostensibly, all she asked for. He withheld from her nothing, no experience, no degree of intimacy. She was his initiate, or he hers. And yet, oh, horror for a woman, he withheld everything from her. He withheld the very centre of himself. For a long time, she never realised. She was dazed and maddened only. But as months of married experience passed into years of married torment, she began to understand. It was that, after their most tremendous, and, it seemed to her, heaven-rending passion--yea, when for her every veil seemed rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth--then--after all this wonder and miracle--in crept a poisonous grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion that bit her to madness, so that she really was a mad woman, demented. Why? Why? He never gave himself. He never came to her, _really_. He withheld himself. Yes, in those supreme and sacred times which for her were the whole culmination of life and being, the ecstasy of unspeakable passional conjunction, he was not really hers. He was withheld. He withheld the central core of himself, like the devil and hell-fiend he was. He cheated and made play with her tremendous passional soul, her sacred sex passion, most sacred of all things for a woman. All the time, some central part of him stood apart from her, aside, looking on. Oh, agony and horror for a passionate, fierce-hearted woman! She who loved him. She who loved him to madness. She who would have died for him. She who did die with him, many terrible and magnificent connubial deaths, in his arms, her husband. Her husband! How bitter the word grew to her! Her husband! and him never once given, given wholly to her! Her husband--and in all the frenzied finality of desire, she never _fully_ possessed him, not once. No, not once. As time went on, she learned it for inevitable. Not once! And then, how she hated him! Cheated, foiled, betrayed, forced to love him or to hate him: never able to be at peace near him nor away from him: poor Lottie, no wonder she was as a mad woman. She was strictly as a woman demented, after the birth of her second child. For all her instinct, all her impulse, all her desire, and above all, all her _will_, was to possess her man in very fulness once: just once: and once and for all. Once, just once: and it would be once and for all. But never! Never! Not once! Never! Not for one single solitary second! Was it not enough to send a woman mad! Was it not enough to make her demented! Yes, and mad she was. She made his life a hell for him. She bit him to the bone with her frenzy of rage, chagrin, and agony. She drove him mad, too: mad, so that he beat her: mad so that he longed to kill her. But even in his greatest rages it was the same: he never finally lost himself: he remained, somewhere in the centre, in possession of himself. She sometimes wished he would kill her: or that she would kill him. Neither event happened. And neither of them understood what was happening. How should they? They were both dazed, horrified, and mortified. He took to leaving her alone as much as was possible. But when he _had_ to come home, there was her terrible will, like a flat, cold snake coiled round his soul and squeezing him to death. Yes, she did not relent. She was a good wife and mother. All her duties she fulfilled. But she was not one to yield. _He_ must yield. That was written in eternal letters, on the iron tablet of her will. _He_ must yield. She the woman, the mother of his children, how should she ever even think to yield? It was unthinkable. He, the man, the weak, the false, the treacherous, the half-hearted, it was he who must yield. Was not hers the divine will and the divine right? Ha, she would be less than woman if she ever capitulated, abandoned her divine responsibility as woman! No, _he_ must yield. So, he was unfaithful to her. Piling reproach after reproach upon himself, he added adultery to his brutality. And this was the beginning of the end. She was more than maddened: but he began to grow silent, unresponsive, as if he did not hear her. He was unfaithful to her: and oh, in such a low way. Such shame, such shame! But he only smiled carelessly now, and asked her what she wanted. She had asked for all she got. That he reiterated. And that was all he would do. Terrible was, that she found even his smile of insolent indifference half-beautiful. Oh, bitter chain to bear! But she summoned up all her strange woman's will. She fought against his fascination, the fascination he exerted over her. With fearful efforts of will she fought against it, and mastered it. And then, suddenly, horror and agony of it, up it would rush in her again, her unbearable desire for him, the longing for his contact, his quality of beauty. That was a cross hard to bear. Yet even that she bore. And schooled herself into a fretful, petulant manner of indifference. Her odd, whimsical petulance hid a will which he, and he alone, knew to be stronger than steel, strong as a diabolical, cold, grey snake that presses and presses and cannot-relax: nay, cannot relax. She became the same as he. Even in her moments of most passionate desire for him, the cold and snake-like tension of her will never relaxed, and the cold, snake-like eye of her intention never closed. So, till it reached a deadlock. Each will was wound tense, and so fixed. Fixed! There was neither any relaxing or any increase of pressure. Fixed. Hard like a numbness, a grip that was solidifying and turning to stone. He realised, somehow, that at this terrible passive game of fixed tension she would beat him. Her fixed female soul, her wound-up female will would solidify into stone--whereas his must break. In him something must break. It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did break. His will flew loose in a recoil: a recoil away from her. He left her, as inevitably as a broken spring flies out from its hold. Not that he was broken. He would not do her even that credit. He had only flown loose from the old centre-fixture. His will was still entire and unabated. Only he did not know: he did not understand. He swung wildly about from place to place, as if he were broken. Then suddenly, on this Sunday evening in the strange country, he realised something about himself. He realised that he had never intended to yield himself fully to her or to anything: that he did not intend ever to yield himself up entirely to her or to anything: that his very being pivoted on the fact of his isolate self-responsibility, aloneness. His intrinsic and central aloneness was the very centre of his being. Break it, and he broke his being. Break this central aloneness, and he broke everything. It was the great temptation, to yield himself: and it was the final sacrilege. Anyhow, it was something which, from his profoundest soul, he did not intend to do. By the innermost isolation and singleness of his own soul he would abide though the skies fell on top of one another, and seven heavens collapsed. Vaguely he realised this. And vaguely he realised that this had been the root cause of his strife with Lottie: Lottie, the only person who had mattered at all to him in all the world: save perhaps his mother. And his mother had not mattered, no, not one-half nor one-fifth what Lottie had mattered. So it was: there was, for him, only her significant in the universe. And between him and her matters were as they were. He coldly and terribly hated her, for a moment. Then no more. There was no solution. It was a situation without a solution. But at any rate, it was now a defined situation. He could rest in peace. Thoughts something in this manner ran through Aaron's subconscious mind as he sat still in the strange house. He could not have fired it all off at any listener, as these pages are fired off at any chance reader. Nevertheless there it was, risen to half consciousness in him. All his life he had _hated_ knowing what he felt. He had wilfully, if not consciously, kept a gulf between his passional soul and his open mind. In his mind was pinned up a nice description of himself, and a description of Lottie, sort of authentic passports to be used in the conscious world. These authentic passports, self-describing: nose short, mouth normal, etc.; he had insisted that they should do all the duty of the man himself. This ready-made and very banal idea of himself as a really quite nice individual: eyes blue, nose short, mouth normal, chin normal; this he had insisted was really himself. It was his conscious mask. Now at last, after years of struggle, he seemed suddenly to have dropped his mask on the floor, and broken it. His authentic self-describing passport, his complete and satisfactory idea of himself suddenly became a rag of paper, ridiculous. What on earth did it matter if he was nice or not, if his chin was normal or abnormal. His mask, his idea of himself dropped and was broken to bits. There he sat now maskless and invisible. That was how he strictly felt: invisible and undefined, rather like Wells' _Invisible Man_. He had no longer a mask to present to people: he was present and invisible: they _could_ not really think anything about him, because they could not really see him. What did they see when they looked at him? Lady Franks, for example. He neither knew nor cared. He only knew he was invisible to himself and everybody, and that all thinking about what he was like was only a silly game of Mrs. Mackenzie's Dead. So there. The old Aaron Sisson was as if painfully transmuted, as the Invisible Man when he underwent his transmutations. Now he was gone, and no longer to be seen. His visibility lost for ever. And then what? Sitting there as an invisible presence, the preconceived world melted also and was gone. Lady Franks, Sir William, all the guests, they talked and maneuvered with their visible personalities, manipulating the masks of themselves. And underneath there was something invisible and dying--something fading, wilting: the essential plasm of themselves: their invisible being. Well now, and what next? Having in some curious manner tumbled from the tree of modern knowledge, and cracked and rolled out from the shell of the preconceived idea of himself like some dark, night-lustrous chestnut from the green ostensibility of the burr, he lay as it were exposed but invisible on the floor, knowing, but making no conceptions: knowing, but having no idea. Now that he was finally unmasked and exposed, the accepted idea of himself cracked and rolled aside like a broken chestnut-burr, the mask split and shattered, he was at last quiet and free. He had dreaded exposure: and behold, we cannot be exposed, for we are invisible. We cannot be exposed to the looks of others, for our very being is night-lustrous and unseeable. Like the Invisible Man, we are only revealed through our clothes and our masks. In his own powerful but subconscious fashion Aaron realized this. He was a musician. And hence even his deepest _ideas_: were not word-ideas, his very thoughts were not composed of words and ideal concepts. They too, his thoughts and his ideas, were dark and invisible, as electric vibrations are invisible no matter how many words they may purport. If I, as a word-user, must translate his deep conscious vibrations into finite words, that is my own business. I do but make a translation of the man. He would speak in music. I speak with words. The inaudible music of his conscious soul conveyed his meaning in him quite as clearly as I convey it in words: probably much more clearly. But in his own mode only: and it was in his own mode only he realised what I must put into words. These words are my own affair. His mind was music. Don't grumble at me then, gentle reader, and swear at me that this damned fellow wasn't half clever enough to think all these smart things, and realise all these fine-drawn-out subtleties. You are quite right, he wasn't, yet it all resolved itself in him as I say, and it is for you to prove that it didn't. In his now silent, maskless state of wordless comprehension, he knew that he had never wanted to surrender himself utterly to Lottie: nor to his mother: nor to anybody. The last extreme of self-abandon in love was for him an act of false behaviour. His own nature inside him fated him not to take this last false step, over the edge of the abyss of selflessness. Even if he wanted to, he could not. He might struggle on the edge of the precipice like an assassin struggling with his own soul, but he could not conquer. For, according to all the current prejudice and impulse in one direction, he too had believed that the final achievement, the consummation of human life, was this flinging oneself over the precipice, down the bottomless pit of love. Now he realised that love, even in its intensest, was only an attribute of the human soul: one of its incomprehensible gestures. And to fling down the whole soul in one gesture of finality in love was as much a criminal suicide as to jump off a church-tower or a mountain-peak. Let a man give himself as much as he liked in love, to seven thousand extremities, he must never give himself _away_. The more generous and the more passionate a soul, the more it _gives_ itself. But the more absolute remains the law, that it shall never give itself away. Give thyself, but give thyself not away. That is the lesson written at the end of the long strange lane of love. The _idee fixe_ of today is that every individual shall not only give himself, but shall achieve the last glory of giving himself away. And since this takes two--you can't even make a present of yourself unless you've got somebody to receive the present; since this last extra-divine act takes two people to perform it, you've got to take into count not only your giver but your receiver. Who is going to be the giver and who the receiver. Why, of course, in our long-drawn-out Christian day, man is given and woman is recipient. Man is the gift, woman the receiver. This is the sacrament we live by; the holy Communion we live for. That man gives himself to woman in an utter and sacred abandon, all, all, all himself given, and taken. Woman, eternal woman, she is the communicant. She receives the sacramental body and spirit of the man. And when she's got it, according to her passionate and all-too-sacred desire, completely, when she possesses her man at last finally and ultimately, without blemish or reservation in the perfection of the sacrament: then, also, poor woman, the blood and the body of which she has partaken become insipid or nauseous to her, she is driven mad by the endless meal of the marriage sacrament, poisoned by the sacred communion which was her goal and her soul's ambition. We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge. Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease. So Aaron, crossing a certain border-line and finding himself alone completely, accepted his loneliness or singleness as a fulfilment, a state of fulfilment. The long fight with Lottie had driven him at last to himself, so that he was quiet as a thing which has its root deep in life, and has lost its anxiety. As for considering the lily, it is not a matter of consideration. The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her own way. But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try to weave ourselves a life. The lily is life-rooted, life-central. She _cannot_ worry. She is life itself, a little, delicate fountain playing creatively, for as long or as short a time as may be, and unable to be anxious. She may be sad or sorry, if the north wind blows. But even then, anxious she cannot be. Whether her fountain play or cease to play, from out the cold, damp earth, she cannot be anxious. She may only be glad or sorry, and continue her way. She is perfectly herself, whatever befall! even if frosts cut her off. Happy lily, never to be saddled with an _idee fixe_, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment. It is not _laisser aller_. It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living, like the much-mooted lily. One toils, one spins, one strives: just as the lily does. But like her, taking one's own life-way amidst everything, and taking one's own life-way alone. Love too. But there also, taking one's way alone, happily alone in all the wonders of communion, swept up on the winds, but never swept away from one's very self. Two eagles in mid-air, maybe, like Whitman's Dalliance of Eagles. Two eagles in mid-air, grappling, whirling, coming to their intensification of love-oneness there in mid-air. In mid-air the love consummation. But all the time each lifted on its own wings: each bearing itself up on its own wings at every moment of the mid-air love consummation. That is the splendid love-way. ............... The party was festive at dinner-time, the women in their finest dresses, new flowers on the table, the best wine going. It was Sunday evening. Aaron too was dressed--and Lady Franks, in black lace and pearls, was almost gay. There were quails for dinner. The Colonel was quite happy. An air of conviviality gathered round the table during the course of the meal. “I hope,” said Aaron, “that we shall have some music tonight.” “I want so much to hear your flute,” said his hostess. “And I your piano,” he said. “I am very weak--very out of practise. I tremble at the thought of playing before a musician. But you must not be too critical.” “Oh,” said Aaron, “I am not a man to be afraid of.” “Well, we will see,” said Lady Franks. “But I am afraid of music itself.” “Yes,” said Aaron. “I think it is risky.” “Risky! I don't see that! Music risky? Bach? Beethoven! No, I don't agree. On the contrary, I think it is most elevating--most morally inspiring. No, I tremble before it because it is so wonderful and elevating.” “I often find it makes me feel diabolical,” said he. “That is your misfortune, I am sure,” said Lady Franks. “Please do take another--but perhaps you don't like mushrooms?” Aaron quite liked mushrooms, and helped himself to the _entree_. “But perhaps,” said she, “you are too modern. You don't care for Bach or Beethoven or Chopin--dear Chopin.” “I find them all quite as modern as I am.” “Is that so! Yes. For myself I am quite old-fashioned--though I can appreciate Strauss and Stravinsky as well, some things. But my old things--ah, I don't think the moderns are so fine. They are not so deep. They haven't fathomed life so deeply.” Lady Franks sighed faintly. “They don't care for depths,” said Aaron. “No, they haven't the capacity. But I like big, deep music. Oh, I love orchestra. But my instrument is the piano. I like the great masters, Bach, Beethoven. They have such faith. You were talking of faith--believing that things would work out well for you in the end. Beethoven inspires that in me, too.” “He makes you feel that all will be well with you at last?” “Yes, he does. He makes me feel faith in my PERSONAL destiny. And I do feel that there is something in one's special fate. I feel that I myself have a special kind of fate, that will always look after me.” “And you can trust to it?” “Yes, I can. It ALWAYS turns out right. I think something has gone wrong--and then, it always turns out right. Why when we were in London--when we were at lunch one morning it suddenly struck me, haven't I left my fur cloak somewhere? It was rather cold, so I had taken it with me, and then never put it on. And I hadn't brought it home. I had left it somewhere. But whether in a taxi, or in a shop, or in a little show of pictures I had been to, I couldn't remember. I COULD NOT remember. And I thought to myself: have I lost my cloak? I went round to everywhere I could think of: no-trace of it. But I didn't give it up. Something prompted me not to give it up: quite distinctly, I felt something telling me that I should get it back. So I called at Scotland Yard and gave the information. Well, two days later I had a notice from Scotland Yard, so I went. And there was my cloak. I had it back. And that has happened to me almost every time. I almost always get my things back. And I always feel that something looks after me, do you know: almost takes care of me.” “But do you mean when you lose things--or in your life?” “I mean when I lose things--or when I want to get something I want--I am very nearly ALWAYS successful. And I always feel there is some sort of higher power which does it for me.” “Finds your cloak for you.” “Yes. Wasn't it extraordinary? I felt when I saw my cloak in Scotland Yard: There, I KNEW I should recover you. And I always feel, as I say, that there is some higher power which helps me. Do you feel the same?” “No, not that way, worse luck. I lost a batch of music a month ago which didn't belong to me--and which I couldn't replace. But I never could recover it: though I'm sure nobody wanted it.” “How very unfortunate! Whereas my fur cloak was just the thing that gets stolen most.” “I wished some power would trace my music: but apparently we aren't all gifted alike with guardian angels.” “Apparently not. And that is how I regard it: almost as a gift, you know, that my fairy godmother gave me in my cradle.” “For always recovering your property?” “Yes--and succeeding in my undertakings.” “I'm afraid I had no fairy godmother.” “Well--I think I had. And very glad I am of it.” “Why, yes,” said Aaron, looking at his hostess. So the dinner sailed merrily on. “But does Beethoven make you feel,” said Aaron as an afterthought, “in the same way--that you will always find the things you have lost?” “Yes--he makes me feel the same faith: that what I lose will be returned to me. Just as I found my cloak. And that if I enter into an undertaking, it will be successful.” “And your life has been always successful?” “Yes--almost always. We have succeeded with almost everything.” “Why, yes,” said Aaron, looking at her again. But even so, he could see a good deal of hard wornness under her satisfaction. She had had her suffering, sure enough. But none the less, she was in the main satisfied. She sat there, a good hostess, and expected the homage due to her success. And of course she got it. Aaron himself did his little share of shoe-licking, and swallowed the taste of boot-polish with a grimace, knowing what he was about. The dinner wound gaily to an end. The ladies retired. Sir William left his seat of honour at the end of the table and came and sat next to Aaron, summoning the other three men to cluster near. “Now, Colonel,” said the host, “send round the bottle.” With a flourish of the elbow and shoulder, the Colonel sent on the port, actually port, in those bleak, post-war days! “Well, Mr. Sisson,” said Sir William, “we will drink to your kind Providence: providing, of course, that we shall give no offence by so doing.” “No, sir; no, sir! The Providence belonged to Mr. Lilly. Mr. Sisson put his money on kindly fortune, I believe,” said Arthur, who rosy and fresh with wine, looked as if he would make a marvelous _bonne bouchee_ for a finely-discriminating cannibal. “Ah, yes, indeed! A much more ingratiating lady to lift our glasses to. Mr. Sisson's kindly fortune. _Fortuna gentil-issima_! Well, Mr. Sisson, and may your Lady Fortune ever smile on you.” Sir William lifted his glass with an odd little smirk, some touch of a strange, prim old satyr lurking in his oddly inclined head. Nay, more than satyr: that curious, rather terrible iron demon that has fought with the world and wrung wealth from it, and which knows all about it. The devilish spirit of iron itself, and iron machines. So, with his strange, old smile showing his teeth rather terribly, the old knight glowered sightlessly over his glass at Aaron. Then he drank: the strange, careful, old-man's gesture in drinking. “But,” said Aaron, “if Fortune is a female---” “Fortune! Fortune! Why, Fortune is a lady. What do you say, Major?” “She has all the airs of one, Sir William,” said the Major, with the wistful grimness of his age and culture. And the young fellow stared like a crucified cyclops from his one eye: the black shutter being over the other. “And all the graces,” capped Sir William, delighted with himself. “Oh, quite!” said the Major. “For some, all the airs, and for others, all the graces.” “Faint heart ne'er won fair lady, my boy,” said Sir William. “Not that your heart is faint. On the contrary--as we know, and your country knows. But with Lady Fortune you need another kind of stout heart--oh, quite another kind.” “I believe it, sir: and the kind of stout heart which I am afraid I haven't got,” said the Major. “What!” said the old man. “Show the white feather before you've tackled the lady! Fill the Major's glass, Colonel. I am quite sure we will none of us ever say die.” “Not likely. Not if we know it,” said the Colonel, stretching himself heartily inside his tunic. He was becoming ruddier than the cherry. All he cared about at the moment was his gay little port glass. But the Major's young cheek was hollow and sallow, his one eye terribly pathetic. “And you, Mr. Sisson,” said Sir William, “mean to carry all before you by taking no thought for the morrow. Well, now, we can only wish you success.” “I don't want to carry all before me,” said Aaron. “I should be sorry. I want to walk past most of it.” “Can you tell us where to? I am intrigued, as Sybil says, to know where you will walk to. Come now. Enlighten us.” “Nowhere, I suppose.” “But is that satisfactory? Can you find it satisfactory?” “Is it even true?” said the Major. “Isn't it quite as positive an act to walk away from a situation as to walk towards it?” “My dear boy, you can't merely walk away from a situation. Believe that. If you walk away from Rome, you walk into the Maremma, or into the Alban Hills, or into the sea--but you walk into something. Now if I am going to walk away from Rome, I prefer to choose my direction, and therefore my destination.” “But you can't,” said the Major. “What can't you?” “Choose. Either your direction or your destination.” The Major was obstinate. “Really!” said Sir William. “I have not found it so. I have not found it so. I have had to keep myself hard at work, all my life, choosing between this or that.” “And we,” said the Major, “have no choice, except between this or nothing.” “Really! I am afraid,” said Sir William, “I am afraid I am too old--or too young--which shall I say?--to understand.” “Too young, sir,” said Arthur sweetly. “The child was always father to the man, I believe.” “I confess the Major makes me feel childish,” said the old man. “The choice between this or nothing is a puzzler to me. Can you help me out, Mr. Sisson? What do you make of this this-or-nothing business? I can understand neck-or-nothing---” “I prefer the NOTHING part of it to the THIS part of it,” said Aaron, grinning. “Colonel,” said the old man, “throw a little light on this nothingness.” “No, Sir William,” said the Colonel. “I am all right as I am.” “As a matter of fact, so are we all, perfectly A-one,” said Arthur. Aaron broke into a laugh. “That's the top and bottom of it,” he laughed, flushed with wine, and handsome. We're all as right as ninepence. Only it's rather nice to talk.” “There!” said Sir William. “We're all as right as ninepence! We're all as right ninepence. So there well leave it, before the Major has time to say he is twopence short.” Laughing his strange old soundless laugh, Sir William rose and made a little bow. “Come up and join the ladies in a minute or two,” he said. Arthur opened the door for him and he left the room. The four men were silent for a moment--then the Colonel whipped up the decanter and filled his glass. Then he stood up and clinked glasses with Aaron, like a real old sport. “Luck to you,” he said. “Thanks,” said Aaron. “You're going in the morning?” said Arthur. “Yes,” said Aaron. “What train?” said Arthur. “Eight-forty.” “Oh--then we shan't see you again. Well--best of luck.” “Best of luck--” echoed the Colonel. “Same to you,” said Aaron, and they all peered over their glasses and quite loved one another for a rosy minute. “I should like to know, though,” said the hollow-cheeked young Major with the black flap over his eye, “whether you do really mean you are all right--that it is all right with you--or whether you only say so to get away from the responsibility.” “I mean I don't really care--I don't a damn--let the devil take it all.” “The devil doesn't want it, either,” said the Major. “Then let him leave it. I don't care one single little curse about it all.” “Be damned. What is there to care about?” said the Colonel. “Ay, what?” said Aaron. “It's all the same, whether you care or don't care. So I say it's much easier not to care,” said Arthur. “Of course it is,” said the Colonel gaily. “And I think so, too,” said Aaron. “Right you are! We're all as right as ninepence--what? Good old sport! Here's yours!” cried the Colonel. “We shall have to be going up,” said Arthur, wise in his generation. As they went into the hall, Arthur suddenly put one arm round Aaron's waist, and one arm round the Colonel's, and the three did a sudden little barn-dance towards the stairs. Arthur was feeling himself quite let loose again, back in his old regimental mess. Approaching the foot of the stairs, he let go again. He was in that rosy condition when united-we-stand. But unfortunately it is a complicated job to climb the stairs in unison. The whole lot tends to fall backwards. Arthur, therefore, rosy, plump, looking so good to eat, stood still a moment in order to find his own neatly-slippered feet. Having found them, he proceeded to put them carefully one before the other, and to his enchantment found that this procedure was carrying him magically up the stairs. The Colonel, like a drowning man, clutched feebly for the straw of the great stair-rail--and missed it. He would have gone under, but that Aaron's hand gripped his arm. So, orientating once more like a fragile tendril, he reached again for the banister rail, and got it. After which, lifting his feet as if they were little packets of sand tied to his trouser buttons, he manipulated his way upwards. Aaron was in that pleasant state when he saw what everybody else was doing and was unconscious of what he did himself. Whilst tall, gaunt, erect, like a murdered Hamlet resurrected in khaki, with the terrible black shutter over his eye, the young Major came last. Arthur was making a stern fight for his composure. His whole future depended on it. But do what he would, he could not get the flushed, pleased, mess-happy look off his face. The Colonel, oh, awful man, did a sort of plump roly-poly-cake-walk, like a fat boy, right to the very door of that santum-sanctorum, the library. Aaron was inwardly convulsed. Even the Major laughed. But Arthur stiffened himself militarily and cleared his throat. All four started to compose themselves, like actors going on the stage, outside that library door. And then Arthur softly, almost wistfully, opened and held the door for the others to pass. The Colonel slunk meekly in, and sat in a chair in the background. The Major stalked in expressionless, and hovered towards the sofa where his wife sat. There was a rather cold-water-down-your-back feeling in the library. The ladies had been waiting for coffee. Sir William was waiting, too. Therefore in a little tension, half silent, the coffee was handed round. Lady Franks was discussing something with Arthur's wife. Arthur's wife was in a cream lace dress, and looking what is called lovely. The Major's wife was in amethyst chiffon with dark-red roses, and was looking blindingly beautiful. The Colonel was looking into his coffee-cup as wistfully as if it contained the illusion of tawny port. The Major was looking into space, as if there and there alone, etc. Arthur was looking for something which Lady Franks had asked for, and which he was much too flushed to find. Sir William was looking at Aaron, and preparing for another _coeur a coeur_. “Well,” he said, “I doubt if you will care for Milan. It is one of the least Italian of all the towns, in my opinion. Venice, of course, is a thing apart. I cannot stand, myself, that miserable specimen the modern Roman. He has most of the vices of the old Romans and none of the virtues. The most congenial town, perhaps, for a stranger, is Florence. But it has a very bad climate.” Lady Franks rose significantly and left the room, accompanied by Arthur's wife. Aaron knew, silently, that he was summoned to follow. His hostess had her eye on him this evening. But always postponing his obedience to the cool commands of women, he remained talking with his host in the library, and sipping _creme de menthe_! Came the ripple of the pianoforte from the open doorway down at the further end of the room. Lady Franks was playing, in the large drawing-room. And the ripple of the music contained in it the hard insistence of the little woman's will. Coldly, and decidedly, she intended there should be no more unsettling conversations for the old Sir William. Aaron was to come forthwith into the drawing room. Which Aaron plainly understood--and so he didn't go. No, he didn't go, though the pianoforte rippled and swelled in volume. No, and he didn't go even when Lady Franks left off playing and came into the library again. There he sat, talking with Sir William. Let us do credit to Lady Franks' will-power, and admit that the talk was quite empty and distracted--none of the depths and skirmishes of the previous occasions. None the less, the talk continued. Lady Franks retired, discomfited, to her piano again. She would never break in upon her lord. So now Aaron relented. He became more and more distracted. Sir William wandered away like some restless, hunted soul. The Colonel still sat in his chair, nursing his last drop of _creme de menthe_ resentfully. He did not care for the green toffee-stuff. Arthur was busy. The Major lay sprawled in the last stages of everything on the sofa, holding his wife's hand. And the music came pathetically through the open folding-doors. Of course, she played with feeling--it went without saying. Aaron's soul felt rather tired. But she had a touch of discrimination also. He rose and went to the drawing-room. It was a large, vacant-seeming, Empire sort of drawing-room, with yellow silk chairs along the walls and yellow silk panels upon the walls, and a huge, vasty crystal chandelier hanging from a faraway-above ceiling. Lady Franks sat at a large black Bechstein piano at one end of this vacant yellow state-room. She sat, a little plump elderly lady in black lace, for all the world like Queen Victoria in Max Beerbohm's drawing of Alfred Tennyson reading to her Victorian Majesty, with space before her. Arthur's wife was bending over some music in a remote corner of the big room. Aaron seated himself on one of the chairs by the wall, to listen. Certainly it was a beautiful instrument. And certainly, in her way, she loved it. But Aaron remembered an anthem in which he had taken part as a boy. His eye is on the sparrow So I know He watches me. For a long time he had failed to catch the word _sparrow_, and had heard: His eye is on the spy-hole So I know He watches me. Which was just how it had all seemed to him, as a boy. Now, as ever, he felt the eye was on the spy-hole. There sat the woman playing music. But her inward eye was on the spy-hole of her vital affairs--her domestic arrangements, her control of her household, guests and husband included. The other eye was left for the music, don't you know. Sir William appeared hovering in the doorway, not at all liking the defection of Mr. Aaron. Then he retreated. He seemed not to care for music. The Major's wife hovered--felt it her duty to _aude_, or play audience--and entered, seating herself in a breath of lilac and amethyst again at the near distance. The Major, after a certain beating about the bush, followed and sat wrapt in dim contemplation near his wife. Arthur luckily was still busy with something. Aaron of course made proper musical remarks in the intervals--Arthur's wife sorted out more pieces. Arthur appeared--and then the Colonel. The Colonel tip-toed beautifully across the wide blank space of the Empire room, and seated himself on a chair, rather in the distance, with his back to the wall, facing Aaron. When Lady Franks finished her piece, to everybody's amazement the Colonel clapped gaily to himself and said Bravo! as if at a Cafe Chantant, looking round for his glass. But there was no glass. So he crossed his neatly-khakied legs, and looked rapt again. Lady Franks started with a _vivace_ Schumann piece. Everybody listened in sanctified silence, trying to seem to like it. When suddenly our Colonel began to spring and bounce in his chair, slinging his loose leg with a kind of rapture up and down in the air, and capering upon his posterior, doing a sitting-down jig to the Schumann _vivace_. Arthur, who had seated himself at the farthest extremity of the room, winked with wild bliss at Aaron. The Major tried to look as if he noticed nothing, and only succeeded in looking agonised. His wife studied the point of her silver shoe minutely, and peeped through her hair at the performance. Aaron grimly chuckled, and loved the Colonel with real tenderness. And the game went on while the _vivace_ lasted. Up and down bounced the plump Colonel on his chair, kicking with his bright, black-patent toe higher and higher, getting quite enthusiastic over his jig. Rosy and unabashed, he was worthy of the great nation he belonged to. The broad-seated Empire chair showed no signs of giving way. Let him enjoy himself, away there across the yellow Sahara of this silk-panelled salon. Aaron felt quite cheered up. “Well, now,” he thought to himself, “this man is in entire command of a very important branch of the British Service in Italy. We are a great race still.” But Lady Franks must have twigged. Her playing went rather stiff. She came to the end of the _vivace_ movement, and abandoned her piece. “I always prefer Schumann in his _vivace_ moods,” said Aaron. “Do you?” said Lady Franks. “Oh, I don't know.” It was now the turn of Arthur's wife to sing. Arthur seemed to get further away: if it was possible, for he was at the remotest remote end of the room, near the gallery doors. The Colonel became quiet, pensive. The Major's wife eyed the young woman in white lace, and seemed not to care for lace. Arthur seemed to be trying to push himself backwards through the wall. Lady Franks switched on more lights into the vast and voluminous crystal chandelier which hung like some glory-cloud above the room's centre. And Arthur's wife sang sweet little French songs, and _Ye Banks and Braes_, and _Caro mio ben_, which goes without saying: and so on. She had quite a nice voice and was quite adequately trained. Which is enough said. Aaron had all his nerves on edge. Then he had to play the flute. Arthur strolled upstairs with him, arm-in-arm, where he went to fetch his instrument. “I find music in the home rather a strain, you know,” said Arthur. “Cruel strain. I quite agree,” said Aaron. “I don't mind it so much in the theatre--or even a concert--where there are a lot of other people to take the edge off-- But after a good dinner--” “It's medicine,” said Aaron. “Well, you know, it really is, to me. It affects my inside.” Aaron laughed. And then, in the yellow drawing-room, blew into his pipe and played. He knew so well that Arthur, the Major, the Major's wife, the Colonel, and Sir William thought it merely an intolerable bore. However, he played. His hostess even accompanied him in a Mozart bit. CHAPTER XIV. XX SETTEMBRE Aaron was awakened in the morning by the soft entrance of the butler with the tray: it was just seven o'clock. Lady Franks' household was punctual as the sun itself. But our hero roused himself with a wrench. The very act of lifting himself from the pillow was like a fight this morning. Why? He recognized his own wrench, the pain with which he struggled under the necessity to move. Why shouldn't he want to move? Why not? Because he didn't want the day in front--the plunge into a strange country, towards nowhere, with no aim in view. True, he said that ultimately he wanted to join Lilly. But this was hardly more than a sop, an excuse for his own irrational behaviour. He was breaking loose from one connection after another; and what for? Why break every tie? Snap, snap, snap went the bonds and ligatures which bound him to the life that had formed him, the people he had loved or liked. He found all his affections snapping off, all the ties which united him with his own people coming asunder. And why? In God's name, why? What was there instead? There was nothingness. There was just himself, and blank nothingness. He had perhaps a faint sense of Lilly ahead of him; an impulse in that direction, or else merely an illusion. He could not persuade himself that he was seeking for love, for any kind of unison or communion. He knew well enough that the thought of any loving, any sort of real coming together between himself and anybody or anything, was just objectionable to him. No--he was not moving _towards_ anything: he was moving almost violently away from everything. And that was what he wanted. Only that. Only let him _not_ run into any sort of embrace with anything or anybody--this was what he asked. Let no new connection be made between himself and anything on earth. Let all old connections break. This was his craving. Yet he struggled under it this morning as under the lid of a tomb. The terrible sudden weight of inertia! He knew the tray stood ready by the bed: he knew the automobile would be at the door at eight o'clock, for Lady Franks had said so, and he half divined that the servant had also said so: yet there he lay, in a kind of paralysis in this bed. He seemed for the moment to have lost his will. Why go forward into more nothingness, away from all that he knew, all he was accustomed to and all he belonged to? However, with a click he sat up. And the very instant he had poured his coffee from the little silver coffee-pot into his delicate cup, he was ready for anything and everything. The sense of silent adventure took him, the exhilarated feeling that he was fulfilling his own inward destiny. Pleasant to taste was the coffee, the bread, the honey--delicious. The man brought his clothes, and again informed him that the automobile would be at the door at eight o'clock: or at least so he made out. “I can walk,” said Aaron. “Milady ha comandato l'automobile,” said the man softly. It was evident that if Milady had ordered it, so it must be. So Aaron left the still-sleeping house, and got into the soft and luxurious car. As he dropped through the park he wondered that Sir William and Lady Franks should be so kind to him: a complete stranger. But so it was. There he sat in their car. He wondered, also, as he ran over the bridge and into the city, whether this soft-running automobile would ever rouse the socialistic bile of the work-people. For the first time in his life, as he sat among the snug cushions, he realised what it might be to be rich and uneasy: uneasy, even if not afraid, lurking there inside an expensive car.--Well, it wasn't much of a sensation anyhow: and riches were stuffy, like wadded upholstery on everything. He was glad to get out into the fresh air of the common crowd. He was glad to be in the bleak, not-very-busy station. He was glad to be part of common life. For the very atmosphere of riches seems to be stuffed and wadded, never any real reaction. It was terrible, as if one's very body, shoulders and arms, were upholstered and made cushiony. Ugh, but he was glad to shake off himself the atmosphere of wealth and motor-cars, to get out of it all. It was like getting out of quilted clothes. “Well,” thought Aaron, “if this is all it amounts to, to be rich, you can have riches. They talk about money being power. But the only sort of power it has over me is to bring on a kind of numbness, which I fairly hate. No wonder rich people don't seem to be really alive.” The relief of escaping quite took away his self-conscious embarrassment at the station. He carried his own bags, bought a third-class ticket, and got into the train for Milan without caring one straw for the comments or the looks of the porters. It began to rain. The rain ran across the great plain of north Italy. Aaron sat in his wood-seated carriage and smoked his pipe in silence, looking at the thick, short Lombards opposite him without heeding them. He paid hardly any outward attention to his surroundings, but sat involved in himself. In Milan he had been advised to go to the Hotel Britannia, because it was not expensive, and English people went there. So he took a carriage, drove round the green space in front of Milan station, and away into the town. The streets were busy, but only half-heartedly so. It must be confessed that every new move he made was rather an effort. Even he himself wondered why he was struggling with foreign porters and foreign cabmen, being talked at and not understanding a word. But there he was. So he went on with it. The hotel was small and congenial. The hotel porter answered in English. Aaron was given a little room with a tiny balcony, looking on to a quiet street. So, he had a home of his own once more. He washed, and then counted his money. Thirty-seven pounds he had: and no more. He stood on the balcony and looked at the people going by below. Life seems to be moving so quick, when one looks down on it from above. Across the road was a large stone house with its green shutters all closed. But from the flagpole under the eaves, over the central window of the uppermost floor--the house was four storeys high--waved the Italian flag in the melancholy damp air. Aaron looked at it--the red, white and green tricolour, with the white cross of Savoy in the centre. It hung damp and still. And there seemed a curious vacancy in the city--something empty and depressing in the great human centre. Not that there was really a lack of people. But the spirit of the town seemed depressed and empty. It was a national holiday. The Italian flag was hanging from almost every housefront. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. Aaron sat in the restaurant of the hotel drinking tea, for he was rather tired, and looking through the thin curtains at the little square outside, where people passed: little groups of dark, aimless-seeming men, a little bit poorer looking--perhaps rather shorter in stature--but very much like the people in any other town. Yet the feeling of the city was so different from that of London. There seemed a curious emptiness. The rain had ceased, but the pavements were still wet. There was a tension. Suddenly there was a noise of two shots, fired in rapid succession. Aaron turned startled to look into the quiet piazza. And to his amazement, the pavements were empty, not a soul was in sight. Two minutes before the place was busy with passers-by, and a newspaper man selling the Corriere, and little carriages rattling through. Now, as if by magic, nobody, nothing. It was as if they had all melted into thin air. The waiter, too, was peeping behind the curtain. A carriage came trotting into the square--an odd man took his way alone--the traffic began to stir once more, and people reappeared as suddenly as they had disappeared. Then the waiter ran hastily and furtively out and craned his neck, peering round the square. He spoke with two youths--rather loutish youths. Then he returned to his duty in the hotel restaurant. “What was it? What were the shots?” Aaron asked him. “Oh--somebody shooting at a dog,” said the man negligently. “At a dog!” said Aaron, with round eyes. He finished his tea, and went out into the town. His hotel was not far from the cathedral square. Passing through the arcade, he came in sight of the famous cathedral with its numerous spines pricking into the afternoon air. He was not as impressed as he should have been. And yet there was something in the northern city--this big square with all the trams threading through, the little yellow Continental trams: and the spiny bulk of the great cathedral, like a grey-purple sea-urchin with many spines, on the one side, the ornamental grass-plots and flower beds on the other: the big shops going all along the further strands, all round: and the endless restless nervous drift of a north Italian crowd, so nervous, so twitchy; nervous and twitchy as the slipping past of the little yellow tram-cars; it all affected him with a sense of strangeness, nervousness, and approaching winter. It struck him the people were afraid of themselves: afraid of their own souls, and that which was in their own souls. Turning up the broad steps of the cathedral, he entered the famous building. The sky had cleared, and the freshened light shone coloured in living tablets round the wonderful, towering, rose-hearted dusk of the great church. At some altars lights flickered uneasily. At some unseen side altar mass was going on, and a strange ragged music fluttered out on the incense-dusk of the great and lofty interior, which was all shadow, all shadow, hung round with jewel tablets of light. Particularly beautiful the great east bay, above the great altar. And all the time, over the big-patterned marble floor, the faint click and rustle of feet coming and going, coming and going, like shallow uneasy water rustled back and forth in a trough. A white dog trotted pale through the under-dusk, over the pale, big-patterned floor. Aaron came to the side altar where mass was going on, candles ruddily wavering. There was a small cluster of kneeling women--a ragged handful of on-looking men--and people wandering up and wandering away, young women with neatly dressed black hair, and shawls, but without hats; fine young women in very high heels; young men with nothing to do; ragged men with nothing to do. All strayed faintly clicking over the slabbed floor, and glanced at the flickering altar where the white-surpliced boys were curtseying and the white-and-gold priest bowing, his hands over his breast, in the candle-light. All strayed, glanced, lingered, and strayed away again, as if the spectacle were not sufficiently holding. The bell chimed for the elevation of the Host. But the thin trickle of people trickled the same, uneasily, over the slabbed floor of the vastly-upreaching shadow-foliaged cathedral. The smell of incense in his nostrils, Aaron went out again by a side door, and began to walk along the pavements of the cathedral square, looking at the shops. Some were closed, and had little notices pinned on them. Some were open, and seemed half-stocked with half-elegant things. Men were carrying newspapers. In the cafes a few men were seated drinking vermouth. In the doorway of the restaurants waiters stood inert, looking out on the streets. The curious heart-eating _ennui_ of the big town on a holiday came over our hero. He felt he must get out, whatever happened. He could not bear it. So he went back to his hotel and up to his room. It was still only five o'clock. And he did not know what to do with himself. He lay down on the bed, and looked at the painting on his bedroom ceiling. It was a terrible business in reckitt's blue and browny gold, with awful heraldic beasts, rather worm-wriggly, displayed in a blue field. As he lay thinking of nothing and feeling nothing except a certain weariness, or dreariness, or tension, or God-knows-what, he heard a loud hoarse noise of humanity in the distance, something frightening. Rising, he went on to his little balcony. It was a sort of procession, or march of men, here and there a red flag fluttering from a man's fist. There had been a big meeting, and this was the issue. The procession was irregular, but powerful, men four abreast. They emerged irregularly from the small piazza to the street, calling and vociferating. They stopped before a shop and clotted into a crowd, shouting, becoming vicious. Over the shop-door hung a tricolour, a national flag. The shop was closed, but the men began to knock at the door. They were all workmen, some in railway men's caps, mostly in black felt hats. Some wore red cotton neck-ties. They lifted their faces to the national flag, and as they shouted and gesticulated Aaron could see their strong teeth in their jaws. There was something frightening in their lean, strong Italian jaws, something inhuman and possessed-looking in their foreign, southern-shaped faces, so much more formed and demon-looking than northern faces. They had a demon-like set purpose, and the noise of their voices was like a jarring of steel weapons. Aaron wondered what they wanted. There were no women--all men--a strange male, slashing sound. Vicious it was--the head of the procession swirling like a little pool, the thick wedge of the procession beyond, flecked with red flags. A window opened above the shop, and a frowsty-looking man, yellow-pale, was quickly and nervously hauling in the national flag. There were shouts of derision and mockery--a great overtone of acrid derision--the flag and its owner ignominiously disappeared. And the procession moved on. Almost every shop had a flag flying. And every one of these flags now disappeared, quickly or slowly, sooner or later, in obedience to the command of the vicious, derisive crowd, that marched and clotted slowly down the street, having its own way. Only one flag remained flying--the big tricolour that floated from the top storey of the house opposite Aaron's hotel. The ground floor of this house consisted of shop-premises--now closed. There was no sign of any occupant. The flag floated inert aloft. The whole crowd had come to a stop immediately below the hotel, and all were now looking up at the green and white and red tricolour which stirred damply in the early evening light, from under the broad eaves of the house opposite. Aaron looked at the long flag, which drooped almost unmoved from the eaves-shadow, and he half expected it to furl itself up of its own accord, in obedience to the will of the masses. Then he looked down at the packed black shoulders of the mob below, and at the curious clustering pattern of a sea of black hats. He could hardly see anything but hats and shoulders, uneasily moving like boiling pitch away beneath him. But the shouts began to come up hotter and hotter. There had been a great ringing of a door-bell and battering on the shop-door. The crowd--the swollen head of the procession--talked and shouted, occupying the centre of the street, but leaving the pavement clear. A woman in a white blouse appeared in the shop-door. She came out and looked up at the flag and shook her head and gesticulated with her hands. It was evidently not her flag--she had nothing to do with it. The leaders again turned to the large house-door, and began to ring all the bells and to knock with their knuckles. But no good--there was no answer. They looked up again at the flag. Voices rose ragged and ironical. The woman explained something again. Apparently there was nobody at home in the upper floors--all entrance was locked--there was no caretaker. Nobody owned the flag. There it hung under the broad eaves of the strong stone house, and didn't even know that it was guilty. The woman went back into her shop and drew down the iron shutter from inside. The crowd, nonplussed, now began to argue and shout and whistle. The voices rose in pitch and derision. Steam was getting up. There hung the flag. The procession crowded forward and filled the street in a mass below. All the rest of the street was empty and shut up. And still hung the showy rag, red and white and green, up aloft. Suddenly there was a lull--then shouts, half-encouraging, half-derisive. And Aaron saw a smallish-black figure of a youth, fair-haired, not more than seventeen years old, clinging like a monkey to the front of the house, and by the help of the heavy drain-pipe and the stone-work ornamentation climbing up to the stone ledge that ran under ground-floor windows, up like a sudden cat on to the projecting footing. He did not stop there, but continued his race like some frantic lizard running up the great wall-front, working away from the noise below, as if in sheer fright. It was one unending wriggling movement, sheer up the front of the impassive, heavy stone house. The flag hung from a pole under one of the windows of the top storey--the third floor. Up went the wriggling figure of the possessed youth. The cries of the crowd below were now wild, ragged ejaculations of excitement and encouragement. The youth seemed to be lifted up, almost magically on the intense upreaching excitement of the massed men below. He passed the ledge of the first floor, like a lizard he wriggled up and passed the ledge or coping of the second floor, and there he was, like an upward-climbing shadow, scrambling on to the coping of the third floor. The crowd was for a second electrically still as the boy rose there erect, cleaving to the wall with the tips of his fingers. But he did not hesitate for one breath. He was on his feet and running along the narrow coping that went across the house under the third floor windows, running there on that narrow footing away above the street, straight to the flag. He had got it--he had clutched it in his hand, a handful of it. Exactly like a great flame rose the simultaneous yell of the crowd as the boy jerked and got the flag loose. He had torn it down. A tremendous prolonged yell, touched with a snarl of triumph, and searing like a puff of flame, sounded as the boy remained for one moment with the flag in his hand looking down at the crowd below. His face was odd and elated and still. Then with the slightest gesture he threw the flag from him, and Aaron watched the gaudy remnant falling towards the many faces, whilst the noise of yelling rose up unheard. There was a great clutch and hiss in the crowd. The boy still stood unmoved, holding by one hand behind him, looking down from above, from his dangerous elevation, in a sort of abstraction. And the next thing Aaron was conscious of was the sound of trumpets. A sudden startling challenge of trumpets, and out of nowhere a sudden rush of grey-green carabinieri battering the crowd wildly with truncheons. It was so sudden that Aaron _heard_ nothing any more. He only saw. In utmost amazement he saw the greeny-grey uniformed carabinieri rushing thick and wild and indiscriminate on the crowd: a sudden new excited crowd in uniforms attacking the black crowd, beating them wildly with truncheons. There was a seething moment in the street below. And almost instantaneously the original crowd burst into a terror of frenzy. The mob broke as if something had exploded inside it. A few black-hatted men fought furiously to get themselves free of the hated soldiers; in the confusion bunches of men staggered, reeled, fell, and were struggling among the legs of their comrades and of the carabinieri. But the bulk of the crowd just burst and fled--in every direction. Like drops of water they seemed to fly up at the very walls themselves. They darted into any entry, any doorway. They sprang up the walls and clambered into the ground-floor windows. They sprang up the walls on to window-ledges, and then jumped down again, and ran--clambering, wriggling, darting, running in every direction; some cut, blood on their faces, terror or frenzy of flight in their hearts. Not so much terror as the frenzy of running away. In a breath the street was empty. And all the time, there above on the stone coping stood the long-faced, fair-haired boy, while four stout carabinieri in the street below stood with uplifted revolvers and covered him, shouting that if he moved they would shoot. So there he stood, still looking down, still holding with his left hand behind him, covered by the four revolvers. He was not so much afraid as twitchily self-conscious because of his false position. Meanwhile down below the crowd had dispersed--melted momentaneously. The carabinieri were busy arresting the men who had fallen and been trodden underfoot, or who had foolishly let themselves be taken; perhaps half a dozen men, half a dozen prisoners; less rather than more. The sergeant ordered these to be secured between soldiers. And last of all the youth up above, still covered by the revolvers, was ordered to come down. He turned quite quietly, and quite humbly, cautiously picked his way along the coping towards the drain-pipe. He reached this pipe and began, in humiliation, to climb down. It was a real climb down. Once in the street he was surrounded by the grey uniforms. The soldiers formed up. The sergeant gave the order. And away they marched, the dejected youth a prisoner between them. Then were heard a few scattered yells of derision and protest, a few shouts of anger and derision against the carabinieri. There were once more gangs of men and groups of youths along the street. They sent up an occasional shout. But always over their shoulders, and pretending it was not they who shouted. They were all cowed and hang-dog once more, and made not the slightest effort to save the youth. Nevertheless, they prowled and watched, ready for the next time. So, away went the prisoner and the grey-green soldiers, and the street was left to the little gangs and groups of hangdog, discontented men, all thoroughly out of countenance. The scene was ended. Aaron looked round, dazed. And then for the first time he noticed, on the next balcony to his own, two young men: young gentlemen, he would have said. The one was tall and handsome and well-coloured, might be Italian. But the other with his pale thin face and his rimless monocle in his eye, he was surely an Englishman. He was surely one of the young officers shattered by the war. A look of strange, arch, bird-like pleasure was on his face at this moment: if one could imagine the gleaming smile of a white owl over the events that had just passed, this was the impression produced on Aaron by the face of the young man with the monocle. The other youth, the ruddy, handsome one, had knitted his brows in mock distress, and was glancing with a look of shrewd curiosity at Aaron, and with a look of almost self-satisfied excitement first to one end of the street, then to the other. “But imagine, Angus, it's all over!” he said, laying his hand on the arm of the monocled young man, and making great eyes--not without a shrewd glance in Aaron's direction. “Did you see him fall!” replied Angus, with another strange gleam. “Yes. But was he HURT--?” “I don't know. I should think so. He fell right back out of that on to those stones!” “But how perfectly AWFUL! Did you ever see anything like it?” “No. It's one of the funniest things I ever did see. I saw nothing quite like it, even in the war--” Here Aaron withdrew into his room. His mind and soul were in a whirl. He sat down in his chair, and did not move again for a great while. When he did move, he took his flute and played he knew not what. But strange, strange his soul passed into his instrument. Or passed half into his instrument. There was a big residue left, to go bitter, or to ferment into gold old wine of wisdom. He did not notice the dinner gong, and only the arrival of the chamber-maid, to put the wash-table in order, sent him down to the restaurant. The first thing he saw, as he entered, was the two young Englishmen seated at a table in a corner just behind him. Their hair was brushed straight back from their foreheads, making the sweep of the head bright and impeccable, and leaving both the young faces clear as if in cameo. Angus had laid his monocle on the table, and was looking round the room with wide, light-blue eyes, looking hard, like some bird-creature, and seeming to see nothing. He had evidently been very ill: was still very ill. His cheeks and even his jaw seemed shrunken, almost withered. He forgot his dinner: or he did not care for it. Probably the latter. “What do you think, Francis,” he said, “of making a plan to see Florence and Sienna and Orvieto on the way down, instead of going straight to Rome?” He spoke in precise, particularly-enunciated words, in a public-school manner, but with a strong twang of South Wales. “Why, Angus,” came the graceful voice of Francis, “I thought we had settled to go straight through via Pisa.” Francis was graceful in everything--in his tall, elegant figure, in the poses of his handsome head, in the modulation of his voice. “Yes, but I see we can go either way--either Pisa or Florence. And I thought it might be nice to look at Florence and Sienna and Orvieto. I believe they're very lovely,” came the soft, precise voice of Angus, ending in a touch of odd emotion on the words “very lovely,” as if it were a new experience to him to be using them. “I'm SURE they're marvellous. I'm quite sure they're marvellously beautiful,” said Francis, in his assured, elegant way. “Well, then, Angus--suppose we do that, then?--When shall we start?” Angus was the nervous insister. Francis was quite occupied with his own thoughts and calculations and curiosity. For he was very curious, not to say inquisitive. And at the present moment he had a new subject to ponder. This new subject was Aaron, who sat with his back to our new couple, and who, with his fine sharp ears, caught every word that they said. Aaron's back was broad enough, and his shoulders square, and his head rather small and fairish and well-shaped--and Francis was intrigued. He wanted to know, was the man English. He _looked_ so English--yet he might be--he might perhaps be Danish, Scandinavian, or Dutch. Therefore, the elegant young man watched and listened with all his ears. The waiter who had brought Aaron his soup now came very free and easy, to ask for further orders. “What would you like to drink? Wine? Chianti? Or white wine? Or beer?”--The old-fashioned “Sir” was dropped. It is too old-fashioned now, since the war. “What SHOULD I drink?” said Aaron, whose acquaintance with wines was not very large. “Half-litre of Chianti: that is very good,” said the waiter, with the air of a man who knew only too well how to bring up his betters, and train them in the way they should go. “All right,” said Aaron. The welcome sound of these two magic words, All Right! was what the waiter most desired. “All right! Yes! All Right!” This is the pith, the marrow, the sum and essence of the English language to a southerner. Of course it is not _all right_. It is _Or-rye_--and one word at that. The blow that would be given to most foreign waiters, if they were forced to realize that the famous _orye_ was really composed of two words, and spelt _all right_, would be too cruel, perhaps. “Half litre Chianti. Orye,” said the waiter. And we'll let him say it. “ENGLISH!” whispered Francis melodramatically in the ear of Angus. “I THOUGHT so. The flautist.” Angus put in his monocle, and stared at the oblivious shoulders of Aaron, without apparently seeing anything. “Yes. Obviously English,” said Angus, pursing like a bird. “Oh, but I heard him,” whispered Francis emphatically. “Quite,” said Angus. “But quite inoffensive.” “Oh, but Angus, my dear--he's the FLAUTIST. Don't you remember? The divine bit of Scriabin. At least I believe it was Scriabin.--But PERFECTLY DIVINE!!! I adore the flute above all things--” And Francis placed his hand on Angus' arm, and rolled his eyes--Lay this to the credit of a bottle of Lacrimae Cristi, if you like. “Yes. So do I,” said Angus, again looking archly through the monocle, and seeing nothing. “I wonder what he's doing here.” “Don't you think we might ASK him?” said Francis, in a vehement whisper. “After all, we are the only three English people in the place.” “For the moment, apparently we are,” said Angus. “But the English are all over the place wherever you go, like bits of orange peel in the street. Don't forget that, Francesco.” “No, Angus, I don't. The point is, his flute is PERFECTLY DIVINE--and he seems quite attractive in himself. Don't you think so?” “Oh, quite,” said Angus, whose observations had got no further than the black cloth of the back of Aaron's jacket. That there was a man inside he had not yet paused to consider. “Quite a musician,” said Francis. “The hired sort,” said Angus, “most probably.” “But he PLAYS--he plays most marvellously. THAT you can't get away from, Angus.” “I quite agree,” said Angus. “Well, then? Don't you think we might hear him again? Don't you think we might get him to play for us?--But I should love it more than anything.” “Yes, I should, too,” said Angus. “You might ask him to coffee and a liqueur.” “I should like to--most awfully. But do you think I might?” “Oh, yes. He won't mind being offered a coffee and liqueur. We can give him something decent--Where's the waiter?” Angus lifted his pinched, ugly bare face and looked round with weird command for the waiter. The waiter, having not much to do, and feeling ready to draw these two weird young birds, allowed himself to be summoned. “Where's the wine list? What liqueurs have you got?” demanded Angus abruptly. The waiter rattled off a list, beginning with Strega and ending with cherry brandy. “Grand Marnier,” said Angus. “And leave the bottle.” Then he looked with arch triumph at Francis, like a wicked bird. Francis bit his finger moodily, and glowered with handsome, dark-blue uncertain eyes at Mr. Aaron, who was just surveying the _Frutte_, which consisted of two rather old pomegranates and various pale yellow apples, with a sprinkling of withered dried figs. At the moment, they all looked like a _Natura Morta_ arrangement. “But do you think I might--?” said Francis moodily. Angus pursed his lips with a reckless brightness. “Why not? I see no reason why you shouldn't,” he said. Whereupon Francis cleared his throat, disposed of his serviette, and rose to his feet, slowly but gracefully. Then he composed himself, and took on the air he wished to assume at the moment. It was a nice degage air, half naive and half enthusiastic. Then he crossed to Aaron's table, and stood on one lounging hip, gracefully, and bent forward in a confidential manner, and said: “Do excuse me. But I MUST ask you if it was you we heard playing the flute so perfectly wonderfully, just before dinner.” The voice was confidential and ingratiating. Aaron, relieved from the world's stress and seeing life anew in the rosy glow of half a litre of good old Chianti--the war was so near but gone by--looked up at the dark blue, ingenuous, well-adapted eyes of our friend Francis, and smiling, said: “Yes, I saw you on the balcony as well.” “Oh, did you notice us?” plunged Francis. “But wasn't it an extraordinary affair?” “Very,” said Aaron. “I couldn't make it out, could you?” “Oh,” cried Francis. “I never try. It's all much too new and complicated for me.--But perhaps you know Italy?” “No, I don't,” said Aaron. “Neither do we. And we feel rather stunned. We had only just arrived--and then--Oh!” Francis put up his hand to his comely brow and rolled his eyes. “I feel perfectly overwhelmed with it still.” He here allowed himself to sink friendlily into the vacant chair opposite Aaron's. “Yes, I thought it was a bit exciting,” said Aaron. “I wonder what will become of him--” “--Of the one who climbed for the flag, you mean? No!--But wasn't it perfectly marvellous! Oh, incredible, quite incredible!--And then your flute to finish it all! Oh! I felt it only wanted that.--I haven't got over it yet. But your playing was MARVELLOUS, really marvellous. Do you know, I can't forget it. You are a professional musician, of course.” “If you mean I play for a living,” said Aaron. “I have played in orchestras in London.” “Of course! Of course! I knew you must be a professional. But don't you give private recitals, too?” “No, I never have.” “Oh!” cried Francis, catching his breath. “I can't believe it. But you play MARVELLOUSLY! Oh, I just loved it, it simply swept me away, after that scene in the street. It seemed to sum it all up, you know.” “Did it,” said Aaron, rather grimly. “But won't you come and have coffee with us at our table?” said Francis. “We should like it most awfully if you would.” “Yes, thank you,” said Aaron, half-rising. “But you haven't had your dessert,” said Francis, laying a fatherly detaining hand on the arm of the other man. Aaron looked at the detaining hand. “The dessert isn't much to stop for,” he said. “I can take with me what I want.” And he picked out a handful of dried figs. The two went across to Angus' table. “We're going to take coffee together,” said Francis complacently, playing the host with a suave assurance that was rather amusing and charming in him. “Yes. I'm very glad,” said Angus. Let us give the show away: he was being wilfully nice. But he _was_ quite glad; to be able to be so nice. Anything to have a bit of life going: especially a bit of pleased life. He looked at Aaron's comely, wine-warmed face with gratification. “Have a Grand Marnier,” he said. “I don't know how bad it is. Everything is bad now. They lay it down to the war as well. It used to be quite a decent drink. What the war had got to do with bad liqueurs, I don't know.” Aaron sat down in a chair at their table. “But let us introduce ourselves,” said Francis. “I am Francis--or really Franz Dekker--And this is Angus Guest, my friend.” “And my name is Aaron Sisson.” “What! What did you say?” said Francis, leaning forward. He, too, had sharp ears. “Aaron Sisson.” “Aaron Sisson! Oh, but how amusing! What a nice name!” “No better than yours, is it?” “Mine! Franz Dekker! Oh, much more amusing, _I_ think,” said Francis archly. “Oh, well, it's a matter of opinion. You're the double decker, not me.” “The double decker!” said Francis archly. “Why, what do you mean!--” He rolled his eyes significantly. “But may I introduce my friend Angus Guest.” “You've introduced me already, Francesco,” said Angus. “So sorry,” said Francis. “Guest!” said Aaron. Francis suddenly began to laugh. “May he not be Guest?” he asked, fatherly. “Very likely,” said Aaron. “Not that I was ever good at guessing.” Francis tilted his eyebrows. Fortunately the waiter arrived with the coffee. “Tell me,” said Francis, “will you have your coffee black, or with milk?” He was determined to restore a tone of sobriety. The coffee was sipped in sober solemnity. “Is music your line as well, then?” asked Aaron. “No, we're painters. We're going to work in Rome.” “To earn your living?” “Not yet.” The amount of discretion, modesty, and reserve which Francis put into these two syllables gave Aaron to think that he had two real young swells to deal with. “No,” continued Francis. “I was only JUST down from Oxford when the war came--and Angus had been about ten months at the Slade--But I have always painted.--So now we are going to work, really hard, in Rome, to make up for lost time.--Oh, one has lost so much time, in the war. And such PRECIOUS time! I don't know if ever one will even be able to make it up again.” Francis tilted his handsome eyebrows and put his head on one side with a wise-distressed look. “No,” said Angus. “One will never be able to make it up. What is more, one will never be able to start again where one left off. We're shattered old men, now, in one sense. And in another sense, we're just pre-war babies.” The speech was uttered with an odd abruptness and didacticism which made Aaron open his eyes. Angus had that peculiar manner: he seemed to be haranguing himself in the circle of his own thoughts, not addressing himself to his listener. So his listener listened on the outside edge of the young fellow's crowded thoughts. Francis put on a distressed air, and let his attention wander. Angus pursed his lips and his eyes were stretched wide with a kind of pleasure, like a wicked owl which has just joyfully hooted an ill omen. “Tell me,” said Francis to Aaron. “Where were YOU all the time during the war?” “I was doing my job,” said Aaron. Which led to his explaining his origins. “Really! So your music is quite new! But how interesting!” cried Francis. Aaron explained further. “And so the war hardly affected you? But what did you FEEL about it, privately?” “I didn't feel much. I didn't know what to feel. Other folks did such a lot of feeling, I thought I'd better keep my mouth shut.” “Yes, quite!” said Angus. “Everybody had such a lot of feelings on somebody else's behalf, that nobody ever had time to realise what they felt themselves. I know I was like that. The feelings all came on to me from the outside: like flies settling on meat. Before I knew where I was I was eaten up with a swarm of feelings, and I found myself in the trenches. God knows what for. And ever since then I've been trying to get out of my swarm of feelings, which buzz in and out of me and have nothing to do with me. I realised it in hospital. It's exactly like trying to get out of a swarm of nasty dirty flies. And every one you kill makes you sick, but doesn't make the swarm any less.” Again Angus pursed and bridled and looked like a pleased, wicked white owl. Then he polished his monocle on a very choice silk handkerchief, and fixed it unseeing in his left eye. But Francis was not interested in his friend's experiences. For Francis had had a job in the War Office--whereas Angus was a war-hero with shattered nerves. And let him depreciate his own experiences as much as he liked, the young man with the monocle kept tight hold on his prestige as a war hero. Only for himself, though. He by no means insisted that anyone else should be war-bitten. Francis was one of those men who, like women, can set up the sympathetic flow and make a fellow give himself away without realising what he is doing. So there sat our friend Aaron, amusingly unbosoming himself of all his history and experiences, drawn out by the arch, subtle attentiveness of the handsome Francis. Angus listened, too, with pleased amusedness on his pale, emaciated face, pursing his shrunken jaw. And Aaron sipped various glasses of the liqueur, and told all his tale as if it was a comedy. A comedy it seemed, too, at that hour. And a comedy no doubt it was. But mixed, like most things in this life. Mixed. It was quite late before this seance broke up: and the waiter itching to get rid of the fellows. “Well, now,” said Francis, as he rose from the table and settled his elegant waist, resting on one hip, as usual. “We shall see you in the morning, I hope. You say you are going to Venice. Why? Have you some engagement in Venice?” “No,” said Aaron. “I only was going to look for a friend--Rawdon Lilly.” “Rawdon Lilly! Why, is he in Venice? Oh, I've heard SUCH a lot about him. I should like so much to meet him. But I heard he was in Germany--” “I don't know where he is.” “Angus! Didn't we hear that Lilly was in Germany?” “Yes, in Munich, being psychoanalysed, I believe it was.” Aaron looked rather blank. “But have you anything to take you to Venice? It's such a bad climate in the winter. Why not come with us to Florence?” said Francis. Aaron wavered. He really did not know what to do. “Think about it,” said Francis, laying his hand on Aaron's arm. “Think about it tonight. And we'll meet in the morning. At what time?” “Any time,” said Aaron. “Well, say eleven. We'll meet in the lounge here at eleven. Will that suit you? All right, then. It's so awfully nice meeting you. That marvellous flute.--And think about Florence. But do come. Don't disappoint us.” The two young men went elegantly upstairs. CHAPTER XV. A RAILWAY JOURNEY The next day but one, the three set off for Florence. Aaron had made an excursion from Milan with the two young heroes, and dined with them subsequently at the most expensive restaurant in the town. Then they had all gone home--and had sat in the young men's bedroom drinking tea, whilst Aaron played the flute. Francis was really musical, and enchanted. Angus enjoyed the novelty, and the moderate patronage he was able to confer. And Aaron felt amused and pleased, and hoped he was paying for his treat. So behold them setting off for Florence in the early morning. Angus and Francis had first-class tickets: Aaron took a third-class. “Come and have lunch with us on the train,” said Angus. “I'll order three places, and we can lunch together.” “Oh, I can buy a bit of food at the station,” said Aaron. “No, come and lunch with us. It will be much nicer. And we shall enjoy it as well,” said Angus. “Of course! Ever so much nicer! Of course!” cried Francis. “Yes, why not, indeed! Why should you hesitate?” “All right, then,” said Aaron, not without some feeling of constraint. So they separated. The young men settled themselves amidst the red plush and crochet-work, looking, with their hair plastered smoothly back, quite as first class as you could wish, creating quite the right impression on the porters and the travelling Italians. Aaron went to his third-class, further up the train. “Well, then, _au revoir_, till luncheon,” cried Francis. The train was fairly full in the third and second classes. However, Aaron got his seat, and the porter brought on his bags, after disposing of the young men's luggage. Aaron gave the tip uneasily. He always hated tipping--it seemed humiliating both ways. And the airy aplomb of the two young cavaliers, as they settled down among the red plush and the obsequiousness, and said “Well, then, _au revoir_ till luncheon,” was peculiarly unsettling: though they did not intend it so. “The porter thinks I'm their servant--their valet,” said Aaron to himself, and a curious half-amused, half-contemptuous look flickered on his face. It annoyed him. The falsity occasioned by the difference in the price of the tickets was really humiliating. Aaron had lived long enough to know that as far as manhood and intellect went--nay, even education--he was not the inferior of the two young “gentlemen.” He knew quite well that, as far as intrinsic nature went, they did not imagine him an inferior: rather the contrary. They had rather an exaggerated respect for him and his life-power, and even his origin. And yet--they had the inestimable cash advantage--and they were going to keep it. They knew it was nothing more than an artificial cash superiority. But they gripped it all the more intensely. They were the upper middle classes. They were Eton and Oxford. And they were going to hang on to their privileges. In these days, it is a fool who abdicates before he's forced to. And therefore: “Well, then--_au revoir_ till luncheon.” They were being so awfully nice. And inwardly they were not condescending. But socially, they just had to be. The world is made like that. It wasn't their own private fault. It was no fault at all. It was just the mode in which they were educated, the style of their living. And as we know, _le style, c'est l'homme_. Angus came of very wealthy iron people near Merthyr. Already he had a very fair income of his own. As soon as the law-business concerning his father's and his grandfather's will was settled, he would be well off. And he knew it, and valued himself accordingly. Francis was the son of a highly-esteemed barrister and politician of Sydney, and in his day would inherit his father's lately-won baronetcy. But Francis had not very much money: and was much more class-flexible than Angus. Angus had been born in a house with a park, and of awful, hard-willed, money-bound people. Francis came of a much more adventurous, loose, excitable family, he had the colonial newness and adaptability. He knew, for his own part, that class superiority was just a trick, nowadays. Still, it was a trick that paid. And a trick he was going to play as long as it did pay. While Aaron sat, a little pale at the gills, immobile, ruminating these matters, a not very pleasant look about his nose-end, he heard a voice: “Oh, there you ARE! I thought I'd better come and see, so that we can fetch you at lunch time.--You've got a seat? Are you quite comfortable? Is there anything I could get you? Why, you're in a non-smoker!--But that doesn't matter, everybody will smoke. Are you sure you have everything? Oh, but wait just one moment--” It was Francis, long and elegant, with his straight shoulders and his coat buttoned to show his waist, and his face so well-formed and so modern. So modern, altogether. His voice was pleasantly modulated, and never hurried. He now looked as if a thought had struck him. He put a finger to his brow, and hastened back to his own carriage. In a minute, he returned with a new London literary magazine. “Something to read--I shall have to FLY--See you at lunch,” and he had turned and elegantly hastened, but not too fast, back to his carriage. The porter was holding the door for him. So Francis looked pleasantly hurried, but by no means rushed. Oh, dear, no. He took his time. It was not for him to bolt and scramble like a mere Italian. The people in Aaron's carriage had watched the apparition of the elegant youth intently. For them, he was a being from another sphere--no doubt a young milordo with power wealth, and glamorous life behind him. Which was just what Francis intended to convey. So handsome--so very, very impressive in all his elegant calm showiness. He made such a _bella figura_. It was just what the Italians loved. Those in the first class regions thought he might even be an Italian, he was so attractive. The train in motion, the many Italian eyes in the carriage studied Aaron. He, too, was good-looking. But by no means as fascinating as the young milordo. Not half as sympathetic. No good at all at playing a role. Probably a servant of the young signori. Aaron stared out of the window, and played the one single British role left to him, that of ignoring his neighbours, isolating himself in their midst, and minding his own business. Upon this insular trick our greatness and our predominance depends--such as it is. Yes, they might look at him. They might think him a servant or what they liked. But he was inaccessible to them. He isolated himself upon himself, and there remained. It was a lovely day, a lovely, lovely day of early autumn. Over the great plain of Lombardy a magnificent blue sky glowed like mid-summer, the sun shone strong. The great plain, with its great stripes of cultivation--without hedges or boundaries---how beautiful it was! Sometimes he saw oxen ploughing. Sometimes. Oh, so beautiful, teams of eight, or ten, even of twelve pale, great soft oxen in procession, ploughing the dark velvety earth, a driver with a great whip at their head, a man far behind holding the plough-shafts. Beautiful the soft, soft plunging motion of oxen moving forwards. Beautiful the strange, snaky lifting of the muzzles, the swaying of the sharp horns. And the soft, soft crawling motion of a team of oxen, so invisible, almost, yet so inevitable. Now and again straight canals of water flashed blue. Now and again the great lines of grey-silvery poplars rose and made avenues or lovely grey airy quadrangles across the plain. Their top boughs were spangled with gold and green leaf. Sometimes the vine-leaves were gold and red, a patterning. And the great square farm-homesteads, white, red-roofed, with their out-buildings, stood naked amid the lands, without screen or softening. There was something big and exposed about it all. No more the cosy English ambushed life, no longer the cosy littleness of the landscape. A bigness--and nothing to shelter the unshrinking spirit. It was all exposed, exposed to the sweep of plain, to the high, strong sky, and to human gaze. A kind of boldness, an indifference. Aaron was impressed and fascinated. He looked with new interest at the Italians in the carriage with him--for this same boldness and indifference and exposed gesture. And he found it in them, too. And again it fascinated him. It seemed so much bigger, as if the walls of life had fallen. Nay, the walls of English life will have to fall. Sitting there in the third-class carriage, he became happy again. The _presence_ of his fellow-passengers was not so hampering as in England. In England, everybody seems held tight and gripped, nothing is left free. Every passenger seems like a parcel holding his string as fast as he can about him, lest one corner of the wrapper should come undone and reveal what is inside. And every other passenger is forced, by the public will, to hold himself as tight-bound also. Which in the end becomes a sort of self-conscious madness. But here, in the third class carriage, there was no tight string round every man. They were not all trussed with self-conscious string as tight as capons. They had a sufficient amount of callousness and indifference and natural equanimity. True, one of them spat continually on the floor, in large spits. And another sat with his boots all unlaced and his collar off, and various important buttons undone. They did not seem to care if bits of themselves did show, through the gaps in the wrapping. Aaron winced--but he preferred it to English tightness. He was pleased, he was happy with the Italians. He thought how generous and natural they were. So the towns passed by, and the hours, and he seemed at last to have got outside himself and his old conditions. It seemed like a great escape. There was magic again in life--real magic. Was it illusion, or was it genuine? He thought it was genuine, and opened his soul a if there was no danger. Lunch-time came. Francis summoned Aaron down the rocking tram. The three men had a table to themselves, and all felt they were enjoying themselves very much indeed. Of course Francis and Angus made a great impression again. But in the dining car were mostly middle-class, well-to-do Italians. And these did not look upon our two young heroes as two young wonders. No, rather with some criticism, and some class-envy. But they were impressed. Oh, they were impressed! How should they not be, when our young gentlemen had such an air! Aaron was conscious all the time that the fellow-diners were being properly impressed by the flower of civilisation and the salt of the earth, namely, young, well-to-do Englishmen. And he had a faint premonition, based on experience perhaps, that fellow-passengers in the end never forgive the man who has “impressed” them. Mankind loves being impressed. It asks to be impressed. It almost forces those whom it can force to play a role and to make an impression. And afterwards, never forgives. When the train ran into Bologna Station, they were still in the restaurant car. Nor did they go at once to their seats. Angus had paid the bill. There was three-quarters-of-an-hour's wait in Bologna. “You may as well come down and sit with us,” said Francis. “We've got nobody in our carriage, so why shouldn't we all stay together during the wait. You kept your own seat, I suppose.” No, he had forgotten. So when he went to look for it, it was occupied by a stout man who was just taking off his collar and wrapping a white kerchief round his neck. The third class carriages were packed. For those were early days after the war, while men still had pre-war notions and were poor. Ten months would steal imperceptibly by, and the mysterious revolution would be effected. Then, the second class and the first class would be packed, indescribably packed, crowded, on all great trains: and the third class carriages, lo and behold, would be comparatively empty. Oh, marvellous days of bankruptcy, when nobody will condescend to travel third! However, these were still modest, sombre months immediately after the peace. So a large man with a fat neck and a white kerchief, and his collar over his knee, sat in Aaron's seat. Aaron looked at the man, and at his own luggage overhead. The fat man saw him looking and stared back: then stared also at the luggage overhead: and with his almost invisible north-Italian gesture said much plainer than words would have said it: “Go to hell. I'm here and I'm going to stop here.” There was something insolent and unbearable about the look--and about the rocky fixity of the large man. He sat as if he had insolently taken root in his seat. Aaron flushed slightly. Francis and Angus strolled along the train, outside, for the corridor was already blocked with the mad Bologna rush, and the baggage belonging. They joined Aaron as he stood on the platform. “But where is YOUR SEAT?” cried Francis, peering into the packed and jammed compartments of the third class. “That man's sitting in it.” “Which?” cried Francis, indignant. “The fat one there--with the collar on his knee.” “But it was your seat--!” Francis' gorge rose in indignation. He mounted into the corridor. And in the doorway of the compartment he bridled like an angry horse rearing, bridling his head. Poising himself on one hip, he stared fixedly at the man with the collar on his knee, then at the baggage aloft. He looked down at the fat man as a bird looks down from the eaves of a house. But the man looked back with a solid, rock-like impudence, before which an Englishman quails: a jeering, immovable insolence, with a sneer round the nose and a solid-seated posterior. “But,” said Francis in English--none of them had any Italian yet. “But,” said Francis, turning round to Aaron, “that was YOUR SEAT?” and he flung his long fore-finger in the direction of the fat man's thighs. “Yes!” said Aaron. “And he's TAKEN it--!” cried Francis in indignation. “And knows it, too,” said Aaron. “But--!” and Francis looked round imperiously, as if to summon his bodyguard. But bodyguards are no longer forthcoming, and train-guards are far from satisfactory. The fat man sat on, with a sneer-grin, very faint but very effective, round his nose, and a solidly-planted posterior. He quite enjoyed the pantomime of the young foreigners. The other passengers said something to him, and he answered laconic. Then they all had the faint sneer-grin round their noses. A woman in the corner grinned jeeringly straight in Francis' face. His charm failed entirely this time: and as for his commandingness, that was ineffectual indeed. Rage came up in him. “Oh well--something must be done,” said he decisively. “But didn't you put something in the seat to RESERVE it?” “Only that _New Statesman_--but he's moved it.” The man still sat with the invisible sneer-grin on his face, and that peculiar and immovable plant of his Italian posterior. “Mais--cette place etait RESERVEE--” said Francis, moving to the direct attack. The man turned aside and ignored him utterly--then said something to the men opposite, and they all began to show their teeth in a grin. Francis was not so easily foiled. He touched the man on the arm. The man looked round threateningly, as if he had been struck. “Cette place est reservee--par ce Monsieur--” said Francis with hauteur, though still in an explanatory tone, and pointing to Aaron. The Italian looked him, not in the eyes, but between the eyes, and sneered full in his face. Then he looked with contempt at Aaron. And then he said, in Italian, that there was room for such snobs in the first class, and that they had not any right to come occupying the place of honest men in the third. “Gia! Gia!” barked the other passengers in the carriage. “Loro possono andare prima classa--PRIMA CLASSA!” said the woman in the corner, in a very high voice, as if talking to deaf people, and pointing to Aaron's luggage, then along the train to the first class carriages. “C'e posto la,” said one of the men, shrugging his shoulders. There was a jeering quality in the hard insolence which made Francis go very red and Augus very white. Angus stared like a death's-head behind his monocle, with death-blue eyes. “Oh, never mind. Come along to the first class. I'll pay the difference. We shall be much better all together. Get the luggage down, Francis. It wouldn't be possible to travel with this lot, even if he gave up the seat. There's plenty of room in our carriage--and I'll pay the extra,” said Angus. He knew there was one solution--and only one--Money. But Francis bit his finger. He felt almost beside himself--and quite powerless. For he knew the guard of the train would jeer too. It is not so easy to interfere with honest third-class Bolognesi in Bologna station, even if they _have_ taken another man's seat. Powerless, his brow knitted, and looking just like Mephistopheles with his high forehead and slightly arched nose, Mephistopheles in a rage, he hauled down Aaron's bag and handed it to Angus. So they transferred themselves to the first-class carriage, while the fat man and his party in the third-class watched in jeering, triumphant silence. Solid, planted, immovable, in static triumph. So Aaron sat with the others amid the red plush, whilst the train began its long slow climb of the Apennines, stinking sulphurous through tunnels innumerable. Wonderful the steep slopes, the great chestnut woods, and then the great distances glimpsed between the heights, Firenzuola away and beneath, Turneresque hills far off, built of heaven-bloom, not of earth. It was cold at the summit-station, ice and snow in the air, fierce. Our travellers shrank into the carriage again, and wrapped themselves round. Then the train began its long slither downhill, still through a whole necklace of tunnels, which fortunately no longer stank. So down and down, till the plain appears in sight once more, the Arno valley. But then began the inevitable hitch that always happens in Italian travel. The train began to hesitate--to falter to a halt, whistling shrilly as if in protest: whistling pip-pip-pip in expostulation as it stood forlorn among the fields: then stealing forward again and stealthily making pace, gathering speed, till it had got up a regular spurt: then suddenly the brakes came on with a jerk, more faltering to a halt, more whistling and pip-pip-pipping, as the engine stood jingling with impatience: after which another creak and splash, and another choking off. So on till they landed in Prato station: and there they sat. A fellow passenger told them, there was an hour to wait here: an hour. Something had happened up the line. “Then I propose we make tea,” said Angus, beaming. “Why not! Of course. Let us make tea. And I will look for water.” So Aaron and Francis went to the restaurant bar and filled the little pan at the tap. Angus got down the red picnic case, of which he was so fond, and spread out the various arrangements on the floor of the coupe. He soon had the spirit-lamp burning, the water heating. Francis proposed that he and Aaron should dash into Prato and see what could be bought, whilst the tea was in preparation. So off they went, leaving Angus like a busy old wizard manipulating his arrangements on the floor of the carriage, his monocle beaming with bliss. The one fat fellow--passenger with a lurid striped rug over his knees watched with acute interest. Everybody who passed the doorway stood to contemplate the scene with pleasure. Officials came and studied the situation with appreciation. Then Francis and Aaron returned with a large supply of roast chestnuts, piping hot, and hard dried plums, and good dried figs, and rather stale rusks. They found the water just boiling, Angus just throwing in the tea-egg, and the fellow-passenger just poking his nose right in, he was so thrilled. Nothing pleased Angus so much as thus pitching camp in the midst of civilisation. The scrubby newspaper packets of chestnuts, plums, figs and rusks were spread out: Francis flew for salt to the man at the bar, and came back with a little paper of rock-salt: the brown tea was dispensed in the silver-fitted glasses from the immortal luncheon-case: and the picnic was in full swing. Angus, being in the height of his happiness, now sat on the seat cross-legged, with his feet under him, in the authentic Buddha fashion, and on his face the queer rapt alert look, half a smile, also somewhat Buddhistic, holding his glass of brown tea in his hand. He was as rapt and immobile as if he really were in a mystic state. Yet it was only his delight in the tea-party. The fellow-passenger peered at the tea, and said in broken French, was it good. In equally fragmentary French Francis said very good, and offered the fat passenger some. He, however, held up his hand in protest, as if to say not for any money would he swallow the hot-watery stuff. And he pulled out a flask of wine. But a handful of chestnuts he accepted. The train-conductor, ticket-collector, and the heavy green soldier who protected them, swung open the door and stared attentively. The fellow passenger addressed himself to these new-comers, and they all began to smile good-naturedly. Then the fellow-passenger--he was stout and fifty and had a brilliant striped rug always over his knees--pointed out the Buddha-like position of Angus, and the three in-starers smiled again. And so the fellow-passenger thought he must try too. So he put aside his rug, and lifted his feet from the floor, and took his toes in his hands, and tried to bring his legs up and his feet under him. But his knees were fat, his trousers in the direst extreme of peril, and he could no more manage it than if he had tried to swallow himself. So he desisted suddenly, rather scared, whilst the three bunched and official heads in the doorway laughed and jested at him, showing their teeth and teasing him. But on our gypsy party they turned their eyes with admiration. They loved the novelty and the fun. And on the thin, elegant Angus in his new London clothes, they looked really puzzled, as he sat there immobile, gleaming through his monocle like some Buddha going wicked, perched cross-legged and ecstatic on the red velvet seat. They marvelled that the lower half of him could so double up, like a foot-rule. So they stared till they had seen enough. When they suddenly said “Buon 'appetito,” withdrew their heads and shoulders, slammed the door, and departed. Then the train set off also--and shortly after six arrived in Florence. It was debated what should Aaron do in Florence. The young men had engaged a room at Bertolini's hotel, on the Lungarno. Bertolini's was not expensive--but Aaron knew that his friends would not long endure hotel life. However, he went along with the other two, trusting to find a cheaper place on the morrow. It was growing quite dark as they drove to the hotel, but still was light enough to show the river rustling, the Ponte Vecchio spanning its little storeys across the flood, on its low, heavy piers: and some sort of magic of the darkening, varied houses facing, on the other side of the stream. Of course they were all enchanted. “I knew,” said Francis, “we should love it.” Aaron was told he could have a little back room and pension terms for fifteen lire a day, if he stayed at least fifteen days. The exchange was then at forty-five. So fifteen lire meant just six-shillings-and-six pence a day, without extras. Extras meant wine, tea, butter, and light. It was decided he should look for something cheaper next day. By the tone of the young men, he now gathered that they would prefer it if he took himself off to a cheaper place. They wished to be on their own. “Well, then,” said Francis, “you will be in to lunch here, won't you? Then we'll see you at lunch.” It was as if both the young men had drawn in their feelers now. They were afraid of finding the new man an incubus. They wanted to wash their hands of him. Aaron's brow darkened. “Perhaps it was right your love to dissemble But why did you kick me down stairs?...” Then morning found him out early, before his friends had arisen. It was sunny again. The magic of Florence at once overcame him, and he forgot the bore of limited means and hotel costs. He went straight out of the hotel door, across the road, and leaned on the river parapet. There ran the Arno: not such a flood after all, but a green stream with shoals of pebbles in its course. Across, and in the delicate shadow of the early sun, stood the opposite Lungarno, the old flat houses, pink, or white, or grey stone, with their green shutters, some closed, some opened. It had a flowery effect, the skyline irregular against the morning light. To the right the delicate Trinita bridge, to the left, the old bridge with its little shops over the river. Beyond, towards the sun, glimpses of green, sky-bloomed country: Tuscany. There was a noise and clatter of traffic: boys pushing hand-barrows over the cobble-stones, slow bullocks stepping side by side, and shouldering one another affectionately, drawing a load of country produce, then horses in great brilliant scarlet cloths, like vivid palls, slowly pulling the long narrow carts of the district: and men hu-huing!--and people calling: all the sharp, clattering morning noise of Florence. “Oh, Angus! Do come and look! OH, so lovely!” Glancing up, he saw the elegant figure of Francis, in fine coloured-silk pyjamas, perched on a small upper balcony, turning away from the river towards the bedroom again, his hand lifted to his lips, as if to catch there his cry of delight. The whole pose was classic and effective: and very amusing. How the Italians would love it! Aaron slipped back across the road, and walked away under the houses towards the Ponte Vecchio. He passed the bridge--and passed the Uffizi--watching the green hills opposite, and San Miniato. Then he noticed the over-dramatic group of statuary in the Piazza Mentana--male and physical and melodramatic--and then the corner house. It was a big old Florentine house, with many green shutters and wide eaves. There was a notice plate by the door--“Pension Nardini.” He came to a full stop. He stared at the notice-plate, stared at the glass door, and turning round, stared at the over-pathetic dead soldier on the arm of his over-heroic pistol-firing comrade; _Mentana_--and the date! Aaron wondered what and where Mentana was. Then at last he summoned his energy, opened the glass door, and mounted the first stairs. He waited some time before anybody appeared. Then a maid-servant. “Can I have a room?” said Aaron. The bewildered, wild-eyed servant maid opened a door and showed him into a heavily-gilt, heavily-plush drawing-room with a great deal of frantic grandeur about it. There he sat and cooled his heels for half an hour. Arrived at length a stout young lady--handsome, with big dark-blue Italian eyes--but anaemic and too stout. “Oh!” she said as she entered, not knowing what else to say. “Good-morning,” said Aaron awkwardly. “Oh, good-morning! English! Yes! Oh, I am so sorry to keep you, you know, to make you wait so long. I was upstairs, you know, with a lady. Will you sit?” “Can I have a room?” said Aaron. “A room! Yes, you can.” “What terms?” “Terms! Oh! Why, ten francs a day, you know, pension--if you stay--How long will you stay?” “At least a month, I expect.” “A month! Oh yes. Yes, ten francs a day.” “For everything?” “Everything. Yes, everything. Coffee, bread, honey or jam in the morning: lunch at half-past twelve; tea in the drawing-room, half-past four: dinner at half-past seven: all very nice. And a warm room with the sun--Would you like to see?” So Aaron was led up the big, rambling old house to the top floor--then along a long old corridor--and at last into a big bedroom with two beds and a red tiled floor--a little dreary, as ever--but the sun just beginning to come in, and a lovely view on to the river, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and at the hills with their pines and villas and verdure opposite. Here he would settle. The signorina would send a man for his bags, at half past two in the afternoon. At luncheon Aaron found the two friends, and told them of his move. “How very nice for you! Ten francs a day--but that is nothing. I am so pleased you've found something. And when will you be moving in?” said Francis. “At half-past two.” “Oh, so soon. Yes, just as well.--But we shall see you from time to time, of course. What did you say the address was? Oh, yes--just near the awful statue. Very well. We can look you up any time--and you will find us here. Leave a message if we should happen not to be in--we've got lots of engagements--” CHAPTER XVI. FLORENCE The very afternoon after Aaron's arrival in Florence the sky became dark, the wind cold, and rain began steadily to fall. He sat in his big, bleak room above the river, and watched the pale green water fused with yellow, the many-threaded streams fuse into one, as swiftly the surface flood came down from the hills. Across, the dark green hills looked darker in the wet, the umbrella pines held up in vain above the villas. But away below, on the Lungarno, traffic rattled as ever. Aaron went down at five o'clock to tea, and found himself alone next a group of women, mostly Swedes or Danish or Dutch, drinking a peculiar brown herb-brew which tasted like nothing else on earth, and eating two thick bits of darkish bread smeared with a brown smear which hoped it was jam, but hoped in vain. Unhappily he sat in the gilt and red, massively ornate room, while the foreign women eyed him. Oh, bitter to be a male under such circumstances. He escaped as soon as possible back to his far-off regions, lonely and cheerless, away above. But he rather liked the far-off remoteness in the big old Florentine house: he did not mind the peculiar dark, uncosy dreariness. It was not really dreary: only indifferent. Indifferent to comfort, indifferent to all homeliness and cosiness. The over-big furniture trying to be impressive, but never to be pretty or bright or cheerful. There it stood, ugly and apart. And there let it stand.--Neither did he mind the lack of fire, the cold sombreness of his big bedroom. At home, in England, the bright grate and the ruddy fire, the thick hearth-rug and the man's arm-chair, these had been inevitable. And now he was glad to get away from it all. He was glad not to have a cosy hearth, and his own arm-chair. He was glad to feel the cold, and to breathe the unwarmed air. He preferred the Italian way of no fires, no heating. If the day was cold, he was willing to be cold too. If it was dark, he was willing to be dark. The cosy brightness of a real home--it had stifled him till he felt his lungs would burst. The horrors of real domesticity. No, the Italian brutal way was better. So he put his overcoat over his knee, and studied some music he had bought in Milan: some Pergolesi and the Scarlatti he liked, and some Corelli. He preferred frail, sensitive, abstract music, with not much feeling in it, but a certain limpidity and purity. Night fell as he sat reading the scores. He would have liked to try certain pieces on his flute. But his flute was too sensitive, it winced from the new strange surroundings, and would not blossom. Dinner sounded at last--at eight o'clock, or something after. He had to learn to expect the meals always forty minutes late. Down he went, down the long, dark, lonely corridors and staircases. The dining room was right downstairs. But he had a little table to himself near the door, the elderly women were at some little distance. The only other men were Agostmo, the unshapely waiter, and an Italian duke, with wife and child and nurse, the family sitting all together at a table halfway down the room, and utterly pre-occupied with a little yellow dog. However, the food was good enough, and sufficient, and the waiter and the maid-servant cheerful and bustling. Everything felt happy-go-lucky and informal, there was no particular atmosphere. Nobody put on any airs, because nobody in the Nardini took any notice if they did. The little ducal dog yapped, the ducal son shouted, the waiter dropped half a dozen spoons, the old women knitted during the waits, and all went off so badly that it was quite pleasant. Yes, Aaron preferred it to Bertolini's, which was trying to be efficient and correct: though not making any strenuous effort. Still, Bertolini's was much more up to the scratch, there was the tension of proper standards. Whereas here at Nardini's, nothing mattered very much. It was November. When he got up to his far-off room again, Aaron felt almost as if he were in a castle with the drawbridge drawn up. Through the open window came the sound of the swelling Arno, as it rushed and rustled along over its gravel-shoals. Lights spangled the opposite side. Traffic sounded deep below. The room was not really cold, for the summer sun so soaks into these thick old buildings, that it takes a month or two of winter to soak it out.--The rain still fell. In the morning it was still November, and the dawn came slowly. And through the open window was the sound of the river's rushing. But the traffic started before dawn, with a bang and a rattle of carts, and a bang and jingle of tram-cars over the not-distant bridge. Oh, noisy Florence! At half-past seven Aaron rang for his coffee: and got it at a few minutes past eight. The signorina had told him to take his coffee in bed. Rain was still falling. But towards nine o'clock it lifted, and he decided to go out. A wet, wet world. Carriages going by, with huge wet shiny umbrellas, black and with many points, erected to cover the driver and the tail of the horse and the box-seat. The hood of the carriage covered the fare. Clatter-clatter through the rain. Peasants with long wagons and slow oxen, and pale-green huge umbrellas erected for the driver to walk beneath. Men tripping along in cloaks, shawls, umbrellas, anything, quite unconcerned. A man loading gravel in the river-bed, in spite of the wet. And innumerable bells ringing: but innumerable bells. The great soft trembling of the cathedral bell felt in all the air. Anyhow it was a new world. Aaron went along close to the tall thick houses, following his nose. And suddenly he caught sight of the long slim neck of the Palazzo Vecchio up above, in the air. And in another minute he was passing between massive buildings, out into the Piazza della Signoria. There he stood still and looked round him in real surprise, and real joy. The flat empty square with its stone paving was all wet. The great buildings rose dark. The dark, sheer front of the Palazzo Vecchio went up like a cliff, to the battlements, and the slim tower soared dark and hawk-like, crested, high above. And at the foot of the cliff stood the great naked David, white and stripped in the wet, white against the dark, warm-dark cliff of the building--and near, the heavy naked men of Bandinelli. The first thing he had seen, as he turned into the square, was the back of one of these Bandinelli statues: a great naked man of marble, with a heavy back and strong naked flanks over which the water was trickling. And then to come immediately upon the David, so much whiter, glistening skin-white in the wet, standing a little forward, and shrinking. He may be ugly, too naturalistic, too big, and anything else you like. But the David in the Piazza della Signoria, there under the dark great palace, in the position Michelangelo chose for him, there, standing forward stripped and exposed and eternally half-shrinking, half--wishing to expose himself, he is the genius of Florence. The adolescent, the white, self-conscious, physical adolescent: enormous, in keeping with the stark, grim, enormous palace, which is dark and bare as he is white and bare. And behind, the big, lumpy Bandinelli men are in keeping too. They may be ugly--but they are there in their place, and they have their own lumpy reality. And this morning in the rain, standing unbroken, with the water trickling down their flanks and along the inner side of their great thighs, they were real enough, representing the undaunted physical nature of the heavier Florentines. Aaron looked and looked at the three great naked men. David so much white, and standing forward, self-conscious: then at the great splendid front of the Palazzo Vecchio: and at the fountain splashing water upon its wet, wet figures; and the distant equestrian statue; and the stone-flagged space of the grim square. And he felt that here he was in one of the world's living centres, here, in the Piazza della Signoria. The sense of having arrived--of having reached a perfect centre of the human world: this he had. And so, satisfied, he turned round to look at the bronze Perseus which rose just above him. Benvenuto Cellini's dark hero looked female, with his plump hips and his waist, female and rather insignificant: graceful, and rather vulgar. The clownish Bandinellis were somehow more to the point.--Then all the statuary in the Loggia! But that is a mistake. It looks too much like the yard of a monumental mason. The great, naked men in the rain, under the dark-grey November sky, in the dark, strong inviolable square! The wonderful hawk-head of the old palace. The physical, self-conscious adolescent, Michelangelo's David, shrinking and exposing himself, with his white, slack limbs! Florence, passionate, fearless Florence had spoken herself out.--Aaron was fascinated by the Piazza della Signoria. He never went into the town, nor returned from it to his lodging, without contriving to pass through the square. And he never passed through it without satisfaction. Here men had been at their intensest, most naked pitch, here, at the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. Since then, always rather puling and apologetic. Aaron felt a new self, a new life-urge rising inside himself. Florence seemed to start a new man in him. It was a town of men. On Friday morning, so early, he heard the traffic. Early, he watched the rather low, two-wheeled traps of the peasants spanking recklessly over the bridge, coming in to town. And then, when he went out, he found the Piazza della Signoria packed with men: but all, all men. And all farmers, land-owners and land-workers. The curious, fine-nosed Tuscan farmers, with their half-sardonic, amber-coloured eyes. Their curious individuality, their clothes worn so easy and reckless, their hats with the personal twist. Their curious full oval cheeks, their tendency to be too fat, to have a belly and heavy limbs. Their close-sitting dark hair. And above all, their sharp, almost acrid, mocking expression, the silent curl of the nose, the eternal challenge, the rock-bottom unbelief, and the subtle fearlessness. The dangerous, subtle, never-dying fearlessness, and the acrid unbelief. But men! Men! A town of men, in spite of everything. The one manly quality, undying, acrid fearlessness. The eternal challenge of the un-quenched human soul. Perhaps too acrid and challenging today, when there is nothing left to challenge. But men--who existed without apology and without justification. Men who would neither justify themselves nor apologize for themselves. Just men. The rarest thing left in our sweet Christendom. Altogether Aaron was pleased with himself, for being in Florence. Those were early days after the war, when as yet very few foreigners had returned, and the place had the native sombreness and intensity. So that our friend did not mind being alone. The third day, however, Francis called on him. There was a tap at the bedroom door, and the young man entered, all eyes of curiosity. “Oh, there you ARE!” he cried, flinging his hand and twisting his waist and then laying his hand on his breast. “Such a LONG way up to you! But miles--! Well, how are you? Are you quite all right here? You are? I'm so glad--we've been so rushed, seeing people that we haven't had a MINUTE. But not a MINUTE! People! People! People! Isn't it amazing how many there are, and how many one knows, and gets to know! But amazing! Endless acquaintances!--Oh, and such quaint people here! so ODD! So MORE than odd! Oh, extraordinary--!” Francis chuckled to himself over the extraordinariness. Then he seated himself gracefully at Aaron's table. “Oh, MUSIC! What? Corelli! So interesting! So very CLEVER, these people, weren't they!--Corelli and the younger Scarlatti and all that crowd.” Here he closed the score again. “But now--LOOK! Do you want to know anybody here, or don't you? I've told them about you, and of course they're dying to meet you and hear you play. But I thought it best not to mention anything about--about your being hard-up, and all that. I said you were just here on a visit. You see with this kind of people I'm sure it's much the best not to let them start off by thinking you will need them at all--or that you MIGHT need them. Why give yourself away, anyhow? Just meet them and take them for what they're worth--and then you can see. If they like to give you an engagement to play at some show or other--well, you can decide when the time comes whether you will accept. Much better that these kind of people shouldn't get it into their heads at once that they can hire your services. It doesn't do. They haven't enough discrimination for that. Much best make rather a favour of it, than sort of ask them to hire you.--Don't you agree? Perhaps I'm wrong.” Aaron sat and listened and wondered at the wisdom and the genuine kindness of the young _beau_. And more still, he wondered at the profound social disillusionment. This handsome collie dog was something of a social wolf, half showing his fangs at the moment. But with genuine kindheartedness for another wolf. Aaron was touched. “Yes, I think that's the best way,” he said. “You do! Yes, so do I. Oh, they are such queer people! Why is it, do you think, that English people abroad go so very QUEER--so ultra-English--INCREDIBLE!--and at the same time so perfectly impossible? But impossible! Pathological, I assure you.--And as for their sexual behaviour--oh, dear, don't mention it. I assure you it doesn't bear mention.--And all quite flagrant, quite unabashed--under the cover of this fanatical Englishness. But I couldn't begin to TELL you all the things. It's just incredible.” Aaron wondered how on earth Francis had been able to discover and bear witness to so much that was incredible, in a bare two days. But a little gossip, and an addition of lurid imagination will carry you anywhere. “Well now,” said Francis. “What are you doing today?” Aaron was not doing anything in particular. “Then will you come and have dinner with us--?” Francis fixed up the time and the place--a small restaurant at the other end of the town. Then he leaned out of the window. “Fascinating place! Oh, fascinating place!” he said, soliloquy. “And you've got a superb view. Almost better than ours, I think.--Well then, half-past seven. We're meeting a few other people, mostly residents or people staying some time. We're not inviting them. Just dropping in, you know--a little restaurant. We shall see you then! Well then, _a rivederci_ till this evening.--So glad you like Florence! I'm simply loving it--revelling. And the pictures!--Oh--” The party that evening consisted all of men: Francis and Angus, and a writer, James Argyle, and little Algy Constable, and tiny Louis Mee, and deaf Walter Rosen. They all snapped and rattled at one another, and were rather spiteful but rather amusing. Francis and Angus had to leave early. They had another appointment. And James Argyle got quite tipsy, and said to Aaron: “But, my boy, don't let yourself be led astray by the talk of such people as Algy. Beware of them, my boy, if you've a soul to save. If you've a soul to save!” And he swallowed the remains of his litre. Algy's nose trembled a little, and his eyes blinked. “And if you've a soul to LOSE,” he said, “I would warn you very earnestly against Argyle.” Whereupon Algy shut one eye and opened the other so wide, that Aaron was almost scared. “Quite right, my boy. Ha! Ha! Never a truer thing said! Ha-ha-ha.” Argyle laughed his Mephistophelian tipsy laugh. “They'll teach you to save. Never was such a lot of ripe old savers! Save their old trouser-buttons! Go to them if you want to learn to save. Oh, yes, I advise it seriously. You'll lose nothing--not even a reputation.--You may lose a SOUL, of course. But that's a detail, among such a hoard of banknotes and trouser-buttons. Ha-ha! What's a soul, to them--?” “What is it to you, is perhaps the more pertinent question,” said Algy, flapping his eyelids like some crazy owl. “It is you who specialise in the matter of soul, and we who are in need of enlightenment--” “Yes, very true, you ARE! You ARE in need of enlightenment. A set of benighted wise virgins. Ha-ha-ha! That's good, that--benighted wise virgins! What--” Argyle put his red face near to Aaron's, and made a _moue_, narrowing his eyes quizzically as he peered up from under his level grey eyebrows. “Sit in the dark to save the lamp-oil--And all no good to them.--When the bridegroom cometh--! Ha-ha! Good that! Good, my boy!--The bridegroom--” he giggled to himself. “What about the bridegroom, Algy, my boy? Eh? What about him? Better trim your wick, old man, if it's not too late--” “We were talking of souls, not wicks, Argyle,” said Algy. “Same thing. Upon my soul it all amounts to the same thing. Where's the soul in a man that hasn't got a bedfellow--eh?--answer me that! Can't be done you know. Might as well ask a virgin chicken to lay you an egg.” “Then there ought to be a good deal of it about,” said Algy. “Of what? Of soul? There ought to be a good deal of soul about?--Ah, because there's a good deal of--, you mean.--Ah, I wish it were so. I wish it were so. But, believe me, there's far more damned chastity in the world, than anything else. Even in this town.--Call it chastity, if you like. I see nothing in it but sterility. It takes a rat to praise long tails. Impotence set up the praise of chastity--believe me or not--but that's the bottom of it. The virtue is made out of the necessity.--Ha-ha-ha!--Like them! Like them! Ha-ha! Saving their souls! Why they'd save the waste matter of their bodies if they could. Grieves them to part with it.--Ha! ha!--ha!” There was a pause. Argyle was in his cups, which left no more to be said. Algy, quivering and angry, looked disconcertingly round the room as if he were quite calm and collected. The deaf Jewish Rosen was smiling down his nose and saying: “What was that last? I didn't catch that last,” cupping his ear with his hand in the frantic hope that someone would answer. No one paid any heed. “I shall be going,” said Algy, looking round. Then to Aaron he said, “You play the flute, I hear. May we hear you some time?” “Yes,” said Aaron, non-committal. “Well, look here--come to tea tomorrow. I shall have some friends, and Del Torre will play the piano. Come to tea tomorrow, will you?” “Thank you, I will.” “And perhaps you'll bring your flute along.” “Don't you do any such thing, my boy. Make them entertain YOU, for once.--They're always squeezing an entertainment out of somebody--” and Argyle desperately emptied the remains of Algy's wine into his own glass: whilst Algy stood as if listening to something far off, and blinking terribly. “Anyhow,” he said at length, “you'll come, won't you? And bring the flute if you feel like it.” “Don't you take that flute, my boy,” persisted Argyle. “Don't think of such a thing. If they want a concert, let them buy their tickets and go to the Teatro Diana. Or to Marchesa del Torre's Saturday morning. She can afford to treat them.” Algy looked at Argyle, and blinked. “Well,” he said. “I hope you'll get home all right, Argyle.” “Thank you for your courtesy, Algy. Won't you lend me your arm?” As Algy was small and frail, somewhat shaky, and as Argyle was a finely built, heavy man of fifty or more, the slap was unkind. “Afraid I can't tonight. Good-night--” Algy departed, so did little Mee, who had sat with a little delighted disapproval on his tiny, bird-like face, without saying anything. And even the Jew Rosen put away his deaf-machine and began awkwardly to take his leave. His long nose was smiling to itself complacently at all the things Argyle had been saying. When he, too, had gone, Argyle arched his brows at Aaron, saying: “Oh, my dear fellow, what a lot they are!--Little Mee--looking like an innocent little boy. He's over seventy if he's a day. Well over seventy. Well, you don't believe me. Ask his mother--ask his mother. She's ninety-five. Old lady of ninety-five--” Argyle even laughed himself at his own preposterousness. “And then Algy--Algy's not a fool, you know. Oh, he can be most entertaining, most witty, and amusing. But he's out of place here. He should be in Kensington, dandling round the ladies' drawing rooms and making his _mots_. They're rich, you know, the pair of them. Little Mee used to boast that he lived on eleven-and-three-pence a week. Had to, poor chap. But then what does a white mouse like that need? Makes a heavy meal on a cheese-paring. Luck, you know--but of course he's come into money as well. Rich as Croesus, and still lives on nineteen-and-two-pence a week. Though it's nearly double, of course, what it used to be. No wonder he looks anxious. They disapprove of me--oh, quite right, quite right from their own point of view. Where would their money be otherwise? It wouldn't last long if I laid hands on it--” he made a devilish quizzing face. “But you know, they get on my nerves. Little old maids, you know, little old maids. I'm sure I'm surprised at their patience with me.--But when people are patient with you, you want to spit gall at them. Don't you? Ha-ha-ha! Poor old Algy.--Did I lay it on him tonight, or did I miss him?” “I think you got him,” said Aaron. “He'll never forgive me. Depend on it, he'll never forgive me. Ha-ha! I like to be unforgiven. It adds ZEST to one's intercourse with people, to know that they'll never forgive one. Ha-ha-ha! Little old maids, who do their knitting with their tongues. Poor old Algy--he drops his stitches now. Ha-ha-ha!--Must be eighty, I should say.” Aaron laughed. He had never met a man like Argyle before--and he could not help being charmed. The other man had a certain wicked whimsicality that was very attractive, when levelled against someone else, and not against oneself. He must have been very handsome in his day, with his natural dignity, and his clean-shaven strong square face. But now his face was all red and softened and inflamed, his eyes had gone small and wicked under his bushy grey brows. Still he had a presence. And his grey hair, almost gone white, was still handsome. “And what are you going to do in Florence?” asked Argyle. Aaron explained. “Well,” said Argyle. “Make what you can out of them, and then go. Go before they have time to do the dirty on you. If they think you want anything from them, they'll treat you like a dog, like a dog. Oh, they're very frightened of anybody who wants anything of them: frightened to death. I see nothing of them.--Live by myself--see nobody. Can't stand it, you know: their silly little teaparties--simply can't stand it. No, I live alone--and shall die alone.--At least, I sincerely hope so. I should be sorry to have any of them hanging round.” The restaurant was empty, the pale, malarial waiter--he had of course contracted malaria during the war--was looking purple round the eyes. But Argyle callously sat on. Aaron therefore rose to his feet. “Oh, I'm coming, I'm coming,” said Argyle. He got unsteadily to his feet. The waiter helped him on with his coat: and he put a disreputable-looking little curly hat on his head. Then he took his stick. “Don't look at my appearance, my dear fellow,” said Argyle. “I am frayed at the wrists--look here!” He showed the cuffs of his overcoat, just frayed through. “I've got a trunkful of clothes in London, if only somebody would bring it out to me.--Ready then! _Avanti!_” And so they passed out into the still rainy street. Argyle lived in the very centre of the town: in the Cathedral Square. Aaron left him at his hotel door. “But come and see me,” said Argyle. “Call for me at twelve o'clock--or just before twelve--and let us have luncheon together. What! Is that all right?--Yes, come just before twelve.--When?--Tomorrow? Tomorrow morning? Will you come tomorrow?” Aaron said he would on Monday. “Monday, eh! You say Monday! Very well then. Don't you forget now. Don't you forget. For I've a memory like a vice. _I_ shan't forget.--Just before twelve then. And come right up. I'm right under the roof. In Paradise, as the porter always says. _Siamo nel paradiso_. But he's a _cretin_. As near Paradise as I care for, for it's devilish hot in summer, and damned cold in winter. Don't you forget now--Monday, twelve o'clock.” And Argyle pinched Aaron's arm fast, then went unsteadily up the steps to his hotel door. The next day at Algy's there was a crowd Algy had a very pleasant flat indeed, kept more scrupulously neat and finicking than ever any woman's flat was kept. So today, with its bowls of flowers and its pictures and books and old furniture, and Algy, very nicely dressed, fluttering and blinking and making really a charming host, it was all very delightful to the little mob of visitors. They were a curious lot, it is true: everybody rather exceptional. Which though it may be startling, is so very much better fun than everybody all alike. Aaron talked to an old, old Italian elegant in side-curls, who peeled off his grey gloves and studied his formalities with a delightful Mid-Victorian dash, and told stories about a _plaint_ which Lady Surry had against Lord Marsh, and was quite incomprehensible. Out rolled the English words, like plums out of a burst bag, and all completely unintelligible. But the old _beau_ was supremely satisfied. He loved talking English, and holding his listeners spell-bound. Next to Aaron on the sofa sat the Marchesa del Torre, an American woman from the Southern States, who had lived most of her life in Europe. She was about forty years of age, handsome, well-dressed, and quiet in the buzz of the tea-party. It was evident she was one of Algy's lionesses. Now she sat by Aaron, eating nothing, but taking a cup of tea and keeping still. She seemed sad--or not well perhaps. Her eyes were heavy. But she was very carefully made up, and very well dressed, though simply: and sitting there, full-bosomed, rather sad, remote-seeming, she suggested to Aaron a modern Cleopatra brooding, Anthony-less. Her husband, the Marchese, was a little intense Italian in a colonel's grey uniform, cavalry, leather gaiters. He had blue eyes, his hair was cut very short, his head looked hard and rather military: he would have been taken for an Austrian officer, or even a German, had it not been for the peculiar Italian sprightliness and touch of grimace in his mobile countenance. He was rather like a gnome--not ugly, but odd. Now he came and stood opposite to Signor di Lanti, and quizzed him in Italian. But it was evident, in quizzing the old buck, the little Marchese was hovering near his wife, in ear-shot. Algy came up with cigarettes, and she at once began to smoke, with that peculiar heavy intensity of a nervous woman. Aaron did not say anything--did not know what to say. He was peculiarly conscious of the woman sitting next to him, her arm near his. She smoked heavily, in silence, as if abstracted, a sort of cloud on her level, dark brows. Her hair was dark, but a softish brown, not black, and her skin was fair. Her bosom would be white.--Why Aaron should have had this thought, he could not for the life of him say. Manfredi, her husband, rolled his blue eyes and grimaced as he laughed at old Lanti. But it was obvious that his attention was diverted sideways, towards his wife. Aaron, who was tired of nursing a tea-cup, placed in on a table and resumed his seat in silence. But suddenly the little Marchese whipped out his cigarette-case, and making a little bow, presented it to Aaron, saying: “Won't you smoke?” “Thank you,” said Aaron. “Turkish that side--Virginia there--you see.” “Thank you, Turkish,” said Aaron. The little officer in his dove-grey and yellow uniform snapped his box shut again, and presented a light. “You are new in Florence?” he said, as he presented the match. “Four days,” said Aaron. “And I hear you are musical.” “I play the flute--no more.” “Ah, yes--but then you play it as an artist, not as an accomplishment.” “But how do you know?” laughed Aaron. “I was told so--and I believe it.” “That's nice of you, anyhow--But you are a musician too.” “Yes--we are both musicians--my wife and I.” Manfredi looked at his wife. She flicked the ash off her cigarette. “What sort?” said Aaron. “Why, how do you mean, what sort? We are dilettanti, I suppose.” “No--what is your instrument? The piano?” “Yes--the pianoforte. And my wife sings. But we are very much out of practice. I have been at the war four years, and we have had our home in Paris. My wife was in Paris, she did not wish to stay in Italy alone. And so--you see--everything goes--” “But you will begin again?” “Yes. We have begun already. We have music on Saturday mornings. Next Saturday a string quartette, and violin solos by a young Florentine woman--a friend--very good indeed, daughter of our Professor Tortoli, who composes--as you may know--” “Yes,” said Aaron. “Would you care to come and hear--?” “Awfully nice if you would--” suddenly said the wife, quite simply, as if she had merely been tired, and not talking before. “I should like to very much--” “Do come then.” While they were making the arrangements, Algy came up in his blandest manner. “Now Marchesa--might we hope for a song?” “No--I don't sing any more,” came the slow, contralto reply. “Oh, but you can't mean you say that deliberately--” “Yes, quite deliberately--” She threw away her cigarette and opened her little gold case to take another. “But what can have brought you to such a disastrous decision?” “I can't say,” she replied, with a little laugh. “The war, probably.” “Oh, but don't let the war deprive us of this, as of everything else.” “Can't be helped,” she said. “I have no choice in the matter. The bird has flown--” She spoke with a certain heavy languor. “You mean the bird of your voice? Oh, but that is quite impossible. One can hear it calling out of the leaves every time you speak.” “I'm afraid you can't get him to do any more than call out of the leaves.” “But--but--pardon me--is it because you don't intend there should be any more song? Is that your intention?” “That I couldn't say,” said the Marchesa, smoking, smoking. “Yes,” said Manfredi. “At the present time it is because she WILL not--not because she cannot. It is her will, as you say.” “Dear me! Dear me!” said Algy. “But this is really another disaster added to the war list.--But--but--will none of us ever be able to persuade you?” He smiled half cajoling, half pathetic, with a prodigious flapping of his eyes. “I don't know,” said she. “That will be as it must be.” “Then can't we say it must be SONG once more?” To this sally she merely laughed, and pressed out her half-smoked cigarette. “How very disappointing! How very cruel of--of fate--and the war--and--and all the sum total of evils,” said Algy. “Perhaps--” here the little and piquant host turned to Aaron. “Perhaps Mr. Sisson, your flute might call out the bird of song. As thrushes call each other into challenge, you know. Don't you think that is very probable?” “I have no idea,” said Aaron. “But you, Marchesa. Won't you give us hope that it might be so?” “I've no idea, either,” said she. “But I should very much like to hear Mr. Sisson's flute. It's an instrument I like extremely.” “There now. You see you may work the miracle, Mr. Sisson. Won't you play to us?” “I'm afraid I didn't bring my flute along,” said Aaron “I didn't want to arrive with a little bag.” “Quite!” said Algy. “What a pity it wouldn't go in your pocket.” “Not music and all,” said Aaron. “Dear me! What a _comble_ of disappointment. I never felt so strongly, Marchesa, that the old life and the old world had collapsed.--Really--I shall soon have to try to give up being cheerful at all.” “Don't do that,” said the Marchesa. “It isn't worth the effort.” “Ah! I'm glad you find it so. Then I have hope.” She merely smiled, indifferent. The teaparty began to break up--Aaron found himself going down the stairs with the Marchesa and her husband. They descended all three in silence, husband and wife in front. Once outside the door, the husband asked: “How shall we go home, dear? Tram or carriage--?” It was evident he was economical. “Walk,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Aaron. “We are all going the same way, I believe.” Aaron said where he lived. They were just across the river. And so all three proceeded to walk through the town. “You are sure it won't be too much for you--too far?” said the little officer, taking his wife's arm solicitously. She was taller than he. But he was a spirited fellow. “No, I feel like walking.” “So long as you don't have to pay for it afterwards.” Aaron gathered that she was not well. Yet she did not look ill--unless it were nerves. She had that peculiar heavy remote quality of pre-occupation and neurosis. The streets of Florence were very full this Sunday evening, almost impassable, crowded particularly with gangs of grey-green soldiers. The three made their way brokenly, and with difficulty. The Italian was in a constant state of returning salutes. The grey-green, sturdy, unsoldierly soldiers looked at the woman as she passed. “I am sure you had better take a carriage,” said Manfredi. “No--I don't mind it.” “Do you feel at home in Florence?” Aaron asked her. “Yes--as much as anywhere. Oh, yes--quite at home.” “Do you like it as well as anywhere?” he asked. “Yes--for a time. Paris for the most part.” “Never America?” “No, never America. I came when I was quite a little girl to Europe--Madrid--Constantinople--Paris. I hardly knew America at all.” Aaron remembered that Francis had told him, the Marchesa's father had been ambassador to Paris. “So you feel you have no country of your own?” “I have Italy. I am Italian now, you know.” Aaron wondered why she spoke so muted, so numbed. Manfredi seemed really attached to her--and she to him. They were so simple with one another. They came towards the bridge where they should part. “Won't you come and have a cocktail?” she said. “Now?” said Aaron. “Yes. This is the right time for a cocktail. What time is it, Manfredi?” “Half past six. Do come and have one with us,” said the Italian. “We always take one about this time.” Aaron continued with them over the bridge. They had the first floor of an old palazzo opposite, a little way up the hill. A man-servant opened the door. “If only it will be warm,” she said. “The apartment is almost impossible to keep warm. We will sit in the little room.” Aaron found himself in a quite warm room with shaded lights and a mixture of old Italian stiffness and deep soft modern comfort. The Marchesa went away to take off her wraps, and the Marchese chatted with Aaron. The little officer was amiable and kind, and it was evident he liked his guest. “Would you like to see the room where we have music?” he said. “It is a fine room for the purpose--we used before the war to have music every Saturday morning, from ten to twelve: and all friends might come. Usually we had fifteen or twenty people. Now we are starting again. I myself enjoy it so much. I am afraid my wife isn't so enthusiastic as she used to be. I wish something would rouse her up, you know. The war seemed to take her life away. Here in Florence are so many amateurs. Very good indeed. We can have very good chamber-music indeed. I hope it will cheer her up and make her quite herself again. I was away for such long periods, at the front.--And it was not good for her to be alone.--I am hoping now all will be better.” So saying, the little, odd officer switched on the lights of the long salon. It was a handsome room in the Italian mode of the Empire period--beautiful old faded tapestry panels--reddish--and some ormolu furniture--and other things mixed in--rather conglomerate, but pleasing, all the more pleasing. It was big, not too empty, and seemed to belong to human life, not to show and shut-upedness. The host was happy showing it. “Of course the flat in Paris is more luxurious than this,” he said. “But I prefer this. I prefer it here.” There was a certain wistfulness as he looked round, then began to switch off the lights. They returned to the little salotta. The Marchesa was seated in a low chair. She wore a very thin white blouse, that showed her arms and her throat. She was a full-breasted, soft-skinned woman, though not stout. “Make the cocktails then, Manfredi,” she said. “Do you find this room very cold?” she asked of Aaron. “Not a bit cold,” he said. “The stove goes all the time,” she said, “but without much effect.” “You wear such thin clothes,” he said. “Ah, no, the stove should give heat enough. Do sit down. Will you smoke? There are cigarettes--and cigars, if you prefer them.” “No, I've got my own, thanks.” She took her own cigarette from her gold case. “It is a fine room, for music, the big room,” said he. “Yes, quite. Would you like to play for us some time, do you think?” “Do you want me to? I mean does it interest you?” “What--the flute?” “No--music altogether--” “Music altogether--! Well! I used to love it. Now--I'm not sure. Manfredi lives for it, almost.” “For that and nothing else?” asked Aaron. “No, no! No, no! Other things as well.” “But you don't like it much any more?” “I don't know. Perhaps I don't. I'm not sure.” “You don't look forward to the Saturday mornings?” he asked. “Perhaps I don't--but for Manfredi's sake, of course, I do. But for his sake more than my own, I admit. And I think he knows it.” “A crowd of people in one's house--” said Aaron. “Yes, the people. But it's not only that. It's the music itself--I think I can't stand it any more. I don't know.” “Too emotional? Too much feeling for you?” “Yes, perhaps. But no. What I can't stand is chords, you know: harmonies. A number of sounds all sounding together. It just makes me ill. It makes me feel so sick.” “What--do you want discords?--dissonances?” “No--they are nearly as bad. No, it's just when any number of musical notes, different notes, come together, harmonies or discords. Even a single chord struck on the piano. It makes me feel sick. I just feel as if I should retch. Isn't it strange? Of course, I don't tell Manfredi. It would be too cruel to him. It would cut his life in two.” “But then why do you have the music--the Saturdays--then?” “Oh, I just keep out of the way as much as possible. I'm sure you feel there is something wrong with me, that I take it as I do,” she added, as if anxious: but half ironical. “No--I was just wondering--I believe I feel something the same myself. I know orchestra makes me blind with hate or I don't know what. But I want to throw bombs.” “There now. It does that to me, too. Only now it has fairly got me down, and I feel nothing but helpless nausea. You know, like when you are seasick.” Her dark-blue, heavy, haunted-looking eyes were resting on him as if she hoped for something. He watched her face steadily, a curious intelligence flickering on his own. “Yes,” he said. “I understand it. And I know, at the bottom, I'm like that. But I keep myself from realising, don't you know? Else perhaps, where should I be? Because I make my life and my living at it, as well.” “At music! Do you! But how bad for you. But perhaps the flute is different. I have a feeling that it is. I can think of one single pipe-note--yes, I can think of it quite, quite calmly. And I can't even think of the piano, or of the violin with its tremolo, or of orchestra, or of a string quartette--or even a military band--I can't think of it without a shudder. I can only bear drum-and-fife. Isn't it crazy of me--but from the other, from what we call music proper, I've endured too much. But bring your flute one day. Bring it, will you? And let me hear it quite alone. Quite, quite alone. I think it might do me an awful lot of good. I do, really. I can imagine it.” She closed her eyes and her strange, sing-song lapsing voice came to an end. She spoke almost like one in a trance--or a sleep-walker. “I've got it now in my overcoat pocket,” he said, “if you like.” “Have you? Yes!” She was never hurried: always slow and resonant, so that the echoes of her voice seemed to linger. “Yes--do get it. Do get it. And play in the other room--quite--quite without accompaniment. Do--and try me.” “And you will tell me what you feel?” “Yes.” Aaron went out to his overcoat. When he returned with his flute, which he was screwing together, Manfredi had come with the tray and the three cocktails. The Marchesa took her glass. “Listen, Manfredi,” she said. “Mr. Sisson is going to play, quite alone in the sala. And I am going to sit here and listen.” “Very well,” said Manfredi. “Drink your cocktail first. Are you going to play without music?” “Yes,” said Aaron. “I'll just put on the lights for you.” “No--leave it dark. Enough light will come in from here.” “Sure?” said Manfredi. “Yes.” The little soldier was an intruder at the moment. Both the others felt it so. But they bore him no grudge. They knew it was they who were exceptional, not he. Aaron swallowed his drink, and looked towards the door. “Sit down, Manfredi. Sit still,” said the Marchesa. “Won't you let me try some accompaniment?” said the soldier. “No. I shall just play a little thing from memory,” said Aaron. “Sit down, dear. Sit down,” said the Marchesa to her husband. He seated himself obediently. The flash of bright yellow on the grey of his uniform seemed to make him like a chaffinch or a gnome. Aaron retired to the other room, and waited awhile, to get back the spell which connected him with the woman, and gave the two of them this strange isolation, beyond the bounds of life, as it seemed. He caught it again. And there, in the darkness of the big room, he put his flute to his lips, and began to play. It was a clear, sharp, lilted run-and-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody, a bright, quick sound of pure animation, a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing. It was like a bird's singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning--a ripple and poise of animate sound. But it was unlike a bird's singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop. A nightingale is rather like that--a wild sound. To read all the human pathos into nightingales' singing is nonsense. A wild, savage, non-human lurch and squander of sound, beautiful, but entirely unaesthetic. What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer. After a little while, when he entered the smaller room again, the Marchesa looked full into his face. “Good!” she said. “Good!” And a gleam almost of happiness seemed to light her up. She seemed like one who had been kept in a horrible enchanted castle--for years and years. Oh, a horrible enchanted castle, with wet walls of emotions and ponderous chains of feelings and a ghastly atmosphere of must-be. She felt she had seen through the opening door a crack of sunshine, and thin, pure, light outside air, outside, beyond this dank and beastly dungeon of feelings and moral necessity. Ugh!--she shuddered convulsively at what had been. She looked at her little husband. Chains of necessity all round him: a little jailor. Yet she was fond of him. If only he would throw away the castle keys. He was a little gnome. What did he clutch the castle-keys so tight for? Aaron looked at her. He knew that they understood one another, he and she. Without any moral necessity or any other necessity. Outside--they had got outside the castle of so-called human life. Outside the horrible, stinking human castle Of life. A bit of true, limpid freedom. Just a glimpse. “Charming!” said the Marchese. “Truly charming! But what was it you played?” Aaron told him. “But truly delightful. I say, won't you play for us one of these Saturdays? And won't you let me take the accompaniment? I should be charmed, charmed if you would.” “All right,” said Aaron. “Do drink another cocktail,” said his hostess. He did so. And then he rose to leave. “Will you stay to dinner?” said the Marchesa. “We have two people coming--two Italian relatives of my husband. But--” No, Aaron declined to stay to dinner. “Then won't you come on--let me see--on Wednesday? Do come on Wednesday. We are alone. And do bring the flute. Come at half-past six, as today, will you? Yes?” Aaron promised--and then he found himself in the street. It was half-past seven. Instead of returning straight home, he crossed the Ponte Vecchio and walked straight into the crowd. The night was fine now. He had his overcoat over his arm, and in a sort of trance or frenzy, whirled away by his evening's experience, and by the woman, he strode swiftly forward, hardly heeding anything, but rushing blindly on through all the crowd, carried away by his own feelings, as much as if he had been alone, and all these many people merely trees. Leaving the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele a gang of soldiers suddenly rushed round him, buffeting him in one direction, whilst another gang, swinging round the corner, threw him back helpless again into the midst of the first gang. For some moments he struggled among the rude, brutal little mob of grey-green coarse uniforms that smelt so strong of soldiers. Then, irritated, he found himself free again, shaking himself and passing on towards the cathedral. Irritated, he now put on his overcoat and buttoned it to the throat, closing himself in, as it were, from the brutal insolence of the Sunday night mob of men. Before, he had been walking through them in a rush of naked feeling, all exposed to their tender mercies. He now gathered himself together. As he was going home, suddenly, just as he was passing the Bargello, he stopped. He stopped, and put his hand to his breast pocket. His letter-case was gone. He had been robbed. It was as if lightning ran through him at that moment, as if a fluid electricity rushed down his limbs, through the sluice of his knees, and out at his feet, leaving him standing there almost unconscious. For a moment unconscious and superconscious he stood there. He had been robbed. They had put their hand in his breast and robbed him. If they had stabbed him, it could hardly have had a greater effect on him. And he had known it. He had known it. When the soldiers jostled him so evilly they robbed him. And he knew it. He had known it as if it were fate. Even as if it were fated beforehand. Feeling quite weak and faint, as if he had really been struck by some evil electric fluid, he walked on. And as soon as he began to walk, he began to reason. Perhaps his letter-case was in his other coat. Perhaps he had not had it with him at all. Perhaps he was feeling all this, just for nothing. Perhaps it was all folly. He hurried forward. He wanted to make sure. He wanted relief. It was as if the power of evil had suddenly seized him and thrown him, and he wanted to say it was not so, that he had imagined it all, conjured it up. He did not want to admit the power of evil--particularly at that moment. For surely a very ugly evil spirit had struck him, in the midst of that gang of Italian soldiers. He knew it--it had pierced him. It had _got_ him. But he wanted to say it was not so. Reaching the house, he hastened upwards to his far-off, lonely room, through the dark corridors. Once in his own apartment, he shut the door and switched on the light, a sensation like fear at his heart. Then he searched his other pockets. He looked everywhere. In vain. In vain, truly enough. For he _knew_ the thing was stolen. He had known it all along. The soldiers had deliberately plotted, had deliberately rushed him and taken his purse. They must have watched him previously. They must have grinned, and jeered at him. He sat down in a chair, to recover from the shock. The pocket-book contained four hundred francs, three one-pound notes, and various letters and private effects. Well, these were lost. But it was not so much the loss as the assault on his person that caused him to feel so stricken. He felt the jeering, gibing blows they had given as they jostled him. And now he sat, weak in every limb, and said to himself: “Yes--and if I hadn't rushed along so full of feeling: if I hadn't exposed myself: if I hadn't got worked up with the Marchesa, and then rushed all kindled through the streets, without reserve, it would never have happened. I gave myself away: and there was someone ready to snatch what I gave. I gave myself away. It is my own fault. I should have been on my guard. I should be always on my guard: always, always. With God and the devil both, I should be on my guard. Godly or devilish, I should hold fast to my reserve and keep on the watch. And if I don't, I deserve what I get.” But still he sat in his chair in his bedroom, dazed. One part of his soul was saying emphatically: It serves you right. It is nothing but right. It serves everybody right who rushes enkindled through the street, and trusts implicitly in mankind and in the life-spirit, as if mankind and the life-spirit were a playground for enkindled individuals. It serves you right. You have paid about twelve pounds sterling for your lesson. Fool, you might have known beforehand, and then you needn't have paid at all. You can ill afford twelve pounds sterling, you fool. But since paid you have, then mind, mind the lesson is learned. Never again. Never expose yourself again. Never again absolute trust. It is a blasphemy against life, is absolute trust. Has a wild creature ever absolute trust? It minds itself. Sleeping or waking it is on its guard. And so must you be, or you'll go under. Sleeping or waking, man or woman, God or the devil, keep your guard over yourself. Keep your guard over yourself, lest worse befall you. No man is robbed unless he incites a robber. No man is murdered unless he attracts a murderer. Then be not robbed: it lies within your own power. And be not murdered. Or if you are, you deserve it. Keep your guard over yourself, now, always and forever. Yes, against God quite as hard as against the devil. He's fully as dangerous to you.... Thus thinking, not in his mind but in his soul, his active, living soul, he gathered his equanimity once more, and accepted the fact. So he rose and tidied himself for dinner. His face was now set, and still. His heart also was still--and fearless. Because its sentinel was stationed. Stationed, stationed for ever. And Aaron never forgot. After this, it became essential to him to feel that the sentinel stood guard in his own heart. He felt a strange unease the moment he was off his guard. Asleep or awake, in the midst of the deepest passion or the suddenest love, or in the throes of greatest excitement or bewilderment, somewhere, some corner of himself was awake to the fact that the sentinel of the soul must not sleep, no, never, not for one instant. CHAPTER XVII. HIGH UP OVER THE CATHEDRAL SQUARE Aaron and Lilly sat in Argyle's little loggia, high up under the eaves of the small hotel, a sort of long attic-terrace just under the roof, where no one would have suspected it. It was level with the grey conical roof of the Baptistery. Here sat Aaron and Lilly in the afternoon, in the last of the lovely autumn sunshine. Below, the square was already cold in shadow, the pink and white and green Baptistery rose lantern-shaped as from some sea-shore, cool, cold and wan now the sun was gone. Black figures, innumerable black figures, curious because they were all on end, up on end--Aaron could not say why he expected them to be horizontal--little black figures upon end, like fishes that swim on their tails, wiggled endlessly across the piazza, little carriages on natural all-fours rattled tinily across, the yellow little tram-cars, like dogs slipped round the corner. The balcony was so high up, that the sound was ineffectual. The upper space, above the houses, was nearer than the under-currents of the noisy town. Sunlight, lovely full sunlight, lingered warm and still on the balcony. It caught the facade of the cathedral sideways, like the tips of a flower, and sideways lit up the stem of Giotto's tower, like a lily stem, or a long, lovely pale pink and white and green pistil of the lily of the cathedral. Florence, the flowery town. Firenze--Fiorenze--the flowery town: the red lilies. The Fiorentini, the flower-souled. Flowers with good roots in the mud and muck, as should be: and fearless blossoms in air, like the cathedral and the tower and the David. “I love it,” said Lilly. “I love this place, I love the cathedral and the tower. I love its pinkness and its paleness. The Gothic souls find fault with it, and say it is gimcrack and tawdry and cheap. But I love it, it is delicate and rosy, and the dark stripes are as they should be, like the tiger marks on a pink lily. It's a lily, not a rose; a pinky white lily with dark tigery marks. And heavy, too, in its own substance: earth-substance, risen from earth into the air: and never forgetting the dark, black-fierce earth--I reckon here men for a moment were themselves, as a plant in flower is for the moment completely itself. Then it goes off. As Florence has gone off. No flowers now. But it HAS flowered. And I don't see why a race should be like an aloe tree, flower once and die. Why should it? Why not flower again? Why not?” “If it's going to, it will,” said Aaron. “Our deciding about it won't alter it.” “The decision is part of the business.” Here they were interrupted by Argyle, who put his head through one of the windows. He had flecks of lather on his reddened face. “Do you think you're wise now,” he said, “to sit in that sun?” “In November?” laughed Lilly. “Always fear the sun when there's an 'r' in the month,” said Argyle. “Always fear it 'r' or no 'r,' _I_ say. I'm frightened of it. I've been in the South, I know what it is. I tell you I'm frightened of it. But if you think you can stand it--well--” “It won't last much longer, anyhow,” said Lilly. “Too long for me, my boy. I'm a shady bird, in all senses of the word, in all senses of the word.--Now are you comfortable? What? Have another cushion? A rug for your knees? You're quite sure now? Well, wait just one moment till the waiter brings up a syphon, and you shall have a whiskey and soda. Precious--oh, yes, very precious these days--like drinking gold. Thirty-five lire a bottle, my boy!” Argyle pulled a long face, and made a noise with his lips. “But I had this bottle given me, and luckily you've come while there's a drop left. Very glad you have! Very glad you have.” Here he poked a little table through the window, and put a bottle and two glasses, one a tooth-glass, upon it. Then he withdrew again to finish shaving. The waiter presently hobbled up with the syphon and third glass. Argyle pushed his head through the window, that was only a little higher than the balcony. He was soon neatly shaved, and was brushing his hair. “Go ahead, my boys, go ahead with that whiskey!” he said. “We'll wait for you,” said Lilly. “No, no, don't think of it. However, if you will, I shall be one minute only--one minute only. I'll put on the water for the tea now. Oh, damned bad methylated spirit they sell now! And six francs a litre! Six francs a litre! I don't know what I'm going to do, the air I breathe costs money nowadays--Just one moment and I'll be with you! Just one moment--” In a very little while he came from the tiny attic bedroom, through the tiniest cupboard of a sitting-room under the eaves, where his books were, and where he had hung his old red India tapestries--or silk embroideries--and he emerged there up above the world on the loggia. “Now then--_siamo nel paradiso_, eh? Paradisal enough for you, is it?” “The devil looking over Lincoln,” said Lilly laughing, glancing up into Argyle's face. “The devil looking over Florence would feel sad,” said Argyle. “The place is fast growing respectable--Oh, piety makes the devil chuckle. But respectability, my boy, argues a serious diminution of spunk. And when the spunk diminishes we-ell--it's enough to make the most sturdy devil look sick. What? No doubt about it, no doubt whatever--There--!” he had just finished settling his tie and buttoning his waistcoat. “How do I look, eh? Presentable?--I've just had this suit turned. Clever little tailor across the way there. But he charged me a hundred and twenty francs.” Argyle pulled a face, and made the little trumping noise with his lips. “However--not bad, is it?--He had to let in a bit at the back of the waistcoat, and a gusset, my boy, a gusset--in the trousers back. Seems I've grown in the arsal region. Well, well, might do worse.--Is it all right?” Lilly eyed the suit. “Very nice. Very nice indeed. Such a good cloth! That makes all the difference.” “Oh, my dear fellow, all the difference! This suit is eleven years old--eleven years old. But beautiful English cloth--before the war, before the war!” “It looks quite wonderfully expensive and smart now,” said Lilly. “Expensive and smart, eh! Ha-ha-ha! Well, it cost me a hundred and twenty francs to have it turned, and I found that expensive enough. Well, now, come--” here Argyle's voice took on a new gay cheer. “A whiskey and soda, Lilly? Say when! Oh, nonsense, nonsense! You're going to have double that. You're no lily of the valley here, remember. Not with me. Not likely. _Siamo nel paradiso_, remember.” “But why should we drink your whiskey? Tea would do for us just as well.” “Not likely! Not likely! When I have the pleasure of your company, my boy, we drink a glass of something, unless I am utterly stripped. Say when, Aaron.” “When,” said Aaron. Argyle at last seated himself heavily in a small chair. The sun had left the loggia, but was glowing still on Giotto's tower and the top of the cathedral facade, and on the remoter great red-tiled dome. “Look at my little red monthly rose,” said Argyle. “Wonderful little fellow! I wouldn't have anything happen to him for the world. Oh, a bacchic little chap. I made Pasquale wear a wreath of them on his hair. Very becoming they were, very.--Oh, I've had a charming show of flowers. Wonderful creatures sunflowers are.” They got up and put their heads over the balcony, looking down on the square below. “Oh, great fun, great fun.--Yes, I had a charming show of flowers, charming.--Zinnias, petunias, ranunculus, sunflowers, white stocks--oh, charming. Look at that bit of honeysuckle. You see the berries where his flowers were! Delicious scent, I assure you.” Under the little balcony wall Argyle had put square red-tiled pots, all round, and in these still bloomed a few pansies and asters, whilst in a corner a monthly rose hung flowers like round blood-drops. Argyle was as tidy and scrupulous in his tiny rooms and his balcony as if he were a first-rate sea-man on a yacht. Lilly remarked on this. “Do you see signs of the old maid coming out in me? Oh, I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it. We all end that way. Age makes old maids of us all. And Tanny is all right, you say? Bring her to see me. Why didn't she come today?” “You know you don't like people unless you expect them.” “Oh, but my dear fellow!--You and Tanny; you'd be welcome if you came at my busiest moment. Of course you would. I'd be glad to see you if you interrupted me at any crucial moment.--I am alone now till August. Then we shall go away together somewhere. But you and Tanny; why, there's the world, and there's Lilly: that's how I put it, my boy.” “All right, Argyle.--Hoflichkeiten.” “What? Gar keine Hoflichkeiten. Wahrhaftiger Kerl bin ich.--When am I going to see Tanny? When are you coming to dine with me?” “After you've dined with us--say the day after tomorrow.” “Right you are. Delighted--. Let me look if that water's boiling.” He got up and poked half himself inside the bedroom. “Not yet. Damned filthy methylated spirit they sell.” “Look,” said Lilly. “There's Del Torre!” “Like some sort of midge, in that damned grey-and-yellow uniform. I can't stand it, I tell you. I can't stand the sight of any more of these uniforms. Like a blight on the human landscape. Like a blight. Like green-flies on rose-trees, smother-flies. Europe's got the smother-fly in these infernal shoddy militarists.” “Del Torre's coming out of it as soon as he can,” said Lilly. “I should think so, too.” “I like him myself--very much. Look, he's seen us! He wants to come up, Argyle.” “What, in that uniform! I'll see him in his grandmother's crinoline first.” “Don't be fanatical, it's bad taste. Let him come up a minute.” “Not for my sake. But for yours, he shall,” Argyle stood at the parapet of the balcony and waved his arm. “Yes, come up,” he said, “come up, you little mistkafer--what the Americans call a bug. Come up and be damned.” Of course Del Torre was too far off to hear this exhortation. Lilly also waved to him--and watched him pass into the doorway far below. “I'll rinse one of these glasses for him,” said Argyle. The Marchese's step was heard on the stone stairs: then his knock. “Come in! Come in!” cried Argyle from the bedroom, where he was rinsing the glass. The Marchese entered, grinning with his curious, half courteous greeting. “Go through--go through,” cried Argyle. “Go on to the loggia--and mind your head. Good heavens, mind your head in that doorway.” The Marchese just missed the top of the doorway as he climbed the abrupt steps on to the loggia.--There he greeted Lilly and Aaron with hearty handshakes. “Very glad to see you--very glad, indeed!” he cried, grinning with excited courtesy and pleasure, and covering Lilly's hand with both his own gloved hands. “When did you come to Florence?” There was a little explanation. Argyle shoved the last chair--it was a luggage stool--through the window. “All I can do for you in the way of a chair,” he said. “Ah, that is all right,” said the Marchese. “Well, it is very nice up here--and very nice company. Of the very best, the very best in Florence.” “The highest, anyhow,” said Argyle grimly, as he entered with the glass. “Have a whiskey and soda, Del Torre. It's the bottom of the bottle, as you see.” “The bottom of the bottle! Then I start with the tail-end, yes!” He stretched his blue eyes so that the whites showed all round, and grinned a wide, gnome-like grin. “You made that start long ago, my dear fellow. Don't play the _ingenue_ with me, you know it won't work. Say when, my man, say when!” “Yes, when,” said Del Torre. “When did I make that start, then?” “At some unmentionably young age. Chickens such as you soon learn to cheep.” “Chickens such as I soon learn to cheap,” repeated Del Torre, pleased with the verbal play. “What is cheap, please? What is TO CHEAP?” “Cheep! Cheep!” squeaked Argyle, making a face at the little Italian, who was perched on one strap of the luggage-stool. “It's what chickens say when they're poking their little noses into new adventures--naughty ones.” “Are chickens naughty? Oh! I thought they could only be good!” “Featherless chickens like yourself, my boy.” “Oh, as for featherless--then there is no saying what they will do.--” And here the Marchese turned away from Argyle with the inevitable question to Lilly: “Well, and how long will you stay in Florence?” Lilly did not know: but he was not leaving immediately. “Good! Then you will come and see us at once....” Argyle rose once more, and went to make the tea. He shoved a lump of cake--or rather panetone, good currant loaf--through the window, with a knife to cut it. “Help yourselves to the panetone,” he said. “Eat it up. The tea is coming at once. You'll have to drink it in your glasses, there's only one old cup.” The Marchese cut the cake, and offered pieces. The two men took and ate. “So you have already found Mr. Sisson!” said Del Torre to Lilly. “Ran straight into him in the Via Nazionale,” said Lilly. “Oh, one always runs into everybody in Florence. We are all already acquainted: also with the flute. That is a great pleasure.” “So I think.--Does your wife like it, too?” “Very much, indeed! She is quite _eprise_. I, too, shall have to learn to play it.” “And run the risk of spoiling the shape of your mouth--like Alcibiades.” “Is there a risk? Yes! Then I shan't play it. My mouth is too beautiful.--But Mr. Sisson has not spoilt his mouth.” “Not yet,” said Lilly. “Give him time.” “Is he also afraid--like Alcibiades?” “Are you, Aaron?” said Lilly. “What?” “Afraid of spoiling your beauty by screwing your mouth to the flute?” “I look a fool, do I, when I'm playing?” said Aaron. “Only the least little bit in the world,” said Lilly. “The way you prance your head, you know, like a horse.” “Ah, well,” said Aaron. “I've nothing to lose.” “And were you surprised, Lilly, to find your friend here?” asked Del Torre. “I ought to have been. But I wasn't really.” “Then you expected him?” “No. It came naturally, though.--But why did you come, Aaron? What exactly brought you?” “Accident,” said Aaron. “Ah, no! No! There is no such thing as accident,” said the Italian. “A man is drawn by his fate, where he goes.” “You are right,” said Argyle, who came now with the teapot. “A man is drawn--or driven. Driven, I've found it. Ah, my dear fellow, what is life but a search for a friend? A search for a friend--that sums it up.” “Or a lover,” said the Marchese, grinning. “Same thing. Same thing. My hair is white--but that is the sum of my whole experience. The search for a friend.” There was something at once real and sentimental in Argyle's tone. “And never finding?” said Lilly, laughing. “Oh, what would you? Often finding. Often finding. And losing, of course.--A life's history. Give me your glass. Miserable tea, but nobody has sent me any from England--” “And you will go on till you die, Argyle?” said Lilly. “Always seeking a friend--and always a new one?” “If I lose the friend I've got. Ah, my dear fellow, in that case I shall go on seeking. I hope so, I assure you. Something will be very wrong with me, if ever I sit friendless and make no search.” “But, Argyle, there is a time to leave off.” “To leave off what, to leave off what?” “Having friends: or a friend, rather: or seeking to have one.” “Oh, no! Not at all, my friend. Not at all! Only death can make an end of that, my friend. Only death. And I should say, not even death. Not even death ends a man's search for a friend. That is my belief. You may hang me for it, but I shall never alter.” “Nay,” said Lilly. “There is a time to love, and a time to leave off loving.” “All I can say to that is that my time to leave off hasn't come yet,” said Argyle, with obstinate feeling. “Ah, yes, it has. It is only a habit and an idea you stick to.” “Indeed, it is no such thing. Indeed, it is no such thing. It is a profound desire and necessity: and what is more, a belief.” “An obstinate persistency, you mean,” said Lilly. “Well, call it so if it pleases you. It is by no means so to me.” There was a brief pause. The sun had left the cathedral dome and the tower, the sky was full of light, the square swimming in shadow. “But can a man live,” said the Marchese, “without having something he lives for: something he wishes for, or longs for, and tries that he may get?” “Impossible! Completely impossible!” said Argyle. “Man is a seeker, and except as such, he has no significance, no importance.” “He bores me with his seeking,” said Lilly. “He should learn to possess himself--to be himself--and keep still.” “Ay, perhaps so,” said Aaron. “Only--” “But my dear boy, believe me, a man is never himself save in the supreme state of love: or perhaps hate, too, which amounts to the same thing. Never really himself.--Apart from this he is a tram-driver or a money-shoveller or an idea-machine. Only in the state of love is he really a man, and really himself. I say so, because I know,” said Argyle. “Ah, yes. That is one side of the truth. It is quite true, also. But it is just as true to say, that a man is never less himself, than in the supreme state of love. Never less himself, than then.” “Maybe! Maybe! But what could be better? What could be better than to lose oneself with someone you love, entirely, and so find yourself. Ah, my dear fellow, that is my creed, that is my creed, and you can't shake me in it. Never in that. Never in that.” “Yes, Argyle,” said Lilly. “I know you're an obstinate love-apostle.” “I am! I am! And I have certain standards, my boy, and certain ideals which I never transgress. Never transgress. And never abandon.” “All right, then, you are an incurable love-maker.” “Pray God I am,” said Argyle. “Yes,” said the Marchese. “Perhaps we are all so. What else do you give? Would you have us make money? Or do you give the centre of your spirit to your work? How is it to be?” “I don't vitally care either about money or my work or--” Lilly faltered. “Or what, then?” “Or anything. I don't really care about anything. Except that--” “You don't care about anything? But what is that for a life?” cried the Marchese, with a hollow mockery. “What do YOU care for?” asked Lilly. “Me? I care for several things. I care for my wife. I care for love. And I care to be loved. And I care for some pleasures. And I care for music. And I care for Italy.” “You are well off for cares,” said Lilly. “And you seem to me so very poor,” said Del Torre. “I should say so--if he cares for nothing,” interjaculated Argyle. Then he clapped Lilly on the shoulder with a laugh. “Ha! Ha! Ha!--But he only says it to tease us,” he cried, shaking Lilly's shoulder. “He cares more than we do for his own way of loving. Come along, don't try and take us in. We are old birds, old birds,” said Argyle. But at that moment he seemed a bit doddering. “A man can't live,” said the Italian, “without an object.” “Well--and that object?” said Lilly. “Well--it may be many things. Mostly it is two things.--love, and money. But it may be many things: ambition, patriotism, science, art--many things. But it is some objective. Something outside the self. Perhaps many things outside the self.” “I have had only one objective all my life,” said Argyle. “And that was love. For that I have spent my life.” “And the lives of a number of other people, too,” said Lilly. “Admitted. Oh, admitted. It takes two to make love: unless you're a miserable--” “Don't you think,” said Aaron, turning to Lilly, “that however you try to get away from it, if you're not after money, and can't fit yourself into a job--you've got to, you've got to try and find something else--somebody else--somebody. You can't really be alone.” “No matter how many mistakes you've made--you can't really be alone--?” asked Lilly. “You can be alone for a minute. You can be alone just in that minute when you've broken free, and you feel heart thankful to be alone, because the other thing wasn't to be borne. But you can't keep on being alone. No matter how many tunes you've broken free, and feel, thank God to be alone (nothing on earth is so good as to breathe fresh air and be alone), no matter how many times you've felt this--it wears off every time, and you begin to look again--and you begin to roam round. And even if you won't admit it to yourself, still you are seeking--seeking. Aren't you? Aren't you yourself seeking?” “Oh, that's another matter,” put in Argyle. “Lilly is happily married and on the shelf. With such a fine woman as Tanny I should think so--RATHER! But his is an exceptional nature, and an exceptional case. As for me, I made a hell of my marriage, and I swear it nearly sent me to hell. But I didn't forswear love, when I forswore marriage and woman. Not by ANY means.” “Are you not seeking any more, Lilly?” asked the Marchese. “Do you seek nothing?” “We married men who haven't left our wives, are we supposed to seek anything?” said Lilly. “Aren't we perfectly satisfied and in bliss with the wonderful women who honour us as wives?” “Ah, yes, yes!” said the Marchese. “But now we are not speaking to the world. Now we try to speak of that which we have in our centre of our hearts.” “And what have we there?” said Lilly. “Well--shall I say? We have unrest. We have another need. We have something that hurts and eats us, yes, eats us inside. Do I speak the truth?” “Yes. But what is the something?” “I don't know. I don't know. But it is something in love, I think. It is love itself which gnaws us inside, like a cancer,” said the Italian. “But why should it? Is that the nature of love?” said Lilly. “I don't know. Truly. I don't know.--But perhaps it is in the nature of love--I don't know.--But I tell you, I love my wife--she is very dear to me. I admire her, I trust her, I believe her. She is to me much more than any woman, more even than my mother.--And so, I am very happy. I am very happy, she is very happy, in our love and our marriage.--But wait. Nothing has changed--the love has not changed: it is the same.--And yet we are NOT happy. No, we are not happy. I know she is not happy, I know I am not--” “Why should you be?” said Lilly. “Yes--and it is not even happiness,” said the Marchese, screwing up his face in a painful effort of confession. “It is not even happiness. No, I do not ask to be happy. Why should I? It is childish--but there is for both of us, I know it, something which bites us, which eats us within, and drives us, drives us, somewhere, we don't know where. But it drives us, and eats away the life--and yet we love each other, and we must not separate--Do you know what I mean? Do you understand me at all in what I say? I speak what is true.” “Yes, I understand. I'm in the same dilemma myself.--But what I want to hear, is WHY you think it is so. Why is it?” “Shall I say what I think? Yes? And you can tell me if it is foolish to you.--Shall I tell you? Well. Because a woman, she now first wants the man, and he must go to her because he is wanted. Do you understand?--You know--supposing I go to a woman--supposing she is my wife--and I go to her, yes, with my blood all ready, because it is I who want. Then she puts me off. Then she says, not now, not now, I am tired, I am not well. I do not feel like it. She puts me off--till I am angry or sorry or whatever I am--but till my blood has gone down again, you understand, and I don't want her any more. And then she puts her arms round me, and caresses me, and makes love to me--till she rouses me once more. So, and so she rouses me--and so I come to her. And I love her, it is very good, very good. But it was she who began, it was her initiative, you know.--I do not think, in all my life, my wife has loved me from my initiative, you know. She will yield to me--because I insist, or because she wants to be a good submissive wife who loves me. So she will yield to me. But ah, what is it, you know? What is it a woman who allows me, and who has no answer? It is something worse than nothing--worse than nothing. And so it makes me very discontented and unbelieving.--If I say to her, she says it is not true--not at all true. Then she says, all she wants is that I should desire her, that I should love her and desire her. But even that is putting her will first. And if I come to her so, if I come to her of my own desire, then she puts me off. She puts me off, or she only allows me to come to her. Even now it is the same after ten years, as it was at first. But now I know, and for many years I did not know--” The little man was intense. His face was strained, his blue eyes so stretched that they showed the whites all round. He gazed into Lilly's face. “But does it matter?” said Lilly slowly, “in which of you the desire initiates? Isn't the result the same?” “It matters. It matters--” cried the Marchese. “Oh, my dear fellow, how MUCH it matters--” interrupted Argyle sagely. “Ay!” said Aaron. The Marchese looked from one to the other of them. “It matters!” he cried. “It matters life or death. It used to be, that desire started in the man, and the woman answered. It used to be so for a long time in Italy. For this reason the women were kept away from the men. For this reason our Catholic religion tried to keep the young girls in convents, and innocent, before marriage. So that with their minds they should not know, and should not start this terrible thing, this woman's desire over a man, beforehand. This desire which starts in a woman's head, when she knows, and which takes a man for her use, for her service. This is Eve. Ah, I hate Eve. I hate her, when she knows, and when she WILLS. I hate her when she will make of me that which serves her desire.--She may love me, she may be soft and kind to me, she may give her life for me. But why? Only because I am HERS. I am that thing which does her most intimate service. She can see no other in me. And I may be no other to her--” “Then why not let it be so, and be satisfied?” said Lilly. “Because I cannot. I cannot. I would. But I cannot. The Borghesia--the citizens--the bourgeoisie, they are the ones who can. Oh, yes. The bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers, these serve their wives so, and their wives love them. They are the marital maquereaux--the husband-maquereau, you know. Their wives are so stout and happy, and they dote on their husbands and always betray them. So it is with the bourgeoise. She loves her husband so much, and is always seeking to betray him. Or she is a Madame Bovary, seeking for a scandal. But the bourgeois husband, he goes on being the same. He is the horse, and she the driver. And when she says gee-up, you know--then he comes ready, like a hired maquereau. Only he feels so good, like a good little boy at her breast. And then there are the nice little children. And so they keep the world going.--But for me--” he spat suddenly and with frenzy on the floor. “You are quite right, my boy,” said Argyle. “You are quite right. They've got the start of us, the women: and we've got to canter when they say gee-up. I--oh, I went through it all. But I broke the shafts and smashed the matrimonial cart, I can tell you, and I didn't care whether I smashed her up along with it or not. I didn't care one single bit, I assure you.--And here I am. And she is dead and buried these dozen years. Well--well! Life, you know, life. And women oh, they are the very hottest hell once they get the start of you. There's NOTHING they won't do to you, once they've got you. Nothing they won't do to you. Especially if they love you. Then you may as well give up the ghost: or smash the cart behind you, and her in it. Otherwise she will just harry you into submission, and make a dog of you, and cuckold you under your nose. And you'll submit. Oh, you'll submit, and go on calling her my darling. Or else, if you won't submit, she'll do for you. Your only chance is to smash the shafts, and the whole matrimonial cart. Or she'll do for you. For a woman has an uncanny, hellish strength--she's a she-bear and a wolf, is a woman when she's got the start of you. Oh, it's a terrible experience, if you're not a bourgeois, and not one of the knuckling-under money-making sort.” “Knuckling-under sort. Yes. That is it,” said the Marchese. “But can't there be a balancing of wills?” said Lilly. “My dear boy, the balance lies in that, that when one goes up, the other goes down. One acts, the other takes. It is the only way in love--And the women are nowadays the active party. Oh, yes, not a shadow of doubt about it. They take the initiative, and the man plays up. That's how it is. The man just plays up.--Nice manly proceeding, what!” cried Argyle. “But why can't man accept it as the natural order of things?” said Lilly. “Science makes it the natural order.” “All my ---- to science,” said Argyle. “No man with one drop of real spunk in him can stand it long.” “Yes! Yes! Yes!” cried the Italian. “Most men want it so. Most men want only, that a woman shall want them, and they shall then play up to her when she has roused them. Most men want only this: that a woman shall choose one man out, to be her man, and he shall worship her and come up when she shall provoke him. Otherwise he is to keep still. And the woman, she is quite sure of her part. She must be loved and adored, and above all, obeyed, particularly in her sex desire. There she must not be thwarted, or she becomes a devil. And if she is obeyed, she becomes a misunderstood woman with nerves, looking round for the next man whom she can bring under. So it is.” “Well,” said Lilly. “And then what?” “Nay,” interrupted Aaron. “But do you think it's true what he says? Have you found it like that? You're married. Has your experience been different, or the same?” “What was yours?” asked Lilly. “Mine was the same. Mine was the same, if ever it was,” said Aaron. “And mine was EXTREMELY similar,” said Argyle with a grimace. “And yours, Lilly?” asked the Marchese anxiously. “Not very different,” said Lilly. “Ah!” cried Del Torre, jerking up erect as if he had found something. “And what's your way out?” Aaron asked him. “I'm not out--so I won't holloa,” said Lilly. “But Del Torre puts it best.--What do you say is the way out, Del Torre?” “The way out is that it should change: that the man should be the asker and the woman the answerer. It must change.” “But it doesn't. Prrr!” Argyle made his trumpeting noise. “Does it?” asked Lilly of the Marchese. “No. I think it does not.” “And will it ever again?” “Perhaps never.” “And then what?” “Then? Why then man seeks a _pis-aller_. Then he seeks something which will give him answer, and which will not only draw him, draw him, with a terrible sexual will.--So he seeks young girls, who know nothing, and so cannot force him. He thinks he will possess them while they are young, and they will be soft and responding to his wishes.--But in this, too, he is mistaken. Because now a baby of one year, if it be a female, is like a woman of forty, so is its will made up, so it will force a man.” “And so young girls are no good, even as a _pis-aller_.” “No good--because they are all modern women. Every one, a modern woman. Not one who isn't.” “Terrible thing, the modern woman,” put in Argyle. “And then--?” “Then man seeks other forms of loves, always seeking the loving response, you know, of one gentler and tenderer than himself, who will wait till the man desires, and then will answer with full love.--But it is all _pis-aller_, you know.” “Not by any means, my boy,” cried Argyle. “And then a man naturally loves his own wife, too, even if it is not bearable to love her.” “Or one leaves her, like Aaron,” said Lilly. “And seeks another woman, so,” said the Marchese. “Does he seek another woman?” said Lilly. “Do you, Aaron?” “I don't WANT to,” said Aaron. “But--I can't stand by myself in the middle of the world and in the middle of people, and know I am quite by myself, and nowhere to go, and nothing to hold on to. I can for a day or two--But then, it becomes unbearable as well. You get frightened. You feel you might go funny--as you would if you stood on this balcony wall with all the space beneath you.” “Can't one be alone--quite alone?” said Lilly. “But no--it is absurd. Like Saint Simeon Stylites on a pillar. But it is absurd!” cried the Italian. “I don't mean like Simeon Stylites. I mean can't one live with one's wife, and be fond of her: and with one's friends, and enjoy their company: and with the world and everything, pleasantly: and yet KNOW that one is alone? Essentially, at the very core of me, alone. Eternally alone. And choosing to be alone. Not sentimental or LONELY. Alone, choosing to be alone, because by one's own nature one is alone. The being with another person is secondary,” said Lilly. “One is alone,” said Argyle, “in all but love. In all but love, my dear fellow. And then I agree with you.” “No,” said Lilly, “in love most intensely of all, alone.” “Completely incomprehensible,” said Argyle. “Amounts to nothing.” “One man is but a part. How can he be so alone?” said the Marchese. “In so far as he is a single individual soul, he IS alone--ipso facto. In so far as I am I, and only I am I, and I am only I, in so far, I am inevitably and eternally alone, and it is my last blessedness to know it, and to accept it, and to live with this as the core of my self-knowledge.” “My dear boy, you are becoming metaphysical, and that is as bad as softening of the brain,” said Argyle. “All right,” said Lilly. “And,” said the Marchese, “it may be so by REASON. But in the heart--? Can the heart ever beat quite alone? Plop! Plop!--Can the heart beat quite alone, alone in all the atmosphere, all the space of the universe? Plop! Plop! Plop!--Quite alone in all the space?” A slow smile came over the Italian's face. “It is impossible. It may eat against the heart of other men, in anger, all in pressure against the others. It may beat hard, like iron, saying it is independent. But this is only beating against the heart of mankind, not alone.--But either with or against the heart of mankind, or the heart of someone, mother, wife, friend, children--so must the heart of every man beat. It is so.” “It beats alone in its own silence,” said Lilly. The Italian shook his head. “We'd better be going inside, anyhow,” said Argyle. “Some of you will be taking cold.” “Aaron,” said Lilly. “Is it true for you?” “Nearly,” said Aaron, looking into the quiet, half-amused, yet frightening eyes of the other man. “Or it has been.” “A miss is as good as a mile,” laughed Lilly, rising and picking up his chair to take it indoors. And the laughter of his voice was so like a simple, deliberate amiability, that Aaron's heart really stood still for a second. He knew that Lilly was alone--as far as he, Aaron, was concerned. Lilly was alone--and out of his isolation came his words, indifferent as to whether they came or not. And he left his friends utterly to their own choice. Utterly to their own choice. Aaron felt that Lilly was _there_, existing in life, yet neither asking for connection nor preventing any connection. He was present, he was the real centre of the group. And yet he asked nothing of them, and he imposed nothing. He left each to himself, and he himself remained just himself: neither more nor less. And there was a finality about it, which was at once maddening and fascinating. Aaron felt angry, as if he were half insulted by the other man's placing the gift of friendship or connection so quietly back in the giver's hands. Lilly would receive no gift of friendship in equality. Neither would he violently refuse it. He let it lie unmarked. And yet at the same time Aaron knew that he could depend on the other man for help, nay, almost for life itself--so long as it entailed no breaking of the intrinsic isolation of Lilly's soul. But this condition was also hateful. And there was also a great fascination in it. CHAPTER XVIII. THE MARCHESA So Aaron dined with the Marchesa and Manfredi. He was quite startled when his hostess came in: she seemed like somebody else. She seemed like a demon, her hair on her brows, her terrible modern elegance. She wore a wonderful gown of thin blue velvet, of a lovely colour, with some kind of gauzy gold-threaded filament down the sides. It was terribly modern, short, and showed her legs and her shoulders and breast and all her beautiful white arms. Round her throat was a collar of dark-blue sapphires. Her hair was done low, almost to the brows, and heavy, like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. She was most carefully made up--yet with that touch of exaggeration, lips slightly too red, which was quite intentional, and which frightened Aaron. He thought her wonderful, and sinister. She affected him with a touch of horror. She sat down opposite him, and her beautifully shapen legs, in frail, goldish stockings, seemed to glisten metallic naked, thrust from out of the wonderful, wonderful skin, like periwinkle-blue velvet. She had tapestry shoes, blue and gold: and almost one could see her toes: metallic naked. The gold-threaded gauze slipped at her side. Aaron could not help watching the naked-seeming arch of her foot. It was as if she were dusted with dark gold-dust upon her marvellous nudity. She must have seen his face, seen that he was _ebloui_. “You brought the flute?” she said, in that toneless, melancholy, unstriving voice of hers. Her voice alone was the same: direct and bare and quiet. “Yes.” “Perhaps I shall sing later on, if you'll accompany me. Will you?” “I thought you hated accompaniments.” “Oh, no--not just unison. I don't mean accompaniment. I mean unison. I don't know how it will be. But will you try?” “Yes, I'll try.” “Manfredi is just bringing the cocktails. Do you think you'd prefer orange in yours?” “Ill have mine as you have yours.” “I don't take orange in mine. Won't you smoke?” The strange, naked, remote-seeming voice! And then the beautiful firm limbs thrust out in that dress, and nakedly dusky as with gold-dust. Her beautiful woman's legs, slightly glistening, duskily. His one abiding instinct was to touch them, to kiss them. He had never known a woman to exercise such power over him. It was a bare, occult force, something he could not cope with. Manfredi came in with the little tray. He was still in uniform. “Hello!” cried the little Italian. “Glad to see you--well, everything all right? Glad to hear it. How is the cocktail, Nan?” “Yes,” she said. “All right.” “One drop too much peach, eh?” “No, all right.” “Ah,” and the little officer seated himself, stretching his gaitered legs as if gaily. He had a curious smiling look on his face, that Aaron thought also diabolical--and almost handsome. Suddenly the odd, laughing, satanic beauty of the little man was visible. “Well, and what have you been doing with yourself?” said he. “What did you do yesterday?” “Yesterday?” said Aaron. “I went to the Uffizi.” “To the Uffizi? Well! And what did you think of it?” “Very fine.” “I think it is. I think it is. What pictures did you look at?” “I was with Dekker. We looked at most, I believe.” “And what do you remember best?” “I remember Botticelli's Venus on the Shell.” “Yes! Yes!--” said Manfredi. “I like her. But I like others better. You thought her a pretty woman, yes?” “No--not particularly pretty. But I like her body. And I like the fresh air. I like the fresh air, the summer sea-air all through it--through her as well.” “And her face?” asked the Marchesa, with a slow, ironic smile. “Yes--she's a bit baby-faced,” said Aaron. “Trying to be more innocent than her own common-sense will let her,” said the Marchesa. “I don't agree with you, Nan,” said her husband. “I think it is just that wistfulness and innocence which makes her the true Venus: the true modern Venus. She chooses NOT to know too much. And that is her attraction. Don't you agree, Aaron? Excuse me, but everybody speaks of you as Aaron. It seems to come naturally. Most people speak of me as Manfredi, too, because it is easier, perhaps, than Del Torre. So if you find it easier, use it. Do you mind that I call you Aaron?” “Not at all. I hate Misters, always.” “Yes, so do I. I like one name only.” The little officer seemed very winning and delightful to Aaron this evening--and Aaron began to like him extremely. But the dominating consciousness in the room was the woman's. “DO you agree, Mr. Sisson?” said the Marchesa. “Do you agree that the mock-innocence and the sham-wistfulness of Botticelli's Venus are her great charms?” “I don't think she is at all charming, as a person,” said Aaron. “As a particular woman, she makes no impression on me at all. But as a picture--and the fresh air, particularly the fresh air. She doesn't seem so much a woman, you know, as the kind of out-of-doors morning-feelings at the seaside.” “Quite! A sort of sea-scape of a woman. With a perfectly sham innocence. Are you as keen on innocence as Manfredi is?” “Innocence?” said Aaron. “It's the sort of thing I don't have much feeling about.” “Ah, I know you,” laughed the soldier wickedly. “You are the sort of man who wants to be Anthony to Cleopatra. Ha-ha!” Aaron winced as if struck. Then he too smiled, flattered. Yet he felt he had been struck! Did he want to be Anthony to Cleopatra? Without knowing, he was watching the Marchesa. And she was looking away, but knew he was watching her. And at last she turned her eyes to his, with a slow, dark smile, full of pain and fuller still of knowledge. A strange, dark, silent look of knowledge she gave him: from so far away, it seemed. And he felt all the bonds that held him melting away. His eyes remained fixed and gloomy, but with his mouth he smiled back at her. And he was terrified. He knew he was sulking towards her--sulking towards her. And he was terrified. But at the back of his mind, also, he knew there was Lilly, whom he might depend on. And also he wanted to sink towards her. The flesh and blood of him simply melted out, in desire towards her. Cost what may, he must come to her. And yet he knew at the same time that, cost what may, he must keep the power to recover himself from her. He must have his cake and eat it. And she became Cleopatra to him. “Age cannot wither, nor custom stale--” To his instinctive, unwilled fancy, she was Cleopatra. They went in to dinner, and he sat on her right hand. It was a smallish table, with a very few daisy-flowers: everything rather frail, and sparse. The food the same--nothing very heavy, all rather exquisite. They drank hock. And he was aware of her beautiful arms, and her bosom; her low-crowded, thick hair, parted in the centre: the sapphires on her throat, the heavy rings on her fingers: and the paint on her lips, the fard. Something deep, deep at the bottom of him hovered upon her, cleaved to her. Yet he was as if sightless, in a stupor. Who was she, what was she? He had lost all his grasp. Only he sat there, with his face turned to hers, or to her, all the time. And she talked to him. But she never looked at him. Indeed she said little. It was the husband who talked. His manner towards Aaron was almost caressive. And Aaron liked it. The woman was silent mostly, and seemed remote. And Aaron felt his life ebb towards her. He felt the marvellousness, the rich beauty of her arms and breast. And the thought of her gold-dusted smooth limbs beneath the table made him feel almost an idiot. The second wine was a gold-coloured Moselle, very soft and rich and beautiful. She drank this with pleasure, as one who understands. And for dessert there was a dish of cacchi--that orange-coloured, pulpy Japanese fruit--persimmons. Aaron had never eaten these before. Soft, almost slimy, of a wonderful colour, and of a flavour that had sunk from harsh astringency down to that first decay-sweetness which is all autumn-rich. The Marchese loved them, and scooped them out with his spoon. But she ate none. Aaron did not know what they talked about, what was said. If someone had taken his mind away altogether, and left him with nothing but a body and a spinal consciousness, it would have been the same. But at coffee the talk turned to Manfredi's duties. He would not be free from the army for some time yet. On the morrow, for example, he had to be out and away before it was day. He said he hated it, and wanted to be a free man once more. But it seemed to Aaron he would be a very bored man, once he was free. And then they drifted on to talk of the palazzo in which was their apartment. “We've got such a fine terrace--you can see it from your house where you are,” said Manfredi. “Have you noticed it?” “No,” said Aaron. “Near that tuft of palm-trees. Don't you know?” “No,” said Aaron. “Let us go out and show it him,” said the Marchesa. Manfredi fetched her a cloak, and they went through various doors, then up some steps. The terrace was broad and open. It looked straight across the river at the opposite Lungarno: and there was the thin-necked tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the great dome of the cathedral in the distance, in shadow-bulk in the cold-aired night of stars. Little trams were running brilliant over the flat new bridge on the right. And from a garden just below rose a tuft of palm-trees. “You see,” said the Marchesa, coming and standing close to Aaron, so that she just touched him, “you can know the terrace, just by these palm trees. And you are in the Nardini just across there, are you? On the top floor, you said?” “Yes, the top floor--one of the middle windows, I think.” “One that is always open now--and the others are shut. I have noticed it, not connecting it with you.” “Yes, my window is always open.” She was leaning very slightly against him, as he stood. And he knew, with the same kind of inevitability with which he knew he would one day die, that he would be the lover of this woman. Nay, that he was her lover already. “Don't take cold,” said Manfredi. She turned at once indoors. Aaron caught a faint whiff of perfume from the little orange trees in tubs round the wall. “Will you get the flute?” she said as they entered. “And will you sing?” he answered. “Play first,” she said. He did as she wished. As the other night, he went into the big music-room to play. And the stream of sound came out with the quick wild imperiousness of the pipe. It had an immediate effect on her. She seemed to relax the peculiar, drug-like tension which was upon her at all ordinary times. She seemed to go still, and yielding. Her red mouth looked as if it might moan with relief. She sat with her chin dropped on her breast, listening. And she did not move. But she sat softly, breathing rather quick, like one who has been hurt, and is soothed. A certain womanly naturalness seemed to soften her. And the music of the flute came quick, rather brilliant like a call-note, or like a long quick message, half command. To her it was like a pure male voice--as a blackbird's when he calls: a pure male voice, not only calling, but telling her something, telling her something, and soothing her soul to sleep. It was like the fire-music putting Brunnhilde to sleep. But the pipe did not flicker and sink. It seemed to cause a natural relaxation in her soul, a peace. Perhaps it was more like waking to a sweet, morning awakening, after a night of tormented, painful tense sleep. Perhaps more like that. When Aaron came in, she looked at him with a gentle, fresh smile that seemed to make the fard on her face look like a curious tiredness, which now she might recover from. And as the last time, it was difficult for her to identify this man with the voice of the flute. It was rather difficult. Except that, perhaps, between his brows was something of a doubt, and in his bearing an aloofness that made her dread he might go away and not come back. She could see it in him, that he might go away and not come back. She said nothing to him, only just smiled. And the look of knowledge in her eyes seemed, for the moment, to be contained in another look: a look of faith, and at last happiness. Aaron's heart stood still. No, in her moment's mood of faith and at last peace, life-trust, he was perhaps more terrified of her than in her previous sinister elegance. His spirit started and shrank. What was she going to ask of him? “I am so anxious that you should come to play one Saturday morning,” said Manfredi. “With an accompaniment, you know. I should like so much to hear you with piano accompaniment.” “Very well,” said Aaron. “Will you really come? And will you practise with me, so that I can accompany you?” said Manfredi eagerly. “Yes. I will,” said Aaron. “Oh, good! Oh, good! Look here, come in on Friday morning and let us both look through the music.” “If Mr. Sisson plays for the public,” said the Marchesa, “he must not do it for charity. He must have the proper fee.” “No, I don't want it,” said Aaron. “But you must earn money, mustn't you?” said she. “I must,” said Aaron. “But I can do it somewhere else.” “No. If you play for the public, you must have your earnings. When you play for me, it is different.” “Of course,” said Manfredi. “Every man must have his wage. I have mine from the Italian government---” After a while, Aaron asked the Marchesa if she would sing. “Shall I?” she said. “Yes, do.” “Then I will sing alone first, to let you see what you think of it--I shall be like Trilby--I won't say like Yvette Guilbert, because I daren't. So I will be like Trilby, and sing a little French song. Though not Malbrouck, and without a Svengali to keep me in tune.” She went near the door, and stood with heir hands by her side. There was something wistful, almost pathetic now, in her elegance. “Derriere chez mon pere _Vole vole mon coeur, vole_! Derriere chez mon pere Il y a un pommier doux. _Tout doux, et iou Et iou, tout doux. Il y a unpommier doux_. Trois belles princesses _Vole vole mon coeur, vole_! Trois belles princesses Sont assis dessous. _Tout doux, et iou Et iou, tout doux. Sont asses dessous._” She had a beautiful, strong, sweet voice. But it was faltering, stumbling and sometimes it seemed to drop almost to speech. After three verses she faltered to an end, bitterly chagrined. “No,” she said. “It's no good. I can't sing.” And she dropped in her chair. “A lovely little tune,” said Aaron. “Haven't you got the music?” She rose, not answering, and found him a little book. “What do the words mean?” he asked her. She told him. And then he took his flute. “You don't mind if I play it, do you?” he said. So he played the tune. It was so simple. And he seemed to catch the lilt and the timbre of her voice. “Come and sing it while I play--” he said. “I can't sing,” she said, shaking her head rather bitterly. “But let us try,” said he, disappointed. “I know I can't,” she said. But she rose. He remained sitting at the little table, the book propped up under the reading lamp. She stood at a little distance, unhappy. “I've always been like that,” she said. “I could never sing music, unless I had a thing drilled into me, and then it wasn't singing any more.” But Aaron wasn't heeding. His flute was at his mouth, he was watching her. He sounded the note, but she did not begin. She was twisting her handkerchief. So he played the melody alone. At the end of the verse, he looked up at her again, and a half mocking smile played in his eyes. Again he sounded the note, a challenge. And this time, as at his bidding, she began to sing. The flute instantly swung with a lovely soft firmness into the song, and she wavered only for a minute or two. Then her soul and her voice got free, and she sang--she sang as she wanted to sing, as she had always wanted to sing, without that awful scotch, that impediment inside her own soul, which prevented her. She sang free, with the flute gliding along with her. And oh, how beautiful it was for her! How beautiful it was to sing the little song in the sweetness of her own spirit. How sweet it was to move pure and unhampered at last in the music! The lovely ease and lilt of her own soul in its motion through the music! She wasn't aware of the flute. She didn't know there was anything except her own pure lovely song-drift. Her soul seemed to breathe as a butterfly breathes, as it rests on a leaf and slowly breathes its wings. For the first time! For the first time her soul drew its own deep breath. All her life, the breath had caught half-way. And now she breathed full, deep, to the deepest extent of her being. And oh, it was so wonderful, she was dazed. The song ended, she stood with a dazed, happy face, like one just coming awake. And the fard on her face seemed like the old night-crust, the bad sleep. New and luminous she looked out. And she looked at Aaron with a proud smile. “Bravo, Nan! That was what you wanted,” said her husband. “It was, wasn't it?” she said, turning a wondering, glowing face to him. His face looked strange and withered and gnome-like, at the moment. She went and sat in her chair, quite silent, as if in a trance. The two men also sat quite still. And in the silence a little drama played itself between the three, of which they knew definitely nothing. But Manfredi knew that Aaron had done what he himself never could do, for this woman. And yet the woman was his own woman, not Aaron's. And so, he was displaced. Aaron, sitting there, glowed with a sort of triumph. He had performed a little miracle, and felt himself a little wonder-worker, to whom reverence was due. And as in a dream the woman sat, feeling what a joy it was to float and move like a swan in the high air, flying upon the wings of her own spirit. She was as a swan which never before could get its wings quite open, and so which never could get up into the open, where alone it can sing. For swans, and storks make their music only when they are high, high up in the air. Then they can give sound to their strange spirits. And so, she. Aaron and Manfredi kept their faces averted from one another and hardly spoke to one another. It was as if two invisible hands pushed their faces apart, away, averted. And Aaron's face glimmered with a little triumph, and a little grimace of obstinacy. And the Italian's face looked old, rather monkey-like, and of a deep, almost stone-bare bitterness. The woman looked wondering from one man to the other--wondering. The glimmer of the open flower, the wonder-look, still lasted. And Aaron said in his heart, what a goodly woman, what a woman to taste and enjoy. Ah, what a woman to enjoy! And was it not his privilege? Had he not gained it? His manhood, or rather his maleness, rose powerfully in him, in a sort of mastery. He felt his own power, he felt suddenly his own virile title to strength and reward. Suddenly, and newly flushed with his own male super-power, he was going to have his reward. The woman was his reward. So it was, in him. And he cast it over in his mind. He wanted her--ha, didn't he! But the husband sat there, like a soap-stone Chinese monkey, greyish-green. So, it would have to be another time. He rose, therefore, and took his leave. “But you'll let us do that again, won't you?” said she. “When you tell me, I'll come,” said he. “Then I'll tell you soon,” said she. So he left, and went home to his own place, and there to his own remote room. As he laid his flute on the table he looked at it and smiled. He remembered that Lilly had called it Aaron's Rod. “So you blossom, do you?--and thorn as well,” said he. For such a long time he had been gripped inside himself, and withheld. For such a long time it had been hard and unyielding, so hard and unyielding. He had wanted nothing, his desire had kept itself back, fast back. For such a long time his desire for woman had withheld itself, hard and resistant. All his deep, desirous blood had been locked, he had wanted nobody, and nothing. And it had been hard to live, so. Without desire, without any movement of passionate love, only gripped back in recoil! That was an experience to endure. And now came his desire back. But strong, fierce as iron. Like the strength of an eagle with the lightning in its talons. Something to glory in, something overweening, the powerful male passion, arrogant, royal, Jove's thunderbolt. Aaron's black rod of power, blossoming again with red Florentine lilies and fierce thorns. He moved about in the splendour of his own male lightning, invested in the thunder of the male passion-power. He had got it back, the male godliness, the male godhead. So he slept, and dreamed violent dreams of strange, black strife, something like the street-riot in Milan, but more terrible. In the morning, however, he cared nothing about his dreams. As soon as it was really light, he rose, and opened his window wide. It was a grey, slow morning. But he saw neither the morning nor the river nor the woman walking on the gravel river-bed with her goose nor the green hill up to San Miniato. He watched the tuft of palm-trees, and the terrace beside it. He could just distinguish the terrace clearly, among the green of foliage. So he stood at his window for a full hour, and did not move. Motionless, planted, he stood and watched that terrace across above the Arno. But like a statue. After an hour or so, he looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock. So he rang for his coffee, and meanwhile still stood watching the terrace on the hill. He felt his turn had come. The phoenix had risen in fire again, out of the ashes. Therefore at ten o'clock he went over the bridge. He wrote on the back of his card a request, would she please let him have the little book of songs, that he might practise them over. The manservant went, and came back with the request that Aaron should wait. So Aaron entered, while the man took his hat. The manservant spoke only French and Spanish, no English. He was a Spaniard, with greyish hair and stooping shoulders, and dark, mute-seeming eyes. He spoke as little as possible. The Marchesa had inherited him from her father. Aaron sat in the little sitting-room and waited. After a rather long time the Marchesa came in--wearing a white, thin blouse and a blue skirt. She was hardly made up at all. She had an odd pleased, yet brooding look on her face as she gave Aaron her hand. Something brooded between her brows. And her voice was strange, with a strange, secret undertone, that he could not understand. He looked up at her. And his face was bright, and his knees, as he sat, were like the knees of the gods. “You wanted the book of _chansons_?” she said. “I wanted to learn your tunes,” he replied. “Yes. Look--here it is!” And she brought him the little yellow book. It was just a hand-book, with melody and words only, no accompaniment. So she stood offering him the book, but waiting as if for something else, and standing as if with another meaning. He opened the leaves at random. “But I ought to know which ones you sing,” said he, rising and standing by her side with the open book. “Yes,” she said, looking over his arm. He turned the pages one by one. “_Trois jeunes tambours_,” said she. “Yes, that.... Yes, _En passant par la Lorraine_.... _Aupres de ma blonde_.... Oh, I like that one so much--” He stood and went over the tune in his mind. “Would you like me to play it?” he said. “Very much,” said she. So he got his flute, propped up the book against a vase, and played the tune, whilst she hummed it fragmentarily. But as he played, he felt that he did not cast the spell over her. There was no connection. She was in some mysterious way withstanding him. She was withstanding him, and his male super-power, and his thunderbolt desire. She was, in some indescribable way, throwing cold water over his phoenix newly risen from the ashes of its nest in flames. He realised that she did not want him to play. She did not want him to look at the songs. So he put the book away, and turned round, rather baffled, not quite sure what was happening, yet feeling she was withstanding him. He glanced at her face: it was inscrutable: it was her Cleopatra face once more, yet with something new and warm in it. He could not understand it. What was it in her face that puzzled him? Almost angered him? But she could not rob him of his male power, she could not divest him of his concentrated force. “Won't you take off your coat?” she said, looking at him with strange, large dark eyes. A strange woman, he could not understand her. Yet, as he sat down again, having removed his overcoat, he felt her looking at his limbs, his physical body. And this went against him, he did not want it. Yet quite fixed in him too was the desire for her, her beautiful white arms, her whole soft white body. And such desire he would not contradict nor allow to be contradicted. It was his will also. Her whole soft white body--to possess it in its entirety, its fulness. “What have you to do this morning?” she asked him. “Nothing,” he said. “Have you?” He lifted his head and looked at her. “Nothing at all,” said she. And then they sat in silence, he with his head dropped. Then again he looked at her. “Shall we be lovers?” he said. She sat with her face averted, and did not answer. His heart struck heavily, but he did not relax. “Shall we be lovers?” came his voice once more, with the faintest touch of irony. Her face gradually grew dusky. And he wondered very much to see it. “Yes,” said she, still not looking at him. “If you wish.” “I do wish,” he said. And all the time he sat with his eyes fixed on her face, and she sat with her face averted. “Now?” he said. “And where?” Again she was silent for some moments, as if struggling with herself. Then she looked at him--a long, strange, dark look, incomprehensible, and which he did not like. “You don't want emotions? You don't want me to say things, do you?” he said. A faint ironic smile came on her face. “I know what all that is worth,” she said, with curious calm equanimity. “No, I want none of that.” “Then--?” But now she sat gazing on him with wide, heavy, incomprehensible eyes. It annoyed him. “What do you want to see in me?” he asked, with a smile, looking steadily back again. And now she turned aside her face once more, and once more the dusky colour came in her cheek. He waited. “Shall I go away?” he said at length. “Would you rather?” she said, keeping her face averted. “No,” he said. Then again she was silent. “Where shall I come to you?” he said. She paused a moment still, then answered: “I'll go to my room.” “I don't know which it is,” he said. “I'll show it you,” she said. “And then I shall come to you in ten minutes. In ten minutes,” he reiterated. So she rose, and led the way out of the little salon. He walked with her to the door of her room, bowed his head as she looked at him, holding the door handle; and then he turned and went back to the drawing-room, glancing at his watch. In the drawing-room he stood quite still, with his feet apart, and waited. He stood with his hands behind him, and his feet apart, quite motionless, planted and firm. So the minutes went by unheeded. He looked at his watch. The ten minutes were just up. He had heard footsteps and doors. So he decided to give her another five minutes. He wished to be quite sure that she had had her own time for her own movements. Then at the end of the five minutes he went straight to her room, entered, and locked the door behind him. She was lying in bed, with her back to him. He found her strange, not as he had imagined her. Not powerful, as he had imagined her. Strange, in his arms she seemed almost small and childish, whilst in daily life she looked a full, womanly woman. Strange, the naked way she clung to him! Almost like a sister, a younger sister! Or like a child! It filled him with a curious wonder, almost a bewilderment. In the dark sightlessness of passion, she seemed almost like a clinging child in his arms. And yet like a child who in some deep and essential way mocked him. In some strange and incomprehensible way, as a girl-child blindly obstinate in her deepest nature, she was against him. He felt she was not his woman. Through him went the feeling, “This is not my woman.” When, after a long sleep, he awoke and came fully to himself, with that click of awakeness which is the end, the first shades were closing on the afternoon. He got up and reached for his watch. “Quarter past four,” he said. Her eyes stretched wide with surprise as she looked at him. But she said nothing. The same strange and wide, perhaps insatiable child-like curiosity was in her eyes as she watched him. He dressed very quickly. And her eyes were wide, and she said no single word. But when he was dressed, and bent over her to say goodbye, she put her arms round him, that seemed such frail and childish arms now, yet withal so deadly in power. Her soft arms round his neck, her tangle of hair over his face. And yet, even as he kissed her, he felt her deadly. He wanted to be gone. He wanted to get out of her arms and her clinging and her tangle of hair and her curiosity and her strange and hateful power. “You'll come again. We'll be like this again?” she whispered. And it was hard for him to realise that this was that other woman, who had sat so silently on the sofa, so darkly and reservedly, at the tea at Algy's. “Yes! I will! Goodbye now!” And he kissed her, and walked straight out of the room. Quickly he took his coat and his hat, quickly, and left the house. In his nostrils was still the scent with which the bed linen was faintly scented--he did not know what it was. But now he wiped his face and his mouth, to wipe it away. He had eaten nothing since coffee that morning, and was hungry, faint-feeling. And his face, and his mind, felt withered. Curiously he felt blasted as if blighted by some electricity. And he knew, he knew quite well he was only in possession of a tithe of his natural faculties. And in his male spirit he felt himself hating her: hating her deeply, damnably. But he said to himself: “No, I won't hate her. I won't hate her.” So he went on, over the Ponte Vecchio, where the jeweller's windows on the bridge were already blazing with light, on into the town. He wanted to eat something, so he decided to go to a shop he knew, where one could stand and eat good tiny rolls split into truffle or salami sandwiches, and drink Marsala. So one after the other he ate little truffle rolls, and drank a few glasses of Marsala. And then he did not know what to do. He did not want to eat any more, he had had what he wanted. His hunger had been more nervous than sensual. So he went into the street. It was just growing dark and the town was lighting up. He felt curiously blazed, as if some flame or electric power had gone through him and withered his vital tissue. Blazed, as if some kind of electric flame had run over him and withered him. His brain felt withered, his mind had only one of its many-sighted eyes left open and unscorched. So many of the eyes of his mind were scorched now and sightless. Yet a restlessness was in his nerves. What should he do? He remembered he had a letter in his pocket from Sir William Franks. Sir William had still teased him about his fate and his providence, in which he, Aaron, was supposed to trust. “I shall be very glad to hear from you, and to know how your benevolent Providence--or was yours a Fate--has treated you since we saw you---” So, Aaron turned away, and walked to the post office. There he took paper, and sat down at one of the tables in the writing room, and wrote his answer. It was very strange, writing thus when most of his mind's eyes were scorched, and it seemed he could hardly see to hold the pen, to drive it straight across the paper. Yet write he must. And most of his faculties being quenched or blasted for the moment, he wrote perhaps his greatest, or his innermost, truth.--“I don't want my Fate or my Providence to treat me well. I don't want kindness or love. I don't believe in harmony and people loving one another. I believe in the fight and in nothing else. I believe in the fight which is in everything. And if it is a question of women, I believe in the fight of love, even if it blinds me. And if it is a question of the world, I believe in fighting it and in having it hate me, even if it breaks my legs. I want the world to hate me, because I can't bear the thought that it might love me. For of all things love is the most deadly to me, and especially from such a repulsive world as I think this is....” Well, here was a letter for a poor old man to receive. But, in the dryness of his withered mind, Aaron got it out of himself. When a man writes a letter to himself, it is a pity to post it to somebody else. Perhaps the same is true of a book. His letter written, however, he stamped it and sealed it and put it in the box. That made it final. Then he turned towards home. One fact remained unbroken in the debris of his consciousness: that in the town was Lilly: and that when he needed, he could go to Lilly: also, that in the world was Lottie, his wife: and that against Lottie, his heart burned with a deep, deep, almost unreachable bitterness.--Like a deep burn on his deepest soul, Lottie. And like a fate which he resented, yet which steadied him, Lilly. He went home and lay on his bed. He had enough self-command to hear the gong and go down to dinner. White and abstract-looking, he sat and ate his dinner. And then, thank God, he could go to bed, alone, in his own cold bed, alone, thank God. To be alone in the night! For this he was unspeakably thankful. CHAPTER XIX. CLEOPATRA, BUT NOT ANTHONY Aaron awoke in the morning feeling better, but still only a part himself. The night alone had restored him. And the need to be alone still was his greatest need. He felt an intense resentment against the Marchesa. He felt that somehow, she had given him a scorpion. And his instinct was to hate her. And yet he avoided hating her. He remembered Lilly--and the saying that one must possess oneself, and be alone in possession of oneself. And somehow, under the influence of Lilly, he refused to follow the reflex of his own passion. He refused to hate the Marchesa. He _did_ like her. He did _esteem_ her. And after all, she too was struggling with her fate. He had a genuine sympathy with her. Nay, he was not going to hate her. But he could not see her. He could not bear the thought that she might call and see him. So he took the tram to Settignano, and walked away all day into the country, having bread and sausage in his pocket. He sat for long hours among the cypress trees of Tuscany. And never had any trees seemed so like ghosts, like soft, strange, pregnant presences. He lay and watched tall cypresses breathing and communicating, faintly moving and as it were walking in the small wind. And his soul seemed to leave him and to go far away, far back, perhaps, to where life was all different and time passed otherwise than time passes now. As in clairvoyance he perceived it: that our life is only a fragment of the shell of life. That there has been and will be life, human life such as we do not begin to conceive. Much that is life has passed away from men, leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing. Men have known as we can no more know, have felt as we can no more feel. Great life-realities gone into the darkness. But the cypresses commemorate. In the afternoon, Aaron felt the cypresses rising dark about him, like so many high visitants from an old, lost, lost subtle world, where men had the wonder of demons about them, the aura of demons, such as still clings to the cypresses, in Tuscany. All day, he did not make up his mind what he was going to do. His first impulse was never to see her again. And this was his intention all day. But as he went home in the tram he softened, and thought. Nay, that would not be fair. For how had she treated him, otherwise than generously. She had been generous, and the other thing, that he felt blasted afterwards, which was his experience, that was fate, and not her fault. So he must see her again. He must not act like a churl. But he would tell her--he would tell her that he was a married man, and that though he had left his wife, and though he had no dogma of fidelity, still, the years of marriage had made a married man of him, and any other woman than his wife was a strange woman to him, a violation. “I will tell her,” he said to himself, “that at the bottom of my heart I love Lottie still, and that I can't help it. I believe that is true. It isn't love, perhaps. But it is marriage. I am married to Lottie. And that means I can't be married to another woman. It isn't my nature. And perhaps I can't bear to live with Lottie now, because I am married and not in love. When a man is married, he is not in love. A husband is not a lover. Lilly told me that: and I know it's true now. Lilly told me that a husband cannot be a lover, and a lover cannot be a husband. And that women will only have lovers now, and never a husband. Well, I am a husband, if I am anything. And I shall never be a lover again, not while I live. No, not to anybody. I haven't it in me. I'm a husband, and so it is finished with me as a lover. I can't be a lover any more, just as I can't be aged twenty any more. I am a man now, not an adolescent. And to my sorrow I am a husband to a woman who wants a lover: always a lover. But all women want lovers. And I can't be it any more. I don't want to. I have finished that. Finished for ever: unless I become senile---” Therefore next day he gathered up his courage. He would not have had courage unless he had known that he was not alone. The other man was in the town, and from this fact he derived his strength: the fact that Lilly was there. So at teatime he went over the river, and rang at her door. Yes, she was at home, and she had other visitors. She was wearing a beautiful soft afternoon dress, again of a blue like chicory-flowers, a pale, warm blue. And she had cornflowers in her belt: heaven knows where she had got them. She greeted Aaron with some of the childish shyness. He could tell that she was glad he had come, and that she had wondered at his not coming sooner. She introduced him to her visitors: two young ladies and one old lady and one elderly Italian count. The conversation was mostly in French or Italian, so Aaron was rather out of it. However, the visitors left fairly early, so Aaron stayed them out. When they had gone, he asked: “Where is Manfredi?” “He will come in soon. At about seven o'clock.” Then there was a silence again. “You are dressed fine today,” he said to her. “Am I?” she smiled. He was never able to make out quite what she felt, what she was feeling. But she had a quiet little air of proprietorship in him, which he did not like. “You will stay to dinner tonight, won't you?” she said. “No--not tonight,” he said. And then, awkwardly, he added: “You know. I think it is better if we are friends--not lovers. You know--I don't feel free. I feel my wife, I suppose, somewhere inside me. And I can't help it---” She bent her head and was silent for some moments. Then she lifted her face and looked at him oddly. “Yes,” she said. “I am sure you love your wife.” The reply rather staggered him--and to tell the truth, annoyed him. “Well,” he said. “I don't know about love. But when one has been married for ten years--and I did love her--then--some sort of bond or something grows. I think some sort of connection grows between us, you know. And it isn't natural, quite, to break it.--Do you know what I mean?” She paused a moment. Then, very softly, almost gently, she said: “Yes, I do. I know so well what you mean.” He was really surprised at her soft acquiescence. What _did_ she mean? “But we can be friends, can't we?” he said. “Yes, I hope so. Why, yes! Goodness, yes! I should be sorry if we couldn't be friends.” After which speech he felt that everything was all right--everything was A-one. And when Manfredi came home, the first sound he heard was the flute and his wife's singing. “I'm so glad you've come,” his wife said to him. “Shall we go into the sala and have real music? Will you play?” “I should love to,” replied the husband. Behold them then in the big drawing-room, and Aaron and the Marchese practising together, and the Marchesa singing an Italian folk-song while her husband accompanied her on the pianoforte. But her singing was rather strained and forced. Still, they were quite a little family, and it seemed quite nice. As soon as she could, the Marchesa left the two men together, whilst she sat apart. Aaron and Manfredi went through old Italian and old German music, tried one thing and then another, and seemed quite like brothers. They arranged a piece which they should play together on a Saturday morning, eight days hence. The next day, Saturday, Aaron went to one of the Del Torre music mornings. There was a string quartette--and a violin soloist--and the Marchese at the piano. The audience, some dozen or fourteen friends, sat at the near end of the room, or in the smaller salotta, whilst the musicians performed at the further end of the room. The Lillys were there, both Tanny and her husband. But apart from these, Aaron knew nobody, and felt uncomfortable. The Marchesa gave her guests little sandwiches and glasses of wine or Marsala or vermouth, as they chose. And she was quite the hostess: the well-bred and very simple, but still the conventional hostess. Aaron did not like it. And he could see that Lilly too was unhappy. In fact, the little man bolted the moment he could, dragging after him the indignant Tanny, who was so looking forward to the excellent little sandwiches. But no--Lilly just rudely bolted. Aaron followed as soon as he could. “Will you come to dinner tomorrow evening?” said his hostess to him as he was leaving. And he agreed. He had really resented seeing her as a conventional hostess, attending so charmingly to all the other people, and treating him so merely as one of the guests, among many others. So that when at the last moment she quietly invited him to dinner next day, he was flattered and accepted at once. The next day was Sunday--the seventh day after his coming together with the Marchesa--which had taken place on the Monday. And already he was feeling much less dramatic in his decision to keep himself apart from her, to be merely friends. Already the memory of the last time was fanning up in him, not as a warning but as a terrible incitement. Again the naked desire was getting hold of him, with that peculiar brutal powerfulness which startled him and also pleased him. So that by the time Sunday morning came, his recoil had exhausted itself, and he was ready again, eager again, but more wary this time. He sat in his room alone in the morning, playing his flute, playing over from memory the tunes she loved, and imagining how he and she would get into unison in the evening. His flute, his Aaron's rod, would blossom once again with splendid scarlet flowers, the red Florentine lilies. It was curious, the passion he had for her: just unalloyed desire, and nothing else. Something he had not known in his life before. Previously there had been always _some_ personal quality, some sort of personal tenderness. But here, none. She did not seem to want it. She seemed to hate it, indeed. No, all he felt was stark, naked desire, without a single pretension. True enough, his last experience had been a warning to him. His desire and himself likewise had broken rather disastrously under the proving. But not finally broken. He was ready again. And with all the sheer powerful insolence of desire he looked forward to the evening. For he almost expected Manfredi would not be there. The officer had said something about having to go to Padua on the Saturday afternoon. So Aaron went skipping off to his appointment, at seven o'clock. Judge of his chagrin, then, when he found already seated in the salotta an elderly, quite well-known, very cultured and very well-connected English authoress. She was charming, in her white hair and dress of soft white wool and white lace, with a long chain of filigree gold beads, like bubbles. She was charming in her old-fashioned manner too, as if the world were still safe and stable, like a garden in which delightful culture, and choice ideas bloomed safe from wind and weather. Alas, never was Aaron more conscious of the crude collapse in the world than when he listened to this animated, young-seeming lady from the safe days of the seventies. All the old culture and choice ideas seemed like blowing bubbles. And dear old Corinna Wade, she seemed to be blowing bubbles still, as she sat there so charming in her soft white dress, and talked with her bright animation about the influence of woman in Parliament and the influence of woman in the Periclean day. Aaron listened spell-bound, watching the bubbles float round his head, and almost hearing them go pop. To complete the party arrived an elderly litterateur who was more proud of his not-very-important social standing than of his literature. In fact he was one of those English snobs of the old order, living abroad. Perfectly well dressed for the evening, his grey hair and his prim face was the most well-dressed thing to be met in North Italy. “Oh, so glad to see you, Mr. French. I didn't know you were in Florence again. You make that journey from Venice so often. I wonder you don't get tired of it,” cried Corinna Wade. “No,” he said. “So long as duty to England calls me to Florence, I shall come to Florence. But I can LIVE in no town but Venice.” “No, I suppose you can't. Well, there is something special about Venice: having no streets and no carriages, and moving about in a gondola. I suppose it is all much more soothing.” “Much less nerve-racking, yes. And then there is a quality in the whole life. Of course I see few English people in Venice--only the old Venetian families, as a rule.” “Ah, yes. That must be very interesting. They are very exclusive still, the Venetian _noblesse_?” said Miss Wade. “Oh, very exclusive,” said Mr. French. “That is one of the charms. Venice is really altogether exclusive. It excludes the world, really, and defies time and modern movement. Yes, in spite of the steamers on the canal, and the tourists.” “That is so. That is so. Venice is a strange back-water. And the old families are very proud still, in these democratic days. They have a great opinion of themselves, I am told.” “Well,” said Mr. French. “Perhaps you know the rhyme: “'Veneziano gran' Signore Padovano buon' dotore. Vicenzese mangia il gatto Veronese tutto matto---'” “How very amusing!” said Miss Wade. “_Veneziana_ gran' Signore. The Venetian is a great gentleman! Yes, I know they are all convinced of it. Really, how very amusing, in these advanced days. To be born a Venetian, is to be born a great gentleman! But this outdoes divine right of king.” “To be born a Venetian GENTLEMAN, is to be born a great gentleman,” said Mr. French, rather fussily. “You seriously think so?” said Miss Wade. “Well now, what do you base your opinion on?” Mr. French gave various bases for his opinion. “Yes--interesting. Very interesting. Rather like the Byzantines--lingering on into far other ages. Anna Comnena always charmed me very much. HOW she despised the flower of the north--even Tancred! And so the lingering Venetian families! And you, in your palazzo on the Grand Canal: you are a northern barbarian civilised into the old Venetian Signoria. But how very romantic a situation!” It was really amusing to see the old maid, how she skirmished and hit out gaily, like an old jaunty free lance: and to see the old bachelor, how prim he was, and nervy and fussy and precious, like an old maid. But need we say that Mr. Aaron felt very much out of it. He sat and listened, with a sardonic small smile on his face and a sardonic gleam in his blue eyes, that looked so very blue on such an occasion. He made the two elderly people uncomfortable with his silence: his democratic silence, Miss Wade might have said. However, Miss Wade lived out towards Galuzzo, so she rose early, to catch her tram. And Mr. French gallantly and properly rose to accompany her, to see her safe on board. Which left Aaron and the Marchesa alone. “What time is Manfredi coming back?” said he. “Tomorrow,” replied she. There was a pause. “Why do you have those people?” he asked. “Who?” “Those two who were here this evening.” “Miss Wade and Mr. French?--Oh, I like Miss Wade so very much. She is so refreshing.” “Those old people,” said Aaron. “They licked the sugar off the pill, and go on as if everything was toffee. And we've got to swallow the pill. It's easy to be refreshing---” “No, don't say anything against her. I like her so much.” “And him?” “Mr. French!--Well, he's perhaps a little like the princess who felt the pea through three feather-beds. But he can be quite witty, and an excellent conversationalist, too. Oh yes, I like him quite well.” “Matter of taste,” said Aaron. They had not much to say to one another. The time passed, in the pauses. He looked at his watch. “I shall have to go,” he said. “Won't you stay?” she said, in a small, muted voice. “Stay all night?” he said. “Won't you?” “Yes,” he said quietly. Did he not feel the strength of his desire on him. After which she said no more. Only she offered him whiskey and soda, which he accepted. “Go then,” he said to her. “And I'll come to you.--Shall I come in fifteen minutes?” She looked at him with strange, slow dark eyes. And he could not understand. “Yes,” she said. And she went. And again, this night as before, she seemed strangely small and clinging in his arms. And this night he felt his passion drawn from him as if a long, live nerve were drawn out from his body, a long live thread of electric fire, a long, living nerve finely extracted from him, from the very roots of his soul. A long fine discharge of pure, bluish fire, from the core of his soul. It was an excruciating, but also an intensely gratifying sensation. This night he slept with a deeper obliviousness than before. But ah, as it grew towards morning how he wished he could be alone. They must stay together till the day was light. And she seemed to love clinging to him and curling strangely on his breast. He could never reconcile it with her who was a hostess entertaining her guests. How could she now in a sort of little ecstasy curl herself and nestle herself on his, Aaron's breast, tangling his face all over with her hair. He verily believed that this was what she really wanted of him: to curl herself on his naked breast, to make herself small, small, to feel his arms around her, while he himself was remote, silent, in some way inaccessible. This seemed almost to make her beside herself with gratification. But why, why? Was it because he was one of her own race, and she, as it were, crept right home to him? He did not know. He only knew it had nothing to do with him: and that, save out of _complaisance_, he did not want it. It simply blasted his own central life. It simply blighted him. And she clung to him closer. Strange, she was afraid of him! Afraid of him as of a fetish! Fetish afraid, and fetish-fascinated! Or was her fear only a delightful game of cat and mouse? Or was the fear genuine, and the delight the greater: a sort of sacrilege? The fear, and the dangerous, sacrilegious power over that which she feared. In some way, she was not afraid of him at all. In some other way she used him as a mere magic implement, used him with the most amazing priestess-craft. Himself, the individual man which he was, this she treated with an indifference that was startling to him. He forgot, perhaps, that this was how he had treated her. His famous desire for her, what had it been but this same attempt to strike a magic fire out of her, for his own ecstasy. They were playing the same game of fire. In him, however, there was all the time something hard and reckless and defiant, which stood apart. She was absolutely gone in her own incantations. She was absolutely gone, like a priestess utterly involved in her terrible rites. And he was part of the ritual only, God and victim in one. God and victim! All the time, God and victim. When his aloof soul realised, amid the welter of incantation, how he was being used,--not as himself but as something quite different--God and victim--then he dilated with intense surprise, and his remote soul stood up tall and knew itself alone. He didn't want it, not at all. He knew he was apart. And he looked back over the whole mystery of their love-contact. Only his soul was apart. He was aware of the strength and beauty and godlikeness that his breast was then to her--the magic. But himself, he stood far off, like Moses' sister Miriam. She would drink the one drop of his innermost heart's blood, and he would be carrion. As Cleopatra killed her lovers in the morning. Surely they knew that death was their just climax. They had approached the climax. Accept then. But his soul stood apart, and could have nothing to do with it. If he had really been tempted, he would have gone on, and she might have had his central heart's blood. Yes, and thrown away the carrion. He would have been willing. But fatally, he was not tempted. His soul stood apart and decided. At the bottom of his soul he disliked her. Or if not her, then her whole motive. Her whole life-mode. He was neither God nor victim: neither greater nor less than himself. His soul, in its isolation as she lay on his breast, chose it so, with the soul's inevitability. So, there was no temptation. When it was sufficiently light, he kissed her and left her. Quietly he left the silent flat. He had some difficulty in unfastening the various locks and bars and catches of the massive door downstairs, and began, in irritation and anger, to feel he was a prisoner, that he was locked in. But suddenly the ponderous door came loose, and he was out in the street. The door shut heavily behind him, with a shudder. He was out in the morning streets of Florence. CHAPTER XX. THE BROKEN ROD The day was rainy. Aaron stayed indoors alone, and copied music and slept. He felt the same stunned, withered feeling as before, but less intensely, less disastrously, this time. He knew now, without argument or thought that he would never go again to the Marchesa: not as a lover. He would go away from it all. He did not dislike her. But he would never see her again. A great gulf had opened, leaving him alone on the far side. He did not go out till after dinner. When he got downstairs he found the heavy night-door closed. He wondered: then remembered the Signorina's fear of riots and disturbances. As again he fumbled with the catches, he felt that the doors of Florence were trying to prevent his egress. However, he got out. It was a very dark night, about nine o'clock, and deserted seeming. He was struck by the strange, deserted feeling of the city's atmosphere. Yet he noticed before him, at the foot of the statue, three men, one with a torch: a long torch with naked flames. The men were stooping over something dark, the man with the torch bending forward too. It was a dark, weird little group, like Mediaeval Florence. Aaron lingered on his doorstep, watching. He could not see what they were doing. But now, the two were crouching down; over a long dark object on the ground, and the one with the torch bending also to look. What was it? They were just at the foot of the statue, a dark little group under the big pediment, the torch-flames weirdly flickering as the torch-bearer moved and stooped lower to the two crouching men, who seemed to be kneeling. Aaron felt his blood stir. There was something dark and mysterious, stealthy, in the little scene. It was obvious the men did not want to draw attention, they were so quiet and furtive-seeming. And an eerie instinct prevented Aaron's going nearer to look. Instead, he swerved on to the Lungarno, and went along the top of the square, avoiding the little group in the centre. He walked the deserted dark-seeming street by the river, then turned inwards, into the city. He was going to the Piazza Vittoria Emmanuele, to sit in the cafe which is the centre of Florence at night. There he could sit for an hour, and drink his vermouth and watch the Florentines. As he went along one of the dark, rather narrow streets, he heard a hurrying of feet behind him. Glancing round, he saw the torch-bearer coming along at a trot, holding his flaming torch up in front of him as he trotted down the middle of the narrow dark street. Aaron shrank under the wall. The trotting torch-bearer drew near, and now Aaron perceived the other two men slowly trotting behind, stealthily, bearing a stretcher on which a body was wrapped up, completely and darkly covered. The torch-bearer passed, the men with the stretcher passed too, hastily and stealthily, the flickering flames revealing them. They took no notice of Aaron, no notice of anything, but trotted softly on towards the centre of the city. Their queer, quick footsteps echoed down the distance. Then Aaron too resumed his way. He came to the large, brilliantly-lighted cafe. It was Sunday evening, and the place was full. Men, Florentines, many, many men sat in groups and in twos and threes at the little marble tables. They were mostly in dark clothes or black overcoats. They had mostly been drinking just a cup of coffee--others however had glasses of wine or liquor. But mostly it was just a little coffee-tray with a tiny coffee pot and a cup and saucer. There was a faint film of tobacco smoke. And the men were all talking: talking, talking with that peculiar intensity of the Florentines. Aaron felt the intense, compressed sound of many half-secret voices. For the little groups and couples abated their voices, none wished that others should hear what they said. Aaron was looking for a seat--there was no table to him-—when suddenly someone took him by the arm. It was Argyle. “Come along, now! Come and join us. Here, this way! Come along!” Aaron let himself be led away towards a corner. There sat Lilly and a strange man: called Levison. The room was warm. Aaron could never bear to be too hot. After sitting a minute, he rose and took off his coat, and hung it on a stand near the window. As he did so he felt the weight of his flute--it was still in his pocket. And he wondered if it was safe to leave it. “I suppose no one will steal from the overcoat pockets,” he said, as he sat down. “My dear chap, they'd steal the gold filling out of your teeth, if you happened to yawn,” said Argyle. “Why, have you left valuables in your overcoat?” “My flute,” said Aaron. “Oh, they won't steal that,” said Argyle. “Besides,” said Lilly, “we should see anyone who touched it.” And so they settled down to the vermouth. “Well,” said Argyle, “what have you been doing with yourself, eh? I haven't seen a glimpse of you for a week. Been going to the dogs, eh?” “Or the bitches,” said Aaron. “Oh, but look here, that's bad! That's bad! I can see I shall have to take you in hand, and commence my work of reform. Oh, I'm a great reformer, a Zwingli and Savonarola in one. I couldn't count the number of people I've led into the right way. It takes some finding, you know. Strait is the gate--damned strait sometimes. A damned tight squeeze....” Argyle was somewhat intoxicated. He spoke with a slight slur, and laughed, really tickled at his own jokes. The man Levison smiled acquiescent. But Lilly was not listening. His brow was heavy and he seemed abstracted. He hardly noticed Aaron's arrival. “Did you see the row yesterday?” asked Levison. “No,” said Aaron. “What was it?” It was the socialists. They were making a demonstration against the imprisonment of one of the railway-strikers. I was there. They went on all right, with a good bit of howling and gibing: a lot of young louts, you know. And the shop-keepers shut up shop, and nobody showed the Italian flag, of course. Well, when they came to the Via Benedetto Croce, there were a few mounted carabinieri. So they stopped the procession, and the sergeant said that the crowd could continue, could go on where they liked, but would they not go down the Via Verrocchio, because it was being repaired, the roadway was all up, and there were piles of cobble stones. These might prove a temptation and lead to trouble. So would the demonstrators not take that road--they might take any other they liked.--Well, the very moment he had finished, there was a revolver shot, he made a noise, and fell forward over his horse's nose. One of the anarchists had shot him. Then there was hell let loose, the carabinieri fired back, and people were bolting and fighting like devils. I cleared out, myself. But my God--what do you think of it?” “Seems pretty mean,” said Aaron. “Mean!--He had just spoken them fair--they could go where they liked, only would they not go down the one road, because of the heap of stones. And they let him finish. And then shot him dead.” “Was he dead?” said Aaron. “Yes--killed outright, the Nazione says.” There was a silence. The drinkers in the cafe all continued to talk vehemently, casting uneasy glances. “Well,” said Argyle, “if you let loose the dogs of war, you mustn't expect them to come to heel again in five minutes.” “But there's no fair play about it, not a bit,” said Levison. “Ah, my dear fellow, are you still so young and callow that you cherish the illusion of fair play?” said Argyle. “Yes, I am,” said Levison. “Live longer and grow wiser,” said Argyle, rather contemptuously. “Are you a socialist?” asked Levison. “Am I my aunt Tabitha's dachshund bitch called Bella,” said Argyle, in his musical, indifferent voice. “Yes, Bella's her name. And if you can tell me a damneder name for a dog, I shall listen, I assure you, attentively.” “But you haven't got an aunt called Tabitha,” said Aaron. “Haven't I? Oh, haven't I? I've got TWO aunts called Tabitha: if not more.” “They aren't of any vital importance to you, are they?” said Levison. “Not the very least in the world--if it hadn't been that my elder Aunt Tabitha had christened her dachshund bitch Bella. I cut myself off from the family after that. Oh, I turned over a new leaf, with not a family name on it. Couldn't stand Bella amongst the rest.” “You must have strained most of the gnats out of your drink, Argyle,” said Lilly, laughing. “Assiduously! Assiduously! I can't stand these little vermin. Oh, I am quite indifferent about swallowing a camel or two--or even a whole string of dromedaries. How charmingly Eastern that sounds! But gnats! Not for anything in the world would I swallow one.” “You're a bit of a SOCIALIST though, aren't you?” persisted Levison, now turning to Lilly. “No,” said Lilly. “I was.” “And am no more,” said Argyle sarcastically. “My dear fellow, the only hope of salvation for the world lies in the re-institution of slavery.” “What kind of slavery?” asked Levison. “Slavery! SLAVERY! When I say SLAVERY I don't mean any of your damned modern reform cant. I mean solid sound slavery on which the Greek and the Roman world rested. FAR finer worlds than ours, my dear chap! Oh FAR finer! And can't be done without slavery. Simply can't be done.--Oh, they'll all come to realise it, when they've had a bit more of this democratic washer-women business.” Levison was laughing, with a slight sneer down his nose. “Anyhow, there's no immediate danger--or hope, if you prefer it--of the re-instituting of classic slavery,” he said. “Unfortunately no. We are all such fools,” said Argyle. “Besides,” said Levison, “who would you make slaves of?” “Everybody, my dear chap: beginning with the idealists and the theorising Jews, and after them your nicely-bred gentlemen, and then perhaps, your profiteers and Rothschilds, and ALL politicians, and ending up with the proletariat,” said Argyle. “Then who would be the masters?--the professional classes, doctors and lawyers and so on?” “What? Masters. They would be the sewerage slaves, as being those who had made most smells.” There was a moment's silence. “The only fault I have to find with your system,” said Levison, rather acidly, “is that there would be only one master, and everybody else slaves.” “Do you call that a fault? What do you want with more than one master? Are you asking for several?--Well, perhaps there's cunning in THAT.--Cunning devils, cunning devils, these theorising slaves--” And Argyle pushed his face with a devilish leer into Aaron's face. “Cunning devils!” he reiterated, with a slight tipsy slur. “That be-fouled Epictetus wasn't the last of 'em--nor the first. Oh, not by any means, not by any means.” Here Lilly could not avoid a slight spasm of amusement. “But returning to serious conversation,” said Levison, turning his rather sallow face to Lilly. “I think you'll agree with me that socialism is the inevitable next step--” Lilly waited for some time without answering. Then he said, with unwilling attention to the question: “I suppose it's the logically inevitable next step.” “Use logic as lavatory paper,” cried Argyle harshly. “Yes--logically inevitable--and humanly inevitable at the same time. Some form of socialism is bound to come, no matter how you postpone it or try variations,” said Levison. “All right, let it come,” said Lilly. “It's not my affair, neither to help it nor to keep it back, or even to try varying it.” “There I don't follow you,” said Levison. “Suppose you were in Russia now--” “I watch it I'm not.” “But you're in Italy, which isn't far off. Supposing a socialist revolution takes place all around you. Won't that force the problem on you?--It is every man's problem,” persisted Levison. “Not mine,” said Lilly. “How shall you escape it?” said Levison. “Because to me it is no problem. To Bolsh or not to Bolsh, as far as my mind goes, presents no problem. Not any more than to be or not to be. To be or not to be is simply no problem--” “No, I quite agree, that since you are already existing, and since death is ultimately inevitable, to be or not to be is no sound problem,” said Levison. “But the parallel isn't true of socialism. That is not a problem of existence, but of a certain mode of existence which centuries of thought and action on the part of Europe have now made logically inevitable for Europe. And therefore there is a problem. There is more than a problem, there is a dilemma. Either we must go to the logical conclusion--or--” “Somewhere else,” said Lilly. “Yes--yes. Precisely! But where ELSE? That's the one half of the problem: supposing you do not agree to a logical progression in human social activity. Because after all, human society through the course of ages only enacts, spasmodically but still inevitably, the logical development of a given idea.” “Well, then, I tell you.--The idea and the ideal has for me gone dead--dead as carrion--” “Which idea, which ideal precisely?” “The ideal of love, the ideal that it is better to give than to receive, the ideal of liberty, the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the ideal of the sanctity of human life, the ideal of what we call goodness, charity, benevolence, public spirited-ness, the ideal of sacrifice for a cause, the ideal of unity and unanimity--all the lot--all the whole beehive of ideals--has all got the modern bee-disease, and gone putrid, stinking.--And when the ideal is dead and putrid, the logical sequence is only stink.--Which, for me, is the truth concerning the ideal of good, peaceful, loving humanity and its logical sequence in socialism and equality, equal opportunity or whatever you like.--But this time he stinketh--and I'm sorry for any Christus who brings him to life again, to stink livingly for another thirty years: the beastly Lazarus of our idealism.” “That may be true for you--” “But it's true for nobody else,” said Lilly. “All the worse for them. Let them die of the bee-disease.” “Not only that,” persisted Levison, “but what is your alternative? Is it merely nihilism?” “My alternative,” said Lilly, “is an alternative for no one but myself, so I'll keep my mouth shut about it.” “That isn't fair.” “I tell you, the ideal of fairness stinks with the rest.--I have no obligation to say what I think.” “Yes, if you enter into conversation, you have--” “Bah, then I didn't enter into conversation.--The only thing is, I agree in the rough with Argyle. You've got to have a sort of slavery again. People are not MEN: they are insects and instruments, and their destiny is slavery. They are too many for me, and so what I think is ineffectual. But ultimately they will be brought to agree--after sufficient extermination--and then they will elect for themselves a proper and healthy and energetic slavery.” “I should like to know what you mean by slavery. Because to me it is impossible that slavery should be healthy and energetic. You seem to have some other idea in your mind, and you merely use the word slavery out of exasperation--” “I mean it none the less. I mean a real committal of the life-issue of inferior beings to the responsibility of a superior being.” “It'll take a bit of knowing, who are the inferior and which is the superior,” said Levison sarcastically. “Not a bit. It is written between a man's brows, which he is.” “I'm afraid we shall all read differently.” “So long as we're liars.” “And putting that question aside: I presume that you mean that this committal of the life-issue of inferior beings to someone higher shall be made voluntarily--a sort of voluntary self-gift of the inferiors--” “Yes--more or less--and a voluntary acceptance. For it's no pretty gift, after all.--But once made it must be held fast by genuine power. Oh yes--no playing and fooling about with it. Permanent and very efficacious power.” “You mean military power?” “I do, of course.” Here Levison smiled a long, slow, subtle smile of ridicule. It all seemed to him the preposterous pretentiousness of a megalomaniac--one whom, after a while, humanity would probably have the satisfaction of putting into prison, or into a lunatic asylum. And Levison felt strong, overwhelmingly strong, in the huge social power with which he, insignificant as he was, was armed against such criminal-imbecile pretensions as those above set forth. Prison or the lunatic asylum. The face of the fellow gloated in these two inevitable engines of his disapproval. “It will take you some time before you'll get your doctrines accepted,” he said. “Accepted! I'd be sorry. I don't want a lot of swine snouting and sniffing at me with their acceptance.--Bah, Levison--one can easily make a fool of you. Do you take this as my gospel?” “I take it you are speaking seriously.” Here Lilly broke into that peculiar, gay, whimsical smile. “But I should say the blank opposite with just as much fervour,” he declared. “Do you mean to say you don't MEAN what you've been saying?” said Levison, now really looking angry. “Why, I'll tell you the real truth,” said Lilly. “I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, NEVER to be violated; I think there is only one thing I hate to the verge of madness, and that is BULLYING. To see any living creature BULLIED, in any way, almost makes a murderer of me. That is true. Do you believe it--?” “Yes,” said Levison unwillingly. “That may be true as well. You have no doubt, like most of us, got a complex nature which--” C R A S H! There intervened one awful minute of pure shock, when the soul was in darkness. Out of this shock Aaron felt himself issuing amid a mass of terrible sensations: the fearful blow of the explosion, the noise of glass, the hoarse howl of people, the rushing of men, the sudden gulf, the awful gulfing whirlpool of horror in the social life. He stood in agony and semi-blindness amid a chaos. Then as he began to recover his consciousness, he found himself standing by a pillar some distance from where he had been sitting: he saw a place where tables and chairs were all upside down, legs in the air, amid debris of glass and breakage: he saw the cafe almost empty, nearly everybody gone: he saw the owner, or the manager, advancing aghast to the place of debris: he saw Lilly standing not far off, white as a sheet, and as if unconscious. And still he had no idea of what had happened. He thought perhaps something had broken down. He could not understand. Lilly began to look round. He caught Aaron's eye. And then Aaron began to approach his friend. “What is it?” he asked. “A bomb,” said Lilly. The manager, and one old waiter, and three or four youths had now advanced to the place of debris. And now Aaron saw that a man was lying there--and horror, blood was running across the floor of the cafe. Men began now hastily to return to the place. Some seized their hats and departed again at once. But many began to crowd in--a black eager crowd of men pressing to where the bomb had burst--where the man was lying. It was rather dark, some of the lamps were broken--but enough still shone. Men surged in with that eager, excited zest of people, when there has been an accident. Grey carabinieri, and carabinieri in the cocked hat and fine Sunday uniform pressed forward officiously. “Let us go,” said Lilly. And he went to the far corner, where his hat hung. But Aaron looked in vain for his own hat. The bomb had fallen near the stand where he had hung it and his overcoat. “My hat and coat?” he said to Lilly. Lilly, not very tall, stood on tiptoe. Then he climbed on a chair and looked round. Then he squeezed past the crowd. Aaron followed. On the other side of the crowd excited angry men were wrestling over overcoats that were mixed up with a broken marble table-top. Aaron spied his own black hat under the sofa near the wall. He waited his turn and then in the confusion pressed forward to where the coats were. Someone had dragged out his, and it lay on the floor under many feet. He managed, with a struggle, to get it from under the feet of the crowd. He felt at once for his flute. But his trampled, torn coat had no flute in its pocket. He pushed and struggled, caught sight of a section, and picked it up. But it was split right down, two silver stops were torn out, and a long thin spelch of wood was curiously torn off. He looked at it, and his heart stood still. No need to look for the rest. He felt utterly, utterly overcome--as if he didn't care what became of him any further. He didn't care whether he were hit by a bomb, or whether he himself threw the next bomb, and hit somebody. He just didn't care any more about anything in life or death. It was as if the reins of his life slipped from his hands. And he would let everything run where it would, so long as it did run. Then he became aware of Lilly's eyes on him--and automatically he joined the little man. “Let us go,” said Lilly. And they pushed their way through the door. The police were just marching across the square. Aaron and Lilly walked in the opposite direction. Groups of people were watching. Suddenly Lilly swerved--in the middle of the road was a large black glisten of blood, trickling horribly. A wounded man had run from the blow and fallen here. Aaron did not know where he was going. But in the Via Tournabuoni Lilly turned towards the Arno, and soon they were on the Ponte Santa Trinita. “Who threw the bomb?” said Aaron. “I suppose an anarchist.” “It's all the same,” said Aaron. The two men, as if unable to walk any further, leaned on the broad parapet of the bridge and looked at the water in the darkness of the still, deserted night. Aaron still had his flute section in his hand, his overcoat over his arm. “Is that your flute?” asked Lilly. “Bit of it. Smashed.” “Let me look.” He looked, and gave it back. “No good,” he said. “Oh, no,” said Aaron. “Throw it in the river, Aaron,” said Lilly. Aaron turned and looked at him. “Throw it in the river,” repeated Lilly. “It's an end.” Aaron nervelessly dropped the flute into the stream. The two men stood leaning on the bridge-parapet, as if unable to move. “We shall have to go home,” said Lilly. “Tanny may hear of it and be anxious.” Aaron was quite dumbfounded by the night's event: the loss of his flute. Here was a blow he had not expected. And the loss was for him symbolistic. It chimed with something in his soul: the bomb, the smashed flute, the end. “There goes Aaron's Rod, then,” he said to Lilly. “It'll grow again. It's a reed, a water-plant--you can't kill it,” said Lilly, unheeding. “And me?” “You'll have to live without a rod, meanwhile.” To which pleasant remark Aaron made no reply. CHAPTER XXI. WORDS He went home to bed: and dreamed a strange dream. He dreamed that he was in a country with which he was not acquainted. Night was coming on, and he had nowhere to sleep. So he passed the mouth of a sort of cave or house, in which a woman, an old woman, sat. Therefore he entered, and though he could not understand the language, still his second self understood. The cave was a house: and men came home from work. His second self assumed that they were tin-miners. He wandered uneasily to and fro, no one taking any particular notice of him. And he realized that there was a whole vast country spreading, a sort of underworld country, spreading away beyond him. He wandered from vast apartment to apartment, down narrow corridors like the roads in a mine. In one of the great square rooms, the men were going to eat. And it seemed to him that what they were going to eat was a man, naked man. But his second self knew that what appeared to his eyes as a man was really a man's skin stuffed tight with prepared meat, as the skin of a Bologna sausage. This did not prevent his seeing the naked man who was to be eaten walk slowly and stiffly across the gangway and down the corridor. He saw him from behind. It was a big handsome man in the prime of life, quite naked and perhaps stupid. But of course he was only a skin stuffed with meat, whom the grey tin-miners were going to eat. Aaron, the dream-Aaron, turned another way, and strayed along the vast square rooms, cavern apartments. He came into one room where there were many children, all in white gowns. And they were all busily putting themselves to bed, in the many beds scattered about the room at haphazard. And each child went to bed with a wreath of flowers on its head, white flowers and pink, so it seemed. So there they all lay, in their flower-crowns in the vast space of the rooms. And Aaron went away. He could not remember the following part. Only he seemed to have passed through many grey domestic apartments, where were all women, all greyish in their clothes and appearance, being wives of the underground tin-miners. The men were away and the dream-Aaron remembered with fear the food they were to eat. The next thing he could recall was, that he was in a boat. And now he was most definitely two people. His invisible, _conscious_ self, what we have called his second self, hovered as it were before the prow of the boat, seeing and knowing, but unseen. His other self, the palpable Aaron, sat as a passenger in the boat, which was being rowed by the unknown people of this underworld. They stood up as they thrust the boat along. Other passengers were in the boat too, women as well, but all of them unknown people, and not noticeable. The boat was upon a great lake in the underworld country, a lake of dark blue water, but crystal clear and very beautiful in colour. The second or invisible Aaron sat in the prow and watched the fishes swimming suspended in the clear, beautiful dark-blue water. Some were pale fish, some frightening-looking, like centipedes swimming, and some were dark fish, of definite form, and delightful to watch. The palpable or visible Aaron sat at the side of the boat, on the end of the middle seat, with his naked right elbow leaning out over the side. And now the boat entered upon shallows. The impalpable Aaron in the bows saw the whitish clay of the bottom swirl up in clouds at each thrust of the oars, whitish-clayey clouds which would envelope the strange fishes in a sudden mist. And on the right hand of the course stakes stood up in the water, at intervals, to mark the course. The boat must pass very near these stakes, almost touching. And Aaron's naked elbow was leaning right over the side. As they approached the first stake, the boatmen all uttered a strange cry of warning, in a foreign language. The flesh-and-blood Aaron seemed not even to hear. The invisible Aaron heard, but did not comprehend the words of the cry. So the naked elbow struck smartly against the stake as the boat passed. The rowers rowed on. And still the flesh-and-blood Aaron sat with his arm over the side. Another stake was nearing. “Will he heed, will he heed?” thought the anxious second self. The rowers gave the strange warning cry. He did not heed, and again the elbow struck against the stake as the boat passed. And yet the flesh-and-blood Aaron sat on and made no sign. There were stakes all along this shallow part of the lake. Beyond was deep water again. The invisible Aaron was becoming anxious. “Will he never hear? Will he never heed? Will he never understand?” he thought. And he watched in pain for the next stake. But still the flesh-and-blood Aaron sat on, and though the rowers cried so acutely that the invisible Aaron almost understood their very language, still the Aaron seated at the side heard nothing, and his elbow struck against the third stake. This was almost too much. But after a few moments, as the boat rowed on, the palpable Aaron changed his position as he sat, and drew in his arm: though even now he was not aware of any need to do so. The invisible Aaron breathed with relief in the bows, the boat swung steadily on, into the deep, unfathomable water again. They were drawing near a city. A lake-city, like Mexico. They must have reached a city, because when Aaron woke up and tried to piece together the dream of which these are mere fragments, he could remember having just seen an idol. An Astarte he knew it as, seated by the road, and in her open lap, were some eggs: smallish hen's eggs, and one or two bigger eggs, like swan's, and one single little roll of bread. These lay in the lap of the roadside Astarte.... And then he could remember no more. He woke, and for a minute tried to remember what he had been dreaming, and what it all meant. But he quickly relinquished the effort. So he looked at his watch: it was only half-past three. He had one of those American watches with luminous, phosphorescent figures and fingers. And tonight he felt afraid of its eerily shining face. He was awake a long time in the dark--for two hours, thinking and not thinking, in that barren state which is not sleep, nor yet full wakefulness, and which is a painful strain. At length he went to sleep again, and did not wake till past eight o'clock. He did not ring for his coffee till nine. Outside was a bright day--but he hardly heeded it. He lay profitlessly thinking. With the breaking of the flute, that which was slowly breaking had finally shattered at last. And there was nothing ahead: no plan, no prospect. He knew quite well that people would help him: Francis Dekker or Angus Guest or the Marchese or Lilly. They would get him a new flute, and find him engagements. But what was the good? His flute was broken, and broken finally. The bomb had settled it. The bomb had settled it and everything. It was an end, no matter how he tried to patch things up. The only thing he felt was a thread of destiny attaching him to Lilly. The rest had all gone as bare and bald as the dead orb of the moon. So he made up his mind, if he could, to make some plan that would bring his life together with that of his evanescent friend. Lilly was a peculiar bird. Clever and attractive as he undoubtedly was, he was perhaps the most objectionable person to know. It was stamped on his peculiar face. Aaron thought of Lilly's dark, ugly face, which had something that lurked in it as a creature under leaves. Then he thought of the wide-apart eyes, with their curious candour and surety. The peculiar, half-veiled surety, as if nothing, nothing could overcome him. It made people angry, this look of silent, indifferent assurance. “Nothing can touch him on the quick, nothing can really GET at him,” they felt at last. And they felt it with resentment, almost with hate. They wanted to be able to get at him. For he was so open-seeming, so very outspoken. He gave himself away so much. And he had no money to fall back on. Yet he gave himself away so easily, paid such attention, almost deference to any chance friend. So they all thought: Here is a wise person who finds me the wonder which I really am.--And lo and behold, after he had given them the trial, and found their inevitable limitations, he departed and ceased to heed their wonderful existence. Which, to say the least of it, was fraudulent and damnable. It was then, after his departure, that they realised his basic indifference to them, and his silent arrogance. A silent arrogance that knew all their wisdom, and left them to it. Aaron had been through it all. He had started by thinking Lilly a peculiar little freak: gone on to think him a wonderful chap, and a bit pathetic: progressed, and found him generous, but overbearing: then cruel and intolerant, allowing no man to have a soul of his own: then terribly arrogant, throwing a fellow aside like an old glove which is in holes at the finger-ends. And all the time, which was most beastly, seeing through one. All the time, freak and outsider as he was, Lilly _knew_. He knew, and his soul was against the whole world. Driven to bay, and forced to choose. Forced to choose, not between life and death, but between the world and the uncertain, assertive Lilly. Forced to choose, and yet, in the world, having nothing left to choose. For in the world there was nothing left to choose, unless he would give in and try for success. Aaron knew well enough that if he liked to do a bit of buttering, people would gladly make a success of him, and give him money and success. He could become quite a favourite. But no! If he had to give in to something: if he really had to give in, and it seemed he had: then he would rather give in to the little Lilly than to the beastly people of the world. If he had to give in, then it should be to no woman, and to no social ideal, and to no social institution. No!--if he had to yield his wilful independence, and give himself, then he would rather give himself to the little, individual man than to any of the rest. For to tell the truth, in the man was something incomprehensible, which had dominion over him, if he chose to allow it. As he lay pondering this over, escaping from the _cul de sac_ in which he had been running for so long, by yielding to one of his pursuers: yielding to the peculiar mastery of one man's nature rather than to the quicksands of woman or the stinking bogs of society: yielding, since yield he must, in some direction or other: yielding in a new direction now, to one strange and incalculable little individual: as Aaron lay so relaxing, finding a peculiar delight in giving his soul to his mind's hero, the self-same hero tapped and entered. “I wondered,” he said, “if you'd like to walk into the country with me: it is such a nice day. I thought you might have gone out already. But here you are in bed like a woman who's had a baby.--You're all right, are you?” “Yes,” said Aaron. “I'm all right.” “Miserable about your flute?--Ah, well, there are more flutes. Get up then.” And Lilly went to the window, and stood looking out at the river. “We're going away on Thursday,” he said. “Where to?” said Aaron. “Naples. We've got a little house there for the winter--in the country, not far from Sorrento--I must get a bit of work done, now the winter is coming. And forget all about everything and just live with life. What's the good of running after life, when we've got it in us, if nobody prevents us and obstructs us?” Aaron felt very queer. “But for how long will you settle down--?” he asked. “Oh, only the winter. I am a vagrant really: or a migrant. I must migrate. Do you think a cuckoo in Africa and a cuckoo in Essex is one AND the same bird? Anyhow, I know I must oscillate between north and south, so oscillate I do. It's just my nature. All people don't have the same needs.” “Perhaps not,” said Aaron, who had risen and was sitting on the side of the bed. “I would very much like to try life in another continent, among another race. I feel Europe becoming like a cage to me. Europe may be all right in herself. But I find myself chafing. Another year I shall get out. I shall leave Europe. I begin to feel caged.” “I guess there are others that feel caged, as well as you,” said Aaron. “I guess there are.” “And maybe they haven't a chance to get out.” Lilly was silent a moment. Then he said: “Well, I didn't make life and society. I can only go my own way.” Aaron too was silent. A deep disappointment was settling over his spirit. “Will you be alone all winter?” “Just myself and Tanny,” he answered. “But people always turn up.” “And then next year, what will you do?” “Who knows? I may sail far off. I should like to. I should like to try quite a new life-mode. This is finished in me--and yet perhaps it is absurd to go further. I'm rather sick of seekers. I hate a seeker.” “What,” said Aaron rather sarcastically--“those who are looking for a new religion?” “Religion--and love--and all that. It's a disease now.” “Oh, I don't know,” said Aaron. “Perhaps the lack of love and religion is the disease.” “Ah--bah! The grinding the old millstones of love and God is what ails us, when there's no more grist between the stones. We've ground love very small. Time to forget it. Forget the very words religion, and God, and love--then have a shot at a new mode. But the very words rivet us down and don't let us move. Rivets, and we can't get them out.” “And where should we be if we could?” said Aaron. “We might begin to be ourselves, anyhow.” “And what does that mean?” said Aaron. “Being yourself--what does it mean?” “To me, everything.” “And to most folks, nothing. They've got to have a goal.” “There is no goal. I loathe goals more than any other impertinence. Gaols, they are. Bah--jails and jailers, gaols and gaolers---” “Wherever you go, you'll find people with their noses tied to some goal,” said Aaron. “Their wagon hitched to a star--which goes round and round like an ass in a gin,” laughed Lilly. “Be damned to it.” Aaron got himself dressed, and the two men went out, took a tram and went into the country. Aaron could not help it--Lilly put his back up. They came to a little inn near a bridge, where a broad stream rustled bright and shallow. It was a sunny warm day, and Aaron and Lilly had a table outside under the thin trees at the top of the bank above the river. The yellow leaves were falling--the Tuscan sky was turquoise blue. In the stream below three naked boys still adventurously bathed, and lay flat on the shingle in the sun. A wagon with two pale, loving, velvety oxen drew slowly down the hill, looking at each step as if they were going to come to rest, to move no more. But still they stepped forward. Till they came to the inn, and there they stood at rest. Two old women were picking the last acorns under three scrubby oak-trees, whilst a girl with bare feet drove her two goats and a sheep up from the water-side towards the women. The girl wore a dress that had been blue, perhaps indigo, but which had faded to the beautiful lavender-purple colour which is so common, and which always reminded Lilly of purple anemones in the south. The two friends sat in the sun and drank red wine. It was midday. From the thin, square belfry on the opposite hill the bells had rung. The old women and the girl squatted under the trees, eating their bread and figs. The boys were dressing, fluttering into their shirts on the stream's shingle. A big girl went past, with somebody's dinner tied in a red kerchief and perched on her head. It was one of the most precious hours: the hour of pause, noon, and the sun, and the quiet acceptance of the world. At such a time everything seems to fall into a true relationship, after the strain of work and of urge. Aaron looked at Lilly, and saw the same odd, distant look on his face as on the face of some animal when it lies awake and alert, yet perfectly at one with its surroundings. It was something quite different from happiness: an alert enjoyment of rest, an intense and satisfying sense of centrality. As a dog when it basks in the sun with one eye open and winking: or a rabbit quite still and wide-eyed, with a faintly-twitching nose. Not passivity, but alert enjoyment of being central, life-central in one's own little circumambient world. They sat thus still--or lay under the trees--for an hour and a half. Then Lilly paid the bill, and went on. “What am I going to do this winter, do you think?” Aaron asked. “What do you want to do?” “Nay, that's what I want to know.” “Do you want anything? I mean, does something drive you from inside?” “I can't just rest,” said Aaron. “Can't you settle down to something?--to a job, for instance?” “I've not found the job I could settle down to, yet,” said Aaron. “Why not?” “It's just my nature.” “Are you a seeker? Have you got a divine urge, or need?” “How do I know?” laughed Aaron. “Perhaps I've got a DAMNED urge, at the bottom of me. I'm sure it's nothing divine.” “Very well then. Now, in life, there are only two great dynamic urges--do you believe me--?” “How do I know?” laughed Aaron. “Do you want to be believed?” “No, I don't care a straw. Only for your own sake, you'd better believe me.” “All right then--what about it?” “Well, then, there are only two great dynamic urges in LIFE: love and power.” “Love and power?” said Aaron. “I don't see power as so very important.” “You don't see because you don't look. But that's not the point. What sort of urge is your urge? Is it the love urge?” “I don't know,” said Aaron. “Yes, you do. You know that you have got an urge, don't you?” “Yes--” rather unwillingly Aaron admitted it. “Well then, what is it? Is it that you want to love, or to be obeyed?” “A bit of both.” “All right--a bit of both. And what are you looking for in love?--A woman whom you can love, and who will love you, out and out and all in all and happy ever after sort of thing?” “That's what I started out for, perhaps,” laughed Aaron. “And now you know it's all my eye!” Aaron looked at Lilly, unwilling to admit it. Lilly began to laugh. “You know it well enough,” he said. “It's one of your lost illusions, my boy. Well, then, what next? Is it a God you're after? Do you want a God you can strive to and attain, through love, and live happy ever after, countless millions of eternities, immortality and all that? Is this your little dodge?” Again Aaron looked at Lilly with that odd double look of mockery and unwillingness to give himself away. “All right then. You've got a love-urge that urges you to God; have you? Then go and join the Buddhists in Burmah, or the newest fangled Christians in Europe. Go and stick your head in a bush of Nirvana or spiritual perfection. Trot off.” “I won't,” said Aaron. “You must. If you've got a love-urge, then give it its fulfilment.” “I haven't got a love-urge.” “You have. You want to get excited in love. You want to be carried away in love. You want to whoosh off in a nice little love whoosh and love yourself. Don't deny it. I know you do. You want passion to sweep you off on wings of fire till you surpass yourself, and like the swooping eagle swoop right into the sun. I know you, my love-boy.” “Not any more--not any more. I've been had too often,” laughed Aaron. “Bah, it's a lesson men never learn. No matter how sick they make themselves with love, they always rush for more, like a dog to his vomit.” “Well, what am I to do then, if I'm not to love?” cried Aaron. “You want to go on, from passion to passion, from ecstasy to ecstasy, from triumph to triumph, till you can whoosh away into glory, beyond yourself, all bonds loosened and happy ever after. Either that or Nirvana, opposite side of the medal.” “There's probably more hate than love in me,” said Aaron. “That's the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.” “All right then. I'm a criminal and a murderer,” said Aaron. “No, you're not. But you've a love-urge. And perhaps on the recoil just now. But listen to me. It's no good thinking the love-urge is the one and only. _Niente_! You can whoosh if you like, and get excited and carried away loving a woman, or humanity, or God. Swoop away in the love direction till you lose yourself. But that's where you're had. You can't lose yourself. You can try. But you might just as well try to swallow yourself. You'll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can't lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end. A very nasty thing to wake up to is one's own raw self after an excessive love-whoosh. Look even at President Wilson: he love-whooshed for humanity, and found in the end he'd only got a very sorry self on his hands. “So leave off. Leave off, my boy. Leave off love-whooshing. You can't lose yourself, so stop trying. The responsibility is on your own shoulders all the time, and no God which man has ever struck can take it off. You ARE yourself and so BE yourself. Stick to it and abide by it. Passion or no passion, ecstasy or no ecstasy, urge or no urge, there's no goal outside you, where you can consummate like an eagle flying into the sun, or a moth into a candle. There's no goal outside you--and there's no God outside you. No God, whom you can get to and rest in. None. It's a case of: 'Trot, trot to market, to buy a penny bun, And trot, trot back again, as fast as you can run.' But there's no God outside you, whom you can rise to or sink to or swoop away to. You can't even gum yourself to a divine Nirvana moon. Because all the time you've got to eat your dinner and digest it. There is no goal outside you. None. “There is only one thing, your own very self. So you'd better stick to it. You can't be any bigger than just yourself, so you needn't drag God in. You've got one job, and no more. There inside you lies your own very self, like a germinating egg, your precious Easter egg of your own soul. There it is, developing bit by bit, from one single egg-cell which you were at your conception in your mother's womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die--if then. You've got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it's the only thing you have got or ever will have, don't go trying to lose it. You've got to develop it, from the egg into the chicken, and from the chicken into the one-and-only phoenix, of which there can only be one at a time in the universe. There can only be one of you at a time in the universe--and one of me. So don't forget it. Your own single oneness is your destiny. Your destiny comes from within, from your own self-form. And you can't know it beforehand, neither your destiny nor your self-form. You can only develop it. You can only stick to your own very self, and NEVER betray it. And by so sticking, you develop the one and only phoenix of your own self, and you unfold your own destiny, as a dandelion unfolds itself into a dandelion, and not into a stick of celery. “Remember this, my boy: you've never got to deny the Holy Ghost which is inside you, your own soul's self. Never. Or you'll catch it. And you've never got to think you'll dodge the responsibility of your own soul's self, by loving or sacrificing or Nirvaning--or even anarchising and throwing bombs. You never will....” Aaron was silenced for a moment by this flood of words. Then he said smiling: “So I'd better sit tight on my soul, till it hatches, had I?” “Oh, yes. If your soul's urge urges you to love, then love. But always know that what you are doing is the fulfilling of your own soul's impulse. It's no good trying to act by prescription: not a bit. And it's no use getting into frenzies. If you've got to go in for love and passion, go in for them. But they aren't the goal. They're a mere means: a life-means, if you will. The only goal is the fulfilling of your own soul's active desire and suggestion. Be passionate as much as ever it is your nature to be passionate, and deeply sensual as far as you can be. Small souls have a small sensuality, deep souls a deep one. But remember, all the time, the responsibility is upon your own head, it all rests with your own lonely soul, the responsibility for your own action.” “I never said it didn't,” said Aaron. “You never said it did. You never accepted. You thought there was something outside, to justify you: God, or a creed, or a prescription. But remember, your soul inside you is your only Godhead. It develops your actions within you as a tree develops its own new cells. And the cells push on into buds and boughs and flowers. And these are your passion and your acts and your thoughts and expressions, your developing consciousness. You don't know beforehand, and you can't. You can only stick to your own soul through thick and thin. “You are your own Tree of Life, roots and limbs and trunk. Somewhere within the wholeness of the tree lies the very self, the quick: its own innate Holy Ghost. And this Holy Ghost puts forth new buds, and pushes past old limits, and shakes off a whole body of dying leaves. And the old limits hate being empassed, and the old leaves hate to fall. But they must, if the tree-soul says so....” They had sat again during this harangue, under a white wall. Aaron listened more to the voice than the words. It was more the sound value which entered his soul, the tone, the strange speech-music which sank into him. The sense he hardly heeded. And yet he understood, he knew. He understood, oh so much more deeply than if he had listened with his head. And he answered an objection from the bottom of his soul. “But you talk,” he said, “as if we were like trees, alone by ourselves in the world. We aren't. If we love, it needs another person than ourselves. And if we hate, and even if we talk.” “Quite,” said Lilly. “And that's just the point. We've got to love and hate moreover--and even talk. But we haven't got to fix on any one of these modes, and say that's the only mode. It is such imbecility to say that love and love alone must rule. It is so obviously not the case. Yet we try and make it so.” “I feel that,” said Aaron. “It's all a lie.” “It's worse. It's a half lie. But listen. I told you there were two urges--two great life-urges, didn't I? There may be more. But it comes on me so strongly, now, that there are two: love, and power. And we've been trying to work ourselves, at least as individuals, from the love-urge exclusively, hating the power-urge, and repressing it. And now I find we've got to accept the very thing we've hated. “We've exhausted our love-urge, for the moment. And yet we try to force it to continue working. So we get inevitably anarchy and murder. It's no good. We've got to accept the power motive, accept it in deep responsibility, do you understand me? It is a great life motive. It was that great dark power-urge which kept Egypt so intensely living for so many centuries. It is a vast dark source of life and strength in us now, waiting either to issue into true action, or to burst into cataclysm. Power--the power-urge. The will-to-power--but not in Nietzsche's sense. Not intellectual power. Not mental power. Not conscious will-power. Not even wisdom. But dark, living, fructifying power. Do you know what I mean?” “I don't know,” said Aaron. “Take what you call love, for example. In the real way of love, the positive aim is to make the other person--or persons--happy. It devotes itself to the other or to others. But change the mode. Let the urge be the urge of power. Then the great desire is not happiness, neither of the beloved nor of oneself. Happiness is only one of many states, and it is horrible to think of fixing us down to one state. The urge of power does not seek for happiness any more than for any other state. It urges from within, darkly, for the displacing of the old leaves, the inception of the new. It is powerful and self-central, not seeking its centre outside, in some God or some beloved, but acting indomitably from within itself. “And of course there must be one who urges, and one who is impelled. Just as in love there is a beloved and a lover: The man is supposed to be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit--but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable free submission.” “You'll never get it,” said Aaron. “You will, if you abandon the love idea and the love motive, and if you stand apart, and never bully, never force from the conscious will. That's where Nietzsche was wrong. His was the conscious and benevolent will, in fact, the love-will. But the deep power-urge is not conscious of its aims: and it is certainly not consciously benevolent or love-directed.--Whatever else happens, somewhere, sometime, the deep power-urge in man will have to issue forth again, and woman will submit, livingly, not subjectedly.” “She never will,” persisted Aaron. “Anything else will happen, but not that.” “She will,” said Lilly, “once man disengages himself from the love-mode, and stands clear. Once he stands clear, and the other great urge begins to flow in him, then the woman won't be able to resist. Her own soul will wish to yield itself.” “Woman yield--?” Aaron re-echoed. “Woman--and man too. Yield to the deep power-soul in the individual man, and obey implicitly. I don't go back on what I said before. I do believe that every man must fulfil his own soul, every woman must be herself, herself only, not some man's instrument, or some embodied theory. But the mode of our being is such that we can only live and have our being whilst we are implicit in one of the great dynamic modes. We MUST either love, or rule. And once the love-mode changes, as change it must, for we are worn out and becoming evil in its persistence, then the other mode will take place in us. And there will be profound, profound obedience in place of this love-crying, obedience to the incalculable power-urge. And men must submit to the greater soul in a man, for their guidance: and women must submit to the positive power-soul in man, for their being.” “You'll never get it,” said Aaron. “You will, when all men want it. All men say, they want a leader. Then let them in their souls submit to some greater soul than theirs. At present, when they say they want a leader, they mean they want an instrument, like Lloyd George. A mere instrument for their use. But it's more than that. It's the reverse. It's the deep, fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man. You, Aaron, you too have the need to submit. You, too, have the need livingly to yield to a more heroic soul, to give yourself. You know you have. And you know it isn't love. It is life-submission. And you know it. But you kick against the pricks. And perhaps you'd rather die than yield. And so, die you must. It is your affair.” There was a long pause. Then Aaron looked up into Lilly's face. It was dark and remote-seeming. It was like a Byzantine eikon at the moment. “And whom shall I submit to?” he said. “Your soul will tell you,” replied the other. THE END 
23727	----	THE LOST GIRL by D. H. LAWRENCE New York Thomas Seltzer 1921 Copyright, 1921, by Thomas Seltzer, Inc. All rights reserved First Printing, February, 1921 Second Printing, February, 1921 Third Printing, September, 1921 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE DECLINE OF MANCHESTER HOUSE 7 II THE RISE OF ALVINA HOUGHTON 27 III THE MATERNITY NURSE 36 IV TWO WOMEN DIE 49 V THE BEAU 64 VI HOUGHTON'S LAST ENDEAVOUR 95 VII NATCHA-KEE-TAWARA 130 VIII CICCIO 164 IX ALVINA BECOMES ALLAYE 191 X THE FALL OF MANCHESTER HOUSE 235 XI HONOURABLE ENGAGEMENT 273 XII ALLAYE ALSO IS ENGAGED 304 XIII THE WEDDED WIFE 317 XIV THE JOURNEY ACROSS 327 XV THE PLACE CALLED CALIFANO 350 XVI SUSPENSE 359 CHAPTER I THE DECLINE OF MANCHESTER HOUSE Take a mining townlet like Woodhouse, with a population of ten thousand people, and three generations behind it. This space of three generations argues a certain well-established society. The old "County" has fled from the sight of so much disembowelled coal, to flourish on mineral rights in regions still idyllic. Remains one great and inaccessible magnate, the local coal owner: three generations old, and clambering on the bottom step of the "County," kicking off the mass below. Rule him out. A well established society in Woodhouse, full of fine shades, ranging from the dark of coal-dust to grit of stone-mason and sawdust of timber-merchant, through the lustre of lard and butter and meat, to the perfume of the chemist and the disinfectant of the doctor, on to the serene gold-tarnish of bank-managers, cashiers for the firm, clergymen and such-like, as far as the automobile refulgence of the general-manager of all the collieries. Here the _ne plus ultra_. The general manager lives in the shrubberied seclusion of the so-called Manor. The genuine Hall, abandoned by the "County," has been taken over as offices by the firm. Here we are then: a vast substratum of colliers; a thick sprinkling of tradespeople intermingled with small employers of labour and diversified by elementary schoolmasters and nonconformist clergy; a higher layer of bank-managers, rich millers and well-to-do ironmasters, episcopal clergy and the managers of collieries, then the rich and sticky cherry of the local coal-owner glistening over all. Such the complicated social system of a small industrial town in the Midlands of England, in this year of grace 1920. But let us go back a little. Such it was in the last calm year of plenty, 1913. A calm year of plenty. But one chronic and dreary malady: that of the odd women. Why, in the name of all prosperity, should every class but the lowest in such a society hang overburdened with Dead Sea fruit of odd women, unmarried, unmarriageable women, called old maids? Why is it that every tradesman, every school-master, every bank-manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more old maids? Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower middle-classes, give birth to more girls than boys? Or do the lower middle-class men assiduously climb up or down, in marriage, thus leaving their true partners stranded? Or are middle-class women very squeamish in their choice of husbands? However it be, it is a tragedy. Or perhaps it is not. Perhaps these unmarried women of the middle-classes are the famous sexless-workers of our ant-industrial society, of which we hear so much. Perhaps all they lack is an occupation: in short, a job. But perhaps we might hear their own opinion, before we lay the law down. In Woodhouse, there was a terrible crop of old maids among the "nobs," the tradespeople and the clergy. The whole town of women, colliers' wives and all, held its breath as it saw a chance of one of these daughters of comfort and woe getting off. They flocked to the well-to-do weddings with an intoxication of relief. For let class-jealousy be what it may, a woman hates to see another woman left stalely on the shelf, without a chance. They all _wanted_ the middle-class girls to find husbands. Every one wanted it, including the girls themselves. Hence the dismalness. Now James Houghton had only one child: his daughter Alvina. Surely Alvina Houghton-- But let us retreat to the early eighties, when Alvina was a baby: or even further back, to the palmy days of James Houghton. In his palmy days, James Houghton was _crême de la crême_ of Woodhouse society. The house of Houghton had always been well-to-do: tradespeople, we must admit; but after a few generations of affluence, tradespeople acquire a distinct _cachet_. Now James Houghton, at the age of twenty-eight, inherited a splendid business in Manchester goods, in Woodhouse. He was a tall, thin, elegant young man with side-whiskers, genuinely refined, somewhat in the Bulwer style. He had a taste for elegant conversation and elegant literature and elegant Christianity: a tall, thin, brittle young man, rather fluttering in his manner, full of facile ideas, and with a beautiful speaking voice: most beautiful. Withal, of course, a tradesman. He courted a small, dark woman, older than himself, daughter of a Derbyshire squire. He expected to get at least ten thousand pounds with her. In which he was disappointed, for he got only eight hundred. Being of a romantic-commercial nature, he never forgave her, but always treated her with the most elegant courtesy. To seehim peel and prepare an apple for her was an exquisite sight. But that peeled and quartered apple was her portion. This elegant Adam of commerce gave Eve her own back, nicely cored, and had no more to do with her. Meanwhile Alvina was born. Before all this, however, before his marriage, James Houghton had built Manchester House. It was a vast square building--vast, that is, for Woodhouse--standing on the main street and high-road of the small but growing town. The lower front consisted of two fine shops, one for Manchester goods, one for silk and woollens. This was James Houghton's commercial poem. For James Houghton was a dreamer, and something of a poet: commercial, be it understood. He liked the novels of George Macdonald, and the fantasies of that author, extremely. He wove one continual fantasy for himself, a fantasy of commerce. He dreamed of silks and poplins, luscious in texture and of unforeseen exquisiteness: he dreamed of carriages of the "County" arrested before his windows, of exquisite women ruffling charmed, entranced to his counter. And charming, entrancing, he served them his lovely fabrics, which only he and they could sufficiently appreciate. His fame spread, until Alexandra, Princess of Wales, and Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, the two best-dressed women in Europe, floated down from heaven to the shop in Woodhouse, and sallied forth to show what could be done by purchasing from James Houghton. We cannot say why James Houghton failed to become the Liberty or the Snelgrove of his day. Perhaps he had too much imagination. Be that as it may, in those early days when he brought his wife to her new home, his window on the Manchester side was a foam and a may-blossom of muslins and prints, his window on the London side was an autumn evening of silks and rich fabrics. What wife could fail to be dazzled! But she, poor darling, from her stone hall in stony Derbyshire, was a little bit repulsed by the man's dancing in front of his stock, like David before the ark. The home to which he brought her was a monument. In the great bedroom over the shop he had his furniture _built_: built of solid mahogany: oh too, too solid. No doubt he hopped or skipped himself with satisfaction into the monstrous matrimonial bed: it could only be mounted by means of a stool and chair. But the poor, secluded little woman, older than he, must have climbed up with a heavy heart, to lie and face the gloomy Bastille of mahogany, the great cupboard opposite, or to turn wearily sideways to the great cheval mirror, which performed a perpetual and hideous bow before her grace. Such furniture! It could never be removed from the room. The little child was born in the second year. And then James Houghton decamped to a small, half-furnished bedroom at the other end of the house, where he slept on a rough board and played the anchorite for the rest of his days. His wife was left alone with her baby and the built-in furniture. She developed heart disease, as a result of nervous repressions. But like a butterfly James fluttered over his fabrics. He was a tyrant to his shop-girls. No French marquis in a Dickens' novel could have been more elegant and _raffiné_ and heartless. The girls detested him. And yet, his curious refinement and enthusiasm bore them away. They submitted to him. The shop attracted much curiosity. But the poor-spirited Woodhouse people were weak buyers. They wearied James Houghton with their demand for common zephyrs, for red flannel which they would scallop with black worsted, for black alpacas and bombazines and merinos. He fluffed out his silk-striped muslins, his India cotton-prints. But the natives shied off as if he had offered them the poisoned robes of Herakles. There was a sale. These sales contributed a good deal to Mrs. Houghton's nervous heart-disease. They brought the first signs of wear and tear into the face of James Houghton. At first, of course, he merely marked down, with discretion, his less-expensive stock of prints and muslins, nuns-veilings and muslin delaines, with a few fancy braidings and trimmings in guimp or bronze to enliven the affair. And Woodhouse bought cautiously. After the sale, however, James Houghton felt himself at liberty to plunge into an orgy of new stock. He flitted, with a tense look on his face, to Manchester. After which huge bundles, bales and boxes arrived in Woodhouse, and were dumped on the pavement of the shop. Friday evening came, and with it a revelation in Houghton's window: the first piqués, the first strangely-woven and honey-combed toilet covers and bed quilts, the first frill-caps and aprons for maid-servants: a wonder in white. That was how James advertised it. "A Wonder in White." Who knows but that he had been reading Wilkie Collins' famous novel! As the nine days of the wonder-in-white passed and receded, James disappeared in the direction of London. A few Fridays later he came out with his Winter Touch. Weird and wonderful winter coats, for ladies--everything James handled was for ladies, he scorned the coarser sex--: weird and wonderful winter coats for ladies, of thick, black, pockmarked cloth, stood and flourished their bear-fur cuffs in the background, while tippets, boas, muffs and winter-fancies coquetted in front of the window-space. Friday-night crowds gathered outside: the gas-lamps shone their brightest: James Houghton hovered in the background like an author on his first night in the theatre. The result was a sensation. Ten villages stared and crushed round the plate glass. It was a sensation: but what sensation! In the breasts of the crowd, wonder, admiration, _fear_, and ridicule. Let us stress the word fear. The inhabitants of Woodhouse were afraid lest James Houghton should impose his standards upon them. His goods were in excellent taste: but his customers were in as bad taste as possible. They stood outside and pointed, giggled, and jeered. Poor James, like an author on his first night, saw his work fall more than flat. But still he believed in his own excellence: and quite justly. What he failed to perceive was that the crowd hated excellence. Woodhouse wanted a gently graduated progress in mediocrity, a mediocrity so stale and flat that it fell outside the imagination of any sensitive mortal. Woodhouse wanted a series of vulgar little thrills, as one tawdry mediocrity was imported from Nottingham or Birmingham to take the place of some tawdry mediocrity which Nottingham and Birmingham had already discarded. That Woodhouse, as a very condition of its own being, hated any approach to originality or real taste, this James Houghton could never learn. He thought he had not been clever enough, when he had been far, far too clever already. He always thought that Dame Fortune was a capricious and fastidious dame, a sort of Elizabeth of Austria or Alexandra, Princess of Wales, elegant beyond his grasp. Whereas Dame Fortune, even in London or Vienna, let alone in Woodhouse, was a vulgar woman of the middle and lower middle-class, ready to put her heavy foot on anything that was not vulgar, machine-made, and appropriate to the herd. When he saw his delicate originalities, as well as his faint flourishes of draper's fantasy, squashed flat under the calm and solid foot of vulgar Dame Fortune, he fell into fits of depression bordering on mysticism, and talked to his wife in a vague way of higher influences and the angel Israfel. She, poor lady, was thoroughly scared by Israfel, and completely unhooked by the vagaries of James. At last--we hurry down the slope of James' misfortunes--the real days of Houghton's Great Sales began. Houghton's Great Bargain Events were really events. After some years of hanging on, he let go splendidly. He marked down his prints, his chintzes, his dimities and his veilings with a grand and lavish hand. Bang went his blue pencil through 3/11, and nobly he subscribed 1/0-3/4. Prices fell like nuts. A lofty one-and-eleven rolled down to six-three, 1/6 magically shrank into 4-3/4d, whilst good solid prints exposed themselves at 3-3/4d per yard. Now this was really an opportunity. Moreover the goods, having become a little stale during their years of ineffectuality, were beginning to approximate to the public taste. And besides, good sound stuff it was, no matter what the pattern. And so the little Woodhouse girls went to school in petties and drawers made of material which James had destined for fair summer dresses: petties and drawers of which the little Woodhouse girls were ashamed, for all that. For if they should chance to turn up their little skirts, be sure they would raise a chorus among their companions: "Yah-h-h, yer've got Houghton's threp'ny draws on!" All this time James Houghton walked on air. He still saw the Fata Morgana snatching his fabrics round her lovely form, and pointing him to wealth untold. True, he became also Superintendent of the Sunday School. But whether this was an act of vanity, or whether it was an attempt to establish an Entente Cordiale with higher powers, who shall judge. Meanwhile his wife became more and more an invalid; the little Alvina was a pretty, growing child. Woodhouse was really impressed by the sight of Mrs. Houghton, small, pale and withheld, taking a walk with her dainty little girl, so fresh in an ermine tippet and a muff. Mrs. Houghton in shiny black bear's-fur, the child in the white and spotted ermine, passing silent and shadowy down the street, made an impression which the people did not forget. But Mrs. Houghton had pains at her heart. If, during her walk, she saw two little boys having a scrimmage, she had to run to them with pence and entreaty, leaving them dumfounded, whilst she leaned blue at the lips against a wall. If she saw a carter crack his whip over the ears of the horse, as the horse laboured uphill, she had to cover her eyes and avert her face, and all her strength left her. So she stayed more and more in her room, and the child was given to the charge of a governess. Miss Frost was a handsome, vigorous young woman of about thirty years of age, with grey-white hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. The white hair was not at all tragical: it was a family _trait_. Miss Frost mattered more than any one else to Alvina Houghton, during the first long twenty-five years of the girl's life. The governess was a strong, generous woman, a musician by nature. She had a sweet voice, and sang in the choir of the chapel, and took the first class of girls in the Sunday-School of which James Houghton was Superintendent. She disliked and rather despised James Houghton, saw in him elements of a hypocrite, detested his airy and gracious selfishness, his lack of human feeling, and most of all, his fairy fantasy. As James went further into life, he became a dreamer. Sad indeed that he died before the days of Freud. He enjoyed the most wonderful and fairy-like dreams, which he could describe perfectly, in charming, delicate language. At such times his beautifully modulated voice all but sang, his grey eyes gleamed fiercely under his bushy, hairy eyebrows, his pale face with its side-whiskers had a strange _lueur_, his long thin hands fluttered occasionally. He had become meagre in figure, his skimpy but genteel coat would be buttoned over his breast, as he recounted his dream-adventures, adventures that were half Edgar Allan Poe, half Andersen, with touches of Vathek and Lord Byron and George Macdonald: perhaps more than a touch of the last. Ladies were always struck by these accounts. But Miss Frost never felt so strongly moved to impatience as when she was within hearing. For twenty years, she and James Houghton treated each other with a courteous distance. Sometimes she broke into open impatience with him, sometimes he answered her tartly: "Indeed, indeed! Oh, indeed! Well, well, I'm sorry you find it so--" as if the injury consisted in her finding it so. Then he would flit away to the Conservative Club, with a fleet, light, hurried step, as if pressed by fate. At the club he played chess--at which he was excellent--and conversed. Then he flitted back at half-past twelve, to dinner. The whole morale of the house rested immediately on Miss Frost. She saw her line in the first year. She must defend the little Alvina, whom she loved as her own, and the nervous, petulant, heart-stricken woman, the mother, from the vagaries of James. Not that James had any vices. He did not drink or smoke, was abstemious and clean as an anchorite, and never lowered his fine tone. But still, the two unprotected ones must be sheltered from him. Miss Frost imperceptibly took into her hands the reins of the domestic government. Her rule was quiet, strong, and generous. She was not seeking her own way. She was steering the poor domestic ship of Manchester House, illuminating its dark rooms with her own sure, radiant presence: her silver-white hair, and her pale, heavy, reposeful face seemed to give off a certain radiance. She seemed to give weight, ballast, and repose to the staggering and bewildered home. She controlled the maid, and suggested the meals--meals which James ate without knowing what he ate. She brought in flowers and books, and, very rarely, a visitor. Visitors were out of place in the dark sombreness of Manchester House. Her flowers charmed the petulant invalid, her books she sometimes discussed with the airy James: after which discussions she was invariably filled with exasperation and impatience, whilst James invariably retired to the shop, and was heard raising his musical voice, which the work-girls hated, to one or other of the work-girls. James certainly had an irritating way of speaking of a book. He talked of incidents, and effects, and suggestions, as if the whole thing had just been a sensational-æsthetic attribute to himself. Not a grain of human feeling in the man, said Miss Frost, flushing pink with exasperation. She herself invariably took the human line. Meanwhile the shops began to take on a hopeless and frowsy look. After ten years' sales, spring sales, summer sales, autumn sales, winter sales, James began to give up the drapery dream. He himself could not bear any more to put the heavy, pock-holed black cloth coat, with wild bear cuffs and collar, on to the stand. He had marked it down from five guineas to one guinea, and then, oh ignoble day, to ten-and-six. He nearly kissed the gipsy woman with a basket of tin saucepan-lids, when at last she bought it for five shillings, at the end of one of his winter sales. But even she, in spite of the bitter sleety day, would not put the coat on in the shop. She carried it over her arm down to the Miners' Arms. And later, with a shock that really hurt him, James, peeping bird-like out of his shop door, saw her sitting driving a dirty rag-and-bone cart with a green-white, mouldy pony, and flourishing her arms like some wild and hairy-decorated squaw. For the long bear-fur, wet with sleet, seemed like a _chevaux de frise_ of long porcupine quills round her fore-arms and her neck. Yet such good, such wonderful material! James eyed it for one moment, and then fled like a rabbit to the stove in his back regions. The higher powers did not seem to fulfil the terms of treaty which James hoped for. He began to back out from the Entente. The Sunday School was a great trial to him. Instead of being carried away by his grace and eloquence, the nasty louts of colliery boys and girls openly banged their feet and made deafening noises when he tried to speak. He said many acid and withering things, as he stood there on the rostrum. But what is the good of saying acid things to those little fiends and gall-bladders, the colliery children. The situation was saved by Miss Frost's sweeping together all the big girls, under her surveillance, and by her organizing that the tall and handsome blacksmith who taught the lower boys should extend his influence over the upper boys. His influence was more than effectual. It consisted in gripping any recalcitrant boy just above the knee, and jesting with him in a jocular manner, in the dialect. The blacksmith's hand was all a blacksmith's hand need be, and his dialect was as broad as could be wished. Between the grip and the homely idiom no boy could endure without squealing. So the Sunday School paid more attention to James, whose prayers were beautiful. But then one of the boys, a protegé of Miss Frost, having been left for half an hour in the obscure room with Mrs. Houghton, gave away the secret of the blacksmith's grip, which secret so haunted the poor lady that it marked a stage in the increase of her malady, and made Sunday afternoon a nightmare to her. And then James Houghton resented something in the coarse Scotch manner of the minister of that day. So that the superintendency of the Sunday School came to an end. At the same time, Solomon had to divide his baby. That is, he let the London side of his shop to W. H. Johnson, the tailor and haberdasher, a parvenu little fellow whose English would not bear analysis. Bitter as it was, it had to be. Carpenters and joiners appeared, and the premises were completely severed. From her room in the shadows at the back the invalid heard the hammering and sawing, and suffered. W. H. Johnson came out with a spick-and-span window, and had his wife, a shrewd, quiet woman, and his daughter, a handsome, loud girl, to help him on Friday evenings. Men flocked in--even women, buying their husbands a sixpence-halfpenny tie. They could have bought a tie for four-three from James Houghton. But no, they would rather give sixpence-halfpenny for W.H. Johnson's fresh but rubbishy stuff. And James, who had tried to rise to another successful sale, saw the streams pass into the other doorway, and heard the heavy feet on the hollow boards of the other shop: his shop no more. After this cut at his pride and integrity he lay in retirement for a while, mystically inclined. Probably he would have come to Swedenborg, had not his clipt wings spread for a new flight. He hit upon the brilliant idea of working up his derelict fabrics into ready-mades: not men's clothes, oh no: women's, or rather, ladies'. Ladies' Tailoring, said the new announcement. James Houghton was happy once more. A zig-zag wooden stair-way was rigged up the high back of Manchester House. In the great lofts sewing-machines of various patterns and movements were installed. A manageress was advertised for, and work-girls were hired. So a new phase of life started. At half-past six in the morning there was a clatter of feet and of girls' excited tongues along the back-yard and up the wooden stair-way outside the back wall. The poor invalid heard every clack and every vibration. She could never get over her nervous apprehension of an invasion. Every morning alike, she felt an invasion of some enemy was breaking in on her. And all day long the low, steady rumble of sewing-machines overhead seemed like the low drumming of a bombardment upon her weak heart. To make matters worse, James Houghton decided that he must have his sewing-machines driven by some extra-human force. He installed another plant of machinery--acetylene or some such contrivance--which was intended to drive all the little machines from one big belt. Hence a further throbbing and shaking in the upper regions, truly terrible to endure. But, fortunately or unfortunately, the acetylene plant was not a success. Girls got their thumbs pierced, and sewing machines absolutely refused to stop sewing, once they had started, and absolutely refused to start, once they had stopped. So that after a while, one loft was reserved for disused and rusty, but expensive engines. Dame Fortune, who had refused to be taken by fine fabrics and fancy trimmings, was just as reluctant to be captured by ready-mades. Again the good dame was thoroughly lower middle-class. James Houghton designed "robes." Now Robes were the mode. Perhaps it was Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who gave glory to the slim, glove-fitting Princess Robe. Be that as it may, James Houghton designed robes. His work-girls, a race even more callous than shop-girls, proclaimed the fact that James tried on his own inventions upon his own elegant thin person, before the privacy of his own cheval mirror. And even if he did, why not? Miss Frost, hearing this legend, looked sideways at the enthusiast. Let us remark in time that Miss Frost had already ceased to draw any maintenance from James Houghton. Far from it, she herself contributed to the upkeep of the domestic hearth and board. She had fully decided never to leave her two charges. She knew that a governess was an impossible item in Manchester House, as things went. And so she trudged the country, giving music lessons to the daughters of tradesmen and of colliers who boasted pianofortes. She even taught heavy-handed but dauntless colliers, who were seized with a passion to "play." Miles she trudged, on her round from village to village: a white-haired woman with a long, quick stride, a strong figure, and a quick, handsome smile when once her face awoke behind her gold-rimmed glasses. Like many short-sighted people, she had a certain intent look of one who goes her own way. The miners knew her, and entertained the highest respect and admiration for her. As they streamed in a grimy stream home from pit, they diverged like some magic dark river from off the pavement into the horse-way, to give her room as she approached. And the men who knew her well enough to salute her, by calling her name "Miss Frost!" giving it the proper intonation of salute, were fussy men indeed. "She's a lady if ever there was one," they said. And they meant it. Hearing her name, poor Miss Frost would flash a smile and a nod from behind her spectacles, but whose black face she smiled to she never, or rarely knew. If she did chance to get an inkling, then gladly she called in reply "Mr. Lamb," or "Mr. Calladine." In her way she was a proud woman, for she was regarded with cordial respect, touched with veneration, by at least a thousand colliers, and by perhaps as many colliers' wives. That is something, for any woman. Miss Frost charged fifteen shillings for thirteen weeks' lessons, two lessons a week. And at that she was considered rather dear. She was supposed to be making money. What money she made went chiefly to support the Houghton household. In the meanwhile she drilled Alvina thoroughly in theory and pianoforte practice, for Alvina was naturally musical, and besides this she imparted to the girl the elements of a young lady's education, including the drawing of flowers in water-colour, and the translation of a Lamartine poem. Now incredible as it may seem, fate threw another prop to the falling house of Houghton, in the person of the manageress of the work-girls, Miss Pinnegar. James Houghton complained of Fortune, yet to what other man would Fortune have sent two such women as Miss Frost and Miss Pinnegar, _gratis_? Yet there they were. And doubtful if James was ever grateful for their presence. If Miss Frost saved him from heaven knows what domestic débâcle and horror, Miss Pinnegar saved him from the workhouse. Let us not mince matters. For a dozen years Miss Frost supported the heart-stricken, nervous invalid, Clariss Houghton: for more than twenty years she cherished, tended and protected the young Alvina, shielding the child alike from a neurotic mother and a father such as James. For nearly twenty years she saw that food was set on the table, and clean sheets were spread on the beds: and all the time remained virtually in the position of an outsider, without one grain of established authority. And then to find Miss Pinnegar! In her way, Miss Pinnegar was very different from Miss Frost. She was a rather short, stout, mouse-coloured, creepy kind of woman with a high colour in her cheeks, and dun, close hair like a cap. It was evident she was not a lady: her grammar was not without reproach. She had pale grey eyes, and a padding step, and a soft voice, and almost purplish cheeks. Mrs. Houghton, Miss Frost, and Alvina did not like her. They suffered her unwillingly. But from the first she had a curious ascendancy over James Houghton. One would have expected his æsthetic eye to be offended. But no doubt it was her voice: her soft, near, sure voice, which seemed almost like a secret touch upon her hearer. Now many of her hearers disliked being secretly touched, as it were beneath their clothing. Miss Frost abhorred it: so did Mrs. Houghton. Miss Frost's voice was clear and straight as a bell-note, open as the day. Yet Alvina, though in loyalty she adhered to her beloved Miss Frost, did not really mind the quiet suggestive power of Miss Pinnegar. For Miss Pinnegar was not vulgarly insinuating. On the contrary, the things she said were rather clumsy and downright. It was only that she seemed to weigh what she said, secretly, before she said it, and then she approached as if she would slip it into her hearer's consciousness without his being aware of it. She seemed to slide her speeches unnoticed into one's ears, so that one accepted them without the slightest challenge. That was just her manner of approach. In her own way, she was as loyal and unselfish as Miss Frost. There are such poles of opposition between honesties and loyalties. Miss Pinnegar had the _second_ class of girls in the Sunday School, and she took second, subservient place in Manchester House. By force of nature, Miss Frost took first place. Only when Miss Pinnegar spoke to Mr. Houghton--nay, the very way she addressed herself to him--"What do _you_ think, Mr. Houghton?"--then there seemed to be assumed an immediacy of correspondence between the two, and an unquestioned priority in their unison, his and hers, which was a cruel thorn in Miss Frost's outspoken breast. This sort of secret intimacy and secret exulting in having, _really_, the chief power, was most repugnant to the white-haired woman. Not that there was, in fact, any secrecy, or any form of unwarranted correspondence between James Houghton and Miss Pinnegar. Far from it. Each of them would have found any suggestion of such a possibility repulsive in the extreme. It was simply an implicit correspondence between their two psyches, an immediacy of understanding which preceded all expression, tacit, wireless. Miss Pinnegar lived in: so that the household consisted of the invalid, who mostly sat, in her black dress with a white lace collar fastened by a twisted gold brooch, in her own dim room, doing nothing, nervous and heart-suffering; then James, and the thin young Alvina, who adhered to her beloved Miss Frost, and then these two strange women. Miss Pinnegar never lifted up her voice in household affairs: she seemed, by her silence, to admit her own inadequacy in culture and intellect, when topics of interest were being discussed, only coming out now and then with defiant platitudes and truisms--for almost defiantly she took the commonplace, vulgarian point of view; yet after everything she would turn with her quiet, triumphant assurance to James Houghton, and start on some point of business, soft, assured, ascendant. The others shut their ears. Now Miss Pinnegar had to get her footing slowly. She had to let James run the gamut of his creations. Each Friday night new wonders, robes and ladies' "suits"--the phrase was very new--garnished the window of Houghton's shop. It was one of the sights of the place, Houghton's window on Friday night. Young or old, no individual, certainly no female left Woodhouse without spending an excited and usually hilarious ten minutes on the pavement under the window. Muffled shrieks of young damsels who had just got their first view, guffaws of sympathetic youths, continued giggling and expostulation and "Eh, but what price the umbrella skirt, my girl!" and "You'd like to marry me in _that_, my boy--what? not half!"--or else "Eh, now, if you'd seen me in _that_ you'd have fallen in love with me at first sight, shouldn't you?"--with a probable answer "I should have fallen over myself making haste to get away"--loud guffaws:--all this was the regular Friday night's entertainment in Woodhouse. James Houghton's shop was regarded as a weekly comic issue. His piqué costumes with glass buttons and sort of steel-trimming collars and cuffs were immortal. But why, once more, drag it out. Miss Pinnegar served in the shop on Friday nights. She stood by her man. Sometimes when the shrieks grew loudest she came to the shop door and looked with her pale grey eyes at the ridiculous mob of lasses in tam-o-shanters and youths half buried in caps. And she imposed a silence. They edged away. Meanwhile Miss Pinnegar pursued the sober and even tenor of her own way. Whilst James lashed out, to use the local phrase, in robes and "suits," Miss Pinnegar steadily ground away, producing strong, indestructible shirts and singlets for the colliers, sound, serviceable aprons for the colliers' wives, good print dresses for servants, and so on. She executed no flights of fancy. She had her goods made to suit her people. And so, underneath the foam and froth of James' creative adventure flowed a slow but steady stream of output and income. The women of Woodhouse came at last to _depend_ on Miss Pinnegar. Growing lads in the pit reduce their garments to shreds with amazing expedition. "I'll go to Miss Pinnegar for thy shirts this time, my lad," said the harassed mothers, "and see if _they'll_ stand thee." It was almost like a threat. But it served Manchester House. James bought very little stock in these days: just remnants and pieces for his immortal robes. It was Miss Pinnegar who saw the travellers and ordered the unions and calicoes and grey flannel. James hovered round and said the last word, of course. But what was his last word but an echo of Miss Pinnegar's penultimate! He was not interested in unions and twills. His own stock remained on hand. Time, like a slow whirlpool churned it over into sight and out of sight, like a mass of dead sea-weed in a backwash. There was a regular series of sales fortnightly. The display of "creations" fell off. The new entertainment was the Friday-night's sale. James would attack some portion of his stock, make a wild jumble of it, spend a delirious Wednesday and Thursday marking down, and then open on Friday afternoon. In the evening there was a crush. A good moiré underskirt for one-and-eleven-three was not to be neglected, and a handsome string-lace collarette for six-three would iron out and be worth at least three-and-six. That was how it went: it would nearly all of it iron out into something really nice, poor James' crumpled stock. His fine, semi-transparent face flushed pink, his eyes flashed as he took in the sixpences and handed back knots of tape or packets of pins for the notorious farthings. What matter if the farthing change had originally cost him a halfpenny! His shop was crowded with women peeping and pawing and turning things over and commenting in loud, unfeeling tones. For there were still many comic items. Once, for example, he suddenly heaped up piles of hats, trimmed and untrimmed, the weirdest, sauciest, most screaming shapes. Woodhouse enjoyed itself that night. And all the time, in her quiet, polite, think-the-more fashion Miss Pinnegar waited on the people, showing them considerable forbearance and just a tinge of contempt. She became very tired those evenings--her hair under its invisible hairnet became flatter, her cheeks hung down purplish and mottled. But while James stood she stood. The people did not like her, yet she influenced them. And the stock slowly wilted, withered. Some was scrapped. The shop seemed to have digested some of its indigestible contents. James accumulated sixpences in a miserly fashion. Luckily for her work-girls, Miss Pinnegar took her own orders, and received payments for her own productions. Some of her regular customers paid her a shilling a week--or less. But it made a small, steady income. She reserved her own modest share, paid the expenses of her department, and left the residue to James. James had accumulated sixpences, and made a little space in his shop. He had desisted from "creations." Time now for a new flight. He decided it was better to be a manufacturer than a tradesman. His shop, already only half its original size, was again too big. It might be split once more. Rents had risen in Woodhouse. Why not cut off another shop from his premises? No sooner said than done. In came the architect, with whom he had played many a game of chess. Best, said the architect, take off one good-sized shop, rather than halve the premises. James would be left a little cramped, a little tight, with only one-third of his present space. But as we age we dwindle. More hammering and alterations, and James found himself cooped in a long, long narrow shop, very dark at the back, with a high oblong window and a door that came in at a pinched corner. Next door to him was a cheerful new grocer of the cheap and florid type. The new grocer whistled "Just Like the Ivy," and shouted boisterously to his shop-boy. In his doorway, protruding on James' sensitive vision, was a pyramid of sixpence-halfpenny tins of salmon, red, shiny tins with pink halved salmons depicted, and another yellow pyramid of four-pence-halfpenny tins of pineapple. Bacon dangled in pale rolls _almost_ over James' doorway, whilst straw and paper, redolent of cheese, lard, and stale eggs filtered through the threshold. This was coming down in the world, with a vengeance. But what James lost downstairs he tried to recover upstairs. Heaven knows what he would have done, but for Miss Pinnegar. She kept her own work-rooms against him, with a soft, heavy, silent tenacity that would have beaten stronger men than James. But his strength lay in his pliability. He rummaged in the empty lofts, and among the discarded machinery. He rigged up the engines afresh, bought two new machines, and started an elastic department, making elastic for garters and for hat-chins. He was immensely proud of his first cards of elastic, and saw Dame Fortune this time fast in his yielding hands. But, becoming used to disillusionment, he almost welcomed it. Within six months he realized that every inch of elastic cost him exactly sixty per cent. more than he could sell it for, and so he scrapped his new department. Luckily, he sold one machine and even gained two pounds on it. After this, he made one last effort. This was hosiery webbing, which could be cut up and made into as-yet-unheard-of garments. Miss Pinnegar kept her thumb on this enterprise, so that it was not much more than abortive. And then James left her alone. Meanwhile the shop slowly churned its oddments. Every Thursday afternoon James sorted out tangles of bits and bobs, antique garments and occasional finds. With these he trimmed his window, so that it looked like a historical museum, rather soiled and scrappy. Indoors he made baskets of assortments: threepenny, sixpenny, ninepenny and shilling baskets, rather like a bran pie in which everything was a plum. And then, on Friday evening, thin and alert he hovered behind the counter, his coat shabbily buttoned over his narrow chest, his face agitated. He had shaved his side-whiskers, so that they only grew becomingly as low as his ears. His rather large, grey moustache was brushed off his mouth. His hair, gone very thin, was brushed frail and floating over his baldness. But still a gentleman, still courteous, with a charming voice he suggested the possibilities of a pad of green parrots' tail-feathers, or of a few yards of pink-pearl trimming or of old chenille fringe. The women would pinch the thick, exquisite old chenille fringe, delicate and faded, curious to feel its softness. But they wouldn't give threepence for it. Tapes, ribbons, braids, buttons, feathers, jabots, bussels, appliqués, fringes, jet-trimmings, bugle-trimmings, bundles of old coloured machine-lace, many bundles of strange cord, in all colours, for old-fashioned braid-patterning, ribbons with H.M.S. Birkenhead, for boys' sailor caps--everything that nobody wanted, did the women turn over and over, till they chanced on a find. And James' quick eyes watched the slow surge of his flotsam, as the pot boiled but did not boil away. Wonderful that he did not think of the days when these bits and bobs were new treasures. But he did not. And at his side Miss Pinnegar quietly took orders for shirts, discussed and agreed, made measurements and received instalments. The shop was now only opened on Friday afternoons and evenings, so every day, twice a day, James was seen dithering bare-headed and hastily down the street, as if pressed by fate, to the Conservative Club, and twice a day he was seen as hastily returning, to his meals. He was becoming an old man: his daughter was a young woman: but in his own mind he was just the same, and his daughter was a little child, his wife a young invalid whom he must charm by some few delicate attentions--such as the peeled apple. At the club he got into more mischief. He met men who wanted to extend a brickfield down by the railway. The brickfield was called Klondyke. James had now a new direction to run in: down hill towards Bagthorpe, to Klondyke. Big penny-daisies grew in tufts on the brink of the yellow clay at Klondyke, yellow eggs-and-bacon spread their midsummer mats of flower. James came home with clay smeared all over him, discoursing brilliantly on grit and paste and presses and kilns and stamps. He carried home a rough and pinkish brick, and gloated over it. It was a _hard_ brick, it was a non-porous brick. It was an ugly brick, painfully heavy and parched-looking. This time he was sure: Dame Fortune would rise like Persephone out of the earth. He was all the more sure, because other men of the town were in with him at this venture: sound, moneyed grocers and plumbers. They were all going to become rich. Klondyke lasted a year and a half, and was not so bad, for in the end, all things considered, James had lost not more than five per cent. of his money. In fact, all things considered, he was about square. And yet he felt Klondyke as the greatest blow of all. Miss Pinnegar would have aided and abetted him in another scheme, if it would but have cheered him. Even Miss Frost was nice with him. But to no purpose. In the year after Klondyke he became an old man, he seemed to have lost all his feathers, he acquired a plucked, tottering look. Yet he roused up, after a coal-strike. Throttle-Ha'penny put new life into him. During a coal-strike the miners themselves began digging in the fields, just near the houses, for the surface coal. They found a plentiful seam of drossy, yellowish coal behind the Methodist New Connection Chapel. The seam was opened in the side of a bank, and approached by a footrill, a sloping shaft down which the men walked. When the strike was over, two or three miners still remained working the soft, drossy coal, which they sold for eight-and-sixpence a ton--or sixpence a hundredweight. But a mining population scorned such dirt, as they called it. James Houghton, however, was seized with a desire to work the Connection Meadow seam, as he called it. He gathered two miner partners--he trotted endlessly up to the field, he talked, as he had never talked before, with inumerable colliers. Everybody he met he stopped, to talk Connection Meadow. And so at last he sank a shaft, sixty feet deep, rigged up a corrugated-iron engine-house with a winding-engine, and lowered his men one at a time down the shaft, in a big bucket. The whole affair was ricketty, amateurish, and twopenny. The name Connection Meadow was forgotten within three months. Everybody knew the place as Throttle-Ha'penny. "What!" said a collier to his wife: "have we got no coal? You'd better get a bit from Throttle-Ha'penny." "Nay," replied the wife, "I'm sure I shan't. I'm sure I shan't burn that muck, and smother myself with white ash." It was in the early Throttle-Ha'penny days that Mrs. Houghton died. James Houghton cried, and put a black band on his Sunday silk hat. But he was too feverishly busy at Throttle-Ha'penny, selling his hundredweights of ash-pit fodder, as the natives called it, to realize anything else. He had three men and two boys working his pit, besides a superannuated old man driving the winding engine. And in spite of all jeering, he flourished. Shabby old coal-carts rambled up behind the New Connection, and filled from the pit-bank. The coal improved a little in quality: it was cheap and it was handy. James could sell at last fifty or sixty tons a week: for the stuff was easy getting. And now at last he was actually handling money. He saw millions ahead. This went on for more than a year. A year after the death of Mrs. Houghton, Miss Frost became ill and suddenly died. Again James Houghton cried and trembled. But it was Throttle-Ha'penny that made him tremble. He trembled in all his limbs, at the touch of success. He saw himself making noble provision for his only daughter. But alas--it is wearying to repeat the same thing over and over. First the Board of Trade began to make difficulties. Then there was a fault in the seam. Then the roof of Throttle-Ha'penny was so loose and soft, James could not afford timber to hold it up. In short, when his daughter Alvina was about twenty-seven years old, Throttle-Ha'penny closed down. There was a sale of poor machinery, and James Houghton came home to the dark, gloomy house--to Miss Pinnegar and Alvina. It was a pinched, dreary house. James seemed down for the last time. But Miss Pinnegar persuaded him to take the shop again on Friday evening. For the rest, faded and peaked, he hurried shadowily down to the club. CHAPTER II THE RISE OF ALVINA HOUGHTON The heroine of this story is Alvina Houghton. If we leave her out of the first chapter of her own story it is because, during the first twenty-five years of her life, she really was left out of count, or so overshadowed as to be negligible. She and her mother were the phantom passengers in the ship of James Houghton's fortunes. In Manchester House, every voice lowered its tone. And so from the first Alvina spoke with a quiet, refined, almost convent voice. She was a thin child with delicate limbs and face, and wide, grey-blue, ironic eyes. Even as a small girl she had that odd ironic tilt of the eyelids which gave her a look as if she were hanging back in mockery. If she were, she was quite unaware of it, for under Miss Frost's care she received no education in irony or mockery. Miss Frost was straightforward, good-humoured, and a little earnest. Consequently Alvina, or Vina as she was called, understood only the explicit mode of good-humoured straightforwardness. It was doubtful which shadow was greater over the child: that of Manchester House, gloomy and a little sinister, or that of Miss Frost, benevolent and protective. Sufficient that the girl herself worshipped Miss Frost: or believed she did. Alvina never went to school. She had her lessons from her beloved governess, she worked at the piano, she took her walks, and for social life she went to the Congregational Chapel, and to the functions connected with the chapel. While she was little, she went to Sunday School twice and to Chapel once on Sundays. Then occasionally there was a magic lantern or a penny reading, to which Miss Frost accompanied her. As she grew older she entered the choir at chapel, she attended Christian Endeavour and P.S.A., and the Literary Society on Monday evenings. Chapel provided her with a whole social activity, in the course of which she met certain groups of people, made certain friends, found opportunity for strolls into the country and jaunts to the local entertainments. Over and above this, every Thursday evening she went to the subscription library to change the week's supply of books, and there again she met friends and acquaintances. It is hard to overestimate the value of church or chapel--but particularly chapel--as a social institution, in places like Woodhouse. The Congregational Chapel provided Alvina with a whole outer life, lacking which she would have been poor indeed. She was not particularly religious by inclination. Perhaps her father's beautiful prayers put her off. So she neither questioned nor accepted, but just let be. She grew up a slim girl, rather distinguished in appearance, with a slender face, a fine, slightly arched nose, and beautiful grey-blue eyes over which the lids tilted with a very odd, sardonic tilt. The sardonic quality was, however, quite in abeyance. She was ladylike, not vehement at all. In the street her walk had a delicate, lingering motion, her face looked still. In conversation she had rather a quick, hurried manner, with intervals of well-bred repose and attention. Her voice was like her father's, flexible and curiously attractive. Sometimes, however, she would have fits of boisterous hilarity, not quite natural, with a strange note half pathetic, half jeering. Her father tended to a supercilious, sneering tone. In Vina it came out in mad bursts of hilarious jeering. This made Miss Frost uneasy. She would watch the girl's strange face, that could take on a gargoyle look. She would see the eyes rolling strangely under sardonic eyelids, and then Miss Frost would feel that never, never had she known anything so utterly alien and incomprehensible and unsympathetic as her own beloved Vina. For twenty years the strong, protective governess reared and tended her lamb, her dove, only to see the lamb open a wolf's mouth, to hear the dove utter the wild cackle of a daw or a magpie, a strange sound of derision. At such times Miss Frost's heart went cold within her. She dared not realize. And she chid and checked her ward, restored her to the usual impulsive, affectionate demureness. Then she dismissed the whole matter. It was just an accidental aberration on the girl's part from her own true nature. Miss Frost taught Alvina thoroughly the qualities of her own true nature, and Alvina believed what she was taught. She remained for twenty years the demure, refined creature of her governess' desire. But there was an odd, derisive look at the back of her eyes, a look of old knowledge and deliberate derision. She herself was unconscious of it. But it was there. And this it was, perhaps, that scared away the young men. Alvina reached the age of twenty-three, and it looked as if she were destined to join the ranks of the old maids, so many of whom found cold comfort in the Chapel. For she had no suitors. True there were extraordinarily few young men of her class--for whatever her condition, she had certain breeding and inherent culture--in Woodhouse. The young men of the same social standing as herself were in some curious way outsiders to her. Knowing nothing, yet her ancient sapience went deep, deeper than Woodhouse could fathom. The young men did not like her for it. They did not like the tilt of her eyelids. Miss Frost, with anxious foreseeing, persuaded the girl to take over some pupils, to teach them the piano. The work was distasteful to Alvina. She was not a good teacher. She persevered in an off-hand way, somewhat indifferent, albeit dutiful. When she was twenty-three years old, Alvina met a man called Graham. He was an Australian, who had been in Edinburgh taking his medical degree. Before going back to Australia, he came to spend some months practising with old Dr. Fordham in Woodhouse--Dr. Fordham being in some way connected with his mother. Alexander Graham called to see Mrs. Houghton. Mrs. Houghton did not like him. She said he was creepy. He was a man of medium height, dark in colouring, with very dark eyes, and a body which seemed to move inside his clothing. He was amiable and polite, laughed often, showing his teeth. It was his teeth which Miss Frost could not stand. She seemed to see a strong mouthful of cruel, compact teeth. She declared he had dark blood in his veins, that he was not a man to be trusted, and that never, never would he make any woman's life happy. Yet in spite of all, Alvina was attracted by him. The two would stay together in the parlour, laughing and talking by the hour. What they could find to talk about was a mystery. Yet there they were, laughing and chatting, with a running insinuating sound through it all which made Miss Frost pace up and down unable to bear herself. The man was always running in when Miss Frost was out. He contrived to meet Alvina in the evening, to take a walk with her. He went a long walk with her one night, and wanted to make love to her. But her upbringing was too strong for her. "Oh no," she said. "We are only friends." He knew her upbringing was too strong for him also. "We're more than friends," he said. "We're more than friends." "I don't think so," she said. "Yes we are," he insisted, trying to put his arm round her waist. "Oh, don't!" she cried. "Let us go home." And then he burst out with wild and thick protestations of love, which thrilled her and repelled her slightly. "Anyhow I must tell Miss Frost," she said. "Yes, yes," he answered. "Yes, yes. Let us be engaged at once." As they passed under the lamps he saw her face lifted, the eyes shining, the delicate nostrils dilated, as of one who scents battle and laughs to herself. She seemed to laugh with a certain proud, sinister recklessness. His hands trembled with desire. So they were engaged. He bought her a ring, an emerald set in tiny diamonds. Miss Frost looked grave and silent, but would not openly deny her approval. "You like him, don't you? You don't dislike him?" Alvina insisted. "I don't dislike him," replied Miss Frost. "How can I? He is a perfect stranger to me." And with this Alvina subtly contented herself. Her father treated the young man with suave attention, punctuated by fits of jerky hostility and jealousy. Her mother merely sighed, and took sal volatile. To tell the truth, Alvina herself was a little repelled by the man's love-making. She found him fascinating, but a trifle repulsive. And she was not sure whether she hated the repulsive element, or whether she rather gloried in it. She kept her look of arch, half-derisive recklessness, which was so unbearably painful to Miss Frost, and so exciting to the dark little man. It was a strange look in a refined, really virgin girl--oddly sinister. And her voice had a curious bronze-like resonance that acted straight on the nerves of her hearers: unpleasantly on most English nerves, but like fire on the different susceptibilities of the young man--the darkie, as people called him. But after all, he had only six weeks in England, before sailing to Sydney. He suggested that he and Alvina should marry before he sailed. Miss Frost would not hear of it. He must see his people first, she said. So the time passed, and he sailed. Alvina missed him, missed the extreme excitement of him rather than the human being he was. Miss Frost set to work to regain her influence over her ward, to remove that arch, reckless, almost lewd look from the girl's face. It was a question of heart against sensuality. Miss Frost tried and tried to wake again the girl's loving heart--which loving heart was certainly not occupied by _that man_. It was a hard task, an anxious, bitter task Miss Frost had set herself. But at last she succeeded. Alvina seemed to thaw. The hard shining of her eyes softened again to a sort of demureness and tenderness. The influence of the man was revoked, the girl was left uninhabited, empty and uneasy. She was due to follow her Alexander in three months' time, to Sydney. Came letters from him, en route--and then a cablegram from Australia. He had arrived. Alvina should have been preparing her trousseau, to follow. But owing to her change of heart, she lingered indecisive. "_Do_ you love him, dear?" said Miss Frost with emphasis, knitting her thick, passionate, earnest eyebrows. "Do you love him sufficiently? _That's_ the point." The way Miss Frost put the question implied that Alvina did not and could not love him--because Miss Frost could not. Alvina lifted her large, blue eyes, confused, half-tender towards her governess, half shining with unconscious derision. "I don't really know," she said, laughing hurriedly. "I don't really." Miss Frost scrutinized her, and replied with a meaningful: "Well--!" To Miss Frost it was clear as daylight. To Alvina not so. In her periods of lucidity, when she saw as clear as daylight also, she certainly did not love the little man. She felt him a terrible outsider, an inferior, to tell the truth. She wondered how he could have the slightest attraction for her. In fact she could not understand it at all. She was as free of him as if he had never existed. The square green emerald on her finger was almost non-sensical. She was quite, quite sure of herself. And then, most irritating, a complete _volte face_ in her feelings. The clear-as-daylight mood disappeared as daylight is bound to disappear. She found herself in a night where the little man loomed large, terribly large, potent and magical, while Miss Frost had dwindled to nothingness. At such times she wished with all her force that she could travel like a cablegram to Australia. She felt it was the only way. She felt the dark, passionate receptivity of Alexander overwhelmed her, enveloped her even from the Antipodes. She felt herself going distracted--she felt she was going out of her mind. For she could not act. Her mother and Miss Frost were fixed in one line. Her father said: "Well, of course, you'll do as you think best. There's a great risk in going so far--a great risk. You would be entirely unprotected." "I don't mind being unprotected," said Alvina perversely. "Because you don't understand what it means," said her father. He looked at her quickly. Perhaps he understood her better than the others. "Personally," said Miss Pinnegar, speaking of Alexander, "I don't care for him. But every one has their own taste." Alvina felt she was being overborne, and that she was letting herself be overborne. She was half relieved. She seemed to nestle into the well-known surety of Woodhouse. The other unknown had frightened her. Miss Frost now took a definite line. "I feel you don't love him, dear. I'm almost sure you don't. So now you have to choose. Your mother dreads your going--she dreads it. I am certain you would never see her again. She says she can't bear it--she can't bear the thought of you out there with Alexander. It makes her shudder. She suffers dreadfully, you know. So you will have to choose, dear. You will have to choose for the best." Alvina was made stubborn by pressure. She herself had come fully to believe that she did not love him. She was quite sure she did not love him. But out of a certain perversity, she wanted to go. Came his letter from Sydney, and one from his parents to her and one to her parents. All seemed straightforward--not _very_ cordial, but sufficiently. Over Alexander's letter Miss Frost shed bitter tears. To her it seemed so shallow and heartless, with terms of endearment stuck in like exclamation marks. He semed to have no thought, no feeling for the girl herself. All he wanted was to hurry her out there. He did not even mention the grief of her parting from her English parents and friends: not a word. Just a rush to get her out there, winding up with "And now, dear, I shall not be myself till I see you here in Sydney--Your ever-loving Alexander." A selfish, sensual creature, who would forget the dear little Vina in three months, if she did not turn up, and who would neglect her in six months, if she did. Probably Miss Frost was right. Alvina knew the tears she was costing all round. She went upstairs and looked at his photograph--his dark and impertinent muzzle. Who was _he_, after all? She did not know him. With cold eyes she looked at him, and found him repugnant. She went across to her governess's room, and found Miss Frost in a strange mood of trepidation. "Don't trust me, dear, don't trust what I say," poor Miss Frost ejaculated hurriedly, even wildly. "Don't notice what I have said. Act for yourself, dear. Act for yourself entirely. I am sure I am wrong in trying to influence you. I know I am wrong. It is wrong and foolish of me. Act just for yourself, dear--the rest doesn't matter. The rest doesn't matter. Don't take _any_ notice of what I have said. I know I am wrong." For the first time in her life Alvina saw her beloved governess flustered, the beautiful white hair looking a little draggled, the grey, near-sighted eyes, so deep and kind behind the gold-rimmed glasses, now distracted and scared. Alvina immediately burst into tears and flung herself into the arms of Miss Frost. Miss Frost also cried as if her heart would break, catching her indrawn breath with a strange sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of "Never now, never now--it is too late," which seemed to ring in the curious, indrawn cries of the elder woman, filled the girl with a deep wisdom. She knew the same would ring in her mother's dying cry. Married or unmarried, it was the same--the same anguish, realized in all its pain after the age of fifty--the loss in never having been able to relax, to submit. Alvina felt very strong and rich in the fact of her youth. For her it was not too late. For Miss Frost it was for ever too late. "I don't want to go, dear," said Alvina to the elder woman. "I know I don't care for him. He is nothing to me." Miss Frost became gradually silent, and turned aside her face. After this there was a hush in the house. Alvina announced her intention of breaking off her engagement. Her mother kissed her, and cried, and said, with the selfishness of an invalid: "I couldn't have parted with you, I couldn't." Whilst the father said: "I think you are wise, Vina. I have thought a lot about it." So Alvina packed up his ring and his letters and little presents, and posted them over the seas. She was relieved, really: as if she had escaped some very trying ordeal. For some days she went about happily, in pure relief. She loved everybody. She was charming and sunny and gentle with everybody, particularly with Miss Frost, whom she loved with a deep, tender, rather sore love. Poor Miss Frost seemed to have lost a part of her confidence, to have taken on a new wistfulness, a new silence and remoteness. It was as if she found her busy contact with life a strain now. Perhaps she was getting old. Perhaps her proud heart had given way. Alvina had kept a little photograph of the man. She would often go and look at it. Love?--no, it was not love! It was something more primitive still. It was curiosity, deep, radical, burning curiosity. How she looked and looked at his dark, impertinent-seeming face. A flicker of derision came into her eyes. Yet still she looked. In the same manner she would look into the faces of the young men of Woodhouse. But she never found there what she found in her photograph. They all seemed like blank sheets of paper in comparison. There was a curious pale surface-look in the faces of the young men of Woodhouse: or, if there was some underneath suggestive power, it was a little abject or humiliating, inferior, common. They were all either blank or common. CHAPTER III THE MATERNITY NURSE Of course Alvina made everybody pay for her mood of submission and sweetness. In a month's time she was quite intolerable. "I can't stay here all my life," she declared, stretching her eyes in a way that irritated the other inmates of Manchester House extremely. "I know I can't. I can't bear it. I simply can't bear it, and there's an end of it. I can't, I tell you. I can't bear it. I'm buried alive--simply buried alive. And it's more than I can stand. It is, really." There was an odd clang, like a taunt, in her voice. She was trying them all. "But what do you want, dear?" asked Miss Frost, knitting her dark brows in agitation. "I want to go away," said Alvina bluntly. Miss Frost gave a slight gesture with her right hand, of helpless impatience. It was so characteristic, that Alvina almost laughed. "But where do you want to go?" asked Miss Frost. "I don't know. I don't care," said Alvina. "Anywhere, if I can get out of Woodhouse." "Do you wish you had gone to Australia?" put in Miss Pinnegar. "No, I don't wish I had gone to Australia," retorted Alvina with a rude laugh. "Australia isn't the only other place besides Woodhouse." Miss Pinnegar was naturally offended. But the curious insolence which sometimes came out in the girl was inherited direct from her father. "You see, dear," said Miss Frost, agitated: "if you knew what you wanted, it would be easier to see the way." "I want to be a nurse," rapped out Alvina. Miss Frost stood still, with the stillness of a middle-aged disapproving woman, and looked at her charge. She believed that Alvina was just speaking at random. Yet she dared not check her, in her present mood. Alvina was indeed speaking at random. She had never thought of being a nurse--the idea had never entered her head. If it had she would certainly never have entertained it. But she had heard Alexander speak of Nurse This and Sister That. And so she had rapped out her declaration. And having rapped it out, she prepared herself to stick to it. Nothing like leaping before you look. "A nurse!" repeated Miss Frost. "But do you feel yourself fitted to be a nurse? Do you think you could bear it?" "Yes, I'm sure I could," retorted Alvina. "I want to be a maternity nurse--" She looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. "I want to be a maternity nurse. Then I shouldn't have to attend operations." And she laughed quickly. Miss Frost's right hand beat like a wounded bird. It was reminiscent of the way she beat time, insistently, when she was giving music lessons, sitting close beside her pupils at the piano. Now it beat without time or reason. Alvina smiled brightly and cruelly. "Whatever put such an idea into your head, Vina?" asked poor Miss Frost. "I don't know," said Alvina, still more archly and brightly. "Of course you don't mean it, dear," said Miss Frost, quailing. "Yes, I do. Why should I say it if I don't." Miss Frost would have done anything to escape the arch, bright, cruel eyes of her charge. "Then we must think about it," she said, numbly. And she went away. Alvina floated off to her room, and sat by the window looking down on the street. The bright, arch look was still on her face. But her heart was sore. She wanted to cry, and fling herself on the breast of her darling. But she couldn't. No, for her life she couldn't. Some little devil sat in her breast and kept her smiling archly. Somewhat to her amazement, he sat steadily on for days and days. Every minute she expected him to go. Every minute she expected to break down, to burst into tears and tenderness and reconciliation. But no--she did not break down. She persisted. They all waited for the old loving Vina to be herself again. But the new and recalcitrant Vina still shone hard. She found a copy of _The Lancet_, and saw an advertisement of a home in Islington where maternity nurses would be fully trained and equipped in six months' time. The fee was sixty guineas. Alvina declared her intention of departing to this training home. She had two hundred pounds of her own, bequeathed by her grandfather. In Manchester House they were all horrified--not moved with grief, this time, but shocked. It seemed such a repulsive and indelicate step to take. Which it was. And which, in her curious perverseness, Alvina must have intended it to be. Mrs. Houghton assumed a remote air of silence, as if she did not hear any more, did not belong. She lapsed far away. She was really very weak. Miss Pinnegar said: "Well really, if she wants to do it, why, she might as well try." And, as often with Miss Pinnegar, this speech seemed to contain a veiled threat. "A maternity nurse!" said James Houghton. "A maternity nurse! What exactly do you mean by a maternity nurse?" "A trained mid-wife," said Miss Pinnegar curtly. "That's it, isn't it? It is as far as I can see. A trained mid-wife." "Yes, of course," said Alvina brightly. "But--!" stammered James Houghton, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead, and making his long fleece of painfully thin hair uncover his baldness. "I can't understand that any young girl of any--any upbringing, any upbringing whatever, should want to choose such a--such an--occupation. I can't understand it." "Can't you?" said Alvina brightly. "Oh well, if she _does_--" said Miss Pinnegar cryptically. Miss Frost said very little. But she had serious confidential talks with Dr. Fordham. Dr. Fordham didn't approve, certainly he didn't--but neither did he see any great harm in it. At that time it was rather the thing for young ladies to enter the nursing profession, if their hopes had been blighted or checked in another direction! And so, enquiries were made. Enquiries were made. The upshot was, that Alvina was to go to Islington for her six months' training. There was a great bustle, preparing her nursing outfit. Instead of a trousseau, nurse's uniforms in fine blue-and-white stripe, with great white aprons. Instead of a wreath of orange blossom, a rather chic nurse's bonnet of blue silk, and for a trailing veil, a blue silk fall. Well and good! Alvina expected to become frightened, as the time drew near. But no, she wasn't a bit frightened. Miss Frost watched her narrowly. Would there not be a return of the old, tender, sensitive, shrinking Vina--the exquisitely sensitive and nervous, loving girl? No, astounding as it may seem, there was no return of such a creature. Alvina remained bright and ready, the half-hilarious clang remained in her voice, taunting. She kissed them all good-bye, brightly and sprightlily, and off she set. She wasn't nervous. She came to St. Pancras, she got her cab, she drove off to her destination--and as she drove, she looked out of the window. Horrid, vast, stony, dilapidated, crumbly-stuccoed streets and squares of Islington, grey, grey, greyer by far than Woodhouse, and interminable. How exceedingly sordid and disgusting! But instead of being repelled and heartbroken, Alvina enjoyed it. She felt her trunk rumble on the top of the cab, and still she looked out on the ghastly dilapidated flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all. Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops--it was February--and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed glimpsing in through uncurtained windows, into sordid rooms where human beings moved as if sordidly unaware. She enjoyed the smell of a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So common! so indescribably common! And she detested bloaters, because of the hairy feel of the spines in her mouth. But to smell them like this, to know that she was in the region of "penny beef-steaks," gave her a perverse pleasure. The cab stopped at a yellow house at the corner of a square where some shabby bare trees were flecked with bits of blown paper, bits of paper and refuse cluttered inside the round railings of each tree. She went up some dirty-yellowish steps, and rang the "Patients'" bell, because she knew she ought not to ring the "Tradesmen's." A servant, not exactly dirty, but unattractive, let her into a hall painted a dull drab, and floored with cocoa-matting, otherwise bare. Then up bare stairs to a room where a stout, pale, common woman with two warts on her face, was drinking tea. It was three o'clock. This was the matron. The matron soon deposited her in a bedroom, not very small, but bare and hard and dusty-seeming, and there left her. Alvina sat down on her chair, looked at her box opposite her, looked round the uninviting room, and smiled to herself. Then she rose and went to the window: a very dirty window, looking down into a sort of well of an area, with other wells ranging along, and straight opposite like a reflection another solid range of back-premises, with iron stair-ways and horrid little doors and washing and little W. C.'s and people creeping up and down like vermin. Alvina shivered a little, but still smiled. Then slowly she began to take off her hat. She put it down on the drab-painted chest of drawers. Presently the servant came in with a tray, set it down, lit a naked gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green blind, which showed a tendency to fly back again alertly to the ceiling. "Thank you," said Alvina, and the girl departed. Then Miss Houghton drank her black tea and ate her bread and margarine. Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina's six months in Islington. The food was objectionable--yet Alvina got fat on it. The air was filthy--and yet never had her colour been so warm and fresh, her skin so soft. Her companions were almost without exception vulgar and coarse--yet never had she got on so well with women of her own age--or older than herself. She was ready with a laugh and a word, and though she was unable to venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for _looking_ knowing and indecent beyond words, rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way--oh, it was quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would have been floored. But she enjoyed it. Amazing how she enjoyed it. She did not care _how_ revolting and indecent these nurses were--she put on a look as if she were in with it all, and it all passed off as easy as winking. She swung her haunches and arched her eyes with the best of them. And they behaved as if she were exactly one of themselves. And yet, with the curious cold tact of women, they left her alone, one and all, in private: just ignored her. It is truly incredible how Alvina became blooming and bouncing at this time. Nothing shocked her, nothing upset her. She was always ready with her hard, nurse's laugh and her nurse's quips. No one was better than she at _double-entendres._ No one could better give the nurse's leer. She had it all in a fortnight. And never once did she feel anything but exhilarated and in full swing. It seemed to her she had not a moment's time to brood or reflect about things--she was too much in the swing. Every moment, in the swing, living, or active in full swing. When she got into bed she went to sleep. When she awoke, it was morning, and she got up. As soon as she was up and dressed she had somebody to answer, something to say, something to do. Time passed like an express train--and she seemed to have known no other life than this. Not far away was a lying-in hospital. A dreadful place it was. There she had to go, right off, and help with cases. There she had to attend lectures and demonstrations. There she met the doctors and students. Well, a pretty lot they were, one way and another. When she had put on flesh and become pink and bouncing she was just their sort: just their very ticket. Her voice had the right twang, her eyes the right roll, her haunches the right swing. She seemed altogether just the ticket. And yet she wasn't. It would be useless to say she was not shocked. She was profoundly and awfully shocked. Her whole state was perhaps largely the result of shock: a sort of play-acting based on hysteria. But the dreadful things she saw in the lying-in hospital, and afterwards, went deep, and finished her youth and her tutelage for ever. How many infernos deeper than Miss Frost could ever know, did she not travel? the inferno of the human animal, the human organism in its convulsions, the human social beast in its abjection and its degradation. For in her latter half she had to visit the slum cases. And such cases! A woman lying on a bare, filthy floor, a few old coats thrown over her, and vermin crawling everywhere, in spite of sanitary inspectors. But what did the woman, the sufferer, herself care! She ground her teeth and screamed and yelled with pains. In her calm periods she lay stupid and indifferent--or she cursed a little. But abject, stupid indifference was the bottom of it all: abject, brutal indifference to everything--yes, everything. Just a piece of female functioning, no more. Alvina was supposed to receive a certain fee for these cases she attended in their homes. A small proportion of her fee she kept for herself, the rest she handed over to the Home. That was the agreement. She received her grudged fee callously, threatened and exacted it when it was not forthcoming. Ha!--if they didn't have to pay you at all, these slum-people, they would treat you with more contempt than if you were one of themselves. It was one of the hardest lessons Alvina had to learn--to bully these people, in their own hovels, into some sort of obedience to her commands, and some sort of respect for her presence. She had to fight tooth and nail for this end. And in a week she was as hard and callous to them as they to her. And so her work was well done. She did not hate them. There they were. They had a certain life, and you had to take them at their own worth in their own way. What else! If one should be gentle, one was gentle. The difficulty did not lie there. The difficulty lay in being sufficiently rough and hard: that was the trouble. It cost a great struggle to be hard and callous enough. Glad she would have been to be allowed to treat them quietly and gently, with consideration. But pah--it was not their line. They wanted to be callous, and if you were not callous to match, they made a fool of you and prevented your doing your work. Was Alvina her own real self all this time? The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be. Alvina had been bred to think of herself as a delicate, tender, chaste creature with unselfish inclinations and a pure, "high" mind. Well, so she was, in the more-or-less exhausted part of herself. But high-mindedness had really come to an end with James Houghton, had really reached the point, not only of pathetic, but of dry and anti-human, repulsive quixotry. In Alvina high-mindedness was already stretched beyond the breaking point. Being a woman of some flexibility of temper, wrought through generations to a fine, pliant hardness, she flew back. She went right back on high-mindedness. Did she thereby betray it? We think not. If we turn over the head of the penny and look at the tail, we don't thereby deny or betray the head. We do but adjust it to its own complement. And so with high-mindedness. It is but one side of the medal--the crowned reverse. On the obverse the three legs still go kicking the soft-footed spin of the universe, the dolphin flirts and the crab leers. So Alvina spun her medal, and her medal came down tails. Heads or tails? Heads for generations. Then tails. See the poetic justice. Now Alvina decided to accept the decision of her fate. Or rather, being sufficiently a woman, she didn't decide anything. She _was_ her own fate. She went through her training experiences like another being. She was not herself, said Everybody. When she came home to Woodhouse at Easter, in her bonnet and cloak, everybody was simply knocked out. Imagine that this frail, pallid, diffident girl, so ladylike, was now a rather fat, warm-coloured young woman, strapping and strong-looking, and with a certain bounce. Imagine her mother's startled, almost expiring: "Why, Vina dear!" Vina laughed. She knew how they were all feeling. "At least it agrees with your _health_," said her father, sarcastically, to which Miss Pinnegar answered: "Well, that's a good deal." But Miss Frost said nothing the first day. Only the second day, at breakfast, as Alvina ate rather rapidly and rather well, the white-haired woman said quietly, with a tinge of cold contempt: "How changed you are, dear!" "Am I?" laughed Alvina. "Oh, not really." And she gave the arch look with her eyes, which made Miss Frost shudder. Inwardly, Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from questioning. Alvina was always speaking of the doctors: Doctor Young and Doctor Headley and Doctor James. She spoke of theatres and music-halls with these young men, and the jolly good time she had with them. And her blue-grey eyes seemed to have become harder and greyer, lighter somehow. In her wistfulness and her tender pathos, Alvina's eyes would deepen their blue, so beautiful. And now, in her floridity, they were bright and arch and light-grey. The deep, tender, flowery blue was gone for ever. They were luminous and crystalline, like the eyes of a changeling. Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from question. She wanted, she _needed_ to ask of her charge: "Alvina, have you betrayed yourself with any of these young men?" But coldly her heart abstained from asking--or even from seriously thinking. She left the matter untouched for the moment. She was already too much shocked. Certainly Alvina represented the young doctors as very nice, but rather fast young fellows. "My word, you have to have your wits about you with them!" Imagine such a speech from a girl tenderly nurtured: a speech uttered in her own home, and accompanied by a florid laugh, which would lead a chaste, generous woman like Miss Frost to imagine--well, she merely abstained from imagining anything. She had that strength of mind. She never for one moment attempted to answer the question to herself, as to whether Alvina had betrayed herself with any of these young doctors, or not. The question remained stated, but completely unanswered--coldly awaiting its answer. Only when Miss Frost kissed Alvina good-bye at the station, tears came to her eyes, and she said hurriedly, in a low voice: "Remember we are all praying for you, dear!" "No, don't do that!" cried Alvina involuntarily, without knowing what she said. And then the train moved out, and she saw her darling standing there on the station, the pale, well-modelled face looking out from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, wistfully, the strong, rather stout figure standing very still and unchangeable, under its coat and skirt of dark purple, the white hair glistening under the folded dark hat. Alvina threw herself down on the seat of her carriage. She loved her darling. She would love her through eternity. She knew she was right--amply and beautifully right, her darling, her beloved Miss Frost. Eternally and gloriously right. And yet--and yet--it was a right which was fulfilled. There were other rights. There was another side to the medal. Purity and high-mindedness--the beautiful, but unbearable tyranny. The beautiful, unbearable tyranny of Miss Frost! It was time now for Miss Frost to die. It was time for that perfected flower to be gathered to immortality. A lovely _immortel_. But an obstruction to other, purple and carmine blossoms which were in bud on the stem. A lovely edelweiss--but time it was gathered into eternity. Black-purple and red anemones were due, real Adonis blood, and strange individual orchids, spotted and fantastic. Time for Miss Frost to die. She, Alvina, who loved her as no one else would ever love her, with that love which goes to the core of the universe, knew that it was time for her darling to be folded, oh, so gently and softly, into immortality. Mortality was busy with the day after her day. It was time for Miss Frost to die. As Alvina sat motionless in the train, running from Woodhouse to Tibshelf, it decided itself in her. She was glad to be back in Islington, among all the horrors of her confinement cases. The doctors she knew hailed her. On the whole, these young men had not any too deep respect for the nurses as a whole. Why drag in respect? Human functions were too obviously established to make any great fuss about. And so the doctors put their arms round Alvina's waist, because she was plump, and they kissed her face, because the skin was soft. And she laughed and squirmed a little, so that they felt all the more her warmth and softness under their arm's pressure. "It's no use, you know," she said, laughing rather breathless, but looking into their eyes with a curious definite look of unchangeable resistance. This only piqued them. "What's no use?" they asked. She shook her head slightly. "It isn't any use your behaving like that with me," she said, with the same challenging definiteness, finality: a flat negative. "Who're you telling?" they said. For she did not at all forbid them to "behave like that." Not in the least. She almost encouraged them. She laughed and arched her eyes and flirted. But her backbone became only the stronger and firmer. Soft and supple as she was, her backbone never yielded for an instant. It could not. She had to confess that she liked the young doctors. They were alert, their faces were clean and bright-looking. She liked the sort of intimacy with them, when they kissed her and wrestled with her in the empty laboratories or corridors--often in the intervals of most critical and appalling cases. She liked their arm round her waist, the kisses as she reached back her face, straining away, the sometimes desperate struggles. They took unpardonable liberties. They pinched her haunches and attacked her in unheard-of ways. Sometimes her blood really came up in the fight, and she felt as if, with her hands, she could tear any man, any male creature, limb from limb. A super-human, voltaic force filled her. For a moment she surged in massive, inhuman, female strength. The men always wilted. And invariably, when they wilted, she touched them with a sudden gentle touch, pitying. So that she always remained friends with them. When her curious Amazonic power left her again, and she was just a mere woman, she made shy eyes at them once more, and treated them with the inevitable female-to-male homage. The men liked her. They cocked their eyes at her, when she was not looking, and wondered at her. They wondered over her. They had been beaten by her, every one of them. But they did not openly know it. They looked at her, as if she were Woman itself, some creature not quite personal. What they noticed, all of them, was the way her brown hair looped over her ears. There was something chaste, and noble, and war-like about it. The remote quality which hung about her in the midst of her intimacies and her frequencies, nothing high or lofty, but something given to the struggle and as yet invincible in the struggle, made them seek her out. They felt safe with her. They knew she would not let them down. She would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any way. She didn't care about them. And so, because of her isolate self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy hair and a pugnacious face. The battle-spirit was really roused in him, and he heartily liked the woman. If he could have overcome her he would have been mad to marry her. With him, she summoned up all her mettle. She had never to be off her guard for a single minute. The treacherous suddenness of his attack--for he was treachery itself--had to be met by the voltaic suddenness of her resistance and counter-attack. It was nothing less than magical the way the soft, slumbering body of the woman could leap in one jet into terrible, overwhelming voltaic force, something strange and massive, at the first treacherous touch of the man's determined hand. His strength was so different from hers--quick, muscular, lambent. But hers was deep and heaving, like the strange heaving of an earthquake, or the heave of a bull as it rises from earth. And by sheer non-human power, electric and paralysing, she could overcome the brawny red-headed fellow. He was nearly a match for her. But she did not like him. The two were enemies--and good acquaintances. They were more or less matched. But as he found himself continually foiled, he became sulky, like a bear with a sore head. And then she avoided him. She really liked Young and James much better. James was a quick, slender, dark-haired fellow, a gentleman, who was always trying to catch her out with his quickness. She liked his fine, slim limbs, and his exaggerated generosity. He would ask her out to ridiculously expensive suppers, and send her sweets and flowers, fabulously recherché. He was always immaculately well-dressed. "Of course, as a lady _and_ a nurse," he said to her, "you are two sorts of women in one." But she was not impressed by his wisdom. She was most strongly inclined to Young. He was a plump young man of middle height, with those blue eyes of a little boy which are so knowing: particularly of a woman's secrets. It is a strange thing that these childish men have such a deep, half-perverse knowledge of the other sex. Young was certainly innocent as far as acts went. Yet his hair was going thin at the crown already. He also played with her--being a doctor, and she a nurse who encouraged it. He too touched her and kissed her: and did _not_ rouse her to contest. For his touch and his kiss had that nearness of a little boy's, which nearly melted her. She could almost have succumbed to him. If it had not been that with him there was no question of succumbing. She would have had to take him between her hands and caress and cajole him like a cherub, into a fall. And though she would have like to do so, yet that inflexible stiffness of her backbone prevented her. She could not do as she liked. There was an inflexible fate within her, which shaped her ends. Sometimes she wondered to herself, over her own virginity. Was it worth much, after all, behaving as she did? Did she care about it, anyhow? Didn't she rather despise it? To sin in thought was as bad as to sin in act. If the thought was the same as the act, how much more was her behaviour equivalent to a whole committal? She wished she were wholly committed. She wished she had gone the whole length. But sophistry and wishing did her no good. There she was, still isolate. And still there was that in her which would preserve her intact, sophistry and deliberate intention notwithstanding. Her time was up. She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows. But so it was, she felt herself beaten, condemned to go back to what she was before. Fate had been too strong for her and her desires: fate which was not an external association of forces, but which was integral in her own nature. Her own inscrutable nature was her fate: sore against her will. It was August when she came home, in her nurse's uniform. She was beaten by fate, as far as chastity and virginity went. But she came home with high material hopes. Here was James Houghton's own daughter. She had an affluent future ahead of her. A fully-qualified maternity nurse, she was going to bring all the babies of the district easily and triumphantly into the world. She was going to charge the regulation fee of two guineas a case: and even on a modest estimate of ten babies a month, she would have twenty guineas. For well-to-do mothers she would charge from three to five guineas. At this calculation she would make an easy three hundred a year, without slaving either. She would be independent, she could laugh every one in the face. She bounced back into Woodhouse to make her fortune. CHAPTER IV TWO WOMEN DIE It goes without saying that Alvina Houghton did not make her fortune as a maternity nurse. Being her father's daughter, we might almost expect that she did not make a penny. But she did--just a few pence. She had exactly four cases--and then no more. The reason is obvious. Who in Woodhouse was going to afford a two-guinea nurse, for a confinement? And who who was going to engage Alvina Houghton, even if they were ready to stretch their purse-strings? After all, they all knew her as _Miss_ Houghton, with a stress on the _Miss_, and they could not conceive of her as Nurse Houghton. Besides, there seemed something positively indecent in technically engaging one who was so much part of themselves. They all preferred either a simple mid-wife, or a nurse procured out of the unknown by the doctor. If Alvina wanted to make her fortune--or even her living--she should have gone to a strange town. She was so advised by every one she knew. But she never for one moment reflected on the advice. She had become a maternity nurse in order to practise in Woodhouse, just as James Houghton had purchased his elegancies to sell in Woodhouse. And father and daughter alike calmly expected Woodhouse demand to rise to their supply. So both alike were defeated in their expectations. For a little while Alvina flaunted about in her nurse's uniform. Then she left it off. And as she left it off she lost her bounce, her colour, and her flesh. Gradually she shrank back to the old, slim, reticent pallor, with eyes a little too large for her face. And now it seemed her face was a little too long, a little gaunt. And in her civilian clothes she seemed a little dowdy, shabby. And altogether, she looked older: she looked more than her age, which was only twenty-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch of the trollops in her dowdiness--so the shrewd-eyed collier-wives decided. But she was a lady still, and unbeaten. Undeniably she was a lady. And that was rather irritating to the well-to-do and florid daughter of W.H. Johnson, next door but one. Undeniably a lady, and undeniably unmastered. This last was irritating to the good-natured but easy-coming young men in the Chapel Choir, where she resumed her seat. These young men had the good nature of dogs that wag their tails and expect to be patted. And Alvina did not pat them. To be sure, a pat from such a shabbily-black-kid-gloved hand would not have been so flattering--she need not imagine it! The way she hung back and looked at them, the young men, as knowing as if she were a prostitute, and yet with the well-bred indifference of a lady--well, it was almost offensive. As a matter of fact, Alvina was detached for the time being from her interest in young men. Manchester House had settled down on her like a doom. There was the quartered shop, through which one had to worm one's encumbered way in the gloom--unless one liked to go miles round a back street, to the yard entry. There was James Houghton, faintly powdered with coal-dust, flitting back and forth in a fever of nervous frenzy, to Throttle-Ha'penny--so carried away that he never saw his daughter at all the first time he came in, after her return. And when she reminded him of her presence, with her--"Hello, father!"--he merely glancied hurriedly at her, as if vexed with her interruption, and said: "Well, Alvina, you're back. You're back to find us busy." And he went off into his ecstasy again. Mrs. Houghton was now very weak, and so nervous in her weakness that she could not bear the slightest sound. Her greatest horror was lest her husband should come into the room. On his entry she became blue at the lips immediately, so he had to hurry out again. At last he stayed away, only hurriedly asking, each time he came into the house, "How is Mrs. Houghton? Ha!" Then off into uninterrupted Throttle-Ha'penny ecstasy once more. When Alvina went up to her mother's room, on her return, all the poor invalid could do was to tremble into tears, and cry faintly: "Child, you look dreadful. It isn't you." This from the pathetic little figure in the bed had struck Alvina like a blow. "Why not, mother?" she asked. But for her mother she had to remove her nurse's uniform. And at the same time, she had to constitute herself nurse. Miss Frost, and a woman who came in, and the servant had been nursing the invalid between them. Miss Frost was worn and rather heavy: her old buoyancy and brightness was gone. She had become irritable also. She was very glad that Alvina had returned to take this responsibility of nursing off her shoulders. For her wonderful energy had ebbed and oozed away. Alvina said nothing, but settled down to her task. She was quiet and technical with her mother. The two loved one another, with a curious impersonal love which had not a single word to exchange: an almost after-death love. In these days Mrs. Houghton never talked--unless to fret a little. So Alvina sat for many hours in the lofty, sombre bedroom, looking out silently on the street, or hurriedly rising to attend the sick woman. For continually came the fretful murmur: "Vina!" To sit still--who knows the long discipline of it, nowadays, as our mothers and grandmothers knew. To sit still, for days, months, and years--perforce to sit still, with some dignity of tranquil bearing. Alvina was old-fashioned. She had the old, womanly faculty for sitting quiet and collected--not indeed for a life-time, but for long spells together. And so it was during these months nursing her mother. She attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good deal of work about the house: she took her walks and occupied her place in the choir on Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January, she seemed to be seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimes reading, but mostly quite still, her hands quietly in her lap, her mind subdued by musing. She did not even think, not even remember. Even such activity would have made her presence too disturbing in the room. She sat quite still, with all her activities in abeyance--except that strange will-to-passivity which was by no means a relaxation, but a severe, deep, soul-discipline. For the moment there was a sense of prosperity--or probable prosperity, in the house. And there was an abundance of Throttle-Ha'penny coal. It was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars of the grate were constantly blanked in with white powdery ash, which it was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, you raised white cumulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with a few darkening and sulphurous embers. But even so, by continuous application, you could keep the room moderately warm, without feeling you were consuming the house's meat and drink in the grate. Which was one blessing. The days, the months darkened past, and Alvina returned to her old thinness and pallor. Her fore-arms were thin, they rested very still in her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she took her walk, in her lingering, yet watchful fashion. She saw everything. Yet she passed without attracting any attention. Early in the year her mother died. Her father came and wept self-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. And Alvina cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poor mother! Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not to think. After all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents' lives. She came after them. Her day was not their day, their life was not hers. Returning up-channel to re-discover their course was quite another matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, as they had done thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinent exploration of the generation gone by, by the present generation, is nothing to our credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeats the mistakes of the generation ahead, any more than any river repeats its course. So the young need not be so proud of their superiority over the old. The young generation glibly makes its own mistakes: and _how_ detestable these new mistakes are, why, only the future will be able to tell us. But be sure they are quite as detestable, quite as full of lies and hypocrisy, as any of the mistakes of our parents. There is no such thing as _absolute_ wisdom. Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes. You can't know beforehand. So Alvina refrained from pondering on her mother's life and fate. Whatever the fate of the mother, the fate of the daughter will be otherwise. That is organically inevitable. The business of the daughter is with her own fate, not with her mother's. Miss Frost however meditated bitterly on the fate of the poor dead woman. Bitterly she brooded on the lot of woman. Here was Clariss Houghton, married, and a mother--and dead. What a life! Who was responsible? James Houghton. What ought James Houghton to have done differently? Everything. In short, he should have been somebody else, and not himself. Which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of idealism. The universe should be something else, and not what it is: so the nonsense of idealistic conclusion. The cat should not catch the mouse, the mouse should not nibble holes in the table-cloth, and so on and so on, in the House that Jack Built. But Miss Frost sat by the dead in grief and despair. This was the end of another woman's life: such an end! Poor Clariss: guilty James. Yet why? Why was James more guilty than Clariss? Is the only aim and end of a man's life, to make some woman, or parcel of women, happy? Why? Why should anybody expect to be _made happy_, and develop heart-disease if she isn't? Surely Clariss' heart-disease was a more emphatic sign of obstinate self-importance than ever James' shop-windows were. She expected to be _made happy_. Every woman in Europe and America expects it. On her own head then if she is made unhappy: for her expectation is arrogant and impertinent. The be-all and end-all of life doesn't lie in feminine happiness--or in any happiness. Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet--he won't be happy till he gets it, and when he's got it, the precious baby, it'll cost him his eyes and his stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn't happy: like a baby in the bath! Poor Clariss, however, was dead--and if she had developed heart-disease because she wasn't happy, well, she had died of her own heart-disease, poor thing. Wherein lies every moral that mankind can wish to draw. Miss Frost wept in anguish, and saw nothing but another woman betrayed to sorrow and a slow death. Sorrow and a slow death, because a man had married her. Miss Frost wept also for herself, for her own sorrow and slow death. Sorrow and slow death, because a man had _not_ married her. Wretched man, what is he to do with these exigeant and never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined because our fathers drank and were rakes. Our wives pine because we are virtuous but inadequate. Who is this sphinx, this woman? Where is the Oedipus that will solve her riddle of happiness, and then strangle her?--only to marry his own mother! In the months that followed her mother's death, Alvina went on the same, in abeyance. She took over the housekeeping, and received one or two overflow pupils from Miss Frost, young girls to whom she gave lessons in the dark drawing-room of Manchester House. She was busy--chiefly with housekeeping. There seemed a great deal to put in order after her mother's death. She sorted all her mother's clothes--expensive, old-fashioned clothes, hardly worn. What was to be done with them? She gave them away, without consulting anybody. She kept a few private things, she inherited a few pieces of jewellery. Remarkable how little trace her mother left--hardly a trace. She decided to move into the big, monumental bedroom in front of the house. She liked space, she liked the windows. She was strictly mistress, too. So she took her place. Her mother's little sitting-room was cold and disused. Then Alvina went through all the linen. There was still abundance, and it was all sound. James had had such large ideas of setting up house, in the beginning. And now he begrudged the household expenses, begrudged the very soap and candles, and even would have liked to introduce margarine instead of butter. This last degradation the women refused. But James was above food. The old Alvina seemed completely herself again. She was quiet, dutiful, affectionate. She appealed in her old, childish way to Miss Frost, and Miss Frost called her "Dear!" with all the old protective gentleness. But there was a difference. Underneath her appearance of appeal, Alvina was almost coldly independent. She did what she thought she would. The old manner of intimacy persisted between her and her darling. And perhaps neither of them knew that the intimacy itself had gone. But it had. There was no spontaneous interchange between them. It was a kind of deadlock. Each knew the great love she felt for the other. But now it was a love static, inoperative. The warm flow did not run any more. Yet each would have died for the other, would have done anything to spare the other hurt. Miss Frost was becoming tired, dragged looking. She would sink into a chair as if she wished never to rise again--never to make the effort. And Alvina quickly would attend on her, bring her tea and take away her music, try to make everything smooth. And continually the young woman exhorted the elder to work less, to give up her pupils. But Miss Frost answered quickly, nervously: "When I don't work I shan't live." "But why--?" came the long query from Alvina. And in her expostulation there was a touch of mockery for such a creed. Miss Frost did not answer. Her face took on a greyish tinge. In these days Alvina struck up an odd friendship with Miss Pinnegar, after so many years of opposition. She felt herself more in sympathy with Miss Pinnegar--it was so easy to get on with her, she left so much unsaid. What was left unsaid mattered more to Alvina now than anything that was expressed. She began to hate outspokenness and direct speaking-forth of the whole mind. It nauseated her. She wanted tacit admission of difference, not open, wholehearted communication. And Miss Pinnegar made this admission all along. She never made you feel for an instant that she was one with you. She was never even near. She kept quietly on her own ground, and left you on yours. And across the space came her quiet commonplaces--but fraught with space. With Miss Frost all was openness, explicit and downright. Not that Miss Frost trespassed. She was far more well-bred than Miss Pinnegar. But her very breeding had that Protestant, northern quality which assumes that we have all the same high standards, really, and all the same divine nature, intrinsically. It is a fine assumption. But willy-nilly, it sickened Alvina at this time. She preferred Miss Pinnegar, and admired Miss Pinnegar's humble wisdom with a new admiration. The two were talking of Dr. Headley, who, they read in the newspaper, had disgraced himself finally. "I suppose," said Miss Pinnegar, "it takes his sort to make all sorts." Such bits of homely wisdom were like relief from cramp and pain, to Alvina. "It takes his sort to make all sorts." It took her sort too. And it took her father's sort--as well as her mother's and Miss Frost's. It took every sort to make all sorts. Why have standards and a regulation pattern? Why have a human criterion? There's the point! Why, in the name of all the free heavens, have human criteria? Why? Simply for bullying and narrowness. Alvina felt at her ease with Miss Pinnegar. The two women talked away to one another, in their quiet moments: and slipped apart like conspirators when Miss Frost came in: as if there was something to be ashamed of. If there was, heaven knows what it might have been, for their talk was ordinary enough. But Alvina liked to be with Miss Pinnegar in the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar wasn't competent and masterful like Miss Frost: she was ordinary and uninspired, with quiet, unobserved movements. But she was deep, and there was some secret satisfaction in her very quality of secrecy. So the days and weeks and months slipped by, and Alvina was hidden like a mole in the dark chambers of Manchester House, busy with cooking and cleaning and arranging, getting the house in her own order, and attending to her pupils. She took her walk in the afternoon. Once and only once she went to Throttle-Ha'penny, and, seized with sudden curiosity, insisted on being wound down in the iron bucket to the little workings underneath. Everything was quite tidy in the short gang-ways down below, timbered and in sound order. The miners were competent enough. But water dripped dismally in places, and there was a stale feeling in the air. Her father accompanied her, pointed her to the seam of yellow-flecked coal, the shale and the bind, the direction of the trend. He had already an airy-fairy kind of knowledge of the whole affair, and seemed like some not quite trustworthy conjuror who had conjured it all up by sleight of hand. In the background the miners stood grey and ghostly, in the candle-light, and seemed to listen sardonically. One of them, facile in his subordinate way as James in his authoritative, kept chiming in: "Ay, that's the road it goes, Miss Huffen--yis, yo'll see th' roof theer bellies down a bit--s' loose. No, you dunna get th' puddin' stones i' this pit--s' not deep enough. Eh, they come down on you plumb, as if th' roof had laid its egg on you. Ay, it runs a bit thin down here--six inches. You see th' bed's soft, it's a sort o' clay-bind, it's not clunch such as you get deeper. Oh, it's easy workin'--you don't have to knock your guts out. There's no need for shots, Miss Huffen--we bring it down--you see here--" And he stooped, pointing to a shallow, shelving excavation which he was making under the coal. The working was low, you must stoop all the time. The roof and the timbered sides of the way seemed to press on you. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever, like the dead and everlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but fascinated. The collier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare, grey-black hairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted hand. The thick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was a thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near her as if he knew--as if he knew--what? Something for ever unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the underground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledge humiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still his voice went on clapping in her ear, and still his presence edged near her, and seemed to impinge on her--a smallish, semi-grotesque, grey-obscure figure with a naked brandished forearm: not human: a creature of the subterranean world, melted out like a bat, fluid. She felt herself melting out also, to become a mere vocal ghost, a presence in the thick atmosphere. Her lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underworld darkness. Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness-- When she was up on the earth again she blinked and peered at the world in amazement. What a pretty, luminous place it was, carved in substantial luminosity. What a strange and lovely place, bubbling iridescent-golden on the surface of the underworld. Iridescent golden--could anything be more fascinating! Like lovely glancing surface on fluid pitch. But a velvet surface. A velvet surface of golden light, velvet-pile of gold and pale luminosity, and strange beautiful elevations of houses and trees, and depressions of fields and roads, all golden and floating like atmospheric majolica. Never had the common ugliness of Woodhouse seemed so entrancing. She thought she had never seen such beauty--a lovely luminous majolica, living and palpitating, the glossy, svelte world-surface, the exquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps gnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, see with such eyes. Perhaps that is why they are absolutely blind to conventional ugliness. For truly nothing could be more hideous than Woodhouse, as the miners had built it and disposed it. And yet, the very cabbage-stumps and rotten fences of the gardens, the very back-yards were instinct with magic, molten as they seemed with the bubbling-up of the under-darkness, bubbling up of majolica weight and luminosity, quite ignorant of the sky, heavy and satisfying. Slaves of the underworld! She watched the swing of the grey colliers along the pavement with a new fascination, hypnotized by a new vision. Slaves--the underground trolls and iron-workers, magic, mischievous, and enslaved, of the ancient stories. But tall--the miners seemed to her to loom tall and grey, in their enslaved magic. Slaves who would cause the superimposed day-order to fall. Not because, individually, they wanted to. But because, collectively, something bubbled up in them, the force of darkness which had no master and no control. It would bubble and stir in them as earthquakes stir the earth. It would be simply disastrous, because it had no master. There was no dark master in the world. The puerile world went on crying out for a new Jesus, another Saviour from the sky, another heavenly superman. When what was wanted was a Dark Master from the underworld. So they streamed past her, home from work--grey from head to foot, distorted in shape, cramped, with curious faces that came out pallid from under their dirt. Their walk was heavy-footed and slurring, their bearing stiff and grotesque. A stream they were--yet they seemed to her to loom like strange, valid figures of fairy-lore, unrealized and as yet unexperienced. The miners, the iron-workers, those who fashion the stuff of the underworld. As it always comes to its children, the nostalgia of the repulsive, heavy-footed Midlands came over her again, even whilst she was there in the midst. The curious, dark, inexplicable and yet insatiable craving--as if for an earthquake. To feel the earth heave and shudder and shatter the world from beneath. To go down in the débâcle. And so, in spite of everything, poverty, dowdiness, obscurity, and nothingness, she was content to stay in abeyance at home for the time. True, she was filled with the same old, slow, dreadful craving of the Midlands: a craving insatiable and inexplicable. But the very craving kept her still. For at this time she did not translate it into a desire, or need, for love. At the back of her mind somewhere was the fixed idea, the fixed intention of finding love, a man. But as yet, at this period, the idea was in abeyance, it did not act. The craving that possessed her as it possesses everybody, in a greater or less degree, in those parts, sustained her darkly and unconsciously. A hot summer waned into autumn, the long, bewildering days drew in, the transient nights, only a few breaths of shadow between noon and noon, deepened and strengthened. A restlessness came over everybody. There was another short strike among the miners. James Houghton, like an excited beetle, scurried to and fro, feeling he was making his fortune. Never had Woodhouse been so thronged on Fridays with purchasers and money-spenders. The place seemed surcharged with life. Autumn lasted beautiful till end of October. And then suddenly, cold rain, endless cold rain, and darkness heavy, wet, ponderous. Through the wind and rain it was a toil to move. Poor Miss Frost, who had seemed almost to blossom again in the long hot days, regaining a free cheerfulness that amounted almost to liveliness, and who even caused a sort of scandal by her intimacy with a rather handsome but common stranger, an insurance agent who had come into the place with a good, unused tenor voice--now she wilted again. She had given the rather florid young man tea in her room, and had laboured away at his fine, metallic voice, correcting him and teaching him and laughing with him and spending really a remarkable number of hours alone with him in her room in Woodhouse--for she had given up tramping the country, and had hired a music-room in a quiet street, where she gave her lessons. And the young man had hung round, and had never wanted to go away. They would prolong their tête-à-tête and their singing on till ten o'clock at night, and Miss Frost would return to Manchester House flushed and handsome and a little shy, while the young man, who was common, took on a new boldness in the streets. He had auburn hair, high colouring, and a rather challenging bearing. He took on a new boldness, his own estimate of himself rose considerably, with Miss Frost and his trained voice to justify him. He was a little insolent and condescending to the natives, who disliked him. For their lives they could not imagine what Miss Frost could find in him. They began even to dislike her, and a pretty scandal was started about the pair, in the pleasant room where Miss Frost had her piano, her books, and her flowers. The scandal was as unjust as most scandals are. Yet truly, all that summer and autumn Miss Frost had a new and slightly aggressive cheerfulness and humour. And Manchester House saw little of her, comparatively. And then, at the end of September, the young man was removed by his Insurance Company to another district. And at the end of October set in the most abominable and unbearable weather, deluges of rain and north winds, cutting the tender, summer-unfolded people to pieces. Miss Frost wilted at once. A silence came over her. She shuddered when she had to leave the fire. She went in the morning to her room, and stayed there all the day, in a hot, close atmosphere, shuddering when her pupils brought the outside weather with them to her. She was always subject to bronchitis. In November she had a bad bronchitis cold. Then suddenly one morning she could not get up. Alvina went in and found her semi-conscious. The girl was almost mad. She flew to the rescue. She despatched her father instantly for the doctor, she heaped the sticks in the bedroom grate and made a bright fire, she brough hot milk and brandy. "Thank you, dear, thank you. It's a bronchial cold," whispered Miss Frost hurriedly, trying to sip the milk. She could not. She didn't want it. "I've sent for the doctor," said Alvina, in her cool voice, wherein none the less there rang the old hesitancy of sheer love. Miss Frost lifted her eyes: "There's no need," she said, and she smiled winsomely at Alvina. It was pneumonia. Useless to talk of the distracted anguish of Alvina during the next two days. She was so swift and sensitive in her nursing, she seemed to have second sight. She talked to nobody. In her silence her soul was alone with the soul of her darling. The long semi-consciousness and the tearing pain of pneumonia, the anguished sickness. But sometimes the grey eyes would open and smile with delicate winsomeness at Alvina, and Alvina smiled back, with a cheery, answering winsomeness. But that costs something. On the evening of the second day, Miss Frost got her hand from under the bedclothes, and laid it on Alvina's hand. Alvina leaned down to her. "Everything is for you, my love," whispered Miss Frost, looking with strange eyes on Alvina's face. "Don't talk, Miss Frost," moaned Alvina. "Everything is for you," murmured the sick woman--"except--" and she enumerated some tiny legacies which showed her generous, thoughtful nature. "Yes, I shall remember," said Alvina, beyond tears now. Miss Frost smiled with her old bright, wonderful look, that had a touch of queenliness in it. "Kiss me, dear," she whispered. Alvina kissed her, and could not suppress the whimpering of her too-much grief. The night passed slowly. Sometimes the grey eyes of the sick woman rested dark, dilated, haggard on Alvina's face, with a heavy, almost accusing look, sinister. Then they closed again. And sometimes they looked pathetic, with a mute, stricken appeal. Then again they closed--only to open again tense with pain. Alvina wiped her blood-phlegmed lips. In the morning she died--lay there haggard, death-smeared, with her lovely white hair smeared also, and disorderly: she who had been so beautiful and clean always. Alvina knew death--which is untellable. She knew that her darling carried away a portion of her own soul into death. But she was alone. And the agony of being alone, the agony of grief, passionate, passionate grief for her darling who was torn into death--the agony of self-reproach, regret; the agony of remembrance; the agony of the looks of the dying woman, winsome, and sinisterly accusing, and pathetically, despairingly appealing--probe after probe of mortal agony, which throughout eternity would never lose its power to pierce to the quick! Alvina seemed to keep strangely calm and aloof all the days after the death. Only when she was alone she suffered till she felt her heart really broke. "I shall never feel anything any more," she said in her abrupt way to Miss Frost's friend, another woman of over fifty. "Nonsense, child!" expostulated Mrs. Lawson gently. "I shan't! I shall never have a heart to feel anything any more," said Alvina, with a strange, distraught roll of the eyes. "Not like this, child. But you'll feel other things--" "I haven't the heart," persisted Alvina. "Not yet," said Mrs. Lawson gently. "You can't expect--But time--time brings back--" "Oh well--but I don't believe it," said Alvina. People thought her rather hard. To one of her gossips Miss Pinnegar confessed: "I thought she'd have felt it more. She cared more for her than she did for her own mother--and her mother knew it. Mrs. Houghton complained bitterly, sometimes, that _she_ had _no_ love. They were everything to one another, Miss Frost and Alvina. I should have thought she'd have felt it more. But you never know. A good thing if she doesn't, really." Miss Pinnegar herself did not care one little bit that Miss Frost was dead. She did not feel herself implicated. The nearest relatives came down, and everything was settled. The will was found, just a brief line on a piece of notepaper expressing a wish that Alvina should have everything. Alvina herself told the verbal requests. All was quietly fulfilled. As it might well be. For there was nothing to leave. Just sixty-three pounds in the bank--no more: then the clothes, piano, books and music. Miss Frost's brother had these latter, at his own request: the books and music, and the piano. Alvina inherited the few simple trinkets, and about forty-five pounds in money. "Poor Miss Frost," cried Mrs. Lawson, weeping rather bitterly--"she saved nothing for herself. You can see why she never wanted to grow old, so that she couldn't work. You can see. It's a shame, it's a shame, one of the best women that ever trod earth." Manchester House settled down to its deeper silence, its darker gloom. Miss Frost was irreparably gone. With her, the reality went out of the house. It seemed to be silently waiting to disappear. And Alvina and Miss Pinnegar might move about and talk in vain. They could never remove the sense of waiting to finish: it was all just waiting to finish. And the three, James and Alvina and Miss Pinnegar, waited lingering through the months, for the house to come to an end. With Miss Frost its spirit passed away: it was no more. Dark, empty-feeling, it seemed all the time like a house just before a sale. CHAPTER V THE BEAU Throttle-Ha'penny worked fitfully through the winter, and in the spring broke down. By this time James Houghton had a pathetic, childish look which touched the hearts of Alvina and Miss Pinnegar. They began to treat him with a certain feminine indulgence, as he fluttered round, agitated and bewildered. He was like a bird that has flown into a room and is exhausted, enfeebled by its attempts to fly through the false freedom of the window-glass. Sometimes he would sit moping in a corner, with his head under his wing. But Miss Pinnegar chased him forth, like the stealthy cat she was, chased him up to the work-room to consider some detail of work, chased him into the shop to turn over the old débris of the stock. At one time he showed the alarming symptom of brooding over his wife's death. Miss Pinnegar was thoroughly scared. But she was not inventive. It was left to Alvina to suggest: "Why doesn't father let the shop, and some of the house?" Let the shop! Let the last inch of frontage on the street! James thought of it. Let the shop! Permit the name of Houghton to disappear from the list of tradesmen? Withdraw? Disappear? Become a nameless nobody, occupying obscure premises? He thought about it. And thinking about it, became so indignant at the thought that he pulled his scattered energies together within his frail frame. And then he came out with the most original of all his schemes. Manchester House was to be fitted up as a boarding-house for the better classes, and was to make a fortune catering for the needs of these gentry, who had now nowhere to go. Yes, Manchester House should be fitted up as a sort of quiet family hotel for the better classes. The shop should be turned into an elegant hall-entrance, carpeted, with a hall-porter and a wide plate-glass door, round-arched, in the round arch of which the words: "Manchester House" should appear large and distinguished, making an arch also, whilst underneath, more refined and smaller, should show the words: "Private Hotel." James was to be proprietor and secretary, keeping the books and attending to correspondence: Miss Pinnegar was to be manageress, superintending the servants and directing the house, whilst Alvina was to occupy the equivocal position of "hostess." She was to shake hands with the guests: she was to play the piano, and she was to nurse the sick. For in the prospectus James would include: "Trained nurse always on the premises." "Why!" cried Miss Pinnegar, for once brutally and angrily hostile to him: "You'll make it sound like a private lunatic asylum." "Will you explain why?" answered James tartly. For himself, he was enraptured with the scheme. He began to tot up ideas and expenses. There would be the handsome entrance and hall: there would be an extension of the kitchen and scullery: there would be an installing of new hot-water and sanitary arrangements: there would be a light lift-arrangment from the kitchen: there would be a handsome glazed balcony or loggia or terrace on the first floor at the back, over the whole length of the back-yard. This loggia would give a wonderful outlook to the south-west and the west. In the immediate foreground, to be sure, would be the yard of the livery-stables and the rather slummy dwellings of the colliers, sloping downhill. But these could be easily overlooked, for the eye would instinctively wander across the green and shallow valley, to the long upslope opposite, showing the Manor set in its clump of trees, and farms and haystacks pleasantly dotted, and moderately far off coal-mines with twinkling headstocks and narrow railwaylines crossing the arable fields, and heaps of burning slag. The balcony or covered terrace--James settled down at last to the word _terrace_--was to be one of the features of the house: _the_ feature. It was to be fitted up as a sort of elegant lounging restaurant. Elegant teas, at two-and-six per head, and elegant suppers, at five shillings without wine, were to be served here. As a teetotaller and a man of ascetic views, James, in his first shallow moments, before he thought about it, assumed that his house should be entirely non-alcoholic. A temperance house! Already he winced. We all know what a provincial Temperance Hotel is. Besides, there is magic in the sound of wine. _Wines Served_. The legend attracted him immensely--as a teetotaller, it had a mysterious, hypnotic influence. He must have wines. He knew nothing about them. But Alfred Swayn, from the Liquor Vaults, would put him in the running in five minutes. It was most curious to see Miss Pinnegar turtle up at the mention of this scheme. When first it was disclosed to her, her colour came up like a turkey's in a flush of indignant anger. "It's ridiculous. It's just ridiculous!" she blurted, bridling and ducking her head and turning aside, like an indignant turkey. "Ridiculous! Why? Will you explain why!" retorted James, turtling also. "It's absolutely ridiculous!" she repeated, unable to do more than splutter. "Well, we'll see," said James, rising to superiority. And again he began to dart absorbedly about, like a bird building a nest. Miss Pinnegar watched him with a sort of sullen fury. She went to the shop door to peep out after him. She saw him slip into the Liquor Vaults, and she came back to announce to Alvina: "He's taken to drink!" "Drink?" said Alvina. "That's what it is," said Miss Pinnegar vindictively. "Drink!" Alvina sank down and laughed till she was weak. It all seemed really too funny to her--too funny. "I can't see what it is to laugh at," said Miss Pinnegar. "Disgraceful--it's disgraceful! But I'm not going to stop to be made a fool of. I shall be no manageress, I tell you. It's absolutely ridiculous. Who does he think will come to the place? He's out of his mind--and it's drink; that's what it is! Going into the Liquor Vaults at ten o'clock in the morning! That's where he gets his ideas--out of whiskey--or brandy! But he's not going to make a fool of me--" "Oh dear!" sighed Alvina, laughing herself into composure and a little weariness. "I know it's _perfectly_ ridiculous. We shall have to stop him." "I've said all I can say," blurted Miss Pinnegar. As soon as James came in to a meal, the two women attacked him. "But father," said Alvina, "there'll be nobody to come." "Plenty of people--plenty of people," said her father. "Look at The Shakespeare's Head, in Knarborough." "Knarborough! Is this Knarborough!" blurted Miss Pinnegar. "Where are the business men here? Where are the foreigners coming here for business, where's our lace-trade and our stocking-trade?" "There _are_ business men," said James. "And there are ladies." "Who," retorted Miss Pinnegar, "is going to give half-a-crown for a tea? They expect tea and bread-and-butter for fourpence, and cake for sixpence, and apricots or pineapple for ninepence, and ham-and-tongue for a shilling, and fried ham and eggs and jam and cake as much as they can eat for one-and-two. If they expect a knife-and-fork tea for a shilling, what are you going to give them for half-a-crown?" "I know what I shall offer," said James. "And we may make it two shillings." Through his mind flitted the idea of 1/11-1/2--but he rejected it. "You don't realize that I'm catering for a higher class of custom--" "But there _isn't_ any higher class in Woodhouse, father," said Alvina, unable to restrain a laugh. "If you create a supply you create a demand," he retorted. "But how can you create a supply of better class people?" asked Alvina mockingly. James took on his refined, abstracted look, as if he were preoccupied on higher planes. It was the look of an obstinate little boy who poses on the side of the angels--or so the women saw it. Miss Pinnegar was prepared to combat him now by sheer weight of opposition. She would pitch her dead negative will obstinately against him. She would not speak to him, she would not observe his presence, she was stone deaf and stone blind: there _was_ no James. This nettled him. And she miscalculated him. He merely took another circuit, and rose another flight higher on the spiral of his spiritual egotism. He believed himself finely and sacredly in the right, that he was frustrated by lower beings, above whom it was his duty to rise, to soar. So he soared to serene heights, and his Private Hotel seemed a celestial injunction, an erection on a higher plane. He saw the architect: and then, with his plans and schemes, he saw the builder and contractor. The builder gave an estimate of six or seven hundred--but James had better see the plumber and fitter who was going to instal the new hot water and sanitary system. James was a little dashed. He had calculated much less. Having only a few hundred pounds in possession after Throttle-Ha'penny, he was prepared to mortgage Manchester House if he could keep in hand a sufficent sum of money for the running of his establishment for a year. He knew he would have to sacrifice Miss Pinnegar's work-room. He knew, and he feared Miss Pinnegar's violent and unmitigated hostility. Still--his obstinate spirit rose--he was quite prepared to risk everything on this last throw. Miss Allsop, daughter of the builder, called to see Alvina. The Allsops were great Chapel people, and Cassie Allsop was one of the old maids. She was thin and nipped and wistful looking, about forty-two years old. In private, she was tyrannously exacting with the servants, and spiteful, rather mean with her motherless nieces. But in public she had this nipped, wistful look. Alvina was surprised by this visit. When she found Miss Allsop at the back door, all her inherent hostility awoke. "Oh, is it you, Miss Allsop! Will you come in." They sat in the middle room, the common living room of the house. "I called," said Miss Allsop, coming to the point at once, and speaking in her Sunday-school-teacher voice, "to ask you if you know about this Private Hotel scheme of your father's?" "Yes," said Alvina. "Oh, you do! Well, we wondered. Mr. Houghton came to father about the building alterations yesterday. They'll be awfully expensive." "Will they?" said Alvina, making big, mocking eyes. "Yes, very. What do _you_ think of the scheme?" "I?--well--!" Alvina hesitated, then broke into a laugh. "To tell the truth I haven't thought much about it at all." "Well I think you should," said Miss Allsop severely. "Father's sure it won't pay--and it will cost I don't know how much. It is bound to be a dead loss. And your father's getting on. You'll be left stranded in the world without a penny to bless yourself with. I think it's an awful outlook for you." "Do you?" said Alvina. Here she was, with a bang, planked upon the shelf among the old maids. "Oh, I do. Sincerely! I should do all I could to prevent him, if I were you." Miss Allsop took her departure. Alvina felt herself jolted in her mood. An old maid along with Cassie Allsop!--and James Houghton fooling about with the last bit of money, mortgaging Manchester House up to the hilt. Alvina sank in a kind of weary mortification, in which _her_ peculiar obstinacy persisted devilishly and spitefully. "Oh well, so be it," said her spirit vindictively. "Let the meagre, mean, despicable fate fulfil itself." Her old anger against her father arose again. Arthur Witham, the plumber, came in with James Houghton to examine the house. Arthur Witham was also one of the Chapel men--as had been his common, interfering, uneducated father before him. The father had left each of his sons a fair little sum of money, which Arthur, the eldest, had already increased ten-fold. He was sly and slow and uneducated also, and spoke with a broad accent. But he was not bad-looking, a tight fellow with big blue eyes, who aspired to keep his "h's" in the right place, and would have been a gentleman if he could. Against her usual habit, Alvina joined the plumber and her father in the scullery. Arthur Witham saluted her with some respect. She liked his blue eyes and tight figure. He was keen and sly in business, very watchful, and slow to commit himself. Now he poked and peered and crept under the sink. Alvina watched him half disappear--she handed him a candle--and she laughed to herself seeing his tight, well-shaped hind-quarters protruding from under the sink like the wrong end of a dog from a kennel. He was keen after money, was Arthur--and bossy, creeping slyly after his own self-importance and power. He wanted power--and he would creep quietly after it till he got it: as much as he was capable of. His "h's" were a barbed-wire fence and entanglement, preventing his unlimited progress. He emerged from under the sink, and they went to the kitchen and afterwards upstairs. Alvina followed them persistently, but a little aloof, and silent. When the tour of inspection was almost over, she said innocently: "Won't it cost a great deal?" Arthur Witham slowly shook his head. Then he looked at her. She smiled rather archly into his eyes. "It won't be done for nothing," he said, looking at her again. "We can go into that later," said James, leading off the plumber. "Good morning, Miss Houghton," said Arthur Witham. "Good morning, Mr. Witham," replied Alvina brightly. But she lingered in the background, and as Arthur Witham was going she heard him say: "Well, I'll work it out, Mr. Houghton. I'll work it out, and let you know tonight. I'll get the figures by tonight." The younger man's tone was a little off-hand, just a little supercilious with her father, she thought. James's star was setting. In the afternoon, directly after dinner, Alvina went out. She entered the shop, where sheets of lead and tins of paint and putty stood about, varied by sheets of glass and fancy paper. Lottie Witham, Arthur's wife, appeared. She was a woman of thirty-five, a bit of a shrew, with social ambitions and no children. "Is Mr. Witham in?" said Alvina. Mrs. Witham eyed her. "I'll see," she answered, and she left the shop. Presently Arthur entered, in his shirt-sleeves: rather attractive-looking. "I don't know what you'll think of me, and what I've come for," said Alvina, with hurried amiability. Arthur lifted his blue eyes to her, and Mrs. Witham appeared in the background, in the inner doorway. "Why, what is it?" said Arthur stolidly. "Make it as dear as you can, for father," said Alvina, laughing nervously. Arthur's blue eyes rested on her face. Mrs. Witham advanced into the shop. "Why? What's that for?" asked Lottie Witham shrewdly. Alvina turned to the woman. "Don't say anything," she said. "But we don't want father to go on with this scheme. It's bound to fail. And Miss Pinnegar and I can't have anything to do with it anyway. I shall go away." "It's bound to fail," said Arthur Witham stolidly. "And father has no money, I'm sure," said Alvina. Lottie Witham eyed the thin, nervous face of Alvina. For some reason, she liked her. And of course, Alvina was considered a lady in Woodhouse. That was what it had come to, with James's declining fortunes: she was merely _considered_ a lady. The consideration was no longer indisputable. "Shall you come in a minute?" said Lottie Witham, lifting the flap of the counter. It was a rare and bold stroke on Mrs. Witham's part. Alvina's immediate instinct was to refuse. But she liked Arthur Witham, in his shirt sleeves. "Well--I must be back in a minute," she said, as she entered the embrasure of the counter. She felt as if she were really venturing on new ground. She was led into the new drawing-room, done in new peacock-and-bronze brocade furniture, with gilt and brass and white walls. This was the Withams' new house, and Lottie was proud of it. The two women had a short confidential chat. Arthur lingered in the doorway a while, then went away. Alvina did not really like Lottie Witham. Yet the other woman was sharp and shrewd in the uptake, and for some reason she fancied Alvina. So she was invited to tea at Manchester House. After this, so many difficulties rose up in James Houghton's way that he was worried almost out of his life. His two women left him alone. Outside difficulties multiplied on him till he abandoned his scheme--he was simply driven out of it by untoward circumstances. Lottie Witham came to tea, and was shown over Manchester House. She had no opinion at all of Manchester House--wouldn't hang a cat in such a gloomy hole. _Still_, she was rather impressed by the sense of superiority. "Oh my goodness!" she exclaimed as she stood in Alvina's bedroom, and looked at the enormous furniture, the lofty tableland of the bed. "Oh my goodness! I wouldn't sleep in _that_ for a trifle, by myself! Aren't you frightened out of your life? Even if I had Arthur at one side of me, I should be that frightened on the other side I shouldn't know what to do. Do you sleep here by yourself?" "Yes," said Alvina laughing. "I haven't got an Arthur, even for one side." "Oh, my word, you'd want a husband on both sides, in that bed," said Lottie Witham. Alvina was asked back to tea--on Wednesday afternoon, closing day. Arthur was there to tea--very ill at ease and feeling as if his hands were swollen. Alvina got on better with his wife, who watched closely to learn from her guest the secret of repose. The indefinable repose and inevitability of a lady--even of a lady who is nervous and agitated--this was the problem which occupied Lottie's shrewd and active, but lower-class mind. She even did not resent Alvina's laughing attempts to draw out the clumsy Arthur: because Alvina was a lady, and her tactics must be studied. Alvina really liked Arthur, and thought a good deal about him--heaven knows why. He and Lottie were quite happy together, and he was absorbed in his petty ambitions. In his limited way, he was invincibly ambitious. He would end by making a sufficient fortune, and by being a town councillor and a J.P. But beyond Woodhouse he did not exist. Why then should Alvina be attracted by him? Perhaps because of his "closeness," and his secret determinedness. When she met him in the street she would stop him--though he was always busy--and make him exchange a few words with her. And when she had tea at his house, she would try to rouse his attention. But though he looked at her, steadily, with his blue eyes, from under his long lashes, still, she knew, he looked at her objectively. He never conceived any connection with her whatsoever. It was Lottie who had a scheming mind. In the family of three brothers there was one--not black sheep, but white. There was one who was climbing out, to be a gentleman. This was Albert, the second brother. He had been a school-teacher in Woodhouse: had gone out to South Africa and occupied a post in a sort of Grammar School in one of the cities of Cape Colony. He had accumulated some money, to add to his patrimony. Now he was in England, at Oxford, where he would take his belated degree. When he had got his degree, he would return to South Africa to become head of his school, at seven hundred a year. Albert was thirty-two years old, and unmarried. Lottie was determined he should take back to the Cape a suitable wife: presumably Alvina. He spent his vacations in Woodhouse--and he was only in his first year at Oxford. Well now, what could be more suitable--a young man at Oxford, a young lady in Woodhouse. Lottie told Alvina all about him, and Alvina was quite excited to meet him. She imagined him a taller, more fascinating, educated Arthur. For the fear of being an old maid, the fear of her own virginity was really gaining on Alvina. There was a terrible sombre futility, nothingness, in Manchester House. She was twenty-six years old. Her life was utterly barren now Miss Frost had gone. She was shabby and penniless, a mere household drudge: for James begrudged even a girl to help in the kitchen. She was looking faded and worn. Panic, the terrible and deadly panic which overcomes so many unmarried women at about the age of thirty, was beginning to overcome her. She would not care about marriage, if even she had a lover. But some sort of _terror_ hunted her to the search of a lover. She would become loose, she would become a prostitute, she said to herself, rather than die off like Cassie Allsop and the rest, wither slowly and ignominiously and hideously on the tree. She would rather kill herself. But it needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a prostitute. If you haven't got the qualities which attract loose men, what are you to do? Supposing it isn't in your nature to attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then you can't be a prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since _willing_ won't do it. It requires a second party to come to an agreement. Therefore all Alvina's desperate and profligate schemes and ideas fell to nought before the inexorable in her nature. And the inexorable in her nature was highly exclusive and selective, an inevitable negation of looseness or prostitution. Hence men were afraid of her--of her power, once they had committed themselves. She would involve and lead a man on, she would destroy him rather than not get of him what she wanted. And what she wanted was something serious and risky. Not mere marriage--oh dear no! But a profound and dangerous inter-relationship. As well ask the paddlers in the small surf of passion to plunge themselves into the heaving gulf of mid-ocean. Bah, with their trousers turned up to their knees it was enough for them to wet their toes in the dangerous sea. They were having nothing to do with such desperate nereids as Alvina. She had cast her mind on Arthur. Truly ridiculous. But there was something compact and energetic and wilful about him that she magnified ten-fold and so obtained, imaginatively, an attractive lover. She brooded her days shabbily away in Manchester House, busy with housework drudgery. Since the collapse of Throttle-Ha'penny, James Houghton had become so stingy that it was like an inflammation in him. A silver sixpence had a pale and celestial radiance which he could not forego, a nebulous whiteness which made him feel he had heaven in his hold. How then could he let it go. Even a brown penny seemed alive and pulsing with mysterious blood, potent, magical. He loved the flock of his busy pennies, in the shop, as if they had been divine bees bringing him sustenance from the infinite. But the pennies he saw dribbling away in household expenses troubled him acutely, as if they were live things leaving his fold. It was a constant struggle to get from him enough money for necessities. And so the household diet became meagre in the extreme, the coal was eked out inch by inch, and when Alvina must have her boots mended she must draw on her own little stock of money. For James Houghton had the impudence to make her an allowance of two shillings a week. She was very angry. Yet her anger was of that dangerous, half-ironical sort which wears away its subject and has no outward effect. A feeling of half-bitter mockery kept her going. In the ponderous, rather sordid nullity of Manchester House she became shadowy and absorbed, absorbed in nothing in particular, yet absorbed. She was always more or less busy: and certainly there was always something to be done, whether she did it or not. The shop was opened once a week, on Friday evenings. James Houghton prowled round the warehouses in Knarborough and picked up job lots of stuff, with which he replenished his shabby window. But his heart was not in the business. Mere tenacity made him hover on with it. In midsummer Albert Witham came to Woodhouse, and Alvina was invited to tea. She was very much excited. All the time imagining Albert a taller, finer Arthur, she had abstained from actually fixing her mind upon this latter little man. Picture her disappointment when she found Albert quite unattractive. He was tall and thin and brittle, with a pale, rather dry, flattish face, and with curious pale eyes. His impression was one of uncanny flatness, something like a lemon sole. Curiously flat and fish-like he was, one might have imagined his backbone to be spread like the backbone of a sole or a plaice. His teeth were sound, but rather large and yellowish and flat. A most curious person. He spoke in a slightly mouthing way, not well bred in spite of Oxford. There was a distinct Woodhouse twang. He would never be a gentleman if he lived for ever. Yet he was not ordinary. Really an odd fish: quite interesting, if one could get over the feeling that one was looking at him through the glass wall of an aquarium: that most horrifying of all boundaries between two worlds. In an aquarium fish seem to come smiling broadly to the doorway, and there to stand talking to one, in a mouthing fashion, awful to behold. For one hears no sound from all their mouthing and staring conversation. Now although Albert Witham had a good strong voice, which rang like water among rocks in her ear, still she seemed never to hear a word he was saying. He smiled down at her and fixed her and swayed his head, and said quite original things, really. For he was a genuine odd fish. And yet she seemed to hear no sound, no word from him: nothing came to her. Perhaps as a matter of fact fish do actually pronounce streams of watery words, to which we, with our aerial-resonant ears, are deaf for ever. The odd thing was that this odd fish seemed from the very first to imagine she had accepted him as a follower. And he was quite prepared to follow. Nay, from the very first moment he was smiling on her with a sort of complacent delight--compassionate, one might almost say--as if there was a full understanding between them. If only she could have got into the right state of mind, she would really rather have liked him. He smiled at her, and said really interesting things between his big teeth. There was something rather nice about him. But, we must repeat, it was as if the glass wall of an aquarium divided them. Alvina looked at Arthur. Arthur was short and dark-haired and nicely coloured. But, now his brother was there, he too seemed to have a dumb, aqueous silence, fish-like and aloof, about him. He seemed to swim like a fish in his own little element. Strange it all was, like Alice in Wonderland. Alvina understood now Lottie's strained sort of thinness, a haggard, sinewy, sea-weedy look. The poor thing was all the time swimming for her life. For Alvina it was a most curious tea-party. She listened and smiled and made vague answers to Albert, who leaned his broad, thin, brittle shoulders towards her. Lottie seemed rather shadowily to preside. But it was Arthur who came out into communication. And now, uttering his rather broad-mouthed speeches, she seemed to hear in him a quieter, subtler edition of his father. His father had been a little, terrifically loud-voiced, hard-skinned man, amazingly uneducated and amazingly bullying, who had tyrannized for many years over the Sunday School children during morning service. He had been an odd-looking creature with round grey whiskers: to Alvina, always a creature, never a man: an atrocious leprechaun from under the Chapel floor. And how he used to dig the children in the back with his horrible iron thumb, if the poor things happened to whisper or nod in chapel! These were his children--most curious chips of the old block. Who ever would have believed she would have been taking tea with them. "Why don't you have a bicycle, and go out on it?" Arthur was saying. "But I can't ride," said Alvina. "You'd learn in a couple of lessons. There's nothing in riding a bicycle." "I don't believe I ever should," laughed Alvina. "You don't mean to say you're nervous?" said Arthur rudely and sneeringly. "I _am_," she persisted. "You needn't be nervous with me," smiled Albert broadly, with his odd, genuine gallantry. "I'll hold you on." "But I haven't got a bicycle," said Alvina, feeling she was slowly colouring to a deep, uneasy blush. "You can have mine to learn on," said Lottie. "Albert will look after it." "There's your chance," said Arthur rudely. "Take it while you've got it." Now Alvina did not want to learn to ride a bicycle. The two Miss Carlins, two more old maids, had made themselves ridiculous for ever by becoming twin cycle fiends. And the horrible energetic strain of peddling a bicycle over miles and miles of high-way did not attract Alvina at all. She was completely indifferent to sight-seeing and scouring about. She liked taking a walk, in her lingering indifferent fashion. But rushing about in any way was hateful to her. And then, to be taught to ride a bicycle by Albert Witham! Her very soul stood still. "Yes," said Albert, beaming down at her from his strange pale eyes. "Come on. When will you have your first lesson?" "Oh," cried Alvina in confusion. "I can't promise. I haven't time, really." "Time!" exclaimed Arthur rudely. "But what do you do wi' yourself all day?" "I have to keep house," she said, looking at him archly. "House! You can put a chain round its neck, and tie it up," he retorted. Albert laughed, showing all his teeth. "I'm sure you find plenty to do, with everything on your hands," said Lottie to Alvina. "I do!" said Alvina. "By evening I'm quite tired--though you mayn't believe it, since you say I do nothing," she added, laughing confusedly to Arthur. But he, hard-headed little fortune-maker, replied: "You have a girl to help you, don't you!" Albert, however, was beaming at her sympathetically. "You have too much to do indoors," he said. "It would do you good to get a bit of exercise out of doors. Come down to the Coach Road tomorrow afternoon, and let me give you a lesson. Go on--" Now the coach-road was a level drive between beautiful park-like grass-stretches, down in the valley. It was a delightful place for learning to ride a bicycle, but open in full view of all the world. Alvina would have died of shame. She began to laugh nervously and hurriedly at the very thought. "No, I can't. I really can't. Thanks, awfully," she said. "Can't you really!" said Albert. "Oh well, we'll say another day, shall we?" "When I feel I can," she said. "Yes, when you feel like it," replied Albert. "That's more it," said Arthur. "It's not the time. It's the nervousness." Again Albert beamed at her sympathetically, and said: "Oh, I'll hold you. You needn't be afraid." "But I'm not afraid," she said. "You won't _say_ you are," interposed Arthur. "Women's faults mustn't be owned up to." Alvina was beginning to feel quite dazed. Their mechanical, overbearing way was something she was unaccustomed to. It was like the jaws of a pair of insentient iron pincers. She rose, saying she must go. Albert rose also, and reached for his straw hat, with its coloured band. "I'll stroll up with you, if you don't mind," he said. And he took his place at her side along the Knarborough Road, where everybody turned to look. For, of course, he had a sort of fame in Woodhouse. She went with him laughing and chatting. But she did not feel at all comfortable. He seemed so pleased. Only he was not pleased with _her_. He was pleased with himself on her account: inordinately pleased with himself. In his world, as in a fish's, there was but his own swimming self: and if he chanced to have something swimming alongside and doing him credit, why, so much the more complacently he smiled. He walked stiff and erect, with his head pressed rather back, so that he always seemed to be advancing from the head and shoulders, in a flat kind of advance, horizontal. He did not seem to be walking with his whole body. His manner was oddly gallant, with a gallantry that completely missed the individual in the woman, circled round her and flew home gratified to his own hive. The way he raised his hat, the way he inclined and smiled flatly, even rather excitedly, as he talked, was all a little discomforting and comical. He left her at the shop door, saying: "I shall see you again, I hope." "Oh, yes," she replied, rattling the door anxiously, for it was locked. She heard her father's step at last tripping down the shop. "Good-evening, Mr. Houghton," said Albert suavely and with a certain confidence, as James peered out. "Oh, good-evening!" said James, letting Alvina pass, and shutting the door in Albert's face. "Who was that?" he asked her sharply. "Albert Witham," she replied. "What has _he_ got to do with you?" said James shrewishly. "Nothing, I hope." She fled into the obscurity of Manchester House, out of the grey summer evening. The Withams threw her off her pivot, and made her feel she was not herself. She felt she didn't know, she couldn't feel, she was just scattered and decentralized. And she was rather afraid of the Witham brothers. She might be their victim. She intended to avoid them. The following days she saw Albert, in his Norfolk jacket and flannel trousers and his straw hat, strolling past several times and looking in through the shop door and up at the upper windows. But she hid herself thoroughly. When she went out, it was by the back way. So she avoided him. But on Sunday evening, there he sat, rather stiff and brittle in the old Withams' pew, his head pressed a little back, so that his face and neck seemed slightly flattened. He wore very low, turn-down starched collars that showed all his neck. And he kept looking up at her during the service--she sat in the choir-loft--gazing up at her with apparently love-lorn eyes and a faint, intimate smile--the sort of _je-sais-tout_ look of a private swain. Arthur also occasionally cast a judicious eye on her, as if she were a chimney that needed repairing, and he must estimate the cost, and whether it was worth it. Sure enough, as she came out through the narrow choir gate into Knarborough Road, there was Albert stepping forward like a policeman, and saluting her and smiling down on her. "I don't know if I'm presuming--" he said, in a mock deferential way that showed he didn't imagine he _could_ presume. "Oh, not at all," said Alvina airily. He smiled with assurance. "You haven't got any engagement, then, for this evening?" he said. "No," she replied simply. "We might take a walk. What do you think?" he said, glancing down the road in either direction. What, after all, was she to think? All the girls were pairing off with the boys for the after-chapel stroll and spoon. "I don't mind," she said. "But I can't go far. I've got to be in at nine." "Which way shall we go?" he said. He steered off, turned downhill through the common gardens, and proposed to take her the not-very-original walk up Flint's Lane, and along the railway line--the colliery railway, that is--then back up the Marlpool Road: a sort of circle. She agreed. They did not find a great deal to talk about. She questioned him about his plans, and about the Cape. But save for bare outlines, which he gave readily enough, he was rather close. "What do you do on Sunday nights as a rule?" he asked her. "Oh, I have a walk with Lucy Grainger--or I go down to Hallam's--or go home," she answered. "You don't go walks with the fellows, then?" "Father would never have it," she replied. "What will he say now?" he asked, with self-satisfaction. "Goodness knows!" she laughed. "Goodness usually does," he answered archly. When they came to the rather stumbly railway, he said: "Won't you take my arm?"--offering her the said member. "Oh, I'm all right," she said. "Thanks." "Go on," he said, pressing a little nearer to her, and offering his arm. "There's nothing against it, is there?" "Oh, it's not that," she said. And feeling in a false position, she took his arm, rather unwillingly. He drew a little nearer to her, and walked with a slight prance. "We get on better, don't we?" he said, giving her hand the tiniest squeeze with his arm against his side. "Much!" she replied, with a laugh. Then he lowered his voice oddly. "It's many a day since I was on this railroad," he said. "Is this one of your old walks?" she asked, malicious. "Yes, I've been it once or twice--with girls that are all married now." "Didn't you want to marry?" she asked. "Oh, I don't know. I may have done. But it never came off, somehow. I've sometimes thought it never would come off." "Why?" "I don't know, exactly. It didn't seem to, you know. Perhaps neither of us was properly inclined." "I should think so," she said. "And yet," he admitted slyly, "I should _like_ to marry--" To this she did not answer. "Shouldn't you?" he continued. "When I meet the right man," she laughed. "That's it," he said. "There, that's just it! And you _haven't_ met him?" His voice seemed smiling with a sort of triumph, as if he had caught her out. "Well--once I thought I had--when I was engaged to Alexander." "But you found you were mistaken?" he insisted. "No. Mother was so ill at the time--" "There's always something to consider," he said. She kept on wondering what she should do if he wanted to kiss her. The mere incongruity of such a desire on his part formed a problem. Luckily, for this evening he formulated no desire, but left her in the shop-door soon after nine, with the request: "I shall see you in the week, shan't I?" "I'm not sure. I can't promise now," she said hurriedly. "Good-night." What she felt chiefly about him was a decentralized perplexity, very much akin to no feeling at all. "Who do you think took me for a walk, Miss Pinnegar?" she said, laughing, to her confidante. "I can't imagine," replied Miss Pinnegar, eyeing her. "You never would imagine," said Alvina. "Albert Witham." "Albert Witham!" exclaimed Miss Pinnegar, standing quite motionless. "It may well take your breath away," said Alvina. "No, it's not that!" hurriedly expostulated Miss Pinnegar. "Well--! Well, I declare!--" and then, on a new note: "Well, he's very eligible, I think." "Most eligible!" replied Alvina. "Yes, he is," insisted Miss Pinnegar. "I think it's very good." "What's very good?" asked Alvina. Miss Pinnegar hesitated. She looked at Alvina. She reconsidered. "Of course he's not the man I should have imagined for you, but--" "You think he'll do?" said Alvina. "Why not?" said Miss Pinnegar. "Why shouldn't he do--if you like him." "Ah--!" cried Alvina, sinking on the sofa with a laugh. "That's it." "Of course you couldn't have anything to do with him if you don't care for him," pronounced Miss Pinnegar. Albert continued to hang around. He did not make any direct attack for a few days. Suddenly one evening he appeared at the back door with a bunch of white stocks in his hand. His face lit up with a sudden, odd smile when she opened the door--a broad, pale-gleaming, remarkable smile. "Lottie wanted to know if you'd come to tea tomorrow," he said straight out, looking at her with the pale light in his eyes, that smiled palely right into her eyes, but did not see her at all. He was waiting on the doorstep to come in. "Will you come in?" said Alvina. "Father is in." "Yes, I don't mind," he said, pleased. He mounted the steps, still holding his bunch of white stocks. James Houghton screwed round in his chair and peered over his spectacles to see who was coming. "Father," said Alvina, "you know Mr. Witham, don't you?" James Houghton half rose. He still peered over his glasses at the intruder. "Well--I do by sight. How do you do?" He held out his frail hand. Albert held back, with the flowers in his own hand, and giving his broad, pleased, pale-gleaming smile from father to daughter, he said: "What am I to do with these? Will you accept them, Miss Houghton?" He stared at her with shining, pallid smiling eyes. "Are they for me?" she said, with false brightness. "Thank you." James Houghton looked over the top of his spectacles, searchingly, at the flowers, as if they had been a bunch of white and sharp-toothed ferrets. Then he looked as suspiciously at the hand which Albert at last extended to him. He shook it slightly, and said: "Take a seat." "I'm afraid I'm disturbing you in your reading," said Albert, still having the drawn, excited smile on his face. "Well--" said James Houghton. "The light is fading." Alvina came in with the flowers in a jar. She set them on the table. "Haven't they a lovely scent?" she said. "Do you think so?" he replied, again with the excited smile. There was a pause. Albert, rather embarrassed, reached forward, saying: "May I see what you're reading!" And he turned over the book. "'Tommy and Grizel!' Oh yes! What do you think of it?" "Well," said James, "I am only in the beginning." "I think it's interesting, myself," said Albert, "as a study of a man who can't get away from himself. You meet a lot of people like that. What I wonder is why they find it such a drawback." "Find what a drawback?" asked James. "Not being able to get away from themselves. That self-consciousness. It hampers them, and interferes with their power of action. Now I wonder why self-consciousness should hinder a man in his action? Why does it cause misgiving? I think I'm self-conscious, but I don't think I have so many misgivings. I don't see that they're necessary." "Certainly I think Tommy is a weak character. I believe he's a despicable character," said James. "No, I don't know so much about that," said Albert. "I shouldn't say weak, exactly. He's only weak in one direction. No, what I wonder is why he feels guilty. If you feel self-conscious, there's no need to feel guilty about it, is there?" He stared with his strange, smiling stare at James. "I shouldn't say so," replied James. "But if a man never knows his own mind, he certainly can't be much of a man." "I don't see it," replied Albert. "What's the matter is that he feels guilty for not knowing his own mind. That's the unnecessary part. The guilty feeling--" Albert seemed insistent on this point, which had no particular interest for James. "Where we've got to make a change," said Albert, "is in the feeling that other people have a right to tell us what we ought to feel and do. Nobody knows what another man ought to feel. Every man has his own special feelings, and his own right to them. That's where it is with education. You ought not to want all your children to feel alike. Their natures are all different, and so they should all feel different, about practically everything." "There would be no end to the confusion," said James. "There needn't be any confusion to speak of. You agree to a number of rules and conventions and laws, for social purposes. But in private you feel just as you do feel, without occasion for trying to feel something else." "I don't know," said James. "There are certain feelings common to humanity, such as love, and honour, and truth." "Would you call them feelings?" said Albert. "I should say what is common is the idea. The idea is common to humanity, once you've put it into words. But the feeling varies with every man. The same idea represents a different kind of feeling in every different individual. It seems to me that's what we've got to recognize if we're going to do anything with education. We don't want to produce mass feelings. Don't you agree?" Poor James was too bewildered to know whether to agree or not to agree. "Shall we have a light, Alvina?" he said to his daughter. Alvina lit the incandescent gas-jet that hung in the middle of the room. The hard white light showed her somewhat haggard-looking as she reached up to it. But Albert watched her, smiling abstractedly. It seemed as if his words came off him without affecting him at all. He did not think about what he was feeling, and he did not feel what he was thinking about. And therefore she hardly heard what he said. Yet she believed he was clever. It was evident Albert was quite blissfully happy, in his own way, sitting there at the end of the sofa not far from the fire, and talking animatedly. The uncomfortable thing was that though he talked in the direction of his interlocutor, he did not speak _to_ him: merely said his words towards him. James, however, was such an airy feather himself he did not remark this, but only felt a little self-important at sustaining such a subtle conversation with a man from Oxford. Alvina, who never expected to be interested in clever conversations, after a long experience of her father, found her expectation justified again. She was not interested. The man was quite nicely dressed, in the regulation tweed jacket and flannel trousers and brown shoes. He was even rather smart, judging from his yellow socks and yellow-and-brown tie. Miss Pinnegar eyed him with approval when she came in. "Good-evening!" she said, just a trifle condescendingly, as she shook hands. "How do you find Woodhouse, after being away so long?" Her way of speaking was so quiet, as if she hardly spoke aloud. "Well," he answered. "I find it the same in many ways." "You wouldn't like to settle here again?" "I don't think I should. It feels a little cramped, you know, after a new country. But it has its attractions." Here he smiled meaningful. "Yes," said Miss Pinnegar. "I suppose the old connections count for something." "They do. Oh decidedly they do. There's no associations like the old ones." He smiled flatly as he looked towards Alvina. "You find it so, do you!" returned Miss Pinnegar. "You don't find that the new connections make up for the old?" "Not altogether, they don't. There's something missing--" Again he looked towards Alvina. But she did not answer his look. "Well," said Miss Pinnegar. "I'm glad we still count for something, in spite of the greater attractions. How long have you in England?" "Another year. Just a year. This time next year I expect I shall be sailing back to the Cape." He smiled as if in anticipation. Yet it was hard to believe that it mattered to him--or that anything mattered. "And is Oxford agreeable to you?" she asked. "Oh, yes. I keep myself busy." "What are your subjects?" asked James. "English and History. But I do mental science for my own interest." Alvina had taken up a piece of sewing. She sat under the light, brooding a little. What _had_ all this to do with her. The man talked on, and beamed in her direction. And she felt a little important. But moved or touched?--not the least in the world. She wondered if any one would ask him to supper--bread and cheese and currant-loaf, and water, was all that offered. No one asked him, and at last he rose. "Show Mr. Witham out through the shop, Alvina," said Miss Pinnegar. Alvina piloted the man through the long, dark, encumbered way of the shop. At the door he said: "You've never said whether you're coming to tea on Thursday." "I don't think I can," said Alvina. He seemed rather taken aback. "Why?" he said. "What stops you?" "I've so much to do." He smiled slowly and satirically. "Won't it keep?" he said. "No, really. I can't come on Thursday--thank you so much. Good-night!" She gave him her hand and turned quickly into the shop, closing the door. He remained standing in the porch, staring at the closed door. Then, lifting his lip, he turned away. "Well," said Miss Pinnegar decidedly, as Alvina re-entered. "You can say what you like--but I think he's _very pleasant_, _very_ pleasant." "Extremely intelligent," said James Houghton, shifting in his chair. "I was awfully bored," said Alvina. They both looked at her, irritated. After this she really did what she could to avoid him. When she saw him sauntering down the street in all his leisure, a sort of anger possessed her. On Sunday, she slipped down from the choir into the Chapel, and out through the main entrance, whilst he awaited her at the small exit. And by good luck, when he called one evening in the week, she was out. She returned down the yard. And there, through the uncurtained window, she saw him sitting awaiting her. Without a thought, she turned on her heel and fled away. She did not come in till he had gone. "How late you are!" said Miss Pinnegar. "Mr. Witham was here till ten minutes ago." "Yes," laughed Alvina. "I came down the yard and saw him. So I went back till he'd gone." Miss Pinnegar looked at her in displeasure: "I suppose you know your own mind," she said. "How do you explain such behaviour?" said her father pettishly. "I didn't want to meet him," she said. The next evening was Saturday. Alvina had inherited Miss Frost's task of attending to the Chapel flowers once a quarter. She had been round the gardens of her friends, and gathered the scarlet and hot yellow and purple flowers of August, asters, red stocks, tall Japanese sunflowers, coreopsis, geraniums. With these in her basket she slipped out towards evening, to the Chapel. She knew Mr. Calladine, the caretaker would not lock up till she had been. The moment she got inside the Chapel--it was a big, airy, pleasant building--she heard hammering from the organ-loft, and saw the flicker of a candle. Some workman busy before Sunday. She shut the baize door behind her, and hurried across to the vestry, for vases, then out to the tap, for water. All was warm and still. It was full early evening. The yellow light streamed through the side windows, the big stained-glass window at the end was deep and full of glowing colour, in which the yellows and reds were richest. Above in the organ-loft the hammering continued. She arranged her flowers in many vases, till the communion table was like the window, a tangle of strong yellow, and crimson, and purple, and bronze-green. She tried to keep the effect light and kaleidoscopic, an interplay of tossed pieces of strong, hot colour, vibrating and lightly intermingled. It was very gorgeous, for a communion table. But the day of white lilies was over. Suddenly there was a terrific crash and bang and tumble, up in the organ-loft, followed by a cursing. "Are you hurt?" called Alvina, looking up into space. The candle had disappeared. But there was no reply. Feeling curious, she went out of the Chapel to the stairs in the side porch, and ran up to the organ. She went round the side--and there she saw a man in his shirt-sleeves sitting crouched in the obscurity on the floor between the organ and the wall of the back, while a collapsed pair of steps lay between her and him. It was too dark to see who it was. "That rotten pair of steps came down with me," said the infuriated voice of Arthur Witham, "and about broke my leg." Alvina advanced towards him, picking her way over the steps. He was sitting nursing his leg. "Is it bad?" she asked, stooping towards him. In the shadow he lifted up his face. It was pale, and his eyes were savage with anger. Her face was near his. "It is bad," he said furious because of the shock. The shock had thrown him off his balance. "Let me see," she said. He removed his hands from clasping his shin, some distance above the ankle. She put her fingers over the bone, over his stocking, to feel if there was any fracture. Immediately her fingers were wet with blood. Then he did a curious thing. With both his hands he pressed her hand down over his wounded leg, pressed it with all his might, as if her hand were a plaster. For some moments he sat pressing her hand over his broken shin, completely oblivious, as some people are when they have had a shock and a hurt, intense on one point of consciousness only, and for the rest unconscious. Then he began to come to himself. The pain modified itself. He could not bear the sudden acute hurt to his shin. That was one of his sensitive, unbearable parts. "The bone isn't broken," she said professionally. "But you'd better get the stocking out of it." Without a thought, he pulled his trouser-leg higher and rolled down his stocking, extremely gingerly, and sick with pain. "Can you show a light?" he said. She found the candle. And she knew where matches always rested, on a little ledge of the organ. So she brought him a light, whilst he examined his broken shin. The blood was flowing, but not so much. It was a nasty cut bruise, swelling and looking very painful. He sat looking at it absorbedly, bent over it in the candle-light. "It's not so very bad, when the pain goes off," she said, noticing the black hairs of his shin. "We'd better tie it up. Have you got a handkerchief?" "It's in my jacket," he said. She looked round for his jacket. He annoyed her a little, by being completely oblivious of her. She got his handkerchief and wiped her fingers on it. Then of her own kerchief she made a pad for the wound. "Shall I tie it up, then?" she said. But he did not answer. He sat still nursing his leg, looking at his hurt, while the blood slowly trickled down the wet hairs towards his ankle. There was nothing to do but wait for him. "Shall I tie it up, then?" she repeated at length, a little impatient. So he put his leg a little forward. She looked at the wound, and wiped it a little. Then she folded the pad of her own handkerchief, and laid it over the hurt. And again he did the same thing, he took her hand as if it were a plaster, and applied it to his wound, pressing it cautiously but firmly down. She was rather angry. He took no notice of her at all. And she, waiting, seemed to go into a dream, a sleep, her arm trembled a little, stretched out and fixed. She seemed to lose count, under the firm compression he imposed on her. It was as if the pressure on her hand pressed her into oblivion. "Tie it up," he said briskly. And she, obedient, began to tie the bandage with numb fingers. He seemed to have taken the use out of her. When she had finished, he scrambled to his feet, looked at the organ which he was repairing, and looked at the collapsed pair of steps. "A rotten pair of things to have, to put a man's life in danger," he said, towards the steps. Then stubbornly, he rigged them up again, and stared again at his interrupted job. "You won't go on, will you?" she asked. "It's got to be done, Sunday tomorrow," he said. "If you'd hold them steps a minute! There isn't more than a minute's fixing to do. It's all done, but fixing." "Hadn't you better leave it," she said. "Would you mind holding the steps, so that they don't let me down again," he said. Then he took the candle, and hobbled stubbornly and angrily up again, with spanner and hammer. For some minutes he worked, tapping and readjusting, whilst she held the ricketty steps and stared at him from below, the shapeless bulk of his trousers. Strange the difference--she could not help thinking it--between the vulnerable hairy, and somehow childish leg of the real man, and the shapeless form of these workmen's trousers. The kernel, the man himself--seemed so tender--the covering so stiff and insentient. And was he not going to speak to her--not one human word of recognition? Men are the most curious and unreal creatures. After all he had made use of her. Think how he had pressed her hand gently but firmly down, down over his bruise, how he had taken the virtue out of her, till she felt all weak and dim. And after that was he going to relapse into his tough and ugly workman's hide, and treat her as if _she_ were a pair of steps, which might let him down or hold him up, as might be. As she stood clinging to the steps she felt weak and a little hysterical. She wanted to summon her strength, to have her own back from him. After all he had taken the virtue from her, he might have the grace to say thank you, and treat her as if she were a human being. At last he left off tinkering, and looked round. "Have you finished?" she said. "Yes," he answered crossly. And taking the candle he began to clamber down. When he got to the bottom he crouched over his leg and felt the bandage. "That gives you what for," he said, as if it were her fault. "Is the bandage holding?" she said. "I think so," he answered churlishly. "Aren't you going to make sure?" she said. "Oh, it's all right," he said, turning aside and taking up his tools. "I'll make my way home." "So will I," she answered. She took the candle and went a little in front. He hurried into his coat and gathered his tools, anxious to get away. She faced him, holding the candle. "Look at my hand," she said, holding it out. It was smeared with blood, as was the cuff of her dress--a black-and-white striped cotton dress. "Is it hurt?" he said. "No, but look at it. Look here!" She showed the bloodstains on her dress. "It'll wash out," he said, frightened of her. "Yes, so it will. But for the present it's there. Don't you think you ought to thank me?" He recoiled a little. "Yes," he said. "I'm very much obliged." "You ought to be more than that," she said. He did not answer, but looked her up and down. "We'll be going down," he said. "We s'll have folks talking." Suddenly she began to laugh. It seemed so comical. What a position! The candle shook as she laughed. What a man, answering her like a little automaton! Seriously, quite seriously he said it to her--"We s'll have folks talking!" She laughed in a breathless, hurried way, as they tramped downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs Calladine, the caretaker, met them. He was a tall thin man with a black moustache--about fifty years old. "Have you done for tonight, all of you?" he said, grinning in echo to Alvina's still fluttering laughter. "That's a nice rotten pair of steps you've got up there for a death-trap," said Arthur angrily. "Come down on top of me, and I'm lucky I haven't got my leg broken. It _is_ near enough." "Come down with you, did they?" said Calladine good-humouredly. "I never knowed 'em come down wi' me." "You ought to, then. My leg's as near broke as it can be." "What, have you hurt yourself?" "I should think I have. Look here--" And he began to pull up his trouser leg. But Alvina had given the candle to Calladine, and fled. She had a last view of Arthur stooping over his precious leg, while Calladine stooped his length and held down the candle. When she got home she took off her dress and washed herself hard and washed the stained sleeve, thoroughly, thoroughly, and threw away the wash water and rinsed the wash-bowls with fresh water, scrupulously. Then she dressed herself in her black dress once more, did her hair, and went downstairs. But she could not sew--and she could not settle down. It was Saturday evening, and her father had opened the shop, Miss Pinnegar had gone to Knarborough. She would be back at nine o'clock. Alvina set about to make a mock woodcock, or a mock something or other, with cheese and an egg and bits of toast. Her eyes were dilated and as if amused, mocking, her face quivered a little with irony that was not all enjoyable. "I'm glad you've come," said Alvina, as Miss Pinnegar entered. "The supper's just done. I'll ask father if he'll close the shop." Of course James would not close the shop, though he was merely wasting light. He nipped in to eat his supper, and started out again with a mouthful the moment he heard the ping of the bell. He kept his customers chatting as long as he could. His love for conversation had degenerated into a spasmodic passion for chatter. Alvina looked across at Miss Pinnegar, as the two sat at the meagre supper-table. Her eyes were dilated and arched with a mocking, almost satanic look. "I've made up my mind about Albert Witham," said Alvina. Miss Pinnegar looked at her. "Which way?" she asked, demurely, but a little sharp. "It's all off," said Alvina, breaking into a nervous laugh. "Why? What has happened?" "Nothing has happened. I can't stand him." "Why?--suddenly--" said Miss Pinnegar. "It's not sudden," laughed Alvina. "Not at all. I can't stand him. I never could. And I won't try. There! Isn't that plain?" And she went off into her hurried laugh, partly at herself, partly at Arthur, partly at Albert, partly at Miss Pinnegar. "Oh, well, if you're so sure--" said Miss Pinnegar rather bitingly. "I _am_ quite sure--" said Alvina. "I'm quite certain." "Cock-sure people are often most mistaken," said Miss Pinnegar. "I'd rather have my own mistakes than somebody else's rights," said Alvina. "Then don't expect anybody to pay for your mistakes," said Miss Pinnegar. "It would be all the same if I did," said Alvina. When she lay in bed, she stared at the light of the street-lamp on the wall. She was thinking busily: but heaven knows what she was thinking. She had sharpened the edge of her temper. She was waiting till tomorrow. She was waiting till she saw Albert Witham. She wanted to finish off with him. She was keen to cut clean through any correspondence with him. She stared for many hours at the light of the street-lamp, and there was a narrowed look in her eyes. The next day she did not go to Morning Service, but stayed at home to cook the dinner. In the evening she sat in her place in the choir. In the Withams' pew sat Lottie and Albert--no Arthur. Albert kept glancing up. Alvina could not bear the sight of him--she simply could not bear the sight of him. Yet in her low, sweet voice she sang the alto to the hymns, right to the vesper: "Lord keep us safe this night Secure from all our fears, May angels guard us while we sleep Till morning light appears--" As she sang her alto, and as the soft and emotional harmony of the vesper swelled luxuriously through the chapel, she was peeping over her folded hands at Lottie's hat. She could not bear Lottie's hats. There was something aggressive and vulgar about them. And she simply detested the look of the back of Albert's head, as he too stooped to the vesper prayer. It looked mean and rather common. She remembered Arthur had the same look, bending to prayer. There!--why had she not seen it before! That petty, vulgar little look! How could she have thought twice of Arthur. She had made a fool of herself, as usual. Him and his little leg. She grimaced round the chapel, waiting for people to bob up their heads and take their departure. At the gate Albert was waiting for her. He came forward lifting his hat with a smiling and familiar "Good evening!" "Good evening," she murmured. "It's ages since I've seen you," he said. "And I've looked out for you everywhere." It was raining a little. She put up her umbrella. "You'll take a little stroll. The rain isn't much," he said. "No, thank you," she said. "I must go home." "Why, what's your hurry! Walk as far as Beeby Bridge. Go on." "No, thank you." "How's that? What makes you refuse?" "I don't want to." He paused and looked down at her. The cold and supercilious look of anger, a little spiteful, came into his face. "Do you mean because of the rain?" he said. "No. I hope you don't mind. But I don't want to take any more walks. I don't mean anything by them." "Oh, as for that," he said, taking the words out of her mouth. "Why should you mean anything by them!" He smiled down on her. She looked him straight in the face. "But I'd rather not take any more walks, thank you--none at all," she said, looking him full in the eyes. "You wouldn't!" he replied, stiffening. "Yes. I'm quite sure," she said. "As sure as all that, are you!" he said, with a sneering grimace. He stood eyeing her insolently up and down. "Good-night," she said. His sneering made her furious. Putting her umbrella between him and her, she walked off. "Good-night then," he replied, unseen by her. But his voice was sneering and impotent. She went home quivering. But her soul was burning with satisfaction. She had shaken them off. Later she wondered if she had been unkind to him. But it was done--and done for ever. _Vogue la galère._ CHAPTER VI HOUGHTON'S LAST ENDEAVOUR The trouble with her ship was that it would _not_ sail. It rode water-logged in the rotting port of home. All very well to have wild, reckless moods of irony and independence, if you have to pay for them by withering dustily on the shelf. Alvina fell again into humility and fear: she began to show symptoms of her mother's heart trouble. For day followed day, month followed month, season after season went by, and she grubbed away like a housemaid in Manchester House, she hurried round doing the shopping, she sang in the choir on Sundays, she attended the various chapel events, she went out to visit friends, and laughed and talked and played games. But all the time, what was there actually in her life? Not much. She was withering towards old-maiddom. Already in her twenty-eighth year, she spent her days grubbing in the house, whilst her father became an elderly, frail man still too lively in mind and spirit. Miss Pinnegar began to grow grey and elderly too, money became scarcer and scarcer, there was a black day ahead when her father would die and the home be broken up, and she would have to tackle life as a worker. There lay the only alternative: in work. She might slave her days away teaching the piano, as Miss Frost had done: she might find a subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it. Work!--a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her--or rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous. She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and smiling at her through the glass wall of an aquarium, he being on the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her backbone against the word _job_. Even the substitutes, _employment_ or _work_, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be more _infra dig_ than the performing of a set of special actions day in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar, sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of modern work. She trembled with anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him. He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better to take the strange leap, over into his element, than to condemn oneself to the routine of a job? He would have been curious and dishuman. But after all, it would have been an experience. In a way, she liked him. There was something odd and integral about him, which she liked. He was not a liar. In his own line, he was honest and direct. Then he would take her to South Africa: a whole new _milieu_. And perhaps she would have children. She shivered a little. No, not his children! He seemed so curiously cold-blooded. And yet, why not? Why not his curious, pale, half cold-blooded children, like little fishes of her own? Why not? Everything was possible: and even desirable, once one could see the strangeness of it. Once she could plunge through the wall of the aquarium! Once she could kiss him! Therefore Miss Pinnegar's quiet harping on the string was unbearable. "I can't understand that you disliked Mr. Witham so much?" said Miss Pinnegar. "We never can understand those things," said Alvina. "I can't understand why I dislike tapioca and arrowroot--but I do." "That's different," said Miss Pinnegar shortly. "It's no more easy to understand," said Alvina. "Because there's no need to understand it," said Miss Pinnegar. "And is there need to understand the other?" "Certainly. I can see nothing wrong with him," said Miss Pinnegar. Alvina went away in silence. This was in the first months after she had given Albert his dismissal. He was at Oxford again--would not return to Woodhouse till Christmas. Between her and the Woodhouse Withams there was a decided coldness. They never looked at her now--nor she at them. None the less, as Christmas drew near Alvina worked up her feelings. Perhaps she would be reconciled to him. She would slip across and smile to him. She would take the plunge, once and for all--and kiss him and marry him and bear the little half-fishes, his children. She worked herself into quite a fever of anticipation. But when she saw him, the first evening, sitting stiff and staring flatly in front of him in Chapel, staring away from everything in the world, at heaven knows what--just as fishes stare--then his dishumanness came over her again like an arrest, and arrested all her flights of fancy. He stared flatly in front of him, and flatly set a wall of oblivion between him and her. She trembled and let be. After Christmas, however, she had nothing at all to think forward to. And it was then she seemed to shrink: she seemed positively to shrink. "You never spoke to Mr. Witham?" Miss Pinnegar asked. "He never spoke to me," replied Alvina. "He raised his hat to me." "_You_ ought to have married him, Miss Pinnegar," said Alvina. "He would have been right for you." And she laughed rather mockingly. "There is no need to make provision for me," said Miss Pinnegar. And after this, she was a long time before she forgave Alvina, and was really friendly again. Perhaps she would never have forgiven her if she had not found her weeping rather bitterly in her mother's abandoned sitting-room. Now so far, the story of Alvina is commonplace enough. It is more or less the story of thousands of girls. They all find work. It is the ordinary solution of everything. And if we were dealing with an ordinary girl we should have to carry on mildly and dully down the long years of employment; or, at the best, marriage with some dull school-teacher or office-clerk. But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or throws them disused aside. There have been enough stories about ordinary people. I should think the Duke of Clarence must even have found malmsey nauseating, when he choked and went purple and was really asphyxiated in a butt of it. And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness. We detest ordinary people. We are in peril of our lives from them: and in peril of our souls too, for they would damn us one and all to the ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days. There was no hope for Alvina in the ordinary. If help came, it would have to come from the extraordinary. Hence the extreme peril of her case. Hence the bitter fear and humiliation she felt as she drudged shabbily on in Manchester House, hiding herself as much as possible from public view. Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures are usually the most conceited of men: even as was James Houghton. But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation. And so the slow years crept round, and the completed coil of each one was a further heavy, strangling noose. Alvina had passed her twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and even her twenty-ninth year. She was in her thirtieth. It ought to be a laughing matter. But it isn't. Ach, schon zwanzig Ach, schon zwanzig Immer noch durch's Leben tanz' ich Jeder, Jeder will mich küssen Mir das Leben zu versüssen. Ach, schon dreissig Ach, schon dreissig Immer Mädchen, Mädchen heiss' ich. In dem Zopf schon graue Härchen Ach, wie schnell vergehn die Jährchen. Ach, schon vierzig Ach, schon vierzig Und noch immer Keiner find 'sich. Im gesicht schon graue Flecken Ach, das muss im Spiegel stecken. Ach, schon fünfzig Ach, schon fünfzig Und noch immer Keiner will 'mich; Soll ich mich mit Bänden zieren Soll ich einen Schleier führen? Dann heisst's, die Alte putzt sich, Sie ist fu'fzig, sie ist fu'fzig. True enough, in Alvina's pig-tail of soft brown the grey hairs were already showing. True enough, she still preferred to be thought of as a girl. And the slow-footed years, so heavy in passing, were so imperceptibly numerous in their accumulation. But we are not going to follow our song to its fatal and dreary conclusion. Presumably, the _ordinary_ old-maid heroine nowadays is destined to die in her fifties, she is not allowed to be the long-liver of the by-gone novels. Let the song suffice her. James Houghton had still another kick in him. He had one last scheme up his sleeve. Looking out on a changing world, it was the popular novelties which had the last fascination for him. The Skating Rink, like another Charybdis, had all but entangled him in its swirl as he pushed painfully off from the rocks of Throttle-Ha'penny. But he had escaped, and for almost three years had lain obscurely in port, like a frail and finished bark, selling the last of his bits and bobs, and making little splashes in warehouse-oddments. Miss Pinnegar thought he had really gone quiet. But alas, at that degenerated and shabby, down-at-heel club he met another tempter: a plump man who had been in the music-hall line as a sort of agent. This man had catered for the little shows of little towns. He had been in America, out West, doing shows there. He had trailed his way back to England, where he had left his wife and daughter. But he did not resume his family life. Wherever he was, his wife was a hundred miles away. Now he found himself more or less stranded in Woodhouse. He had _nearly_ fixed himself up with a music-hall in the Potteries--as manager: he had all-but got such another place at Ickley, in Derbyshire: he had forced his way through the industrial and mining townlets, prospecting for any sort of music-hall or show from which he could get a picking. And now, in very low water, he found himself at Woodhouse. Woodhouse had a cinema already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James's younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. W. Jordan. "I missed a chance there," said James, fluttering. "I missed a rare chance there. I ought to have been first with a cinema." He admitted as much to Mr. May, the stranger who was looking for some sort of "managing" job. Mr. May, who also was plump and who could hold his tongue, but whose pink, fat face and light-blue eyes had a loud look, for all that, put the speech in his pipe and smoked it. Not that he smoked a pipe: always cigarettes. But he seized on James's admission, as something to be made the most of. Now Mr. May's mind, though quick, was pedestrian, not winged. He had come to Woodhouse not to look at Jordan's "Empire," but at the temporary wooden structure that stood in the old Cattle Market--"Wright's Cinematograph and Variety Theatre." Wright's was not a superior show, like the Woodhouse Empire. Yet it was always packed with colliers and work-lasses. But unfortunately there was no chance of Mr. May's getting a finger in the Cattle Market pie. Wright's was a family affair. Mr. and Mrs. Wright and a son and two daughters with their husbands: a tight old lock-up family concern. Yet it was the kind of show that appealed to Mr. May: pictures between the turns. The cinematograph was but an item in the program, amidst the more thrilling incidents--to Mr. May--of conjurors, popular songs, five-minute farces, performing birds, and comics. Mr. May was too human to believe that a show should consist entirely of the dithering eye-ache of a film. He was becoming really depressed by his failure to find any opening. He had his family to keep--and though his honesty was of the variety sort, he had a heavy conscience in the direction of his wife and daughter. Having been so long in America, he had acquired American qualities, one of which was this heavy sort of private innocence, coupled with complacent and natural unscrupulousness in "matters of business." A man of some odd sensitiveness in material things, he liked to have his clothes neat and spick, his linen immaculate, his face clean-shaved like a cherub. But alas, his clothes were now old-fashioned, so that their rather expensive smartness was detrimental to his chances, in spite of their scrupulous look of having come almost new out of the bandbox that morning. His rather small felt hats still curved jauntily over his full pink face. But his eyes looked lugubrious, as if he felt he had not deserved so much bad luck, and there were bilious lines beneath them. So Mr. May, in his room in the Moon and Stars, which was the best inn in Woodhouse--he must have a good hötel--lugubriously considered his position. Woodhouse offered little or nothing. He must go to Alfreton. And would he find anything there? Ah, where, where in this hateful world was there refuge for a man saddled with responsibilities, who wanted to do his best and was given no opportunity? Mr. May had travelled in his Pullman car and gone straight to the best hotel in the town, like any other American with money--in America. He had done it smart, too. And now, in this grubby penny-picking England, he saw his boots being worn-down at the heel, and was afraid of being stranded without cash even for a railway ticket. If he had to clear out without paying his hotel bill--well, that was the world's fault. He had to live. But he must perforce keep enough in hand for a ticket to Birmingham. He always said his wife was in London. And he always walked down to Lumley to post his letters. He was full of evasions. So again he walked down to Lumley to post his letters. And he looked at Lumley. And he found it a damn god-forsaken hell of a hole. It was a long straggle of a dusty road down in the valley, with a pale-grey dust and spatter from the pottery, and big chimneys bellying forth black smoke right by the road. Then there was a short cross-way, up which one saw the iron foundry, a black and rusty place. A little further on was the railway junction, and beyond that, more houses stretching to Hathersedge, where the stocking factories were busy. Compared with Lumley, Woodhouse, whose church could be seen sticking up proudly and vulgarly on an eminence, above trees and meadow-slopes, was an idyllic heaven. Mr. May turned in to the Derby Hotel to have a small whiskey. And of course he entered into conversation. "You seem somewhat quiet at Lumley," he said, in his odd, refined-showman's voice. "Have you _nothing at all_ in the way of amusement?" "They all go up to Woodhouse, else to Hathersedge." "But couldn't you support some place of your own--some _rival_ to Wright's Variety?" "Ay--'appen--if somebody started it." And so it was that James was inoculated with the idea of starting a cinema on the virgin soil of Lumley. To the women he said not a word. But on the very first morning that Mr. May broached the subject, he became a new man. He fluttered like a boy, he fluttered as if he had just grown wings. "Let us go down," said Mr. May, "and look at a site. You pledge yourself to nothing--you don't compromise yourself. You merely have a site in your mind." And so it came to pass that, next morning, this oddly assorted couple went down to Lumley together. James was very shabby, in his black coat and dark grey trousers, and his cheap grey cap. He bent forward as he walked, and still nipped along hurriedly, as if pursued by fate. His face was thin and still handsome. Odd that his cheap cap, by incongruity, made him look more a gentleman. But it did. As he walked he glanced alertly hither and thither, and saluted everybody. By his side, somewhat tight and tubby, with his chest out and his head back, went the prim figure of Mr. May, reminding one of a consequential bird of the smaller species. His plumbago-grey suit fitted exactly--save that it was perhaps a little tight. The jacket and waistcoat were bound with silk braid of exactly the same shade as the cloth. His soft collar, immaculately fresh, had a dark stripe like his shirt. His boots were black, with grey suède uppers: but a _little_ down at heel. His dark-grey hat was jaunty. Altogether he looked very spruce, though a _little_ behind the fashions: very pink faced, though his blue eyes were bilious beneath: very much on the spot, although the spot was the wrong one. They discoursed amiably as they went, James bending forward, Mr. May bending back. Mr. May took the refined man-of-the-world tone. "Of course," he said--he used the two words very often, and pronounced the second, rather mincingly, to rhyme with _sauce_: "Of course," said Mr. May, "it's a disgusting place--_disgusting_! I never was in a worse, in all the _cauce_ of my travels. But _then_--that isn't the point--" He spread his plump hands from his immaculate shirt-cuffs. "No, it isn't. Decidedly it isn't. That's beside the point altogether. What we want--" began James. "Is an audience--of _cauce_--! And we have it--! Virgin soil--! "Yes, decidedly. Untouched! An unspoiled market." "An unspoiled market!" reiterated Mr. May, in full confirmation, though with a faint flicker of a smile. "How very _fortunate_ for us." "Properly handled," said James. "Properly handled." "Why yes--of _cauce_! Why _shouldn't_ we handle it properly!" "Oh, we shall manage that, we shall manage that," came the quick, slightly husky voice of James. "Of _cauce_ we shall! Why bless my life, if we can't manage an audience in Lumley, what _can_ we do." "We have a guide in the matter of their taste," said James. "We can see what Wright's are doing--and Jordan's--and we can go to Hathersedge and Knarborough and Alfreton--beforehand, that is--" "Why certainly--if you think it's _necessary_. I'll do all that for you. _And_ I'll interview the managers and the performers themselves--as if I were a journalist, don't you see. I've done a fair amount of journalism, and nothing easier than to get cards from various newspapers." "Yes, that's a good suggestion," said James. "As if you were going to write an account in the newspapers--excellent." "And so simple! You pick up just _all_ the information you require." "Decidedly--decidedly!" said James. And so behold our two heroes sniffing round the sordid backs and wasted meadows and marshy places of Lumley. They found one barren patch where two caravans were standing. A woman was peeling potatoes, sitting on the bottom step of her caravan. A half-caste girl came up with a large pale-blue enamelled jug of water. In the background were two booths covered up with coloured canvas. Hammering was heard inside. "Good-morning!" said Mr. May, stopping before the woman. "'Tisn't fair time, is it?" "No, it's no fair," said the woman. "I see. You're just on your own. Getting on all right?" "Fair," said the woman. "Only fair! Sorry. Good-morning." Mr. May's quick eye, roving round, had seen a negro stoop from under the canvas that covered one booth. The negro was thin, and looked young but rather frail, and limped. His face was very like that of the young negro in Watteau's drawing--pathetic, wistful, north-bitten. In an instant Mr. May had taken all in: the man was the woman's husband--they were acclimatized in these regions: the booth where he had been hammering was a Hoop-La. The other would be a cocoanut-shy. Feeling the instant American dislike for the presence of a negro, Mr. May moved off with James. They found out that the woman was a Lumley woman, that she had two children, that the negro was a most quiet and respectable chap, but that the family kept to itself, and didn't mix up with Lumley. "I should think so," said Mr. May, a little disgusted even at the suggestion. Then he proceeded to find out how long they had stood on this ground--three months--how long they would remain--only another week, then they were moving off to Alfreton fair--who was the owner of the pitch--Mr. Bows, the butcher. Ah! And what was the ground used for? Oh, it was building land. But the foundation wasn't very good. "The very thing! Aren't we _fortunate_!" cried Mr. May, perking up the moment they were in the street. But this cheerfulness and brisk perkiness was a great strain on him. He missed his eleven o'clock whiskey terribly--terribly--his pick-me-up! And he daren't confess it to James, who, he knew, was T-T. So he dragged his weary and hollow way up to Woodhouse, and sank with a long "Oh!" of nervous exhaustion in the private bar of the Moon and Stars. He wrinkled his short nose. The smell of the place was distasteful to him. The _disgusting_ beer that the colliers drank. Oh!--he _was_ so tired. He sank back with his whiskey and stared blankly, dismally in front of him. Beneath his eyes he looked more bilious still. He felt thoroughly out of luck, and petulant. None the less he sallied out with all his old bright perkiness, the next time he had to meet James. He hadn't yet broached the question of costs. When would he be able to get an advance from James? He _must_ hurry the matter forward. He brushed his crisp, curly brown hair carefully before the mirror. How grey he was at the temples! No wonder, dear me, with such a life! He was in his shirt-sleeves. His waistcoat, with its grey satin back, fitted him tightly. He had filled out--but he hadn't developed a corporation. Not at all. He looked at himself sideways, and feared dismally he was thinner. He was one of those men who carry themselves in a birdie fashion, so that their tail sticks out a little behind, jauntily. How wonderfully the satin of his waistcoat had worn! He looked at his shirt-cuffs. They were going. Luckily, when he had had the shirts made he had secured enough material for the renewing of cuffs and neckbands. He put on his coat, from which he had flicked the faintest suspicion of dust, and again settled himself to go out and meet James on the question of an advance. He simply must have an advance. He didn't get it that day, none the less. The next morning he was ringing for his tea at six o'clock. And before ten he had already flitted to Lumley and back, he had already had a word with Mr. Bows, about that pitch, and, overcoming all his repugnance, a word with the quiet, frail, sad negro, about Alfreton fair, and the chance of buying some sort of collapsible building, for his cinematograph. With all this news he met James--not at the shabby club, but in the deserted reading-room of the so-called Artizans Hall--where never an artizan entered, but only men of James's class. Here they took the chessboard and pretended to start a game. But their conversation was rapid and secretive. Mr. May disclosed all his discoveries. And then he said, tentatively: "Hadn't we better think about the financial part now? If we're going to look round for an erection"--curious that he always called it an erection--"we shall have to know what we are going to spend." "Yes--yes. Well--" said James vaguely, nervously, giving a glance at Mr. May. Whilst Mr. May abstractedly fingered his black knight. "You see at the moment," said Mr. May, "I have no funds that I can represent in cash. I have no doubt a little _later_--if we need it--I can find a few hundreds. Many things are _due_--numbers of things. But it is so difficult to _collect_ one's dues, particularly from America." He lifted his blue eyes to James Houghton. "Of course we can _delay_ for some time, until I get my supplies. Or I can act just as your manager--you can _employ_ me--" He watched James's face. James looked down at the chessboard. He was fluttering with excitement. He did not want a partner. He wanted to be in this all by himself. He hated partners. "You will agree to be manager, at a fixed salary?" said James hurriedly and huskily, his fine fingers slowly rubbing each other, along the sides. "Why yes, willingly, if you'll give me the option of becoming your partner upon terms of mutual agreement, later on." James did not quite like this. "What terms are you thinking of?" he asked. "Well, it doesn't matter for the moment. Suppose for the moment I enter an engagement as your manager, at a salary, let us say, of--of what, do you think?" "So much a week?" said James pointedly. "Hadn't we better make it monthly?" The two men looked at one another. "With a month's notice on either hand?" continued Mr. May. "How much?" said James, avaricious. Mr. May studied his own nicely kept hands. "Well, I don't see how I can do it under twenty pounds a month. Of course it's ridiculously low. In America I _never_ accepted less than three hundred dollars a month, and that was my poorest and lowest. But of _cauce_, England's not America--more's the pity." But James was shaking his head in a vibrating movement. "Impossible!" he replied shrewdly. "Impossible! Twenty pounds a month? Impossible. I couldn't do it. I couldn't think of it." "Then name a figure. Say what you _can_ think of," retorted Mr. May, rather annoyed by this shrewd, shaking head of a doddering provincial, and by his own sudden collapse into mean subordination. "I can't make it more than ten pounds a month," said James sharply. "What!" screamed Mr. May. "What am I to live on? What is my wife to live on?" "I've got to make it pay," said James. "If I've got to make it pay, I must keep down expenses at the beginning." "No,--on the contrary. You must be prepared to spend something at the beginning. If you go in a pinch-and-scrape fashion in the beginning, you will get nowhere at all. Ten pounds a month! Why it's impossible! Ten pounds a month! But how am I to _live_?" James's head still vibrated in a negative fashion. And the two men came to no agreement _that_ morning. Mr. May went home more sick and weary than ever, and took his whiskey more biliously. But James was lit with the light of battle. Poor Mr. May had to gather together his wits and his sprightliness for his next meeting. He had decided he must make a percentage in other ways. He schemed in all known ways. He would accept the ten pounds--but really, did ever you hear of anything so ridiculous in your life, _ten pounds!_--dirty old screw, dirty, screwing old woman! He would accept the ten pounds; but he would get his own back. He flitted down once more to the negro, to ask him of a certain wooden show-house, with section sides and roof, an old travelling theatre which stood closed on Selverhay Common, and might probably be sold. He pressed across once more to Mr. Bows. He wrote various letters and drew up certain notes. And the next morning, by eight o'clock, he was on his way to Selverhay: walking, poor man, the long and uninteresting seven miles on his small and rather tight-shod feet, through country that had been once beautiful but was now scrubbled all over with mining villages, on and on up heavy hills and down others, asking his way from uncouth clowns, till at last he came to the Common, which wasn't a Common at all, but a sort of village more depressing than usual: naked, high, exposed to heaven and to full barren view. There he saw the theatre-booth. It was old and sordid-looking, painted dark-red and dishevelled with narrow, tattered announcements. The grass was growing high up the wooden sides. If only it wasn't rotten? He crouched and probed and pierced with his pen-knife, till a country-policeman in a high helmet like a jug saw him, got off his bicycle and came stealthily across the grass wheeling the same bicycle, and startled poor Mr. May almost into apoplexy by demanding behind him, in a loud voice: "What're you after?" Mr. May rose up with flushed face and swollen neck-veins, holding his pen-knife in his hand. "Oh," he said, "good-morning." He settled his waistcoat and glanced over the tall, lanky constable and the glittering bicycle. "I was taking a look at this old erection, with a view to buying it. I'm afraid it's going rotten from the bottom." "Shouldn't wonder," said the policeman suspiciously, watching Mr. May shut the pocket knife. "I'm afraid that makes it useless for my purpose," said Mr. May. The policeman did not deign to answer. "Could you tell me where I can find out about it, anyway?" Mr. May used his most affable, man of the world manner. But the policeman continued to stare him up and down, as if he were some marvellous specimen unknown on the normal, honest earth. "What, find out?" said the constable. "About being able to buy it," said Mr. May, a little testily. It was with great difficulty he preserved his man-to-man openness and brightness. "They aren't here," said the constable. "Oh indeed! Where _are_ they? And _who_ are they?" The policeman eyed him more suspiciously than ever. "Cowlard's their name. An' they live in Offerton when they aren't travelling." "Cowlard--thank you." Mr. May took out his pocket-book. "C-o-w-l-a-r-d--is that right? And the address, please?" "I dunno th' street. But you can find out from the Three Bells. That's Missis' sister." "The Three Bells--thank you. Offerton did you say?" "Yes." "Offerton!--where's that?" "About eight mile." "Really--and how do you get there?" "You can walk--or go by train." "Oh, there is a station?" "Station!" The policeman looked at him as if he were either a criminal or a fool. "Yes. There _is_ a station there?" "Ay--biggest next to Chesterfield--" Suddenly it dawned on Mr. May. "Oh-h!" he said. "You mean _Alfreton_--" "Alfreton, yes." The policeman was now convinced the man was a wrong-'un. But fortunately he was not a pushing constable, he did not want to rise in the police-scale: thought himself safest at the bottom. "And which is the way to the station here?" asked Mr. May. "Do yer want Pinxon or Bull'ill?" "Pinxon or Bull'ill?" "There's two," said the policeman. "For Selverhay?" asked Mr. May. "Yes, them's the two." "And which is the best?" "Depends what trains is runnin'. Sometimes yer have to wait an hour or two--" "You don't know the trains, do you--?" "There's one in th' afternoon--but I don't know if it'd be gone by the time you get down." "To where?" "Bull'ill." "Oh Bull'ill! Well, perhaps I'll try. Could you tell me the way?" When, after an hour's painful walk, Mr. May came to Bullwell Station and found there was no train till six in the evening, he felt he was earning every penny he would ever get from Mr. Houghton. The first intelligence which Miss Pinnegar and Alvina gathered of the coming adventure was given them when James announced that he had let the shop to Marsden, the grocer next door. Marsden had agreed to take over James's premises at the same rent as that of the premises he already occupied, and moreover to do all alterations and put in all fixtures himself. This was a grand scoop for James: not a penny was it going to cost him, and the rent was clear profit. "But when?" cried Miss Pinnegar. "He takes possession on the first of October." "Well--it's a good idea. The shop isn't worth while," said Miss Pinnegar. "Certainly it isn't," said James, rubbing his hands: a sign that he was rarely excited and pleased. "And you'll just retire, and live quietly," said Miss Pinnegar. "I shall see," said James. And with those fatal words he wafted away to find Mr. May. James was now nearly seventy years old. Yet he nipped about like a leaf in the wind. Only, it was a frail leaf. "Father's got something going," said Alvina, in a warning voice. "I believe he has," said Miss Pinnegar pensively. "I wonder what it is, now." "I can't imagine," laughed Alvina. "But I'll bet it's something awful--else he'd have told us." "Yes," said Miss Pinnegar slowly. "Most likely he would. I wonder what it can be." "I haven't an idea," said Alvina. Both women were so retired, they had heard nothing of James's little trips down to Lumley. So they watched like cats for their man's return, at dinner-time. Miss Pinnegar saw him coming along talking excitedly to Mr. May, who, all in grey, with his chest perkily stuck out like a robin, was looking rather pinker than usual. Having come to an agreement, he had ventured on whiskey and soda in honour, and James had actually taken a glass of port. "Alvina!" Miss Pinnegar called discreetly down the shop. "Alvina! Quick!" Alvina flew down to peep round the corner of the shop window. There stood the two men, Mr. May like a perky, pink-faced grey bird standing cocking his head in attention to James Houghton, and occasionally catching James by the lapel of his coat, in a vain desire to get a word in, whilst James's head nodded and his face simply wagged with excited speech, as he skipped from foot to foot, and shifted round his listener. "Who _ever_ can that common-looking man be?" said Miss Pinnegar, her heart going down to her boots. "I can't imagine," said Alvina, laughing at the comic sight. "Don't you think he's dreadful?" said the poor elderly woman. "Perfectly impossible. Did ever you see such a pink face?" "_And_ the braid binding!" said Miss Pinnegar in indignation. "Father might almost have sold him the suit," said Alvina. "Let us hope he hasn't sold your father, that's all," said Miss Pinnegar. The two men had moved a few steps further towards home, and the women prepared to flee indoors. Of course it was frightfully wrong to be standing peeping in the high street at all. But who could consider the proprieties now? "They've stopped again," said Miss Pinnegar, recalling Alvina. The two men were having a few more excited words, their voices just audible. "I do wonder who he can be," murmured Miss Pinnegar miserably. "In the theatrical line, I'm sure," declared Alvina. "Do you think so?" said Miss Pinnegar. "Can't be! Can't be!" "He couldn't be anything else, don't you think?" "Oh I _can't_ believe it, I can't." But now Mr. May had laid his detaining hand on James's arm. And now he was shaking his employer by the hand. And now James, in his cheap little cap, was smiling a formal farewell. And Mr. May, with a graceful wave of his grey-suède-gloved hand, was turning back to the Moon and Stars, strutting, whilst James was running home on tip-toe, in his natural hurry. Alvina hastily retreated, but Miss Pinnegar stood it out. James started as he nipped into the shop entrance, and found her confronting him. "Oh--Miss Pinnegar!" he said, and made to slip by her. "Who was that man?" she asked sharply, as if James were a child whom she could endure no more. "Eh? I beg your pardon?" said James, starting back. "Who was that man?" "Eh? Which man?" James was a little deaf, and a little husky. "The man--" Miss Pinnegar turned to the door. "There! That man!" James also came to the door, and peered out as if he expected to see a sight. The sight of Mr. May's tight and perky back, the jaunty little hat and the grey suède hands retreating quite surprised him. He was angry at being introduced to the sight. "Oh," he said. "That's my manager." And he turned hastily down the shop, asking for his dinner. Miss Pinnegar stood for some moments in pure oblivion in the shop entrance. Her consciousness left her. When she recovered, she felt she was on the brink of hysteria and collapse. But she hardened herself once more, though the effort cost her a year of her life. She had never collapsed, she had never fallen into hysteria. She gathered herself together, though bent a little as from a blow, and, closing the shop door, followed James to the living room, like the inevitable. He was eating his dinner, and seemed oblivious of her entry. There was a smell of Irish stew. "What manager?" said Miss Pinnegar, short, silent, and inevitable in the doorway. But James was in one of his abstractions, his trances. "What manager?" persisted Miss Pinnegar. But he still bent unknowing over his plate and gobbled his Irish stew. "Mr. Houghton!" said Miss Pinnegar, in a sudden changed voice. She had gone a livid yellow colour. And she gave a queer, sharp little rap on the table with her hand. James started. He looked up bewildered, as one startled out of sleep. "Eh?" he said, gaping. "Eh?" "Answer me," said Miss Pinnegar. "What manager?" "Manager? Eh? Manager? What manager?" She advanced a little nearer, menacing in her black dress. James shrank. "What manager?" he re-echoed. "My manager. The manager of my cinema." Miss Pinnegar looked at him, and looked at him, and did not speak. In that moment all the anger which was due to him from all womanhood was silently discharged at him, like a black bolt of silent electricity. But Miss Pinnegar, the engine of wrath, felt she would burst. "Cinema! Cinema! Do you mean to tell me--" but she was really suffocated, the vessels of her heart and breast were bursting. She had to lean her hand on the table. It was a terrible moment. She looked ghastly and terrible, with her mask-like face and her stony eyes and her bluish lips. Some fearful thunderbolt seemed to fall. James withered, and was still. There was silence for minutes, a suspension. And in those minutes, she finished with him. She finished with him for ever. When she had sufficiently recovered, she went to her chair, and sat down before her plate. And in a while she began to eat, as if she were alone. Poor Alvina, for whom this had been a dreadful and uncalled-for moment, had looked from one to another, and had also dropped her head to her plate. James too, with bent head, had forgotten to eat. Miss Pinnegar ate very slowly, alone. "Don't you want your dinner, Alvina?" she said at length. "Not as much as I did," said Alvina. "Why not?" said Miss Pinnegar. She sounded short, almost like Miss Frost. Oddly like Miss Frost. Alvina took up her fork and began to eat automatically. "I always think," said Miss Pinnegar, "Irish stew is more tasty with a bit of Swede in it." "So do I, really," said Alvina. "But Swedes aren't come yet." "Oh! Didn't we have some on Tuesday?" "No, they were yellow turnips--but they weren't Swedes." "Well then, yellow turnip. I like a little yellow turnip," said Miss Pinnegar. "I might have put some in, if I'd known," said Alvina. "Yes. We will another time," said Miss Pinnegar. Not another word about the cinema: not another breath. As soon as James had eaten his plum tart, he ran away. "What can he have been doing?" said Alvina when he had gone. "Buying a cinema show--and that man we saw is his manager. It's quite simple." "But what are we going to do with a cinema show?" said Alvina. "It's what is _he_ going to do. It doesn't concern me. It's no concern of mine. I shall not lend him anything, I shall not think about it, it will be the same to me as if there _were_ no cinema. Which is all I have to say," announced Miss Pinnegar. "But he's gone and done it," said Alvina. "Then let him go through with it. It's no affair of mine. After all, your father's affairs don't concern me. It would be impertinent of me to introduce myself into them." "They don't concern _me_ very much," said Alvina. "You're different. You're his daughter. He's no connection of mine, I'm glad to say. I pity your mother." "Oh, but he was always alike," said Alvina. "That's where it is," said Miss Pinnegar. There was something fatal about her feelings. Once they had gone cold, they would never warm up again. As well try to warm up a frozen mouse. It only putrifies. But poor Miss Pinnegar after this looked older, and seemed to get a little round-backed. And the things she said reminded Alvina so often of Miss Frost. James fluttered into conversation with his daughter the next evening, after Miss Pinnegar had retired. "I told you I had bought a cinematograph building," said James. "We are negotiating for the machinery now: the dynamo and so on." "But where is it to be?" asked Alvina. "Down at Lumley. I'll take you and show you the site tomorrow. The building--it is a frame-section travelling theatre--will arrive on Thursday--next Thursday." "But who is in with you, father?" "I am quite alone--quite alone," said James Houghton. "I have found an excellent manager, who knows the whole business thoroughly--a Mr. May. Very nice man. Very nice man." "Rather short and dressed in grey?" "Yes. And I have been thinking--if Miss Pinnegar will take the cash and issue tickets: if she will take over the ticket-office: and you will play the piano: and if Mr. May learns the control of the machine--he is having lessons now--: and if I am the indoors attendant, we shan't need any more staff." "Miss Pinnegar won't take the cash, father." "Why not? Why not?" "I can't say why not. But she won't do anything--and if I were you I wouldn't ask her." There was a pause. "Oh, well," said James, huffy. "She isn't indispensable." And Alvina was to play the piano! Here was a blow for her! She hurried off to her bedroom to laugh and cry at once. She just saw herself at that piano, banging off the _Merry Widow Waltz_, and, in tender moments, _The Rosary_. Time after time, _The Rosary_. While the pictures flickered and the audience gave shouts and some grubby boy called "Chot-let, penny a bar! Chot-let, penny a bar! Chot-let, penny a bar!" away she banged at another tune. What a sight for the gods! She burst out laughing. And at the same time, she thought of her mother and Miss Frost, and she cried as if her heart would break. And then all kinds of comic and incongruous tunes came into her head. She imagined herself dressing up with most priceless variations. _Linger Longer Lucy_, for example. She began to spin imaginary harmonies and variations in her head, upon the theme of _Linger Longer Lucy_. "Linger longer Lucy, linger longer Loo. How I love to linger longer linger long o' you. Listen while I sing, love, promise you'll be true, And linger longer longer linger linger longer Loo." All the tunes that used to make Miss Frost so angry. All the Dream Waltzes and Maiden's Prayers, and the awful songs. "For in Spooney-ooney Island Is there any one cares for me? In Spooney-ooney Island Why surely there ought to be--" Poor Miss Frost! Alvina imagined herself leading a chorus of collier louts, in a bad atmosphere of "Woodbines" and oranges, during the intervals when the pictures had collapsed. "How'd you like to spoon with me? How'd you like to spoon with me? (_Why ra-ther!_) Underneath the oak-tree nice and shady Calling me your tootsey-wootsey lady? How'd you like to hug and squeeze, (_Just try me!_) Dandle me upon your knee, Calling me your little lovey-dovey-- How'd you like to spoon with me? (_Oh-h--Go on!_)" Alvina worked herself into quite a fever, with her imaginings. In the morning she told Miss Pinnegar. "Yes," said Miss Pinnegar, "you see me issuing tickets, don't you? Yes--well. I'm afraid he will have to do that part himself. And you're going to play the piano. It's a disgrace! It's a disgrace! It's a disgrace! It's a mercy Miss Frost and your mother are dead. He's lost every bit of shame--every bit--if he ever had any--which I doubt very much. Well, all I can say, I'm glad I am not concerned. And I'm sorry for you, for being his daughter. I'm heart sorry for you, I am. Well, well--no sense of shame--no sense of shame--" And Miss Pinnegar padded out of the room. Alvina walked down to Lumley and was shown the site and was introduced to Mr. May. He bowed to her in his best American fashion, and treated her with admirable American deference. "Don't you think," he said to her, "it's an admirable scheme?" "Wonderful," she replied. "Of cauce," he said, "the erection will be a merely temporary one. Of cauce it won't be anything to _look_ at: just an old wooden travelling theatre. But _then_--all we need is to make a start." "And you are going to work the film?" she asked. "Yes," he said with pride, "I spend every evening with the operator at Marsh's in Knarborough. Very interesting I find it--very interesting indeed. And _you_ are going to play the piano?" he said, perking his head on one side and looking at her archly. "So father says," she answered. "But what do _you_ say?" queried Mr. May. "I suppose I don't have any say." "Oh but _surely_. Surely you won't do it if you don't wish to. That would never do. Can't we hire some young fellow--?" And he turned to Mr. Houghton with a note of query. "Alvina can play as well as anybody in Woodhouse," said James. "We mustn't add to our expenses. And wages in particular--" "But surely Miss Houghton will have her wage. The labourer is worthy of his hire. Surely! Even of _her_ hire, to put it in the feminine. And for the same wage you could get some unimportant fellow with strong wrists. I'm afraid it will tire Miss Houghton to death--" "I don't think so," said James. "I don't think so. Many of the turns she will not need to accompany--" "Well, if it comes to that," said Mr. May, "I can accompany some of them myself, when I'm not operating the film. I'm not an expert pianist--but I can play a little, you know--" And he trilled his fingers up and down an imaginary keyboard in front of Alvina, cocking his eye at her smiling a little archly. "I'm sure," he continued, "I can accompany anything except a man juggling dinner-plates--and then I'd be afraid of making him drop the plates. But songs--oh, songs! _Con molto espressione!_" And again he trilled the imaginary keyboard, and smiled his rather fat cheeks at Alvina. She began to like him. There was something a little dainty about him, when you knew him better--really rather fastidious. A showman, true enough! Blatant too. But fastidiously so. He came fairly frequently to Manchester House after this. Miss Pinnegar was rather stiff with him and he did not like her. But he was very happy sitting chatting tête-à-tête with Alvina. "Where is your wife?" said Alvina to him. "My wife! Oh, don't speak of _her_," he said comically. "She's in London." "Why not speak of her?" asked Alvina. "Oh, every reason for not speaking of her. We don't get on at _all_ well, she and I." "What a pity," said Alvina. "Dreadful pity! But what are you to do?" He laughed comically. Then he became grave. "No," he said. "She's an impossible person." "I see," said Alvina. "I'm sure you _don't_ see," said Mr. May. "Don't--" and here he laid his hand on Alvina's arm--"don't run away with the idea that she's _immoral_! You'd never make a greater mistake. Oh dear me, no. Morality's her strongest point. Live on three lettuce leaves, and give the rest to the char. That's her. Oh, dreadful times we had in those first years. We only lived together for three years. But dear _me_! how awful it was!" "Why?" "There was no pleasing the woman. She wouldn't eat. If I said to her 'What shall we have for supper, Grace?' as sure as anything she'd answer 'Oh, I shall take a bath when I go to bed--that will be my supper.' She was one of these advanced vegetarian women, don't you know." "How extraordinary!" said Alvina. "Extraordinary! I should think so. Extraordinary hard lines on _me_. And she wouldn't let _me_ eat either. She followed me to the kitchen in a _fury_ while I cooked for myself. Why imagine! I prepared a dish of champignons: oh, most _beautiful_ champignons, beautiful--and I put them on the stove to fry in butter: beautiful young champignons. I'm hanged if she didn't go into the kitchen while my back was turned, and pour a pint of old carrot-water into the pan. I was _furious_. Imagine!--beautiful fresh young champignons--" "Fresh mushrooms," said Alvina. "Mushrooms--most beautiful things in the world. Oh! don't you think so?" And he rolled his eyes oddly to heaven. "They _are_ good," said Alvina. "I should say so. And swamped--_swamped_ with her dirty old carrot water. Oh I was so angry. And all she could say was, 'Well, I didn't want to waste it!' Didn't want to waste her old carrot water, and so _ruined_ my champignons. _Can_ you imagine such a person?" "It must have been trying." "I should think it was. I lost weight. I lost I don't know how many pounds, the first year I was married to that woman. She hated me to eat. Why, one of her great accusations against me, at the last, was when she said: 'I've looked round the larder,' she said to me, 'and seen it was quite empty, and I thought to myself: _Now_ he _can't_ cook a supper! And _then_ you did!' There! What do you think of that? The spite of it! 'And _then_ you did!'" "What did she expect you to live on?" asked Alvina. "Nibble a lettuce leaf with her, and drink water from the tap--and then elevate myself with a Bernard Shaw pamphlet. That was the sort of woman she was. All it gave _me_ was gas in the stomach." "So overbearing!" said Alvina. "Oh!" he turned his eyes to heaven, and spread his hands. "I didn't believe my senses. I didn't know such people existed. And her friends! Oh the dreadful friends she had--these Fabians! Oh, their eugenics. They wanted to examine my private morals, for eugenic reasons. Oh, you can't imagine such a state. Worse than the Spanish Inquisition. And I stood it for three years. _How_ I stood it, I don't know--" "Now don't you see her?" "Never! I never let her know where I am! But I _support_ her, of cauce." "And your daughter?" "Oh, she's the dearest child in the world. I saw her at a friend's when I came back from America. Dearest little thing in the world. But of _cauce_ suspicious of me. Treats me as if she didn't _know_ me--" "What a pity!" "Oh--unbearable!" He spread his plump, manicured hands, on one finger of which was a green intaglio ring. "How old is your daughter?" "Fourteen." "What is her name?" "Gemma. She was born in Rome, where I was managing for Miss Maud Callum, the _danseuse_." Curious the intimacy Mr. May established with Alvina at once. But it was all purely verbal, descriptive. He made no physical advances. On the contrary, he was like a dove-grey, disconsolate bird pecking the crumbs of Alvina's sympathy, and cocking his eye all the time to watch that she did not advance one step towards him. If he had seen the least sign of coming-on-ness in her, he would have fluttered off in a great dither. Nothing _horrified_ him more than a woman who was coming-on towards him. It horrified him, it exasperated him, it made him hate the whole tribe of women: horrific two-legged cats without whiskers. If he had been a bird, his innate horror of a cat would have been such. He liked the _angel_, and particularly the angel-mother in woman. Oh!--that he worshipped. But coming-on-ness! So he never wanted to be seen out-of-doors with Alvina; if he met her in the street he bowed and passed on: bowed very deep and reverential, indeed, but passed on, with his little back a little more strutty and assertive than ever. Decidedly he turned his back on her in public. But Miss Pinnegar, a regular old, grey, dangerous she-puss, eyed him from the corner of her pale eye, as he turned tail. "So unmanly!" she murmured. "In his dress, in his way, in everything--so unmanly." "If I was you, Alvina," she said, "I shouldn't see so much of Mr. May, in the drawing-room. People will talk." "I should almost feel flattered," laughed Alvina. "What do you mean?" snapped Miss Pinnegar. None the less, Mr. May was dependable in matters of business. He was up at half-past five in the morning, and by seven was well on his way. He sailed like a stiff little ship before a steady breeze, hither and thither, out of Woodhouse and back again, and across from side to side. Sharp and snappy, he was, on the spot. He trussed himself up, when he was angry or displeased, and sharp, snip-snap came his words, rather like scissors. "But how is it--" he attacked Arthur Witham--"that the gas isn't connected with the main yet? It was to be ready yesterday." "We've had to wait for the fixings for them brackets," said Arthur. "_Had_ to _wait_ for _fixings_! But didn't you know a fortnight ago that you'd want the fixings?" "I thought we should have some as would do." "Oh! you thought so! Really! Kind of you to think so. And have you just thought about those that are coming, or have you made sure?" Arthur looked at him sullenly. He hated him. But Mr. May's sharp touch was not to be foiled. "I hope you'll go further than _thinking_," said Mr. May. "Thinking seems such a slow process. And when do you expect the fittings--?" "Tomorrow." "What! Another day! Another day _still!_ But you're strangely indifferent to time, in your line of business. Oh! _Tomorrow!_ Imagine it! Two days late already, and then _tomorrow!_ Well I hope by tomorrow you mean _Wednesday_, and not tomorrow's tomorrow, or some other absurd and fanciful date that you've just _thought about_. But now, _do_ have the thing finished by tomorrow--" here he laid his hand cajoling on Arthur's arm. "You promise me it will all be ready by tomorrow, don't you?" "Yes, I'll do it if anybody could do it." "Don't say 'if anybody could do it.' Say it shall be done." "It shall if I can possibly manage it--" "Oh--very well then. Mind you manage it--and thank you _very_ much. I shall be _most_ obliged, if it _is_ done." Arthur was annoyed, but he was kept to the scratch. And so, early in October the place was ready, and Woodhouse was plastered with placards announcing "Houghton's Pleasure Palace." Poor Mr. May could not but see an irony in the Palace part of the phrase. "We can guarantee the _pleasure_," he said. "But personally, I feel I can't take the responsibility for the palace." But James, to use the vulgar expression, was in his eye-holes. "Oh, father's in his eye-holes," said Alvina to Mr. May. "Oh!" said Mr. May, puzzled and concerned. But it merely meant that James was having the time of his life. He was drawing out announcements. First was a batch of vermilion strips, with the mystic script, in big black letters: Houghton's Picture Palace, underneath which, quite small: Opens at Lumley on October 7th, at 6:30 P.M. Everywhere you went, these vermilion and black bars sprang from the wall at you. Then there were other notices, in delicate pale-blue and pale red, like a genuine theatre notice, giving full programs. And beneath these a broad-letter notice announced, in green letters on a yellow ground: "Final and Ultimate Clearance Sale at Houghton's, Knarborough Road, on Friday, September 30th. Come and Buy Without Price." James was in his eye-holes. He collected all his odds and ends from every corner of Manchester House. He sorted them in heaps, and marked the heaps in his own mind. And then he let go. He pasted up notices all over the window and all over the shop: "Take what you want and Pay what you Like." He and Miss Pinnegar kept shop. The women flocked in. They turned things over. It nearly killed James to take the prices they offered. But take them he did. But he exacted that they should buy one article at a time. "One piece at a time, if you don't mind," he said, when they came up with their three-a-penny handfuls. It was not till later in the evening that he relaxed this rule. Well, by eleven o'clock he had cleared out a good deal--really, a very great deal--and many women had bought what they didn't want, at their own figure. Feverish but content, James shut the shop for the last time. Next day, by eleven, he had removed all his belongings, the door that connected the house with the shop was screwed up fast, the grocer strolled in and looked round his bare extension, took the key from James, and immediately set his boy to paste a new notice in the window, tearing down all James's announcements. Poor James had to run round, down Knarborough Road, and down Wellington Street as far as the Livery Stable, then down long narrow passages, before he could get into his own house, from his own shop. But he did not mind. Every hour brought the first performance of his Pleasure Palace nearer. He was satisfied with Mr. May: he had to admit that he was satisfied with Mr. May. The Palace stood firm at last--oh, it was so ricketty when it arrived!--and it glowed with a new coat, all over, of dark-red paint, like ox-blood. It was tittivated up with a touch of lavender and yellow round the door and round the decorated wooden eaving. It had a new wooden slope up to the doors--and inside, a new wooden floor, with red-velvet seats in front, before the curtain, and old chapel-pews behind. The collier youths recognized the pews. "Hey! These 'ere's the pews out of the old Primitive Chapel." "Sorry ah! We'n come ter hear t' parson." Theme for endless jokes. And the Pleasure Palace was christened, in some lucky stroke, Houghton's Endeavour, a reference to that particular Chapel effort called the Christian Endeavour, where Alvina and Miss Pinnegar both figured. "Wheer art off, Sorry?" "Lumley." "Houghton's Endeavour?" "Ah." "Rotten." So, when one laconic young collier accosted another. But we anticipate. Mr. May had worked hard to get a program for the first week. His pictures were: "The Human Bird," which turned out to be a ski-ing film from Norway, purely descriptive; "The Pancake," a humorous film: and then his grand serial: "The Silent Grip." And then, for Turns, his first item was Miss Poppy Traherne, a lady in innumerable petticoats, who could whirl herself into anything you like, from an arum lily in green stockings to a rainbow and a Catherine wheel and a cup-and-saucer: marvellous, was Miss Poppy Traherne. The next turn was The Baxter Brothers, who ran up and down each other's backs and up and down each other's front, and stood on each other's heads and on their own heads, and perched for a moment on each other's shoulders, as if each of them was a flight of stairs with a landing, and the three of them were three flights, three storeys up, the top flight continually running down and becoming the bottom flight, while the middle flight collapsed and became a horizontal corridor. Alvina had to open the performance by playing an overture called "Welcome All": a ridiculous piece. She was excited and unhappy. On the Monday morning there was a rehearsal, Mr. May conducting. She played "Welcome All," and then took the thumbed sheets which Miss Poppy Traherne carried with her. Miss Poppy was rather exacting. As she whirled her skirts she kept saying: "A little faster, please"--"A little slower"--in a rather haughty, official voice that was somewhat muffled by the swim of her drapery. "Can you give it _expression_?" she cried, as she got the arum lily in full blow, and there was a sound of real ecstasy in her tones. But why she should have called "Stronger! Stronger!" as she came into being as a cup and saucer, Alvina could not imagine: unless Miss Poppy was fancying herself a strong cup of tea. However, she subsided into her mere self, panted frantically, and then, in a hoarse voice, demanded if she was in the bare front of the show. She scorned to count "Welcome All." Mr. May said Yes. She was the first item. Whereupon she began to raise a dust. Mr. Houghton said, hurriedly interposing, that he meant to make a little opening speech. Miss Poppy eyed him as if he were a cuckoo-clock, and she had to wait till he'd finished cuckooing. Then she said: "That's not every night. There's six nights to a week." James was properly snubbed. It ended by Mr. May metamorphizing himself into a pug dog: he said he had got the "costoom" in his bag: and doing a lump-of-sugar scene with one of the Baxter Brothers, as a brief first item. Miss Poppy's professional virginity was thus saved from outrage. At the back of the stage there was half-a-yard of curtain screening the two dressing-rooms, ladies and gents. In her spare time Alvina sat in the ladies' dressing room, or in its lower doorway, for there was not room right inside. She watched the ladies making up--she gave some slight assistance. She saw the men's feet, in their shabby pumps, on the other side of the curtain, and she heard the men's gruff voices. Often a slangy conversation was carried on through the curtain--for most of the turns were acquainted with each other: very affable before each other's faces, very sniffy behind each other's backs. Poor Alvina was in a state of bewilderment. She was extremely nice--oh, much too nice with the female turns. They treated her with a sort of off-hand friendliness, and they snubbed and patronized her and were a little spiteful with her because Mr. May treated her with attention and deference. She felt bewildered, a little excited, and as if she was not herself. The first evening actually came. Her father had produced a pink crêpe de Chine blouse and a back-comb massed with brilliants--both of which she refused to wear. She stuck to her black blouse and black shirt, and her simple hair-dressing. Mr. May said "Of cauce! She wasn't intended to attract attention to herself." Miss Pinnegar actually walked down the hill with her, and began to cry when she saw the ox-blood red erection, with its gas-flares in front. It was the first time she had seen it. She went on with Alvina to the little stage door at the back, and up the steps into the scrap of dressing-room. But she fled out again from the sight of Miss Poppy in her yellow hair and green knickers with green-lace frills. Poor Miss Pinnegar! She stood outside on the trodden grass behind the Band of Hope, and really cried. Luckily she had put a veil on. She went valiantly round to the front entrance, and climbed the steps. The crowd was just coming. There was James's face peeping inside the little ticket-window. "One!" he said officially, pushing out the ticket. And then he recognized her. "Oh," he said, "_You're_ not going to pay." "Yes I am," she said, and she left her fourpence, and James's coppery, grimy fingers scooped it in, as the youth behind Miss Pinnegar shoved her forward. "Arf way down, fourpenny," said the man at the door, poking her in the direction of Mr. May, who wanted to put her in the red velvet. But she marched down one of the pews, and took her seat. The place was crowded with a whooping, whistling, excited audience. The curtain was down. James had let it out to his fellow tradesmen, and it represented a patchwork of local adverts. There was a fat porker and a fat pork-pie, and the pig was saying: "You all know where to find me. Inside the crust at Frank Churchill's, Knarborough Road, Woodhouse." Round about the name of W. H. Johnson floated a bowler hat, a collar-and-necktie, a pair of braces and an umbrella. And so on and so on. It all made you feel very homely. But Miss Pinnegar was sadly hot and squeezed in her pew. Time came, and the colliers began to drum their feet. It was exactly the excited, crowded audience Mr. May wanted. He darted out to drive James round in front of the curtain. But James, fascinated by raking in the money so fast, could not be shifted from the pay-box, and the two men nearly had a fight. At last Mr. May was seen shooing James, like a scuffled chicken, down the side gangway and on to the stage. James before the illuminated curtain of local adverts, bowing and beginning and not making a single word audible! The crowd quieted itself, the eloquence flowed on. The crowd was sick of James, and began to shuffle. "Come down, come down!" hissed Mr. May frantically from in front. But James did not move. He would flow on all night. Mr. May waved excitedly at Alvina, who sat obscurely at the piano, and darted on to the stage. He raised his voice and drowned James. James ceased to wave his penny-blackened hands, Alvina struck up "Welcome All" as loudly and emphatically as she could. And all the time Miss Pinnegar sat like a sphinx--like a sphinx. What she thought she did not know herself. But stolidly she stared at James, and anxiously she glanced sideways at the pounding Alvina. She knew Alvina had to pound until she received the cue that Mr. May was fitted in his pug-dog "Costoom." A twitch of the curtain. Alvina wound up her final flourish, the curtain rose, and: "Well really!" said Miss Pinnegar, out loud. There was Mr. May as a pug dog begging, too lifelike and too impossible. The audience shouted. Alvina sat with her hands in her lap. The Pug was a great success. Curtain! A few bars of Toreador--and then Miss Poppy's sheets of music. Soft music. Miss Poppy was on the ground under a green scarf. And so the accumulating dilation, on to the whirling climax of the perfect arum lily. Sudden curtain, and a yell of ecstasy from the colliers. Of all blossoms, the arum, the arum lily is most mystical and portentous. Now a crash and rumble from Alvina's piano. This is the storm from whence the rainbow emerges. Up goes the curtain--Miss Poppy twirling till her skirts lift as in a breeze, rise up and become a rainbow above her now darkened legs. The footlights are all but extinguished. Miss Poppy is all but extinguished also. The rainbow is not so moving as the arum lily. But the Catherine wheel, done at the last moment on one leg and then an amazing leap into the air backwards, again brings down the house. Miss Poppy herself sets all store on her cup and saucer. But the audience, vulgar as ever, cannot quite see it. And so, Alvina slips away with Miss Poppy's music-sheets, while Mr. May sits down like a professional at the piano and makes things fly for the up-and-down-stairs Baxter Bros. Meanwhile, Alvina's pale face hovering like a ghost in the side darkness, as it were under the stage. The lamps go out: gurglings and kissings--and then the dither on the screen: "The Human Bird," in awful shivery letters. It's not a very good machine, and Mr. May is not a very good operator. Audience distinctly critical. Lights up--an "Chot-let, penny a bar! Chot-let, penny a bar!" even as in Alvina's dream--and then "The Pancake"--so the first half over. Lights up for the interval. Miss Pinnegar sighed and folded her hands. She looked neither to right nor to left. In spite of herself, in spite of outraged shame and decency, she was excited. But she felt such excitement was not wholesome. In vain the boy most pertinently yelled "Chot-let" at her. She looked neither to right nor left. But when she saw Alvina nodding to her with a quick smile from the side gangway under the stage, she almost burst into tears. It was too much for her, all at once. And Alvina looked almost indecently excited. As she slipped across in front of the audience, to the piano, to play the seductive "Dream Waltz!" she looked almost fussy, like her father. James, needless to say, flittered and hurried hither and thither around the audience and the stage, like a wagtail on the brink of a pool. The second half consisted of a comic drama acted by two Baxter Bros., disguised as women, and Miss Poppy disguised as a man--with a couple of locals thrown in to do the guardsman and the Count. This went very well. The winding up was the first instalment of "The Silent Grip." When lights went up and Alvina solemnly struck "God Save Our Gracious King," the audience was on its feet and not very quiet, evidently hissing with excitement like doughnuts in the pan even when the pan is taken off the fire. Mr. Houghton thanked them for their courtesy and attention, and hoped--And nobody took the slightest notice. Miss Pinnegar stayed last, waiting for Alvina. And Alvina, in her excitement, waited for Mr. May and her father. Mr. May fairly pranced into the empty hall. "Well!" he said, shutting both his fists and flourishing them in Miss Pinnegar's face. "How did it go?" "I think it went very well," she said. "Very well! I should think so, indeed. It went like a house on fire. What? Didn't it?" And he laughed a high, excited little laugh. James was counting pennies for his life, in the cash-place, and dropping them into a Gladstone bag. The others had to wait for him. At last he locked his bag. "Well," said Mr. May, "done well?" "Fairly well," said James, huskily excited. "Fairly well." "Only fairly? Oh-h!" And Mr. May suddenly picked up the bag. James turned as if he would snatch it from him. "Well! Feel that, for fairly well!" said Mr. May, handing the bag to Alvina. "Goodness!" she cried, handing it to Miss Pinnegar. "Would you believe it?" said Miss Pinnegar, relinquishing it to James. But she spoke coldly, aloof. Mr. May turned off the gas at the meter, came talking through the darkness of the empty theatre, picking his way with a flash-light. "C'est le premier pas qui coute," he said, in a sort of American French, as he locked the doors and put the key in his pocket. James tripped silently alongside, bowed under the weight of his Gladstone bag of pennies. "How much have we taken, father?" asked Alvina gaily. "I haven't counted," he snapped. When he got home he hurried upstairs to his bare chamber. He swept his table clear, and then, in an expert fashion, he seized handfuls of coin and piled them in little columns on his board. There was an army of fat pennies, a dozen to a column, along the back, rows and rows of fat brown rank-and-file. In front of these, rows of slim halfpence, like an advance-guard. And commanding all, a stout column of half-crowns, a few stoutish and important florin-figures, like general and colonels, then quite a file of shillings, like so many captains, and a little cloud of silvery lieutenant sixpences. Right at the end, like a frail drummer boy, a thin stick of threepenny pieces. There they all were: burly dragoons of stout pennies, heavy and holding their ground, with a screen of halfpenny light infantry, officered by the immovable half-crown general, who in his turn was flanked by all his staff of florin colonels and shilling captains, from whom lightly moved the nimble sixpenny lieutenants all ignoring the wan, frail Joey of the threepenny-bits. Time after time James ran his almighty eye over his army. He loved them. He loved to feel that his table was pressed down, that it groaned under their weight. He loved to see the pence, like innumerable pillars of cloud, standing waiting to lead on into wildernesses of unopened resource, while the silver, as pillars of light, should guide the way down the long night of fortune. Their weight sank sensually into his muscle, and gave him gratification. The dark redness of bronze, like full-blooded fleas, seemed alive and pulsing, the silver was magic as if winged. CHAPTER VII NATCHA-KEE-TAWARA Mr. May and Alvina became almost inseparable, and Woodhouse buzzed with scandal. Woodhouse could not believe that Mr. May was absolutely final in his horror of any sort of coming-on-ness in a woman. It could not believe that he was only _so_ fond of Alvina because she was like a sister to him, poor, lonely, harassed soul that he was: a pure sister who really hadn't any body. For although Mr. May was rather fond, in an epicurean way, of his own body, yet other people's bodies rather made him shudder. So that his grand utterance on Alvina was: "She's not physical, she's mental." He even explained to her one day how it was, in his naïve fashion. "There are two kinds of friendships," he said, "physical and mental. The physical is a thing of the moment. Of cauce you quite _like_ the individual, you remain quite nice with them, and so on,--to keep the thing as decent as possible. It _is_ quite decent, so long as you keep it so. But it is a thing of the moment. Which you know. It may last a week or two, or a month or two. But you know from the beginning it is going to end--quite finally--quite soon. You take it for what it is. But it's so different with the mental friendships. _They_ are lasting. They are eternal--if anything human (he said yuman) ever is eternal, ever _can_ be eternal." He pressed his hands together in an odd cherubic manner. He was quite sincere: if man ever _can_ be quite sincere. Alvina was quite content to be one of his mental and eternal friends, or rather _friendships_--since she existed _in abstractu_ as far as he was concerned. For she did not find him at all physically moving. Physically he was not there: he was oddly an absentee. But his naïveté roused the serpent's tooth of her bitter irony. "And your wife?" she said to him. "Oh, my wife! Dreadful thought! _There_ I made the great mistake of trying to find the two in one person! And _didn't_ I fall between two stools! Oh dear, _didn't_ I? Oh, I fell between the two stools beautifully, beautifully! And _then_--she nearly set the stools on top of me. I thought I should never get up again. When I was physical, she was mental--Bernard Shaw and cold baths for supper!--and when I was mental she was physical, and threw her arms round my neck. In the morning, mark you. Always in the morning, when I was on the alert for business. Yes, invariably. What do you think of it? Could the devil himself have invented anything more trying? Oh dear me, don't mention it. Oh, what a time I had! Wonder I'm alive. Yes, really! Although you smile." Alvina did more than smile. She laughed outright. And yet she remained good friends with the odd little man. He bought himself a new, smart overcoat, that fitted his figure, and a new velour hat. And she even noticed, one day when he was curling himself up cosily on the sofa, that he had pale blue silk underwear, and purple silk suspenders. She wondered where he got them, and how he afforded them. But there they were. James seemed for the time being wrapt in his undertaking--particularly in the takings part of it. He seemed for the time being contented--or nearly so, nearly so. Certainly there was money coming in. But then he had to pay off all he had borrowed to buy his erection and its furnishings, and a bulk of pennies sublimated into a very small £.s.d. account, at the bank. The Endeavour was successful--yes, it was successful. But not overwhelmingly so. On wet nights Woodhouse did not care to trail down to Lumley. And then Lumley was one of those depressed, negative spots on the face of the earth which have no pull at all. In that region of sharp hills with fine hill-brows, and shallow, rather dreary canal-valleys, it was the places on the hill-brows, like Woodhouse and Hathersedge and Rapton which flourished, while the dreary places down along the canals existed only for work-places, not for life and pleasure. It was just like James to have planted his endeavour down in the stagnant dust and rust of potteries and foundries, where no illusion could bloom. He had dreamed of crowded houses every night, and of raised prices. But there was no probability of his being able to raise his prices. He had to figure lower than the Woodhouse Empire. He was second-rate from the start. His hope now lay in the tramway which was being built from Knarborough away through the country--a black country indeed--through Woodhouse and Lumley and Hathersedge, to Rapton. When once this tramway-system was working, he would have a supply of youths and lasses always on tap, as it were. So he spread his rainbow wings towards the future, and began to say: "When we've got the trams, I shall buy a new machine and finer lenses, and I shall extend my premises." Mr. May did not talk business to Alvina. He was terribly secretive with respect to business. But he said to her once, in the early year following their opening: "Well, how do you think we're doing, Miss Houghton?" "We're not doing any better than we did at first, I think," she said. "No," he answered. "No! That's true. That's perfectly true. But why? They seem to like the programs." "I think they do," said Alvina. "I think they like them when they're there. But isn't it funny, they don't seem to want to come to them. I know they always talk as if we were second-rate. And they only come because they can't get to the Empire, or up to Hathersedge. We're a stop-gap. I know we are." Mr. May looked down in the mouth. He cocked his blue eyes at her, miserable and frightened. Failure began to frighten him abjectly. "Why do you think that is?" he said. "I don't believe they like the turns," she said. "But _look_ how they applaud them! _Look_ how pleased they are!" "I know. I know they like them once they're there, and they see them. But they don't come again. They crowd the Empire--and the Empire is only pictures now; and it's much cheaper to run." He watched her dismally. "I can't believe they want nothing but pictures. I can't believe they want everything in the flat," he said, coaxing and miserable. He himself was not interested in the film. His interest was still the human interest in living performers and their living feats. "Why," he continued, "they are ever so much more excited after a good turn, than after any film." "I know they are," said Alvina. "But I don't believe they want to be excited in that way." "In what way?" asked Mr. May plaintively. "By the things which the artistes do. I believe they're jealous." "Oh nonsense!" exploded Mr. May, starting as if he had been shot. Then he laid his hand on her arm. "But forgive my rudeness! I don't mean it, of _cauce_! But do you mean to say that these collier louts and factory girls are jealous of the things the artistes do, because they could never do them themselves?" "I'm sure they are," said Alvina. "But I _can't_ believe it," said Mr. May, pouting up his mouth and smiling at her as if she were a whimsical child. "What a low opinion you have of human nature!" "Have I?" laughed Alvina. "I've never reckoned it up. But I'm sure that these common people here are jealous if anybody does anything or has anything they can't have themselves." "I can't believe it," protested Mr. May. "Could they be so _silly_! And then why aren't they jealous of the extraordinary things which are done on the film?" "Because they don't see the flesh-and-blood people. I'm sure that's it. The film is only pictures, like pictures in the _Daily Mirror_. And pictures don't have any feelings apart from their own feelings. I mean the feelings of the people who watch them. Pictures don't have any life except in the people who watch them. And that's why they like them. Because they make them feel that they are everything." "The pictures make the colliers and lasses feel that they themselves are everything? But how? They identify themselves with the heroes and heroines on the screen?" "Yes--they take it all to themselves--and there isn't anything except themselves. I know it's like that. It's because they can spread themselves over a film, and they _can't_ over a living performer. They're up against the performer himself. And they hate it." Mr. May watched her long and dismally. "I _can't_ believe people are like that!--sane people!" he said. "Why, to me the whole joy is in the living personality, the curious _personality_ of the artiste. That's what I enjoy so much." "I know. But that's where you're different from them." "But _am_ I?" "Yes. You're not as up to the mark as they are." "Not up to the mark? What do you mean? Do you mean they are more intelligent?" "No, but they're more modern. You like things which aren't yourself. But they don't. They hate to admire anything that they can't take to themselves. They hate anything that isn't themselves. And that's why they like pictures. It's all themselves to them, all the time." He still puzzled. "You know I don't follow you," he said, a little mocking, as if she were making a fool of herself. "Because you don't know them. You don't know the common people. You don't know how conceited they are." He watched her a long time. "And you think we ought to cut out the variety, and give nothing but pictures, like the Empire?" he said. "I believe it takes best," she said. "And costs less," he answered. "But _then_! It's so dull. Oh my _word_, it's so dull. I don't think I could bear it." "And our pictures aren't good enough," she said. "We should have to get a new machine, and pay for the expensive films. Our pictures do shake, and our films are rather ragged." "But then, _surely_ they're good enough!" he said. That was how matters stood. The Endeavour paid its way, and made just a margin of profit--no more. Spring went on to summer, and then there was a very shadowy margin of profit. But James was not at all daunted. He was waiting now for the trams, and building up hopes since he could not build in bricks and mortar. The navvies were busy in troops along the Knarborough Road, and down Lumley Hill. Alvina became quite used to them. As she went down the hill soon after six o'clock in the evening, she met them trooping home. And some of them she liked. There was an outlawed look about them as they swung along the pavement--some of them; and there was a certain lurking set of the head which rather frightened her because it fascinated her. There was one tall young fellow with a red face and fair hair, who looked as if he had fronted the seas and the arctic sun. He looked at her. They knew each other quite well, in passing. And he would glance at perky Mr. May. Alvina tried to fathom what the young fellow's look meant. She wondered what he thought of Mr. May. She was surprised to hear Mr. May's opinion of the navvy. "_He's_ a handsome young man, now!" exclaimed her companion one evening as the navvies passed. And all three turned round, to find all three turning round. Alvina laughed, and made eyes. At that moment she would cheerfully have gone along with the navvy. She was getting so tired of Mr. May's quiet prance. On the whole, Alvina enjoyed the cinema and the life it brought her. She accepted it. And she became somewhat vulgarized in her bearing. She was _déclassée_: she had lost her class altogether. The other daughters of respectable tradesmen avoided her now, or spoke to her only from a distance. She was supposed to be "carrying on" with Mr. May. Alvina did not care. She rather liked it. She liked being _déclassée_. She liked feeling an outsider. At last she seemed to stand on her own ground. She laughed to herself as she went back and forth from Woodhouse to Lumley, between Manchester House and the Pleasure Palace. She laughed when she saw her father's theatre-notices plastered about. She laughed when she saw his thrilling announcements in the _Woodhouse Weekly_. She laughed when she knew that all the Woodhouse youths recognized her, and looked on her as one of their inferior entertainers. She was off the map: and she liked it. For after all, she got a good deal of fun out of it. There was not only the continual activity. There were the artistes. Every week she met a new set of stars--three or four as a rule. She rehearsed with them on Monday afternoons, and she saw them every evening, and twice a week at matinees. James now gave two performances each evening--and he always had _some_ audience. So that Alvina had opportunity to come into contact with all the odd people of the inferior stage. She found they were very much of a type: a little frowsy, a little flea-bitten as a rule, indifferent to ordinary morality, and philosophical even if irritable. They were often very irritable. And they had always a certain fund of callous philosophy. Alvina did not _like_ them--you were not supposed, really, to get deeply emotional over them. But she found it amusing to see them all and know them all. It was so different from Woodhouse, where everything was priced and ticketed. These people were nomads. They didn't care a straw who you were or who you weren't. They had a most irritable professional vanity, and that was all. It was most odd to watch them. They weren't very squeamish. If the young gentlemen liked to peep round the curtain when the young lady was in her knickers: oh, well, she rather roundly told them off, perhaps, but nobody minded. The fact that ladies wore knickers and black silk stockings thrilled nobody, any more than grease-paint or false moustaches thrilled. It was all part of the stock-in-trade. As for immorality--well, what did it amount to? Not a great deal. Most of the men cared far more about a drop of whiskey than about any more carnal vice, and most of the girls were good pals with each other, men were only there to act with: even if the act was a private love-farce of an improper description. What's the odds? You couldn't get excited about it: not as a rule. Mr. May usually took rooms for the artistes in a house down in Lumley. When any one particular was coming, he would go to a rather better-class widow in Woodhouse. He never let Alvina take any part in the making of these arrangements, except with the widow in Woodhouse, who had long ago been a servant at Manchester House, and even now came in to do cleaning. Odd, eccentric people they were, these entertainers. Most of them had a streak of imagination, and most of them drank. Most of them were middle-aged. Most of them had an abstracted manner; in ordinary life, they seemed left aside, somehow. Odd, extraneous creatures, often a little depressed, feeling life slip away from them. The cinema was killing them. Alvina had quite a serious flirtation with a man who played a flute and piccolo. He was about fifty years old, still handsome, and growing stout. When sober, he was completely reserved. When rather drunk, he talked charmingly and amusingly--oh, most charmingly. Alvina quite loved him. But alas, _how_ he drank! But what a charm he had! He went, and she saw him no more. The usual rather American-looking, clean-shaven, slightly pasty young man left Alvina quite cold, though he had an amiable and truly chivalrous _galanterie_. He was quite likeable. But so unattractive. Alvina was more fascinated by the odd fish: like the lady who did marvellous things with six ferrets, or the Jap who was tattooed all over, and had the most amazing strong wrists, so that he could throw down any collier, with one turn of the hand. Queer cuts these!--but just a little bit beyond her. She watched them rather from a distance. She wished she could jump across the distance. Particularly with the Jap, who was almost quite naked, but clothed with the most exquisite tattooing. Never would she forget the eagle that flew with terrible spread wings between his shoulders, or the strange mazy pattern that netted the roundness of his buttocks. He was not very large, but nicely shaped, and with no hair on his smooth, tattooed body. He was almost blue in colour--that is, his tattooing was blue, with pickings of brilliant vermilion: as for instance round the nipples, and in a strange red serpent's-jaws over the navel. A serpent went round his loins and haunches. He told her how many times he had had blood-poisoning, during the process of his tattooing. He was a queer, black-eyed creature, with a look of silence and toad-like lewdness. He frightened her. But when he was dressed in common clothes, and was just a cheap, shoddy-looking European Jap, he was more frightening still. For his face--he was not tattooed above a certain ring low on his neck--was yellow and flat and basking with one eye open, like some age-old serpent. She felt he was smiling horribly all the time: lewd, unthinkable. A strange sight he was in Woodhouse, on a sunny morning; a shabby-looking bit of riff-raff of the East, rather down at the heel. Who could have imagined the terrible eagle of his shoulders, the serpent of his loins, his supple, magic skin? The summer passed again, and autumn. Winter was a better time for James Houghton. The trams, moreover, would begin to run in January. He wanted to arrange a good program for the week when the trams started. A long time ahead, Mr. May prepared it. The one item was the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe. The Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe consisted of five persons, Madame Rochard and four young men. They were a strictly Red Indian troupe. But one of the young men, the German Swiss, was a famous yodeller, and another, the French Swiss, was a good comic with a French accent, whilst Madame and the German did a screaming two-person farce. Their great turn, of course, was the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Red Indian scene. The Natcha-Kee-Tawaras were due in the third week in January, arriving from the Potteries on the Sunday evening. When Alvina came in from Chapel that Sunday evening, she found her widow, Mrs. Rollings, seated in the living room talking with James, who had an anxious look. Since opening the Pleasure Palace James was less regular at Chapel. And moreover, he was getting old and shaky, and Sunday was the one evening he might spend in peace. Add that on this particular black Sunday night it was sleeting dismally outside, and James had already a bit of a cough, and we shall see that he did right to stay at home. Mrs. Rollings sat nursing a bottle. She was to go to the chemist for some cough-cure, because Madame had got a bad cold. The chemist was gone to Chapel--he wouldn't open till eight. Madame and the four young men had arrived at about six. Madame, said Mrs. Rollings, was a little fat woman, and she was complaining all the time that she had got a cold on her chest, laying her hand on her chest and trying her breathing and going "He-e-e-er! Herr!" to see if she could breathe properly. She, Mrs. Rollings, had suggested that Madame should put her feet in hot mustard and water, but Madame said she must have something to clear her chest. The four young men were four nice civil young fellows. They evidently liked Madame. Madame had insisted on cooking the chops for the young men. She herself had eaten one, but she laid her hand on her chest when she swallowed. One of the young men had gone out to get her some brandy, and he had come back with half-a-dozen large bottles of Bass as well. Mr. Houghton was very much concerned over Madame's cold. He asked the same questions again and again, to try and make sure how bad it was. But Mrs. Rollings didn't seem quite to know. James wrinkled his brow. Supposing Madame could not take her part! He was most anxious. "Do you think you might go across with Mrs. Rollings and see how this woman is, Alvina?" he said to his daughter. "I should think you'll never turn Alvina out on such a night," said Miss Pinnegar. "And besides, it isn't right. Where is Mr. May? It's his business to go." "Oh!" returned Alvina. "_I_ don't mind going. Wait a minute, I'll see if we haven't got some of those pastilles for burning. If it's very bad, I can make one of those plasters mother used." And she ran upstairs. She was curious to see what Madame and her four young men were like. With Mrs. Rollings she called at the chemist's back door, and then they hurried through the sleet to the widow's dwelling. It was not far. As they went up the entry they heard the sound of voices. But in the kitchen all was quiet. The voices came from the front room. Mrs. Rollings tapped. "Come in!" said a rather sharp voice. Alvina entered on the widow's heels. "I've brought you the cough stuff," said the widow. "And Miss Huff'n's come as well, to see how you was." Four young men were sitting round the table in their shirt-sleeves, with bottles of Bass. There was much cigarette smoke. By the fire, which was burning brightly, sat a plump, pale woman with dark bright eyes and finely-drawn eyebrows: she might be any age between forty and fifty. There were grey threads in her tidy black hair. She was neatly dressed in a well-made black dress with a small lace collar. There was a slight look of self-commiseration on her face. She had a cigarette between her drooped fingers. She rose as if with difficulty, and held out her plump hand, on which four or five rings showed. She had dropped the cigarette unnoticed into the hearth. "How do you do," she said. "I didn't catch your name." Madame's voice was a little plaintive and plangent now, like a bronze reed mournfully vibrating. "Alvina Houghton," said Alvina. "Daughter of him as owns the thee-etter where you're goin' to act," interposed the widow. "Oh yes! Yes! I see. Miss Houghton. I didn't know how it was said. Huff-ton--yes? Miss Houghton. I've got a bad cold on my chest--" laying her plump hand with the rings on her plump bosom. "But let me introduce you to my young men--" A wave of the plump hand, whose forefinger was very slightly cigarette-stained, towards the table. The four young men had risen, and stood looking at Alvina and Madame. The room was small, rather bare, with horse-hair and white-crochet antimacassars and a linoleum floor. The table also was covered with a brightly-patterned American oil-cloth, shiny but clean. A naked gas-jet hung over it. For furniture, there were just chairs, arm-chairs, table, and a horse-hair antimacassar-ed sofa. Yet the little room seemed very full--full of people, young men with smart waistcoats and ties, but without coats. "That is Max," said Madame. "I shall tell you only their names, and not their family names, because that is easier for you--" In the meantime Max had bowed. He was a tall Swiss with almond eyes and a flattish face and a rather stiff, ramrod figure. "And that is Louis--" Louis bowed gracefully. He was a Swiss Frenchman, moderately tall, with prominent cheekbones and a wing of glossy black hair falling on his temple. "And that is Géoffroi--Geoffrey--" Geoffrey made his bow--a broad-shouldered, watchful, taciturn man from Alpine France. "And that is Francesco--Frank--" Francesco gave a faint curl of his lip, half smile, as he saluted her involuntarily in a military fashion. He was dark, rather tall and loose, with yellow-tawny eyes. He was an Italian from the south. Madame gave another look at him. "He doesn't like his English name of Frank. You will see, he pulls a face. No, he doesn't like it. We call him Ciccio also--" But Ciccio was dropping his head sheepishly, with the same faint smile on his face, half grimace, and stooping to his chair, wanting to sit down. "These are my family of young men," said Madame. "We are drawn from three races, though only Ciccio is not of our mountains. Will you please to sit down." They all took their chairs. There was a pause. "My young men drink a little beer, after their horrible journey. As a rule, I do not like them to drink. But tonight they have a little beer. I do not take any myself, because I am afraid of inflaming myself." She laid her hand on her breast, and took long, uneasy breaths. "I feel it. I feel it _here_." She patted her breast. "It makes me afraid for tomorrow. Will you perhaps take a glass of beer? Ciccio, ask for another glass--" Ciccio, at the end of the table, did not rise, but looked round at Alvina as if he presumed there would be no need for him to move. The odd, supercilious curl of the lip persisted. Madame glared at him. But he turned the handsome side of his cheek towards her, with the faintest flicker of a sneer. "No, thank you. I never take beer," said Alvina hurriedly. "No? Never? Oh!" Madame folded her hands, but her black eyes still darted venom at Ciccio. The rest of the young men fingered their glasses and put their cigarettes to their lips and blew the smoke down their noses, uncomfortably. Madame closed her eyes and leaned back a moment. Then her face looked transparent and pallid, there were dark rings under her eyes, the beautifully-brushed hair shone dark like black glass above her ears. She was obviously unwell. The young men looked at her, and muttered to one another. "I'm afraid your cold is rather bad," said Alvina. "Will you let me take your temperature?" Madame started and looked frightened. "Oh, I don't think you should trouble to do that," she said. Max, the tall, highly-coloured Swiss, turned to her, saying: "Yes, you must have your temperature taken, and then we s'll know, shan't we. I had a hundred and five when we were in Redruth." Alvina had taken the thermometer from her pocket. Ciccio meanwhile muttered something in French--evidently something rude--meant for Max. "What shall I do if I can't work tomorrow!" moaned Madame, seeing Alvina hold up the thermometer towards the light. "Max, what shall we do?" "You will stay in bed, and we must do the White Prisoner scene," said Max, rather staccato and official. Ciccio curled his lip and put his head aside. Alvina went across to Madame with the thermometer. Madame lifted her plump hand and fended off Alvina, while she made her last declaration: "Never--never have I missed my work, for a single day, for ten years. Never. If I am going to lie abandoned, I had better die at once." "Lie abandoned!" said Max. "You know you won't do no such thing. What are you talking about?" "Take the thermometer," said Geoffrey roughly, but with feeling. "Tomorrow, see, you will be well. Quite certain!" said Louis. Madame mournfully shook her head, opened her mouth, and sat back with closed eyes and the stump of the thermometer comically protruding from a corner of her lips. Meanwhile Alvina took her plump white wrist and felt her pulse. "We can practise--" began Geoffrey. "Sh!" said Max, holding up his finger and looking anxiously at Alvina and Madame, who still leaned back with the stump of the thermometer jauntily perking up from her pursed mouth, while her face was rather ghastly. Max and Louis watched anxiously. Geoffrey sat blowing the smoke down his nose, while Ciccio callously lit another cigarette, striking a match on his boot-heel and puffing from under the tip of his rather long nose. Then he took the cigarette from his mouth, turned his head, slowly spat on the floor, and rubbed his foot on his spit. Max flapped his eyelids and looked all disdain, murmuring something about "ein schmutziges italienisches Volk," whilst Louis, refusing either to see or to hear, framed the word "chien" on his lips. Then quick as lightning both turned their attention again to Madame. Her temperature was a hundred and two. "You'd better go to bed," said Alvina. "Have you eaten anything?" "One little mouthful," said Madame plaintively. Max sat looking pale and stricken, Louis had hurried forward to take Madame's hand. He kissed it quickly, then turned aside his head because of the tears in his eyes. Geoffrey gulped beer in large throatfuls, and Ciccio, with his head bent, was watching from under his eyebrows. "I'll run round for the doctor--" said Alvina. "Don't! Don't do that, my dear! Don't you go and do that! I'm likely to a temperature--" "Liable to a temperature," murmured Louis pathetically. "I'll go to bed," said Madame, obediently rising. "Wait a bit. I'll see if there's a fire in the bedroom," said Alvina. "Oh, my dear, you are too good. Open the door for her, Ciccio--" Ciccio reached across at the door, but was too late. Max had hastened to usher Alvina out. Madame sank back in her chair. "Never for ten years," she was wailing. "Quoi faire, ah, quoi faire! Que ferez-vous, mes pauvres, sans votre Kishwégin. Que vais-je faire, mourir dans un tel pays! La bonne demoiselle--la bonne demoiselle--elle a du coeur. Elle pourrait aussi être belle, s'il y avait un peu plus de chair. Max, liebster, schau ich sehr elend aus? Ach, oh jeh, oh jeh!" "Ach nein, Madame, ach nein. Nicht so furchtbar elend," said Max. "Manca il cuore solamente al Ciccio," moaned Madame. "Che natura povera, senza sentimento--niente di bello. Ahimé, che amico, che ragazzo duro, aspero--" "Trova?" said Ciccio, with a curl of the lip. He looked, as he dropped his long, beautiful lashes, as if he might weep for all that, if he were not bound to be misbehaving just now. So Madame moaned in four languages as she posed pallid in her arm-chair. Usually she spoke in French only, with her young men. But this was an extra occasion. "La pauvre Kishwégin!" murmured Madame. "Elle va finir au monde. Elle passe--la pauvre Kishwégin." Kishwégin was Madame's Red Indian name, the name under which she danced her Squaw's fire-dance. Now that she knew she was ill, Madame seemed to become more ill. Her breath came in little pants. She had a pain in her side. A feverish flush seemed to mount her cheek. The young men were all extremely uncomfortable. Louis did not conceal his tears. Only Ciccio kept the thin smile on his lips, and added to Madame's annoyance and pain. Alvina came down to take her to bed. The young men all rose, and kissed Madame's hand as she went out: her poor jewelled hand, that was faintly perfumed with eau de Cologne. She spoke an appropriate good-night, to each of them. "Good-night, my faithful Max, I trust myself to you. Good-night, Louis, the tender heart. Good-night valiant Geoffrey. Ah Ciccio, do not add to the weight of my heart. Be good _braves_, all, be brothers in one accord. One little prayer for poor Kishwégin. Good-night!" After which valediction she slowly climbed the stairs, putting her hand on her knee at each step, with the effort. "No--no," she said to Max, who would have followed to her assistance. "Do not come up. No--no!" Her bedroom was tidy and proper. "Tonight," she moaned, "I shan't be able to see that the boys' rooms are well in order. They are not to be trusted, no. They need an overseeing eye: especially Ciccio; especially Ciccio!" She sank down by the fire and began to undo her dress. "You must let me help you," said Alvina. "You know I have been a nurse." "Ah, you are too kind, too kind, dear young lady. I am a lonely old woman. I am not used to attentions. Best leave me." "Let me help you," said Alvina. "Alas, ahimé! Who would have thought Kishwégin would need help. I danced last night with the boys in the theatre in Leek: and tonight I am put to bed in--what is the name of this place, dear?--It seems I don't remember it." "Woodhouse," said Alvina. "Woodhouse! Woodhouse! Is there not something called Woodlouse? I believe. Ugh, horrible! Why is it horrible?" Alvina quickly undressed the plump, trim little woman. She seemed so soft. Alvina could not imagine how she could be a dancer on the stage, strenuous. But Madame's softness could flash into wild energy, sudden convulsive power, like a cuttle-fish. Alvina brushed out the long black hair, and plaited it lightly. Then she got Madame into bed. "Ah," sighed Madame, "the good bed! The good bed! But cold--it is so cold. Would you hang up my dress, dear, and fold my stockings?" Alvina quickly folded and put aside the dainty underclothing. Queer, dainty woman, was Madame, even to her wonderful threaded black-and-gold garters. "My poor boys--no Kishwégin tomorrow! You don't think I need see a priest, dear? A priest!" said Madame, her teeth chattering. "Priest! Oh no! You'll be better when we can get you warm. I think it's only a chill. Mrs. Rollings is warming a blanket--" Alvina ran downstairs. Max opened the sitting-room door and stood watching at the sound of footsteps. His rather bony fists were clenched beneath his loose shirt-cuffs, his eyebrows tragically lifted. "Is she much ill?" he asked. "I don't know. But I don't think so. Do you mind heating the blanket while Mrs. Rollings makes thin gruel?" Max and Louis stood heating blankets. Louis' trousers were cut rather tight at the waist, and gave him a female look. Max was straight and stiff. Mrs. Rollings asked Geoffrey to fill the coal-scuttles and carry one upstairs. Geoffrey obediently went out with a lantern to the coal-shed. Afterwards he was to carry up the horse-hair arm-chair. "I must go home for some things," said Alvina to Ciccio. "Will you come and carry them for me?" He started up, and with one movement threw away his cigarette. He did not look at Alvina. His beautiful lashes seemed to screen his eyes. He was fairly tall, but loosely built for an Italian, with slightly sloping shoulders. Alvina noticed the brown, slender Mediterranean hand, as he put his fingers to his lips. It was a hand such as she did not know, prehensile and tender and dusky. With an odd graceful slouch he went into the passage and reached for his coat. He did not say a word, but held aloof as he walked with Alvina. "I'm sorry for Madame," said Alvina, as she hurried rather breathless through the night. "She does think for you men." But Ciccio vouchsafed no answer, and walked with his hands in the pockets of his water-proof, wincing from the weather. "I'm afraid she will never be able to dance tomorrow," said Alvina. "You think she won't be able?" he said. "I'm almost sure she won't." After which he said nothing, and Alvina also kept silence till they came to the black dark passage and encumbered yard at the back of the house. "I don't think you can see at all," she said. "It's this way." She groped for him in the dark, and met his groping hand. "This way," she said. It was curious how light his fingers were in their clasp--almost like a child's touch. So they came under the light from the window of the sitting-room. Alvina hurried indoors, and the young man followed. "I shall have to stay with Madame tonight," she explained hurriedly. "She's feverish, but she may throw it off if we can get her into a sweat." And Alvina ran upstairs collecting things necessary. Ciccio stood back near the door, and answered all Miss Pinnegar's entreaties to come to the fire with a shake of the head and a slight smile of the lips, bashful and stupid. "But do come and warm yourself before you go out again," said Miss Pinnegar, looking at the man as he drooped his head in the distance. He still shook dissent, but opened his mouth at last. "It makes it colder after," he said, showing his teeth in a slight, stupid smile. "Oh well, if you think so," said Miss Pinnegar, nettled. She couldn't make heads or tails of him, and didn't try. When they got back, Madame was light-headed, and talking excitedly of her dance, her young men. The three young men were terrified. They had got the blankets scorching hot. Alvina smeared the plasters and applied them to Madame's side, where the pain was. What a white-skinned, soft, plump child she seemed! Her pain meant a touch of pleurisy, for sure. The men hovered outside the door. Alvina wrapped the poor patient in the hot blankets, got a few spoonfuls of hot gruel and whiskey down her throat, fastened her down in bed, lowered the light and banished the men from the stairs. Then she sat down to watch. Madame chafed, moaned, murmured feverishly. Alvina soothed her, and put her hands in bed. And at last the poor dear became quiet. Her brow was faintly moist. She fell into a quiet sleep, perspiring freely. Alvina watched her still, soothed her when she suddenly started and began to break out of the bedclothes, quieted her, pressed her gently, firmly down, folded her tight and made her submit to the perspiration against which, in convulsive starts, she fought and strove, crying that she was suffocating, she was too hot, too hot. "Lie still, lie still," said Alvina. "You must keep warm." Poor Madame moaned. How she hated seething in the bath of her own perspiration. Her wilful nature rebelled strongly. She would have thrown aside her coverings and gasped into the cold air, if Alvina had not pressed her down with that soft, inevitable pressure. So the hours passed, till about one o'clock, when the perspiration became less profuse, and the patient was really better, really quieter. Then Alvina went downstairs for a moment. She saw the light still burning in the front room. Tapping, she entered. There sat Max by the fire, a picture of misery, with Louis opposite him, nodding asleep after his tears. On the sofa Geoffrey snored lightly, while Ciccio sat with his head on the table, his arms spread out, dead asleep. Again she noticed the tender, dusky Mediterranean hands, the slender wrists, slender for a man naturally loose and muscular. "Haven't you gone to bed?" whispered Alvina. "Why?" Louis started awake. Max, the only stubborn watcher, shook his head lugubriously. "But she's better," whispered Alvina. "She's perspired. She's better. She's sleeping naturally." Max stared with round, sleep-whitened, owlish eyes, pessimistic and sceptical: "Yes," persisted Alvina. "Come and look at her. But don't wake her, whatever you do." Max took off his slippers and rose to his tall height. Louis, like a scared chicken, followed. Each man held his slippers in his hand. They noiselessly entered and peeped stealthily over the heaped bedclothes. Madame was lying, looking a little flushed and very girlish, sleeping lightly, with a strand of black hair stuck to her cheek, and her lips lightly parted. Max watched her for some moments. Then suddenly he straightened himself, pushed back his brown hair that was brushed up in the German fashion, and crossed himself, dropping his knee as before an altar; crossed himself and dropped his knee once more; and then a third time crossed himself and inclined before the altar. Then he straightened himself again, and turned aside. Louis also crossed himself. His tears burst out. He bowed and took the edge of a blanket to his lips, kissing it reverently. Then he covered his face with his hand. Meanwhile Madame slept lightly and innocently on. Alvina turned to go. Max silently followed, leading Louis by the arm. When they got downstairs, Max and Louis threw themselves in each other's arms, and kissed each other on either cheek, gravely, in Continental fashion. "She is better," said Max gravely, in French. "Thanks to God," replied Louis. Alvina witnessed all this with some amazement. The men did not heed her. Max went over and shook Geoffrey, Louis put his hand on Ciccio's shoulder. The sleepers were difficult to wake. The wakers shook the sleeping, but in vain. At last Geoffrey began to stir. But in vain Louis lifted Ciccio's shoulders from the table. The head and the hands dropped inert. The long black lashes lay motionless, the rather long, fine Greek nose drew the same light breaths, the mouth remained shut. Strange fine black hair, he had, close as fur, animal, and naked, frail-seeming, tawny hands. There was a silver ring on one hand. Alvina suddenly seized one of the inert hands that slid on the table-cloth as Louis shook the young man's shoulders. Tight she pressed the hand. Ciccio opened his tawny-yellowish eyes, that seemed to have been put in with a dirty finger, as the saying goes, owing to the sootiness of the lashes and brows. He was quite drunk with his first sleep, and saw nothing. "Wake up," said Alvina, laughing, pressing his hand again. He lifted his head once more, suddenly clasped her hand, his eyes came to consciousness, his hand relaxed, he recognized her, and he sat back in his chair, turning his face aside and lowering his lashes. "Get up, great beast," Louis was saying softly in French, pushing him as ox-drivers sometimes push their oxen. Ciccio staggered to his feet. "She is better," they told him. "We are going to bed." They took their candles and trooped off upstairs, each one bowing to Alvina as he passed. Max solemnly, Louis gallant, the other two dumb and sleepy. They occupied the two attic chambers. Alvina carried up the loose bed from the sofa, and slept on the floor before the fire in Madame's room. Madame slept well and long, rousing and stirring and settling off again. It was eight o'clock before she asked her first question. Alvina was already up. "Oh--alors--Then I am better, I am quite well. I can dance today." "I don't think today," said Alvina. "But perhaps tomorrow." "No, today," said Madame. "I can dance today, because I am quite well. I am Kishwégin." "You are better. But you must lie still today. Yes, really--you will find you are weak when you try to stand." Madame watched Alvina's thin face with sullen eyes. "You are an Englishwoman, severe and materialist," she said. Alvina started and looked round at her with wide blue eyes. "Why?" she said. There was a wan, pathetic look about her, a sort of heroism which Madame detested, but which now she found touching. "Come!" said Madame, stretching out her plump jewelled hand. "Come, I am an ungrateful woman. Come, they are not good for you, the people, I see it. Come to me." Alvina went slowly to Madame, and took the outstretched hand. Madame kissed her hand, then drew her down and kissed her on either cheek, gravely, as the young men had kissed each other. "You have been good to Kishwégin, and Kishwégin has a heart that remembers. There, Miss Houghton, I shall do what you tell me. Kishwégin obeys you." And Madame patted Alvina's hand and nodded her head sagely. "Shall I take your temperature?" said Alvina. "Yes, my dear, you shall. You shall bid me, and I shall obey." So Madame lay back on her pillow, submissively pursing the thermometer between her lips and watching Alvina with black eyes. "It's all right," said Alvina, as she looked at the thermometer. "Normal." "Normal!" re-echoed Madame's rather guttural voice. "Good! Well, then when shall I dance?" Alvina turned and looked at her. "I think, truly," said Alvina, "it shouldn't be before Thursday or Friday." "Thursday!" repeated Madame. "You say Thursday?" There was a note of strong rebellion in her voice. "You'll be so weak. You've only just escaped pleurisy. I can only say what I truly think, can't I?" "Ah, you Englishwomen," said Madame, watching with black eyes. "I think you like to have your own way. In all things, to have your own way. And over all people. You are so good, to have your own way. Yes, you good Englishwomen. Thursday. Very well, it shall be Thursday. Till Thursday, then, Kishwégin does not exist." And she subsided, already rather weak, upon her pillow again. When she had taken her tea and was washed and her room was tidied, she summoned the young men. Alvina had warned Max that she wanted Madame to be kept as quiet as possible this day. As soon as the first of the four appeared, in his shirt-sleeves and his slippers, in the doorway, Madame said: "Ah, there you are, my young men! Come in! Come in! It is not Kishwégin addresses you. Kishwégin does not exist till Thursday, as the English demoiselle makes it." She held out her hand, faintly perfumed with eau de Cologne--the whole room smelled of eau de Cologne--and Max stooped his brittle spine and kissed it. She touched his cheek gently with her other hand. "My faithful Max, my support." Louis came smiling with a bunch of violets and pinky anemones. He laid them down on the bed before her, and took her hand, bowing and kissing it reverently. "You are better, dear Madame?" he said, smiling long at her. "Better, yes, gentle Louis. And better for thy flowers, chivalric heart." She put the violets and anemones to her face with both hands, and then gently laid them aside to extend her hand to Geoffrey. "The good Geoffrey will do his best, while there is no Kishwégin?" she said as he stooped to her salute. "Bien sûr, Madame." "Ciccio, a button off thy shirt-cuff. Where is my needle?" She looked round the room as Ciccio kissed her hand. "Did you want anything?" said Alvina, who had not followed the French. "My needle, to sew on this button. It is there, in the silk bag." "I will do it," said Alvina. "Thank you." While Alvina sewed on the button, Madame spoke to her young men, principally to Max. They were to obey Max, she said, for he was their eldest brother. This afternoon they would practise well the scene of the White Prisoner. Very carefully they must practise, and they must find some one who would play the young squaw--for in this scene she had practically nothing to do, the young squaw, but just sit and stand. Miss Houghton--but ah, Miss Houghton must play the piano, she could not take the part of the young squaw. Some other then. While the interview was going on, Mr. May arrived, full of concern. "Shan't we have the procession!" he cried. "Ah, the procession!" cried Madame. The Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe upon request would signalize its entry into any town by a procession. The young men were dressed as Indian _braves_, and headed by Kishwégin they rode on horseback through the main streets. Ciccio, who was the crack horseman, having served a very well-known horsey Marchese in an Italian cavalry regiment, did a bit of show riding. Mr. May was very keen on the procession. He had the horses in readiness. The morning was faintly sunny, after the sleet and bad weather. And now he arrived to find Madame in bed and the young men holding council with her. "How _very_ unfortunate!" cried Mr. May. "How _very_ unfortunate!" "Dreadful! Dreadful!" wailed Madame from the bed. "But can't we do _anything_?" "Yes--you can do the White Prisoner scene--the young men can do that, if you find a dummy squaw. Ah, I think I must get up after all." Alvina saw the look of fret and exhaustion in Madame's face. "Won't you all go downstairs now?" said Alvina. "Mr. Max knows what you must do." And she shooed the five men out of the bedroom. "I _must_ get up. I won't dance. I will be a dummy. But I must be there. It is too dre-eadful, too dre-eadful!" wailed Madame. "Don't take any notice of them. They can manage by themselves. Men are such babies. Let them carry it through by themselves." "Children--they are all children!" wailed Madame. "All children! And so, what will they do without their old _gouvernante_? My poor _braves_, what will they do without Kishwégin? It is too dreadful, too dre-eadful, yes. The poor Mr. May--so _disappointed_." "Then let him _be_ disappointed," cried Alvina, as she forcibly tucked up Madame and made her lie still. "You are hard! You are a hard Englishwoman. All alike. All alike!" Madame subsided fretfully and weakly. Alvina moved softly about. And in a few minutes Madame was sleeping again. Alvina went downstairs. Mr. May was listening to Max, who was telling in German all about the White Prisoner scene. Mr. May had spent his boyhood in a German school. He cocked his head on one side, and, laying his hand on Max's arm, entertained him in odd German. The others were silent. Ciccio made no pretence of listening, but smoked and stared at his own feet. Louis and Geoffrey half understood, so Louis nodded with a look of deep comprehension, whilst Geoffrey uttered short, snappy "Ja!--Ja!--Doch!--Eben!" rather irrelevant. "I'll be the squaw," cried Mr. May in English, breaking off and turning round to the company. He perked up his head in an odd, parrot-like fashion. "_I'll_ be the squaw! What's her name? Kishwégin? I'll be Kishwégin." And he bridled and beamed self-consciously. The two tall Swiss looked down on him, faintly smiling. Ciccio, sitting with his arms on his knees on the sofa, screwed round his head and watched the phenomenon of Mr. May with inscrutable, expressionless attention. "Let us go," said Mr. May, bubbling with new importance. "Let us go and rehearse _this morning_, and let us do the procession this afternoon, when the colliers are just coming home. There! What? Isn't that exactly the idea? Well! Will you be ready at once, _now_?" He looked excitedly at the young men. They nodded with slow gravity, as if they were already _braves_. And they turned to put on their boots. Soon they were all trooping down to Lumley, Mr. May prancing like a little circus-pony beside Alvina, the four young men rolling ahead. "What do you think of it?" cried Mr. May. "We've saved the situation--what? Don't you think so? Don't you think we can congratulate ourselves." They found Mr. Houghton fussing about in the theatre. He was on tenterhooks of agitation, knowing Madame was ill. Max gave a brilliant display of yodelling. "But I must _explain_ to them," cried Mr. May. "I must _explain_ to them what yodel means." And turning to the empty theatre, he began, stretching forth his hand. "In the high Alps of Switzerland, where eternal snows and glaciers reign over luscious meadows full of flowers, if you should chance to awaken, as I have done, in some lonely wooden farm amid the mountain pastures, you--er--you--let me see--if you--no--if you should chance to _spend the night_ in some lonely wooden farm, amid the upland pastures, dawn will awake you with a wild, inhuman song, you will open your eyes to the first gleam of icy, eternal sunbeams, your ears will be ringing with weird singing, that has no words and no meaning, but sounds as if some wild and icy god were warbling to himself as he wandered among the peaks of dawn. You look forth across the flowers to the blue snow, and you see, far off, a small figure of a man moving among the grass. It is a peasant singing his mountain song, warbling like some creature that lifted up its voice on the edge of the eternal snows, before the human race began--" During this oration James Houghton sat with his chin in his hand, devoured with bitter jealousy, measuring Mr. May's eloquence. And then he started, as Max, tall and handsome now in Tyrolese costume, white shirt and green, square braces, short trousers of chamois leather stitched with green and red, firm-planted naked knees, naked ankles and heavy shoes, warbled his native Yodel strains, a piercing and disturbing sound. He was flushed, erect, keen tempered and fierce and mountainous. There was a fierce, icy passion in the man. Alvina began to understand Madame's subjection to him. Louis and Geoffrey did a farce dialogue, two foreigners at the same moment spying a purse in the street, struggling with each other and protesting they wanted to take it to the policeman, Ciccio, who stood solid and ridiculous. Mr. Houghton nodded slowly and gravely, as if to give his measured approval. Then all retired to dress for the great scene. Alvina practised the music Madame carried with her. If Madame found a good pianist, she welcomed the accompaniment: if not, she dispensed with it. "Am I all right?" said a smirking voice. And there was Kishwégin, dusky, coy, with long black hair and a short chamois dress, gaiters and moccasins and bare arms: _so_ coy, and _so_ smirking. Alvina burst out laughing. "But shan't I do?" protested Mr. May, hurt. "Yes, you're wonderful," said Alvina, choking. "But I _must_ laugh." "But why? Tell me why?" asked Mr. May anxiously. "Is it my _appearance_ you laugh at, or is it only _me_? If it's me I don't mind. But if it's my appearance, tell me so." Here an appalling figure of Ciccio in war-paint strolled on to the stage. He was naked to the waist, wore scalp-fringed trousers, was dusky-red-skinned, had long black hair and eagle's feathers--only two feathers--and a face wonderfully and terribly painted with white, red, yellow, and black lines. He was evidently pleased with himself. His curious soft slouch, and curious way of lifting his lip from his white teeth, in a sort of smile, was very convincing. "You haven't got the girdle," he said, touching Mr. May's plump waist--"and some flowers in your hair." Mr. May here gave a sharp cry and a jump. A bear on its hind legs, slow, shambling, rolling its loose shoulders, was stretching a paw towards him. The bear dropped heavily on four paws again, and a laugh came from its muzzle. "You won't have to dance," said Geoffrey out of the bear. "Come and put in the flowers," said Mr. May anxiously, to Alvina. In the dressing-room, the dividing-curtain was drawn. Max, in deerskin trousers but with unpainted torso looked very white and strange as he put the last touches of war-paint on Louis' face. He glanced round at Alvina, then went on with his work. There was a sort of nobility about his erect white form and stiffly-carried head, the semi-luminous brown hair. He seemed curiously superior. Alvina adjusted the maidenly Mr. May. Louis arose, a _brave_ like Ciccio, in war-paint even more hideous. Max slipped on a tattered hunting-shirt and cartridge belt. His face was a little darkened. He was the white prisoner. They arranged the scenery, while Alvina watched. It was soon done. A back cloth of tree-trunks and dark forest: a wigwam, a fire, and a cradle hanging from a pole. As they worked, Alvina tried in vain to dissociate the two _braves_ from their war-paint. The lines were drawn so cleverly that the grimace of ferocity was fixed and horrible, so that even in the quiet work of scene-shifting Louis' stiffish, female grace seemed full of latent cruelty, whilst Ciccio's more muscular slouch made her feel she would not trust him for one single moment. Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization. The scene had its beauty. It began with Kishwégin alone at the door of the wigwam, cooking, listening, giving an occasional push to the hanging cradle, and, if only Madame were taking the part, crooning an Indian cradle-song. Enter the _brave_ Louis with his white prisoner, Max, who has his hands bound to his side. Kishwégin gravely salutes her husband--the bound prisoner is seated by the fire--Kishwégin serves food, and asks permission to feed the prisoner. The _brave_ Louis, hearing a sound, starts up with his bow and arrow. There is a dumb scene of sympathy between Kishwégin and the prisoner--the prisoner wants his bonds cut. Re-enter the _brave_ Louis--he is angry with Kishwégin--enter the _brave_ Ciccio hauling a bear, apparently dead. Kishwégin examines the bear, Ciccio examines the prisoner. Ciccio tortures the prisoner, makes him stand, makes him caper unwillingly. Kishwégin swings the cradle. The prisoner is tripped up--falls, and cannot rise. He lies near the fallen bear. Kishwégin carries food to Ciccio. The two _braves_ converse in dumb show, Kishwégin swings the cradle and croons. The men rise once more and bend over the prisoner. As they do so, there is a muffled roar. The bear is sitting up. Louis swings round, and at the same moment the bear strikes him down. Ciccio springs forward and stabs the bear, then closes with it. Kishwégin runs and cuts the prisoner's bonds. He rises, and stands trying to lift his numbed and powerless arms, while the bear slowly crushes Ciccio, and Kishwégin kneels over her husband. The bear drops Ciccio lifeless, and turns to Kishwégin. At that moment Max manages to kill the bear--he takes Kishwégin by the hand and kneels with her beside the dead Louis. It was wonderful how well the men played their different parts. But Mr. May was a little too frisky as Kishwégin. However, it would do. Ciccio got dressed as soon as possible, to go and look at the horses hired for the afternoon procession. Alvina accompanied him, Mr. May and the others were busy. "You know I think it's quite wonderful, your scene," she said to Ciccio. He turned and looked down at her. His yellow, dusky-set eyes rested on her good-naturedly, without seeing her, his lip curled in a self-conscious, contemptuous sort of smile. "Not without Madame," he said, with the slow, half-sneering, stupid smile. "Without Madame--" he lifted his shoulders and spread his hands and tilted his brows--"fool's play, you know." "No," said Alvina. "I think Mr. May is good, considering. What does Madame _do_?" she asked a little jealously. "Do?" He looked down at her with the same long, half-sardonic look of his yellow eyes, like a cat looking casually at a bird which flutters past. And again he made his shrugging motion. "She does it all, really. The others--they are nothing--what they are Madame has made them. And now they think they've done it all, you see. You see, that's it." "But how has Madame made it all? Thought it out, you mean?" "Thought it out, yes. And then _done_ it. You should see her dance--ah! You should see her dance round the bear, when I bring him in! Ah, a beautiful thing, you know. She claps her hand--" And Ciccio stood still in the street, with his hat cocked a little on one side, rather common-looking, and he smiled along his fine nose at Alvina, and he clapped his hands lightly, and he tilted his eyebrows and his eyelids as if facially he were imitating a dance, and all the time his lips smiled stupidly. As he gave a little assertive shake of his head, finishing, there came a great yell of laughter from the opposite pavement, where a gang of pottery lasses, in aprons all spattered with grey clay, and hair and boots and skin spattered with pallid spots, had stood to watch. The girls opposite shrieked again, for all the world like a gang of grey baboons. Ciccio turned round and looked at them with a sneer along his nose. They yelled the louder. And he was horribly uncomfortable, walking there beside Alvina with his rather small and effeminately-shod feet. "How stupid they are," said Alvina. "I've got used to them." "They should be--" he lifted his hand with a sharp, vicious movement--"_smacked_," he concluded, lowering his hand again. "Who is going to do it?" said Alvina. He gave a Neapolitan grimace, and twiddled the fingers of one hand outspread in the air, as if to say: "There you are! You've got to thank the fools who've failed to do it." "Why do you all love Madame so much?" Alvina asked. "How, love?" he said, making a little grimace. "We like her--we love her--as if she were a mother. You say _love_--" He raised his shoulders slightly, with a shrug. And all the time he looked down at Alvina from under his dusky eyelashes, as if watching her sideways, and his mouth had the peculiar, stupid, self-conscious, half-jeering smile. Alvina was a little bit annoyed. But she felt that a great instinctive good-naturedness came out of him, he was self-conscious and constrained, knowing she did not follow his language of gesture. For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them. But certainly he was stupid, in her sense of the word. She could hear Mr. May's verdict of him: "Like a child, you know, just as charming and just as tiresome and just as stupid." "Where is your home?" she asked him. "In Italy." She felt a fool. "Which part?" she insisted. "Naples," he said, looking down at her sideways, searchingly. "It must be lovely," she said. "Ha--!" He threw his head on one side and spread out his hands, as if to say--"What do you want, if you don't find Naples lovely." "I should like to see it. But I shouldn't like to die," she said. "What?" "They say 'See Naples and die,'" she laughed. He opened his mouth, and understood. Then he smiled at her directly. "You know what that means?" he said cutely. "It means see Naples and die afterwards. Don't die _before_ you've seen it." He smiled with a knowing smile. "I see! I see!" she cried. "I never thought of that." He was pleased with her surprise and amusement. "Ah Naples!" he said. "She is lovely--" He spread his hand across the air in front of him--"The sea--and Posilippo--and Sorrento--and Capri--Ah-h! You've never been out of England?" "No," she said. "I should love to go." He looked down into her eyes. It was his instinct to say at once he would take her. "You've seen nothing--nothing," he said to her. "But if Naples is so lovely, how could you leave it?" she asked. "What?" She repeated her question. For answer, he looked at her, held out his hand, and rubbing the ball of his thumb across the tips of his fingers, said, with a fine, handsome smile: "Pennies! Money! You can't earn money in Naples. Ah, Naples is beautiful, but she is poor. You live in the sun, and you earn fourteen, fifteen pence a day--" "Not enough," she said. He put his head on one side and tilted his brows, as if to say "What are you to do?" And the smile on his mouth was sad, fine, and charming. There was an indefinable air of sadness or wistfulness about him, something so robust and fragile at the same time, that she was drawn in a strange way. "But you'll go back?" she said. "Where?" "To Italy. To Naples." "Yes, I shall go back to Italy," he said, as if unwilling to commit himself. "But perhaps I shan't go back to Naples." "Never?" "Ah, never! I don't say never. I shall go to Naples, to see my mother's sister. But I shan't go to live--" "Have you a mother and father?" "I? No! I have a brother and two sisters--in America. Parents, none. They are dead." "And you wander about the world--" she said. He looked at her, and made a slight, sad gesture, indifferent also. "But you have Madame for a mother," she said. He made another gesture this time: pressed down the corners of his mouth as if he didn't like it. Then he turned with the slow, fine smile. "Does a man want two mothers? Eh?" he said, as if he posed a conundrum. "I shouldn't think so," laughed Alvina. He glanced at her to see what she meant, what she understood. "My mother is dead, see!" he said. "Frenchwomen--Frenchwomen--they have their babies till they are a hundred--" "What do you mean?" said Alvina, laughing. "A Frenchman is a little man when he's seven years old--and if his mother comes, he is a little baby boy when he's seventy. Do you know that?" "I _didn't_ know it," said Alvina. "But now--you do," he said, lurching round a corner with her. They had come to the stables. Three of the horses were there, including the thoroughbred Ciccio was going to ride. He stood and examined the beasts critically. Then he spoke to them with strange sounds, patted them, stroked them down, felt them, slid his hand down them, over them, under them, and felt their legs. Then, he looked up from stooping there under the horses, with a long, slow look of his yellow eyes, at Alvina. She felt unconsciously flattered. His long, yellow look lingered, holding her eyes. She wondered what he was thinking. Yet he never spoke. He turned again to the horses. They seemed to understand him, to prick up alert. "This is mine," he said, with his hand on the neck of the old thoroughbred. It was a bay with a white blaze. "I think he's nice," she said. "He seems so sensitive." "In England," he answered suddenly, "horses live a long time, because they _don't_ live--never alive--see? In England railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels." He smiled into her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifle nervous as he smiled at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and half-mysterious, derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away from the stable. But a deeper impulse made her smile into his face, as she said to him: "They like you to touch them." "Who?" His eyes kept hers. Curious how _dark_ they seemed, with only a yellow ring of pupil. He was looking right into her, beyond her usual self, impersonal. "The horses," she said. She was afraid of his long, cat-like look. Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature. He seemed to her to be the only passionately good-natured man she had ever seen. She watched him vaguely, with strange vague trust, implicit belief in him. In him--in what? That afternoon the colliers trooping home in the winter afternoon were rejoiced with a spectacle: Kishwégin, in her deerskin, fringed gaiters and fringed frock of deerskin, her long hair down her back, and with marvellous cloths and trappings on her steed, riding astride on a tall white horse, followed by Max in chieftain's robes and chieftain's long head-dress of dyed feathers, then by the others in war-paint and feathers and brilliant Navajo blankets. They carried bows and spears. Ciccio was without his blanket, naked to the waist, in war-paint, and brandishing a long spear. He dashed up from the rear, saluted the chieftain with his arm and his spear on high as he swept past, suddenly drew up his rearing steed, and trotted slowly back again, making his horse perform its paces. He was extraordinarily velvety and alive on horseback. Crowds of excited, shouting children ran chattering along the pavements. The colliers, as they tramped grey and heavy, in an intermittent stream uphill from the low grey west, stood on the pavement in wonder as the cavalcade approached and passed, jingling the silver bells of its trappings, vibrating the wonderful colours of the barred blankets and saddle cloths, the scarlet wool of the accoutrements, the bright tips of feathers. Women shrieked as Ciccio, in his war-paint, wheeled near the pavement. Children screamed and ran. The colliers shouted. Ciccio smiled in his terrifying war-paint, brandished his spear and trotted softly, like a flower on its stem, round to the procession. Miss Pinnegar and Alvina and James Houghton had come round into Knarborough Road to watch. It was a great moment. Looking along the road they saw all the shopkeepers at their doors, the pavements eager. And then, in the distance, the white horse jingling its trappings of scarlet hair and bells, with the dusky Kishwégin sitting on the saddle-blanket of brilliant, lurid stripes, sitting impassive and all dusky above that intermittent flashing of colour: then the chieftain, dark-faced, erect, easy, swathed in a white blanket, with scarlet and black stripes, and all his strange crest of white, tip-dyed feathers swaying down his back: as he came nearer one saw the wolfskin and the brilliant moccasins against the black sides of his horse; Louis and Goeffrey followed, lurid, horrid in the face, wearing blankets with stroke after stroke of blazing colour upon their duskiness, and sitting stern, holding their spears: lastly, Ciccio, on his bay horse with a green seat, flickering hither and thither in the rear, his feathers swaying, his horse sweating, his face ghastlily smiling in its war-paint. So they advanced down the grey pallor of Knarborough Road, in the late wintry afternoon. Somewhere the sun was setting, and far overhead was a flush of orange. "Well I never!" murmured Miss Pinnegar. "Well I never!" The strange savageness of the striped Navajo blankets seemed to her unsettling, advancing down Knarborough Road: she examined Kishwégin curiously. "Can you _believe_ that that's Mr. May--he's exactly like a girl. Well, well--it makes you wonder what is and what isn't. But _aren't_ they good? What? Most striking. Exactly like Indians. You can't believe your eyes. My word what a terrifying race they--" Here she uttered a scream and ran back clutching the wall as Ciccio swept past, brushing her with his horse's tail, and actually swinging his spear so as to touch Alvina and James Houghton lightly with the butt of it. James too started with a cry, the mob at the corner screamed. But Alvina caught the slow, mischievous smile as the painted horror showed his teeth in passing; she was able to flash back an excited laugh. She felt his yellow-tawny eyes linger on her, in that one second, as if negligently. "I call that too much!" Miss Pinnegar was crying, thoroughly upset. "Now that was unnecessary! Why it was enough to scare one to death. Besides, it's dangerous. It ought to be put a stop to. I don't believe in letting these show-people have liberties." The cavalcade was slowly passing, with its uneasy horses and its flare of striped colour and its silent riders. Ciccio was trotting softly back, on his green saddle-cloth, suave as velvet, his dusky, naked torso beautiful. "Eh, you'd think he'd get his death," the women in the crowd were saying. "A proper savage one, that. Makes your blood run cold--" "Ay, an' a man for all that, take's painted face for what's worth. A tidy man, _I_ say." He did not look at Alvina. The faint, mischievous smile uncovered his teeth. He fell in suddenly behind Geoffrey, with a jerk of his steed, calling out to Geoffrey in Italian. It was becoming cold. The cavalcade fell into a trot, Mr. May shaking rather badly. Ciccio halted, rested his lance against a lamp-post, switched his green blanket from beneath him, flung it round him as he sat, and darted off. They had all disappeared over the brow of Lumley Hill, descending. He was gone too. In the wintry twilight the crowd began, lingeringly, to turn away. And in some strange way, it manifested its disapproval of the spectacle: as grown-up men and women, they were a little bit insulted by such a show. It was an anachronism. They wanted a direct appeal to the mind. Miss Pinnegar expressed it. "Well," she said, when she was safely back in Manchester House, with the gas lighted, and as she was pouring the boiling water into the tea-pot, "You may say what you like. It's interesting in a way, just to show what savage Red-Indians were like. But it's childish. It's only childishness. I can't understand, myself, how people can go on liking shows. Nothing happens. It's not like the cinema, where you see it all and take it all in at once; you _know_ everything at a glance. You don't know anything by looking at these people. You know they're only men dressed up, for money. I can't see why you should encourage it. I don't hold with idle show-people, parading round, I don't, myself. I like to go to the cinema once a week. It's instruction, you take it all in at a glance, all you need to know, and it lasts you for a week. You can get to know everything about people's actual lives from the cinema. I don't see why you want people dressing up and showing off." They sat down to their tea and toast and marmalade, during this harangue. Miss Pinnegar was always like a douche of cold water to Alvina, bringing her back to consciousness after a delicious excitement. In a minute Madame and Ciccio and all seemed to become unreal--the actual unrealities: while the ragged dithering pictures of the film were actual, real as the day. And Alvina was always put out when this happened. She really hated Miss Pinnegar. Yet she had nothing to answer. They _were_ unreal, Madame and Ciccio and the rest. Ciccio was just a fantasy blown in on the wind, to blow away again. The real, permanent thing was Woodhouse, the _semper idem_ Knarborough Road, and the unchangeable grubby gloom of Manchester House, with the stuffy, padding Miss Pinnegar, and her father, whose fingers, whose very soul seemed dirty with pennies. These were the solid, permanent fact. These were life itself. And Ciccio, splashing up on his bay horse and green cloth, he was a mountebank and an extraneous nonentity, a coloured old rag blown down the Knarborough Road into Limbo. Into Limbo. Whilst Miss Pinnegar and her father sat frowsily on for ever, eating their toast and cutting off the crust, and sipping their third cup of tea. They would never blow away--never, never. Woodhouse was there to eternity. And the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe was blowing like a rag of old paper into Limbo. Nothingness! Poor Madame! Poor gallant histrionic Madame! The frowsy Miss Pinnegar could crumple her up and throw her down the utilitarian drain, and have done with her. Whilst Miss Pinnegar lived on for ever. This put Alvina into a sharp temper. "Miss Pinnegar," she said. "I do think you go on in the most unattractive way sometimes. You're a regular spoil-sport." "Well," said Miss Pinnegar tartly. "I don't approve of your way of sport, I'm afraid." "You can't disapprove of it as much as I hate your spoil-sport existence," said Alvina in a flare. "Alvina, are you mad!" said her father. "Wonder I'm not," said Alvina, "considering what my life is." CHAPTER VIII CICCIO Madame did not pick up her spirits, after her cold. For two days she lay in bed, attended by Mrs. Rollings and Alvina and the young men. But she was most careful never to give any room for scandal. The young men might not approach her save in the presence of some third party. And then it was strictly a visit of ceremony or business. "Oh, your Woodhouse, how glad I shall be when I have left it," she said to Alvina. "I feel it is unlucky for me." "Do you?" said Alvina. "But if you'd had this bad cold in some places, you might have been much worse, don't you think." "Oh my dear!" cried Madame. "Do you think I could confuse you in my dislike of this Woodhouse? Oh no! You are not Woodhouse. On the contrary, I think it is unkind for you also, this place. You look--also--what shall I say--thin, not very happy." It was a note of interrogation. "I'm sure I dislike Woodhouse much more than you can," replied Alvina. "I am sure. Yes! I am sure. I see it. Why don't you go away? Why don't you marry?" "Nobody wants to marry me," said Alvina. Madame looked at her searchingly, with shrewd black eyes under her arched eyebrows. "How!" she exclaimed. "How don't they? You are not bad looking, only a little too thin--too haggard--" She watched Alvina. Alvina laughed uncomfortably. "Is there _nobody_?" persisted Madame. "Not now," said Alvina. "Absolutely nobody." She looked with a confused laugh into Madame's strict black eyes. "You see I didn't care for the Woodhouse young men, either. I _couldn't_." Madame nodded slowly up and down. A secret satisfaction came over her pallid, waxy countenance, in which her black eyes were like twin swift extraneous creatures: oddly like two bright little dark animals in the snow. "Sure!" she said, sapient. "Sure! How could you? But there are other men besides these here--" She waved her hand to the window. "I don't meet them, do I?" said Alvina. "No, not often. But sometimes! sometimes!" There was a silence between the two women, very pregnant. "Englishwomen," said Madame, "are so practical. Why are they?" "I suppose they can't help it," said Alvina. "But they're not half so practical and clever as _you_, Madame." "Oh la--la! I am practical differently. I am practical impractically--" she stumbled over the words. "But your Sue now, in Jude the Obscure--is it not an interesting book? And is she not always too practically practical. If she had been impractically practical she could have been quite happy. Do you know what I mean?--no. But she is ridiculous. Sue: so Anna Karénine. Ridiculous both. Don't you think?" "Why?" said Alvina. "Why did they both make everybody unhappy, when they had the man they wanted, and enough money? I think they are both so silly. If they had been beaten, they would have lost all their practical ideas and troubles, merely forgot them, and been happy enough. I am a woman who says it. Such ideas they have are not tragical. No, not at all. They are nonsense, you see, nonsense. That is all. Nonsense. Sue and Anna, they are--non-sensical. That is all. No tragedy whatsoever. Nonsense. I am a woman. I know men also. And I know nonsense when I see it. Englishwomen are all nonsense: the worst women in the world for nonsense." "Well, I am English," said Alvina. "Yes, my dear, you are English. But you are not necessarily so non-sensical. Why are you at all?" "Nonsensical?" laughed Alvina. "But I don't know what you call my nonsense." "Ah," said Madame wearily. "They never understand. But I like you, my dear. I am an old woman--" "Younger than I," said Alvina. "Younger than you, because I am practical from the heart, and not only from the head. You are not practical from the heart. And yet you have a heart." "But all Englishwomen have good hearts," protested Alvina. "No! No!" objected Madame. "They are all ve-ry kind, and ve-ry practical with their kindness. But they have no heart in all their kindness. It is all head, all head: the kindness of the head." "I can't agree with you," said Alvina. "No. No. I don't expect it. But I don't mind. You are very kind to me, and I thank you. But it is from the head, you see. And so I thank you from the head. From the heart--no." Madame plucked her white fingers together and laid them on her breast with a gesture of repudiation. Her black eyes stared spitefully. "But Madame," said Alvina, nettled, "I should never be half such a good business woman as you. Isn't that from the head?" "Ha! of course! Of course you wouldn't be a good business woman. Because you are kind from the head. I--" she tapped her forehead and shook her head--"I am not kind from the head. From the head I am business-woman, good business-woman. Of course I am a good business-woman--of course! But--" here she changed her expression, widened her eyes, and laid her hand on her breast--"when the heart speaks--then I listen with the heart. I do not listen with the head. The heart hears the heart. The head--that is another thing. But you have blue eyes, you cannot understand. Only dark eyes--" She paused and mused. "And what about yellow eyes?" asked Alvina, laughing. Madame darted a look at her, her lips curling with a very faint, fine smile of derision. Yet for the first time her black eyes dilated and became warm. "Yellow eyes like Ciccio's?" she said, with her great watchful eyes and her smiling, subtle mouth. "They are the darkest of all." And she shook her head roguishly. "Are they!" said Alvina confusedly, feeling a blush burning up her throat into her face. "Ha--ha!" laughed Madame. "Ha-ha! I am an old woman, you see. My heart is old enough to be kind, and my head is old enough to be clever. My heart is kind to few people--very few--especially in this England. My young men know that. But perhaps to you it is kind." "Thank you," said Alvina. "There! From the head _Thank you_. It is not well done, you see. You see!" But Alvina ran away in confusion. She felt Madame was having her on a string. Mr. May enjoyed himself hugely playing Kishwégin. When Madame came downstairs Louis, who was a good satirical mimic, imitated him. Alvina happened to come into their sitting-room in the midst of their bursts of laughter. They all stopped and looked at her cautiously. "Continuez! Continuez!" said Madame to Louis. And to Alvina: "Sit down, my dear, and see what a good actor we have in our Louis." Louis glanced round, laid his head a little on one side and drew in his chin, with Mr. May's smirk exactly, and wagging his tail slightly, he commenced to play the false Kishwégin. He sidled and bridled and ejaculated with raised hands, and in the dumb show the tall Frenchman made such a ludicrous caricature of Mr. Houghton's manager that Madame wept again with laughter, whilst Max leaned back against the wall and giggled continuously like some pot involuntarily boiling. Geoffrey spread his shut fists across the table and shouted with laughter, Ciccio threw back his head and showed all his teeth in a loud laugh of delighted derision. Alvina laughed also. But she flushed. There was a certain biting, annihilating quality in Louis' derision of the absentee. And the others enjoyed it so much. At moments Alvina caught her lip between her teeth, it was so screamingly funny, and so annihilating. She laughed in spite of herself. In spite of herself she was shaken into a convulsion of laughter. Louis was masterful--he mastered her psyche. She laughed till her head lay helpless on the chair, she could not move. Helpless, inert she lay, in her orgasm of laughter. The end of Mr. May. Yet she was hurt. And then Madame wiped her own shrewd black eyes, and nodded slow approval. Suddenly Louis started and held up a warning finger. They all at once covered their smiles and pulled themselves together. Only Alvina lay silently laughing. "Oh, good morning, Mrs. Rollings!" they heard Mr. May's voice. "Your company is lively. Is Miss Houghton here? May I go through?" They heard his quick little step and his quick little tap. "Come in," called Madame. The Natcha-Kee-Tawaras all sat with straight faces. Only poor Alvina lay back in her chair in a new weak convulsion. Mr. May glanced quickly round, and advanced to Madame. "Oh, good-morning, Madame, so glad to see you downstairs," he said, taking her hand and bowing ceremoniously. "Excuse my intruding on your mirth!" He looked archly round. Alvina was still incompetent. She lay leaning sideways in her chair, and could not even speak to him. "It was evidently a good joke," he said. "May I hear it too?" "Oh," said Madame, drawling. "It was no joke. It was only Louis making a fool of himself, doing a turn." "Must have been a good one," said Mr. May. "Can't we put it on?" "No," drawled Madame, "it was nothing--just a non-sensical mood of the moment. Won't you sit down? You would like a little whiskey?--yes?" Max poured out whiskey and water for Mr. May. Alvina sat with her face averted, quiet, but unable to speak to Mr. May. Max and Louis had become polite. Geoffrey stared with his big, dark-blue eyes stolidly at the newcomer. Ciccio leaned with his arms on his knees, looking sideways under his long lashes at the inert Alvina. "Well," said Madame, "and are you satisfied with your houses?" "Oh yes," said Mr. May. "Quite! The two nights have been excellent. Excellent!" "Ah--I am glad. And Miss Houghton tells me I should not dance tomorrow, it is too soon." "Miss Houghton _knows_," said Mr. May archly. "Of course!" said Madame. "I must do as she tells me." "Why yes, since it is for your good, and not hers." "Of course! Of course! It is very kind of her." "Miss Houghton is _most_ kind--to _every one_," said Mr. May. "I am sure," said Madame. "And I am very glad you have been such a good Kishwégin. That is very nice also." "Yes," replied Mr. May. "I begin to wonder if I have mistaken my vocation. I should have been _on_ the boards, instead of behind them." "No doubt," said Madame. "But it is a little late--" The eyes of the foreigners, watching him, flattered Mr. May. "I'm afraid it is," he said. "Yes. Popular taste is a mysterious thing. How do you feel, now? Do you feel they appreciate your work as much as they did?" Madame watched him with her black eyes. "No," she replied. "They don't. The pictures are driving us away. Perhaps we shall last for ten years more. And after that, we are finished." "You think so," said Mr. May, looking serious. "I am sure," she said, nodding sagely. "But why is it?" said Mr. May, angry and petulant. "Why is it? I don't know. I don't know. The pictures are cheap, and they are easy, and they cost the audience nothing, no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit, cost them nothing of these. And so they like them, and they don't like us, because they must _feel_ the things we do, from the heart, and appreciate them from the spirit. There!" "And they don't want to appreciate and to feel?" said Mr. May. "No. They don't want. They want it all through the eye, and finished--so! Just curiosity, impertinent curiosity. That's all. In all countries, the same. And so--in ten years' time--no more Kishwégin at all." "No. Then what future have you?" said Mr. May gloomily. "I may be dead--who knows. If not, I shall have my little apartment in Lausanne, or in Bellizona, and I shall be a bourgeoise once more, and the good Catholic which I am." "Which I am also," said Mr. May. "So! Are you? An American Catholic?" "Well--English--Irish--American." "So!" Mr. May never felt more gloomy in his life than he did that day. Where, finally, was he to rest his troubled head? There was not all peace in the Natcha-Kee-Tawara group either. For Thursday, there was to be a change of program--"Kishwégin's Wedding--" (with the white prisoner, be if said)--was to take the place of the previous scene. Max of course was the director of the rehearsal. Madame would not come near the theatre when she herself was not to be acting. Though very quiet and unobtrusive as a rule, Max could suddenly assume an air of _hauteur_ and overbearing which was really very annoying. Geoffrey always fumed under it. But Ciccio it put into unholy, ungovernable tempers. For Max, suddenly, would reveal his contempt of the Eyetalian, as he called Ciccio, using the Cockney word. "Bah! quelle tête de veau," said Max, suddenly contemptuous and angry because Ciccio, who really was slow at taking in the things said to him, had once more failed to understand. "Comment?" queried Ciccio, in his slow, derisive way. "_Comment_!" sneered Max, in echo. "_What?_ _What?_ Why what _did_ I say? Calf's-head I said. Pig's-head, if that seems more suitable to you." "To whom? To me or to you?" said Ciccio, sidling up. "To you, lout of an Italian." Max's colour was up, he held himself erect, his brown hair seemed to rise erect from his forehead, his blue eyes glared fierce. "That is to say, to me, from an uncivilized German pig, ah? ah?" All this in French. Alvina, as she sat at the piano, saw Max tall and blanched with anger; Ciccio with his neck stuck out, oblivious and convulsed with rage, stretching his neck at Max. All were in ordinary dress, but without coats, acting in their shirt-sleeves. Ciccio was clutching a property knife. "Now! None of that! None of that!" said Mr. May, peremptory. But Ciccio, stretching forward taut and immobile with rage, was quite unconscious. His hand was fast on his stage knife. "A dirty Eyetalian," said Max, in English, turning to Mr. May. "They understand nothing." But the last word was smothered in Ciccio's spring and stab. Max half started on to his guard, received the blow on his collar-bone, near the pommel of the shoulder, reeled round on top of Mr. May, whilst Ciccio sprang like a cat down from the stage and bounded across the theatre and out of the door, leaving the knife rattling on the boards behind him. Max recovered and sprang like a demon, white with rage, straight out into the theatre after him. "Stop--stop--!" cried Mr. May. "Halte, Max! Max, Max, attends!" cried Louis and Geoffrey, as Louis sprang down after his friend. Thud went the boards again, with the spring of a man. Alvina, who had been seated waiting at the piano below, started up and overturned her chair as Ciccio rushed past her. Now Max, white, with set blue eyes, was upon her. "Don't--!" she cried, lifting her hand to stop his progress. He saw her, swerved, and hesitated, turned to leap over the seats and avoid her, when Louis caught him and flung his arms round him. "Max--attends, ami! Laisse le partir. Max, tu sais que je t'aime. Tu le sais, ami. Tu le sais. Laisse le partir." Max and Louis wrestled together in the gangway, Max looking down with hate on his friend. But Louis was determined also, he wrestled as fiercely as Max, and at last the latter began to yield. He was panting and beside himself. Louis still held him by the hand and by the arm. "Let him go, brother, he isn't worth it. What does he understand, Max, dear brother, what does he understand? These fellows from the south, they are half children, half animal. They don't know what they are doing. Has he hurt you, dear friend? Has he hurt you? It was a dummy knife, but it was a heavy blow--the dog of an Italian. Let us see." So gradually Max was brought to stand still. From under the edge of his waistcoat, on the shoulder, the blood was already staining the shirt. "Are you cut, brother, brother?" said Louis. "Let us see." Max now moved his arm with pain. They took off his waistcoat and pushed back his shirt. A nasty blackening wound, with the skin broken. "If the bone isn't broken!" said Louis anxiously. "If the bone isn't broken! Lift thy arm, frère--lift. It hurts you--so--. No--no--it is not broken--no--the bone is not broken." "There is no bone broken, I know," said Max. "The animal. He hasn't done _that_, at least." "Where do you imagine he's gone?" asked Mr. May. The foreigners shrugged their shoulders, and paid no heed. There was no more rehearsal. "We had best go home and speak to Madame," said Mr. May, who was very frightened for his evening performance. They locked up the Endeavour. Alvina was thinking of Ciccio. He was gone in his shirt sleeves. She had taken his jacket and hat from the dressing-room at the back, and carried them under her rain-coat, which she had on her arm. Madame was in a state of perturbation. She had heard some one come in at the back, and go upstairs, and go out again. Mrs. Rollings had told her it was the Italian, who had come in in his shirt-sleeves and gone out in his black coat and black hat, taking his bicycle, without saying a word. Poor Madame! She was struggling into her shoes, she had her hat on, when the others arrived. "What is it?" she cried. She heard a hurried explanation from Louis. "Ah, the animal, the animal, he wasn't worth all my pains!" cried poor Madame, sitting with one shoe off and one shoe on. "Why, Max, why didst thou not remain man enough to control that insulting mountain temper of thine. Have I not said, and said, and said that in the Natcha-Kee-Tawara there was but one nation, the Red Indian, and but one tribe, the tribe of Kishwe? And now thou hast called him a dirty Italian, or a dog of an Italian, and he has behaved like an animal. Too much, too much of an animal, too little _esprit_. But thou, Max, art almost as bad. Thy temper is a devil's, which maybe is worse than an animal's. Ah, this Woodhouse, a curse is on it, I know it is. Would we were away from it. Will the week never pass? We shall have to find Ciccio. Without him the company is ruined--until I get a substitute. I must get a substitute. And how?--and where?--in this country?--tell me that. I am tired of Natcha-Kee-Tawara. There is no true tribe of Kishwe--no, never. I have had enough of Natcha-Kee-Tawara. Let us break up, let us part, _mes braves_, let us say adieu here in this _funeste_ Woodhouse." "Oh, Madame, dear Madame," said Louis, "let us hope. Let us swear a closer fidelity, dear Madame, our Kishwégin. Let us never part. Max, thou dost not want to part, brother, well-loved? Thou dost not want to part, brother whom I love? And thou, Geoffrey, thou--" Madame burst into tears, Louis wept too, even Max turned aside his face, with tears. Alvina stole out of the room, followed by Mr. May. In a while Madame came out to them. "Oh," she said. "You have not gone away! We are wondering which way Ciccio will have gone, on to Knarborough or to Marchay. Geoffrey will go on his bicycle to find him. But shall it be to Knarborough or to Marchay?" "Ask the policeman in the market-place," said Alvina. "He's sure to have noticed him, because Ciccio's yellow bicycle is so uncommon." Mr. May tripped out on this errand, while the others discussed among themselves where Ciccio might be. Mr. May returned, and said that Ciccio had ridden off down the Knarborough Road. It was raining slightly. "Ah!" said Madame. "And now how to find him, in that great town. I am afraid he will leave us without pity." "Surely he will want to speak to Geoffrey before he goes," said Louis. "They were always good friends." They all looked at Geoffrey. He shrugged his broad shoulders. "Always good friends," he said. "Yes. He will perhaps wait for me at his cousin's in Battersea. In Knarborough, I don't know." "How much money had he?" asked Mr. May. Madame spread her hands and lifted her shoulders. "Who knows?" she said. "These Italians," said Louis, turning to Mr. May. "They have always money. In another country, they will not spend one sou if they can help. They are like this--" And he made the Neapolitan gesture drawing in the air with his fingers. "But would he abandon you all without a word?" cried Mr. May. "Yes! Yes!" said Madame, with a sort of stoic pathos. "_He_ would. He alone would do such a thing. But he would do it." "And what point would he make for?" "What point? You mean where would he go? To Battersea, no doubt, to his cousin--and then to Italy, if he thinks he has saved enough money to buy land, or whatever it is." "And so good-bye to him," said Mr. May bitterly. "Geoffrey ought to know," said Madame, looking at Geoffrey. Geoffrey shrugged his shoulders, and would not give his comrade away. "No," he said. "I don't know. He will leave a message at Battersea, I know. But I don't know if he will go to Italy." "And you don't know where to find him in Knarborough?" asked Mr. May, sharply, very much on the spot. "No--I don't. Perhaps at the station he will go by train to London." It was evident Geoffrey was not going to help Mr. May. "Alors!" said Madame, cutting through this futility. "Go thou to Knarborough, Geoffrey, and see--and be back at the theatre for work. Go now. And if thou can'st find him, bring him again to us. Tell him to come out of kindness to me. Tell him." And she waved the young man away. He departed on his nine mile ride through the rain to Knarborough. "They know," said Madame. "They know each other's places. It is a little more than a year since we came to Knarborough. But they will remember." Geoffrey rode swiftly as possible through the mud. He did not care very much whether he found his friend or not. He liked the Italian, but he never looked on him as a permanency. He knew Ciccio was dissatisfied, and wanted a change. He knew that Italy was pulling him away from the troupe, with which he had been associated now for three years or more. And the Swiss from Martigny knew that the Neapolitan would go, breaking all ties, one day suddenly back to Italy. It was so, and Geoffrey was philosophical about it. He rode into town, and the first thing he did was to seek out the music-hall artistes at their lodgings. He knew a good many of them. They gave him a welcome and a whiskey--but none of them had seen Ciccio. They sent him off to other artistes, other lodging-houses. He went the round of associates known and unknown, of lodgings strange and familiar, of third-rate possible public houses. Then he went to the Italians down in the Marsh--he knew these people always ask for one another. And then, hurrying, he dashed to the Midland Station, and then to the Great Central Station, asking the porters on the London departure platform if they had seen his pal, a man with a yellow bicycle, and a black bicycle cape. All to no purpose. Geoffrey hurriedly lit his lamp and swung off in the dark back to Woodhouse. He was a powerfully built, imperturbable fellow. He pressed slowly uphill through the streets, then ran downhill into the darkness of the industrial country. He had continually to cross the new tram-lines, which were awkward, and he had occasionally to dodge the brilliantly-illuminated tram-cars which threaded their way across-country through so much darkness. All the time it rained, and his back wheel slipped under him, in the mud and on the new tram-track. As he pressed in the long darkness that lay between Slaters Mill and Durbeyhouses, he saw a light ahead--another cyclist. He moved to his side of the road. The light approached very fast. It was a strong acetylene flare. He watched it. A flash and a splash and he saw the humped back of what was probably Ciccio going by at a great pace on the low racing machine. "Hi Cic'--! Ciccio!" he yelled, dropping off his own bicycle. "Ha-er-er!" he heard the answering shout, unmistakably Italian, way down the darkness. He turned--saw the other cyclist had stopped. The flare swung round, and Ciccio softly rode up. He dropped off beside Geoffrey. "Toi!" said Ciccio. "Hé! Où vas-tu?" "Hé!" ejaculated Ciccio. Their conversation consisted a good deal in noises variously ejaculated. "Coming back?" asked Geoffrey. "Where've you been?" retorted Ciccio. "Knarborough--looking for thee. Where have you--?" "Buckled my front wheel at Durbeyhouses." "Come off?" "Hé!" "Hurt?" "Nothing." "Max is all right." "Merde!" "Come on, come back with me." "Nay." Ciccio shook his head. "Madame's crying. Wants thee to come back." Ciccio shook his head. "Come on, Cic'--" said Geoffrey. Ciccio shook his head. "Never?" said Geoffrey. "Basta--had enough," said Ciccio, with an invisible grimace. "Come for a bit, and we'll clear together." Ciccio again shook his head. "What, is it adieu?" Ciccio did not speak. "Don't go, comrade," said Geoffrey. "Faut," said Ciccio, slightly derisive. "Eh alors! I'd like to come with thee. What?" "Where?" "Doesn't matter. Thou'rt going to Italy?" "Who knows!--seems so." "I'd like to go back." "Eh alors!" Ciccio half veered round. "Wait for me a few days," said Geoffrey. "Where?" "See you tomorrow in Knarborough. Go to Mrs. Pym's, 6 Hampden Street. Gittiventi is there. Right, eh?" "I'll think about it." "Eleven o'clock, eh?" "I'll think about it." "Friends ever--Ciccio--eh?" Geoffrey held out his hand. Ciccio slowly took it. The two men leaned to each other and kissed farewell, on either cheek. "Tomorrow, Cic'--" "Au revoir, Gigi." Ciccio dropped on to his bicycle and was gone in a breath. Geoffrey waited a moment for a tram which was rushing brilliantly up to him in the rain. Then he mounted and rode in the opposite direction. He went straight down to Lumley, and Madame had to remain on tenterhooks till ten o'clock. She heard the news, and said: "Tomorrow I go to fetch him." And with this she went to bed. In the morning she was up betimes, sending a note to Alvina. Alvina appeared at nine o'clock. "You will come with me?" said Madame. "Come. Together we will go to Knarborough and bring back the naughty Ciccio. Come with me, because I haven't all my strength. Yes, you will? Good! Good! Let us tell the young men, and we will go now, on the tram-car." "But I am not properly dressed," said Alvina. "Who will see?" said Madame. "Come, let us go." They told Geoffrey they would meet him at the corner of Hampden Street at five minutes to eleven. "You see," said Madame to Alvina, "they are very funny, these young men, particularly Italians. You must never let them think you have caught them. Perhaps he will not let us see him--who knows? Perhaps he will go off to Italy all the same." They sat in the bumping tram-car, a long and wearying journey. And then they tramped the dreary, hideous streets of the manufacturing town. At the corner of the street they waited for Geoffrey, who rode up muddily on his bicycle. "Ask Ciccio to come out to us, and we will go and drink coffee at the Geisha Restaurant--or tea or something," said Madame. Again the two women waited wearily at the street-end. At last Geoffrey returned, shaking his head. "He won't come?" cried Madame. "No." "He says he is going back to Italy?" "To London." "It is the same. You can never trust them. Is he quite obstinate?" Geoffrey lifted his shoulders. Madame could see the beginnings of defection in him too. And she was tired and dispirited. "We shall have to finish the Natcha-Kee-Tawara, that is all," she said fretfully. Geoffrey watched her stolidly, impassively. "Dost thou want to go with him?" she asked suddenly. Geoffrey smiled sheepishly, and his colour deepened. But he did not speak. "Go then--" she said. "Go then! Go with him! But for the sake of my honour, finish this week at Woodhouse. Can I make Miss Houghton's father lose these two nights? Where is your shame? Finish this week and then go, go--But finish this week. Tell Francesco that. I have finished with him. But let him finish this engagement. Don't put me to shame, don't destroy my honour, and the honour of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara. Tell him that." Geoffrey turned again into the house. Madame, in her chic little black hat and spotted veil, and her trim black coat-and-skirt, stood there at the street-corner staring before her, shivering a little with cold, but saying no word of any sort. Again Geoffrey appeared out of the doorway. His face was impassive. "He says he doesn't want," he said. "Ah!" she cried suddenly in French, "the ungrateful, the animal! He shall suffer. See if he shall not suffer. The low canaille, without faith or feeling. My Max, thou wert right. Ah, such canaille should be beaten, as dogs are beaten, till they follow at heel. Will no one beat him for me, no one? Yes. Go back. Tell him before he leaves England he shall feel the hand of Kishwégin, and it shall be heavier than the Black Hand. Tell him that, the coward, that causes a woman's word to be broken against her will. Ah, canaille, canaille! Neither faith nor feeling, neither faith nor feeling. Trust them not, dogs of the south." She took a few agitated steps down the pavement. Then she raised her veil to wipe away her tears of anger and bitter disappointment. "Wait a bit," said Alvina. "I'll go." She was touched. "No. Don't you!" cried Madame. "Yes I will," she said. The light of battle was in her eyes. "You'll come with me to the door," she said to Geoffrey. Geoffrey started obediently, and led the way up a long narrow stair, covered with yellow-and-brown oil-cloth, rather worn, on to the top of the house. "Ciccio," he said, outside the door. "Oui!" came the curly voice of Ciccio. Geoffrey opened the door. Ciccio was sitting on a narrow bed, in a rather poor attic, under the steep slope of the roof. "Don't come in," said Alvina to Geoffrey, looking over her shoulder at him as she entered. Then she closed the door behind her, and stood with her back to it, facing the Italian. He sat loose on the bed, a cigarette between his fingers, dropping ash on the bare boards between his feet. He looked up curiously at Alvina. She stood watching him with wide, bright blue eyes, smiling slightly, and saying nothing. He looked up at her steadily, on his guard, from under his long black lashes. "Won't you come?" she said, smiling and looking into his eyes. He flicked off the ash of his cigarette with his little finger. She wondered why he wore the nail of his little finger so long, so very long. Still she smiled at him, and still he gave no sign. "Do come!" she urged, never taking her eyes from him. He made not the slightest movement, but sat with his hands dropped between his knees, watching her, the cigarette wavering up its blue thread of smoke. "Won't you?" she said, as she stood with her back to the door. "Won't you come?" She smiled strangely and vividly. Suddenly she took a pace forward, stooped, watching his face as if timidly, caught his brown hand in her own and lifted it towards herself. His hand started, dropped the cigarette, but was not withdrawn. "You will come, won't you?" she said, smiling gently into his strange, watchful yellow eyes, that looked fixedly into hers, the dark pupil opening round and softening. She smiled into his softening round eyes, the eyes of some animal which stares in one of its silent, gentler moments. And suddenly she kissed his hand, kissed it twice, quickly, on the fingers and the back. He wore a silver ring. Even as she kissed his fingers with her lips, the silver ring seemed to her a symbol of his subjection, inferiority. She drew his hand slightly. And he rose to his feet. She turned round and took the door-handle, still holding his fingers in her left hand. "You are coming, aren't you?" she said, looking over her shoulder into his eyes. And taking consent from his unchanging eyes, she let go his hand and slightly opened the door. He turned slowly, and taking his coat from a nail, slung it over his shoulders and drew it on. Then he picked up his hat, and put his foot on his half-smoked cigarette, which lay smoking still. He followed her out of the room, walking with his head rather forward, in the half loutish, sensual-subjected way of the Italians. As they entered the street, they saw the trim, French figure of Madame standing alone, as if abandoned. Her face was very white under her spotted veil, her eyes very black. She watched Ciccio following behind Alvina in his dark, hangdog fashion, and she did not move a muscle until he came to a standstill in front of her. She was watching his face. "Te voilà donc!" she said, without expression. "Allons boire un café, hé? Let us go and drink some coffee." She had now put an inflection of tenderness into her voice. But her eyes were black with anger. Ciccio smiled slowly, the slow, fine, stupid smile, and turned to walk alongside. Madame said nothing as they went. Geoffrey passed on his bicycle, calling out that he would go straight to Woodhouse. When the three sat with their cups of coffee, Madame pushed up her veil just above her eyes, so that it was a black band above her brows. Her face was pale and full like a child's, but almost stonily expressionless, her eyes were black and inscrutable. She watched both Ciccio and Alvina with her black, inscrutable looks. "Would you like also biscuits with your coffee, the two of you?" she said, with an amiable intonation which her strange black looks belied. "Yes," said Alvina. She was a little flushed, as if defiant, while Ciccio sat sheepishly, turning aside his ducked head, the slow, stupid, yet fine smile on his lips. "And no more trouble with Max, hein?--you Ciccio?" said Madame, still with the amiable intonation and the same black, watching eyes. "No more of these stupid scenes, hein? What? Do you answer me." "No more from me," he said, looking up at her with a narrow, cat-like look in his derisive eyes. "Ho? No? No more? Good then! It is good! We are glad, aren't we, Miss Houghton, that Ciccio has come back and there are to be no more rows?--hein?--aren't we?" "_I'm_ awfully glad," said Alvina. "Awfully glad--yes--awfully glad! You hear, you Ciccio. And you remember another time. What? Don't you? Hé?" He looked up at her, the slow, derisive smile curling his lips. "Sure," he said slowly, with subtle intonation. "Yes. Good! Well then! Well then! We are all friends. We are all friends, aren't we, all the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras? Hé? What you think? What you say?" "Yes," said Ciccio, again looking up at her with his yellow, glinting eyes. "All right! All right then! It is all right--forgotten--" Madame sounded quite frank and restored. But the sullen watchfulness in her eyes, and the narrowed look in Ciccio's, as he glanced at her, showed another state behind the obviousness of the words. "And Miss Houghton is one of us! Yes? She has united us once more, and so she has become one of us." Madame smiled strangely from her blank, round white face. "I should love to be one of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras," said Alvina. "Yes--well--why not? Why not become one? Why not? What you say, Ciccio? You can play the piano, perhaps do other things. Perhaps better than Kishwégin. What you say, Ciccio, should she not join us? Is she not one of us?" He smiled and showed his teeth but did not answer. "Well, what is it? Say then? Shall she not?" "Yes," said Ciccio, unwilling to commit himself. "Yes, so I say! So I say. Quite a good idea! We will think of it, and speak perhaps to your father, and you shall come! Yes." So the two women returned to Woodhouse by the tram-car, while Ciccio rode home on his bicycle. It was surprising how little Madame and Alvina found to say to one another. Madame effected the reunion of her troupe, and all seemed pretty much as before. She had decided to dance the next night, the Saturday night. On Sunday the party would leave for Warsall, about thirty miles away, to fulfil their next engagement. That evening Ciccio, whenever he had a moment to spare, watched Alvina. She knew it. But she could not make out what his watching meant. In the same way he might have watched a serpent, had he found one gliding in the theatre. He looked at her sideways, furtively, but persistently. And yet he did not want to meet her glance. He avoided her, and watched her. As she saw him standing, in his negligent, muscular, slouching fashion, with his head dropped forward, and his eyes sideways, sometimes she disliked him. But there was a sort of _finesse_ about his face. His skin was delicately tawny, and slightly lustrous. The eyes were set in so dark, that one expected them to be black and flashing. And then one met the yellow pupils, sulphureous and remote. It was like meeting a lion. His long, fine nose, his rather long, rounded chin and curling lips seemed refined through ages of forgotten culture. He was waiting: silent there, with something muscular and remote about his very droop, he was waiting. What for? Alvina could not guess. She wanted to meet his eye, to have an open understanding with him. But he would not. When she went up to talk to him, he answered in his stupid fashion, with a smile of the mouth and no change of the eyes, saying nothing at all. Obstinately he held away from her. When he was in his war-paint, for one moment she hated his muscular, handsome, downward-drooping torso: so stupid and full. The fine sharp uprightness of Max seemed much finer, clearer, more manly. Ciccio's velvety, suave heaviness, the very heave of his muscles, so full and softly powerful, sickened her. She flashed away angrily on her piano. Madame, who was dancing Kishwégin on the last evening, cast sharp glances at her. Alvina had avoided Madame as Ciccio had avoided Alvina--elusive and yet conscious, a distance, and yet a connection. Madame danced beautifully. No denying it, she was an artist. She became something quite different: fresh, virginal, pristine, a magic creature flickering there. She was infinitely delicate and attractive. Her _braves_ became glamorous and heroic at once, and magically she cast her spell over them. It was all very well for Alvina to bang the piano crossly. She could not put out the glow which surrounded Kishwégin and her troupe. Ciccio was handsome now: without war-paint, and roused, fearless and at the same time suggestive, a dark, mysterious glamour on his face, passionate and remote. A stranger--and so beautiful. Alvina flashed at the piano, almost in tears. She hated his beauty. It shut her apart. She had nothing to do with it. Madame, with her long dark hair hanging in finely-brushed tresses, her cheek burning under its dusky stain, was another creature. How soft she was on her feet. How humble and remote she seemed, as across a chasm from the men. How submissive she was, with an eternity of inaccessible submission. Her hovering dance round the dead bear was exquisite: her dark, secretive curiosity, her admiration of the massive, male strength of the creature, her quivers of triumph over the dead beast, her cruel exultation, and her fear that he was not really dead. It was a lovely sight, suggesting the world's morning, before Eve had bitten any white-fleshed apple, whilst she was still dusky, dark-eyed, and still. And then her stealthy sympathy with the white prisoner! Now indeed she was the dusky Eve tempted into knowledge. Her fascination was ruthless. She kneeled by the dead _brave_, her husband, as she had knelt by the bear: in fear and admiration and doubt and exultation. She gave him the least little push with her foot. Dead meat like the bear! And a flash of delight went over her, that changed into a sob of mortal anguish. And then, flickering, wicked, doubtful, she watched Ciccio wrestling with the bear. She was the clue to all the action, was Kishwégin. And her dark _braves_ seemed to become darker, more secret, malevolent, burning with a cruel fire, and at the same time wistful, knowing their end. Ciccio laughed in a strange way, as he wrestled with the bear, as he had never laughed on the previous evenings. The sound went out into the audience, a soft, malevolent, derisive sound. And when the bear was supposed to have crushed him, and he was to have fallen, he reeled out of the bear's arms and said to Madame, in his derisive voice: "Vivo sempre, Madame." And then he fell. Madame stopped as if shot, hearing his words: "I am still alive, Madame." She remained suspended motionless, suddenly wilted. Then all at once her hand went to her mouth with a scream: "The Bear!" So the scene concluded itself. But instead of the tender, half-wistful triumph of Kishwégin, a triumph electric as it should have been when she took the white man's hand and kissed it, there was a doubt, a hesitancy, a nullity, and Max did not quite know what to do. After the performance, neither Madame nor Max dared say anything to Ciccio about his innovation into the play. Louis felt he had to speak--it was left to him. "I say, Cic'--" he said, "why did you change the scene? It might have spoiled everything if Madame wasn't such a genius. Why did you say that?" "Why," said Ciccio, answering Louis' French in Italian, "I am tired of being dead, you see." Madame and Max heard in silence. When Alvina had played _God Save the King_ she went round behind the stage. But Ciccio and Geoffrey had already packed up the property, and left. Madame was talking to James Houghton. Louis and Max were busy together. Mr. May came to Alvina. "Well," he said. "That closes another week. I think we've done very well, in face of difficulties, don't you?" "Wonderfully," she said. But poor Mr. May spoke and looked pathetically. He seemed to feel forlorn. Alvina was not attending to him. Her eye was roving. She took no notice of him. Madame came up. "Well, Miss Houghton," she said, "time to say good-bye, I suppose." "How do you feel after dancing?" asked Alvina. "Well--not so strong as usual--but not so bad, you know. I shall be all right--thanks to you. I think your father is more ill than I. To me he looks very ill." "Father wears himself away," said Alvina. "Yes, and when we are no longer young, there is not so much to wear. Well, I must thank you once more--" "What time do you leave in the morning?" "By the train at half-past ten. If it doesn't rain, the young men will cycle--perhaps all of them. Then they will go when they like--" "I will come round to say good-bye--" said Alvina. "Oh no--don't disturb yourself--" "Yes, I want to take home the things--the kettle for the bronchitis, and those things--" "Oh thank you very much--but don't trouble yourself. I will send Ciccio with them--or one of the others--" "I should like to say good-bye to you all," persisted Alvina. Madame glanced round at Max and Louis. "Are we not all here? No. The two have gone. No! Well! Well what time will you come?" "About nine?" "Very well, and I leave at ten. Very well. Then _au revoir_ till the morning. Good-night." "Good-night," said Alvina. Her colour was rather flushed. She walked up with Mr. May, and hardly noticed he was there. After supper, when James Houghton had gone up to count his pennies, Alvina said to Miss Pinnegar: "Don't you think father looks rather seedy, Miss Pinnegar?" "I've been thinking so a long time," said Miss Pinnegar tartly. "What do you think he ought to do?" "He's killing himself down there, in all weathers and freezing in that box-office, and then the bad atmosphere. He's killing himself, that's all." "What can we do?" "Nothing so long as there's that place down there. Nothing at all." Alvina thought so too. So she went to bed. She was up in time, and watching the clock. It was a grey morning, but not raining. At five minutes to nine, she hurried off to Mrs. Rollings. In the back yard the bicycles were out, glittering and muddy according to their owners. Ciccio was crouching mending a tire, crouching balanced on his toes, near the earth. He turned like a quick-eared animal glancing up as she approached, but did not rise. "Are you getting ready to go?" she said, looking down at him. He screwed his head round to her unwillingly, upside down, his chin tilted up at her. She did not know him thus inverted. Her eyes rested on his face, puzzled. His chin seemed so large, aggressive. He was a little bit repellent and brutal, inverted. Yet she continued: "Would you help me to carry back the things we brought for Madame?" He rose to his feet, but did not look at her. He was wearing broken cycling shoes. He stood looking at his bicycle tube. "Not just yet," she said. "I want to say good-bye to Madame. Will you come in half an hour?" "Yes, I will come," he said, still watching his bicycle tube, which sprawled nakedly on the floor. The forward drop of his head was curiously beautiful to her, the straight, powerful nape of the neck, the delicate shape of the back of the head, the black hair. The way the neck sprang from the strong, loose shoulders was beautiful. There was something mindless but _intent_ about the forward reach of his head. His face seemed colourless, neutral-tinted and expressionless. She went indoors. The young men were moving about making preparations. "Come upstairs, Miss Houghton!" called Madame's voice from above. Alvina mounted, to find Madame packing. "It is an uneasy moment, when we are busy to move," said Madame, looking up at Alvina as if she were a stranger. "I'm afraid I'm in the way. But I won't stay a minute." "Oh, it is all right. Here are the things you brought--" Madame indicated a little pile--"and thank you _very_ much, _very_ much. I feel you saved my life. And now let me give you one little token of my gratitude. It is not much, because we are not millionaires in the Natcha-Kee-Tawara. Just a little remembrance of our troublesome visit to Woodhouse." She presented Alvina with a pair of exquisite bead moccasins, woven in a weird, lovely pattern, with soft deerskin soles and sides. "They belong to Kishwégin, so it is Kishwégin who gives them to you, because she is grateful to you for saving her life, or at least from a long illness." "Oh--but I don't want to take them--" said Alvina. "You don't like them? Why?" "I think they're lovely, lovely! But I don't want to take them from you--" "If I give them, you do not take them from me. You receive them. Hé?" And Madame pressed back the slippers, opening her plump jewelled hands in a gesture of finality. "But I don't like to take _these_," said Alvina. "I feel they belong to Natcha-Kee-Tawara. And I don't want to rob Natcha-Kee-Tawara, do I? Do take them back." "No, I have given them. You cannot rob Natcha-Kee-Tawara in taking a pair of shoes--impossible!" "And I'm sure they are much too small for me." "Ha!" exclaimed Madame. "It is that! Try." "I know they are," said Alvina, laughing confusedly. She sat down and took off her own shoe. The moccasin was a little too short--just a little. But it was charming on the foot, charming. "Yes," said Madame. "It is too short. Very well. I must find you something else." "Please don't," said Alvina. "Please don't find me anything. I don't want anything. Please!" "What?" said Madame, eyeing her closely. "You don't want? Why? You don't want anything from Natcha-Kee-Tawara, or from Kishwégin? Hé? From which?" "Don't give me anything, please," said Alvina. "All right! All right then. I won't. I won't give you anything. I can't give you anything you want from Natcha-Kee-Tawara." And Madame busied herself again with the packing. "I'm awfully sorry you are going," said Alvina. "Sorry? Why? Yes, so am I sorry we shan't see you any more. Yes, so I am. But perhaps we shall see you another time--hé? I shall send you a post-card. Perhaps I shall send one of the young men on his bicycle, to bring you something which I shall buy for you. Yes? Shall I?" "Oh! I should be awfully glad--but don't buy--" Alvina checked herself in time. "Don't buy anything. Send me a little thing from Natcha-Kee-Tawara. I _love_ the slippers--" "But they are too small," said Madame, who had been watching her with black eyes that read every motive. Madame too had her avaricious side, and was glad to get back the slippers. "Very well--very well, I will do that. I will send you some small thing from Natcha-Kee-Tawara, and one of the young men shall bring it. Perhaps Ciccio? Hé?" "Thank you _so_ much," said Alvina, holding out her hand. "Good-bye. I'm so sorry you're going." "Well--well! We are not going so very far. Not so very far. Perhaps we shall see each other another day. It may be. Good-bye!" Madame took Alvina's hand, and smiled at her winsomely all at once, kindly, from her inscrutable black eyes. A sudden unusual kindness. Alvina flushed with surprise and a desire to cry. "Yes. I am sorry you are not with Natcha-Kee-Tawara. But we shall see. Good-bye. I shall do my packing." Alvina carried down the things she had to remove. Then she went to say good-bye to the young men, who were in various stages of their toilet. Max alone was quite presentable. Ciccio was just putting on the outer cover of his front tire. She watched his brown thumbs press it into place. He was quick and sure, much more capable, and even masterful, than you would have supposed, seeing his tawny Mediterranean hands. He spun the wheel round, patting it lightly. "Is it finished?" "Yes, I think." He reached his pump and blew up the tire. She watched his softly-applied force. What physical, muscular force there was in him. Then he swung round the bicycle, and stood it again on its wheels. After which he quickly folded his tools. "Will you come now?" she said. He turned, rubbing his hands together, and drying them on an old cloth. He went into the house, pulled on his coat and his cap, and picked up the things from the table. "Where are you going?" Max asked. Ciccio jerked his head towards Alvina. "Oh, allow me to carry them, Miss Houghton. He is not fit--" said Max. True, Ciccio had no collar on, and his shoes were burst. "I don't mind," said Alvina hastily. "He knows where they go. He brought them before." "But I will carry them. I am dressed. Allow me--" and he began to take the things. "You get dressed, Ciccio." Ciccio looked at Alvina. "Do you want?" he said, as if waiting for orders. "Do let Ciccio take them," said Alvina to Max. "Thank you _ever_ so much. But let him take them." So Alvina marched off through the Sunday morning streets, with the Italian, who was down at heel and encumbered with an armful of sick-room apparatus. She did not know what to say, and he said nothing. "We will go in this way," she said, suddenly opening the hall door. She had unlocked it before she went out, for that entrance was hardly ever used. So she showed the Italian into the sombre drawing-room, with its high black bookshelves with rows and rows of calf-bound volumes, its old red and flowered carpet, its grand piano littered with music. Ciccio put down the things as she directed, and stood with his cap in his hands, looking aside. "Thank you so much," she said, lingering. He curled his lips in a faint deprecatory smile. "Nothing," he murmured. His eye had wandered uncomfortably up to a portrait on the wall. "That was my mother," said Alvina. He glanced down at her, but did not answer. "I am so sorry you're going away," she said nervously. She stood looking up at him with wide blue eyes. The faint smile grew on the lower part of his face, which he kept averted. Then he looked at her. "We have to move," he said, with his eyes watching her reservedly, his mouth twisting with a half-bashful smile. "Do you like continually going away?" she said, her wide blue eyes fixed on his face. He nodded slightly. "We have to do it. I like it." What he said meant nothing to him. He now watched her fixedly, with a slightly mocking look, and a reserve he would not relinquish. "Do you think I shall ever see you again?" she said. "Should you like--?" he answered, with a sly smile and a faint shrug. "I should like awfully--" a flush grew on her cheek. She heard Miss Pinnegar's scarcely audible step approaching. He nodded at her slightly, watching her fixedly, turning up the corners of his eyes slyly, his nose seeming slyly to sharpen. "All right. Next week, eh? In the morning?" "Do!" cried Alvina, as Miss Pinnegar came through the door. He glanced quickly over his shoulder. "Oh!" cried Miss Pinnegar. "I couldn't imagine who it was." She eyed the young fellow sharply. "Couldn't you?" said Alvina. "We brought back these things." "Oh yes. Well--you'd better come into the other room, to the fire," said Miss Pinnegar. "I shall go along. Good-bye!" said Ciccio, and with a slight bow to Alvina, and a still slighter to Miss Pinnegar, he was out of the room and out of the front door, as if turning tail. "I suppose they're going this morning," said Miss Pinnegar. CHAPTER IX ALVINA BECOMES ALLAYE Alvina wept when the Natchas had gone. She loved them so much, she wanted to be with them. Even Ciccio she regarded as only one of the Natchas. She looked forward to his coming as to a visit from the troupe. How dull the theatre was without them! She was tired of the Endeavour. She wished it did not exist. The rehearsal on the Monday morning bored her terribly. Her father was nervous and irritable. The previous week had tried him sorely. He had worked himself into a state of nervous apprehension such as nothing would have justified, unless perhaps, if the wooden walls of the Endeavour had burnt to the ground, with James inside victimized like another Samson. He had developed a nervous horror of all artistes. He did not feel safe for one single moment whilst he depended on a single one of them. "We shall have to convert into all pictures," he said in a nervous fever to Mr. May. "Don't make any more engagements after the end of next month." "Really!" said Mr. May. "Really! Have you quite decided?" "Yes quite! Yes quite!" James fluttered. "I have written about a new machine, and the supply of films from Chanticlers." "Really!" said Mr. May. "Oh well then, in that case--" But he was filled with dismay and chagrin. "Of cauce," he said later to Alvina, "I can't _possibly_ stop on if we are nothing but a picture show!" And he arched his blanched and dismal eyelids with ghastly finality. "Why?" cried Alvina. "Oh--why!" He was rather ironic. "Well, it's not my line at _all_. I'm not a _film-operator_!" And he put his head on one side with a grimace of contempt and superiority. "But you are, as well," said Alvina. "Yes, _as well_. But not _only_! You _may_ wash the dishes in the scullery. But you're not only the _char_, are you?" "But is it the same?" cried Alvina. "Of cauce!" cried Mr. May. "Of _cauce_ it's the same." Alvina laughed, a little heartlessly, into his pallid, stricken eyes. "But what will you do?" she asked. "I shall have to look for something else," said the injured but dauntless little man. "There's nothing _else_, is there?" "Wouldn't you stay on?" she asked. "I wouldn't think of it. I wouldn't think of it." He turtled like an injured pigeon. "Well," she said, looking laconically into his face: "It's between you and father--" "Of _cauce_!" he said. "Naturally! Where else--!" But his tone was a little spiteful, as if he had rested his last hopes on Alvina. Alvina went away. She mentioned the coming change to Miss Pinnegar. "Well," said Miss Pinnegar, judicious but aloof, "it's a move in the right direction. But I doubt if it'll do any good." "Do you?" said Alvina. "Why?" "I don't believe in the place, and I never did," declared Miss Pinnegar. "I don't believe any good will come of it." "But why?" persisted Alvina. "What makes you feel so sure about it?" "I don't know. But that's how I feel. And I have from the first. It was wrong from the first. It was wrong to begin it." "But why?" insisted Alvina, laughing. "Your father had no business to be led into it. He'd no business to touch this show business. It isn't like him. It doesn't belong to him. He's gone against his own nature and his own life." "Oh but," said Alvina, "father was a showman even in the shop. He always was. Mother said he was like a showman in a booth." Miss Pinnegar was taken aback. "Well!" she said sharply. "If _that's_ what you've seen in him!"--there was a pause. "And in that case," she continued tartly, "I think some of the showman has come out in his daughter! or show-woman!--which doesn't improve it, to my idea." "Why is it any worse?" said Alvina. "I enjoy it--and so does father." "No," cried Miss Pinnegar. "There you're wrong! There you make a mistake. It's all against his better nature." "Really!" said Alvina, in surprise. "What a new idea! But which is father's better nature?" "You may not know it," said Miss Pinnegar coldly, "and if so, I can never tell you. But that doesn't alter it." She lapsed into dead silence for a moment. Then suddenly she broke out, vicious and cold: "He'll go on till he's killed himself, and _then_ he'll know." The little adverb _then_ came whistling across the space like a bullet. It made Alvina pause. Was her father going to die? She reflected. Well, all men must die. She forgot the question in others that occupied her. First, could she bear it, when the Endeavour was turned into another cheap and nasty film-shop? The strange figures of the artistes passing under her observation had really entertained her, week by week. Some weeks they had bored her, some weeks she had detested them, but there was always a chance in the coming week. Think of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras! She thought too much of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. She knew it. And she tried to force her mind to the contemplation of the new state of things, when she banged at the piano to a set of dithering and boring pictures. There would be her father, herself, and Mr. May--or a new operator, a new manager. The new manager!--she thought of him for a moment--and thought of the mechanical factory-faced persons who _managed_ Wright's and the Woodhouse Empire. But her mind fell away from this barren study. She was obsessed by the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. They seemed to have fascinated her. Which of them it was, or what it was that had cast the spell over her, she did not know. But she was as if hypnotized. She longed to be with them. Her soul gravitated towards them all the time. Monday passed, and Ciccio did not come: Tuesday passed: and Wednesday. In her soul she was sceptical of their keeping their promise--either Madame or Ciccio. Why should they keep their promise? She knew what these nomadic artistes were. And her soul was stubborn within her. On Wednesday night there was another sensation at the Endeavour. Mr. May found James Houghton fainting in the box-office after the performance had begun. What to do? He could not interrupt Alvina, nor the performance. He sent the chocolate-and-orange boy across to the Pear Tree for brandy. James revived. "I'm all right," he said, in a brittle fashion. "I'm all right. Don't bother." So he sat with his head on his hand in the box-office, and Mr. May had to leave him to operate the film. When the interval arrived, Mr. May hurried to the box-office, a narrow hole that James could just sit in, and there he found the invalid in the same posture, semi-conscious. He gave him more brandy. "I'm all right, I tell you," said James, his eyes flaring. "Leave me alone." But he looked anything but all right. Mr. May hurried for Alvina. When the daughter entered the ticket place, her father was again in a state of torpor. "Father," she said, shaking his shoulder gently. "What's the matter." He murmured something, but was incoherent. She looked at his face. It was grey and blank. "We shall have to get him home," she said. "We shall have to get a cab." "Give him a little brandy," said Mr. May. The boy was sent for the cab, James swallowed a spoonful of brandy. He came to himself irritably. "What? What," he said. "I won't have all this fuss. Go on with the performance, there's no need to bother about me." His eye was wild. "You must go home, father," said Alvina. "Leave me alone! Will you leave me alone! Hectored by women all my life--hectored by women--first one, then another. I won't stand it--I won't stand it--" He looked at Alvina with a look of frenzy as he lapsed again, fell with his head on his hands on his ticket-board. Alvina looked at Mr. May. "We must get him home," she said. She covered him up with a coat, and sat by him. The performance went on without music. At last the cab came. James, unconscious, was driven up to Woodhouse. He had to be carried indoors. Alvina hurried ahead to make a light in the dark passage. "Father's ill!" she announced to Miss Pinnegar. "Didn't I say so!" said Miss Pinnegar, starting from her chair. The two women went out to meet the cab-man, who had James in his arms. "Can you manage?" cried Alvina, showing a light. "He doesn't weigh much," said the man. "Tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu!" went Miss Pinnegar's tongue, in a rapid tut-tut of distress. "What have I said, now," she exclaimed. "What have I said all along?" James was laid on the sofa. His eyes were half-shut. They made him drink brandy, the boy was sent for the doctor, Alvina's bed was warmed. The sick man was got to bed. And then started another vigil. Alvina sat up in the sick room. James started and muttered, but did not regain consciousness. Dawn came, and he was the same. Pneumonia and pleurisy and a touch of meningitis. Alvina drank her tea, took a little breakfast, and went to bed at about nine o'clock in the morning, leaving James in charge of Miss Pinnegar. Time was all deranged. Miss Pinnegar was a nervous nurse. She sat in horror and apprehension, her eyebrows raised, starting and looking at James in terror whenever he made a noise. She hurried to him and did what she could. But one would have said she was repulsed, she found her task unconsciously repugnant. During the course of the morning Mrs. Rollings came up and said that the Italian from last week had come, and could he speak to Miss Houghton. "Tell him she's resting, and Mr. Houghton is seriously ill," said Miss Pinnegar sharply. When Alvina came downstairs at about four in the afternoon she found a package: a comb of carved bone, and a message from Madame: "To Miss Houghton, with kindest greetings and most sincere thanks from Kishwégin." The comb with its carved, beast-faced serpent was her portion. Alvina asked if there had been any other message. None. Mr. May came in, and stayed for a dismal half-hour. Then Alvina went back to her nursing. The patient was no better, still unconscious. Miss Pinnegar came down, red eyed and sullen looking. The condition of James gave little room for hope. In the early morning he died. Alvina called Mrs. Rollings, and they composed the body. It was still only five o'clock, and not light. Alvina went to lie down in her father's little, rather chilly chamber at the end of the corridor. She tried to sleep, but could not. At half-past seven she arose, and started the business of the new day. The doctor came--she went to the registrar--and so on. Mr. May came. It was decided to keep open the theatre. He would find some one else for the piano, some one else to issue the tickets. In the afternoon arrived Frederick Houghton, James's cousin and nearest relative. He was a middle-aged, blond, florid, church-going draper from Knarborough, well-to-do and very _bourgeois_. He tried to talk to Alvina in a fatherly fashion, or a friendly, or a helpful fashion. But Alvina could not listen to him. He got on her nerves. Hearing the gate bang, she rose and hurried to the window. She was in the drawing-room with her cousin, to give the interview its proper air of solemnity. She saw Ciccio rearing his yellow bicycle against the wall, and going with his head forward along the narrow, dark way of the back yard, to the scullery door. "Excuse me a minute," she said to her cousin, who looked up irritably as she left the room. She was just in time to open the door as Ciccio tapped. She stood on the doorstep above him. He looked up, with a faint smile, from under his black lashes. "How nice of you to come," she said. But her face was blanched and tired, without expression. Only her large eyes looked blue in their tiredness, as she glanced down at Ciccio. He seemed to her far away. "Madame asks how is Mr. Houghton," he said. "Father! He died this morning," she said quietly. "He died!" exclaimed the Italian, a flash of fear and dismay going over his face. "Yes--this morning." She had neither tears nor emotion, but just looked down on him abstractedly, from her height on the kitchen step. He dropped his eyes and looked at his feet. Then he lifted his eyes again, and looked at her. She looked back at him, as from across a distance. So they watched each other, as strangers across a wide, abstract distance. He turned and looked down the dark yard, towards the gate where he could just see the pale grey tire of his bicycle, and the yellow mud-guard. He seemed to be reflecting. If he went now, he went for ever. Involuntarily he turned and lifted his face again towards Alvina, as if studying her curiously. She remained there on the doorstep, neutral, blanched, with wide, still, neutral eyes. She did not seem to see him. He studied her with alert, yellow-dusky, inscrutable eyes, until she met his look. And then he gave the faintest gesture with his head, as of summons towards him. Her soul started, and died in her. And again he gave the slight, almost imperceptible jerk of the head, backwards and sideways, as if summoning her towards him. His face too was closed and expressionless. But in his eyes, which kept hers, there was a dark flicker of ascendancy. He was going to triumph over her. She knew it. And her soul sank as if it sank out of her body. It sank away out of her body, left her there powerless, soulless. And yet as he turned, with his head stretched forward, to move away: as he glanced slightly over his shoulder: she stepped down from the step, down to his level, to follow him. He went ducking along the dark yard, nearly to the gate. Near the gate, near his bicycle, was a corner made by a shed. Here he turned, lingeringly, to her, and she lingered in front of him. Her eyes were wide and neutral and submissive, with a new, awful submission as if she had lost her soul. So she looked up at him, like a victim. There was a faint smile in his eyes. He stretched forward over her. "You love me? Yes?--Yes?" he said, in a voice that seemed like a palpable contact on her. "Yes," she whispered involuntarily, soulless, like a victim. He put his arm round her, subtly, and lifted her. "Yes," he re-echoed, almost mocking in his triumph. "Yes. Yes!" And smiling, he kissed her, delicately, with a certain finesse of knowledge. She moaned in spirit, in his arms, felt herself dead, dead. And he kissed her with a finesse, a passionate finesse which seemed like coals of fire on her head. They heard footsteps. Miss Pinnegar was coming to look for her. Ciccio set her down, looked long into her eyes, inscrutably, smiling, and said: "I come tomorrow." With which he ducked and ran out of the yard, picking up his bicycle like a feather, and, taking no notice of Miss Pinnegar, letting the yard-door bang to behind him. "Alvina!" said Miss Pinnegar. But Alvina did not answer. She turned, slipped past, ran indoors and upstairs to the little bare bedroom she had made her own. She locked the door and kneeled down on the floor, bowing down her head to her knees in a paroxysm on the floor. In a paroxysm--because she loved him. She doubled herself up in a paroxysm on her knees on the floor--because she loved him. It was far more like pain, like agony, than like joy. She swayed herself to and fro in a paroxysm of unbearable sensation, because she loved him. Miss Pinnegar came and knocked at the door. "Alvina! Alvina! Oh, you are there! Whatever are you doing? Aren't you coming down to speak to your cousin?" "Soon," said Alvina. And taking a pillow from the bed, she crushed it against herself and swayed herself unconsciously, in her orgasm of unbearable feeling. Right in her bowels she felt it--the terrible, unbearable feeling. How could she bear it. She crouched over until she became still. A moment of stillness seemed to cover her like sleep: an eternity of sleep in that one second. Then she roused and got up. She went to the mirror, still, evanescent, and tidied her hair, smoothed her face. She was so still, so remote, she felt that nothing, nothing could ever touch her. And so she went downstairs, to that horrible cousin of her father's. She seemed so intangible, remote and virginal, that her cousin and Miss Pinnegar both failed to make anything of her. She answered their questions simply, but did not talk. They talked to each other. And at last the cousin went away, with a profound dislike of Miss Alvina. She did not notice. She was only glad he was gone. And she went about for the rest of the day elusive and vague. She slept deeply that night, without dreams. The next day was Saturday. It came with a great storm of wind and rain and hail: a fury. Alvina looked out in dismay. She knew Ciccio would not be able to come--he could not cycle, and it was impossible to get by train and return the same day. She was almost relieved. She was relieved by the intermission of fate, she was thankful for the day of neutrality. In the early afternoon came a telegram: Coming both tomorrow morning deepest sympathy Madame. Tomorrow was Sunday: and the funeral was in the afternoon. Alvina felt a burning inside her, thinking of Ciccio. She winced--and yet she wanted him to come. Terribly she wanted him to come. She showed the telegram to Miss Pinnegar. "Good gracious!" said the weary Miss Pinnegar. "Fancy those people. And I warrant they'll want to be at the funeral. As if he was anything to _them_--" "I think it's very nice of her," said Alvina. "Oh well," said Miss Pinnegar. "If you think so. I don't fancy he would have wanted such people following, myself. And what does she mean by _both_. Who's the other?" Miss Pinnegar looked sharply at Alvina. "Ciccio," said Alvina. "The Italian! Why goodness me! What's _he_ coming for? I can't make you out, Alvina. Is that his name, Chicho? I never heard such a name. Doesn't sound like a name at all to me. There won't be room for them in the cabs." "We'll order another." "More expense. I never knew such impertinent people--" But Alvina did not hear her. On the next morning she dressed herself carefully in her new dress. It was black voile. Carefully she did her hair. Ciccio and Madame were coming. The thought of Ciccio made her shudder. She hung about, waiting. Luckily none of the funeral guests would arrive till after one o'clock. Alvina sat listless, musing, by the fire in the drawing-room. She left everything now to Miss Pinnegar and Mrs. Rollings. Miss Pinnegar, red-eyed and yellow-skinned, was irritable beyond words. It was nearly mid-day when Alvina heard the gate. She hurried to open the front door. Madame was in her little black hat and her black spotted veil, Ciccio in a black overcoat was closing the yard door behind her. "Oh, my dear girl!" Madame cried, trotting forward with outstretched black-kid hands, one of which held an umbrella: "I am so shocked--I am so shocked to hear of your poor father. Am I to believe it?--am I really? No, I can't." She lifted her veil, kissed Alvina, and dabbed her eyes. Ciccio came up the steps. He took off his hat to Alvina, smiled slightly as he passed her. He looked rather pale, constrained. She closed the door and ushered them into the drawing-room. Madame looked round like a bird, examining the room and the furniture. She was evidently a little impressed. But all the time she was uttering her condolences. "Tell me, poor girl, how it happened?" "There isn't much to tell," said Alvina, and she gave the brief account of James's illness and death. "Worn out! Worn out!" Madame said, nodding slowly up and down. Her black veil, pushed up, sagged over her brows like a mourning band. "You cannot afford to waste the stamina. And will you keep on the theatre--with Mr. May--?" Ciccio was sitting looking towards the fire. His presence made Alvina tremble. She noticed how the fine black hair of his head showed no parting at all--it just grew like a close cap, and was pushed aside at the forehead. Sometimes he looked at her, as Madame talked, and again looked at her, and looked away. At last Madame came to a halt. There was a long pause. "You will stay to the funeral?" said Alvina. "Oh my dear, we shall be too much--" "No," said Alvina. "I have arranged for you--" "There! You think of everything. But I will come, not Ciccio. He will not trouble you." Ciccio looked up at Alvina. "I should like him to come," said Alvina simply. But a deep flush began to mount her face. She did not know where it came from, she felt so cold. And she wanted to cry. Madame watched her closely. "Siamo di accordo," came the voice of Ciccio. Alvina and Madame both looked at him. He sat constrained, with his face averted, his eyes dropped, but smiling. Madame looked closely at Alvina. "Is it true what he says?" she asked. "I don't understand him," said Alvina. "I don't understand what he said." "That you have agreed with him--" Madame and Ciccio both watched Alvina as she sat in her new black dress. Her eyes involuntarily turned to his. "I don't know," she said vaguely. "Have I--?" and she looked at him. Madame kept silence for some moments. Then she said gravely: "Well!--yes!--well!" She looked from one to another. "Well, there is a lot to consider. But if you have decided--" Neither of them answered. Madame suddenly rose and went to Alvina. She kissed her on either cheek. "I shall protect you," she said. Then she returned to her seat. "What have you said to Miss Houghton?" she said suddenly to Ciccio, tackling him direct, and speaking coldly. He looked at Madame with a faint derisive smile. Then he turned to Alvina. She bent her head and blushed. "Speak then," said Madame, "you have a reason." She seemed mistrustful of him. But he turned aside his face, and refused to speak, sitting as if he were unaware of Madame's presence. "Oh well," said Madame. "I shall be there, Signorino." She spoke with a half-playful threat. Ciccio curled his lip. "You do not know him yet," she said, turning to Alvina. "I know that," said Alvina, offended. Then she added: "Wouldn't you like to take off your hat?" "If you truly wish me to stay," said Madame. "Yes, please do. And will you hang your coat in the hall?" she said to Ciccio. "Oh!" said Madame roughly. "He will not stay to eat. He will go out to somewhere." Alvina looked at him. "Would you rather?" she said. He looked at her with sardonic yellow eyes. "If you want," he said, the awkward, derisive smile curling his lips and showing his teeth. She had a moment of sheer panic. Was he just stupid and bestial? The thought went clean through her. His yellow eyes watched her sardonically. It was the clean modelling of his dark, other-world face that decided her--for it sent the deep spasm across her. "I'd like you to stay," she said. A smile of triumph went over his face. Madame watched him stonily as she stood beside her chair, one hand lightly balanced on her hip. Alvina was reminded of Kishwégin. But even in Madame's stony mistrust there was an element of attraction towards him. He had taken his cigarette case from his pocket. "On ne fume pas dans le salon," said Madame brutally. "Will you put your coat in the passage?--and do smoke if you wish," said Alvina. He rose to his feet and took off his overcoat. His face was obstinate and mocking. He was rather floridly dressed, though in black, and wore boots of black patent leather with tan uppers. Handsome he was--but undeniably in bad taste. The silver ring was still on his finger--and his close, fine, unparted hair went badly with smart English clothes. He looked common--Alvina confessed it. And her heart sank. But what was she to do? He evidently was not happy. Obstinacy made him stick out the situation. Alvina and Madame went upstairs. Madame wanted to see the dead James. She looked at his frail, handsome, ethereal face, and crossed herself as she wept. "Un bel homme, cependant," she whispered. "Mort en un jour. C'est trop fort, voyez!" And she sniggered with fear and sobs. They went down to Alvina's bare room. Madame glanced round, as she did in every room she entered. "This was father's bedroom," said Alvina. "The other was mine. He wouldn't have it anything but like this--bare." "Nature of a monk, a hermit," whispered Madame. "Who would have thought it! Ah, the men, the men!" And she unpinned her hat and patted her hair before the small mirror, into which she had to peep to see herself. Alvina stood waiting. "And now--" whispered Madame, suddenly turning: "What about this Ciccio, hein?" It was ridiculous that she would not raise her voice above a whisper, upstairs there. But so it was. She scrutinized Alvina with her eyes of bright black glass. Alvina looked back at her, but did not know what to say. "What about him, hein? Will you marry him? Why will you?" "I suppose because I like him," said Alvina, flushing. Madame made a little grimace. "Oh yes!" she whispered, with a contemptuous mouth. "Oh yes!--because you like him! But you know nothing _of_ him--nothing. How can you like him, not knowing him? He may be a real bad character. How would you like him then?" "He isn't, is he?" said Alvina. "I don't know. I don't know. He may be. Even I, I don't know him--no, though he has been with me for three years. What is he? He is a man of the people, a boatman, a labourer, an artist's model. He sticks to nothing--" "How old is he?" asked Alvina. "He is twenty-five--a boy only. And you? You are older." "Thirty," confessed Alvina. "Thirty! Well now--so much difference! How can you trust him? How can you? Why does he want to marry you--why?" "I don't know--" said Alvina. "No, and I don't know. But I know something of these Italian men, who are labourers in every country, just labourers and under-men always, always down, down, down--" And Madame pressed her spread palms downwards. "And so--when they have a chance to come up--" she raised her hand with a spring--"they are very conceited, and they take their chance. He will want to rise, by you, and you will go down, with him. That is how it is. I have seen it before--yes--more than one time--" "But," said Alvina, laughing ruefully. "He can't rise much because of me, can he?" "How not? How not? In the first place, you are English, and he thinks to rise by that. Then you are not of the lower class, you are of the higher class, the class of the masters, such as employ Ciccio and men like him. How will he not rise in the world by you? Yes, he will rise very much. Or he will draw you down, down--Yes, one or another. And then he thinks that now you have money--now your father is dead--" here Madame glanced apprehensively at the closed door--"and they all like money, yes, very much, all Italians--" "Do they?" said Alvina, scared. "I'm sure there won't _be_ any money. I'm sure father is in debt." "What? You think? Do you? Really? Oh poor Miss Houghton! Well--and will you tell Ciccio that? Eh? Hein?" "Yes--certainly--if it matters," said poor Alvina. "Of course it matters. Of course it matters very much. It matters to him. Because he will not have much. He saves, saves, saves, as they all do, to go back to Italy and buy a piece of land. And if he has you, it will cost him much more, he cannot continue with Natcha-Kee-Tawara. All will be much more difficult--" "Oh, I will tell him in time," said Alvina, pale at the lips. "You will tell him! Yes. That is better. And then you will see. But he is obstinate--as a mule. And if he will still have you, then you must think. Can you live in England as the wife of a labouring man, a dirty Eyetalian, as they all say? It is serious. It is not pleasant for you, who have not known it. I also have not known it. But I have seen--" Alvina watched with wide, troubled eyes, while Madame darted looks, as from bright, deep black glass. "Yes," said Alvina. "I should hate being a labourer's wife in a nasty little house in a street--" "In a house?" cried Madame. "It would not be in a house. They live many together in one house. It would be two rooms, or even one room, in another house with many people not quite clean, you see--" Alvina shook her head. "I couldn't stand that," she said finally. "No!" Madame nodded approval. "No! you could not. They live in a bad way, the Italians. They do not know the English home--never. They don't like it. Nor do they know the Swiss clean and proper house. No. They don't understand. They run into their holes to sleep or to shelter, and that is all." "The same in Italy?" said Alvina. "Even more--because there it is sunny very often--" "And you don't need a house," said Alvina. "I should like that." "Yes, it is nice--but you don't know the life. And you would be alone with people like animals. And if you go to Italy he will beat you--he will beat you--" "If I let him," said Alvina. "But you can't help it, away there from everybody. Nobody will help you. If you are a wife in Italy, nobody will help you. You are his property, when you marry by Italian law. It is not like England. There is no divorce in Italy. And if he beats you, you are helpless--" "But why should he beat me?" said Alvina. "Why should he want to?" "They do. They are so jealous. And then they go into their ungovernable tempers, horrible tempers--" "Only when they are provoked," said Alvina, thinking of Max. "Yes, but you will not know what provokes him. Who can _say_ when he will be provoked? And then he beats you--" There seemed to be a gathering triumph in Madame's bright black eyes. Alvina looked at her, and turned to the door. "At any rate I know now," she said, in rather a flat voice. "And it is _true_. It is all of it true," whispered Madame vindictively. Alvina wanted to run from her. "I _must_ go to the kitchen," she said. "Shall we go down?" Alvina did not go into the drawing-room with Madame. She was too much upset, and she had almost a horror of seeing Ciccio at that moment. Miss Pinnegar, her face stained carmine by the fire, was helping Mrs. Rollings with the dinner. "Are they both staying, or only one?" she said tartly. "Both," said Alvina, busying herself with the gravy, to hide her distress and confusion. "The man as well," said Miss Pinnegar. "What does the woman want to bring _him_ for? I'm sure I don't know what your father would say--a common show-fellow, _looks_ what he is--and staying to dinner." Miss Pinnegar was thoroughly out of temper as she tried the potatoes. Alvina set the table. Then she went to the drawing-room. "Will you come to dinner?" she said to her two guests. Ciccio rose, threw his cigarette into the fire, and looked round. Outside was a faint, watery sunshine: but at least it was out of doors. He felt himself imprisoned and out of his element. He had an irresistible impulse to go. When he got into the hall he laid his hand on his hat. The stupid, constrained smile was on his face. "I'll go now," he said. "We have set the table for you," said Alvina. "Stop now, since you have stopped for so long," said Madame, darting her black looks at him. But he hurried on his coat, looking stupid. Madame lifted her eyebrows disdainfully. "This is polite behaviour!" she said sarcastically. Alvina stood at a loss. "You return to the funeral?" said Madame coldly. He shook his head. "When you are ready to go," he said. "At four o'clock," said Madame, "when the funeral has come home. Then we shall be in time for the train." He nodded, smiled stupidly, opened the door, and went. "This is just like him, to be so--so--" Madame could not express herself as she walked down to the kitchen. "Miss Pinnegar, this is Madame," said Alvina. "How do you do?" said Miss Pinnegar, a little distant and condescending. Madame eyed her keenly. "Where is the man? I don't know his name," said Miss Pinnegar. "He wouldn't stay," said Alvina. "What _is_ his name, Madame?" "Marasca--Francesco. Francesco Marasca--Neapolitan." "Marasca!" echoed Alvina. "It has a bad sound--a sound of a bad augury, bad sign," said Madame. "Ma-rà-sca!" She shook her head at the taste of the syllables. "Why do you think so?" said Alvina. "Do you think there is a meaning in sounds? goodness and badness?" "Yes," said Madame. "Certainly. Some sounds are good, they are for life, for creating, and some sounds are bad, they are for destroying. Ma-rà-sca!--that is bad, like swearing." "But what sort of badness? What does it do?" said Alvina. "What does it do? It sends life down--down--instead of lifting it up." "Why should things always go up? Why should life always go up?" said Alvina. "I don't know," said Madame, cutting her meat quickly. There was a pause. "And what about other names," interrupted Miss Pinnegar, a little lofty. "What about Houghton, for example?" Madame put down her fork, but kept her knife in her hand. She looked across the room, not at Miss Pinnegar. "Houghton--! Huff-ton!" she said. "When it is said, it has a sound _against_: that is, against the neighbour, against humanity. But when it is written _Hough-ton!_ then it is different, it is _for_." "It is always pronounced _Huff-ton_," said Miss Pinnegar. "By us," said Alvina. "We ought to know," said Miss Pinnegar. Madame turned to look at the unhappy, elderly woman. "You are a relative of the family?" she said. "No, not a relative. But I've been here many years," said Miss Pinnegar. "Oh, yes!" said Madame. Miss Pinnegar was frightfully affronted. The meal, with the three women at table, passed painfully. Miss Pinnegar rose to go upstairs and weep. She felt very forlorn. Alvina rose to wipe the dishes, hastily, because the funeral guests would all be coming. Madame went into the drawing-room to smoke her sly cigarette. Mr. May was the first to turn up for the lugubrious affair: very tight and tailored, but a little extinguished, all in black. He never wore black, and was very unhappy in it, being almost morbidly sensitive to the impression the colour made on him. He was set to entertain Madame. She did not pretend distress, but sat black-eyed and watchful, very much her business self. "What about the theatre?--will it go on?" she asked. "Well I don't know. I don't know Miss Houghton's intentions," said Mr. May. He was a little stilted today. "It's hers?" said Madame. "Why, as far as I understand--" "And if she wants to sell out--?" Mr. May spread his hands, and looked dismal, but distant. "You should form a company, and carry on--" said Madame. Mr. May looked even more distant, drawing himself up in an odd fashion, so that he looked as if he were trussed. But Madame's shrewd black eyes and busy mind did not let him off. "Buy Miss Houghton out--" said Madame shrewdly. "Of cauce," said Mr. May. "Miss Houghton herself must decide." "Oh sure--! You--are you married?" "Yes." "Your wife here?" "My wife is in London." "And children--?" "A daughter." Madame slowly nodded her head up and down, as if she put thousands of two-and-two's together. "You think there will be much to come to Miss Houghton?" she said. "Do you mean property? I really can't say. I haven't enquired." "No, but you have a good idea, eh?" "I'm afraid I haven't. "No! Well! It won't be much, then?" "Really, I don't know. I should say, not a _large_ fortune--!" "No--eh?" Madame kept him fixed with her black eyes. "Do you think the other one will get anything?" "The _other one_--?" queried Mr. May, with an uprising cadence. Madame nodded slightly towards the kitchen. "The old one--the Miss--Miss Pin--Pinny--what you call her." "Miss Pinnegar! The manageress of the work-girls? Really, I don't know at all--" Mr. May was most freezing. "Ha--ha! Ha--ha!" mused Madame quietly. Then she asked: "Which work-girls do you say?" And she listened astutely to Mr. May's forced account of the work-room upstairs, extorting all the details she desired to gather. Then there was a pause. Madame glanced round the room. "Nice house!" she said. "Is it their own?" "So I _believe_--" Again Madame nodded sagely. "Debts perhaps--eh? Mortgage--" and she looked slyly sardonic. "Really!" said Mr. May, bouncing to his feet. "Do you mind if I go to speak to Mrs. Rollings--" "Oh no--go along," said Madame, and Mr. May skipped out in a temper. Madame was left alone in her comfortable chair, studying details of the room and making accounts in her own mind, until the actual funeral guests began to arrive. And then she had the satisfaction of sizing them up. Several arrived with wreaths. The coffin had been carried down and laid in the small sitting-room--Mrs. Houghton's sitting-room. It was covered with white wreaths and streamers of purple ribbon. There was a crush and a confusion. And then at last the hearse and the cabs had arrived--the coffin was carried out--Alvina followed, on the arm of her father's cousin, whom she disliked. Miss Pinnegar marshalled the other mourners. It was a wretched business. But it was a great funeral. There were nine cabs, besides the hearse--Woodhouse had revived its ancient respect for the house of Houghton. A posse of minor tradesmen followed the cabs--all in black and with black gloves. The richer tradesmen sat in the cabs. Poor Alvina, this was the only day in all her life when she was the centre of public attention. For once, every eye was upon her, every mind was thinking about her. Poor Alvina! said every member of the Woodhouse "middle class": Poor Alvina Houghton, said every collier's wife. Poor thing, left alone--and hardly a penny to bless herself with. Lucky if she's not left with a pile of debts. James Houghton ran through some money in his day. Ay, if she had her rights she'd be a rich woman. Why, her mother brought three or four thousands with her. Ay, but James sank it all in Throttle-Ha'penny and Klondyke and the Endeavour. Well, he was his own worst enemy. He paid his way. I'm not so sure about that. Look how he served his wife, and now Alvina. I'm not so sure he was his own worst enemy. He was bad enough enemy to his own flesh and blood. Ah well, he'll spend no more money, anyhow. No, he went sudden, didn't he? But he was getting very frail, if you noticed. Oh yes, why he fair seemed to totter down to Lumley. Do you reckon as that place pays its way? What, the Endeavour?--they say it does. They say it makes a nice bit. Well, it's mostly pretty full. Ay, it is. Perhaps it won't be now Mr. Houghton's gone. Perhaps not. I wonder if he _will_ leave much. I'm sure he won't. Everything he's got's mortgaged up to the hilt. He'll leave debts, you see if he doesn't. What is she going to do then? She'll have to go out of Manchester House--her and Miss Pinnegar. Wonder what she'll do. Perhaps she'll take up that nursing. She never made much of that, did she--and spent a sight of money on her training, they say. She's a bit like her father in the business line--all flukes. Pity some nice young man doesn't turn up and marry her. I don't know, she doesn't seem to hook on, does she? Why she's never had a proper boy. They make out she was engaged once. Ay, but nobody ever saw him, and it was off as soon as it was on. Can you remember she went with Albert Witham for a bit. Did she? No, I never knew. When was that? Why, when he was at Oxford, you know, learning for his head master's place. Why didn't she marry him then? Perhaps he never asked her. Ay, there's that to it. She'd have looked down her nose at him, times gone by. Ay, but that's all over, my boy. She'd snap at anybody now. Look how she carries on with that manager. Why, _that's_ something awful. Haven't you ever watched her in the Cinema? She never lets him alone. And it's anybody alike. Oh, she doesn't respect herself. I don't consider. No girl who respected herself would go on as she does, throwing herself at every feller's head. Does she, though? Ay, any performer or anybody. She's a tidy age, though. She's not much chance of getting off. How old do you reckon she is? Must be well over thirty. You never say. Well, she _looks_ it. She does beguy--a dragged old maid. Oh but she sprightles up a bit sometimes. Ay, when she thinks she's hooked on to somebody. I wonder why she never did take? It's funny. Oh, she was too high and mighty before, and now it's too late. Nobody wants her. And she's got no relations to go to either, has she? No, that's her father's cousin who she's walking with. Look, they're coming. He's a fine-looking man, isn't he? You'd have thought they'd have buried Miss Frost beside Mrs. Houghton. You would, wouldn't you? I should think Alvina will lie by Miss Frost. They say the grave was made for both of them. Ay, she was a lot more of a mother to her than her own mother. She _was_ good to them, Miss Frost was. Alvina thought the world of her. That's her stone--look, down there. Not a very grand one, considering. No, it isn't. Look, there's room for Alvina's name underneath. Sh!-- Alvina had sat back in the cab and watched from her obscurity the many faces on the street: so familiar, so familiar, familiar as her own face. And now she seemed to see them from a great distance, out of her darkness. Her big cousin sat opposite her--how she disliked his presence. In chapel she cried, thinking of her mother, and Miss Frost, and her father. She felt so desolate--it all seemed so empty. Bitterly she cried, when she bent down during the prayer. And her crying started Miss Pinnegar, who cried almost as bitterly. It was all rather horrible. The afterwards--the horrible afterwards. There was the slow progress to the cemetery. It was a dull, cold day. Alvina shivered as she stood on the bleak hillside, by the open grave. Her coat did not seem warm enough, her old black seal-skin furs were not much protection. The minister stood on the plank by the grave, and she stood near, watching the white flowers blowing in the cold wind. She had watched them for her mother--and for Miss Frost. She felt a sudden clinging to Miss Pinnegar. Yet they would have to part. Miss Pinnegar had been so fond of her father, in a quaint, reserved way. Poor Miss Pinnegar, that was all life had offered her. Well, after all, it had been a home and a home life. To which home and home life Alvina now clung with a desperate yearning, knowing inevitably she was going to lose it, now her father was gone. Strange, that he was gone. But he was weary, worn very thin and weary. He had lived his day. How different it all was, now, at his death, from the time when Alvina knew him as a little child and thought him such a fine gentleman. You live and learn and lose. For one moment she looked at Madame, who was shuddering with cold, her face hidden behind her black spotted veil. But Madame seemed immensely remote: so unreal. And Ciccio--what was his name? She could not think of it. What was it? She tried to think of Madame's slow enunciation. Marasca--maraschino. Marasca! Maraschino! What was maraschino? Where had she heard it. Cudgelling her brains, she remembered the doctors, and the suppers after the theatre. And maraschino--why, that was the favourite white liqueur of the innocent Dr. Young. She could remember even now the way he seemed to smack his lips, saying the word _maraschino_. Yet she didn't think much of it. Hot, bitterish stuff--nothing: not like green Chartreuse, which Dr. James gave her. Maraschino! Yes, that was it. Made from cherries. Well, Ciccio's name was nearly the same. Ridiculous! But she supposed Italian words were a good deal alike. Ciccio, the marasca, the bitter cherry, was standing on the edge of the crowd, looking on. He had no connection whatever with the proceedings--stood outside, self-conscious, uncomfortable, bitten by the wind, and hating the people who stared at him. He saw the trim, plump figure of Madame, like some trim plump partridge among a flock of barn-yard fowls. And he depended on her presence. Without her, he would have felt too horribly uncomfortable on that raw hillside. She and he were in some way allied. But these others, how alien and uncouth he felt them. Impressed by their fine clothes, the English working-classes were none the less barbarians to him, uncivilized: just as he was to them an uncivilized animal. Uncouth, they seemed to him, all raw angles and harshness, like their own weather. Not that he thought about them. But he felt it in his flesh, the harshness and discomfort of them. And Alvina was one of them. As she stood there by the grave, pale and pinched and reserved looking, she was of a piece with the hideous cold grey discomfort of the whole scene. Never had anything been more uncongenial to him. He was dying to get away--to clear out. That was all he wanted. Only some southern obstinacy made him watch, from the duskiness of his face, the pale, reserved girl at the grave. Perhaps he even disliked her, at that time. But he watched in his dislike. When the ceremony was over, and the mourners turned away to go back to the cabs, Madame pressed forward to Alvina. "I shall say good-bye now, Miss Houghton. We must go to the station for the train. And thank you, thank you. Good-bye." "But--" Alvina looked round. "Ciccio is there. I see him. We must catch the train." "Oh but--won't you drive? Won't you ask Ciccio to drive with you in the cab? Where is he?" Madame pointed him out as he hung back among the graves, his black hat cocked a little on one side. He was watching. Alvina broke away from her cousin, and went to him. "Madame is going to drive to the station," she said. "She wants you to get in with her." He looked round at the cabs. "All right," he said, and he picked his way across the graves to Madame, following Alvina. "So, we go together in the cab," said Madame to him. Then: "Good-bye, my dear Miss Houghton. Perhaps we shall meet once more. Who knows? My heart is with you, my dear." She put her arms round Alvina and kissed her, a little theatrically. The cousin looked on, very much aloof. Ciccio stood by. "Come then, Ciccio," said Madame. "Good-bye," said Alvina to him. "You'll come again, won't you?" She looked at him from her strained, pale face. "All right," he said, shaking her hand loosely. It sounded hopelessly indefinite. "You will come, won't you?" she repeated, staring at him with strained, unseeing blue eyes. "All right," he said, ducking and turning away. She stood quite still for a moment, quite lost. Then she went on with her cousin to her cab, home to the funeral tea. "Good-bye!" Madame fluttered a black-edged handkerchief. But Ciccio, most uncomfortable in his four-wheeler, kept hidden. The funeral tea, with its baked meats and sweets, was a terrible affair. But it came to an end, as everything comes to an end, and Miss Pinnegar and Alvina were left alone in the emptiness of Manchester House. "If you weren't here, Miss Pinnegar, I should be quite by myself," said Alvina, blanched and strained. "Yes. And so should I without you," said Miss Pinnegar doggedly. They looked at each other. And that night both slept in Miss Pinnegar's bed, out of sheer terror of the empty house. During the days following the funeral, no one could have been more tiresome than Alvina. James had left everything to his daughter, excepting some rights in the work-shop, which were Miss Pinnegar's. But the question was, how much did "everything" amount to? There was something less than a hundred pounds in the bank. There was a mortgage on Manchester House. There were substantial bills owing on account of the Endeavour. Alvina had about a hundred pounds left from the insurance money, when all funeral expenses were paid. Of that she was sure, and of nothing else. For the rest, she was almost driven mad by people coming to talk to her. The lawyer came, the clergyman came, her cousin came, the old, stout, prosperous tradesmen of Woodhouse came, Mr. May came, Miss Pinnegar came. And they all had schemes, and they all had advice. The chief plan was that the theatre should be sold up: and that Manchester House should be sold, reserving a lease on the top floor, where Miss Pinnegar's work-rooms were: that Miss Pinnegar and Alvina should move into a small house, Miss Pinnegar keeping the work-room, Alvina giving music-lessons: that the two women should be partners in the work-shop. There were other plans, of course. There was a faction against the chapel faction, which favoured the plan sketched out above. The theatre faction, including Mr. May and some of the more florid tradesmen, favoured the risking of everything in the Endeavour. Alvina was to be the proprietress of the Endeavour, she was to run it on some sort of successful lines, and abandon all other enterprise. Minor plans included the election of Alvina to the post of parish nurse, at six pounds a month: a small private school; a small haberdashery shop; and a position in the office of her cousin's Knarborough business. To one and all Alvina answered with a tantalizing: "I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know. I can't say yet. I shall see. I shall see." Till one and all became angry with her. They were all so benevolent, and all so sure that they were proposing the very best thing she could do. And they were all nettled, even indignant that she did not jump at their proposals. She listened to them all. She even invited their advice. Continually she said: "Well, what do _you_ think of it?" And she repeated the chapel plan to the theatre group, the theatre plan to the chapel party, the nursing to the pianoforte proposers, the haberdashery shop to the private school advocates. "Tell me what _you_ think," she said repeatedly. And they all told her they thought _their_ plan was best. And bit by bit she told every advocate the proposal of every other advocate "Well, Lawyer Beeby thinks--" and "Well now, Mr. Clay, the minister, advises--" and so on and so on, till it was all buzzing through thirty benevolent and officious heads. And thirty benevolently-officious wills were striving to plant each one its own particular scheme of benevolence. And Alvina, naïve and pathetic, egged them all on in their strife, without even knowing what she was doing. One thing only was certain. Some obstinate will in her own self absolutely refused to have her mind made up. She would _not_ have her mind made up for her, and she would not make it up for herself. And so everybody began to say "I'm getting tired of her. You talk to her, and you get no forrarder. She slips off to something else. I'm not going to bother with her any more." In truth, Woodhouse was in a fever, for three weeks or more, arranging Alvina's unarrangeable future for her. Offers of charity were innumerable--for three weeks. Meanwhile, the lawyer went on with the proving of the will and the drawing up of a final account of James's property; Mr. May went on with the Endeavour, though Alvina did not go down to play; Miss Pinnegar went on with the work-girls: and Alvina went on unmaking her mind. Ciccio did not come during the first week. Alvina had a post-card from Madame, from Cheshire: rather far off. But such was the buzz and excitement over her material future, such a fever was worked up round about her that Alvina, the petty-propertied heroine of the moment, was quite carried away in a storm of schemes and benevolent suggestions. She answered Madame's post-card, but did not give much thought to the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. As a matter of fact, she was enjoying a real moment of importance, there at the centre of Woodhouse's rather domineering benevolence: a benevolence which she unconsciously, but systematically frustrated. All this scheming for selling out and making reservations and hanging on and fixing prices and getting private bids for Manchester House and for the Endeavour, the excitement of forming a Limited Company to run the Endeavour, of seeing a lawyer about the sale of Manchester House and the auctioneer about the sale of the furniture, of receiving men who wanted to pick up the machines upstairs cheap, and of keeping everything dangling, deciding nothing, putting everything off till she had seen somebody else, this for the moment fascinated her, went to her head. It was not until the second week had passed that her excitement began to merge into irritation, and not until the third week had gone by that she began to feel herself entangled in an asphyxiating web of indecision, and her heart began to sing because Ciccio had never turned up. Now she would have given anything to see the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras again. But she did not know where they were. Now she began to loathe the excitement of her property: doubtfully hers, every stick of it. Now she would give anything to get away from Woodhouse, from the horrible buzz and entanglement of her sordid affairs. Now again her wild recklessness came over her. She suddenly said she was going away somewhere: she would not say where. She cashed all the money she could: a hundred-and-twenty-five pounds. She took the train to Cheshire, to the last address of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras: she followed them to Stockport: and back to Chinley: and there she was stuck for the night. Next day she dashed back almost to Woodhouse, and swerved round to Sheffield. There, in that black town, thank heaven, she saw their announcement on the wall. She took a taxi to their theatre, and then on to their lodgings. The first thing she saw was Louis, in his shirt sleeves, on the landing above. She laughed with excitement and pleasure. She seemed another woman. Madame looked up, almost annoyed, when she entered. "I couldn't keep away from you, Madame," she cried. "Evidently," said Madame. Madame was darning socks for the young men. She was a wonderful mother for them, sewed for them, cooked for them, looked after them most carefully. Not many minutes was Madame idle. "Do you mind?" said Alvina. Madame darned for some moments without answering. "And how is everything at Woodhouse?" she asked. "I couldn't bear it any longer. I couldn't bear it. So I collected all the money I could, and ran away. Nobody knows where I am." Madame looked up with bright, black, censorious eyes, at the flushed girl opposite. Alvina had a certain strangeness and brightness, which Madame did not know, and a frankness which the Frenchwoman mistrusted, but found disarming. "And all the business, the will and all?" said Madame. "They're still fussing about it." "And there is some money?" "I have got a hundred pounds here," laughed Alvina. "What there will be when everything is settled, I don't know. But not very much, I'm sure of that." "How much do you think? A thousand pounds?" "Oh, it's just possible, you know. But it's just as likely there won't be another penny--" Madame nodded slowly, as always when she did her calculations. "And if there is nothing, what do you intend?" said Madame. "I don't know," said Alvina brightly. "And if there is something?" "I don't know either. But I thought, if you would let me play for you, I could keep myself for some time with my own money. You said perhaps I might be with the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. I wish you would let me." Madame bent her head so that nothing showed but the bright black folds of her hair. Then she looked up, with a slow, subtle, rather jeering smile. "Ciccio didn't come to see you, hein?" "No," said Alvina. "Yet he promised." Again Madame smiled sardonically. "Do you call it a promise?" she said. "You are easy to be satisfied with a word. A hundred pounds? No more?" "A hundred and twenty--" "Where is it?" "In my bag at the station--in notes. And I've got a little here--" Alvina opened her purse, and took out some little gold and silver. "At the station!" exclaimed Madame, smiling grimly. "Then perhaps you have nothing." "Oh, I think it's quite safe, don't you--?" "Yes--maybe--since it is England. And you think a hundred and twenty pounds is enough?" "What for?" "To satisfy Ciccio." "I wasn't thinking of him," cried Alvina. "No?" said Madame ironically. "I can propose it to him. Wait one moment." She went to the door and called Ciccio. He entered, looking not very good-tempered. "Be so good, my dear," said Madame to him, "to go to the station and fetch Miss Houghton's little bag. You have got the ticket, have you?" Alvina handed the luggage ticket to Madame. "Midland Railway," said Madame. "And, Ciccio, you are listening--? Mind! There is a hundred and twenty pounds of Miss Houghton's money in the bag. You hear? Mind it is not lost." "It's all I have," said Alvina. "For the time, for the time--till the will is proved, it is all the cash she has. So mind doubly. You hear?" "All right," said Ciccio. "Tell him what sort of a bag, Miss Houghton," said Madame. Alvina told him. He ducked and went. Madame listened for his final departure. Then she nodded sagely at Alvina. "Take off your hat and coat, my dear. Soon we will have tea--when Cic' returns. Let him think, let him think what he likes. So much money is certain, perhaps there will be more. Let him think. It will make all the difference that there is so much cash--yes, so much--" "But would it _really_ make a difference to him?" cried Alvina. "Oh my dear!" exclaimed Madame. "Why should it not? We are on earth, where we must eat. We are not in Paradise. If it were a thousand pounds, then he would want very badly to marry you. But a hundred and twenty is better than a blow to the eye, eh? Why sure!" "It's dreadful, though--!" said Alvina. "Oh la-la! Dreadful! If it was Max, who is sentimental, then no, the money is nothing. But all the others--why, you see, they are men, and they know which side to butter their bread. Men are like cats, my dear, they don't like their bread without butter. Why should they? Nor do I, nor do I." "Can I help with the darning?" said Alvina. "Hein? I shall give you Ciccio's socks, yes? He pushes holes in the toes--you see?" Madame poked two fingers through the hole in the toe of a red-and-black sock, and smiled a little maliciously at Alvina. "I don't mind which sock I darn," she said. "No? You don't? Well then, I give you another. But if you like I will speak to him--" "What to say?" asked Alvina. "To say that you have so much money, and hope to have more. And that you like him--Yes? Am I right? You like him very much?--hein? Is it so?" "And then what?" said Alvina. "That he should tell me if he should like to marry you also--quite simply. What? Yes?" "No," said Alvina. "Don't say anything--not yet." "Hé? Not yet? Not yet. All right, not yet then. You will see--" Alvina sat darning the sock and smiling at her own shamelessness. The point that amused her most of all was the fact that she was not by any means sure she wanted to marry him. There was Madame spinning her web like a plump prolific black spider. There was Ciccio, the unrestful fly. And there was herself, who didn't know in the least what she was doing. There sat two of them, Madame and herself, darning socks in a stuffy little bedroom with a gas fire, as if they had been born to it. And after all, Woodhouse wasn't fifty miles away. Madame went downstairs to get tea ready. Wherever she was, she superintended the cooking and the preparation of meals for her young men, scrupulous and quick. She called Alvina downstairs. Ciccio came in with the bag. "See, my dear, that your money is safe," said Madame. Alvina unfastened her bag and counted the crisp white notes. "And now," said Madame, "I shall lock it in my little bank, yes, where it will be safe. And I shall give you a receipt, which the young men will witness." The party sat down to tea, in the stuffy sitting-room. "Now, boys," said Madame, "what do you say? Shall Miss Houghton join the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras? Shall she be our pianist?" The eyes of the four young men rested on Alvina. Max, as being the responsible party, looked business-like. Louis was tender, Geoffrey round-eyed and inquisitive, Ciccio furtive. "With great pleasure," said Max. "But can the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras afford to pay a pianist for themselves?" "No," said Madame. "No. I think not. Miss Houghton will come for one month, to prove, and in that time she shall pay for herself. Yes? So she fancies it." "Can we pay her expenses?" said Max. "No," said Alvina. "Let me pay everything for myself, for a month. I should like to be with you, awfully--" She looked across with a look half mischievous, half beseeching at the erect Max. He bowed as he sat at table. "I think we shall all be honoured," he said. "Certainly," said Louis, bowing also over his tea-cup. Geoffrey inclined his head, and Ciccio lowered his eyelashes in indication of agreement. "Now then," said Madame briskly, "we are all agreed. Tonight we will have a bottle of wine on it. Yes, gentlemen? What d'you say? Chianti--hein?" They all bowed above the table. "And Miss Houghton shall have her professional name, eh? Because we cannot say Miss Houghton--what?" "Do call me Alvina," said Alvina. "Alvina--Al-vy-na! No, excuse me, my dear, I don't like it. I don't like this 'vy' sound. Tonight we shall find a name." After tea they inquired for a room for Alvina. There was none in the house. But two doors away was another decent lodging-house, where a bedroom on the top floor was found for her. "I think you are very well here," said Madame. "Quite nice," said Alvina, looking round the hideous little room, and remembering her other term of probation, as a maternity nurse. She dressed as attractively as possible, in her new dress of black voile, and imitating Madame, she put four jewelled rings on her fingers. As a rule she only wore the mourning-ring of black enamel and diamond, which had been always on Miss Frost's finger. Now she left off this, and took four diamond rings, and one good sapphire. She looked at herself in her mirror as she had never done before, really interested in the effect she made. And in her dress she pinned a valuable old ruby brooch. Then she went down to Madame's house. Madame eyed her shrewdly, with just a touch of jealousy: the eternal jealousy that must exist between the plump, pale partridge of a Frenchwoman, whose black hair is so glossy and tidy, whose black eyes are so acute, whose black dress is so neat and _chic_, and the rather thin Englishwoman in soft voile, with soft, rather loose brown hair and demure, blue-grey eyes. "Oh--a difference--what a difference! When you have a little more flesh--then--" Madame made a slight click with her tongue. "What a good brooch, eh?" Madame fingered the brooch. "Old paste--old paste--antique--" "No," said Alvina. "They are real rubies. It was my great-grandmother's." "Do you mean it? Real? Are you sure--" "I think I'm quite sure." Madame scrutinized the jewels with a fine eye. "Hm!" she said. And Alvina did not know whether she was sceptical, or jealous, or admiring, or really impressed. "And the diamonds are real?" said Madame, making Alvina hold up her hands. "I've always understood so," said Alvina. Madame scrutinized, and slowly nodded her head. Then she looked into Alvina's eyes, really a little jealous. "Another four thousand francs there," she said, nodding sagely. "Really!" said Alvina. "For sure. It's enough--it's enough--" And there was a silence between the two women. The young men had been out shopping for the supper. Louis, who knew where to find French and German stuff, came in with bundles, Ciccio returned with a couple of flasks, Geoffrey with sundry moist papers of edibles. Alvina helped Madame to put the anchovies and sardines and tunny and ham and salami on various plates, she broke off a bit of fern from one of the flower-pots, to stick in the pork-pie, she set the table with its ugly knives and forks and glasses. All the time her rings sparkled, her red brooch sent out beams, she laughed and was gay, she was quick, and she flattered Madame by being very deferential to her. Whether she was herself or not, in the hideous, common, stuffy sitting-room of the lodging-house she did not know or care. But she felt excited and gay. She knew the young men were watching her. Max gave his assistance wherever possible. Geoffrey watched her rings, half spell-bound. But Alvina was concerned only to flatter the plump, white, soft vanity of Madame. She carefully chose for Madame the finest plate, the clearest glass, the whitest-hafted knife, the most delicate fork. All of which Madame saw, with acute eyes. At the theatre the same: Alvina played for Kishwégin, only for Kishwégin. And Madame had the time of her life. "You know, my dear," she said afterward to Alvina, "I understand sympathy in music. Music goes straight to the heart." And she kissed Alvina on both cheeks, throwing her arms round her neck dramatically. "I'm _so_ glad," said the wily Alvina. And the young men stirred uneasily, and smiled furtively. They hurried home to the famous supper. Madame sat at one end of the table, Alvina at the other. Madame had Max and Louis by her side, Alvina had Ciccio and Geoffrey. Ciccio was on Alvina's right hand: a delicate hint. They began with hors d'oeuvres and tumblers three parts full of Chianti. Alvina wanted to water her wine, but was not allowed to insult the sacred liquid. There was a spirit of great liveliness and conviviality. Madame became paler, her eyes blacker, with the wine she drank, her voice became a little raucous. "Tonight," she said, "the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras make their feast of affiliation. The white daughter has entered the tribe of the Hirondelles, swallows that pass from land to land, and build their nests between roof and wall. A new swallow, a new Huron from the tents of the pale-face, from the lodges of the north, from the tribe of the Yenghees." Madame's black eyes glared with a kind of wild triumph down the table at Alvina. "Nameless, without having a name, comes the maiden with the red jewels, dark-hearted, with the red beams. Wine from the pale-face shadows, drunken wine for Kishwégin, strange wine for the _braves_ in their nostrils, Vaali, _à vous_." Madame lifted her glass. "Vaali, drink to her--Boire à elle--" She thrust her glass forwards in the air. The young men thrust their glasses up towards Alvina, in a cluster. She could see their mouths all smiling, their teeth white as they cried in their throats: "Vaali! Vaali! Boire à vous." Ciccio was near to her. Under the table he laid his hand on her knee. Quickly she put forward her hand to protect herself. He took her hand, and looked at her along the glass as he drank. She saw his throat move as the wine went down it. He put down his glass, still watching her. "Vaali!" he said, in his throat. Then across the table "Hé, Gigi--Viale! Le Petit Chemin! Comment? Me prends-tu? L'allée--" There came a great burst of laughter from Louis. "It is good, it is good!" he cried. "Oh Madame! Viale, it is Italian for the little way, the alley. That is too rich." Max went off into a high and ribald laugh. "L'allée italienne!" he said, and shouted with laughter. "Alley or avenue, what does it matter," cried Madame in French, "so long as it is a good journey." Here Geoffrey at last saw the joke. With a strange determined flourish he filled his glass, cocking up his elbow. "A toi, Cic'--et bon voyage!" he said, and then he tilted up his chin and swallowed in great throatfuls. "Certainly! Certainly!" cried Madame. "To thy good journey, my Ciccio, for thou art not a great traveller--" "Na, pour _ça_, y'a plus d'une voie," said Geoffrey. During this passage in French Alvina sat with very bright eyes looking from one to another, and not understanding. But she knew it was something improper, on her account. Her eyes had a bright, slightly-bewildered look as she turned from one face to another. Ciccio had let go her hand, and was wiping his lips with his fingers. He too was a little self-conscious. "Assez de cette éternelle voix italienne," said Madame. "Courage, courage au chemin d'Angleterre." "Assez de cette éternelle voix rauque," said Ciccio, looking round. Madame suddenly pulled herself together. "They will not have my name. They will call you Allay!" she said to Alvina. "Is it good? Will it do?" "Quite," said Alvina. And she could not understand why Gigi, and then the others after him, went off into a shout of laughter. She kept looking round with bright, puzzled eyes. Her face was slightly flushed and tender looking, she looked naïve, young. "Then you will become one of the tribe of Natcha-Kee-Tawara, of the name Allaye? Yes?" "Yes," said Alvina. "And obey the strict rules of the tribe. Do you agree?" "Yes." "Then listen." Madame primmed and preened herself like a black pigeon, and darted glances out of her black eyes. "We are one tribe, one nation--say it." "We are one tribe, one nation," repeated Alvina. "Say all," cried Madame. "We are one tribe, one nation--" they shouted, with varying accent. "Good!" said Madame. "And no nation do we know but the nation of the Hirondelles--" "No nation do we know but the nation of the Hirondelles," came the ragged chant of strong male voices, resonant and gay with mockery. "Hurons--Hirondelles, means _swallows_," said Madame. "Yes, I know," said Alvina. "So! you know! Well, then! We know no nation but the Hirondelles. WE HAVE NO LAW BUT HURON LAW!" "We have no law but Huron law!" sang the response, in a deep, sardonic chant. "WE HAVE NO LAWGIVER EXCEPT KISHWÉGIN." "We have no lawgiver except Kishwégin," they sang sonorous. "WE HAVE NO HOME BUT THE TENT OF KISHWÉGIN." "We have no home but the tent of Kishwégin." "THERE IS NO GOOD BUT THE GOOD OF NATCHA-KEE-TAWARA." "There is no good but the good of Natcha-Kee-Tawara." "WE ARE THE HIRONDELLES." "We are the Hirondelles." "WE ARE KISHWÉGIN." "We are Kishwégin." "WE ARE MONDAGUA." "We are Mondagua--" "WE ARE ATONQUOIS--" "We are Atonquois--" "WE ARE PACOHUILA--" "We are Pacohuila--" "WE ARE WALGATCHKA--" "We are Walgatchka--" "WE ARE ALLAYE--" "We are Allaye--" "La musica! Pacohuila, la musica!" cried Madame, starting to her feet and sounding frenzied. Ciccio got up quickly and took his mandoline from its case. "A--A--Ai--Aii--eee--ya--" began Madame, with a long, faint wail. And on the wailing mandoline the music started. She began to dance a slight but intense dance. Then she waved for a partner, and set up a tarantella wail. Louis threw off his coat and sprang to tarantella attention, Ciccio rang out the peculiar tarantella, and Madame and Louis danced in the tight space. "Brava--Brava!" cried the others, when Madame sank into her place. And they crowded forward to kiss her hand. One after the other, they kissed her fingers, whilst she laid her left hand languidly on the head of one man after another, as she sat slightly panting. Ciccio however did not come up, but sat faintly twanging the mandoline. Nor did Alvina leave her place. "Pacohuila!" cried Madame, with an imperious gesture. "Allaye! Come--" Ciccio laid down his mandoline and went to kiss the fingers of Kishwégin. Alvina also went forward. Madame held out her hand. Alvina kissed it. Madame laid her hand on the head of Alvina. "This is the squaw Allaye, this is the daughter of Kishwégin," she said, in her Tawara manner. "And where is the _brave_ of Allaye, where is the arm that upholds the daughter of Kishwégin, which of the Swallows spreads his wings over the gentle head of the new one!" "Pacohuila!" said Louis. "Pacohuila! Pacohuila! Pacohuila!" said the others. "Spread soft wings, spread dark-roofed wings, Pacohuila," said Kishwégin, and Ciccio, in his shirt-sleeves solemnly spread his arms. "Stoop, stoop, Allaye, beneath the wings of Pacohuila," said Kishwégin, faintly pressing Alvina on the shoulder. Alvina stooped and crouched under the right arm of Pacohuila. "Has the bird flown home?" chanted Kishwégin, to one of the strains of their music. "The bird is home--" chanted the men. "Is the nest warm?" chanted Kishwégin. "The nest is warm." "Does the he-bird stoop--?" "He stoops." "Who takes Allaye?" "Pacohuila." Ciccio gently stooped and raised Alvina to her feet. "C'est ça!" said Madame, kissing her. "And now, children, unless the Sheffield policeman will knock at our door, we must retire to our wigwams all--" Ciccio was watching Alvina. Madame made him a secret, imperative gesture that he should accompany the young woman. "You have your key, Allaye?" she said. "Did I have a key?" said Alvina. Madame smiled subtly as she produced a latch-key. "Kishwégin must open your doors for you all," she said. Then, with a slight flourish, she presented the key to Ciccio. "I give it to him? Yes?" she added, with her subtle, malicious smile. Ciccio, smiling slightly, and keeping his head ducked, took the key. Alvina looked brightly, as if bewildered, from one to another. "Also the light!" said Madame, producing a pocket flash-light, which she triumphantly handed to Ciccio. Alvina watched him. She noticed how he dropped his head forward from his straight, strong shoulders, how beautiful that was, the strong, forward-inclining nape and back of the head. It produced a kind of dazed submission in her, the drugged sense of unknown beauty. "And so good-night, Allaye--bonne nuit, fille des Tawara." Madame kissed her, and darted black, unaccountable looks at her. Each _brave_ also kissed her hand, with a profound salute. Then the men shook hands warmly with Ciccio, murmuring to him. He did not put on his hat nor his coat, but ran round as he was to the neighbouring house with her, and opened the door. She entered, and he followed, flashing on the light. So she climbed weakly up the dusty, drab stairs, he following. When she came to her door, she turned and looked at him. His face was scarcely visible, it seemed, and yet so strange and beautiful. It was the unknown beauty which almost killed her. "You aren't coming?" she quavered. He gave an odd, half-gay, half-mocking twitch of his thick dark brows, and began to laugh silently. Then he nodded again, laughing at her boldly, carelessly, triumphantly, like the dark Southerner he was. Her instinct was to defend herself. When suddenly she found herself in the dark. She gasped. And as she gasped, he quite gently put her inside her room, and closed the door, keeping one arm round her all the time. She felt his heavy muscular predominance. So he took her in both arms, powerful, mysterious, horrible in the pitch dark. Yet the sense of the unknown beauty of him weighed her down like some force. If for one moment she could have escaped from that black spell of his beauty, she would have been free. But she could not. He was awful to her, shameless so that she died under his shamelessness, his smiling, progressive shamelessness. Yet she could not see him ugly. If only she could, for one second, have seen him ugly, he would not have killed her and made her his slave as he did. But the spell was on her, of his darkness and unfathomed handsomeness. And he killed her. He simply took her and assassinated her. How she suffered no one can tell. Yet all the time, his lustrous dark beauty, unbearable. When later she pressed her face on his chest and cried, he held her gently as if she was a child, but took no notice, and she felt in the darkness that he smiled. It was utterly dark, and she knew he smiled, and she began to get hysterical. But he only kissed her, his smiling deepening to a heavy laughter, silent and invisible, but sensible, as he carried her away once more. He intended her to be his slave, she knew. And he seemed to throw her down and suffocate her like a wave. And she could have fought, if only the sense of his dark, rich handsomeness had not numbed her like a venom. So she was suffocated in his passion. In the morning when it was light he turned and looked at her from under his long black lashes, a long, steady, cruel, faintly-smiling look from his tawny eyes, searching her as if to see whether she were still alive. And she looked back at him, heavy-eyed and half subjected. He smiled slightly at her, rose, and left her. And she turned her face to the wall, feeling beaten. Yet not quite beaten to death. Save for the fatal numbness of her love for him, she could still have escaped him. But she lay inert, as if envenomed. He wanted to make her his slave. When she went down to the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras for breakfast she found them waiting for her. She was rather frail and tender-looking, with wondering eyes that showed she had been crying. "Come, daughter of the Tawaras," said Madame brightly to her. "We have been waiting for you. Good-morning, and all happiness, eh? Look, it is a gift-day for you--" Madame smilingly led Alvina to her place. Beside her plate was a bunch of violets, a bunch of carnations, a pair of exquisite bead moccasins, and a pair of fine doeskin gloves delicately decorated with feather-work on the cuffs. The slippers were from Kishwégin, the gloves from Mondagua, the carnations from Atonquois, the violets from Walgatchka--all _To the Daughter of the Tawaras, Allaye_, as it said on the little cards. "The gift of Pacohuila you know," said Madame, smiling. "The brothers of Pacohuila are your brothers." One by one they went to her and each one laid the back of her fingers against his forehead, saying in turn: "I am your brother Mondagua, Allaye!" "I am your brother Atonquois, Allaye!" "I am your brother Walgatchka, Allaye, best brother, you know--" So spoke Geoffrey, looking at her with large, almost solemn eyes of affection. Alvina smiled a little wanly, wondering where she was. It was all so solemn. Was it all mockery, play-acting? She felt bitterly inclined to cry. Meanwhile Madame came in with the coffee, which she always made herself, and the party sat down to breakfast. Ciccio sat on Alvina's right, but he seemed to avoid looking at her or speaking to her. All the time he looked across the table, with the half-asserted, knowing look in his eyes, at Gigi: and all the time he addressed himself to Gigi, with the throaty, rich, plangent quality in his voice, that Alvina could not bear, it seemed terrible to her: and he spoke in French: and the two men seemed to be exchanging unspeakable communications. So that Alvina, for all her wistfulness and subjectedness, was at last seriously offended. She rose as soon as possible from table. In her own heart she wanted attention and public recognition from Ciccio--none of which she got. She returned to her own house, to her own room, anxious to tidy everything, not wishing to have her landlady in the room. And she half expected Ciccio to come to speak to her. As she was busy washing a garment in the bowl, her landlady knocked and entered. She was a rough and rather beery-looking Yorkshire woman, not attractive. "Oh, yo'n made yer bed then, han' yer!" "Yes," said Alvina. "I've done everything." "I see yer han. Yo'n bin sharp." Alvina did not answer. "Seems yer doin' yersen a bit o' weshin'." Still Alvina didn't answer. "Yo' can 'ing it i' th' back yard." "I think it'll dry here," said Alvina. "Isna much dryin' up here. Send us howd when 't's ready. Yo'll 'appen be wantin' it. I can dry it off for yer i' t' kitchen. You don't take a drop o' nothink, do yer?" "No," said Alvina. "I don't like it." "Summat a bit stronger 'n 't bottle, my sakes alive! Well, yo mun ha'e yer fling, like t' rest. But coom na, which on 'em is it? I catched sight on 'im goin' out, but I didna ma'e out then which on 'em it wor. He--eh, it's a pity you don't take a drop of nothink, it's a world's pity. Is it the fairest on 'em, the tallest." "No," said Alvina. "The darkest one." "Oh ay! Well, 's a strappin' anuff feller, for them as goes that road. I thought Madame was partikler. I s'll charge yer a bit more, yer know. I s'll 'ave to make a bit out of it. _I'm_ partikler as a rule. I don't like 'em comin' in an' goin' out, you know. Things get said. You look so quiet, you do. Come now, it's worth a hextra quart to me, else I shan't have it, I shan't. You can't make as free as all that with the house, you know, be it what it may--" She stood red-faced and dour in the doorway. Alvina quietly gave her half-a-sovereign. "Nay, lass," said the woman, "if you share niver a drop o' th' lashins, you mun split it. Five shillin's is oceans, ma wench. I'm not down on you--not me. On'y we've got to keep up appearances a bit, you know. Dash my rags, it's a caution!" "I haven't got five shillings--" said Alvina. "Yer've not? All right, gi'e 's ha 'efcrown today, an' t'other termorrer. It'll keep, it'll keep. God bless you for a good wench. A' open 'eart 's worth all your bum-righteousness. It is for me. An' a sight more. You're all right, ma wench, you're all right--" And the rather bleary woman went nodding away. Alvina ought to have minded. But she didn't. She even laughed into her ricketty mirror. At the back of her thoughts, all she minded was that Ciccio did not pay her some attention. She really expected him now to come to speak to her. If she could have imagined how far he was from any such intention. So she loitered unwillingly at her window high over the grey, hard, cobbled street, and saw her landlady hastening along the black asphalt pavement, her dirty apron thrown discreetly over what was most obviously a quart jug. She followed the squat, intent figure with her eye, to the public-house at the corner. And then she saw Ciccio humped over his yellow bicycle, going for a steep and perilous ride with Gigi. Still she lingered in her sordid room. She could feel Madame was expecting her. But she felt inert, weak, incommunicative. Only a real fear of offending Madame drove her down at last. Max opened the door to let her in. "Ah!" he said. "You've come. We were wondering about you." "Thank you," she said, as she passed into the dirty hall where still two bicycles stood. "Madame is in the kitchen," he said. Alvina found Madame trussed in a large white apron, busy rubbing a yellow-fleshed hen with lemon, previous to boiling. "Ah!" said Madame. "So there you are! I have been out and done my shopping, and already begun to prepare the dinner. Yes, you may help me. Can you wash leeks? Yes? Every grain of sand? Shall I trust you then--?" Madame usually had a kitchen to herself, in the morning. She either ousted her landlady, or used her as second cook. For Madame was a gourmet, if not gourmand. If she inclined towards self-indulgence in any direction, it was in the direction of food. She _loved_ a good table. And hence the Tawaras saved less money than they might. She was an exacting, tormenting, bullying cook. Alvina, who knew well enough how to prepare a simple dinner, was offended by Madame's exactions. Madame turning back the green leaves of a leek, and hunting a speck of earth down into the white, like a flea in a bed, was too much for Alvina. "I'm afraid I shall never be particular enough," she said. "Can't I do anything else for you?" "For me? I need nothing to be done for me. But for the young men--yes, I will show you in one minute--" And she took Alvina upstairs to her room, and gave her a pair of the thin leather trousers fringed with hair, belonging to one of the _braves_. A seam had ripped. Madame gave Alvina a fine awl and some waxed thread. "The leather is not good in these things of Gigi's," she said. "It is badly prepared. See, like this." And she showed Alvina another place where the garment was repaired. "Keep on your apron. At the week-end you must fetch more clothes, not spoil this beautiful gown of voile. Where have you left your diamonds? What? In your room? Are they locked? Oh my dear--!" Madame turned pale and darted looks of fire at Alvina. "If they are stolen--!" she cried. "Oh! I have become quite weak, hearing you!" She panted and shook her head. "If they are not stolen, you have the Holy Saints alone to be thankful for keeping them. But run, run!" And Madame really stamped her foot. "Bring me everything you've got--every _thing_ that is valuable. I shall lock it up. How _can_ you--" Alvina was hustled off to her lodging. Fortunately nothing was gone. She brought all to Madame, and Madame fingered the treasures lovingly. "Now what you want you must ask me for," she said. With what close curiosity Madame examined the ruby brooch. "You can have that if you like, Madame," said Alvina. "You mean--what?" "I will give you that brooch if you like to take it--" "Give me this--!" cried Madame, and a flash went over her face. Then she changed into a sort of wheedling. "No--no. I shan't take it! I shan't take it. You don't want to give away such a thing." "I don't mind," said Alvina. "Do take it if you like it." "Oh no! Oh no! I can't take it. A beautiful thing it is, really. It would be worth over a thousand francs, because I believe it is quite genuine." "I'm sure it's genuine," said Alvina. "Do have it since you like it." "Oh, I can't! I can't!--" "Yes do--" "The beautiful red stones!--antique gems, antique gems--! And do you really give it to me?" "Yes, I should like to." "You are a girl with a noble heart--" Madame threw her arms round Alvina's neck, and kissed her. Alvina felt very cool about it. Madame locked up the jewels quickly, after one last look. "My fowl," she said, "which must not boil too fast." At length Alvina was called down to dinner. The young men were at table, talking as young men do, not very interestingly. After the meal, Ciccio sat and twanged his mandoline, making its crying noise vibrate through the house. "I shall go and look at the town," said Alvina. "And who shall go with you?" asked Madame. "I will go alone," said Alvina, "unless you will come, Madame." "Alas no, I can't. I can't come. Will you really go alone?" "Yes, I want to go to the women's shops," said Alvina. "You want to! All right then! And you will come home at tea-time, yes?" As soon as Alvina had gone out Ciccio put away his mandoline and lit a cigarette. Then after a while he hailed Geoffrey, and the two young men sallied forth. Alvina, emerging from a draper's shop in Rotherhampton Broadway, found them loitering on the pavement outside. And they strolled along with her. So she went into a shop that sold ladies' underwear, leaving them on the pavement. She stayed as long as she could. But there they were when she came out. They had endless lounging patience. "I thought you would be gone on," she said. "No hurry," said Ciccio, and he took away her parcels from her, as if he had a right. She wished he wouldn't tilt the flap of his black hat over one eye, and she wished there wasn't quite so much waist-line in the cut of his coat, and that he didn't smoke cigarettes against the end of his nose in the street. But wishing wouldn't alter him. He strayed alongside as if he half belonged, and half didn't--most irritating. She wasted as much time as possible in the shops, then they took the tram home again. Ciccio paid the three fares, laying his hand restrainingly on Gigi's hand, when Gigi's hand sought pence in his trouser pocket, and throwing his arm over his friend's shoulder, in affectionate but vulgar triumph, when the fares were paid. Alvina was on her high horse. They tried to talk to her, they tried to ingratiate themselves--but she wasn't having any. She talked with icy pleasantness. And so the tea-time passed, and the time after tea. The performance went rather mechanically, at the theatre, and the supper at home, with bottled beer and boiled ham, was a conventionally cheerful affair. Even Madame was a little afraid of Alvina this evening. "I am tired, I shall go early to my room," said Alvina. "Yes, I think we are all tired," said Madame. "Why is it?" said Max metaphysically--"why is it that two merry evenings never follow one behind the other." "Max, beer makes thee a _farceur_ of a fine quality," said Madame. Alvina rose. "Please don't get up," she said to the others. "I have my key and can see quite well," she said. "Good-night all." They rose and bowed their good-nights. But Ciccio, with an obstinate and ugly little smile on his face, followed her. "Please don't come," she said, turning at the street door. But obstinately he lounged into the street with her. He followed her to her door. "Did you bring the flash-light?" she said. "The stair is so dark." He looked at her, and turned as if to get the light. Quickly she opened the house-door and slipped inside, shutting it sharply in his face. He stood for some moments looking at the door, and an ugly little look mounted his straight nose. He too turned indoors. Alvina hurried to bed and slept well. And the next day the same, she was all icy pleasantness. The Natcha-Kee-Tawaras were a little bit put out by her. She was a spoke in their wheel, a scotch to their facility. She made them irritable. And that evening--it was Friday--Ciccio did not rise to accompany her to her house. And she knew they were relieved that she had gone. That did not please her. The next day, which was Saturday, the last and greatest day of the week, she found herself again somewhat of an outsider in the troupe. The tribe had assembled in its old unison. She was the intruder, the interloper. And Ciccio never looked at her, only showed her the half-averted side of his cheek, on which was a slightly jeering, ugly look. "Will you go to Woodhouse tomorrow?" Madame asked her, rather coolly. They none of them called her Allaye any more. "I'd better fetch some things, hadn't I?" said Alvina. "Certainly, if you think you will stay with us." This was a nasty slap in the face for her. But: "I want to," she said. "Yes! Then you will go to Woodhouse tomorrow, and come to Mansfield on Monday morning? Like that shall it be? You will stay one night at Woodhouse?" Through Alvina's mind flitted the rapid thought--"They want an evening without me." Her pride mounted obstinately. She very nearly said--"I may stay in Woodhouse altogether." But she held her tongue. After all, they were very common people. They ought to be glad to have her. Look how Madame snapped up that brooch! And look what an uncouth lout Ciccio was! After all, she was demeaning herself shamefully staying with them in common, sordid lodgings. After all, she had been bred up differently from that. They had horribly low standards--such low standards--not only of morality, but of life altogether. Really, she had come down in the world, conforming to such standards of life. She evoked the images of her mother and Miss Frost: ladies, and noble women both. Whatever could she be thinking of herself! However, there was time for her to retrace her steps. She had not given herself away. Except to Ciccio. And her heart burned when she thought of him, partly with anger and mortification, partly, alas, with undeniable and unsatisfied love. Let her bridle as she might, her heart burned, and she wanted to look at him, she wanted him to notice her. And instinct told her that he might ignore her for ever. She went to her room an unhappy woman, and wept and fretted till morning, chafing between humiliation and yearning. CHAPTER X THE FALL OF MANCHESTER HOUSE Alvina rose chastened and wistful. As she was doing her hair, she heard the plaintive nasal sound of Ciccio's mandoline. She looked down the mixed vista of back-yards and little gardens, and was able to catch sight of a portion of Ciccio, who was sitting on a box in the blue-brick yard of his house, bare-headed and in his shirt-sleeves, twitching away at the wailing mandoline. It was not a warm morning, but there was a streak of sunshine. Alvina had noticed that Ciccio did not seem to feel the cold, unless it were a wind or a driving rain. He was playing the wildly-yearning Neapolitan songs, of which Alvina knew nothing. But, although she only saw a section of him, the glimpse of his head was enough to rouse in her that overwhelming fascination, which came and went in spells. His remoteness, his southernness, something velvety and dark. So easily she might miss him altogether! Within a hair's-breadth she had let him disappear. She hurried down. Geoffrey opened the door to her. She smiled at him in a quick, luminous smile, a magic change in her. "I could hear Ciccio playing," she said. Geoffrey spread his rather thick lips in a smile, and jerked his head in the direction of the back door, with a deep, intimate look into Alvina's eyes, as if to say his friend was lovesick. "Shall I go through?" said Alvina. Geoffrey laid his large hand on her shoulder for a moment, looked into her eyes, and nodded. He was a broad-shouldered fellow, with a rather flat, handsome face, well-coloured, and with the look of the Alpine ox about him, slow, eternal, even a little mysterious. Alvina was startled by the deep, mysterious look in his dark-fringed ox-eyes. The odd arch of his eyebrows made him suddenly seem not quite human to her. She smiled to him again, startled. But he only inclined his head, and with his heavy hand on her shoulder gently impelled her towards Ciccio. When she came out at the back she smiled straight into Ciccio's face, with her sudden, luminous smile. His hand on the mandoline trembled into silence. He sat looking at her with an instant re-establishment of knowledge. And yet she shrank from the long, inscrutable gaze of his black-set, tawny eyes. She resented him a little. And yet she went forward to him and stood so that her dress touched him. And still he gazed up at her, with the heavy, unspeaking look, that seemed to bear her down: he seemed like some creature that was watching her for his purposes. She looked aside at the black garden, which had a wiry goose-berry bush. "You will come with me to Woodhouse?" she said. He did not answer till she turned to him again. Then, as she met his eyes, "To Woodhouse?" he said, watching her, to fix her. "Yes," she said, a little pale at the lips. And she saw his eternal smile of triumph slowly growing round his mouth. She wanted to cover his mouth with her hand. She preferred his tawny eyes with their black brows and lashes. His eyes watched her as a cat watches a bird, but without the white gleam of ferocity. In his eyes was a deep, deep sun-warmth, something fathomless, deepening black and abysmal, but somehow sweet to her. "Will you?" she repeated. But his eyes had already begun to glimmer their consent. He turned aside his face, as if unwilling to give a straight answer. "Yes," he said. "Play something to me," she cried. He lifted his face to her, and shook his head slightly. "Yes do," she said, looking down on him. And he bent his head to the mandoline, and suddenly began to sing a Neapolitan song, in a faint, compressed head-voice, looking up at her again as his lips moved, looking straight into her face with a curious mocking caress as the muted _voix blanche_ came through his lips at her, amid the louder quavering of the mandoline. The sound penetrated her like a thread of fire, hurting, but delicious, the high thread of his voice. She could see the Adam's apple move in his throat, his brows tilted as he looked along his lashes at her all the time. Here was the strange sphinx singing again, and herself between its paws! She seemed almost to melt into his power. Madame intervened to save her. "What, serenade before breakfast! You have strong stomachs, I say. Eggs and ham are more the question, hein? Come, you smell them, don't you?" A flicker of contempt and derision went over Ciccio's face as he broke off and looked aside. "I prefer the serenade," said Alvina. "I've had ham and eggs before." "You do, hein? Well--always, you won't. And now you must eat the ham and eggs, however. Yes? Isn't it so?" Ciccio rose to his feet, and looked at Alvina: as he would have looked at Gigi, had Gigi been there. His eyes said unspeakable things about Madame. Alvina flashed a laugh, suddenly. And a good-humoured, half-mocking smile came over his face too. They turned to follow Madame into the house. And as Alvina went before him, she felt his fingers stroke the nape of her neck, and pass in a soft touch right down her back. She started as if some unseen creature had stroked her with its paw, and she glanced swiftly round, to see the face of Ciccio mischievous behind her shoulder. "Now I think," said Madame, "that today we all take the same train. We go by the Great Central as far as the junction, together. Then you, Allaye, go on to Knarborough, and we leave you until tomorrow. And now there is not much time." "I am going to Woodhouse," said Ciccio in French. "You also! By the train, or the bicycle?" "Train," said Ciccio. "Waste so much money?" Ciccio raised his shoulders slightly. When breakfast was over, and Alvina had gone to her room, Geoffrey went out into the back yard, where the bicycles stood. "Cic'," he said. "I should like to go with thee to Woodhouse. Come on bicycle with me." Ciccio shook his head. "I'm going in train with _her_," he said. Geoffrey darkened with his heavy anger. "I would like to see how it is, there, _chez elle_," he said. "Ask _her_," said Ciccio. Geoffrey watched him suddenly. "Thou forsakest me," he said. "I would like to see it, there." "Ask _her_," repeated Ciccio. "Then come on bicycle." "You're content to leave me," muttered Geoffrey. Ciccio touched his friend on his broad cheek, and smiled at him with affection. "I don't leave thee, Gigi. I asked thy advice. You said, Go. But come. Go and ask her, and then come. Come on bicycle, eh? Ask her! Go on! Go and ask her." Alvina was surprised to hear a tap at her door, and Gigi's voice, in his strong foreign accent: "Mees Houghton, I carry your bag." She opened her door in surprise. She was all ready. "There it is," she said, smiling at him. But he confronted her like a powerful ox, full of dangerous force. Her smile had reassured him. "Na, Allaye," he said, "tell me something." "What?" laughed Alvina. "Can I come to Woodhouse?" "When?" "Today. Can I come on bicycle, to tea, eh? At your house with you and Ciccio? Eh?" He was smiling with a thick, doubtful, half sullen smile. "Do!" said Alvina. He looked at her with his large, dark-blue eyes. "Really, eh?" he said, holding out his large hand. She shook hands with him warmly. "Yes, really!" she said. "I wish you would." "Good," he said, a broad smile on his thick mouth. And all the time he watched her curiously, from his large eyes. "Ciccio--a good chap, eh?" he said. "Is he?" laughed Alvina. "Ha-a--!" Gigi shook his head solemnly. "The best!" He made such solemn eyes, Alvina laughed. He laughed too, and picked up her bag as if it were a bubble. "Na Cic'--" he said, as he saw Ciccio in the street. "Sommes d'accord." "Ben!" said Ciccio, holding out his hand for the bag. "Donne." "Ne-ne," said Gigi, shrugging. Alvina found herself on the new and busy station that Sunday morning, one of the little theatrical company. It was an odd experience. They were so obviously a theatrical company--people apart from the world. Madame was darting her black eyes here and there, behind her spotted veil, and standing with the ostensible self-possession of her profession. Max was circling round with large strides, round a big black box on which the red words Natcha-Kee-Tawara showed mystic, and round the small bunch of stage fittings at the end of the platform. Louis was waiting to get the tickets, Gigi and Ciccio were bringing up the bicycles. They were a whole train of departure in themselves, busy, bustling, cheerful--and curiously apart, vagrants. Alvina strolled away towards the half-open bookstall. Geoffrey was standing monumental between her and the company. She returned to him. "What time shall we expect you?" she said. He smiled at her in his broad, friendly fashion. "Expect me to be there? Why--" he rolled his eyes and proceeded to calculate. "At four o'clock." "Just about the time when we get there," she said. He looked at her sagely, and nodded. They were a good-humoured company in the railway carriage. The men smoked cigarettes and tapped off the ash on the heels of their boots, Madame watched every traveller with professional curiosity. Max scrutinized the newspaper, Lloyds, and pointed out items to Louis, who read them over Max's shoulder, Ciccio suddenly smacked Geoffrey on the thigh, and looked laughing into his face. So till they arrived at the junction. And then there was a kissing and a taking of farewells, as if the company were separating for ever. Louis darted into the refreshment bar and returned with little pies and oranges, which he deposited in the carriage, Madame presented Alvina with a packet of chocolate. And it was "Good-bye, good-bye, Allaye! Good-bye, Ciccio! Bon voyage. Have a good time, both." So Alvina sped on in the fast train to Knarborough with Ciccio. "I _do_ like them all," she said. He opened his mouth slightly and lifted his head up and down. She saw in the movement how affectionate he was, and in his own way, how emotional. He loved them all. She put her hand to his. He gave her hand one sudden squeeze, of physical understanding, then left it as if nothing had happened. There were other people in the carriage with them. She could not help feeling how sudden and lovely that moment's grasp of his hand was: so warm, so whole. And thus they watched the Sunday morning landscape slip by, as they ran into Knarborough. They went out to a little restaurant to eat. It was one o'clock. "Isn't it strange, that we are travelling together like this?" she said, as she sat opposite him. He smiled, looking into her eyes. "You think it's strange?" he said, showing his teeth slightly. "Don't you?" she cried. He gave a slight, laconic laugh. "And I can hardly bear it that I love you so much," she said, quavering, across the potatoes. He glanced furtively round, to see if any one was listening, if any one might hear. He would have hated it. But no one was near. Beneath the tiny table, he took her two knees between his knees, and pressed them with a slow, immensely powerful pressure. Helplessly she put her hand across the table to him. He covered it for one moment with his hand, then ignored it. But her knees were still between the powerful, living vice of his knees. "Eat!" he said to her, smiling, motioning to her plate. And he relaxed her. They decided to go out to Woodhouse on the tram-car, a long hour's ride. Sitting on the top of the covered car, in the atmosphere of strong tobacco smoke, he seemed self-conscious, withdrawn into his own cover, so obviously a dark-skinned foreigner. And Alvina, as she sat beside him, was reminded of the woman with the negro husband, down in Lumley. She understood the woman's reserve. She herself felt, in the same way, something of an outcast, because of the man at her side. An outcast! And glad to be an outcast. She clung to Ciccio's dark, despised foreign nature. She loved it, she worshipped it, she defied all the other world. Dark, he sat beside her, drawn in to himself, overcast by his presumed inferiority among these northern industrial people. And she was with him, on his side, outside the pale of her own people. There were already acquaintances on the tram. She nodded in answer to their salutation, but so obviously from a distance, that they kept turning round to eye her and Ciccio. But they left her alone. The breach between her and them was established for ever--and it was her will which established it. So up and down the weary hills of the hilly, industrial countryside, till at last they drew near to Woodhouse. They passed the ruins of Throttle-Ha'penny, and Alvina glanced at it indifferent. They ran along the Knarborough Road. A fair number of Woodhouse young people were strolling along the pavements in their Sunday clothes. She knew them all. She knew Lizzie Bates's fox furs, and Fanny Clough's lilac costume, and Mrs. Smitham's winged hat. She knew them all. And almost inevitably the old Woodhouse feeling began to steal over her, she was glad they could not see her, she was a little ashamed of Ciccio. She wished, for the moment, Ciccio were not there. And as the time came to get down, she looked anxiously back and forth to see at which halt she had better descend--where fewer people would notice her. But then she threw her scruples to the wind, and descended into the staring, Sunday afternoon street, attended by Ciccio, who carried her bag. She knew she was a marked figure. They slipped round to Manchester House. Miss Pinnegar expected Alvina, but by the train, which came later. So she had to be knocked up, for she was lying down. She opened the door looking a little patched in her cheeks, because of her curious colouring, and a little forlorn, and a little dumpy, and a little irritable. "I didn't know there'd be two of you," was her greeting. "Didn't you," said Alvina, kissing her. "Ciccio came to carry my bag." "Oh," said Miss Pinnegar. "How do you do?" and she thrust out her hand to him. He shook it loosely. "I had your wire," said Miss Pinnegar. "You said the train. Mrs. Rollings is coming in at four again--" "Oh all right--" said Alvina. The house was silent and afternoon-like. Ciccio took off his coat and sat down in Mr. Houghton's chair. Alvina told him to smoke. He kept silent and reserved. Miss Pinnegar, a poor, patch-cheeked, rather round-backed figure with grey-brown fringe, stood as if she did not quite know what to say or do. She followed Alvina upstairs to her room. "I can't think why you bring _him_ here," snapped Miss Pinnegar. "I don't know what you're thinking about. The whole place is talking already." "I don't care," said Alvina. "I like him." "Oh--for shame!" cried Miss Pinnegar, lifting her hand with Miss Frost's helpless, involuntary movement. "What do you think of yourself? And your father a month dead." "It doesn't matter. Father _is_ dead. And I'm sure the dead don't mind." "I never _knew_ such things as you say." "Why? I mean them." Miss Pinnegar stood blank and helpless. "You're not asking him to stay the night," she blurted. "Yes. And I'm going back with him to Madame tomorrow. You know I'm part of the company now, as pianist." "And are you going to marry him?" "I don't know." "How _can_ you say you don't know! Why, it's awful. You make me feel I shall go out of my mind." "But I _don't_ know," said Alvina. "It's incredible! Simply incredible! I believe you're out of your senses. I used to think sometimes there was something wrong with your mother. And that's what it is with you. You're not quite right in your mind. You need to be looked after." "Do I, Miss Pinnegar! Ah, well, don't you trouble to look after me, will you?" "No one will if I don't." "I hope no one will." There was a pause. "I'm ashamed to live another day in Woodhouse," said Miss Pinnegar. "_I'm_ leaving it for ever," said Alvina. "I should think so," said Miss Pinnegar. Suddenly she sank into a chair, and burst into tears, wailing: "Your poor father! Your poor father!" "I'm sure the dead are all right. Why must you pity him?" "You're a lost girl!" cried Miss Pinnegar. "Am I really?" laughed Alvina. It sounded funny. "Yes, you're a lost girl," sobbed Miss Pinnegar, on a final note of despair. "I like being lost," said Alvina. Miss Pinnegar wept herself into silence. She looked huddled and forlorn. Alvina went to her and laid her hand on her shoulder. "Don't fret, Miss Pinnegar," she said. "Don't be silly. I love to be with Ciccio and Madame. Perhaps in the end I shall marry him. But if I don't--" her hand suddenly gripped Miss Pinnegar's heavy arm till it hurt--"I wouldn't lose a minute of him, no, not for anything would I." Poor Miss Pinnegar dwindled, convinced. "You make it hard for _me_, in Woodhouse," she said, hopeless. "Never mind," said Alvina, kissing her. "Woodhouse isn't heaven and earth." "It's been my home for forty years." "It's been mine for thirty. That's why I'm glad to leave it." There was a pause. "I've been thinking," said Miss Pinnegar, "about opening a little business in Tamworth. You know the Watsons are there." "I believe you'd be happy," said Alvina. Miss Pinnegar pulled herself together. She had energy and courage still. "I don't want to stay here, anyhow," she said. "Woodhouse has nothing for me any more." "Of course it hasn't," said Alvina. "I think you'd be happier away from it." "Yes--probably I should--now!" None the less, poor Miss Pinnegar was grey-haired, she was almost a dumpy, odd old woman. They went downstairs. Miss Pinnegar put on the kettle. "Would you like to see the house?" said Alvina to Ciccio. He nodded. And she took him from room to room. His eyes looked quickly and curiously over everything, noticing things, but without criticism. "This was my mother's little sitting-room," she said. "She sat here for years, in this chair." "Always here?" he said, looking into Alvina's face. "Yes. She was ill with her heart. This is another photograph of her. I'm not like her." "Who is _that_?" he asked, pointing to a photograph of the handsome, white-haired Miss Frost. "That was Miss Frost, my governess. She lived here till she died. I loved her--she meant everything to me." "She also dead--?" "Yes, five years ago." They went to the drawing-room. He laid his hand on the keys of the piano, sounding a chord. "Play," she said. He shook his head, smiling slightly. But he wished her to play. She sat and played one of Kishwégin's pieces. He listened, faintly smiling. "Fine piano--eh?" he said, looking into her face. "I like the tone," she said. "Is it yours?" "The piano? Yes. I suppose everything is mine--in name at least. I don't know how father's affairs are really." He looked at her, and again his eye wandered over the room. He saw a little coloured portrait of a child with a fleece of brownish-gold hair and surprised eyes, in a pale-blue stiff frock with a broad dark-blue sash. "You?" he said. "Do you recognize me?" she said. "Aren't I comical?" She took him upstairs--first to the monumental bedroom. "This was mother's room," she said. "Now it is mine." He looked at her, then at the things in the room, then out of the window, then at her again. She flushed, and hurried to show him his room, and the bath-room. Then she went downstairs. He kept glancing up at the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms, taking in the size and proportion of the house, and the quality of the fittings. "It is a big house," he said. "Yours?" "Mine in name," said Alvina. "Father left all to me--and his debts as well, you see." "Much debts?" "Oh yes! I don't quite know how much. But perhaps more debts than there is property. I shall go and see the lawyer in the morning. Perhaps there will be nothing at all left for me, when everything is paid." She had stopped on the stairs, telling him this, turning round to him, who was on the steps above. He looked down on her, calculating. Then he smiled sourly. "Bad job, eh, if it is all gone--!" he said. "I don't mind, really, if I can live," she said. He spread his hands, deprecating, not understanding. Then he glanced up the stairs and along the corridor again, and downstairs into the hall. "A fine big house. Grand if it was yours," he said. "I wish it were," she said rather pathetically, "if you like it so much." He shrugged his shoulders. "Hé!" he said. "How not like it!" "I don't like it," she said. "I think it's a gloomy miserable hole. I hate it. I've lived here all my life and seen everything bad happen here. I hate it." "Why?" he said, with a curious, sarcastic intonation. "It's a bad job it isn't yours, for certain," he said, as they entered the living-room, where Miss Pinnegar sat cutting bread and butter. "What?" said Miss Pinnegar sharply. "The house," said Alvina. "Oh well, we don't know. We'll hope for the best," replied Miss Pinnegar, arranging the bread and butter on the plate. Then, rather tart, she added: "It is a bad job. And a good many things are a bad job, besides that. If Miss Houghton had what she _ought_ to have, things would be very different, I assure you." "Oh yes," said Ciccio, to whom this address was directed. "Very different indeed. If all the money hadn't been--lost--in the way it has, Miss Houghton wouldn't be playing the piano, for one thing, in a cinematograph show." "No, perhaps not," said Ciccio. "Certainly not. It's not the right thing for her to be doing, _at all_!" "You think not?" said Ciccio. "Do you imagine it is?" said Miss Pinnegar, turning point blank on him as he sat by the fire. He looked curiously at Miss Pinnegar, grinning slightly. "Hé!" he said. "How do I know!" "I should have thought it was obvious," said Miss Pinnegar. "Hé!" he ejaculated, not fully understanding. "But of course those that are used to nothing better can't see anything but what they're used to," she said, rising and shaking the crumbs from her black silk apron, into the fire. He watched her. Miss Pinnegar went away into the scullery. Alvina was laying a fire in the drawing-room. She came with a dustpan to take some coal from the fire of the living-room. "What do you want?" said Ciccio, rising. And he took the shovel from her hand. "Big, hot fires, aren't they?" he said, as he lifted the burning coals from the glowing mass of the grate. "Enough," said Alvina. "Enough! We'll put it in the drawing-room." He carried the shovel of flaming, smoking coals to the other room, and threw them in the grate on the sticks, watching Alvina put on more pieces of coal. "Fine, a fire! Quick work, eh? A beautiful thing, a fire! You know what they say in my place: You can live without food, but you can't live without fire." "But I thought it was always hot in Naples," said Alvina. "No, it isn't. And my village, you know, when I was small boy, that was in the mountains, an hour quick train from Naples. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer--" "As cold as England?" said Alvina. "Hé--and colder. The wolves come down. You could hear them crying in the night, in the frost--" "How terrifying--!" said Alvina. "And they will kill the dogs! Always they kill the dogs. You know, they hate dogs, wolves do." He made a queer noise, to show how wolves hate dogs. Alvina understood, and laughed. "So should I, if I was a wolf," she said. "Yes--eh?" His eyes gleamed on her for a moment. "Ah but, the poor dogs! You find them bitten--carried away among the trees or the stones, hard to find them, poor things, the next day." "How frightened they must be--!" said Alvina. "Frightened--hu!" he made sudden gesticulations and ejaculations, which added volumes to his few words. "And did you like it, your village?" she said. He put his head on one side in deprecation. "No," he said, "because, you see--hé, there is nothing to do--no money--work--work--work--no life--you see nothing. When I was a small boy my father, he died, and my mother comes with me to Naples. Then I go with the little boats on the sea--fishing, carrying people--" He flourished his hand as if to make her understand all the things that must be wordless. He smiled at her--but there was a faint, poignant sadness and remoteness in him, a beauty of old fatality, and ultimate indifference to fate. "And were you very poor?" "Poor?--why yes! Nothing. Rags--no shoes--bread, little fish from the sea--shell-fish--" His hands flickered, his eyes rested on her with a profound look of knowledge. And it seemed, in spite of all, one state was very much the same to him as another, poverty was as much life as affluence. Only he had a sort of jealous idea that it was humiliating to be poor, and so, for vanity's sake, he would have possessions. The countless generations of civilization behind him had left him an instinct of the world's meaninglessness. Only his little modern education made money and independence an _idée fixe_. Old instinct told him the world was nothing. But modern education, so shallow, was much more efficacious than instinct. It drove him to make a show of himself to the world. Alvina watching him, as if hypnotized, saw his old beauty, formed through civilization after civilization; and at the same time she saw his modern vulgarianism, and decadence. "And when you go back, you will go back to your old village?" she said. He made a gesture with his head and shoulders, evasive, non-committal. "I don't know, you see," he said. "What is the name of it?" "Pescocalascio." He said the word subduedly, unwillingly. "Tell me again," said Alvina. "Pescocalascio." She repeated it. "And tell me how you spell it," she said. He fumbled in his pocket for a pencil and a piece of paper. She rose and brought him an old sketch-book. He wrote, slowly, but with the beautiful Italian hand, the name of his village. "And write your name," she said. "Marasca Francesco," he wrote. "And write the name of your father and mother," she said. He looked at her enquiringly. "I want to see them," she said. "Marasca Giovanni," he wrote, and under that "Califano Maria." She looked at the four names, in the graceful Italian script. And one after the other she read them out. He corrected her, smiling gravely. When she said them properly, he nodded. "Yes," he said. "That's it. You say it well." At that moment Miss Pinnegar came in to say Mrs. Rollings had seen another of the young men riding down the street. "That's Gigi! He doesn't know how to come here," said Ciccio, quickly taking his hat and going out to find his friend. Geoffrey arrived, his broad face hot and perspiring. "Couldn't you find it?" said Alvina. "I find the house, but I couldn't find no door," said Geoffrey. They all laughed, and sat down to tea. Geoffrey and Ciccio talked to each other in French, and kept each other in countenance. Fortunately for them, Madame had seen to their table-manners. But still they were far too free and easy to suit Miss Pinnegar. "Do you know," said Ciccio in French to Geoffrey, "what a fine house this is?" "No," said Geoffrey, rolling his large eyes round the room, and speaking with his cheek stuffed out with food. "Is it?" "Ah--if it was _hers_, you know--" And so, after tea, Ciccio said to Alvina: "Shall you let Geoffrey see the house?" The tour commenced again. Geoffrey, with his thick legs planted apart, gazed round the rooms, and made his comments in French to Ciccio. When they climbed the stairs, he fingered the big, smooth mahogany bannister-rail. In the bedroom he stared almost dismayed at the colossal bed and cupboard. In the bath-room he turned on the old-fashioned, silver taps. "Here is my room--" said Ciccio in French. "Assez éloigné!" replied Gigi. Ciccio also glanced along the corridor. "Yes," he said. "But an open course--" "Look, my boy--if you could marry _this_--" meaning the house. "Ha, she doesn't know if it hers any more! Perhaps the debts cover every bit of it." "Don't say so! Na, that's a pity, that's a pity! La pauvre fille--pauvre demoiselle!" lamented Geoffrey. "Isn't it a pity! What dost say?" "A thousand pities! A thousand pities! Look, my boy, love needs no havings, but marriage does. Love is for all, even the grasshoppers. But marriage means a kitchen. That's how it is. La pauvre demoiselle; c'est malheur pour elle." "That's true," said Ciccio. "Et aussi pour moi. For me as well." "For thee as well, cher! Perhaps--" said Geoffrey, laying his arm on Ciccio's shoulder, and giving him a sudden hug. They smiled to each other. "Who knows!" said Ciccio. "Who knows, truly, my Cic'." As they went downstairs to rejoin Alvina, whom they heard playing on the piano in the drawing-room, Geoffrey peeped once more into the big bedroom. "Tu n'es jamais monté si haut, mon beau. Pour moi, ça serait difficile de m'élever. J'aurais bien peur, moi. Tu te trouves aussi un peu ébahi, hein? n'est-ce pas?" "Y'a place pour trois," said Ciccio. "Non, je crêverais, là haut. Pas pour moi!" And they went laughing downstairs. Miss Pinnegar was sitting with Alvina, determined not to go to Chapel this evening. She sat, rather hulked, reading a novel. Alvina flirted with the two men, played the piano to them, and suggested a game of cards. "Oh, Alvina, you will never bring out the cards tonight!" expostulated poor Miss Pinnegar. "But, Miss Pinnegar, it can't possibly hurt anybody." "You know what I think--and what your father thought--and your mother and Miss Frost--" "You see I think it's only prejudice," said Alvina. "Oh very well!" said Miss Pinnegar angrily. And closing her book, she rose and went to the other room. Alvina brought out the cards, and a little box of pence which remained from Endeavour harvests. At that moment there was a knock. It was Mr. May. Miss Pinnegar brought him in, in triumph. "Oh!" he said. "Company! I heard you'd come, Miss Houghton, so I _hastened_ to pay my compliments. I didn't know you had _company_. How do you do, Francesco! How do you do, Geoffrey. Comment allez-vous, alors?" "Bien!" said Geoffrey. "You are going to take a hand?" "Cards on Sunday evening! Dear me, what a revolution! Of course, I'm not _bigoted_. If Miss Houghton asks me--" Miss Pinnegar looked solemnly at Alvina. "Yes, do take a hand, Mr. May," said Alvina. "Thank you, I will then, if I may. Especially as I see those tempting piles of pennies and ha'pennies. Who is bank, may I ask? Is Miss Pinnegar going to play too?" But Miss Pinnegar had turned her poor, bowed back, and departed. "I'm afraid she's offended," said Alvina. "But why? We don't put _her_ soul in danger, do we now? I'm a good Catholic, you know, I _can't_ do with these provincial little creeds. Who deals? Do you, Miss Houghton? But I'm afraid we shall have a rather _dry_ game? What? Isn't that your opinion?" The other men laughed. "If Miss Houghton would just _allow_ me to run round and bring something in. Yes? May I? That would be _so_ much more cheerful. What is your choice, gentlemen?" "Beer," said Ciccio, and Geoffrey nodded. "Beer! Oh really! Extraor'nary! I always take a little whiskey myself. What kind of beer? Ale?--or bitter? I'm afraid I'd better bring bottles. Now how can I secrete them? You haven't a small travelling case, Miss Houghton? Then I shall look as if I'd just been taking a _journey_. Which I have--to the Sun and back: and if _that_ isn't far enough, even for Miss Pinnegar and John Wesley, why, I'm sorry." Alvina produced the travelling case. "Excellent!" he said. "Excellent! It will hold half-a-dozen beautifully. Now--" he fell into a whisper--"hadn't I better sneak out at the front door, and so escape the clutches of the watch-dog?" Out he went, on tip-toe, the other two men grinning at him. Fortunately there were glasses, the best old glasses, in the side cupboard in the drawing room. But unfortunately, when Mr. May returned, a corkscrew was in request. So Alvina stole to the kitchen. Miss Pinnegar sat dumped by the fire, with her spectacles and her book. She watched like a lynx as Alvina returned. And she saw the tell-tale corkscrew. So she dumped a little deeper in her chair. "There was a sound of revelry by night!" For Mr. May, after a long depression, was in high feather. They shouted, positively shouted over their cards, they roared with excitement, expostulation, and laughter. Miss Pinnegar sat through it all. But at one point she could bear it no longer. The drawing-room door opened, and the dumpy, hulked, faded woman in a black serge dress stood like a rather squat avenging angel in the doorway. "What would your _father_ say to this?" she said sternly. The company suspended their laughter and their cards, and looked around. Miss Pinnegar wilted and felt strange under so many eyes. "Father!" said Alvina. "But why father?" "You lost girl!" said Miss Pinnegar, backing out and closing the door. Mr. May laughed so much that he knocked his whiskey over. "There," he cried, helpless, "look what she's cost me!" And he went off into another paroxysm, swelling like a turkey. Ciccio opened his mouth, laughing silently. "Lost girl! Lost girl! How lost, when you are at home?" said Geoffrey, making large eyes and looking hither and thither as if _he_ had lost something. They all went off again in a muffled burst. "No but, really," said Mr. May, "drinking and card-playing with strange men in the drawing-room on Sunday evening, of _cauce_ it's scandalous. It's _terrible_! I don't know how ever you'll be saved, after such a sin. And in Manchester House, too--!" He went off into another silent, turkey-scarlet burst of mirth, wriggling in his chair and squealing faintly: "Oh, I love it, I love it! _You lost girl!_ Why of _cauce_ she's lost! And Miss Pinnegar has only just found it out. Who _wouldn't_ be lost? Why even Miss Pinnegar would be lost if she could. Of _cauce_ she would! Quite natch'ral!" Mr. May wiped his eyes, with his handkerchief which had unfortunately mopped up his whiskey. So they played on, till Mr. May and Geoffrey had won all the pennies, except twopence of Ciccio's. Alvina was in debt. "Well I think it's been a most agreeable game," said Mr. May. "Most agreeable! Don't you all?" The two other men smiled and nodded. "I'm only sorry to think Miss Houghton has _lost_ so steadily all evening. Really quite remarkable. But _then_--you see--I comfort myself with the reflection 'Lucky in cards, unlucky in love.' I'm certainly _hounded_ with misfortune in love. And I'm _sure_ Miss Houghton would rather be unlucky in cards than in love. What, isn't it so?" "Of course," said Alvina. "There, you see, _of cauce_! Well, all we can do after that is to wish her success in love. Isn't that so, gentlemen? I'm sure _we_ are all quite willing to do our best to contribute to it. Isn't it so, gentlemen? Aren't we all ready to do our best to contribute to Miss Houghton's happiness in love? Well then, let us drink to it." He lifted his glass, and bowed to Alvina. "With _every_ wish for your success in love, Miss Houghton, and your _devoted_ servant--" He bowed and drank. Geoffrey made large eyes at her as he held up his glass. "_I_ know you'll come out all right in love, _I_ know," he said heavily. "And you, Ciccio? Aren't you drinking?" said Mr. May. Ciccio held up his glass, looked at Alvina, made a little mouth at her, comical, and drank his beer. "Well," said Mr. May, "_beer_ must confirm it, since words won't." "What time is it?" said Alvina. "We must have supper." It was past nine o'clock. Alvina rose and went to the kitchen, the men trailing after her. Miss Pinnegar was not there. She was not anywhere. "Has she gone to bed?" said Mr. May. And he crept stealthily upstairs on tip-toe, a comical, flush-faced, tubby little man. He was familiar with the house. He returned prancing. "I heard her cough," he said. "There's a light under her door. She's gone to bed. Now haven't I always said she was a good soul? I shall drink her health. Miss Pinnegar--" and he bowed stiffly in the direction of the stairs--"your health, and a _good night's rest_." After which, giggling gaily, he seated himself at the head of the table and began to carve the cold mutton. "And where are the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras this week?" he asked. They told him. "Oh? And you two are cycling back to the camp of Kishwégin tonight? We mustn't prolong our cheerfulness _too_ far." "Ciccio is staying to help me with my bag tomorrow," said Alvina. "You know I've joined the Tawaras permanently--as pianist." "No, I didn't know that! Oh really! Really! Oh! Well! I see! Permanently! Yes, I am surprised! Yes! As pianist? And if I might ask, what is your share of the tribal income?" "That isn't settled yet," said Alvina. "No! Exactly! Exactly! It _wouldn't_ be settled yet. And you say it is a permanent engagement? Of _cauce_, at such a figure." "Yes, it is a permanent engagement," said Alvina. "Really! What a blow you give me! You won't come back to the Endeavour? What? Not at all?" "No," said Alvina. "I shall sell out of the Endeavour." "Really! You've decided, have you? Oh! This is news to me. And is _this_ quite final, too?" "Quite," said Alvina. "I see! Putting two and two together, if I may say so--" and he glanced from her to the young men--"I _see_. Most decidedly, most one-sidedly, if I may use the vulgarism, I _see--e--e!_ Oh! but what a blow you give me! What a blow you give me!" "Why?" said Alvina. "What's to become of the Endeavour? and consequently, of poor me?" "Can't you keep it going?--form a company?" "I'm afraid I can't. I've done my best. But I'm afraid, you know, you've landed me." "I'm so sorry," said Alvina. "I hope not." "Thank you for the _hope_" said Mr. May sarcastically. "They say hope is sweet. _I_ begin to find it a little _bitter_!" Poor man, he had already gone quite yellow in the face. Ciccio and Geoffrey watched him with dark-seeing eyes. "And when are you going to let this fatal decision take effect?" asked Mr. May. "I'm going to see the lawyer tomorrow, and I'm going to tell him to sell everything and clear up as soon as possible," said Alvina. "Sell everything! This house, and all it contains?" "Yes," said Alvina. "Everything." "Really!" Mr. May seemed smitten quite dumb. "I feel as if the world had suddenly come to an end," he said. "But hasn't your world often come to an end before?" said Alvina. "Well--I suppose, once or twice. But _never_ quite on top of me, you see, before--" There was a silence. "And have you told Miss Pinnegar?" said Mr. May. "Not finally. But she has decided to open a little business in Tamworth, where she has relations." "Has she! And are you _really_ going to _tour_ with these young people--?" he indicated Ciccio and Gigi. "And at _no_ salary!" His voice rose. "Why! It's almost _White Slave Traffic_, on Madame's part. Upon my word!" "I don't think so," said Alvina. "Don't you see that's insulting." "_Insulting!_ Well, I don't know. I think it's the _truth_--" "Not to be said to me, for all that," said Alvina, quivering with anger. "Oh!" perked Mr. May, yellow with strange rage. "Oh! I mustn't say what I think! Oh!" "Not if you think those things--" said Alvina. "Oh really! The difficulty is, you see, I'm afraid I _do_ think them--" Alvina watched him with big, heavy eyes. "Go away," she said. "Go away! I won't be insulted by you." "No _indeed!_" cried Mr. May, starting to his feet, his eyes almost bolting from his head. "No _indeed!_ I wouldn't _think_ of insulting you in the presence of these _two_ young gentlemen." Ciccio rose slowly, and with a slow, repeated motion of the head, indicated the door. "Allez!" he said. "_Certainement!_" cried Mr. May, flying at Ciccio, verbally, like an enraged hen yellow at the gills. "_Certainement!_ Je m'en vais. Cette compagnie n'est pas de ma choix." "Allez!" said Ciccio, more loudly. And Mr. May strutted out of the room like a bird bursting with its own rage. Ciccio stood with his hands on the table, listening. They heard Mr. May slam the front door. "Gone!" said Geoffrey. Ciccio smiled sneeringly. "Voyez, un cochon de lait," said Gigi amply and calmly. Ciccio sat down in his chair. Geoffrey poured out some beer for him, saying: "Drink, my Cic', the bubble has burst, prfff!" And Gigi knocked in his own puffed cheek with his fist. "Allaye, my dear, your health! We are the Tawaras. We are Allaye! We are Pacohuila! We are Walgatchka! Allons! The milk-pig is stewed and eaten. Voilà!" He drank, smiling broadly. "One by one," said Geoffrey, who was a little drunk: "One by one we put them out of the field, they are _hors de combat_. Who remains? Pacohuila, Walgatchka, Allaye--" He smiled very broadly. Alvina was sitting sunk in thought and torpor after her sudden anger. "Allaye, what do you think about? You are the bride of Tawara," said Geoffrey. Alvina looked at him, smiling rather wanly. "And who is Tawara?" she asked. He raised his shoulders and spread his hands and swayed his head from side to side, for all the world like a comic mandarin. "There!" he cried. "The question! Who is Tawara? Who? Tell me! Ciccio is he--and I am he--and Max and Louis--" he spread his hand to the distant members of the tribe. "I can't be the bride of all four of you," said Alvina, laughing. "No--no! No--no! Such a thing does not come into my mind. But you are the Bride of Tawara. You dwell in the tent of Pacohuila. And comes the day, should it ever be so, there is no room for you in the tent of Pacohuila, then the lodge of Walgatchka the bear is open for you. Open, yes, wide open--" He spread his arms from his ample chest, at the end of the table. "Open, and when Allaye enters, it is the lodge of Allaye, Walgatchka is the bear that serves Allaye. By the law of the Pale Face, by the law of the Yenghees, by the law of the Fransayes, Walgatchka shall be husband-bear to Allaye, that day she lifts the door-curtain of his tent--" He rolled his eyes and looked around. Alvina watched him. "But I might be afraid of a husband-bear," she said. Geoffrey got on to his feet. "By the Manitou," he said, "the head of the bear Walgatchka is humble--" here Geoffrey bowed his head--"his teeth are as soft as lilies--" here he opened his mouth and put his finger on his small close teeth--"his hands are as soft as bees that stroke a flower--" here he spread his hands and went and suddenly flopped on his knees beside Alvina, showing his hands and his teeth still, and rolling his eyes. "Allaye can have no fear at all of the bear Walgatchka," he said, looking up at her comically. Ciccio, who had been watching and slightly grinning, here rose to his feet and took Geoffrey by the shoulder, pulling him up. "Basta!" he said. "Tu es saoul. You are drunk, my Gigi. Get up. How are you going to ride to Mansfield, hein?--great beast." "Ciccio," said Geoffrey solemnly. "I love thee, I love thee as a brother, and also more. I love thee as a brother, my Ciccio, as thou knowest. But--" and he puffed fiercely--"I am the slave of Allaye, I am the tame bear of Allaye." "Get up," said Ciccio, "get up! Per bacco! She doesn't want a tame bear." He smiled down on his friend. Geoffrey rose to his feet and flung his arms round Ciccio. "Cic'," he besought him. "Cic'--I love thee as a brother. But let me be the tame bear of Allaye, let me be the gentle bear of Allaye." "All right," said Ciccio. "Thou art the tame bear of Allaye." Geoffrey strained Ciccio to his breast. "Thank you! Thank you! Salute me, my own friend." And Ciccio kissed him on either cheek. Whereupon Geoffrey immediately flopped on his knees again before Alvina, and presented her his broad, rich-coloured cheek. "Salute your bear, Allaye," he cried. "Salute your slave, the tame bear Walgatchka, who is a wild bear for all except Allaye and his brother Pacohuila the Puma." Geoffrey growled realistically as a wild bear as he kneeled before Alvina, presenting his cheek. Alvina looked at Ciccio, who stood above, watching. Then she lightly kissed him on the cheek, and said: "Won't you go to bed and sleep?" Geoffrey staggered to his feet, shaking his head. "No--no--" he said. "No--no! Walgatchka must travel to the tent of Kishwégin, to the Camp of the Tawaras." "Not tonight, _mon brave_," said Ciccio. "Tonight we stay here, hein. Why separate, hein?--frère?" Geoffrey again clasped Ciccio in his arms. "Pacohuila and Walgatchka are blood-brothers, two bodies, one blood. One blood, in two bodies; one stream, in two valleys: one lake, between two mountains." Here Geoffrey gazed with large, heavy eyes on Ciccio. Alvina brought a candle and lighted it. "You will manage in the one room?" she said. "I will give you another pillow." She led the way upstairs. Geoffrey followed, heavily. Then Ciccio. On the landing Alvina gave them the pillow and the candle, smiled, bade them good-night in a whisper, and went downstairs again. She cleared away the supper and carried away all glasses and bottles from the drawing-room. Then she washed up, removing all traces of the feast. The cards she restored to their old mahogany box. Manchester House looked itself again. She turned off the gas at the meter, and went upstairs to bed. From the far room she could hear the gentle, but profound vibrations of Geoffrey's snoring. She was tired after her day: too tired to trouble about anything any more. But in the morning she was first downstairs. She heard Miss Pinnegar, and hurried. Hastily she opened the windows and doors to drive away the smell of beer and smoke. She heard the men rumbling in the bath-room. And quickly she prepared breakfast and made a fire. Mrs. Rollings would not appear till later in the day. At a quarter to seven Miss Pinnegar came down, and went into the scullery to make her tea. "Did both the men stay?" she asked. "Yes, they both slept in the end room," said Alvina. Miss Pinnegar said no more, but padded with her tea and her boiled egg into the living room. In the morning she was wordless. Ciccio came down, in his shirt-sleeves as usual, but wearing a collar. He greeted Miss Pinnegar politely. "Good-morning!" she said, and went on with her tea. Geoffrey appeared. Miss Pinnegar glanced once at him, sullenly, and briefly answered his good-morning. Then she went on with her egg, slow and persistent in her movements, mum. The men went out to attend to Geoffrey's bicycle. The morning was slow and grey, obscure. As they pumped up the tires, they heard some one padding behind. Miss Pinnegar came and unbolted the yard door, but ignored their presence. Then they saw her return and slowly mount the outer stair-ladder, which went up to the top floor. Two minutes afterwards they were startled by the irruption of the work-girls. As for the work-girls, they gave quite loud, startled squeals, suddenly seeing the two men on their right hand, in the obscure morning. And they lingered on the stair-way to gaze in rapt curiosity, poking and whispering, until Miss Pinnegar appeared overhead, and sharply rang a bell which hung beside the entrance door of the work-rooms. After which excitements Geoffrey and Ciccio went in to breakfast, which Alvina had prepared. "You have done it all, eh?" said Ciccio, glancing round. "Yes. I've made breakfast for years, now," said Alvina. "Not many more times here, eh?" he said, smiling significantly. "I hope not," said Alvina. Ciccio sat down almost like a husband--as if it were his right. Geoffrey was very quiet this morning. He ate his breakfast, and rose to go. "I shall see you soon," he said, smiling sheepishly and bowing to Alvina. Ciccio accompanied him to the street. When Ciccio returned, Alvina was once more washing dishes. "What time shall we go?" he said. "We'll catch the one train. I must see the lawyer this morning." "And what shall you say to him?" "I shall tell him to sell everything--" "And marry me?" She started, and looked at him. "You don't want to marry, do you?" she said. "Yes, I do." "Wouldn't you rather wait, and see--" "What?" he said. "See if there is any money." He watched her steadily, and his brow darkened. "Why?" he said. She began to tremble. "You'd like it better if there was money." A slow, sinister smile came on his mouth. His eyes never smiled, except to Geoffrey, when a flood of warm, laughing light sometimes suffused them. "You think I should!" "Yes. It's true, isn't it? You would!" He turned his eyes aside, and looked at her hands as she washed the forks. They trembled slightly. Then he looked back at her eyes again, that were watching him large and wistful and a little accusing. His impudent laugh came on his face. "Yes," he said, "it is always better if there is money." He put his hand on her, and she winced. "But I marry you for love, you know. You know what love is--" And he put his arms round her, and laughed down into her face. She strained away. "But you can have love without marriage," she said. "You know that." "All right! All right! Give me love, eh? I want that." She struggled against him. "But not now," she said. She saw the light in his eyes fix determinedly, and he nodded. "Now!" he said. "Now!" His yellow-tawny eyes looked down into hers, alien and overbearing. "I can't," she struggled. "I can't now." He laughed in a sinister way: yet with a certain warmheartedness. "Come to that big room--" he said. Her face flew fixed into opposition. "I can't now, really," she said grimly. His eyes looked down at hers. Her eyes looked back at him, hard and cold and determined. They remained motionless for some seconds. Then, a stray wisp of her hair catching his attention, desire filled his heart, warm and full, obliterating his anger in the combat. For a moment he softened. He saw her hardness becoming more assertive, and he wavered in sudden dislike, and almost dropped her. Then again the desire flushed his heart, his smile became reckless of her, and he picked her right up. "Yes," he said. "Now." For a second, she struggled frenziedly. But almost instantly she recognized how much stronger he was, and she was still, mute and motionless with anger. White, and mute, and motionless, she was taken to her room. And at the back of her mind all the time she wondered at his deliberate recklessness of her. Recklessly, he had his will of her--but deliberately, and thoroughly, not rushing to the issue, but taking everything he wanted of her, progressively, and fully, leaving her stark, with nothing, nothing of herself--nothing. When she could lie still she turned away from him, still mute. And he lay with his arms over her, motionless. Noises went on, in the street, overhead in the work-room. But theirs was complete silence. At last he rose and looked at her. "Love is a fine thing, Allaye," he said. She lay mute and unmoving. He approached, laid his hand on her breast, and kissed her. "Love," he said, asserting, and laughing. But still she was completely mute and motionless. He threw bedclothes over her and went downstairs, whistling softly. She knew she would have to break her own trance of obstinacy. So she snuggled down into the bedclothes, shivering deliciously, for her skin had become chilled. She didn't care a bit, really, about her own downfall. She snuggled deliciously in the sheets, and admitted to herself that she loved him. In truth, she loved him--and she was laughing to herself. Luxuriously, she resented having to get up and tackle her heap of broken garments. But she did it. She took other clothes, adjusted her hair, tied on her apron, and went downstairs once more. She could not find Ciccio: he had gone out. A stray cat darted from the scullery, and broke a plate in her leap. Alvina found her washing-up water cold. She put on more, and began to dry her dishes. Ciccio returned shortly, and stood in the doorway looking at her. She turned to him, unexpectedly laughing. "What do you think of yourself?" she laughed. "Well," he said, with a little nod, and a furtive look of triumph about him, evasive. He went past her and into the room. Her inside burned with love for him: so elusive, so beautiful, in his silent passing out of her sight. She wiped her dishes happily. Why was she so absurdly happy, she asked herself? And why did she still fight so hard against the sense of his dark, unseizable beauty? Unseizable, for ever unseizable! That made her almost his slave. She fought against her own desire to fall at his feet. Ridiculous to be so happy. She sang to herself as she went about her work downstairs. Then she went upstairs, to do the bedrooms and pack her bag. At ten o'clock she was to go to the family lawyer. She lingered over her possessions: what to take, and what not to take. And so doing she wasted her time. It was already ten o'clock when she hurried downstairs. He was sitting quite still, waiting. He looked up at her. "Now I must hurry," she said. "I don't think I shall be more than an hour." He put on his hat and went out with her. "I shall tell the lawyer I am engaged to you. Shall I?" she asked. "Yes," he said. "Tell him what you like." He was indifferent. "Because," said Alvina gaily, "we can please ourselves what we do, whatever we say. I shall say we think of getting married in the summer, when we know each other better, and going to Italy." "Why shall you say all that?" said Ciccio. "Because I shall _have_ to give some account of myself, or they'll make me do something I don't want to do. You might come to the lawyer's with me, will you? He's an awfully nice old man. Then he'd believe in you." But Ciccio shook his head. "No," he said. "I shan't go. He doesn't want to see _me_." "Well, if you don't want to. But I remember your name, Francesco Marasca, and I remember Pescocalascio." Ciccio heard in silence, as they walked the half-empty, Monday-morning street of Woodhouse. People kept nodding to Alvina. Some hurried inquisitively across to speak to her and look at Ciccio. Ciccio however stood aside and turned his back. "Oh yes," Alvina said. "I am staying with friends, here and there, for a few weeks. No, I don't know when I shall be back. Good-bye!" "You're looking well, Alvina," people said to her. "I think you're looking wonderful. A change does you good." "It does, doesn't it," said Alvina brightly. And she was pleased she was looking well. "Well, good-bye for a minute," she said, glancing smiling into his eyes and nodding to him, as she left him at the gate of the lawyer's house, by the ivy-covered wall. The lawyer was a little man, all grey. Alvina had known him since she was a child: but rather as an official than an individual. She arrived all smiling in his room. He sat down and scrutinized her sharply, officially, before beginning. "Well, Miss Houghton, and what news have you?" "I don't think I've any, Mr. Beeby. I came to you for news." "Ah!" said the lawyer, and he fingered a paper-weight that covered a pile of papers. "I'm afraid there is nothing very pleasant, unfortunately. And nothing very unpleasant either, for that matter." He gave her a shrewd little smile. "Is the will proved?" "Not yet. But I expect it will be through in a few days' time." "And are all the claims in?" "Yes. I _think_ so. I think so!" And again he laid his hand on the pile of papers under the paper-weight, and ran through the edges with the tips of his fingers. "All those?" said Alvina. "Yes," he said quietly. It sounded ominous. "Many!" said Alvina. "A fair amount! A fair amount! Let me show you a statement." He rose and brought her a paper. She made out, with the lawyer's help, that the claims against her father's property exceeded the gross estimate of his property by some seven hundred pounds. "Does it mean we owe seven hundred pounds?" she asked. "That is only on the _estimate_ of the property. It might, of course, realize much more, when sold--or it might realize less." "How awful!" said Alvina, her courage sinking. "Unfortunate! Unfortunate! However, I don't think the realization of the property would amount to less than the estimate. I don't think so." "But even then," said Alvina. "There is sure to be something owing--" She saw herself saddled with her father's debts. "I'm afraid so," said the lawyer. "And then what?" said Alvina. "Oh--the creditors will have to be satisfied with a little less than they claim, I suppose. Not a very great deal, you see. I don't expect they will complain a great deal. In fact, some of them will be less badly off than they feared. No, on that score we need not trouble further. Useless if we do, anyhow. But now, about yourself. Would you like me to try to compound with the creditors, so that you could have some sort of provision? They are mostly people who know you, know your condition: and I might try--" "Try what?" said Alvina. "To make some sort of compound. Perhaps you might retain a lease of Miss Pinnegar's work-rooms. Perhaps even something might be done about the cinematograph. What would you like--?" Alvina sat still in her chair, looking through the window at the ivy sprays, and the leaf buds on the lilac. She felt she could not, she could not cut off every resource. In her own heart she had confidently expected a few hundred pounds: even a thousand or more. And that would make her _something_ of a catch, to people who had nothing. But now!--nothing!--nothing at the back of her but her hundred pounds. When that was gone--! In her dilemma she looked at the lawyer. "You didn't expect it would be quite so bad?" he said. "I think I didn't," she said. "No. Well--it might have been worse." Again he waited. And again she looked at him vacantly. "What do you think?" he said. For answer, she only looked at him with wide eyes. "Perhaps you would rather decide later." "No," she said. "No. It's no use deciding later." The lawyer watched her with curious eyes, his hand beat a little impatiently. "I will do my best," he said, "to get what I can for you." "Oh well!" she said. "Better let everything go. I don't _want_ to hang on. Don't bother about me at all. I shall go away, anyhow." "You will go away?" said the lawyer, and he studied his finger-nails. "Yes. I shan't stay here." "Oh! And may I ask if you have any definite idea, where you will go?" "I've got an engagement as pianist, with a travelling theatrical company." "Oh indeed!" said the lawyer, scrutinizing her sharply. She stared away vacantly out of the window. He took to the attentive study of his finger-nails once more. "And at a sufficient salary?" "Quite sufficient, thank you," said Alvina. "Oh! Well! Well now!--" He fidgetted a little. "You see, we are all old neighbours and connected with your father for many years. We--that is the persons interested, and myself--would not like to think that you were driven out of Woodhouse--er--er--destitute. If--er--we could come to some composition--make some arrangement that would be agreeable to you, and would, in some measure, secure you a means of livelihood--" He watched Alvina with sharp blue eyes. Alvina looked back at him, still vacantly. "No--thanks awfully!" she said. "But don't bother. I'm going away." "With the travelling theatrical company?" "Yes." The lawyer studied his finger-nails intensely. "Well," he said, feeling with a finger-tip an imaginary roughness of one nail-edge. "Well, in that case--In that case--Supposing you have made an irrevocable decision--" He looked up at her sharply. She nodded slowly, like a porcelain mandarin. "In that case," he said, "we must proceed with the valuation and the preparation for the sale." "Yes," she said faintly. "You realize," he said, "that everything in Manchester House, except your private personal property, and that of Miss Pinnegar, belongs to the claimants, your father's creditors, and may not be removed from the house." "Yes," she said. "And it will be necessary to make an account of everything in the house. So if you and Miss Pinnegar will put your possessions strictly apart--But I shall see Miss Pinnegar during the course of the day. Would you ask her to call about seven--I think she is free then--" Alvina sat trembling. "I shall pack my things today," she said. "Of course," said the lawyer, "any little things to which you may be attached the claimants would no doubt wish you to regard as your own. For anything of greater value--your piano, for example--I should have to make a personal request--" "Oh, I don't want anything--" said Alvina. "No? Well! You will see. You will be here a few days?" "No," said Alvina. "I'm going away today." "Today! Is that also irrevocable?" "Yes. I must go this afternoon." "On account of your engagement? May I ask where your company is performing this week? Far away?" "Mansfield!" "Oh! Well then, in case I particularly wished to see you, you could come over?" "If necessary," said Alvina. "But I don't want to come to Woodhouse unless it _is_ necessary. Can't we write?" "Yes--certainly! Certainly!--most things! Certainly! And now--" He went into certain technical matters, and Alvina signed some documents. At last she was free to go. She had been almost an hour in the room. "Well, good-morning, Miss Houghton. You will hear from me, and I from you. I wish you a pleasant experience in your new occupation. You are not leaving Woodhouse for ever." "Good-bye!" she said. And she hurried to the road. Try as she might, she felt as if she had had a blow which knocked her down. She felt she had had a blow. At the lawyer's gate she stood a minute. There, across a little hollow, rose the cemetery hill. There were her graves: her mother's, Miss Frost's, her father's. Looking, she made out the white cross at Miss Frost's grave, the grey stone at her parents'. Then she turned slowly, under the church wall, back to Manchester House. She felt humiliated. She felt she did not want to see anybody at all. She did not want to see Miss Pinnegar, nor the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras: and least of all, Ciccio. She felt strange in Woodhouse, almost as if the ground had risen from under her feet and hit her over the mouth. The fact that Manchester House and its very furniture was under seal to be sold on behalf of her father's creditors made her feel as if all her Woodhouse life had suddenly gone smash. She loathed the thought of Manchester House. She loathed staying another minute in it. And yet she did not want to go to the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras either. The church clock above her clanged eleven. She ought to take the twelve-forty train to Mansfield. Yet instead of going home she turned off down the alley towards the fields and the brook. How many times had she gone that road! How many times had she seen Miss Frost bravely striding home that way, from her music-pupils. How many years had she noticed a particular wild cherry-tree come into blossom, a particular bit of black-thorn scatter its whiteness in among the pleached twigs of a hawthorn hedge. How often, how many springs had Miss Frost come home with a bit of this black-thorn in her hand! Alvina did _not_ want to go to Mansfield that afternoon. She felt insulted. She knew she would be much cheaper in Madame's eyes. She knew her own position with the troupe would be humiliating. It would be openly a little humiliating. But it would be much more maddeningly humiliating to stay in Woodhouse and experience the full flavour of Woodhouse's calculated benevolence. She hardly knew which was worse: the cool look of insolent half-contempt, half-satisfaction with which Madame would receive the news of her financial downfall, or the officious patronage which she would meet from the Woodhouse magnates. She knew exactly how Madame's black eyes would shine, how her mouth would curl with a sneering, slightly triumphant smile, as she heard the news. And she could hear the bullying tone in which Henry Wagstaff would dictate the Woodhouse benevolence to her. She wanted to go away from them all--from them all--for ever. Even from Ciccio. For she felt he insulted her too. Subtly, they all did it. They had regard for her possibilities as an heiress. Five hundred, even two hundred pounds would have made all the difference. Useless to deny it. Even to Ciccio. Ciccio would have had a lifelong respect for her, if she had come with even so paltry a sum as two hundred pounds. Now she had nothing, he would coolly withhold this respect. She felt he might jeer at her. And she could not get away from this feeling. Mercifully she had the bit of ready money. And she had a few trinkets which might be sold. Nothing else. Mercifully, for the mere moment, she was independent. Whatever else she did, she must go back and pack. She must pack her two boxes, and leave them ready. For she felt that once she had left, she could never come back to Woodhouse again. If England had cliffs all round--why, when there was nowhere else to go and no getting beyond, she could walk over one of the cliffs. Meanwhile, she had her short run before her. She banked hard on her independence. So she turned back to the town. She would not be able to take the twelve-forty train, for it was already mid-day. But she was glad. She wanted some time to herself. She would send Ciccio on. Slowly she climbed the familiar hill--slowly--and rather bitterly. She felt her native place insulted her: and she felt the Natchas insulted her. In the midst of the insult she remained isolated upon herself, and she wished to be alone. She found Ciccio waiting at the end of the yard: eternally waiting, it seemed. He was impatient. "You've been a long time," he said. "Yes," she answered. "We shall have to make haste to catch the train." "I can't go by this train. I shall have to come on later. You can just eat a mouthful of lunch, and go now." They went indoors. Miss Pinnegar had not yet come down. Mrs. Rollings was busily peeling potatoes. "Mr. Marasca is going by the train, he'll have to have a little cold meat," said Alvina. "Would you mind putting it ready while I go upstairs?" "Sharpses and Fullbankses sent them bills," said Mrs. Rollings. Alvina opened them, and turned pale. It was thirty pounds, the total funeral expenses. She had completely forgotten them. "And Mr. Atterwell wants to know what you'd like put on th' headstone for your father--if you'd write it down." "All right." Mrs. Rollings popped on the potatoes for Miss Pinnegar's dinner, and spread the cloth for Ciccio. When he was eating, Miss Pinnegar came in. She inquired for Alvina--and went upstairs. "Have you had your dinner?" she said. For there was Alvina sitting writing a letter. "I'm going by a later train," said Alvina. "Both of you?" "No. He's going now." Miss Pinnegar came downstairs again, and went through to the scullery. When Alvina came down, she returned to the living room. "Give this letter to Madame," Alvina said to Ciccio. "I shall be at the hall by seven tonight. I shall go straight there." "Why can't you come now?" said Ciccio. "I can't possibly," said Alvina. "The lawyer has just told me father's debts come to much more than everything is worth. Nothing is ours--not even the plate you're eating from. Everything is under seal to be sold to pay off what is owing. So I've got to get my own clothes and boots together, or they'll be sold with the rest. Mr. Beeby wants you to go round at seven this evening, Miss Pinnegar--before I forget." "Really!" gasped Miss Pinnegar. "Really! The house and the furniture and everything got to be sold up? Then we're on the streets! I can't believe it." "So he told me," said Alvina. "But how positively awful," said Miss Pinnegar, sinking motionless into a chair. "It's not more than I expected," said Alvina. "I'm putting my things into my two trunks, and I shall just ask Mrs. Slaney to store them for me. Then I've the bag I shall travel with." "Really!" gasped Miss Pinnegar. "I can't believe it! And when have we got to get out?" "Oh, I don't think there's a desperate hurry. They'll take an inventory of all the things, and we can live on here till they're actually ready for the sale." "And when will that be?" "I don't know. A week or two." "And is the cinematograph to be sold the same?" "Yes--everything! The piano--even mother's portrait--" "It's impossible to believe it," said Miss Pinnegar. "It's impossible. He can never have left things so bad." "Ciccio," said Alvina. "You'll really have to go if you are to catch the train. You'll give Madame my letter, won't you? I should hate you to miss the train. I know she can't bear me already, for all the fuss and upset I cause." Ciccio rose slowly, wiping his mouth. "You'll be there at seven o'clock?" he said. "At the theatre," she replied. And without more ado, he left. Mrs. Rollings came in. "You've heard?" said Miss Pinnegar dramatically. "I heard somethink," said Mrs. Rollings. "Sold up! Everything to be sold up. Every stick and rag! I never thought I should live to see the day," said Miss Pinnegar. "You might almost have expected it," said Mrs. Rollings. "But you're all right, yourself, Miss Pinnegar. Your money isn't with his, is it?" "No," said Miss Pinnegar. "What little I have put by is safe. But it's not enough to live on. It's not enough to keep me, even supposing I only live another ten years. If I only spend a pound a week, it costs fifty-two pounds a year. And for ten years, look at it, it's five hundred and twenty pounds. And you couldn't say less. And I haven't half that amount. I never had more than a wage, you know. Why, Miss Frost earned a good deal more than I do. And _she_ didn't leave much more than fifty. Where's the money to come from--?" "But if you've enough to start a little business--" said Alvina. "Yes, it's what I shall _have_ to do. It's what I shall have to do. And then what about you? What about you?" "Oh, don't bother about me," said Alvina. "Yes, it's all very well, don't bother. But when you come to my age, you know you've _got_ to bother, and bother a great deal, if you're not going to find yourself in a position you'd be sorry for. You _have_ to bother. And _you'll_ have to bother before you've done." "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," said Alvina. "Ha, sufficient for a good many days, it seems to me." Miss Pinnegar was in a real temper. To Alvina this seemed an odd way of taking it. The three women sat down to an uncomfortable dinner of cold meat and hot potatoes and warmed-up pudding. "But whatever you do," pronounced Miss Pinnegar; "whatever you do, and however you strive, in this life, you're knocked down in the end. You're always knocked down." "It doesn't matter," said Alvina, "if it's only in the end. It doesn't matter if you've had your life." "You've never had your life, till you're dead," said Miss Pinnegar. "And if you work and strive, you've a right to the fruits of your work." "It doesn't matter," said Alvina laconically, "so long as you've enjoyed working and striving." But Miss Pinnegar was too angry to be philosophic. Alvina knew it was useless to be either angry or otherwise emotional. None the less, she also felt as if she had been knocked down. And she almost envied poor Miss Pinnegar the prospect of a little, day-by-day haberdashery shop in Tamworth. Her own problem seemed so much more menacing. "Answer or die," said the Sphinx of fate. Miss Pinnegar could answer her own fate according to its question. She could say "haberdashery shop," and her sphinx would recognize this answer as true to nature, and would be satisfied. But every individual has his own, or her own fate, and her own sphinx. Alvina's sphinx was an old, deep thoroughbred, she would take no mongrel answers. And her thoroughbred teeth were long and sharp. To Alvina, the last of the fantastic but pure-bred race of Houghton, the problem of her fate was terribly abstruse. The only thing to do was not to solve it: to stray on, and answer fate with whatever came into one's head. No good striving with fate. Trust to a lucky shot, or take the consequences. "Miss Pinnegar," said Alvina. "Have we any money in hand?" "There is about twenty pounds in the bank. It's all shown in my books," said Miss Pinnegar. "We couldn't take it, could we?" "Every penny shows in the books." Alvina pondered again. "Are there more bills to come in?" she asked. "I mean my bills. Do I owe anything?" "I don't think you do," said Miss Pinnegar. "I'm going to keep the insurance money, any way. They can say what they like. I've got it, and I'm going to keep it." "Well," said Miss Pinnegar, "it's not my business. But there's Sharps and Fullbanks to pay." "I'll pay those," said Alvina. "You tell Atterwell what to put on father's stone. How much does it cost?" "Five shillings a letter, you remember." "Well, we'll just put the name and the date. How much will that be? James Houghton. Born 17th January--" "You'll have to put 'Also of,'" said Miss Pinnegar. "Also of--" said Alvina. "One--two--three--four--five--six--. Six letters--thirty shillings. Seems an awful lot for _Also of_--" "But you can't leave it out," said Miss Pinnegar. "You can't economize over that." "I begrudge it," said Alvina. CHAPTER XI HONOURABLE ENGAGEMENT For days, after joining the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, Alvina was very quiet, subdued, and rather remote, sensible of her humiliating position as a hanger-on. They none of them took much notice of her. They drifted on, rather disjointedly. The cordiality, the _joie de vivre_ did not revive. Madame was a little irritable, and very exacting, and inclined to be spiteful. Ciccio went his way with Geoffrey. In the second week, Madame found out that a man had been surreptitiously inquiring about them at their lodgings, from the landlady and the landlady's blowsy daughter. It must have been a detective--some shoddy detective. Madame waited. Then she sent Max over to Mansfield, on some fictitious errand. Yes, the lousy-looking dogs of detectives had been there too, making the most minute enquiries as to the behaviour of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, what they did, how their sleeping was arranged, how Madame addressed the men, what attitude the men took towards Alvina. Madame waited again. And again, when they moved to Doncaster, the same two mongrel-looking fellows were lurking in the street, and plying the inmates of their lodging-house with questions. All the Natchas caught sight of the men. And Madame cleverly wormed out of the righteous and respectable landlady what the men had asked. Once more it was about the sleeping accommodation--whether the landlady heard anything in the night--whether she noticed anything in the bedrooms, in the beds. No doubt about it, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras were under suspicion. They were being followed, and watched. What for? Madame made a shrewd guess. "They want to say we are immoral foreigners," she said. "But what have our personal morals got to do with them?" said Max angrily. "Yes--but the English! They are so pure," said Madame. "You know," said Louis, "somebody must have put them up to it--" "Perhaps," said Madame, "somebody on account of Allaye." Alvina went white. "Yes," said Geoffrey. "White Slave Traffic! Mr. May said it." Madame slowly nodded. "Mr. May!" she said. "Mr. May! It is he. He knows all about morals--and immorals. Yes, I know. Yes--yes--yes! He suspects all our immoral doings, _mes braves_." "But there aren't any, except mine," cried Alvina, pale to the lips. "You! You! There you are!" Madame smiled archly, and rather mockingly. "What are we to do?" said Max, pale on the cheekbones. "Curse them! Curse them!" Louis was muttering, in his rolling accent. "Wait," said Madame. "Wait. They will not do anything to us. You are only dirty foreigners, _mes braves_. At the most they will ask us only to leave their pure country." "We don't interfere with none of them," cried Max. "Curse them," muttered Louis. "Never mind, _mon cher_. You are in a pure country. Let us wait." "If you think it's me," said Alvina, "I can go away." "Oh, my dear, you are only the excuse," said Madame, smiling indulgently at her. "Let us wait, and see." She took it smilingly. But her cheeks were white as paper, and her eyes black as drops of ink, with anger. "Wait and see!" she chanted ironically. "Wait and see! If we must leave the dear country--then _adieu!_" And she gravely bowed to an imaginary England. "I feel it's my fault. I feel I ought to go away," cried Alvina, who was terribly distressed, seeing Madame's glitter and pallor, and the black brows of the men. Never had Ciccio's brow looked so ominously black. And Alvina felt it was all her fault. Never had she experienced such a horrible feeling: as if something repulsive were creeping on her from behind. Every minute of these weeks was a horror to her: the sense of the low-down dogs of detectives hanging round, sliding behind them, trying to get hold of some clear proof of immorality on their part. And then--the unknown vengeance of the authorities. All the repulsive secrecy, and all the absolute power of the police authorities. The sense of a great malevolent power which had them all the time in its grip, and was watching, feeling, waiting to strike the morbid blow: the sense of the utter helplessness of individuals who were not even accused, only watched and enmeshed! the feeling that they, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, herself included, must be monsters of hideous vice, to have provoked all this: and yet the sane knowledge that they, none of them, _were_ monsters of vice; this was quite killing. The sight of a policeman would send up Alvina's heart in a flame of fear, agony; yet she knew she had nothing legally to be afraid of. Every knock at the door was horrible. She simply could not understand it. Yet there it was: they were watched, followed. Of that there was no question. And all she could imagine was that the troupe was secretly accused of White Slave Traffic by somebody in Woodhouse. Probably Mr. May had gone the round of the benevolent magnates of Woodhouse, concerning himself with her virtue, and currying favour with his concern. Of this she became convinced, that it was concern for her virtue which had started the whole business: and that the first instigator was Mr. May, who had got round some vulgar magistrate or County Councillor. Madame did not consider Alvina's view very seriously. She thought it was some personal malevolence against the Tawaras themselves, probably put up by some other professionals, with whom Madame was not popular. Be that as it may, for some weeks they went about in the shadow of this repulsive finger which was following after them, to touch them and destroy them with the black smear of shame. The men were silent and inclined to be sulky. They seemed to hold together. They seemed to be united into a strong, four-square silence and tension. They kept to themselves--and Alvina kept to herself--and Madame kept to herself. So they went about. And slowly the cloud melted. It never broke. Alvina felt that the very force of the sullen, silent fearlessness and fury in the Tawaras had prevented its bursting. Once there had been a weakening, a cringing, they would all have been lost. But their hearts hardened with black, indomitable anger. And the cloud melted, it passed away. There was no sign. Early summer was now at hand. Alvina no longer felt at home with the Natchas. While the trouble was hanging over, they seemed to ignore her altogether. The men hardly spoke to her. They hardly spoke to Madame, for that matter. They kept within the four-square enclosure of themselves. But Alvina felt herself particularly excluded, left out. And when the trouble of the detectives began to pass off, and the men became more cheerful again, wanted her to jest and be familiar with them, she responded verbally, but in her heart there was no response. Madame had been quite generous with her. She allowed her to pay for her room, and the expense of travelling. But she had her food with the rest. Wherever she was, Madame bought the food for the party, and cooked it herself. And Alvina came in with the rest: she paid no board. She waited, however, for Madame to suggest a small salary--or at least, that the troupe should pay her living expenses. But Madame did not make such a suggestion. So Alvina knew that she was not very badly wanted. And she guarded her money, and watched for some other opportunity. It became her habit to go every morning to the public library of the town in which she found herself, to look through the advertisements: advertisements for maternity nurses, for nursery governesses, pianists, travelling companions, even ladies' maids. For some weeks she found nothing, though she wrote several letters. One morning Ciccio, who had begun to hang round her again, accompanied her as she set out to the library. But her heart was closed against him. "Why are you going to the library?" he asked her. It was in Lancaster. "To look at the papers and magazines." "Ha-a! To find a job, eh?" His cuteness startled her for a moment. "If I found one I should take it," she said. "Hé! I know that," he said. It so happened that that very morning she saw on the notice-board of the library an announcement that the Borough Council wished to engage the services of an experienced maternity nurse, applications to be made to the medical board. Alvina wrote down the directions. Ciccio watched her. "What is a maternity nurse?" he said. "An _accoucheuse_!" she said. "The nurse who attends when babies are born." "Do you know how to do that?" he said, incredulous, and jeering slightly. "I was trained to do it," she said. He said no more, but walked by her side as she returned to the lodgings. As they drew near the lodgings, he said: "You don't want to stop with us any more?" "I can't," she said. He made a slight, mocking gesture. "'I can't,'" he repeated. "Why do you always say you can't?" "Because I can't," she said. "Pff--!" he went, with a whistling sound of contempt. But she went indoors to her room. Fortunately, when she had finally cleared her things from Manchester House, she had brought with her her nurse's certificate, and recommendations from doctors. She wrote out her application, took the tram to the Town Hall and dropped it in the letterbox there. Then she wired home to her doctor for another reference. After which she went to the library and got out a book on her subject. If summoned, she would have to go before the medical board on Monday. She had a week. She read and pondered hard, recalling all her previous experience and knowledge. She wondered if she ought to appear before the board in uniform. Her nurse's dresses were packed in her trunk at Mrs. Slaney's, in Woodhouse. It was now May. The whole business at Woodhouse was finished. Manchester House and all the furniture was sold to some boot-and-shoe people: at least the boot-and-shoe people had the house. They had given four thousand pounds for it--which was above the lawyer's estimate. On the other hand, the theatre was sold for almost nothing. It all worked out that some thirty-three pounds, which the creditors made up to fifty pounds, remained for Alvina. She insisted on Miss Pinnegar's having half of this. And so that was all over. Miss Pinnegar was already in Tamworth, and her little shop would be opened next week. She wrote happily and excitedly about it. Sometimes fate acts swiftly and without a hitch. On Thursday Alvina received her notice that she was to appear before the Board on the following Monday. And yet she could not bring herself to speak of it to Madame till the Saturday evening. When they were all at supper, she said: "Madame, I applied for a post of maternity nurse, to the Borough of Lancaster." Madame raised her eyebrows. Ciccio had said nothing. "Oh really! You never told me." "I thought it would be no use if it all came to nothing. They want me to go and see them on Monday, and then they will decide--" "Really! Do they! On Monday? And then if you get this work you will stay here? Yes?" "Yes, of course." "Of course! Of course! Yes! H'm! And if not?" The two women looked at each other. "What?" said Alvina. "If you _don't_ get it--! You are not _sure_?" "No," said Alvina. "I am not a bit sure." "Well then--! Now! And if you don't get it--?" "What shall I do, you mean?" "Yes, what shall you do?" "I don't know." "How! you don't know! Shall you come back to us, then?" "I will if you like--" "If I like! If _I_ like! Come, it is not a question of if _I_ like. It is what do you want to do yourself." "I feel you don't want me very badly," said Alvina. "Why? Why do you feel? Who makes you? Which of us makes you feel so? Tell me." "Nobody in particular. But I feel it." "Oh we-ell! If nobody makes you, and yet you feel it, it must be in yourself, don't you see? Eh? Isn't it so?" "Perhaps it is," admitted Alvina. "We-ell then! We-ell--" So Madame gave her her congé. "But if you like to come back--if you _laike_--then--" Madame shrugged her shoulders--"you must come, I suppose." "Thank you," said Alvina. The young men were watching. They seemed indifferent. Ciccio turned aside, with his faint, stupid smile. In the morning Madame gave Alvina all her belongings, from the little safe she called her bank. "There is the money--so--and so--and so--that is correct. Please count it once more!--" Alvina counted it and kept it clutched in her hand. "And there are your rings, and your chain, and your locket--see--all--everything--! But not the brooch. Where is the brooch? Here! Shall I give it back, hein?" "I gave it to you," said Alvina, offended. She looked into Madame's black eyes. Madame dropped her eyes. "Yes, you gave it. But I thought, you see, as you have now not much mo-oney, perhaps you would like to take it again--" "No, thank you," said Alvina, and she went away, leaving Madame with the red brooch in her plump hand. "Thank goodness I've given her something valuable," thought Alvina to herself, as she went trembling to her room. She had packed her bag. She had to find new rooms. She bade good-bye to the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. Her face was cold and distant, but she smiled slightly as she bade them good-bye. "And perhaps," said Madame, "per-haps you will come to Wigan tomorrow afternoon--or evening? Yes?" "Thank you," said Alvina. She went out and found a little hotel, where she took her room for the night, explaining the cause of her visit to Lancaster. Her heart was hard and burning. A deep, burning, silent anger against everything possessed her, and a profound indifference to mankind. And therefore, the next day, everything went as if by magic. She had decided that at the least sign of indifference from the medical board people she would walk away, take her bag, and go to Windermere. She had never been to the Lakes. And Windermere was not far off. She would not endure one single hint of contumely from any one else. She would go straight to Windermere, to see the big lake. Why not do as she wished! She could be quite happy by herself among the lakes. And she would be absolutely free, absolutely free. She rather looked forward to leaving the Town Hall, hurrying to take her bag and off to the station and freedom. Hadn't she still got about a hundred pounds? Why bother for one moment? To be quite alone in the whole world--and quite, quite free, with her hundred pounds--the prospect attracted her sincerely. And therefore, everything went charmingly at the Town Hall. The medical board were charming to her--charming. There was no hesitation at all. From the first moment she was engaged. And she was given a pleasant room in a hospital in a garden, and the matron was charming to her, and the doctors most courteous. When could she undertake to commence her duties? When did they want her? The very _moment_ she could come. She could begin tomorrow--but she had no uniform. Oh, the matron would lend her uniform and aprons, till her box arrived. So there she was--by afternoon installed in her pleasant little room looking on the garden, and dressed in a nurse's uniform. It was all sudden like magic. She had wired to Madame, she had wired for her box. She was another person. Needless to say, she was glad. Needless to say that, in the morning, when she had thoroughly bathed, and dressed in clean clothes, and put on the white dress, the white apron, and the white cap, she felt another person. So clean, she felt, so thankful! Her skin seemed caressed and live with cleanliness and whiteness, luminous she felt. It was so different from being with the Natchas. In the garden the snowballs, guelder-roses, swayed softly among green foliage, there was pink may-blossom, and single scarlet may-blossom, and underneath the young green of the trees, irises rearing purple and moth-white. A young gardener was working--and a convalescent slowly trailed a few paces. Having ten minutes still, Alvina sat down and wrote to Ciccio: "I am glad I have got this post as nurse here. Every one is most kind, and I feel at home already. I feel quite happy here. I shall think of my days with the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, and of you, who were such a stranger to me. Good-bye.--A. H." This she addressed and posted. No doubt Madame would find occasion to read it. But let her. Alvina now settled down to her new work. There was of course a great deal to do, for she had work both in the hospital and out in the town, though chiefly out in the town. She went rapidly from case to case, as she was summoned. And she was summoned at all hours. So that it was tiring work, which left her no time to herself, except just in snatches. She had no serious acquaintance with anybody, she was too busy. The matron and sisters and doctors and patients were all part of her day's work, and she regarded them as such. The men she chiefly ignored: she felt much more friendly with the matron. She had many a cup of tea and many a chat in the matron's room, in the quiet, sunny afternoons when the work was not pressing. Alvina took her quiet moments when she could: for she never knew when she would be rung up by one or other of the doctors in the town. And so, from the matron, she learned to crochet. It was work she had never taken to. But now she had her ball of cotton and her hook, and she worked away as she chatted. She was in good health, and she was getting fatter again. With the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, she had improved a good deal, her colour and her strength had returned. But undoubtedly the nursing life, arduous as it was, suited her best. She became a handsome, reposeful woman, jolly with the other nurses, really happy with her friend the matron, who was well-bred and wise, and never over-intimate. The doctor with whom Alvina had most to do was a Dr. Mitchell, a Scotchman. He had a large practice among the poor, and was an energetic man. He was about fifty-four years old, tall, largely-built, with a good figure, but with extraordinarily large feet and hands. His face was red and clean-shaven, his eyes blue, his teeth very good. He laughed and talked rather mouthingly. Alvina, who knew what the nurses told her, knew that he had come as a poor boy and bottle-washer to Dr. Robertson, a fellow-Scotchman, and that he had made his way up gradually till he became a doctor himself, and had an independent practice. Now he was quite rich--and a bachelor. But the nurses did not set their bonnets at him very much, because he was rather mouthy and overbearing. In the houses of the poor he was a great autocrat. "What is that stuff you've got there!" he inquired largely, seeing a bottle of somebody's Soothing Syrup by a poor woman's bedside. "Take it and throw it down the sink, and the next time you want a soothing syrup put a little boot-blacking in hot water. It'll do you just as much good." Imagine the slow, pompous, large-mouthed way in which the red-faced, handsomely-built man pronounced these words, and you realize why the poor set such store by him. He was eagle-eyed. Wherever he went, there was a scuffle directly his foot was heard on the stairs. And he knew they were hiding something. He sniffed the air: he glanced round with a sharp eye: and during the course of his visit picked up a blue mug which was pushed behind the looking-glass. He peered inside--and smelled it. "Stout?" he said, in a tone of indignant inquiry: God-Almighty would presumably take on just such a tone, finding the core of an apple flung away among the dead-nettle of paradise: "Stout! Have you been drinking stout?" This as he gazed down on the wan mother in the bed. "They gave me a drop, doctor. I felt that low." The doctor marched out of the room, still holding the mug in his hand. The sick woman watched him with haunted eyes. The attendant women threw up their hands and looked at one another. Was he going for ever? There came a sudden smash. The doctor had flung the blue mug downstairs. He returned with a solemn stride. "There!" he said. "And the next person that gives you stout will be thrown down along with the mug." "Oh doctor, the bit o' comfort!" wailed the sick woman. "It ud never do me no harm." "Harm! Harm! With a stomach as weak as yours! Harm! Do you know better than I do? What have I come here for? To be told by _you_ what will do you harm and what won't? It appears to me you need no doctor here, you know everything already--" "Oh no, doctor. It's not like that. But when you feel as if you'd sink through the bed, an' you don't know what to do with yourself--" "Take a little beef-tea, or a little rice pudding. Take _nourishment_, don't take that muck. Do you hear--" charging upon the attendant women, who shrank against the wall--"she's to have nothing alcoholic at all, and don't let me catch you giving it her." "They say there's nobbut fower per cent. i' stout," retorted the daring female. "Fower per cent.," mimicked the doctor brutally. "Why, what does an ignorant creature like _you_ know about fower per cent." The woman muttered a little under her breath. "What? Speak out. Let me hear what you've got to say, my woman. I've no doubt it's something for my benefit--" But the affronted woman rushed out of the room, and burst into tears on the landing. After which Dr. Mitchell, mollified, largely told the patient how she was to behave, concluding: "Nourishment! Nourishment is what you want. Nonsense, don't tell me you can't take it. Push it down if it won't go down by itself--" "Oh doctor--" "Don't say _oh doctor_ to me. Do as I tell you. That's _your_ business." After which he marched out, and the rattle of his motor car was shortly heard. Alvina got used to scenes like these. She wondered why the people stood it. But soon she realized that they loved it--particularly the women. "Oh, nurse, stop till Dr. Mitchell's been. I'm scared to death of him, for fear he's going to shout at me." "Why does everybody put up with him?" asked innocent Alvina. "Oh, he's good-hearted, nurse, he _does_ feel for you." And everywhere it was the same: "Oh, he's got a heart, you know. He's rough, but he's got a heart. I'd rather have him than your smarmy slormin sort. Oh, you feel safe with Dr. Mitchell, I don't care what you say." But to Alvina this peculiar form of blustering, bullying heart which had all the women scurrying like chickens was not particularly attractive. The men did not like Dr. Mitchell, and would not have him if possible. Yet since he was club doctor and panel doctor, they had to submit. The first thing he said to a sick or injured labourer, invariably, was: "And keep off the beer." "Oh ay!" "Keep off the beer, or I shan't set foot in this house again." "Tha's got a red enough face on thee, tha nedna shout." "My face is red with exposure to all weathers, attending ignorant people like you. I never touch alcohol in any form." "No, an' I dunna. I drink a drop o' beer, if that's what you ca' touchin' alcohol. An' I'm none th' wuss for it, tha sees." "You've heard what I've told you." "Ah, I have." "And if you go on with the beer, you may go on with curing yourself. _I_ shan't attend you. You know I mean what I say, Mrs. Larrick"--this to the wife. "I do, doctor. And I know it's true what you say. An' I'm at him night an' day about it--" "Oh well, if he will hear no reason, he must suffer for it. He mustn't think _I'm_ going to be running after him, if he disobeys my orders." And the doctor stalked off, and the woman began to complain. None the less the women had their complaints against Dr. Mitchell. If ever Alvina entered a clean house on a wet day, she was sure to hear the housewife chuntering. "Oh my lawk, come in nurse! What a day! Doctor's not been yet. And he's bound to come now I've just cleaned up, trapesin' wi' his gret feet. He's got the biggest understandin's of any man i' Lancaster. My husband says they're the best pair o' pasties i' th' kingdom. An' he does make such a mess, for he never stops to wipe his feet on th' mat, marches straight up your clean stairs--" "Why don't you tell him to wipe his feet?" said Alvina. "Oh my word! Fancy me telling him! He'd jump down my throat with both feet afore I'd opened my mouth. He's not to be spoken to, he isn't. He's my-lord, he is. You mustn't look, or you're done for." Alvina laughed. She knew they all liked him for browbeating them, and having a heart over and above. Sometimes he was given a good hit--though nearly always by a man. It happened he was in a workman's house when the man was at dinner. "Canna yer gi'e a man summat better nor this 'ere pap, Missis?" said the hairy husband, turning up his nose at the rice pudding. "Oh go on," cried the wife. "I hadna time for owt else." Dr. Mitchell was just stooping his handsome figure in the doorway. "Rice pudding!" he exclaimed largely. "You couldn't have anything more wholesome and nourishing. I have a rice pudding every day of my life--every day of my life, I do." The man was eating his pudding and pearling his big moustache copiously with it. He did not answer. "Do you doctor!" cried the woman. "And never no different." "Never," said the doctor. "Fancy that! You're that fond of them?" "I find they agree with me. They are light and digestible. And my stomach is as weak as a baby's." The labourer wiped his big moustache on his sleeve. "Mine _isna_, tha sees," he said, "so pap's no use. 'S watter ter me. I want ter feel as I've had summat: a bit o' suetty dumplin' an' a pint o' hale, summat ter fill th' hole up. An' tha'd be th' same if tha did my work." "If I did your work," sneered the doctor. "Why I do ten times the work that any one of you does. It's just the work that has ruined my digestion, the never getting a quiet meal, and never a whole night's rest. When do you think _I_ can sit at table and digest my dinner? I have to be off looking after people like you--" "Eh, tha can ta'e th' titty-bottle wi' thee," said the labourer. But Dr. Mitchell was furious for weeks over this. It put him in a black rage to have his great manliness insulted. Alvina was quietly amused. The doctor began by being rather lordly and condescending with her. But luckily she felt she knew her work at least as well as he knew it. She smiled and let him condescend. Certainly she neither feared nor even admired him. To tell the truth, she rather disliked him: the great, red-faced bachelor of fifty-three, with his bald spot and his stomach as weak as a baby's, and his mouthing imperiousness and his good heart which was as selfish as it could be. Nothing can be more cocksuredly selfish than a good heart which believes in its own beneficence. He was a little too much the teetotaller on the one hand to be so largely manly on the other. Alvina preferred the labourers with their awful long moustaches that got full of food. And he was a little too loud-mouthedly lordly to be in human good taste. As a matter of fact, he was conscious of the fact that he had risen to be a gentleman. Now if a man is conscious of being a _gentleman_, he is bound to be a little less than a _man_. But if he is gnawed with anxiety lest he may _not_ be a gentleman, he is only pitiable. There is a third case, however. If a man must loftily, by his manner, assert that he is _now_ a gentleman, he shows himself a clown. For Alvina, poor Dr. Mitchell fell into this third category, of clowns. She tolerated him good-humouredly, as women so often tolerate ninnies and _poseurs_. She smiled to herself when she saw his large and important presence on the board. She smiled when she saw him at a sale, buying the grandest pieces of antique furniture. She smiled when he talked of going up to Scotland, for grouse shooting, or of snatching an hour on Sunday morning, for golf. And she talked him over, with quiet, delicate malice, with the matron. He was no favourite at the hospital. Gradually Dr. Mitchell's manner changed towards her. From his imperious condescension he took to a tone of uneasy equality. This did not suit him. Dr. Mitchell had no equals: he had only the vast stratum of inferiors, towards whom he exercised his quite profitable beneficence--it brought him in about two thousand a year: and then his superiors, people who had been born with money. It was the tradesmen and professionals who had started at the bottom and clambered to the motor-car footing, who distressed him. And therefore, whilst he treated Alvina on this uneasy tradesman footing, he felt himself in a false position. She kept her attitude of quiet amusement, and little by little he sank. From being a lofty creature soaring over her head, he was now like a big fish poking its nose above water and making eyes at her. He treated her with rather presuming deference. "You look tired this morning," he barked at her one hot day. "I think it's thunder," she said. "Thunder! Work, you mean," and he gave a slight smile. "I'm going to drive you back." "Oh no, thanks, don't trouble! I've got to call on the way." "Where have you got to call?" She told him. "Very well. That takes you no more than five minutes. I'll wait for you. Now take your cloak." She was surprised. Yet, like other women, she submitted. As they drove he saw a man with a barrow of cucumbers. He stopped the car and leaned towards the man. "Take that barrow-load of poison and _bury_ it!" he shouted, in his strong voice. The busy street hesitated. "What's that, mister?" replied the mystified hawker. Dr. Mitchell pointed to the green pile of cucumbers. "Take that barrow-load of poison, and bury it," he called, "before you do anybody any more harm with it." "What barrow-load of poison's that?" asked the hawker, approaching. A crowd began to gather. "What barrow-load of poison is that!" repeated the doctor. "Why your barrow-load of cucumbers." "Oh," said the man, scrutinizing his cucumbers carefully. To be sure, some were a little yellow at the end. "How's that? Cumbers is right enough: fresh from market this morning." "Fresh or not fresh," said the doctor, mouthing his words distinctly, "you might as well put poison into your stomach, as those things. Cucumbers are the worst thing you can eat." "Oh!" said the man, stuttering. "That's 'appen for them as doesn't like them. I niver knowed a cumber do _me_ no harm, an' I eat 'em like a happle." Whereupon the hawker took a "cumber" from his barrow, bit off the end, and chewed it till the sap squirted. "What's wrong with that?" he said, holding up the bitten cucumber. "I'm not talking about what's wrong with that," said the doctor. "My business is what's wrong with the stomach it goes into. I'm a doctor. And I know that those things cause me half my work. They cause half the internal troubles people suffer from in summertime." "Oh ay! That's no loss to you, is it? Me an' you's partners. More cumbers I sell, more graft for you, 'cordin' to that. What's wrong then. _Cum-bers! Fine fresh Cum-berrrs! All fresh and juisty, all cheap and tasty--!_" yelled the man. "I am a doctor not only to cure illness, but to prevent it where I can. And cucumbers are poison to everybody." "_Cum-bers! Cum-bers! Fresh cumbers!_" yelled the man, Dr. Mitchell started his car. "When will they learn intelligence?" he said to Alvina, smiling and showing his white, even teeth. "I don't care, you know, myself," she said. "I should always let people do what they wanted--" "Even if you knew it would do them harm?" he queried, smiling with amiable condescension. "Yes, why not! It's their own affair. And they'll do themselves harm one way or another." "And you wouldn't try to prevent it?" "You might as well try to stop the sea with your fingers." "You think so?" smiled the doctor. "I see, you are a pessimist. You are a pessimist with regard to human nature." "Am I?" smiled Alvina, thinking the rose would smell as sweet. It seemed to please the doctor to find that Alvina was a pessimist with regard to human nature. It seemed to give her an air of distinction. In his eyes, she _seemed_ distinguished. He was in a fair way to dote on her. She, of course, when he began to admire her, liked him much better, and even saw graceful, boyish attractions in him. There was really something childish about him. And this something childish, since it looked up to her as if she were the saving grace, naturally flattered her and made her feel gentler towards him. He got in the habit of picking her up in his car, when he could. And he would tap at the matron's door, smiling and showing all his beautiful teeth, just about tea-time. "May I come in?" His voice sounded almost flirty. "Certainly." "I see you're having tea! Very nice, a cup of tea at this hour!" "Have one too, doctor." "I will with pleasure." And he sat down wreathed with smiles. Alvina rose to get a cup. "I didn't intend to disturb you, nurse," he said. "Men are always intruders," he smiled to the matron. "Sometimes," said the matron, "women are charmed to be intruded upon." "Oh really!" his eyes sparkled. "Perhaps _you_ wouldn't say so, nurse?" he said, turning to Alvina. Alvina was just reaching at the cupboard. Very charming she looked, in her fresh dress and cap and soft brown hair, very attractive her figure, with its full, soft loins. She turned round to him. "Oh yes," she said. "I quite agree with the matron." "Oh, you do!" He did not quite know how to take it. "But you mind being disturbed at your tea, I am sure." "No," said Alvina. "We are so used to being disturbed." "Rather weak, doctor?" said the matron, pouring the tea. "Very weak, please." The doctor was a little laboured in his gallantry, but unmistakably gallant. When he was gone, the matron looked demure, and Alvina confused. Each waited for the other to speak. "Don't you think Dr. Mitchell is quite coming out?" said Alvina. "Quite! _Quite_ the ladies' man! I wonder who it is can be _bringing_ him out. A very praiseworthy work, I am sure." She looked wickedly at Alvina. "No, don't look at me," laughed Alvina, "_I_ know nothing about it." "Do you think it may be _me_!" said the matron, mischievous. "I'm sure of it, matron! He begins to show some taste at last." "There now!" said the matron. "I shall put my cap straight." And she went to the mirror, fluffing her hair and settling her cap. "There!" she said, bobbing a little curtsey to Alvina. They both laughed, and went off to work. But there was no mistake, Dr. Mitchell was beginning to expand. With Alvina he quite unbent, and seemed even to sun himself when she was near, to attract her attention. He smiled and smirked and became oddly self-conscious: rather uncomfortable. He liked to hang over her chair, and he made a great event of offering her a cigarette whenever they met, although he himself never smoked. He had a gold cigarette case. One day he asked her in to see his garden. He had a pleasant old square house with a big walled garden. He showed her his flowers and his wall-fruit, and asked her to eat his strawberries. He bade her admire his asparagus. And then he gave her tea in the drawing-room, with strawberries and cream and cakes, of all of which he ate nothing. But he smiled expansively all the time. He was a made man: and now he was really letting himself go, luxuriating in everything; above all, in Alvina, who poured tea gracefully from the old Georgian tea-pot, and smiled so pleasantly above the Queen Anne tea-cups. And she, wicked that she was, admired every detail of his drawing-room. It was a pleasant room indeed, with roses outside the French door, and a lawn in sunshine beyond, with bright red flowers in beds. But indoors, it was insistently antique. Alvina admired the Jacobean sideboard and the Jacobean arm-chairs and the Hepplewhite wall-chairs and the Sheraton settee and the Chippendale stands and the Axminster carpet and the bronze clock with Shakespeare and Ariosto reclining on it--yes, she even admired Shakespeare on the clock--and the ormolu cabinet and the bead-work foot-stools and the dreadful Sèvres dish with a cherub in it and--but why enumerate. She admired _everything_! And Dr. Mitchell's heart expanded in his bosom till he felt it would burst, unless he either fell at her feet or did something extraordinary. He had never even imagined what it was to be so expanded: what a delicious feeling. He could have kissed her feet in an ecstasy of wild expansion. But habit, so far, prevented his doing more than beam. Another day he said to her, when they were talking of age: "You are as young as you feel. Why, when I was twenty I felt I had all the cares and responsibility of the world on my shoulders. And now I am middle-aged more or less, I feel as light as if I were just beginning life." He beamed down at her. "Perhaps you _are_ only just beginning your _own_ life," she said. "You have lived for your work till now." "It may be that," he said. "It may be that up till now I have lived for others, for my patients. And now perhaps I may be allowed to live a little more for myself." He beamed with real luxury, saw the real luxury of life begin. "Why shouldn't you?" said Alvina. "Oh yes, I intend to," he said, with confidence. He really, by degrees, made up his mind to marry now, and to retire in part from his work. That is, he would hire another assistant, and give himself a fair amount of leisure. He was inordinately proud of his house. And now he looked forward to the treat of his life: hanging round the woman he had made his wife, following her about, feeling proud of her and his house, talking to her from morning till night, really finding himself in her. When he had to go his rounds she would go with him in the car: he made up his mind she would be willing to accompany him. He would teach her to drive, and they would sit side by side, she driving him and waiting for him. And he would run out of the houses of his patients, and find her sitting there, and he would get in beside her and feel so snug and so sure and so happy as she drove him off to the next case, he informing her about his work. And if ever she did not go out with him, she would be there on the doorstep waiting for him the moment she heard the car. And they would have long, cosy evenings together in the drawing-room, as he luxuriated in her very presence. She would sit on his knees and they would be snug for hours, before they went warmly and deliciously to bed. And in the morning he need not rush off. He would loiter about with her, they would loiter down the garden looking at every new flower and every new fruit, she would wear fresh flowery dresses and no cap on her hair, he would never be able to tear himself away from her. Every morning it would be unbearable to have to tear himself away from her, and every hour he would be rushing back to her. They would be simply everything to one another. And how he would enjoy it! Ah! He pondered as to whether he would have children. A child would take her away from him. That was his first thought. But then--! Ah well, he would have to leave it till the time. Love's young dream is never so delicious as at the virgin age of fifty-three. But he was quite cautious. He made no definite advances till he had put a plain question. It was August Bank Holiday, that for ever black day of the declaration of war, when his question was put. For this year of our story is the fatal year 1914. There was quite a stir in the town over the declaration of war. But most people felt that the news was only intended to give an extra thrill to the all-important event of Bank Holiday. Half the world had gone to Blackpool or Southport, the other half had gone to the Lakes or into the country. Lancaster was busy with a sort of fête, notwithstanding. And as the weather was decent, everybody was in a real holiday mood. So that Dr. Mitchell, who had contrived to pick up Alvina at the Hospital, contrived to bring her to his house at half-past three, for tea. "What do you think of this new war?" said Alvina. "Oh, it will be over in six weeks," said the doctor easily. And there they left it. Only, with a fleeting thought, Alvina wondered if it would affect the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. She had never heard any more of them. "Where would you have liked to go today?" said the doctor, turning to smile at her as he drove the car. "I think to Windermere--into the Lakes," she said. "We might make a tour of the Lakes before long," he said. She was not thinking, so she took no particular notice of the speech. "How nice!" she said vaguely. "We could go in the car, and take them as we chose," said the doctor. "Yes," she said, wondering at him now. When they had had tea, quietly and gallantly tête-à-tête in his drawing-room, he asked her if she would like to see the other rooms of the house. She thanked him, and he showed her the substantial oak dining-room, and the little room with medical works and a revolving chair, which he called his study: then the kitchen and the pantry, the housekeeper looking askance; then upstairs to his bedroom, which was very fine with old mahogany tall-boys and silver candle-sticks on the dressing-table, and brushes with green ivory backs, and a hygienic white bed and straw mats: then the visitors' bedroom corresponding, with its old satin-wood furniture and cream-coloured chairs with large, pale-blue cushions, and a pale carpet with reddish wreaths. Very nice, lovely, awfully nice, I do like that, isn't that beautiful, I've never seen anything like that! came the gratifying fireworks of admiration from Alvina. And he smiled and gloated. But in her mind she was thinking of Manchester House, and how dark and horrible it was, how she hated it, but how it had impressed Ciccio and Geoffrey, how they would have loved to feel themselves masters of it, and how done in the eye they were. She smiled to herself rather grimly. For this afternoon she was feeling unaccountably uneasy and wistful, yearning into the distance again: a trick she thought she had happily lost. The doctor dragged her up even to the slanting attics. He was a big man, and he always wore navy blue suits, well-tailored and immaculate. Unconsciously she felt that big men in good navy-blue suits, especially if they had reddish faces and rather big feet and if their hair was wearing thin, were a special type all to themselves, solid and rather namby-pamby and tiresome. "What very nice attics! I think the many angles which the roof makes, the different slants, you know, are so attractive. Oh, and the fascinating little window!" She crouched in the hollow of the small dormer window. "Fascinating! See the town and the hills! I know I should want this room for my own." "Then have it," he said. "Have it for _one_ of your own." She crept out of the window recess and looked up at him. He was leaning forward to her, smiling, self-conscious, tentative, and eager. She thought it best to laugh it off. "I was only talking like a child, from the imagination," she said. "I quite understand that," he replied deliberately. "But I am speaking what I _mean_--" She did not answer, but looked at him reproachfully. He was smiling and smirking broadly at her. "Won't you marry me, and come and have this garret for your own?" He spoke as if he were offering her a chocolate. He smiled with curious uncertainty. "I don't know," she said vaguely. His smile broadened. "Well now," he said, "make up your mind. I'm not good at _talking_ about love, you know. But I think I'm pretty good at _feeling_ it, you know. I want you to come here and be happy: with me." He added the two last words as a sort of sly post-scriptum, and as if to commit himself finally. "But I've never thought about it," she said, rapidly cogitating. "I know you haven't. But think about it now--" He began to be hugely pleased with himself. "Think about it now. And tell me if you could put up with _me_, as well as the garret." He beamed and put his head a little on one side--rather like Mr. May, for one second. But he was much more dangerous than Mr. May. He was overbearing, and had the devil's own temper if he was thwarted. This she knew. He was a big man in a navy blue suit, with very white teeth. Again she thought she had better laugh it off. "It's you I _am_ thinking about," she laughed, flirting still. "It's you I _am_ wondering about." "Well," he said, rather pleased with himself, "you wonder about me till you've made up your mind--" "I will--" she said, seizing the opportunity. "I'll wonder about you till I've made up my mind--shall I?" "Yes," he said. "That's what I wish you to do. And the next time I ask you, you'll let me know. That's it, isn't it?" He smiled indulgently down on her: thought her face young and charming, charming. "Yes," she said. "But don't ask me too soon, will you?" "How, too soon--?" He smiled delightedly. "You'll give me time to wonder about you, won't you? You won't ask me again this month, will you?" "This month?" His eyes beamed with pleasure. He enjoyed the procrastination as much as she did. "But the month's only just begun! However! Yes, you shall have your way. I won't ask you again this month." "And I'll promise to wonder about you all the month," she laughed. "That's a bargain," he said. They went downstairs, and Alvina returned to her duties. She was very much excited, very much excited indeed. A big, well-to-do man in a navy blue suit, of handsome appearance, aged fifty-three, with white teeth and a delicate stomach: it _was_ exciting. A sure position, a very nice home and lovely things in it, once they were dragged about a bit. And of course he'd adore her. That went without saying. She was as fussy as if some one had given her a lovely new pair of boots. She was really fussy and pleased with herself: and _quite_ decided she'd take it all on. That was how it put itself to her: she would take it all on. Of course there was the man himself to consider. But he was quite presentable. There was nothing at all against it: nothing at all. If he had pressed her during the first half of the month of August, he would almost certainly have got her. But he only beamed in anticipation. Meanwhile the stir and restlessness of the war had begun, and was making itself felt even in Lancaster. And the excitement and the unease began to wear through Alvina's rather glamorous fussiness. Some of her old fretfulness came back on her. Her spirit, which had been as if asleep these months, now woke rather irritably, and chafed against its collar. Who was this elderly man, that she should marry him? Who was he, that she should be kissed by him. Actually kissed and fondled by him! Repulsive. She avoided him like the plague. Fancy reposing against his broad, navy blue waistcoat! She started as if she had been stung. Fancy seeing his red, smiling face just above hers, coming down to embrace her! She pushed it away with her open hand. And she ran away, to avoid the thought. And yet! And yet! She would be so comfortable, she would be so well-off for the rest of her life. The hateful problem of material circumstance would be solved for ever. And she knew well how hateful material circumstances can make life. Therefore, she could not decide in a hurry. But she bore poor Dr. Mitchell a deep grudge, that he could not grant her all the advantages of his offer, and excuse her the acceptance of him himself. She dared not decide in a hurry. And this very fear, like a yoke on her, made her resent the man who drove her to decision. Sometimes she rebelled. Sometimes she laughed unpleasantly in the man's face: though she dared not go _too_ far: for she was a little afraid of him and his rabid temper, also. In her moments of sullen rebellion she thought of Natcha-Kee-Tawara. She thought of them deeply. She wondered where they were, what they were doing, how the war had affected them. Poor Geoffrey was a Frenchman--he would have to go to France to fight. Max and Louis were Swiss, it would not affect them: nor Ciccio, who was Italian. She wondered if the troupe was in England: if they would continue together when Geoffrey was gone. She wondered if they thought of her. She felt they did. She felt they did not forget her. She felt there was a connection. In fact, during the latter part of August she wondered a good deal more about the Natchas than about Dr. Mitchell. But wondering about the Natchas would not help her. She felt, if she knew where they were, she would fly to them. But then she knew she wouldn't. When she was at the station she saw crowds and bustle. People were seeing their young men off. Beer was flowing: sailors on the train were tipsy: women were holding young men by the lapel of the coat. And when the train drew away, the young men waving, the women cried aloud and sobbed after them. A chill ran down Alvina's spine. This was another matter, apart from her Dr. Mitchell. It made him feel very unreal, trivial. She did not know what she was going to do. She realized she must do something--take some part in the wild dislocation of life. She knew that she would put off Dr. Mitchell again. She talked the matter over with the matron. The matron advised her to procrastinate. Why not volunteer for war-service? True, she was a maternity nurse, and this was hardly the qualification needed for the nursing of soldiers. But still, she _was_ a nurse. Alvina felt this was the thing to do. Everywhere was a stir and a seethe of excitement. Men were active, women were needed too. She put down her name on the list of volunteers for active service. This was on the last day of August. On the first of September Dr. Mitchell was round at the hospital early, when Alvina was just beginning her morning duties there. He went into the matron's room, and asked for Nurse Houghton. The matron left them together. The doctor was excited. He smiled broadly, but with a tension of nervous excitement. Alvina was troubled. Her heart beat fast. "Now!" said Dr. Mitchell. "What have you to say to me?" She looked up at him with confused eyes. He smiled excitedly and meaningful at her, and came a little nearer. "Today is the day when you answer, isn't it?" he said. "Now then, let me hear what you have to say." But she only watched him with large, troubled eyes, and did not speak. He came still nearer to her. "Well then," he said, "I am to take it that silence gives consent." And he laughed nervously, with nervous anticipation, as he tried to put his arm round her. But she stepped suddenly back. "No, not yet," she said. "Why?" he asked. "I haven't given my answer," she said. "Give it then," he said, testily. "I've volunteered for active service," she stammered. "I felt I ought to do something." "Why?" he asked. He could put a nasty intonation into that monosyllable. "I should have thought you would answer _me_ first." She did not answer, but watched him. She did not like him. "I only signed yesterday," she said. "Why didn't you leave it till tomorrow? It would have looked better." He was angry. But he saw a half-frightened, half-guilty look on her face, and during the weeks of anticipation he had worked himself up. "But put that aside," he smiled again, a little dangerously. "You have still to answer my question. Having volunteered for war service doesn't prevent your being engaged to me, does it?" Alvina watched him with large eyes. And again he came very near to her, so that his blue-serge waistcoat seemed, to impinge on her, and his purplish red face was above her. "I'd rather not be engaged, under the circumstances," she said. "Why?" came the nasty monosyllable. "What have the circumstances got to do with it?" "Everything is so uncertain," she said. "I'd rather wait." "Wait! Haven't you waited long enough? There's nothing at all to prevent your getting engaged to me now. Nothing whatsoever! Come now. I'm old enough not to be played with. And I'm much too much in love with you to let you go on indefinitely like this. Come now!" He smiled imminent, and held out his large hand for her hand. "Let me put the ring on your finger. It will be the proudest day of my life when I make you my wife. Give me your hand--" Alvina was wavering. For one thing, mere curiosity made her want to see the ring. She half lifted her hand. And but for the knowledge that he would kiss her, she would have given it. But he would kiss her--and against that she obstinately set her will. She put her hand behind her back, and looked obstinately into his eyes. "Don't play a game with me," he said dangerously. But she only continued to look mockingly and obstinately into his eyes. "Come," he said, beckoning for her to give her hand. With a barely perceptible shake of the head, she refused, staring at him all the time. His ungovernable temper got the better of him. He saw red, and without knowing, seized her by the shoulder, swung her back, and thrust her, pressed her against the wall as if he would push her through it. His face was blind with anger, like a hot, red sun. Suddenly, almost instantaneously, he came to himself again and drew back his hands, shaking his right hand as if some rat had bitten it. "I'm sorry!" he shouted, beside himself. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I'm sorry." He dithered before her. She recovered her equilibrium, and, pale to the lips, looked at him with sombre eyes. "I'm sorry!" he continued loudly, in his strange frenzy like a small boy. "Don't remember! Don't remember! Don't think I did it." His face was a kind of blank, and unconsciously he wrung the hand that had gripped her, as if it pained him. She watched him, and wondered why on earth all this frenzy. She was left rather cold, she did not at all feel the strong feelings he seemed to expect of her. There was nothing so very unnatural, after all, in being bumped up suddenly against the wall. Certainly her shoulder hurt where he had gripped it. But there were plenty of worse hurts in the world. She watched him with wide, distant eyes. And he fell on his knees before her, as she backed against the bookcase, and he caught hold of the edge of her dress-bottom, drawing it to him. Which made her rather abashed, and much more uncomfortable. "Forgive me!" he said. "Don't remember! Forgive me! Love me! Love me! Forgive me and love me! Forgive me and love me!" As Alvina was looking down dismayed on the great, red-faced, elderly man, who in his crying-out showed his white teeth like a child, and as she was gently trying to draw her skirt from his clutch, the door opened, and there stood the matron, in her big frilled cap. Alvina glanced at her, flushed crimson and looked down to the man. She touched his face with her hand. "Never mind," she said. "It's nothing. Don't think about it." He caught her hand and clung to it. "Love me! Love me! Love me!" he cried. The matron softly closed the door again, withdrawing. "Love me! Love me!" Alvina was absolutely dumbfounded by this scene. She had no idea men did such things. It did not touch her, it dumbfounded her. The doctor, clinging to her hand, struggled to his feet and flung his arms round her, clasping her wildly to him. "You love me! You love me, don't you?" he said, vibrating and beside himself as he pressed her to his breast and hid his face against her hair. At such a moment, what was the good of saying she didn't? But she didn't. Pity for his shame, however, kept her silent, motionless and silent in his arms, smothered against the blue-serge waistcoat of his broad breast. He was beginning to come to himself. He became silent. But he still strained her fast, he had no idea of letting her go. "You will take my ring, won't you?" he said at last, still in the strange, lamentable voice. "You will take my ring." "Yes," she said coldly. Anything for a quiet emergence from this scene. He fumbled feverishly in his pocket with one hand, holding her still fast by the other arm. And with one hand he managed to extract the ring from its case, letting the case roll away on the floor. It was a diamond solitaire. "Which finger? Which finger is it?" he asked, beginning to smile rather weakly. She extricated her hand, and held out her engagement finger. Upon it was the mourning-ring Miss Frost had always worn. The doctor slipped the diamond solitaire above the mourning ring, and folded Alvina to his breast again. "Now," he said, almost in his normal voice. "Now I know you love me." The pleased self-satisfaction in his voice made her angry. She managed to extricate herself. "You will come along with me now?" he said. "I can't," she answered. "I must get back to my work here." "Nurse Allen can do that." "I'd rather not." "Where are you going today?" She told him her cases. "Well, you will come and have tea with me. I shall expect you to have tea with me every day." But Alvina was straightening her crushed cap before the mirror, and did not answer. "We can see as much as we like of each other now we're engaged," he said, smiling with satisfaction. "I wonder where the matron is," said Alvina, suddenly going into the cool white corridor. He followed her. And they met the matron just coming out of the ward. "Matron!" said Dr. Mitchell, with a return of his old mouthing importance. "You may congratulate Nurse Houghton and me on our engagement--" He smiled largely. "I may congratulate _you_, you mean," said the matron. "Yes, of course. And both of us, since we are now one," he replied. "Not quite, yet," said the matron gravely. And at length she managed to get rid of him. At once she went to look for Alvina, who had gone to her duties. "Well, I _suppose_ it is all right," said the matron gravely. "No it isn't," said Alvina. "I shall _never_ marry him." "Ah, never is a long while! Did he hear me come in?" "No, I'm sure he didn't." "Thank goodness for that." "Yes indeed! It was perfectly horrible. Following me round on his knees and shouting for me to love him! Perfectly horrible!" "Well," said the matron. "You never know what men will do till you've known them. And then you need be surprised at nothing, _nothing_. I'm surprised at nothing they do--" "I must say," said Alvina, "I was surprised. Very unpleasantly." "But you accepted him--" "Anything to quieten him--like a hysterical child." "Yes, but I'm not sure you haven't taken a very risky way of quietening him, giving him what he wanted--" "I think," said Alvina, "I can look after myself. I may be moved any day now." "Well--!" said the matron. "He may prevent your getting moved, you know. He's on the board. And if he says you are indispensable--" This was a new idea for Alvina to cogitate. She had counted on a speedy escape. She put his ring in her apron pocket, and there she forgot it until he pounced on her in the afternoon, in the house of one of her patients. He waited for her, to take her off. "Where is your ring?" he said. And she realized that it lay in the pocket of a soiled, discarded apron--perhaps lost for ever. "I shan't wear it on duty," she said. "You know that." She had to go to tea with him. She avoided his love-making, by telling him any sort of spooniness revolted her. And he was too much an old bachelor to take easily to a fondling habit--before marriage, at least. So he mercifully left her alone: he was on the whole devoutly thankful she wanted to be left alone. But he wanted her to be there. That was his greatest craving. He wanted her to be always there. And so he craved for marriage: to possess her entirely, and to have her always there with him, so that he was never alone. Alone and apart from all the world: but by her side, always by her side. "Now when shall we fix the marriage?" he said. "It is no good putting it back. We both know what we are doing. And now the engagement is announced--" He looked at her anxiously. She could see the hysterical little boy under the great, authoritative man. "Oh, not till after Christmas!" she said. "After Christmas!" he started as if he had been bitten. "Nonsense! It's nonsense to wait so long. Next month, at the latest." "Oh no," she said. "I don't think so soon." "Why not? The sooner the better. You had better send in your resignation at once, so that you're free." "Oh but is there any need? I may be transferred for war service." "That's not likely. You're our only maternity nurse--" And so the days went by. She had tea with him practically every afternoon, and she got used to him. They discussed the furnishing--she could not help suggesting a few alterations, a few arrangements according to _her_ idea. And he drew up a plan of a wedding tour in Scotland. Yet she was quite certain she would not marry him. The matron laughed at her certainty. "You will drift into it," she said. "He is tying you down by too many little threads." "Ah, well, you'll see!" said Alvina. "Yes," said the matron. "I _shall_ see." And it was true that Alvina's will was indeterminate, at this time. She was _resolved_ not to marry. But her will, like a spring that is hitched somehow, did not fly direct against the doctor. She had sent in her resignation, as he suggested. But not that she might be free to marry him, but that she might be at liberty to flee him. So she told herself. Yet she worked into his hands. One day she sat with the doctor in the car near the station--it was towards the end of September--held up by a squad of soldiers in khaki, who were marching off with their band wildly playing, to embark on the special troop train that was coming down from the north. The town was in great excitement. War-fever was spreading everywhere. Men were rushing to enlist--and being constantly rejected, for it was still the days of regular standards. As the crowds surged on the pavement, as the soldiers tramped to the station, as the traffic waited, there came a certain flow in the opposite direction. The 4:15 train had come in. People were struggling along with luggage, children were running with spades and buckets, cabs were crawling along with families: it was the seaside people coming home. Alvina watched the two crowds mingle. And as she watched she saw two men, one carrying a mandoline case and a suit-case which she knew. It was Ciccio. She did not know the other man; some theatrical individual. The two men halted almost near the car, to watch the band go by. Alvina saw Ciccio quite near to her. She would have liked to squirt water down his brown, handsome, oblivious neck. She felt she hated him. He stood there, watching the music, his lips curling in his faintly-derisive Italian manner, as he talked to the other man. His eyelashes were as long and dark as ever, his eyes had still the attractive look of being set in with a smutty finger. He had got the same brownish suit on, which she disliked, the same black hat set slightly, jauntily over one eye. He looked common: and yet with that peculiar southern aloofness which gave him a certain beauty and distinction in her eyes. She felt she hated him, rather. She felt she had been let down by him. The band had passed. A child ran against the wheel of the standing car. Alvina suddenly reached forward and made a loud, screeching flourish on the hooter. Every one looked round, including the laden, tramping soldiers. "We can't move yet," said Dr. Mitchell. But Alvina was looking at Ciccio at that moment. He had turned with the rest, looking inquiringly at the car. And his quick eyes, the whites of which showed so white against his duskiness, the yellow pupils so non-human, met hers with a quick flash of recognition. His mouth began to curl in a smile of greeting. But she stared at him without moving a muscle, just blankly stared, abstracting every scrap of feeling, even of animosity or coldness, out of her gaze. She saw the smile die on his lips, his eyes glance sideways, and again sideways, with that curious animal shyness which characterized him. It was as if he did not want to see her looking at him, and ran from side to side like a caged weasel, avoiding her blank, glaucous look. She turned pleasantly to Dr. Mitchell. "What did you say?" she asked sweetly. CHAPTER XII ALLAYE ALSO IS ENGAGED Alvina found it pleasant to be respected as she was respected in Lancaster. It is not only the prophet who hath honour _save_ in his own country: it is every one with individuality. In this northern town Alvina found that her individuality really told. Already she belonged to the revered caste of medicine-men. And into the bargain she was a personality, a person. Well and good. She was not going to cheapen herself. She felt that even in the eyes of the natives--the well-to-do part, at least--she lost a _little_ of her distinction when she was engaged to Dr. Mitchell. The engagement had been announced in _The Times_, _The Morning Post_, _The Manchester Guardian_, and the local _News_. No fear about its being known. And it cast a slight slur of vulgar familiarity over her. In Woodhouse, she knew, it elevated her in the common esteem tremendously. But she was no longer in Woodhouse. She was in Lancaster. And in Lancaster her engagement pigeonholed her. Apart from Dr. Mitchell she had a magic potentiality. Connected with him, she was a known and labelled quantity. This she gathered from her contact with the local gentry. The matron was a woman of family, who somehow managed, in her big, white, frilled cap, to be distinguished like an abbess of old. The really toney women of the place came to take tea in her room, and these little teas in the hospital were like a little elegant female conspiracy. There was a slight flavour of art and literature about. The matron had known Walter Pater, in the somewhat remote past. Alvina was admitted to these teas with the few women who formed the toney intellectual élite of this northern town. There was a certain freemasonry in the matron's room. The matron, a lady-doctor, a clergyman's daughter, and the wives of two industrial magnates of the place, these five, and then Alvina, formed the little group. They did not meet a great deal outside the hospital. But they always met with that curious female freemasonry which can form a law unto itself even among most conventional women. They talked as they would never talk before men, or before feminine outsiders. They threw aside the whole vestment of convention. They discussed plainly the things they thought about--even the most secret--and they were quite calm about the things they did--even the most impossible. Alvina felt that her transgression was a very mild affair, and that her engagement was really _infra dig_. "And are you going to marry him?" asked Mrs. Tuke, with a long, cool look. "I can't _imagine_ myself--" said Alvina. "Oh, but so many things happen outside one's imagination. That's where your body has you. I can't _imagine_ that I'm going to have a child--" She lowered her eyelids wearily and sardonically over her large eyes. Mrs. Tuke was the wife of the son of a local manufacturer. She was about twenty-eight years old, pale, with great dark-grey eyes and an arched nose and black hair, very like a head on one of the lovely Syracusan coins. The odd look of a smile which wasn't a smile, at the corners of the mouth, the arched nose, and the slowness of the big, full, classic eyes gave her the dangerous Greek look of the Syracusan women of the past: the dangerous, heavily-civilized women of old Sicily: those who laughed about the latomia. "But do you think you can have a child without wanting it _at all_?" asked Alvina. "Oh, but there isn't _one bit_ of me wants it, not _one bit_. My _flesh_ doesn't want it. And my mind doesn't--yet there it is!" She spread her fine hands with a flicker of inevitability. "Something must want it," said Alvina. "Oh!" said Mrs. Tuke. "The universe is one big machine, and we're just part of it." She flicked out her grey silk handkerchief, and dabbed her nose, watching with big, black-grey eyes the fresh face of Alvina. "There's not _one bit_ of me concerned in having this child," she persisted to Alvina. "My flesh isn't concerned, and my mind isn't. And _yet_!--_le voilà!_--I'm just _planté_. I can't _imagine_ why I married Tommy. And yet--I did--!" She shook her head as if it was all just beyond her, and the pseudo-smile at the corners of her ageless mouth deepened. Alvina was to nurse Mrs. Tuke. The baby was expected at the end of August. But already the middle of September was here, and the baby had not arrived. The Tukes were not very rich--the young ones, that is. Tommy wanted to compose music, so he lived on what his father gave him. His father gave him a little house outside the town, a house furnished with expensive bits of old furniture, in a way that the townspeople thought insane. But there you are--Effie would insist on dabbing a rare bit of yellow brocade on the wall, instead of a picture, and in painting apple-green shelves in the recesses of the whitewashed wall of the dining-room. Then she enamelled the hall-furniture yellow, and decorated it with curious green and lavender lines and flowers, and had unearthly cushions and Sardinian pottery with unspeakable peaked griffins. What were you to make of such a woman! Alvina slept in her house these days, instead of at the hospital. For Effie was a very bad sleeper. She would sit up in bed, the two glossy black plaits hanging beside her white, arch face, wrapping loosely round her her dressing-gown of a sort of plumbago-coloured, dark-grey silk lined with fine silk of metallic blue, and there, ivory and jet-black and grey like black-lead, she would sit in the white bedclothes flicking her handkerchief and revealing a flicker of kingfisher-blue silk and white silk night dress, complaining of her neuritis nerve and her own impossible condition, and begging Alvina to stay with her another half-hour, and suddenly studying the big, blood-red stone on her finger as if she was reading something in it. "I believe I shall be like the woman in the _Cent Nouvelles_ and carry my child for five years. Do you know that story? She said that eating a parsley leaf on which bits of snow were sticking started the child in her. It might just as well--" Alvina would laugh and get tired. There was about her a kind of half bitter sanity and nonchalance which the nervous woman liked. One night as they were sitting thus in the bedroom, at nearly eleven o'clock, they started and listened. Dogs in the distance had also started to yelp. A mandoline was wailing its vibration in the night outside, rapidly, delicately quivering. Alvina went pale. She knew it was Ciccio. She had seen him lurking in the streets of the town, but had never spoken to him. "What's this?" cried Mrs. Tuke, cocking her head on one side. "Music! A mandoline! How extraordinary! Do you think it's a serenade?--" And she lifted her brows archly. "I should think it is," said Alvina. "How extraordinary! What a moment to choose to serenade the lady! _Isn't_ it like life--! I _must_ look at it--" She got out of bed with some difficulty, wrapped her dressing-gown round her, pushed her feet into slippers, and went to the window. She opened the sash. It was a lovely moonlight night of September. Below lay the little front garden, with its short drive and its iron gates that closed on the high-road. From the shadow of the high-road came the noise of the mandoline. "Hello, Tommy!" called Mrs. Tuke to her husband, whom she saw on the drive below her. "How's your musical ear--?" "All right. Doesn't it disturb you?" came the man's voice from the moonlight below. "Not a bit. I like it. I'm waiting for the voice. '_O Richard, O mon roi!_'--" But the music had stopped. "There!" cried Mrs. Tuke. "You've frightened him off! And we're dying to be serenaded, aren't we, nurse?" She turned to Alvina. "Do give me my fur, will you? Thanks so much. Won't you open the other window and look out there--?" Alvina went to the second window. She stood looking out. "Do play again!" Mrs. Tuke called into the night. "Do sing something." And with her white arm she reached for a glory rose that hung in the moonlight from the wall, and with a flash of her white arm she flung it toward the garden wall--ineffectually, of course. "Won't you play again?" she called into the night, to the unseen. "Tommy, go indoors, the bird won't sing when you're about." "It's an Italian by the sound of him. Nothing I hate more than emotional Italian music. Perfectly nauseating." "Never mind, dear. I know it sounds as if all their insides were coming out of their mouth. But we want to be serenaded, don't we, nurse?--" Alvina stood at her window, but did not answer. "Ah-h?" came the odd query from Mrs. Tuke. "Don't you like it?" "Yes," said Alvina. "Very much." "And aren't you dying for the song?" "Quite." "There!" cried Mrs. Tuke, into the moonlight. "Una canzone bella-bella--molto bella--" She pronounced her syllables one by one, calling into the night. It sounded comical. There came a rude laugh from the drive below. "Go indoors, Tommy! He won't sing if you're there. Nothing will sing if you're there," called the young woman. They heard a footstep on the gravel, and then the slam of the hall door. "Now!" cried Mrs. Tuke. They waited. And sure enough, came the fine tinkle of the mandoline, and after a few moments, the song. It was one of the well-known Neapolitan songs, and Ciccio sang it as it should be sung. Mrs. Tuke went across to Alvina. "Doesn't he put his _bowels_ into it--?" she said, laying her hand on her own full figure, and rolling her eyes mockingly. "I'm _sure_ it's more effective than senna-pods." Then she returned to her own window, huddled her furs over her breast, and rested her white elbows in the moonlight. "Torn' a Surrientu Fammi campar--" The song suddenly ended, in a clamorous, animal sort of yearning. Mrs. Tuke was quite still, resting her chin on her fingers. Alvina also was still. Then Mrs. Tuke slowly reached for the rose-buds on the old wall. "Molto bella!" she cried, half ironically. "Molto bella! Je vous envoie une rose--" And she threw the roses out on to the drive. A man's figure was seen hovering outside the gate, on the high-road. "Entrez!" called Mrs. Tuke. "Entrez! Prenez votre rose. Come in and take your rose." The man's voice called something from the distance. "What?" cried Mrs. Tuke. "Je ne peux pas entrer." "Vous ne pouvez pas entrer? Pourquoi alors! La porte n'est pas fermée à clef. Entrez donc!" "Non. On n'entre pas--" called the well-known voice of Ciccio. "Quoi faire, alors! Alvina, take him the rose to the gate, will you? Yes do! Their singing is horrible, I think. I can't go down to him. But do take him the roses, and see what he looks like. Yes do!" Mrs. Tuke's eyes were arched and excited. Alvina looked at her slowly. Alvina also was smiling to herself. She went slowly down the stairs and out of the front door. From a bush at the side she pulled two sweet-smelling roses. Then in the drive she picked up Effie's flowers. Ciccio was standing outside the gate. "Allaye!" he said, in a soft, yearning voice. "Mrs. Tuke sent you these roses," said Alvina, putting the flowers through the bars of the gate. "Allaye!" he said, caressing her hand, kissing it with a soft, passionate, yearning mouth. Alvina shivered. Quickly he opened the gate and drew her through. He drew her into the shadow of the wall, and put his arms round her, lifting her from her feet with passionate yearning. "Allaye!" he said. "I love you, Allaye, my beautiful, Allaye. I love you, Allaye!" He held her fast to his breast and began to walk away with her. His throbbing, muscular power seemed completely to envelop her. He was just walking away with her down the road, clinging fast to her, enveloping her. "Nurse! Nurse! I can't see you! Nurse!--" came the long call of Mrs. Tuke through the night. Dogs began to bark. "Put me down," murmured Alvina. "Put me down, Ciccio." "Come with me to Italy. Come with me to Italy, Allaye. I can't go to Italy by myself, Allaye. Come with me, be married to me--Allaye, Allaye--" His voice was a strange, hoarse whisper just above her face, he still held her in his throbbing, heavy embrace. "Yes--yes!" she whispered. "Yes--yes! But put me down, Ciccio. Put me down." "Come to Italy with me, Allaye. Come with me," he still reiterated, in a voice hoarse with pain and yearning. "Nurse! Nurse! Wherever are you? Nurse! I want you," sang the uneasy, querulous voice of Mrs. Tuke. "Do put me down!" murmured Alvina, stirring in his arms. He slowly relaxed his clasp, and she slid down like rain to earth. But still he clung to her. "Come with me, Allaye! Come with me to Italy!" he said. She saw his face, beautiful, non-human in the moonlight, and she shuddered slightly. "Yes!" she said. "I will come. But let me go now. Where is your mandoline?" He turned round and looked up the road. "Nurse! You absolutely _must_ come. I can't bear it," cried the strange voice of Mrs. Tuke. Alvina slipped from the man, who was a little bewildered, and through the gate into the drive. "You must come!" came the voice in pain from the upper window. Alvina ran upstairs. She found Mrs. Tuke crouched in a chair, with a drawn, horrified, terrified face. As her pains suddenly gripped her, she uttered an exclamation, and pressed her clenched fists hard on her face. "The pains have begun," said Alvina, hurrying to her. "Oh, it's horrible! It's horrible! I don't want it!" cried the woman in travail. Alvina comforted her and reassured her as best she could. And from outside, once more, came the despairing howl of the Neapolitan song, animal and inhuman on the night. "E tu dic' Io part', addio! T'alluntare di sta core, Nel paese del amore Tien' o cor' di non turnar' --Ma nun me lasciar'--" It was almost unendurable. But suddenly Mrs. Tuke became quite still, and sat with her fists clenched on her knees, her two jet-black plaits dropping on either side of her ivory face, her big eyes fixed staring into space. At the line-- Ma nun me lasciar'-- she began to murmur softly to herself--"Yes, it's dreadful! It's horrible! I can't understand it. What does it mean, that noise? It's as bad as these pains. What does it mean? What does he say? I can understand a little Italian--" She paused. And again came the sudden complaint: Ma nun me lasciar'-- "Ma nun me lasciar'--!" she murmured, repeating the music. "That means--Don't leave me! Don't leave me! But why? Why shouldn't one human being go away from another? What does it mean? That _awful_ noise! Isn't love the most horrible thing! I think it's horrible. It just does one in, and turns one into a sort of howling animal. I'm howling with one sort of pain, he's howling with another. Two hellish animals howling through the night! I'm not myself, he's not himself. Oh, I think it's horrible. What does he look like, Nurse? Is he beautiful? Is he a great hefty brute?" She looked with big, slow, enigmatic eyes at Alvina. "He's a man I knew before," said Alvina. Mrs. Tuke's face woke from its half-trance. "Really! Oh! A man you knew before! Where?" "It's a long story," said Alvina. "In a travelling music-hall troupe." "In a travelling music-hall troupe! How extraordinary! Why, how did you come across such an individual--?" Alvina explained as briefly as possible. Mrs. Tuke watched her. "Really!" she said. "You've done all those things!" And she scrutinized Alvina's face. "You've had some effect on him, that's evident," she said. Then she shuddered, and dabbed her nose with her handkerchief. "Oh, the flesh is a _beastly_ thing!" she cried. "To make a man howl outside there like that, because you're here. And to make me howl because I've got a child inside me. It's unbearable! What does he look like, really?" "I don't know," said Alvina. "Not extraordinary. Rather a hefty brute--" Mrs. Tuke glanced at her, to detect the irony. "I should like to see him," she said. "Do you think I might?" "I don't know," said Alvina, non-committal. "Do you think he might come up? Ask him. Do let me see him." "Do you really want to?" said Alvina. "Of course--" Mrs. Tuke watched Alvina with big, dark, slow eyes. Then she dragged herself to her feet. Alvina helped her into bed. "Do ask him to come up for a minute," Effie said. "We'll give him a glass of Tommy's famous port. Do let me see him. Yes do!" She stretched out her long white arm to Alvina, with sudden imploring. Alvina laughed, and turned doubtfully away. The night was silent outside. But she found Ciccio leaning against a gate-pillar. He started up. "Allaye!" he said. "Will you come in for a moment? I can't leave Mrs. Tuke." Ciccio obediently followed Alvina into the house and up the stairs, without a word. He was ushered into the bedroom. He drew back when he saw Effie in the bed, sitting with her long plaits and her dark eyes, and the subtle-seeming smile at the corners of her mouth. "Do come in!" she said. "I want to thank you for the music. Nurse says it was for her, but I enjoyed it also. Would you tell me the words? I think it's a wonderful song." Ciccio hung back against the door, his head dropped, and the shy, suspicious, faintly malicious smile on his face. "Have a glass of port, do!" said Effie. "Nurse, give us all one. I should like one too. And a biscuit." Again she stretched out her long white arm from the sudden blue lining of her wrap, suddenly, as if taken with the desire. Ciccio shifted on his feet, watching Alvina pour out the port. He swallowed his in one swallow, and put aside his glass. "Have some more!" said Effie, watching over the top of her glass. He smiled faintly, stupidly, and shook his head. "Won't you? Now tell me the words of the song--" He looked at her from out of the dusky hollows of his brow, and did not answer. The faint, stupid half-smile, half-sneer was on his lips. "Won't you tell them me? I understood one line--" Ciccio smiled more pronouncedly as he watched her, but did not speak. "I understood one line," said Effie, making big eyes at him. "_Ma non me lasciare_--_Don't leave me!_ There, isn't that it?" He smiled, stirred on his feet, and nodded. "Don't leave me! There, I knew it was that. Why don't you want Nurse to leave you? Do you want her to be with you _every minute_?" He smiled a little contemptuously, awkwardly, and turned aside his face, glancing at Alvina. Effie's watchful eyes caught the glance. It was swift, and full of the terrible yearning which so horrified her. At the same moment a spasm crossed her face, her expression went blank. "Shall we go down?" said Alvina to Ciccio. He turned immediately, with his cap in his hand, and followed. In the hall he pricked up his ears as he took the mandoline from the chest. He could hear the stifled cries and exclamations from Mrs. Tuke. At the same moment the door of the study opened, and the musician, a burly fellow with troubled hair, came out. "Is that Mrs. Tuke?" he snapped anxiously. "Yes. The pains have begun," said Alvina. "Oh God! And have you left her!" He was quite irascible. "Only for a minute," said Alvina. But with a _Pf_! of angry indignation, he was climbing the stairs. "She is going to have a child," said Alvina to Ciccio. "I shall have to go back to her." And she held out her hand. He did not take her hand, but looked down into her face with the same slightly distorted look of overwhelming yearning, yearning heavy and unbearable, in which he was carried towards her as on a flood. "Allaye!" he said, with a faint lift of the lip that showed his teeth, like a pained animal: a curious sort of smile. He could not go away. "I shall have to go back to her," she said. "Shall you come with me to Italy, Allaye?" "Yes. Where is Madame?" "Gone! Gigi--all gone." "Gone where?" "Gone back to France--called up." "And Madame and Louis and Max?" "Switzerland." He stood helplessly looking at her. "Well, I must go," she said. He watched her with his yellow eyes, from under his long black lashes, like some chained animal, haunted by doom. She turned and left him standing. She found Mrs. Tuke wildly clutching the edge of the sheets, and crying: "No, Tommy dear. I'm awfully fond of you, you know I am. But go away. Oh God, go away. And put a space between us. Put a space between us!" she almost shrieked. He pushed up his hair. He had been working on a big choral work which he was composing, and by this time he was almost demented. "Can't you stand my presence!" he shouted, and dashed downstairs. "Nurse!" cried Effie. "It's _no use_ trying to get a grip on life. You're just at the mercy of _Forces_," she shrieked angrily. "Why not?" said Alvina. "There are good life-forces. Even the will of God is a life-force." "You don't understand! I want to be _myself_. And I'm _not_ myself. I'm just torn to pieces by _Forces_. It's horrible--" "Well, it's not my fault. I didn't make the universe," said Alvina. "If you have to be torn to pieces by forces, well, you have. Other forces will put you together again." "I don't want them to. I want to be myself. I don't want to be nailed together like a chair, with a hammer. I want to be myself." "You won't be nailed together like a chair. You should have faith in life." "But I hate life. It's nothing but a mass of forces. _I_ am intelligent. Life isn't intelligent. Look at it at this moment. Do you call this intelligent? Oh--Oh! It's horrible! Oh--!" She was wild and sweating with her pains. Tommy flounced out downstairs, beside himself. He was heard talking to some one in the moonlight outside. To Ciccio. He had already telephoned wildly for the doctor. But the doctor had replied that Nurse would ring him up. The moment Mrs. Tuke recovered her breath she began again. "I hate life, and faith, and such things. Faith is only fear. And life is a mass of unintelligent forces to which intelligent beings are submitted. Prostituted. Oh--oh!!--prostituted--" "Perhaps life itself is something bigger than intelligence," said Alvina. "Bigger than intelligence!" shrieked Effie. "_Nothing_ is bigger than intelligence. Your man is a hefty brute. His yellow eyes _aren't_ intelligent. They're _animal_--" "No," said Alvina. "Something else. I wish he didn't attract me--" "There! Because you're not content to be at the mercy of _Forces_!" cried Effie. "I'm not. I'm not. I want to be myself. And so forces tear me to pieces! Tear me to pie--eee--Oh-h-h! No!--" Downstairs Tommy had walked Ciccio back into the house again, and the two men were drinking port in the study, discussing Italy, for which Tommy had a great sentimental affection, though he hated all Italian music after the younger Scarlatti. They drank port all through the night, Tommy being strictly forbidden to interfere upstairs, or even to fetch the doctor. They drank three and a half bottles of port, and were discovered in the morning by Alvina fast asleep in the study, with the electric light still burning. Tommy slept with his fair and ruffled head hanging over the edge of the couch like some great loose fruit, Ciccio was on the floor, face downwards, his face in his folded arms. Alvina had a great difficulty in waking the inert Ciccio. In the end, she had to leave him and rouse Tommy first: who in rousing fell off the sofa with a crash which woke him disagreeably. So that he turned on Alvina in a fury, and asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. In answer to which Alvina held up a finger warningly, and Tommy, suddenly remembering, fell back as if he had been struck. "She is sleeping now," said Alvina. "Is it a boy or a girl?" he cried. "It isn't born yet," she said. "Oh God, it's an accursed fugue!" cried the bemused Tommy. After which they proceeded to wake Ciccio, who was like the dead doll in Petrushka, all loose and floppy. When he was awake, however, he smiled at Alvina, and said: "Allaye!" The dark, waking smile upset her badly. CHAPTER XIII THE WEDDED WIFE The upshot of it all was that Alvina ran away to Scarborough without telling anybody. It was in the first week in October. She asked for a week-end, to make some arrangements for her marriage. The marriage was presumably with Dr. Mitchell--though she had given him no definite word. However, her month's notice was up, so she was legally free. And therefore she packed a rather large bag with all her ordinary things, and set off in her everyday dress, leaving the nursing paraphernalia behind. She knew Scarborough quite well: and quite quickly found rooms which she had occupied before, in a boarding-house where she had stayed with Miss Frost long ago. Having recovered from her journey, she went out on to the cliffs on the north side. It was evening, and the sea was before her. What was she to do? She had run away from both men--from Ciccio as well as from Mitchell. She had spent the last fortnight more or less avoiding the pair of them. Now she had a moment to herself. She was even free from Mrs. Tuke, who in her own way was more exacting than the men. Mrs. Tuke had a baby daughter, and was getting well. Ciccio was living with the Tukes. Tommy had taken a fancy to him, and had half engaged him as a sort of personal attendant: the sort of thing Tommy would do, not having paid his butcher's bills. So Alvina sat on the cliffs in a mood of exasperation. She was sick of being badgered about. She didn't really want to marry anybody. Why should she? She was thankful beyond measure to be by herself. How sick she was of other people and their importunities! What was she to do? She decided to offer herself again, in a little while, for war service--in a new town this time. Meanwhile she wanted to be by herself. She made excursions, she walked on the moors, in the brief but lovely days of early October. For three days it was all so sweet and lovely--perfect liberty, pure, almost paradisal. The fourth day it rained: simply rained all day long, and was cold, dismal, disheartening beyond words. There she sat, stranded in the dismalness, and knew no way out. She went to bed at nine o'clock, having decided in a jerk to go to London and find work in the war-hospitals at once: not to leave off until she had found it. But in the night she dreamed that Alexander, her first fiancé, was with her on the quay of some harbour, and was reproaching her bitterly, even reviling her, for having come too late, so that they had missed their ship. They were there to catch the boat--and she, for dilatoriness, was an hour late, and she could see the broad stern of the steamer not far off. Just an hour late. She showed Alexander her watch--exactly ten o'clock, instead of nine. And he was more angry than ever, because her watch was slow. He pointed to the harbour clock--it was ten minutes past ten. When she woke up she was thinking of Alexander. It was such a long time since she had thought of him. She wondered if he had a right to be angry with her. The day was still grey, with sweepy rain-clouds on the sea--gruesome, objectionable. It was a prolongation of yesterday. Well, despair was no good, and being miserable was no good either. She got no satisfaction out of either mood. The only thing to do was to act: seize hold of life and wring its neck. She took the time-table that hung in the hall: the time-table, that magic carpet of today. When in doubt, _move_. This was the maxim. Move. Where to? Another click of a resolution. She would wire to Ciccio and meet him--where? York--Leeds--Halifax--? She looked up the places in the time-table, and decided on Leeds. She wrote out a telegram, that she would be at Leeds that evening. Would he get it in time? Chance it. She hurried off and sent the telegram. Then she took a little luggage, told the people of her house she would be back next day, and set off. She did not like whirling in the direction of Lancaster. But no matter. She waited a long time for the train from the north to come in. The first person she saw was Tommy. He waved to her and jumped from the moving train. "I say!" he said. "So glad to see you! Ciccio is with me. Effie insisted on my coming to see you." There was Ciccio climbing down with the bag. A sort of servant! This was too much for her. "So you came with your valet?" she said, as Ciccio stood with the bag. "Not a bit," said Tommy, laying his hand on the other man's shoulder. "We're the best of friends. I don't carry bags because my heart is rather groggy. I say, nurse, excuse me, but I like you better in uniform. Black doesn't suit you. You don't _mind_--" "Yes, I do. But I've only got black clothes, except uniforms." "Well look here now--! You're not going on anywhere tonight, are you?" "It is too late." "Well now, let's turn into the hotel and have a talk. I'm acting under Effie's orders, as you may gather--" At the hotel Tommy gave her a letter from his wife: to the tune of--don't marry this Italian, you'll put yourself in a wretched hole, and one wants to avoid getting into holes. _I know_--concluded Effie, on a sinister note. Tommy sang another tune. Ciccio was a lovely chap, a rare chap, a treat. He, Tommy, could quite understand any woman's wanting to marry him--didn't agree a bit with Effie. But marriage, you know, was so final. And then with this war on: you never knew how things might turn out: a foreigner and all that. And then--you won't mind what I say--? We won't talk about class and that rot. If the man's good enough, he's good enough by himself. But is he your intellectual equal, nurse? After all, it's a big point. You don't want to marry a man you can't talk to. Ciccio's a treat to be with, because he's so natural. But it isn't a _mental_ treat-- Alvina thought of Mrs. Tuke, who complained that Tommy talked music and pseudo-philosophy _by the hour_ when he was wound up. She saw Effie's long, outstretched arm of repudiation and weariness. "Of course!"--another of Mrs. Tuke's exclamations. "Why not _be_ atavistic if you _can_ be, and follow at a man's heel just because he's a man. Be like barbarous women, a slave." During all this, Ciccio stayed out of the room, as bidden. It was not till Alvina sat before her mirror that he opened her door softly, and entered. "I come in," he said, and he closed the door. Alvina remained with her hair-brush suspended, watching him. He came to her, smiling softly, to take her in his arms. But she put the chair between them. "Why did you bring Mr. Tuke?" she said. He lifted his shoulders. "I haven't brought him," he said, watching her. "Why did you show him the telegram?" "It was Mrs. Tuke took it." "Why did you give it her?" "It was she who gave it me, in her room. She kept it in her room till I came and took it." "All right," said Alvina. "Go back to the Tukes." And she began again to brush her hair. Ciccio watched her with narrowing eyes. "What you mean?" he said. "I shan't go, Allaye. You come with me." "Ha!" she sniffed scornfully. "I shall go where I like." But slowly he shook his head. "You'll come, Allaye," he said. "You come with me, with Ciccio." She shuddered at the soft, plaintive entreaty. "How can I go with you? How can I depend on you at all?" Again he shook his head. His eyes had a curious yellow fire, beseeching, plaintive, with a demon quality of yearning compulsion. "Yes, you come with me, Allaye. You come with me, to Italy. You don't go to that other man. He is too old, not healthy. You come with me to Italy. Why do you send a telegram?" Alvina sat down and covered her face, trembling. "I can't! I can't! I can't!" she moaned. "I can't do it." "Yes, you come with me. I have money. You come with me, to my place in the mountains, to my uncle's house. Fine house, you like it. Come with me, Allaye." She could not look at him. "Why do you want me?" she said. "Why I want you?" He gave a curious laugh, almost of ridicule. "I don't know that. You ask me another, eh?" She was silent, sitting looking downwards. "I can't, I think," she said abstractedly, looking up at him. He smiled, a fine, subtle smile, like a demon's, but inexpressibly gentle. He made her shiver as if she was mesmerized. And he was reaching forward to her as a snake reaches, nor could she recoil. "You come, Allaye," he said softly, with his foreign intonation. "You come. You come to Italy with me. Yes?" He put his hand on her, and she started as if she had been struck. But his hands, with the soft, powerful clasp, only closed her faster. "Yes?" he said. "Yes? All right, eh? All right!"--he had a strange mesmeric power over her, as if he possessed the sensual secrets, and she was to be subjected. "I can't," she moaned, trying to struggle. But she was powerless. Dark and insidious he was: he had no regard for her. How could a man's movements be so soft and gentle, and yet so inhumanly regardless! He had no regard for her. Why didn't she revolt? Why couldn't she? She was as if bewitched. She couldn't fight against her bewitchment. Why? Because he seemed to her beautiful, so beautiful. And this left her numb, submissive. Why must she see him beautiful? Why was she will-less? She felt herself like one of the old sacred prostitutes: a sacred prostitute. In the morning, very early, they left for Scarborough, leaving a letter for the sleeping Tommy. In Scarborough they went to the registrar's office: they could be married in a fortnight's time. And so the fortnight passed, and she was under his spell. Only she knew it. She felt extinguished. Ciccio talked to her: but only ordinary things. There was no wonderful intimacy of speech, such as she had always imagined, and always craved for. No. He loved her--but it was in a dark, mesmeric way, which did not let her be herself. His love did not stimulate her or excite her. It extinguished her. She had to be the quiescent, obscure woman: she felt as if she were veiled. Her thoughts were dim, in the dim back regions of consciousness--yet, somewhere, she almost exulted. Atavism! Mrs. Tuke's word would play in her mind. Was it atavism, this sinking into extinction under the spell of Ciccio? Was it atavism, this strange, sleep-like submission to his being? Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was. But it was also heavy and sweet and rich. Somewhere, she was content. Somewhere even she was vastly proud of the dark veiled eternal loneliness she felt, under his shadow. And so it had to be. She shuddered when she touched him, because he was so beautiful, and she was so submitted. She quivered when he moved as if she were his shadow. Yet her mind remained distantly clear. She would criticize him, find fault with him, the things he did. But _ultimately_ she could find no fault with him. She had lost the power. She didn't care. She had lost the power to care about his faults. Strange, sweet, poisonous indifference! She was drugged. And she knew it. Would she ever wake out of her dark, warm coma? She shuddered, and hoped not. Mrs. Tuke would say atavism. Atavism! The word recurred curiously. But under all her questionings she felt well; a nonchalance deep as sleep, a passivity and indifference so dark and sweet she felt it must be evil. Evil! She was evil. And yet she had no power to be otherwise. They were legally married. And she was glad. She was relieved by knowing she could not escape. She was Mrs. Marasca. What was the good of trying to be Miss Houghton any longer? Marasca, the bitter cherry. Some dark poison fruit she had eaten. How glad she was she had eaten it! How beautiful he was! And no one saw it but herself. For her it was so potent it made her tremble when she noticed him. His beauty, his dark shadow. Ciccio really was much handsomer since his marriage. He seemed to emerge. Before, he had seemed to make himself invisible in the streets, in England, altogether. But now something unfolded in him, he was a potent, glamorous presence, people turned to watch him. There was a certain dark, leopard-like pride in the air about him, something that the English people watched. He wanted to go to Italy. And now it was _his_ will which counted. Alvina, as his wife, must submit. He took her to London the day after the marriage. He wanted to get away to Italy. He did not like being in England, a foreigner, amid the beginnings of the spy craze. In London they stayed at his cousin's house. His cousin kept a restaurant in Battersea, and was a flourishing London Italian, a real London product with all the good English virtues of cleanliness and honesty added to an Italian shrewdness. His name was Giuseppe Califano, and he was pale, and he had four children of whom he was very proud. He received Alvina with an affable respect, as if she were an asset in the family, but as if he were a little uneasy and disapproving. She had _come down_, in marrying Ciccio. She had lost caste. He rather seemed to exult over her degradation. For he was a northernized Italian, he had accepted English standards. His children were English brats. He almost patronized Alvina. But then a long, slow look from her remote blue eyes brought him up sharp, and he envied Ciccio suddenly, he was almost in love with her himself. She disturbed him. She disturbed him in his new English aplomb of a London _restaurateur_, and she disturbed in him the old Italian dark soul, to which he was renegade. He tried treating her as an English lady. But the slow, remote look in her eyes made this fall flat. He had to be Italian. And he was jealous of Ciccio. In Ciccio's face was a lurking smile, and round his fine nose there seemed a subtle, semi-defiant triumph. After all, he had triumphed over his well-to-do, Anglicized cousin. With a stealthy, leopard-like pride Ciccio went through the streets of London in those wild early days of war. He was the one victor, arching stealthily over the vanquished north. Alvina saw nothing of all these complexities. For the time being, she was all dark and potent. Things were curious to her. It was curious to be in Battersea, in this English-Italian household, where the children spoke English more readily than Italian. It was strange to be high over the restaurant, to see the trees of the park, to hear the clang of trams. It was strange to walk out and come to the river. It was strange to feel the seethe of war and dread in the air. But she did not question. She seemed steeped in the passional influence of the man, as in some narcotic. She even forgot Mrs. Tuke's atavism. Vague and unquestioning she went through the days, she accompanied Ciccio into town, she went with him to make purchases, or she sat by his side in the music hall, or she stayed in her room and sewed, or she sat at meals with the Califanos, a vague brightness on her face. And Mrs. Califano was very nice to her, very gentle, though with a suspicion of malicious triumph, mockery, beneath her gentleness. Still, she was nice and womanly, hovering as she was between her English emancipation and her Italian subordination. She half pitied Alvina, and was more than half jealous of her. Alvina was aware of nothing--only of the presence of Ciccio. It was his physical presence which cast a spell over her. She lived within his aura. And she submitted to him as if he had extended his dark nature over her. She knew nothing about him. She lived mindlessly within his presence, quivering within his influence, as if his blood beat in her. She _knew_ she was subjected. One tiny corner of her knew, and watched. He was very happy, and his face had a real beauty. His eyes glowed with lustrous secrecy, like the eyes of some victorious, happy wild creature seen remote under a bush. And he was very good to her. His tenderness made her quiver into a swoon of complete self-forgetfulness, as if the flood-gates of her depths opened. The depth of his warm, mindless, enveloping love was immeasurable. She felt she could sink forever into his warm, pulsating embrace. Afterwards, later on, when she was inclined to criticize him, she would remember the moment when she saw his face at the Italian Consulate in London. There were many people at the Consulate, clamouring for passports--a wild and ill-regulated crowd. They had waited their turn and got inside--Ciccio was not good at pushing his way. And inside a courteous tall old man with a white beard had lifted the flap for Alvina to go inside the office and sit down to fill in the form. She thanked the old man, who bowed as if he had a reputation to keep up. Ciccio followed, and it was he who had to sit down and fill up the form, because she did not understand the Italian questions. She stood at his side, watching the excited, laughing, noisy, east-end Italians at the desk. The whole place had a certain free-and-easy confusion, a human, unofficial, muddling liveliness which was not quite like England, even though it was in the middle of London. "What was your mother's name?" Ciccio was asking her. She turned to him. He sat with the pen perched flourishingly at the end of his fingers, suspended in the serious and artistic business of filling in a form. And his face had a dark luminousness, like a dark transparence which was shut and has now expanded. She quivered, as if it was more than she could bear. For his face was open like a flower right to the depths of his soul, a dark, lovely translucency, vulnerable to the deep quick of his soul. The lovely, rich darkness of his southern nature, so different from her own, exposing itself now in its passional vulnerability, made her go white with a kind of fear. For an instant, her face seemed drawn and old as she looked down at him, answering his questions. Then her eyes became sightless with tears, she stooped as if to look at his writing, and quickly kissed his fingers that held the pen, there in the midst of the crowded, vulgar Consulate. He stayed suspended, again looking up at her with the bright, unfolded eyes of a wild creature which plays and is not seen. A faint smile, very beautiful to her, was on his face. What did he see when he looked at her? She did not know, she did not know. And she would never know. For an instant, she swore inside herself that God Himself should not take her away from this man. She would commit herself to him through every eternity. And then the vagueness came over her again, she turned aside, photographically seeing the crowd in the Consulate, but really unconscious. His movement as he rose seemed to move her in her sleep, she turned to him at once. It was early in November before they could leave for Italy, and her dim, lustrous state lasted all the time. She found herself at Charing Cross in the early morning, in all the bustle of catching the Continental train. Giuseppe was there, and Gemma his wife, and two of the children, besides three other Italian friends of Ciccio. They all crowded up the platform. Giuseppe had insisted that Ciccio should take second-class tickets. They were very early. Alvina and Ciccio were installed in a second-class compartment, with all their packages, Ciccio was pale, yellowish under his tawny skin, and nervous. He stood excitedly on the platform talking in Italian--or rather, in his own dialect--whilst Alvina sat quite still in her corner. Sometimes one of the women or one of the children came to say a few words to her, or Giuseppe hurried to her with illustrated papers. They treated her as if she were some sort of invalid or angel, now she was leaving. But most of their attention they gave to Ciccio, talking at him rapidly all at once, whilst he answered, and glanced in this way and that, under his fine lashes, and smiled his old, nervous, meaningless smile. He was curiously upset. Time came to shut the doors. The women and children kissed Alvina, saying: "You'll be all right, eh? Going to Italy--!" And then profound and meaningful nods, which she could not interpret, but which were fraught surely with good-fellowship. Then they all kissed Ciccio. The men took him in their arms and kissed him on either cheek, the children lifted their faces in eager anticipation of the double kiss. Strange, how eager they were for this embrace--how they all kept taking Ciccio's hand, one after the other, whilst he smiled constrainedly and nervously. CHAPTER XIV THE JOURNEY ACROSS The train began to move. Giuseppe ran alongside, holding Ciccio's hand still; the women and children were crying and waving their handkerchiefs, the other men were shouting messages, making strange, eager gestures. And Alvina sat quite still, wonderingly. And so the big, heavy train drew out, leaving the others small and dim on the platform. It was foggy, the river was a sea of yellow beneath the ponderous iron bridge. The morning was dim and dank. The train was very full. Next to Alvina sat a trim Frenchwoman reading _L'Aiglon_. There was a terrible encumbrance of packages and luggage everywhere. Opposite her sat Ciccio, his black overcoat open over his pale-grey suit, his black hat a little over his left eye. He glanced at her from time to time, smiling constrainedly. She remained very still. They ran through Bromley and out into the open country. It was grey, with shivers of grey sunshine. On the downs there was thin snow. The air in the train was hot, heavy with the crowd and tense with excitement and uneasiness. The train seemed to rush ponderously, massively, across the Weald. And so, through Folkestone to the sea. There was sun in the sky now, and white clouds, in the sort of hollow sky-dome above the grey earth with its horizon walls of fog. The air was still. The sea heaved with a sucking noise inside the dock. Alvina and Ciccio sat aft on the second-class deck, their bags near them. He put a white muffler round himself, Alvina hugged herself in her beaver scarf and muff. She looked tender and beautiful in her still vagueness, and Ciccio, hovering about her, was beautiful too, his estrangement gave him a certain wistful nobility which for the moment put him beyond all class inferiority. The passengers glanced at them across the magic of estrangement. The sea was very still. The sun was fairly high in the open sky, where white cloud-tops showed against the pale, wintry blue. Across the sea came a silver sun-track. And Alvina and Ciccio looked at the sun, which stood a little to the right of the ship's course. "The sun!" said Ciccio, nodding towards the orb and smiling to her. "I love it," she said. He smiled again, silently. He was strangely moved: she did not know why. The wind was cold over the wintry sea, though the sun's beams were warm. They rose, walked round the cabins. Other ships were at sea--destroyers and battleships, grey, low, and sinister on the water. Then a tall bright schooner glimmered far down the channel. Some brown fishing smacks kept together. All was very still in the wintry sunshine of the Channel. So they turned to walk to the stern of the boat. And Alvina's heart suddenly contracted. She caught Ciccio's arm, as the boat rolled gently. For there behind, behind all the sunshine, was England. England, beyond the water, rising with ash-grey, corpse-grey cliffs, and streaks of snow on the downs above. England, like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging. She watched it, fascinated and terrified. It seemed to repudiate the sunshine, to remain unilluminated, long and ash-grey and dead, with streaks of snow like cerements. That was England! Her thoughts flew to Woodhouse, the grey centre of it all. Home! Her heart died within her. Never had she felt so utterly strange and far-off. Ciccio at her side was as nothing, as spell-bound she watched, away off, behind all the sunshine and the sea, the grey, snow-streaked substance of England slowly receding and sinking, submerging. She felt she could not believe it. It was like looking at something else. What? It was like a long, ash-grey coffin, winter, slowly submerging in the sea. England? She turned again to the sun. But clouds and veils were already weaving in the sky. The cold was beginning to soak in, moreover. She sat very still for a long time, almost an eternity. And when she looked round again there was only a bank of mist behind, beyond the sea: a bank of mist, and a few grey, stalking ships. She must watch for the coast of France. And there it was already, looming up grey and amorphous, patched with snow. It had a grey, heaped, sordid look in the November light. She had imagined Boulogne gay and brilliant. Whereas it was more grey and dismal than England. But not that magical, mystic, phantom look. The ship slowly put about, and backed into the harbour. She watched the quay approach. Ciccio was gathering up the luggage. Then came the first cry one ever hears: "_Porteur! Porteur!_ Want a _porteur_?" A porter in a blouse strung the luggage on his strap, and Ciccio and Alvina entered the crush for the exit and the passport inspection. There was a tense, eager, frightened crowd, and officials shouting directions in French and English. Alvina found herself at last before a table where bearded men in uniforms were splashing open the big pink sheets of the English passports: she felt strange and uneasy, that her passport was unimpressive and Italian. The official scrutinized her, and asked questions of Ciccio. Nobody asked her anything--she might have been Ciccio's shadow. So they went through to the vast, crowded cavern of a Customs house, where they found their porter waving to them in the mob. Ciccio fought in the mob while the porter whisked off Alvina to get seats in the big train. And at last she was planted once more in a seat, with Ciccio's place reserved beside her. And there she sat, looking across the railway lines at the harbour, in the last burst of grey sunshine. Men looked at her, officials stared at her, soldiers made remarks about her. And at last, after an eternity, Ciccio came along the platform, the porter trotting behind. They sat and ate the food they had brought, and drank wine and tea. And after weary hours the train set off through snow-patched country to Paris. Everywhere was crowded, the train was stuffy without being warm. Next to Alvina sat a large, fat, youngish Frenchman who overflowed over her in a hot fashion. Darkness began to fall. The train was very late. There were strange and frightening delays. Strange lights appeared in the sky, everybody seemed to be listening for strange noises. It was all such a whirl and confusion that Alvina lost count, relapsed into a sort of stupidity. Gleams, flashes, noises and then at last the frenzy of Paris. It was night, a black city, and snow falling, and no train that night across to the Gare de Lyon. In a state of semi-stupefaction after all the questionings and examinings and blusterings, they were finally allowed to go straight across Paris. But this meant another wild tussle with a Paris taxi-driver, in the filtering snow. So they were deposited in the Gare de Lyon. And the first person who rushed upon them was Geoffrey, in a rather grimy private's uniform. He had already seen some hard service, and had a wild, bewildered look. He kissed Ciccio and burst into tears on his shoulder, there in the great turmoil of the entrance hall of the Gare de Lyon. People looked, but nobody seemed surprised. Geoffrey sobbed, and the tears came silently down Ciccio's cheeks. "I've waited for you since five o'clock, and I've got to go back now. Ciccio! Ciccio! I wanted so badly to see you. I shall never see thee again, brother, my brother!" cried Gigi, and a sob shook him. "Gigi! Mon Gigi. Tu as done regu ma lettre?" "Yesterday. O Ciccio, Ciccio, I shall die without thee!" "But no, Gigi, frère. You won't die." "Yes, Ciccio, I shall. I know I shall." "I say _no_, brother," said Ciccio. But a spasm suddenly took him, he pulled off his hat and put it over his face and sobbed into it. "Adieu, ami! Adieu!" cried Gigi, clutching the other man's arm. Ciccio took his hat from his tear-stained face and put it on his head. Then the two men embraced. "_Toujours à toi!_" said Geoffrey, with a strange, solemn salute in front of Ciccio and Alvina. Then he turned on his heel and marched rapidly out of the station, his soiled soldier's overcoat flapping in the wind at the door. Ciccio watched him go. Then he turned and looked with haunted eyes into the eyes of Alvina. And then they hurried down the desolate platform in the darkness. Many people, Italians, largely, were camped waiting there, while bits of snow wavered down. Ciccio bought food and hired cushions. The train backed in. There was a horrible fight for seats, men scrambling through windows. Alvina got a place--but Ciccio had to stay in the corridor. Then the long night journey through France, slow and blind. The train was now so hot that the iron plate on the floor burnt Alvina's feet. Outside she saw glimpses of snow. A fat Italian hotel-keeper put on a smoking cap, covered the light, and spread himself before Alvina. In the next carriage a child was screaming. It screamed all the night--all the way from Paris to Chambéry it screamed. The train came to sudden halts, and stood still in the snow. The hotel-keeper snored. Alvina became almost comatose, in the burning heat of the carriage. And again the train rumbled on. And again she saw glimpses of stations, glimpses of snow, through the chinks in the curtained windows. And again there was a jerk and a sudden halt, a drowsy mutter from the sleepers, somebody uncovering the light, and somebody covering it again, somebody looking out, somebody tramping down the corridor, the child screaming. The child belonged to two poor Italians--Milanese--a shred of a thin little man, and a rather loose woman. They had five tiny children, all boys: and the four who could stand on their feet all wore scarlet caps. The fifth was a baby. Alvina had seen a French official yelling at the poor shred of a young father on the platform. When morning came, and the bleary people pulled the curtains, it was a clear dawn, and they were in the south of France. There was no sign of snow. The landscape was half southern, half Alpine. White houses with brownish tiles stood among almond trees and cactus. It was beautiful, and Alvina felt she had known it all before, in a happier life. The morning was graceful almost as spring. She went out in the corridor to talk to Ciccio. He was on his feet with his back to the inner window, rolling slightly to the motion of the train. His face was pale, he had that sombre, haunted, unhappy look. Alvina, thrilled by the southern country, was smiling excitedly. "This is my first morning abroad," she said. "Yes," he answered. "I love it here," she said. "Isn't this like Italy?" He looked darkly out of the window, and shook his head. But the sombre look remained on his face. She watched him. And her heart sank as she had never known it sink before. "Are you thinking of Gigi?" she said. He looked at her, with a faint, unhappy, bitter smile, but he said nothing. He seemed far off from her. A wild unhappiness beat inside her breast. She went down the corridor, away from him, to avoid this new agony, which after all was not her agony. She listened to the chatter of French and Italian in the corridor. She felt the excitement and terror of France, inside the railway carriage: and outside she saw white oxen slowly ploughing, beneath the lingering yellow poplars of the sub-Alps, she saw peasants looking up, she saw a woman holding a baby to her breast, watching the train, she saw the excited, yeasty crowds at the station. And they passed a river, and a great lake. And it all seemed bigger, nobler than England. She felt vaster influences spreading around, the Past was greater, more magnificent in these regions. For the first time the nostalgia of the vast Roman and classic world took possession of her. And she found it splendid. For the first time she opened her eyes on a continent, the Alpine core of a continent. And for the first time she realized what it was to escape from the smallish perfection of England, into the grander imperfection of a great continent. Near Chambéry they went down for breakfast to the restaurant car. And secretly, she was very happy. Ciccio's distress made her uneasy. But underneath she was extraordinarily relieved and glad. Ciccio did not trouble her very much. The sense of the bigness of the lands about her, the excitement of travelling with Continental people, the pleasantness of her coffee and rolls and honey, the feeling that vast events were taking place--all this stimulated her. She had brushed, as it were, the fringe of the terror of the war and the invasion. Fear was seething around her. And yet she was excited and glad. The vast world was in one of its convulsions, and she was moving amongst it. Somewhere, she believed in the convulsion, the event elated her. The train began to climb up to Modane. How wonderful the Alps were!--what a bigness, an unbreakable power was in the mountains! Up and up the train crept, and she looked at the rocky slopes, the glistening peaks of snow in the blue heaven, the hollow valleys with fir trees and low-roofed houses. There were quarries near the railway, and men working. There was a strange mountain town, dirty-looking. And still the train climbed up and up, in the hot morning sunshine, creeping slowly round the mountain loops, so that a little brown dog from one of the cottages ran alongside the train for a long way, barking at Alvina, even running ahead of the creeping, snorting train, and barking at the people ahead. Alvina, looking out, saw the two unfamiliar engines snorting out their smoke round the bend ahead. And the morning wore away to mid-day. Ciccio became excited as they neared Modane, the frontier station. His eye lit up again, he pulled himself together for the entrance into Italy. Slowly the train rolled in to the dismal station. And then a confusion indescribable, of porters and masses of luggage, the unspeakable crush and crowd at the customs barriers, the more intense crowd through the passport office, all like a madness. They were out on the platform again, they had secured their places. Ciccio wanted to have luncheon in the station restaurant. They went through the passages. And there in the dirty station gang-ways and big corridors dozens of Italians were lying on the ground, men, women, children, camping with their bundles and packages in heaps. They were either emigrants or refugees. Alvina had never seen people herd about like cattle, dumb, brute cattle. It impressed her. She could not grasp that an Italian labourer would lie down just where he was tired, in the street, on a station, in any corner, like a dog. In the afternoon they were slipping down the Alps towards Turin. And everywhere was snow--deep, white, wonderful snow, beautiful and fresh, glistening in the afternoon light all down the mountain slopes, on the railway track, almost seeming to touch the train. And twilight was falling. And at the stations people crowded in once more. It had been dark a long time when they reached Turin. Many people alighted from the train, many surged to get in. But Ciccio and Alvina had seats side by side. They were becoming tired now. But they were in Italy. Once more they went down for a meal. And then the train set off again in the night for Alessandria and Genoa, Pisa and Rome. It was night, the train ran better, there was a more easy sense in Italy. Ciccio talked a little with other travelling companions. And Alvina settled her cushion, and slept more or less till Genoa. After the long wait at Genoa she dozed off again. She woke to see the sea in the moonlight beneath her--a lovely silvery sea, coming right to the carriage. The train seemed to be tripping on the edge of the Mediterranean, round bays, and between dark rocks and under castles, a night-time fairy-land, for hours. She watched spell-bound: spell-bound by the magic of the world itself. And she thought to herself: "Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place." This thought dozed her off again. Yet she had a consciousness of tunnels and hills and of broad marshes pallid under a moon and a coming dawn. And in the dawn there was Pisa. She watched the word hanging in the station in the dimness: "Pisa." Ciccio told her people were changing for Florence. It all seemed wonderful to her--wonderful. She sat and watched the black station--then she heard the sound of the child's trumpet. And it did not occur to her to connect the train's moving on with the sound of the trumpet. But she saw the golden dawn, a golden sun coming out of level country. She loved it. She loved being in Italy. She loved the lounging carelessness of the train, she liked having Italian money, hearing the Italians round her--though they were neither as beautiful nor as melodious as she expected. She loved watching the glowing antique landscape. She read and read again: "E pericoloso sporgersi," and "E vietato fumare," and the other little magical notices on the carriages. Ciccio told her what they meant, and how to say them. And sympathetic Italians opposite at once asked him if they were married and who and what his bride was, and they gazed at her with bright, approving eyes, though she felt terribly bedraggled and travel-worn. "You come from England? Yes! Nice contry!" said a man in a corner, leaning forward to make this display of his linguistic capacity. "Not so nice as this," said Alvina. "Eh?" Alvina repeated herself. "Not so nice? Oh? No! Fog, eh!" The fat man whisked his fingers in the air, to indicate fog in the atmosphere. "But nice contry! Very--_convenient_." He sat up in triumph, having achieved this word. And the conversation once more became a spatter of Italian. The women were very interested. They looked at Alvina, at every atom of her. And she divined that they were wondering if she was already with child. Sure enough, they were asking Ciccio in Italian if she was "making him a baby." But he shook his head and did not know, just a bit constrained. So they ate slices of sausages and bread and fried rice-balls, with wonderfully greasy fingers, and they drank red wine in big throatfuls out of bottles, and they offered their fare to Ciccio and Alvina, and were charmed when she said to Ciccio she _would_ have some bread and sausage. He picked the strips off the sausage for her with his fingers, and made her a sandwich with a roll. The women watched her bite it, and bright-eyed and pleased they said, nodding their heads-- "Buono? Buono?" And she, who knew this word, understood, and replied: "Yes, good! Buono!" nodding her head likewise. Which caused immense satisfaction. The women showed the whole paper of sausage slices, and nodded and beamed and said: "Se vuole ancora--!" And Alvina bit her wide sandwich, and smiled, and said: "Yes, awfully nice!" And the women looked at each other and said something, and Ciccio interposed, shaking his head. But one woman ostentatiously wiped a bottle mouth with a clean handkerchief, and offered the bottle to Alvina, saying: "Vino buono. Vecchio! Vecchio!" nodding violently and indicating that she should drink. She looked at Ciccio, and he looked back at her, doubtingly. "Shall I drink some?" she said. "If you like," he replied, making an Italian gesture of indifference. So she drank some of the wine, and it dribbled on to her chin. She was not good at managing a bottle. But she liked the feeling of warmth it gave her. She was very tired. "Si piace? Piace?" "Do you like it," interpreted Ciccio. "Yes, very much. What is very much?" she asked of Ciccio. "Molto." "Si, molto. Of course, I knew molto, from, music," she added. The women made noises, and smiled and nodded, and so the train pulsed on till they came to Rome. There was again, the wild scramble with luggage, a general leave taking, and then the masses of people on the station at Rome. _Roma! Roma!_ What was it to Alvina but a name, and a crowded, excited station, and Ciccio running after the luggage, and the pair of them eating in a station restaurant? Almost immediately after eating, they were in the train once more, with new fellow travellers, running south this time towards Naples. In a daze of increasing weariness Alvina watched the dreary, to her sordid-seeming Campagna that skirts the railway, the broken aqueduct trailing in the near distance over the stricken plain. She saw a tram-car, far out from everywhere, running up to cross the railway. She saw it was going to Frascati. And slowly the hills approached--they passed the vines of the foothills, the reeds, and were among the mountains. Wonderful little towns perched fortified on rocks and peaks, mountains rose straight up off the level plain, like old topographical prints, rivers wandered in the wild, rocky places, it all seemed ancient and shaggy, savage still, under all its remote civilization, this region of the Alban Mountains south of Rome. So the train clambered up and down, and went round corners. They had not far to go now. Alvina was almost too tired to care what it would be like. They were going to Ciccio's native village. They were to stay in the house of his uncle, his mother's brother. This uncle had been a model in London. He had built a house on the land left by Ciccio's grandfather. He lived alone now, for his wife was dead and his children were abroad. Giuseppe was his son: Giuseppe of Battersea, in whose house Alvina had stayed. This much Alvina knew. She knew that a portion of the land down at Pescocalascio belonged to Ciccio: a bit of half-savage, ancient earth that had been left to his mother by old Francesco Califano, her hard-grinding peasant father. This land remained integral in the property, and was worked by Ciccio's two uncles, Pancrazio and Giovanni. Pancrazio was the well-to-do uncle, who had been a model and had built a "villa." Giovanni was not much good. That was how Ciccio put it. They expected Pancrazio to meet them at the station. Ciccio collected his bundles and put his hat straight and peered out of the window into the steep mountains of the afternoon. There was a town in the opening between steep hills, a town on a flat plain that ran into the mountains like a gulf. The train drew up. They had arrived. Alvina was so tired she could hardly climb down to the platform. It was about four o'clock. Ciccio looked up and down for Pancrazio, but could not see him. So he put his luggage into a pile on the platform, told Alvina to stand by it, whilst he went off for the registered boxes. A porter came and asked her questions, of which she understood nothing. Then at last came Ciccio, shouldering one small trunk, whilst a porter followed, shouldering another. Out they trotted, leaving Alvina abandoned with the pile of hand luggage. She waited. The train drew out. Ciccio and the porter came bustling back. They took her out through the little gate, to where, in the flat desert space behind the railway, stood two great drab motor-omnibuses, and a rank of open carriages. Ciccio was handing up the handbags to the roof of one of the big post-omnibuses. When it was finished the man on the roof came down, and Ciccio gave him and the station porter each sixpence. The station-porter immediately threw his coin on the ground with a gesture of indignant contempt, spread his arms wide and expostulated violently. Ciccio expostulated back again, and they pecked at each other, verbally, like two birds. It ended by the rolling up of the burly, black moustached driver of the omnibus. Whereupon Ciccio quite amicably gave the porter two nickel twopences in addition to the sixpence, whereupon the porter quite lovingly wished him "buon' viaggio." So Alvina was stowed into the body of the omnibus, with Ciccio at her side. They were no sooner seated than a voice was heard, in beautifully-modulated English: "You are here! Why how have I missed you?" It was Pancrazio, a smallish, rather battered-looking, shabby Italian of sixty or more, with a big moustache and reddish-rimmed eyes and a deeply-lined face. He was presented to Alvina. "How have I missed you?" he said. "I was on the station when the train came, and I did not see you." But it was evident he had taken wine. He had no further opportunity to talk. The compartment was full of large, mountain-peasants with black hats and big cloaks and overcoats. They found Pancrazio a seat at the far end, and there he sat, with his deeply-lined, impassive face and slightly glazed eyes. He had yellow-brown eyes like Ciccio. But in the uncle the eyelids dropped in a curious, heavy way, the eyes looked dull like those of some old, rakish tom-cat, they were slightly rimmed with red. A curious person! And his English, though slow, was beautifully pronounced. He glanced at Alvina with slow, impersonal glances, not at all a stare. And he sat for the most part impassive and abstract as a Red Indian. At the last moment a large black priest was crammed in, and the door shut behind him. Every available seat was let down and occupied. The second great post-omnibus rolled away, and then the one for Mola followed, rolling Alvina and Ciccio over the next stage of their journey. The sun was already slanting to the mountain tops, shadows were falling on the gulf of the plain. The omnibus charged at a great speed along a straight white road, which cut through the cultivated level straight towards the core of the mountain. By the road-side, peasant men in cloaks, peasant women in full-gathered dresses with white bodices or blouses having great full sleeves, tramped in the ridge of grass, driving cows or goats, or leading heavily-laden asses. The women had coloured kerchiefs on their heads, like the women Alvina remembered at the Sunday-School treats, who used to tell fortunes with green little love-birds. And they all tramped along towards the blue shadow of the closing-in mountains, leaving the peaks of the town behind on the left. At a branch-road the 'bus suddenly stopped, and there it sat calmly in the road beside an icy brook, in the falling twilight. Great moth-white oxen waved past, drawing a long, low load of wood; the peasants left behind began to come up again, in picturesque groups. The icy brook tinkled, goats, pigs and cows wandered and shook their bells along the grassy borders of the road and the flat, unbroken fields, being driven slowly home. Peasants jumped out of the omnibus on to the road, to chat--and a sharp air came in. High overhead, as the sun went down, was the curious icy radiance of snow mountains, and a pinkness, while shadow deepened in the valley. At last, after about half an hour, the youth who was conductor of the omnibus came running down the wild side-road, everybody clambered in, and away the vehicle charged, into the neck of the plain. With a growl and a rush it swooped up the first loop of the ascent. Great precipices rose on the right, the ruddiness of sunset above them. The road wound and swirled, trying to get up the pass. The omnibus pegged slowly up, then charged round a corner, swirled into another loop, and pegged heavily once more. It seemed dark between the closing-in mountains. The rocks rose very high, the road looped and swerved from one side of the wide defile to the other, the vehicle pulsed and persisted. Sometimes there was a house, sometimes a wood of oak-trees, sometimes the glimpse of a ravine, then the tall white glisten of snow above the earthly blackness. And still they went on and on, up the darkness. Peering ahead, Alvina thought she saw the hollow between the peaks, which was the top of the pass. And every time the omnibus took a new turn, she thought it was coming out on the top of this hollow between the heights. But no--the road coiled right away again. A wild little village came in sight. This was the destination. Again no. Only the tall, handsome mountain youth who had sat across from her, descended grumbling because the 'bus had brought him past his road, the driver having refused to pull up. Everybody expostulated with him, and he dropped into the shadow. The big priest squeezed into his place. The 'bus wound on and on, and always towards that hollow sky-line between the high peaks. At last they ran up between buildings nipped between high rock-faces, and out into a little market-place, the crown of the pass. The luggage was got out and lifted down. Alvina descended. There she was, in a wild centre of an old, unfinished little mountain town. The façade of a church rose from a small eminence. A white road ran to the right, where a great open valley showed faintly beyond and beneath. Low, squalid sort of buildings stood around--with some high buildings. And there were bare little trees. The stars were in the sky, the air was icy. People stood darkly, excitedly about, women with an odd, shell-pattern head-dress of gofered linen, something like a parlour-maid's cap, came and stared hard. They were hard-faced mountain women. Pancrazio was talking to Ciccio in dialect. "I couldn't get a cart to come down," he said in English. "But I shall find one here. Now what will you do? Put the luggage in Grazia's place while you wait?--" They went across the open place to a sort of shop called the Post Restaurant. It was a little hole with an earthen floor and a smell of cats. Three crones were sitting over a low brass brazier, in which charcoal and ashes smouldered. Men were drinking. Ciccio ordered coffee with rum--and the hard-faced Grazia, in her unfresh head-dress, dabbled the little dirty coffee-cups in dirty water, took the coffee-pot out of the ashes, poured in the old black boiling coffee three parts full, and slopped the cup over with rum. Then she dashed in a spoonful of sugar, to add to the pool in the saucer, and her customers were served. However, Ciccio drank up, so Alvina did likewise, burning her lips smartly. Ciccio paid and ducked his way out. "Now what will you buy?" asked Pancrazio. "Buy?" said Ciccio. "Food," said Pancrazio. "Have you brought food?" "No," said Ciccio. So they trailed up stony dark ways to a butcher, and got a big red slice of meat; to a baker, and got enormous flat loaves. Sugar and coffee they bought. And Pancrazio lamented in his elegant English that no butter was to be obtained. Everywhere the hard-faced women came and stared into Alvina's face, asking questions. And both Ciccio and Pancrazio answered rather coldly, with some _hauteur_. There was evidently not too much intimacy between the people of Pescocalascio and these semi-townfolk of Ossona. Alvina felt as if she were in a strange, hostile country, in the darkness of the savage little mountain town. At last they were ready. They mounted into a two-wheeled cart, Alvina and Ciccio behind, Pancrazio and the driver in front, the luggage promiscuous. The bigger things were left for the morrow. It was icy cold, with a flashing darkness. The moon would not rise till later. And so, without any light but that of the stars, the cart went spanking and rattling downhill, down the pale road which wound down the head of the valley to the gulf of darkness below. Down in the darkness into the darkness they rattled, wildly, and without heed, the young driver making strange noises to his dim horse, cracking a whip and asking endless questions of Pancrazio. Alvina sat close to Ciccio. He remained almost impassive. The wind was cold, the stars flashed. And they rattled down the rough, broad road under the rocks, down and down in the darkness. Ciccio sat crouching forwards, staring ahead. Alvina was aware of mountains, rocks, and stars. "I didn't know it was so _wild_!" she said. "It is not much," he said. There was a sad, plangent note in his voice. He put his hand upon her. "You don't like it?" he said. "I think it's lovely--wonderful," she said, dazed. He held her passionately. But she did not feel she needed protecting. It was all wonderful and amazing to her. She could not understand why he seemed upset and in a sort of despair. To her there was magnificence in the lustrous stars and the steepnesses, magic, rather terrible and grand. They came down to the level valley bed, and went rolling along. There was a house, and a lurid red fire burning outside against the wall, and dark figures about it. "What is that?" she said. "What are they doing?" "I don't know," said Ciccio. "Cosa fanno li--eh?" "Ka--? Fanno il buga'--" said the driver. "They are doing some washing," said Pancrazio, explanatory. "Washing!" said Alvina. "Boiling the clothes," said Ciccio. On the cart rattled and bumped, in the cold night, down the high-way in the valley. Alvina could make out the darkness of the slopes. Overhead she saw the brilliance of Orion. She felt she was quite, quite lost. She had gone out of the world, over the border, into some place of mystery. She was lost to Woodhouse, to Lancaster, to England--all lost. They passed through a darkness of woods, with a swift sound of cold water. And then suddenly the cart pulled up. Some one came out of a lighted doorway in the darkness. "We must get down here--the cart doesn't go any further," said Pancrazio. "Are we there?" said Alvina. "No, it is about a mile. But we must leave the cart." Ciccio asked questions in Italian. Alvina climbed down. "Good-evening! Are you cold?" came a loud, raucous, American-Italian female voice. It was another relation of Ciccio's. Alvina stared and looked at the handsome, sinister, raucous-voiced young woman who stood in the light of the doorway. "Rather cold," she said. "Come in, and warm yourself," said the young woman. "My sister's husband lives here," explained Pancrazio. Alvina went through the doorway into the room. It was a sort of inn. On the earthen floor glowed a great round pan of charcoal, which looked like a flat pool of fire. Men in hats and cloaks sat at a table playing cards by the light of a small lamp, a man was pouring wine. The room seemed like a cave. "Warm yourself," said the young woman, pointing to the flat disc of fire on the floor. She put a chair up to it, and Alvina sat down. The men in the room stared, but went on noisily with their cards. Ciccio came in with luggage. Men got up and greeted him effusively, watching Alvina between whiles as if she were some alien creature. Words of American sounded among the Italian dialect. There seemed to be a confab of some sort, aside. Ciccio came and said to her: "They want to know if we will stay the night here." "I would rather go on home," she said. He averted his face at the word home. "You see," said Pancrazio, "I think you might be more comfortable here, than in my poor house. You see I have no woman to care for it--" Alvina glanced round the cave of a room, at the rough fellows in their black hats. She was thinking how she would be "more comfortable" here. "I would rather go on," she said. "Then we will get the donkey," said Pancrazio stoically. And Alvina followed him out on to the high-road. From a shed issued a smallish, brigand-looking fellow carrying a lantern. He had his cloak over his nose and his hat over his eyes. His legs were bundled with white rag, crossed and crossed with hide straps, and he was shod in silent skin sandals. "This is my brother Giovanni," said Pancrazio. "He is not quite sensible." Then he broke into a loud flood of dialect. Giovanni touched his hat to Alvina, and gave the lantern to Pancrazio. Then he disappeared, returning in a few moments with the ass. Ciccio came out with the baggage, and by the light of the lantern the things were slung on either side of the ass, in a rather precarious heap. Pancrazio tested the rope again. "There! Go on, and I shall come in a minute." "Ay-er-er!" cried Giovanni at the ass, striking the flank of the beast. Then he took the leading rope and led up on the dark high-way, stalking with his dingy white legs under his muffled cloak, leading the ass. Alvina noticed the shuffle of his skin-sandalled feet, the quiet step of the ass. She walked with Ciccio near the side of the road. He carried the lantern. The ass with its load plodded a few steps ahead. There were trees on the road-side, and a small channel of invisible but noisy water. Big rocks jutted sometimes. It was freezing, the mountain high-road was congealed. High stars flashed overhead. "How strange it is!" said Alvina to Ciccio. "Are you glad you have come home?" "It isn't my home," he replied, as if the word fretted him. "Yes, I like to see it again. But it isn't the place for young people to live in. You will see how you like it." She wondered at his uneasiness. It was the same in Pancrazio. The latter now came running to catch them up. "I think you will be tired," he said. "You ought to have stayed at my relation's house down there." "No, I am not tired," said Alvina. "But I'm hungry." "Well, we shall eat something when we come to my house." They plodded in the darkness of the valley high-road. Pancrazio took the lantern and went to examine the load, hitching the ropes. A great flat loaf fell out, and rolled away, and smack came a little valise. Pancrazio broke into a flood of dialect to Giovanni, handing him the lantern. Ciccio picked up the bread and put it under his arm. "Break me a little piece," said Alvina. And in the darkness they both chewed bread. After a while, Pancrazio halted with the ass just ahead, and took the lantern from Giovanni. "We must leave the road here," he said. And with the lantern he carefully, courteously showed Alvina a small track descending in the side of the bank, between bushes. Alvina ventured down the steep descent, Pancrazio following showing a light. In the rear was Giovanni, making noises at the ass. They all picked their way down into the great white-bouldered bed of a mountain river. It was a wide, strange bed of dry boulders, pallid under the stars. There was a sound of a rushing river, glacial-sounding. The place seemed wild and desolate. In the distance was a darkness of bushes, along the far shore. Pancrazio swinging the lantern, they threaded their way through the uneven boulders till they came to the river itself--not very wide, but rushing fast. A long, slender, drooping plank crossed over. Alvina crossed rather tremulous, followed by Pancrazio with the light, and Ciccio with the bread and the valise. They could hear the click of the ass and the ejaculations of Giovanni. Pancrazio went back over the stream with the light. Alvina saw the dim ass come up, wander uneasily to the stream, plant his fore legs, and sniff the water, his nose right down. "Er! Err!" cried Pancrazio, striking the beast on the flank. But it only lifted its nose and turned aside. It would not take the stream. Pancrazio seized the leading rope angrily and turned upstream. "Why were donkeys made! They are beasts without sense," his voice floated angrily across the chill darkness. Ciccio laughed. He and Alvina stood in the wide, stony river-bed, in the strong starlight, watching the dim figures of the ass and the men crawl upstream with the lantern. Again the same performance, the white muzzle of the ass stooping down to sniff the water suspiciously, his hind-quarters tilted up with the load. Again the angry yells and blows from Pancrazio. And the ass seemed to be taking the water. But no! After a long deliberation he drew back. Angry language sounded through the crystal air. The group with the lantern moved again upstream, becoming smaller. Alvina and Ciccio stood and watched. The lantern looked small up the distance. But there--a clocking, shouting, splashing sound. "He is going over," said Ciccio. Pancrazio came hurrying back to the plank with the lantern. "Oh the stupid beast! I could kill him!" cried he. "Isn't he used to the water?" said Alvina. "Yes, he is. But he won't go except where he thinks he will go. You might kill him before he should go." They picked their way across the river bed, to the wild scrub and bushes of the farther side. There they waited for the ass, which came up clicking over the boulders, led by the patient Giovanni. And then they took a difficult, rocky track ascending between banks. Alvina felt the uneven scramble a great effort. But she got up. Again they waited for the ass. And then again they struck off to the right, under some trees. A house appeared dimly. "Is that it?" said Alvina. "No. It belongs to me. But that is not my house. A few steps further. Now we are on my land." They were treading a rough sort of grass-land--and still climbing. It ended in a sudden little scramble between big stones, and suddenly they were on the threshold of a quite important-looking house: but it was all dark. "Oh!" exclaimed Pancrazio, "they have done nothing that I told them." He made queer noises of exasperation. "What?" said Alvina. "Neither made a fire nor anything. Wait a minute--" The ass came up. Ciccio, Alvina, Giovanni and the ass waited in the frosty starlight under the wild house. Pancrazio disappeared round the back. Ciccio talked to Giovanni. He seemed uneasy, as if he felt depressed. Pancrazio returned with the lantern, and opened the big door. Alvina followed him into a stone-floored, wide passage, where stood farm implements, where a little of straw and beans lay in a corner, and whence rose bare wooden stairs. So much she saw in the glimpse of lantern-light, as Pancrazio pulled the string and entered the kitchen: a dim-walled room with a vaulted roof and a great dark, open hearth, fireless: a bare room, with a little rough dark furniture: an unswept stone floor: iron-barred windows, rather small, in the deep-thickness of the wall, one-half shut with a drab shutter. It was rather like a room on the stage, gloomy, not meant to be lived in. "I will make a light," said Pancrazio, taking a lamp from the mantel-piece, and proceeding to wind it up. Ciccio stood behind Alvina, silent. He had put down the bread and valise on a wooden chest. She turned to him. "It's a beautiful room," she said. Which, with its high, vaulted roof, its dirty whitewash, its great black chimney, it really was. But Ciccio did not understand. He smiled gloomily. The lamp was lighted. Alvina looked round in wonder. "Now I will make a fire. You, Ciccio, will help Giovanni with the donkey," said Pancrazio, scuttling with the lantern. Alvina looked at the room. There was a wooden settle in front of the hearth, stretching its back to the room. There was a little table under a square, recessed window, on whose sloping ledge were newspapers, scattered letters, nails and a hammer. On the table were dried beans and two maize cobs. In a corner were shelves, with two chipped enamel plates, and a small table underneath, on which stood a bucket of water with a dipper. Then there was a wooden chest, two little chairs, and a litter of faggots, cane, vine-twigs, bare maize-hubs, oak-twigs filling the corner by the hearth. Pancrazio came scrambling in with fresh faggots. "They have not done what I told them, the tiresome people!" he said. "I told them to make a fire and prepare the house. You will be uncomfortable in my poor home. I have no woman, nothing, everything is wrong--" He broke the pieces of cane and kindled them in the hearth. Soon there was a good blaze. Ciccio came in with the bags and the food. "I had better go upstairs and take my things off," said Alvina. "I am so hungry." "You had better keep your coat on," said Pancrazio. "The room is cold." Which it was, ice-cold. She shuddered a little. She took off her hat and fur. "Shall we fry some meat?" said Pancrazio. He took a frying-pan, found lard in the wooden chest--it was the food-chest--and proceeded to fry pieces of meat in a frying-pan over the fire. Alvina wanted to lay the table. But there was no cloth. "We will sit here, as I do, to eat," said Pancrazio. He produced two enamel plates and one soup-plate, three penny iron forks and two old knives, and a little grey, coarse salt in a wooden bowl. These he placed on the seat of the settle in front of the fire. Ciccio was silent. The settle was dark and greasy. Alvina feared for her clothes. But she sat with her enamel plate and her impossible fork, a piece of meat and a chunk of bread, and ate. It was difficult--but the food was good, and the fire blazed. Only there was a film of wood-smoke in the room, rather smarting. Ciccio sat on the settle beside her, and ate in large mouthfuls. "I think it's fun," said Alvina. He looked at her with dark, haunted, gloomy eyes. She wondered what was the matter with him. "Don't you think it's fun?" she said, smiling. He smiled slowly. "You won't like it," he said. "Why not?" she cried, in panic lest he prophesied truly. Pancrazio scuttled in and out with the lantern. He brought wrinkled pears, and green, round grapes, and walnuts, on a white cloth, and presented them. "I think my pears are still good," he said. "You must eat them, and excuse my uncomfortable house." Giovanni came in with a big bowl of soup and a bottle of milk. There was room only for three on the settle before the hearth. He pushed his chair among the litter of fire-kindling, and sat down. He had bright, bluish eyes, and a fattish face--was a man of about fifty, but had a simple, kindly, slightly imbecile face. All the men kept their hats on. The soup was from Giovanni's cottage. It was for Pancrazio and him. But there was only one spoon. So Pancrazio ate a dozen spoonfuls, and handed the bowl to Giovanni--who protested and tried to refuse--but accepted, and ate ten spoonfuls, then handed the bowl back to his brother, with the spoon. So they finished the bowl between them. Then Pancrazio found wine--a whitish wine, not very good, for which he apologized. And he invited Alvina to coffee. Which she accepted gladly. For though the fire was warm in front, behind was very cold. Pancrazio stuck a long pointed stick down the handle of a saucepan, and gave this utensil to Ciccio, to hold over the fire and scald the milk, whilst he put the tin coffee-pot in the ashes. He took a long iron tube or blow-pipe, which rested on two little feet at the far end. This he gave to Giovanni to blow the fire. Giovanni was a fire-worshipper. His eyes sparkled as he took the blowing tube. He put fresh faggots behind the fire--though Pancrazio forbade him. He arranged the burning faggots. And then softly he blew a red-hot fire for the coffee. "Basta! Basta!" said Ciccio. But Giovanni blew on, his eyes sparkling, looking to Alvina. He was making the fire beautiful for her. There was one cup, one enamelled mug, one little bowl. This was the coffee-service. Pancrazio noisily ground the coffee. He seemed to do everything, old, stooping as he was. At last Giovanni took his leave--the kettle which hung on the hook over the fire was boiling over. Ciccio burnt his hand lifting it off. And at last, at last Alvina could go to bed. Pancrazio went first with the candle--then Ciccio with the black kettle--then Alvina. The men still had their hats on. Their boots tramped noisily on the bare stairs. The bedroom was very cold. It was a fair-sized room with a concrete floor and white walls, and window-door opening on a little balcony. There were two high white beds on opposite sides of the room. The wash-stand was a little tripod thing. The air was very cold, freezing, the stone floor was dead cold to the feet. Ciccio sat down on a chair and began to take off his boots. She went to the window. The moon had risen. There was a flood of light on dazzling white snow tops, glimmering and marvellous in the evanescent night. She went out for a moment on to the balcony. It was a wonder-world: the moon over the snow heights, the pallid valley-bed away below; the river hoarse, and round about her, scrubby, blue-dark foothills with twiggy trees. Magical it all was--but so cold. "You had better shut the door," said Ciccio. She came indoors. She was dead tired, and stunned with cold, and hopelessly dirty after that journey. Ciccio had gone to bed without washing. "Why does the bed rustle?" she asked him. It was stuffed with dry maize-leaves, the dry sheathes from the cobs--stuffed enormously high. He rustled like a snake among dead foliage. Alvina washed her hands. There was nothing to do with the water but throw it out of the door. Then she washed her face, thoroughly, in good hot water. What a blessed relief! She sighed as she dried herself. "It does one good!" she sighed. Ciccio watched her as she quickly brushed her hair. She was almost stupefied with weariness and the cold, bruising air. Blindly she crept into the high, rustling bed. But it was made high in the middle. And it was icy cold. It shocked her almost as if she had fallen into water. She shuddered, and became semi-conscious with fatigue. The blankets were heavy, heavy. She was dazed with excitement and wonder. She felt vaguely that Ciccio was miserable, and wondered why. She woke with a start an hour or so later. The moon was in the room. She did not know where she was. And she was frightened. And she was cold. A real terror took hold of her. Ciccio in his bed was quite still. Everything seemed electric with horror. She felt she would die instantly, everything was so terrible around her. She could not move. She felt that everything around her was horrific, extinguishing her, putting her out. Her very being was threatened. In another instant she would be transfixed. Making a violent effort she sat up. The silence of Ciccio in his bed was as horrible as the rest of the night. She had a horror of him also. What would she do, where should she flee? She was lost--lost--lost utterly. The knowledge sank into her like ice. Then deliberately she got out of bed and went across to him. He was horrible and frightening, but he was warm. She felt his power and his warmth invade her and extinguish her. The mad and desperate passion that was in him sent her completely unconscious again, completely unconscious. CHAPTER XV THE PLACE CALLED CALIFANO There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut off from everything she belonged to. Ovid isolated in Thrace might well lament. The soul itself needs its own mysterious nourishment. This nourishment lacking, nothing is well. At Pescocalascio it was the mysterious influence of the mountains and valleys themselves which seemed always to be annihilating the Englishwoman: nay, not only her, but the very natives themselves. Ciccio and Pancrazio clung to her, essentially, as if she saved them also from extinction. It needed all her courage. Truly, she had to support the souls of the two men. At first she did not realize. She was only stunned with the strangeness of it all: startled, half-enraptured with the terrific beauty of the place, half-horrified by its savage annihilation of her. But she was stunned. The days went by. It seems there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country has its potent negative centres, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture. And Alvina had struck one of them, here on the edge of the Abruzzi. She was not in the village of Pescocalascio itself. That was a long hour's walk away. Pancrazio's house was the chief of a tiny hamlet of three houses, called Califano because the Califanos had made it. There was the ancient, savage hole of a house, quite windowless, where Pancrazio and Ciccio's mother had been born: the family home. Then there was Pancrazio's villa. And then, a little below, another newish, modern house in a sort of wild meadow, inhabited by the peasants who worked the land. Ten minutes' walk away was another cluster of seven or eight houses, where Giovanni lived. But there was no shop, no post nearer than Pescocalascio, an hour's heavy road up deep and rocky, wearying tracks. And yet, what could be more lovely than the sunny days: pure, hot, blue days among the mountain foothills: irregular, steep little hills half wild with twiggy brown oak-trees and marshes and broom heaths, half cultivated, in a wild, scattered fashion. Lovely, in the lost hollows beyond a marsh, to see Ciccio slowly ploughing with two great white oxen: lovely to go with Pancrazio down to the wild scrub that bordered the river-bed, then over the white-bouldered, massive desert and across stream to the other scrubby savage shore, and so up to the high-road. Pancrazio was very happy if Alvina would accompany him. He liked it that she was not afraid. And her sense of the beauty of the place was an infinite relief to him. Nothing could have been more marvellous than the winter twilight. Sometimes Alvina and Pancrazio were late returning with the ass. And then gingerly the ass would step down the steep banks, already beginning to freeze when the sun went down. And again and again he would balk the stream, while a violet-blue dusk descended on the white, wide stream-bed, and the scrub and lower hills became dark, and in heaven, oh, almost unbearably lovely, the snow of the near mountains was burning rose, against the dark-blue heavens. How unspeakably lovely it was, no one could ever tell, the grand, pagan twilight of the valleys, savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods who knew the right for human sacrifice. It stole away the soul of Alvina. She felt transfigured in it, clairvoyant in another mystery of life. A savage hardness came in her heart. The gods who had demanded human sacrifice were quite right, immutably right. The fierce, savage gods who dipped their lips in blood, these were the true gods. The terror, the agony, the nostalgia of the heathen past was a constant torture to her mediumistic soul. She did not know what it was. But it was a kind of neuralgia in the very soul, never to be located in the human body, and yet physical. Coming over the brow of a heathy, rocky hillock, and seeing Ciccio beyond leaning deep over the plough, in his white shirt-sleeves following the slow, waving, moth-pale oxen across a small track of land turned up in the heathen hollow, her soul would go all faint, she would almost swoon with realization of the world that had gone before. And Ciccio was so silent, there seemed so much dumb magic and anguish in him, as if he were for ever afraid of himself and the thing he was. He seemed, in his silence, to _concentrate_ upon her so terribly. She believed she would not live. Sometimes she would go gathering acorns, large, fine acorns, a precious crop in that land where the fat pig was almost an object of veneration. Silently she would crouch filling the pannier. And far off she would hear the sound of Giovanni chopping wood, of Ciccio calling to the oxen or Pancrazio making noises to the ass, or the sound of a peasant's mattock. Over all the constant speech of the passing river, and the real breathing presence of the upper snows. And a wild, terrible happiness would take hold of her, beyond despair, but very like despair. No one would ever find her. She had gone beyond the world into the pre-world, she had reopened on the old eternity. And then Maria, the little elvish old wife of Giovanni, would come up with the cows. One cow she held by a rope round its horns, and she hauled it from the patches of young corn into the rough grass, from the little plantation of trees in among the heath. Maria wore the full-pleated white-sleeved dress of the peasants, and a red kerchief on her head. But her dress was dirty, and her face was dirty, and the big gold rings of her ears hung from ears which perhaps had never been washed. She was rather smoke-dried too, from perpetual wood-smoke. Maria in her red kerchief hauling the white cow, and screaming at it, would come laughing towards Alvina, who was rather afraid of cows. And then, screaming high in dialect, Maria would talk to her. Alvina smiled and tried to understand. Impossible. It was not strictly a human speech. It was rather like the crying of half-articulate animals. It certainly was not Italian. And yet Alvina by dint of constant hearing began to pick up the coagulated phrases. She liked Maria. She liked them all. They were all very kind to her, as far as they knew. But they did not know. And they were kind with each other. For they all seemed lost, like lost, forlorn aborigines, and they treated Alvina as if she were a higher being. They loved her that she would strip maize-cobs or pick acorns. But they were all anxious to serve her. And it seemed as if they needed some one to serve. It seemed as if Alvina, the Englishwoman, had a certain magic glamour for them, and so long as she was happy, it was a supreme joy and relief to them to have her there. But it seemed to her she would not live. And when she was unhappy! Ah, the dreadful days of cold rain mingled with sleet, when the world outside was more than impossible, and the house inside was a horror. The natives kept themselves alive by going about constantly working, dumb and elemental. But what was Alvina to do? For the house was unspeakable. The only two habitable rooms were the kitchen and Alvina's bedroom: and the kitchen, with its little grated windows high up in the wall, one of which had a broken pane and must keep one-half of its shutters closed, was like a dark cavern vaulted and bitter with wood-smoke. Seated on the settle before the fire, the hard, greasy settle, Alvina could indeed keep the fire going, with faggots of green oak. But the smoke hurt her chest, she was not clean for one moment, and she could do nothing else. The bedroom again was just impossibly cold. And there was no other place. And from far away came the wild braying of an ass, primeval and desperate in the snow. The house was quite large; but uninhabitable. Downstairs, on the left of the wide passage where the ass occasionally stood out of the weather, and where the chickens wandered in search of treasure, was a big, long apartment where Pancrazio kept implements and tools and potatoes and pumpkins, and where four or five rabbits hopped unexpectedly out of the shadows. Opposite this, on the right, was the cantina, a dark place with wine-barrels and more agricultural stores. This was the whole of the downstairs. Going upstairs, half way up, at the turn of the stairs was the opening of a sort of barn, a great wire-netting behind which showed a glow of orange maize-cobs and some wheat. Upstairs were four rooms. But Alvina's room alone was furnished. Pancrazio slept in the unfurnished bedroom opposite, on a pile of old clothes. Beyond was a room with litter in it, a chest of drawers, and rubbish of old books and photographs Pancrazio had brought from England. There was a battered photograph of Lord Leighton, among others. The fourth room, approached through the corn-chamber, was always locked. Outside was just as hopeless. There had been a little garden within the stone enclosure. But fowls, geese, and the ass had made an end of this. Fowl-droppings were everywhere, indoors and out, the ass left his pile of droppings to steam in the winter air on the threshold, while his heartrending bray rent the air. Roads there were none: only deep tracks, like profound ruts with rocks in them, in the hollows, and rocky, grooved tracks over the brows. The hollow grooves were full of mud and water, and one struggled slipperily from rock to rock, or along narrow grass-ledges. What was to be done, then, on mornings that were dark with sleet? Pancrazio would bring a kettle of hot water at about half-past eight. For had he not travelled Europe with English gentlemen, as a sort of model-valet! Had he not _loved_ his English gentlemen? Even now, he was infinitely happier performing these little attentions for Alvina than attending to his wretched domains. Ciccio rose early, and went about in the hap-hazard, useless way of Italians all day long, getting nothing done. Alvina came out of the icy bedroom to the black kitchen. Pancrazio would be gallantly heating milk for her, at the end of a long stick. So she would sit on the settle and drink her coffee and milk, into which she dipped her dry bread. Then the day was before her. She washed her cup and her enamelled plate, and she tried to clean the kitchen. But Pancrazio had on the fire a great black pot, dangling from the chain. He was boiling food for the eternal pig--the only creature for which any cooking was done. Ciccio was tramping in with faggots. Pancrazio went in and out, back and forth from his pot. Alvina stroked her brow and decided on a method. Once she was rid of Pancrazio, she would wash every cup and plate and utensil in boiling water. Well, at last Pancrazio went off with his great black pan, and she set to. But there were not six pieces of crockery in the house, and not more than six cooking utensils. These were soon scrubbed. Then she scrubbed the two little tables and the shelves. She lined the food-chest with clean paper. She washed the high window-ledges and the narrow mantel-piece, that had large mounds of dusty candle-wax, in deposits. Then she tackled the settle. She scrubbed it also. Then she looked at the floor. And even she, English housewife as she was, realized the futility of trying to wash it. As well try to wash the earth itself outside. It was just a piece of stone-laid earth. She swept it as well as she could, and made a little order in the faggot-heap in the corner. Then she washed the little, high-up windows, to try and let in light. And what was the difference? A dank wet soapy smell, and not much more. Maria had kept scuffling admiringly in and out, crying her wonderment and approval. She had most ostentatiously chased out an obtrusive hen, from this temple of cleanliness. And that was all. It was hopeless. The same black walls, the same floor, the same cold from behind, the same green-oak wood-smoke, the same bucket of water from the well--the same come-and-go of aimless busy men, the same cackle of wet hens, the same hopeless nothingness. Alvina stood up against it for a time. And then she caught a bad cold, and was wretched. Probably it was the wood-smoke. But her chest was raw, she felt weak and miserable. She could not sit in her bedroom, for it was too cold. If she sat in the darkness of the kitchen she was hurt with smoke, and perpetually cold behind her neck. And Pancrazio rather resented the amount of faggots consumed for nothing. The only hope would have been in work. But there was nothing in that house to be done. How could she even sew? She was to prepare the mid-day and evening meals. But with no pots, and over a smoking wood fire, what could she prepare? Black and greasy, she boiled potatoes and fried meat in lard, in a long-handled frying pan. Then Pancrazio decreed that Maria should prepare macaroni with the tomato sauce, and thick vegetable soup, and sometimes polenta. This coarse, heavy food was wearying beyond words. Alvina began to feel she would die, in the awful comfortless meaninglessness of it all. True, sunny days returned and some magic. But she was weak and feverish with her cold, which would not get better. So that even in the sunshine the crude comfortlessness and inferior savagery of the place only repelled her. The others were depressed when she was unhappy. "Do you wish you were back in England?" Ciccio asked her, with a little sardonic bitterness in his voice. She looked at him without answering. He ducked and went away. "We will make a fire-place in the other bedroom," said Pancrazio. No sooner said than done. Ciccio persuaded Alvina to stay in bed a few days. She was thankful to take refuge. Then she heard a rare come-and-go. Pancrazio, Ciccio, Giovanni, Maria and a mason all set about the fire-place. Up and down stairs they went, Maria carrying stone and lime on her head, and swerving in Alvina's doorway, with her burden perched aloft, to shout a few unintelligible words. In the intervals of lime-carrying she brought the invalid her soup or her coffee or her hot milk. It turned out quite a good job--a pleasant room with two windows, that would have all the sun in the afternoon, and would see the mountains on one hand, the far-off village perched up on the other. When she was well enough they set off one early Monday morning to the market in Ossona. They left the house by starlight, but dawn was coming by the time they reached the river. At the high-road, Pancrazio harnessed the ass, and after endless delay they jogged off to Ossona. The dawning mountains were wonderful, dim-green and mauve and rose, the ground rang with frost. Along the roads many peasants were trooping to market, women in their best dresses, some of thick heavy silk with the white, full-sleeved bodices, dresses green, lavender, dark-red, with gay kerchiefs on the head: men muffled in cloaks, treading silently in their pointed skin sandals: asses with loads, carts full of peasants, a belated cow. The market was lovely, there in the crown of the pass, in the old town, on the frosty sunny morning. Bulls, cows, sheep, pigs, goats stood and lay about under the bare little trees on the platform high over the valley: some one had kindled a great fire of brush-wood, and men crowded round, out of the blue frost. From laden asses vegetables were unloaded, from little carts all kinds of things, boots, pots, tin-ware, hats, sweet-things, and heaps of corn and beans and seeds. By eight o'clock in the December morning the market was in full swing: a great crowd of handsome mountain people, all peasants, nearly all in costume, with different head-dresses. Ciccio and Pancrazio and Alvina went quietly about. They bought pots and pans and vegetables and sweet-things and thick rush matting and two wooden arm-chairs and one old soft arm-chair, going quietly and bargaining modestly among the crowd, as Anglicized Italians do. The sun came on to the market at about nine o'clock, and then, from the terrace of the town gate, Alvina looked down on the wonderful sight of all the coloured dresses of the peasant women, the black hats of the men, the heaps of goods, the squealing pigs, the pale lovely cattle, the many tethered asses--and she wondered if she would die before she became one with it altogether. It was impossible for her to become one with it altogether. Ciccio would have to take her to England again, or to America. He was always hinting at America. But then, Italy might enter the war. Even here it was the great theme of conversation. She looked down on the seethe of the market. The sun was warm on her. Ciccio and Pancrazio were bargaining for two cowskin rugs: she saw Ciccio standing with his head rather forward. Her husband! She felt her heart die away within her. All those other peasant women, did they feel as she did?--the same sort of acquiescent passion, the same lapse of life? She believed they did. The same helpless passion for the man, the same remoteness from the world's actuality? Probably, under all their tension of money and money-grubbing and vindictive mountain morality and rather horrible religion, probably they felt the same. She was one with them. But she could never endure it for a life-time. It was only a test on her. Ciccio must take her to America, or England--to America preferably. And even as he turned to look for her, she felt a strange thrilling in her bowels: a sort of trill strangely within her, yet extraneous to her. She caught her hand to her flank. And Ciccio was looking up for her from the market beneath, searching with that quick, hasty look. He caught sight of her. She seemed to glow with a delicate light for him, there beyond all the women. He came straight towards her, smiling his slow, enigmatic smile. He could not bear it if he lost her. She knew how he loved her--almost inhumanly, elementally, without communication. And she stood with her hand to her side, her face frightened. She hardly noticed him. It seemed to her she was with child. And yet in the whole market-place she was aware of nothing but him. "We have bought the skins," he said. "Twenty-seven lire each." She looked at him, his dark skin, his golden eyes--so near to her, so unified with her, yet so incommunicably remote. How far off was his being from hers! "I believe I'm going to have a child," she said. "Eh?" he ejaculated quickly. But he had understood. His eyes shone weirdly on her. She felt the strange terror and loveliness of his passion. And she wished she could lie down there by that town gate, in the sun, and swoon for ever unconscious. Living was almost too great a demand on her. His yellow, luminous eyes watched her and enveloped her. There was nothing for her but to yield, yield, yield. And yet she could not sink to earth. She saw Pancrazio carrying the skins to the little cart, which was tilted up under a small, pale-stemmed tree on the platform above the valley. Then she saw him making his way quickly back through the crowd, to rejoin them. "Did you feel something?" said Ciccio. "Yes--here--!" she said, pressing her hand on her side as the sensation trilled once more upon her consciousness. She looked at him with remote, frightened eyes. "That's good--" he said, his eyes full of a triumphant, incommunicable meaning. "Well!--And now," said Pancrazio, coming up, "shall we go and eat something?" They jogged home in the little flat cart in the wintry afternoon. It was almost night before they had got the ass untackled from the shafts, at the wild lonely house where Pancrazio left the cart. Giovanni was there with the lantern. Ciccio went on ahead with Alvina, whilst the others stood to load up the ass by the high-way. Ciccio watched Alvina carefully. When they were over the river, and among the dark scrub, he took her in his arms and kissed her with long, terrible passion. She saw the snow-ridges flare with evening, beyond his cheek. They had glowed dawn as she crossed the river outwards, they were white-fiery now in the dusk sky as she returned. What strange valley of shadow was she threading? What was the terrible man's passion that haunted her like a dark angel? Why was she so much beyond herself? CHAPTER XVI SUSPENSE Christmas was at hand. There was a heap of maize cobs still unstripped. Alvina sat with Ciccio stripping them, in the corn-place. "Will you be able to stop here till the baby is born?" he asked her. She watched the films of the leaves come off from the burning gold maize cob under his fingers, the long, ruddy cone of fruition. The heap of maize on one side burned like hot sunshine, she felt it really gave off warmth, it glowed, it burned. On the other side the filmy, crackly, sere sheaths were also faintly sunny. Again and again the long, red-gold, full ear of corn came clear in his hands, and was put gently aside. He looked up at her, with his yellow eyes. "Yes, I think so," she said. "Will you?" "Yes, if they let me. I should like it to be born here." "Would you like to bring up a child here?" she asked. "You wouldn't be happy here, so long," he said, sadly. "Would you?" He slowly shook his head: indefinite. She was settling down. She had her room upstairs, her cups and plates and spoons, her own things. Pancrazio had gone back to his old habit, he went across and ate with Giovanni and Maria, Ciccio and Alvina had their meals in their pleasant room upstairs. They were happy alone. Only sometimes the terrible influence of the place preyed on her. However, she had a clean room of her own, where she could sew and read. She had written to the matron and Mrs. Tuke, and Mrs. Tuke had sent books. Also she helped Ciccio when she could, and Maria was teaching her to spin the white sheep's wool into coarse thread. This morning Pancrazio and Giovanni had gone off somewhere, Alvina and Ciccio were alone on the place, stripping the last maize. Suddenly, in the grey morning air, a wild music burst out: the drone of a bagpipe, and a man's high voice half singing, half yelling a brief verse, at the end of which a wild flourish on some other reedy wood instrument. Alvina sat still in surprise. It was a strange, high, rapid, yelling music, the very voice of the mountains. Beautiful, in our musical sense of the word, it was not. But oh, the magic, the nostalgia of the untamed, heathen past which it evoked. "It is for Christmas," said Ciccio. "They will come every day now." Alvina rose and went round to the little balcony. Two men stood below, amid the crumbling of finely falling snow. One, the elder, had a bagpipe whose bag was patched with shirting: the younger was dressed in greenish clothes, he had his face lifted, and was yelling the verses of the unintelligible Christmas ballad: short, rapid verses, followed by a brilliant flourish on a short wooden pipe he held ready in his hand. Alvina felt he was going to be out of breath. But no, rapid and high came the next verse, verse after verse, with the wild scream on the little new pipe in between, over the roar of the bagpipe. And the crumbs of snow were like a speckled veil, faintly drifting the atmosphere and powdering the littered threshold where they stood--a threshold littered with faggots, leaves, straw, fowls and geese and ass droppings, and rag thrown out from the house, and pieces of paper. The carol suddenly ended, the young man snatched off his hat to Alvina who stood above, and in the same breath he was gone, followed by the bagpipe. Alvina saw them dropping hurriedly down the incline between the twiggy wild oaks. "They will come every day now, till Christmas," said Ciccio. "They go to every house." And sure enough, when Alvina went down, in the cold, silent house, and out to the well in the still crumbling snow, she heard the sound far off, strange, yelling, wonderful: and the same ache for she knew not what overcame her, so that she felt one might go mad, there in the veiled silence of these mountains, in the great hilly valley cut off from the world. Ciccio worked all day on the land or round about. He was building a little earth closet also: the obvious and unscreened place outside was impossible. It was curious how little he went to Pescocalascio, how little he mixed with the natives. He seemed always to withhold something from them. Only with his relatives, of whom he had many, he was more free, in a kind of family intimacy. Yet even here he was guarded. His uncle at the mill, an unwashed, fat man with a wife who tinkled with gold and grime, and who shouted a few lost words of American, insisted on giving Alvina wine and a sort of cake made with cheese and rice. Ciccio too was feasted, in the dark hole of a room. And the two natives seemed to press their cheer on Alvina and Ciccio whole-heartedly. "How nice they are!" said Alvina when she had left. "They give so freely." But Ciccio smiled a wry smile, silent. "Why do you make a face?" she said. "It's because you are a foreigner, and they think you will go away again," he said. "But I should have thought that would make them less generous," she said. "No. They like to give to foreigners. They don't like to give to the people here. Giocomo puts water in the wine which he sells to the people who go by. And if I leave the donkey in her shed, I give Marta Maria something, or the next time she won't let me have it. Ha, they are--they are sly ones, the people here." "They are like that everywhere," said Alvina. "Yes. But nowhere they say so many bad things about people as here--nowhere where I have ever been." It was strange to Alvina to feel the deep-bed-rock distrust which all the hill-peasants seemed to have of one another. They were watchful, venomous, dangerous. "Ah," said Pancrazio, "I am glad there is a woman in my house once more." "But did _nobody_ come in and do for you before?" asked Alvina. "Why didn't you pay somebody?" "Nobody will come," said Pancrazio, in his slow, aristocratic English. "Nobody will come, because I am a man, and if somebody should see her at my house, they will all talk." "Talk!" Alvina looked at the deeply-lined man of sixty-six, "But what will they say?" "Many bad things. Many bad things indeed. They are not good people here. All saying bad things, and all jealous. They don't like me because I have a house--they think I am too much a _signore_. They say to me 'Why do you think you are a signore?' Oh, they are bad people, envious, you cannot have anything to do with them." "They are nice to me," said Alvina. "They think you will go away. But if you stay, they will say bad things. You must wait. Oh, they are evil people, evil against one another, against everybody but strangers who don't know them--" Alvina felt the curious passion in Pancrazio's voice, the passion of a man who has lived for many years in England and known the social confidence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the ancient malevolence of the remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She understood also why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud, why he loved serving her. She seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity such as "these people here" lacked entirely. When she went to Ossona with him, she knew everybody questioned him about her and Ciccio. She began to get the drift of the questions--which Pancrazio answered with reserve. "And how long are they staying?" This was an invariable, envious question. And invariably Pancrazio answered with a reserved-- "Some months. As long as _they_ like." And Alvina could feel waves of black envy go out against Pancrazio, because she was domiciled with him, and because she sat with him in the flat cart, driving to Ossona. Yet Pancrazio himself was a study. He was thin, and very shabby, and rather out of shape. Only in his yellow eyes lurked a strange sardonic fire, and a leer which puzzled her. When Ciccio happened to be out in the evening he would sit with her and tell her stories of Lord Leighton and Millais and Alma Tadema and other academicians dead and living. There would sometimes be a strange passivity on his worn face, an impassive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world like a debauched old tom-cat. His narration was like this: either simple, bare, stoical, with a touch of nobility; or else satiric, malicious, with a strange, rather repellent jeering. "Leighton--he wasn't Lord Leighton then--he wouldn't have me to sit for him, because my figure was too poor, he didn't like it. He liked fair young men, with plenty of flesh. But once, when he was doing a picture--I don't know if you know it? It is a crucifixion, with a man on a cross, and--" He described the picture. "No! Well, the model had to be tied hanging on to a wooden cross. And it made you suffer! Ah!" Here the odd, arch, diabolic yellow flare lit up through the stoicism of Pancrazio's eyes. "Because Leighton, he was cruel to his model. He wouldn't let you rest. 'Damn you, you've got to keep still till I've finished with you, you devil,' so he said. Well, for this man on the cross, he couldn't get a model who would do it for him. They all tried it once, but they would not go again. So they said to him, he must try Califano, because Califano was the only man who would stand it. At last then he sent for me. 'I don't like your damned figure, Califano,' he said to me, 'but nobody will do this if you won't. Now will you do it? 'Yes!' I said, 'I will.' So he tied me up on the cross. And he paid me well, so I stood it. Well, he kept me tied up, hanging you know forwards naked on this cross, for four hours. And then it was luncheon. And after luncheon he would tie me again. Well, I suffered. I suffered so much, that I must lean against the wall to support me to walk home. And in the night I could not sleep, I could cry with the pains in my arms and my ribs, I had no sleep. 'You've said you'd do it, so now you must,' he said to me. 'And I will do it,' I said. And so he tied me up. This cross, you know, was on a little raised place--I don't know what you call it--" "A platform," suggested Alvina. "A platform. Now one day when he came to do something to me, when I was tied up, he slipped back over this platform, and he pulled me, who was tied on the cross, with him. So we all fell down, he with the naked man on top of him, and the heavy cross on top of us both. I could not move, because I was tied. And it was so, with me on top of him, and the heavy cross, that he could not get out. So he had to lie shouting underneath me until some one came to the studio to untie me. No, we were not hurt, because the top of the cross fell so that it did not crush us. 'Now you have had a taste of the cross,' I said to him. 'Yes, you devil, but I shan't let you off,' he said to me. "To make the time go he would ask me questions. Once he said, 'Now, Califano, what time is it? I give you three guesses, and if you guess right once I give you sixpence.' So I guessed three o'clock. 'That's one. Now then, what time is it? 'Again, three o'clock. 'That's two guesses gone, you silly devil. Now then, what time is it? 'So now I was obstinate, and I said _Three o'clock_. He took out his watch. 'Why damn you, how did you know? I give you a shilling--' It was three o'clock, as I said, so he gave me a shilling instead of sixpence as he had said--" It was strange, in the silent winter afternoon, downstairs in the black kitchen, to sit drinking a cup of tea with Pancrazio and hearing these stories of English painters. It was strange to look at the battered figure of Pancrazio, and think how much he had been crucified through the long years in London, for the sake of late Victorian art. It was strangest of all to see through his yellow, often dull, red-rimmed eyes these blithe and well-conditioned painters. Pancrazio looked on them admiringly and contemptuously, as an old, rakish tom-cat might look on such frivolous well-groomed young gentlemen. As a matter of fact Pancrazio had never been rakish or debauched, but mountain-moral, timid. So that the queer, half-sinister drop of his eyelids was curious, and the strange, wicked yellow flare that came into his eyes was almost frightening. There was in the man a sort of sulphur-yellow flame of passion which would light up in his battered body and give him an almost diabolic look. Alvina felt that if she were left much alone with him she would need all her English ascendancy not to be afraid of him. It was a Sunday morning just before Christmas when Alvina and Ciccio and Pancrazio set off for Pescocalascio for the first time. Snow had fallen--not much round the house, but deep between the banks as they climbed. And the sun was very bright. So that the mountains were dazzling. The snow was wet on the roads. They wound between oak-trees and under the broom-scrub, climbing over the jumbled hills that lay between the mountains, until the village came near. They got on to a broader track, where the path from a distant village joined theirs. They were all talking, in the bright clear air of the morning. A little man came down an upper path. As he joined them near the village he hailed them in English: "Good morning. Nice morning." "Does everybody speak English here?" asked Alvina. "I have been eighteen years in Glasgow. I am only here for a trip." He was a little Italian shop-keeper from Glasgow. He was most friendly, insisted on paying for drinks, and coffee and almond biscuits for Alvina. Evidently he also was grateful to Britain. The village was wonderful. It occupied the crown of an eminence in the midst of the wide valley. From the terrace of the high-road the valley spread below, with all its jumble of hills, and two rivers, set in the walls of the mountains, a wide space, but imprisoned. It glistened with snow under the blue sky. But the lowest hollows were brown. In the distance, Ossona hung at the edge of a platform. Many villages clung like pale swarms of birds to the far slopes, or perched on the hills beneath. It was a world within a world, a valley of many hills and townlets and streams shut in beyond access. Pescocalascio itself was crowded. The roads were sloppy with snow. But none the less, peasants in full dress, their feet soaked in the skin sandals, were trooping in the sun, purchasing, selling, bargaining for cloth, talking all the time. In the shop, which was also a sort of inn, an ancient woman was making coffee over a charcoal brazier, while a crowd of peasants sat at the tables at the back, eating the food they had brought. Post was due at mid-day. Ciccio went to fetch it, whilst Pancrazio took Alvina to the summit, to the castle. There, in the level region, boys were snowballing and shouting. The ancient castle, badly cracked by the last earthquake, looked wonderfully down on the valley of many hills beneath, Califano a speck down the left, Ossona a blot to the right, suspended, its towers and its castle clear in the light. Behind the castle of Pescocalascio was a deep, steep valley, almost a gorge, at the bottom of which a river ran, and where Pancrazio pointed out the electricity works of the village, deep in the gloom. Above this gorge, at the end, rose the long slopes of the mountains, up to the vivid snow--and across again was the wall of the Abruzzi. They went down, past the ruined houses broken by the earthquake. Ciccio still had not come with the post. A crowd surged at the post-office door, in a steep, black, wet side-street. Alvina's feet were sodden. Pancrazio took her to the place where she could drink coffee and a strega, to make her warm. On the platform of the high-way, above the valley, people were parading in the hot sun. Alvina noticed some ultra-smart young men. They came up to Pancrazio, speaking English. Alvina hated their Cockney accent and florid showy vulgar presence. They were more models. Pancrazio was cool with them. Alvina sat apart from the crowd of peasants, on a chair the old crone had ostentatiously dusted for her. Pancrazio ordered beer for himself. Ciccio came with letters--long-delayed letters, that had been censored. Alvina's heart went down. The first she opened was from Miss Pinnegar--all war and fear and anxiety. The second was a letter, a real insulting letter from Dr. Mitchell. "I little thought, at the time when I was hoping to make you my wife, that you were carrying on with a dirty Italian organ-grinder. So your fair-seeming face covered the schemes and vice of your true nature. Well, I can only thank Providence which spared me the disgust and shame of marrying you, and I hope that, when I meet you on the streets of Leicester Square, I shall have forgiven you sufficiently to be able to throw you a coin--" Here was a pretty little epistle! In spite of herself, she went pale and trembled. She glanced at Ciccio. Fortunately he was turning round talking to another man. She rose and went to the ruddy brazier, as if to warm her hands. She threw on the screwed-up letter. The old crone said something unintelligible to her. She watched the letter catch fire--glanced at the peasants at the table--and out at the wide, wild valley. The world beyond could not help, but it still had the power to injure one here. She felt she had received a bitter blow. A black hatred for the Mitchells of this world filled her. She could hardly bear to open the third letter. It was from Mrs. Tuke, and again, all war. Would Italy join the Allies? She ought to, her every interest lay that way. Could Alvina bear to be so far off, when such terrible events were happening near home? Could she possibly be happy? Nurses were so valuable now. She, Mrs. Tuke, had volunteered. She would do whatever she could. She had had to leave off nursing Jenifer, who had an _excellent_ Scotch nurse, much better than a mother. Well, Alvina and Mrs. Tuke might yet meet in some hospital in France. So the letter ended. Alvina sat down, pale and trembling. Pancrazio was watching her curiously. "Have you bad news?" he asked. "Only the war." "Ha!" and the Italian gesture of half-bitter "what can one do?" They were talking war--all talking war. The dandy young models had left England because of the war, expecting Italy to come in. And everybody talked, talked, talked. Alvina looked round her. It all seemed alien to her, bruising upon the spirit. "Do you think I shall ever be able to come here alone and do my shopping by myself?" she asked. "You must never come alone," said Pancrazio, in his curious, benevolent courtesy. "Either Ciccio or I will come with you. You must never come so far alone." "Why not?" she said. "You are a stranger here. You are not a contadina--" Alvina could feel the oriental idea of women, which still leaves its mark on the Mediterranean, threatening her with surveillance and subjection. She sat in her chair, with cold wet feet, looking at the sunshine outside, the wet snow, the moving figures in the strong light, the men drinking at the counter, the cluster of peasant women bargaining for dress-material. Ciccio was still turning talking in the rapid way to his neighbour. She knew it was war. She noticed the movement of his finely-modelled cheek, a little sallow this morning. And she rose hastily. "I want to go into the sun," she said. When she stood above the valley in the strong, tiring light, she glanced round. Ciccio inside the shop had risen, but he was still turning to his neighbour and was talking with all his hands and all his body. He did not talk with his mind and lips alone. His whole physique, his whole living body spoke and uttered and emphasized itself. A certain weariness possessed her. She was beginning to realize something about him: how he had no sense of home and domestic life, as an Englishman has. Ciccio's home would never be his castle. His castle was the piazza of Pescocalascio. His home was nothing to him but a possession, and a hole to sleep in. He didn't _live_ in it. He lived in the open air, and in the community. When the true Italian came out in him, his veriest home was the piazza of Pescocalascio, the little sort of market-place where the roads met in the village, under the castle, and where the men stood in groups and talked, talked, talked. This was where Ciccio belonged: his active, mindful self. His active, mindful self was none of hers. She only had his passive self, and his family passion. His masculine mind and intelligence had its home in the little public square of his village. She knew this as she watched him now, with all his body talking politics. He could not break off till he had finished. And then, with a swift, intimate handshake to the group with whom he had been engaged, he came away, putting all his interest off from himself. She tried to make him talk and discuss with her. But he wouldn't. An obstinate spirit made him darkly refuse masculine conversation with her. "If Italy goes to war, you will have to join up?" she asked him. "Yes," he said, with a smile at the futility of the question. "And I shall have to stay here?" He nodded, rather gloomily. "Do you want to go?" she persisted. "No, I don't want to go." "But you think Italy ought to join in?" "Yes, I do." "Then you _do_ want to go--" "I want to go if Italy goes in--and she ought to go in--" Curious, he was somewhat afraid of her, he half venerated her, and half despised her. When she tried to make him discuss, in the masculine way, he shut obstinately against her, something like a child, and the slow, fine smile of dislike came on his face. Instinctively he shut off all masculine communication from her, particularly politics and religion. He would discuss both, violently, with other men. In politics he was something of a Socialist, in religion a freethinker. But all this had nothing to do with Alvina. He would not enter on a discussion in English. Somewhere in her soul, she knew the finality of his refusal to hold discussion with a woman. So, though at times her heart hardened with indignant anger, she let herself remain outside. The more so, as she felt that in matters intellectual he was rather stupid. Let him go to the piazza or to the wine-shop, and talk. To do him justice, he went little. Pescocalascio was only half his own village. The nostalgia, the campanilismo from which Italians suffer, the craving to be in sight of the native church-tower, to stand and talk in the native market place or piazza, this was only half formed in Ciccio, taken away as he had been from Pescocalascio when so small a boy. He spent most of his time working in the fields and woods, most of his evenings at home, often weaving a special kind of fishnet or net-basket from fine, frail strips of cane. It was a work he had learned at Naples long ago. Alvina meanwhile would sew for the child, or spin wool. She became quite clever at drawing the strands of wool from her distaff, rolling them fine and even between her fingers, and keeping her bobbin rapidly spinning away below, dangling at the end of the thread. To tell the truth, she was happy in the quietness with Ciccio, now they had their own pleasant room. She loved his presence. She loved the quality of his silence, so rich and physical. She felt he was never very far away: that he was a good deal a stranger in Califano, as she was: that he clung to her presence as she to his. Then Pancrazio also contrived to serve her and shelter her, he too, loved her for being there. They both revered her because she was with child. So that she lived more and more in a little, isolate, illusory, wonderful world then, content, moreover, because the living cost so little. She had sixty pounds of her own money, always intact in the little case. And after all, the high-way beyond the river led to Ossona, and Ossona gave access to the railway, and the railway would take her anywhere. So the month of January passed, with its short days and its bits of snow and bursts of sunshine. On sunny days Alvina walked down to the desolate river-bed, which fascinated her. When Pancrazio was carrying up stone or lime on the ass, she accompanied him. And Pancrazio was always carrying up something, for he loved the extraneous jobs like building a fire-place much more than the heavy work of the land. Then she would find little tufts of wild narcissus among the rocks, gold-centred pale little things, many on one stem. And their scent was powerful and magical, like the sound of the men who came all those days and sang before Christmas. She loved them. There was green hellebore too, a fascinating plant--and one or two little treasures, the last of the rose-coloured Alpine cyclamens, near the earth, with snake-skin leaves, and so rose, so rose, like violets for shadowiness. She sat and cried over the first she found: heaven knows why. In February, as the days opened, the first almond trees flowered among grey olives, in warm, level corners between the hills. But it was March before the real flowering began. And then she had continual bowl-fuls of white and blue violets, she had sprays of almond blossom, silver-warm and lustrous, then sprays of peach and apricot, pink and fluttering. It was a great joy to wander looking for flowers. She came upon a bankside all wide with lavender crocuses. The sun was on them for the moment, and they were opened flat, great five-pointed, seven-pointed lilac stars, with burning centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at Islington. All down the oak-dry bankside they burned their great exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning, when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs, wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a badger's face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand bowl of lilac fire. March was a lovely month. The men were busy in the hills. She wandered, extending her range. Sometimes with a strange fear. But it was a fear of the elements rather than of man. One day she went along the high-road with her letters, towards the village of Casa Latina. The high-road was depressing, wherever there were houses. For the houses had that sordid, ramshackle, slummy look almost invariable on an Italian high-road. They were patched with a hideous, greenish mould-colour, blotched, as if with leprosy. It frightened her, till Pancrazio told her it was only the copper sulphate that had sprayed the vines hitched on to the walls. But none the less the houses were sordid, unkempt, slummy. One house by itself could make a complete slum. Casa Latina was across the valley, in the shadow. Approaching it were rows of low cabins--fairly new. They were the one-storey dwellings commanded after the earthquake. And hideous they were. The village itself was old, dark, in perpetual shadow of the mountain. Streams of cold water ran round it. The piazza was gloomy, forsaken. But there was a great, twin-towered church, wonderful from outside. She went inside, and was almost sick with repulsion. The place was large, whitewashed, and crowded with figures in glass cases and ex voto offerings. The lousy-looking, dressed-up dolls, life size and tinselly, that stood in the glass cases; the blood-streaked Jesus on the crucifix; the mouldering, mumbling, filthy peasant women on their knees; all the sense of trashy, repulsive, degraded fetish-worship was too much for her. She hurried out, shrinking from the contamination of the dirty leather door-curtain. Enough of Casa Latina. She would never go _there_ again. She was beginning to feel that, if she lived in this part of the world at all, she must avoid the _inside_ of it. She must never, if she could help it, enter into any interior but her own--neither into house nor church nor even shop or post-office, if she could help it. The moment she went through a door the sense of dark repulsiveness came over her. If she was to save her sanity she must keep to the open air, and avoid any contact with human interiors. When she thought of the insides of the native people she shuddered with repulsion, as in the great, degraded church of Casa Latina. They were horrible. Yet the outside world was so fair. Corn and maize were growing green and silken, vines were in the small bud. Everywhere little grape hyacinths hung their blue bells. It was a pity they reminded her of the many-breasted Artemis, a picture of whom, or of whose statue, she had seen somewhere. Artemis with her clusters of breasts was horrible to her, now she had come south: nauseating beyond words. And the milky grape hyacinths reminded her. She turned with thankfulness to the magenta anemones that were so gay. Some one told her that wherever Venus had shed a tear for Adonis, one of these flowers had sprung. They were not tear-like. And yet their red-purple silkiness had something pre-world about it, at last. The more she wandered, the more the shadow of the by-gone pagan world seemed to come over her. Sometimes she felt she would shriek and go mad, so strong was the influence on her, something pre-world and, it seemed to her now, vindictive. She seemed to feel in the air strange Furies, Lemures, things that had haunted her with their tomb-frenzied vindictiveness since she was a child and had pored over the illustrated Classical Dictionary. Black and cruel presences were in the under-air. They were furtive and slinking. They bewitched you with loveliness, and lurked with fangs to hurt you afterwards. There it was: the fangs sheathed in beauty: the beauty first, and then, horribly, inevitably, the fangs. Being a great deal alone, in the strange place, fancies possessed her, people took on strange shapes. Even Ciccio and Pancrazio. And it came that she never wandered far from the house, from her room, after the first months. She seemed to hide herself in her room. There she sewed and spun wool and read, and learnt Italian. Her men were not at all anxious to teach her Italian. Indeed her chief teacher, at first, was a young fellow called Bussolo. He was a model from London, and he came down to Califano sometimes, hanging about, anxious to speak English. Alvina did not care for him. He was a dandy with pale grey eyes and a heavy figure. Yet he had a certain penetrating intelligence. "No, this country is a country for old men. It is only for old men," he said, talking of Pescocalascio. "You won't stop here. Nobody young can stop here." The odd plangent certitude in his voice penetrated her. And all the young people said the same thing. They were all waiting to go away. But for the moment the war held them up. Ciccio and Pancrazio were busy with the vines. As she watched them hoeing, crouching, tying, tending, grafting, mindless and utterly absorbed, hour after hour, day after day, thinking vines, living vines, she wondered they didn't begin to sprout vine-buds and vine stems from their own elbows and neck-joints. There was something to her unnatural in the quality of the attention the men gave to the wine. It was a sort of worship, almost a degradation again. And heaven knows, Pancrazio's wine was poor enough, his grapes almost invariably bruised with hail-stones, and half-rotten instead of ripe. The loveliness of April came, with hot sunshine. Astonishing the ferocity of the sun, when he really took upon himself to blaze. Alvina was amazed. The burning day quite carried her away. She loved it: it made her quite careless about everything, she was just swept along in the powerful flood of the sunshine. In the end, she felt that intense sunlight had on her the effect of night: a sort of darkness, and a suspension of life. She had to hide in her room till the cold wind blew again. Meanwhile the declaration of war drew nearer, and became inevitable. She knew Ciccio would go. And with him went the chance of her escape. She steeled herself to bear the agony of the knowledge that he would go, and she would be left alone in this place, which sometimes she hated with a hatred unspeakable. After a spell of hot, intensely dry weather she felt she would die in this valley, wither and go to powder as some exposed April roses withered and dried into dust against a hot wall. Then the cool wind came in a storm, the next day there was grey sky and soft air. The rose-coloured wild gladioli among the young green corn were a dream of beauty, the morning of the world. The lovely, pristine morning of the world, before our epoch began. Rose-red gladioli among corn, in among the rocks, and small irises, black-purple and yellow blotched with brown, like a wasp, standing low in little desert places, that would seem forlorn but for this weird, dark-lustrous magnificence. Then there were the tiny irises, only one finger tall, growing in dry places, frail as crocuses, and much tinier, and blue, blue as the eye of the morning heaven, which was a morning earlier, more pristine than ours. The lovely translucent pale irises, tiny and morning-blue, they lasted only a few hours. But nothing could be more exquisite, like gods on earth. It was the flowers that brought back to Alvina the passionate nostalgia for the place. The human influence was a bit horrible to her. But the flowers that came out and uttered the earth in magical expression, they cast a spell on her, bewitched her and stole her own soul away from her. She went down to Ciccio where he was weeding armfuls of rose-red gladioli from the half-grown wheat, and cutting the lushness of the first weedy herbage. He threw down his sheaves of gladioli, and with his sickle began to cut the forest of bright yellow corn-marigolds. He looked intent, he seemed to work feverishly. "Must they all be cut?" she said, as she went to him. He threw aside the great armful of yellow flowers, took off his cap, and wiped the sweat from his brow. The sickle dangled loose in his hand. "We have declared war," he said. In an instant she realized that she had seen the figure of the old post-carrier dodging between the rocks. Rose-red and gold-yellow of the flowers swam in her eyes. Ciccio's dusk-yellow eyes were watching her. She sank on her knees on a sheaf of corn-marigolds. Her eyes, watching him, were vulnerable as if stricken to death. Indeed she felt she would die. "You will have to go?" she said. "Yes, we shall all have to go." There seemed a certain sound of triumph in his voice. Cruel! She sank lower on the flowers, and her head dropped. But she would not be beaten. She lifted her face. "If you are very long," she said, "I shall go to England. I can't stay here very long without you." "You will have Pancrazio--and the child," he said. "Yes. But I shall still be myself. I can't stay here very long without you. I shall go to England." He watched her narrowly. "I don't think they'll let you," he said. "Yes they will." At moments she hated him. He seemed to want to crush her altogether. She was always making little plans in her mind--how she could get out of that great cruel valley and escape to Rome, to English people. She would find the English Consul and he would help her. She would do anything rather than be really crushed. She knew how easy it would be, once her spirit broke, for her to die and be buried in the cemetery at Pescocalascio. And they would all be so sentimental about her--just as Pancrazio was. She felt that in some way Pancrazio had killed his wife--not consciously, but unconsciously, as Ciccio might kill _her_. Pancrazio would tell Alvina about his wife and her ailments. And he seemed always anxious to prove that he had been so good to her. No doubt he had been good to her, also. But there was something underneath--malevolent in his spirit, some caged-in sort of cruelty, malignant beyond his control. It crept out in his stories. And it revealed itself in his fear of his dead wife. Alvina knew that in the night the elderly man was afraid of his dead wife, and of her ghost or her avenging spirit. He would huddle over the fire in fear. In the same way the cemetery had a fascination of horror for him--as, she noticed, for most of the natives. It was an ugly, square place, all stone slabs and wall-cupboards, enclosed in four-square stone walls, and lying away beneath Pescocalascio village obvious as if it were on a plate. "That is our cemetery," Pancrazio said, pointing it out to her, "where we shall all be carried some day." And there was fear, horror in his voice. He told her how the men had carried his wife there--a long journey over the hill-tracks, almost two hours. These were days of waiting--horrible days of waiting for Ciccio to be called up. One batch of young men left the village--and there was a lugubrious sort of saturnalia, men and women alike got rather drunk, the young men left amid howls of lamentation and shrieks of distress. Crowds accompanied them to Ossona, whence they were marched towards the railway. It was a horrible event. A shiver of horror and death went through the valley. In a lugubrious way, they seemed to enjoy it. "You'll never be satisfied till you've gone," she said to Ciccio. "Why don't they be quick and call you?" "It will be next week," he said, looking at her darkly. In the twilight he came to her, when she could hardly see him. "Are you sorry you came here with me, Allaye?" he asked. There was malice in the very question. She put down the spoon and looked up from the fire. He stood shadowy, his head ducked forward, the firelight faint on his enigmatic, timeless, half-smiling face. "I'm not sorry," she answered slowly, using all her courage. "Because I love you--" She crouched quite still on the hearth. He turned aside his face. After a moment or two he went out. She stirred her pot slowly and sadly. She had to go downstairs for something. And there on the landing she saw him standing in the darkness with his arm over his face, as if fending a blow. "What is it?" she said, laying her hand on him. He uncovered his face. "I would take you away if I could," he said. "I can wait for you," she answered. He threw himself in a chair that stood at a table there on the broad landing, and buried his head in his arms. "Don't wait for me! Don't wait for me!" he cried, his voice muffled. "Why not?" she said, filled with terror. He made no sign. "Why not?" she insisted. And she laid her fingers on his head. He got up and turned to her. "I love you, even if it kills me," she said. But he only turned aside again, leaned his arm against the wall, and hid his face, utterly noiseless. "What is it?" she said. "What is it? I don't understand." He wiped his sleeve across his face, and turned to her. "I haven't any hope," he said, in a dull, dogged voice. She felt her heart and the child die within her. "Why?" she said. Was she to bear a hopeless child? "You _have_ hope. Don't make a scene," she snapped. And she went downstairs, as she had intended. And when she got into the kitchen, she forgot what she had come for. She sat in the darkness on the seat, with all life gone dark and still, death and eternity settled down on her. Death and eternity were settled down on her as she sat alone. And she seemed to hear him moaning upstairs--"I can't come back. I can't come back." She heard it. She heard it so distinctly, that she never knew whether it had been an actual utterance, or whether it was her inner ear which had heard the inner, unutterable sound. She wanted to answer, to call to him. But she could not. Heavy, mute, powerless, there she sat like a lump of darkness, in that doomed Italian kitchen. "I can't come back." She heard it so fatally. She was interrupted by the entrance of Pancrazio. "Oh!" he cried, startled when, having come near the fire, he caught sight of her. And he said something, frightened, in Italian. "Is it you? Why are you in the darkness?" he said. "I am just going upstairs again." "You frightened me." She went up to finish the preparing of the meal. Ciccio came down to Pancrazio. The latter had brought a newspaper. The two men sat on the settle, with the lamp between them, reading and talking the news. Ciccio's group was called up for the following week, as he had said. The departure hung over them like a doom. Those were perhaps the worst days of all: the days of the impending departure. Neither of them spoke about it. But the night before he left she could bear the silence no more. "You will come back, won't you?" she said, as he sat motionless in his chair in the bedroom. It was a hot, luminous night. There was still a late scent of orange blossom from the garden, the nightingale was shaking the air with his sound. At times other, honey scents wafted from the hills. "You will come back?" she insisted. "Who knows?" he replied. "If you make up your mind to come back, you will come back. We have our fate in our hands," she said. He smiled slowly. "You think so?" he said. "I know it. If you don't come back it will be because you don't want to--no other reason. It won't be because you can't. It will be because you don't want to." "Who told you so?" he asked, with the same cruel smile. "I know it," she said. "All right," he answered. But he still sat with his hands abandoned between his knees. "So make up your mind," she said. He sat motionless for a long while: while she undressed and brushed her hair and went to bed. And still he sat there unmoving, like a corpse. It was like having some unnatural, doomed, unbearable presence in the room. She blew out the light, that she need not see him. But in the darkness it was worse. At last he stirred--he rose. He came hesitating across to her. "I'll come back, Allaye," he said quietly. "Be damned to them all." She heard unspeakable pain in his voice. "To whom?" she said, sitting up. He did not answer, but put his arms round her. "I'll come back, and we'll go to America," he said. "You'll come back to me," she whispered, in an ecstasy of pain and relief. It was not her affair, where they should go, so long as he really returned to her. "I'll come back," he said. "Sure?" she whispered, straining him to her. 
4240	----	Further corrections by Menno de Leeuw. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Sisters CHAPTER II. Shortlands CHAPTER III. Class-room CHAPTER IV. Diver CHAPTER V. In the Train CHAPTER VI. Crème de Menthe CHAPTER VII. Fetish CHAPTER VIII. Breadalby CHAPTER IX. Coal-dust CHAPTER X. Sketch-book CHAPTER XI. An Island CHAPTER XII. Carpeting CHAPTER XIII. Mino CHAPTER XIV. Water-party CHAPTER XV. Sunday Evening CHAPTER XVI. Man to Man CHAPTER XVII. The Industrial Magnate CHAPTER XVIII. Rabbit CHAPTER XIX. Moony CHAPTER XX. Gladiatorial CHAPTER XXI. Threshold CHAPTER XXII. Woman to Woman CHAPTER XXIII. Excurse CHAPTER XXIV. Death and Love CHAPTER XXV. Marriage or Not CHAPTER XXVI. A Chair CHAPTER XXVII. Flitting CHAPTER XXVIII. Gudrun in the Pompadour CHAPTER XXIX. Continental CHAPTER XXX. Snowed Up CHAPTER XXXI. Exeunt CHAPTER I. SISTERS Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father�s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds. �Ursula,� said Gudrun, �don�t you _really want_ to get married?� Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate. �I don�t know,� she replied. �It depends how you mean.� Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments. �Well,� she said, ironically, �it usually means one thing! But don�t you think anyhow, you�d be�� she darkened slightly��in a better position than you are in now.� A shadow came over Ursula�s face. �I might,� she said. �But I�m not sure.� Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite. �You don�t think one needs the _experience_ of having been married?� she asked. �Do you think it need _be_ an experience?� replied Ursula. �Bound to be, in some way or other,� said Gudrun, coolly. �Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.� �Not really,� said Ursula. �More likely to be the end of experience.� Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this. �Of course,� she said, �there�s _that_ to consider.� This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly. �You wouldn�t consider a good offer?� asked Gudrun. �I think I�ve rejected several,� said Ursula. �_Really!_� Gudrun flushed dark��But anything really worth while? Have you _really?_� �A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked him awfully,� said Ursula. �Really! But weren�t you fearfully tempted?� �In the abstract but not in the concrete,� said Ursula. �When it comes to the point, one isn�t even tempted�oh, if I were tempted, I�d marry like a shot. I�m only tempted _not_ to.� The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement. �Isn�t it an amazing thing,� cried Gudrun, �how strong the temptation is, not to!� They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened. There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women, Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula�s sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun�s perfect _sang-froid_ and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: �She is a smart woman.� She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life. �I was hoping now for a man to come along,� Gudrun said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid. �So you have come home, expecting him here?� she laughed. �Oh my dear,� cried Gudrun, strident, �I wouldn�t go out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient means�well�� she tailed off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. �Don�t you find yourself getting bored?� she asked of her sister. �Don�t you find, that things fail to materialize? _Nothing materializes!_ Everything withers in the bud.� �What withers in the bud?� asked Ursula. �Oh, everything�oneself�things in general.� There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate. �It does frighten one,� said Ursula, and again there was a pause. �But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?� �It seems to be the inevitable next step,� said Gudrun. Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years. �I know,� she said, �it seems like that when one thinks in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening, and saying �Hello,� and giving one a kiss�� There was a blank pause. �Yes,� said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. �It�s just impossible. The man makes it impossible.� �Of course there�s children�� said Ursula doubtfully. Gudrun�s face hardened. �Do you _really_ want children, Ursula?� she asked coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula�s face. �One feels it is still beyond one,� she said. �_Do_ you feel like that?� asked Gudrun. �I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.� Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows. �Perhaps it isn�t genuine,� she faltered. �Perhaps one doesn�t really want them, in one�s soul�only superficially.� A hardness came over Gudrun�s face. She did not want to be too definite. �When one thinks of other people�s children�� said Ursula. Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile. �Exactly,� she said, to close the conversation. The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened. She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come. She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so _charming_, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul. �Why did you come home, Prune?� she asked. Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes. �Why did I come back, Ursula?� she repeated. �I have asked myself a thousand times.� �And don�t you know?� �Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just _reculer pour mieux sauter_.� And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula. �I know!� cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if she did _not_ know. �But where can one jump to?� �Oh, it doesn�t matter,� said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. �If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.� �But isn�t it very risky?� asked Ursula. A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun�s face. �Ah!� she said laughing. �What is it all but words!� And so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding. �And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?� she asked. Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a cold truthful voice, she said: �I find myself completely out of it.� �And father?� Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay. �I haven�t thought about him: I�ve refrained,� she said coldly. �Yes,� wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the edge. They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun�s cheek was flushed with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being. �Shall we go out and look at that wedding?� she asked at length, in a voice that was too casual. �Yes!� cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and leaping up, as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the situation and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun�s nerves. As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling frightened her. The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion. They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all. �It is like a country in an underworld,� said Gudrun. �The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it�s marvellous, it�s really marvellous�it�s really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It�s like being mad, Ursula.� The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On the left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight lines along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened red brick, brittle, with dark slate roofs. The path on which the sisters walked was black, trodden-in by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from the field by iron fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed shiny by the moleskins of the passing miners. Now the two girls were going between some rows of dwellings, of the poorer sort. Women, their arms folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block, stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out names. Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid. She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: �I want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.� Yet she must go forward. Ursula could feel her suffering. �You hate this, don�t you?� she asked. �It bewilders me,� stammered Gudrun. �You won�t stay long,� replied Ursula. And Gudrun went along, grasping at release. They drew away from the colliery region, over the curve of the hill, into the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls. Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went between high banks towards the church. There, in the lowest bend of the road, low under the trees, stood a little group of expectant people, waiting to see the wedding. The daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district, Thomas Crich, was getting married to a naval officer. �Let us go back,� said Gudrun, swerving away. �There are all those people.� And she hung wavering in the road. �Never mind them,� said Ursula, �they�re all right. They all know me, they don�t matter.� �But must we go through them?� asked Gudrun. �They�re quite all right, really,� said Ursula, going forward. And together the two sisters approached the group of uneasy, watchful common people. They were chiefly women, colliers� wives of the more shiftless sort. They had watchful, underworld faces. The two sisters held themselves tense, and went straight towards the gate. The women made way for them, but barely sufficient, as if grudging to yield ground. The sisters passed in silence through the stone gateway and up the steps, on the red carpet, a policeman estimating their progress. �What price the stockings!� said a voice at the back of Gudrun. A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path, along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight. �I won�t go into the church,� she said suddenly, with such final decision that Ursula immediately halted, turned round, and branched off up a small side path which led to the little private gate of the Grammar School, whose grounds adjoined those of the church. Just inside the gate of the school shrubbery, outside the churchyard, Ursula sat down for a moment on the low stone wall under the laurel bushes, to rest. Behind her, the large red building of the school rose up peacefully, the windows all open for the holiday. Over the shrubs, before her, were the pale roofs and tower of the old church. The sisters were hidden by the foliage. Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close, her face averted. She was regretting bitterly that she had ever come back. Ursula looked at her, and thought how amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with discomfiture. But she caused a constraint over Ursula�s nature, a certain weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the tightness, the enclosure of Gudrun�s presence. �Are we going to stay here?� asked Gudrun. �I was only resting a minute,� said Ursula, getting up as if rebuked. �We will stand in the corner by the fives-court, we shall see everything from there.� For the moment, the sunshine fell brightly into the churchyard, there was a vague scent of sap and of spring, perhaps of violets from off the graves. Some white daisies were out, bright as angels. In the air, the unfolding leaves of a copper-beech were blood-red. Punctually at eleven o�clock, the carriages began to arrive. There was a stir in the crowd at the gate, a concentration as a carriage drove up, wedding guests were mounting up the steps and passing along the red carpet to the church. They were all gay and excited because the sun was shining. Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity. She saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognise their various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as they passed before her along the path to the church. She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished with, for her. There was none that had anything unknown, unresolved, until the Criches themselves began to appear. Then her interest was piqued. Here was something not quite so preconcluded. There came the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son Gerald. She was a queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been made to bring her into line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear, transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features were strongly marked, handsome, with a tense, unseeing, predative look. Her colourless hair was untidy, wisps floating down on to her sac coat of dark blue silk, from under her blue silk hat. She looked like a woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud. Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. �His totem is the wolf,� she repeated to herself. �His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.� And then she experienced a keen paroxyism, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. �Good God!� she exclaimed to herself, �what is this?� And then, a moment after, she was saying assuredly, �I shall know more of that man.� She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him. �Am I _really_ singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?� she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around. The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom had not come. Ursula wondered if something was amiss, and if the wedding would yet all go wrong. She felt troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief bridesmaids had arrived. Ursula watched them come up the steps. One of them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face. This was Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. Now she came along, with her head held up, balancing an enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world. She was rich. She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to escape. Ursula watched her with fascination. She knew her a little. She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man�s woman, it was the manly world that held her. She had various intimacies of mind and soul with various men of capacity. Ursula knew, among these men, only Rupert Birkin, who was one of the school-inspectors of the county. But Gudrun had met others, in London. Moving with her artist friends in different kinds of society, Gudrun had already come to know a good many people of repute and standing. She had met Hermione twice, but they did not take to each other. It would be queer to meet again down here in the Midlands, where their social standing was so diverse, after they had known each other on terms of equality in the houses of sundry acquaintances in town. For Gudrun had been a social success, and had her friends among the slack aristocracy that keeps touch with the arts. Hermione knew herself to be well-dressed; she knew herself to be the social equal, if not far the superior, of anyone she was likely to meet in Willey Green. She knew she was accepted in the world of culture and of intellect. She was a _Kulturträger_, a medium for the culture of ideas. With all that was highest, whether in society or in thought or in public action, or even in art, she was at one, she moved among the foremost, at home with them. No one could put her down, no one could make mock of her, because she stood among the first, and those that were against her were below her, either in rank, or in wealth, or in high association of thought and progress and understanding. So, she was invulnerable. All her life, she had sought to make herself invulnerable, unassailable, beyond reach of the world�s judgment. And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking up the path to the church, confident as she was that in every respect she stood beyond all vulgar judgment, knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and perfect, according to the first standards, yet she suffered a torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite. She always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it was. It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her. And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency, to close it up for ever. She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole. For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities, any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency, by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own defences of æsthetic knowledge, and culture, and world-visions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up the terrible gap of insufficiency. If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving. She made herself beautiful, she strove so hard to come to that degree of beauty and advantage, when he should be convinced. But always there was a deficiency. He was perverse too. He fought her off, he always fought her off. The more she strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back. And they had been lovers now, for years. Oh, it was so wearying, so aching; she was so tired. But still she believed in herself. She knew he was trying to leave her. She knew he was trying to break away from her finally, to be free. But still she believed in her strength to keep him, she believed in her own higher knowledge. His own knowledge was high, she was the central touchstone of truth. She only needed his conjunction with her. And this, this conjunction with her, which was his highest fulfilment also, with the perverseness of a wilful child he wanted to deny. With the wilfulness of an obstinate child, he wanted to break the holy connection that was between them. He would be at this wedding; he was to be groom�s man. He would be in the church, waiting. He would know when she came. She shuddered with nervous apprehension and desire as she went through the church-door. He would be there, surely he would see how beautiful her dress was, surely he would see how she had made herself beautiful for him. He would understand, he would be able to see how she was made for him, the first, how she was, for him, the highest. Surely at last he would be able to accept his highest fate, he would not deny her. In a little convulsion of too-tired yearning, she entered the church and looked slowly along her cheeks for him, her slender body convulsed with agitation. As best man, he would be standing beside the altar. She looked slowly, deferring in her certainty. And then, he was not there. A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness. And she approached mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond death, so utterly null, desert. The bridegroom and the groom�s man had not yet come. There was a growing consternation outside. Ursula felt almost responsible. She could not bear it that the bride should arrive, and no groom. The wedding must not be a fiasco, it must not. But here was the bride�s carriage, adorned with ribbons and cockades. Gaily the grey horses curvetted to their destination at the church-gate, a laughter in the whole movement. Here was the quick of all laughter and pleasure. The door of the carriage was thrown open, to let out the very blossom of the day. The people on the roadway murmured faintly with the discontented murmuring of a crowd. The father stepped out first into the air of the morning, like a shadow. He was a tall, thin, careworn man, with a thin black beard that was touched with grey. He waited at the door of the carriage patiently, self-obliterated. In the opening of the doorway was a shower of fine foliage and flowers, a whiteness of satin and lace, and a sound of a gay voice saying: �How do I get out?� A ripple of satisfaction ran through the expectant people. They pressed near to receive her, looking with zest at the stooping blond head with its flower buds, and at the delicate, white, tentative foot that was reaching down to the step of the carriage. There was a sudden foaming rush, and the bride like a sudden surf-rush, floating all white beside her father in the morning shadow of trees, her veil flowing with laughter. �That�s done it!� she said. She put her hand on the arm of her care-worn, sallow father, and frothing her light draperies, proceeded over the eternal red carpet. Her father, mute and yellowish, his black beard making him look more careworn, mounted the steps stiffly, as if his spirit were absent; but the laughing mist of the bride went along with him undiminished. And no bridegroom had arrived! It was intolerable for her. Ursula, her heart strained with anxiety, was watching the hill beyond; the white, descending road, that should give sight of him. There was a carriage. It was running. It had just come into sight. Yes, it was he. Ursula turned towards the bride and the people, and, from her place of vantage, gave an inarticulate cry. She wanted to warn them that he was coming. But her cry was inarticulate and inaudible, and she flushed deeply, between her desire and her wincing confusion. The carriage rattled down the hill, and drew near. There was a shout from the people. The bride, who had just reached the top of the steps, turned round gaily to see what was the commotion. She saw a confusion among the people, a cab pulling up, and her lover dropping out of the carriage, and dodging among the horses and into the crowd. �Tibs! Tibs!� she cried in her sudden, mocking excitement, standing high on the path in the sunlight and waving her bouquet. He, dodging with his hat in his hand, had not heard. �Tibs!� she cried again, looking down to him. He glanced up, unaware, and saw the bride and her father standing on the path above him. A queer, startled look went over his face. He hesitated for a moment. Then he gathered himself together for a leap, to overtake her. �Ah-h-h!� came her strange, intaken cry, as, on the reflex, she started, turned and fled, scudding with an unthinkable swift beating of her white feet and fraying of her white garments, towards the church. Like a hound the young man was after her, leaping the steps and swinging past her father, his supple haunches working like those of a hound that bears down on the quarry. �Ay, after her!� cried the vulgar women below, carried suddenly into the sport. She, her flowers shaken from her like froth, was steadying herself to turn the angle of the church. She glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey stone buttress. In another instant the bridegroom, bent forward as he ran, had caught the angle of the silent stone with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his supple, strong loins vanishing in pursuit. Instantly cries and exclamations of excitement burst from the crowd at the gate. And then Ursula noticed again the dark, rather stooping figure of Mr Crich, waiting suspended on the path, watching with expressionless face the flight to the church. It was over, and he turned round to look behind him, at the figure of Rupert Birkin, who at once came forward and joined him. �We�ll bring up the rear,� said Birkin, a faint smile on his face. �Ay!� replied the father laconically. And the two men turned together up the path. Birkin was as thin as Mr Crich, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow but nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which came only from self-consciousness. Although he was dressed correctly for his part, yet there was an innate incongruity which caused a slight ridiculousness in his appearance. His nature was clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the conventional occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common idea, travestied himself. He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for the moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness. Now he spoke quite easily and pleasantly to Mr Crich, as they walked along the path; he played with situations like a man on a tight-rope: but always on a tight-rope, pretending nothing but ease. �I�m sorry we are so late,� he was saying. �We couldn�t find a button-hook, so it took us a long time to button our boots. But you were to the moment.� �We are usually to time,� said Mr Crich. �And I�m always late,� said Birkin. �But today I was _really_ punctual, only accidentally not so. I�m sorry.� The two men were gone, there was nothing more to see, for the time. Ursula was left thinking about Birkin. He piqued her, attracted her, and annoyed her. She wanted to know him more. She had spoken with him once or twice, but only in his official capacity as inspector. She thought he seemed to acknowledge some kinship between her and him, a natural, tacit understanding, a using of the same language. But there had been no time for the understanding to develop. And something kept her from him, as well as attracted her to him. There was a certain hostility, a hidden ultimate reserve in him, cold and inaccessible. Yet she wanted to know him. �What do you think of Rupert Birkin?� she asked, a little reluctantly, of Gudrun. She did not want to discuss him. �What do I think of Rupert Birkin?� repeated Gudrun. �I think he�s attractive�decidedly attractive. What I can�t stand about him is his way with other people�his way of treating any little fool as if she were his greatest consideration. One feels so awfully sold, oneself.� �Why does he do it?� said Ursula. �Because he has no real critical faculty�of people, at all events,� said Gudrun. �I tell you, he treats any little fool as he treats me or you�and it�s such an insult.� �Oh, it is,� said Ursula. �One must discriminate.� �One _must_ discriminate,� repeated Gudrun. �But he�s a wonderful chap, in other respects�a marvellous personality. But you can�t trust him.� �Yes,� said Ursula vaguely. She was always forced to assent to Gudrun�s pronouncements, even when she was not in accord altogether. The sisters sat silent, waiting for the wedding party to come out. Gudrun was impatient of talk. She wanted to think about Gerald Crich. She wanted to see if the strong feeling she had got from him was real. She wanted to have herself ready. Inside the church, the wedding was going on. Hermione Roddice was thinking only of Birkin. He stood near her. She seemed to gravitate physically towards him. She wanted to stand touching him. She could hardly be sure he was near her, if she did not touch him. Yet she stood subjected through the wedding service. She had suffered so bitterly when he did not come, that still she was dazed. Still she was gnawed as by a neuralgia, tormented by his potential absence from her. She had awaited him in a faint delirium of nervous torture. As she stood bearing herself pensively, the rapt look on her face, that seemed spiritual, like the angels, but which came from torture, gave her a certain poignancy that tore his heart with pity. He saw her bowed head, her rapt face, the face of an almost demoniacal ecstatic. Feeling him looking, she lifted her face and sought his eyes, her own beautiful grey eyes flaring him a great signal. But he avoided her look, she sank her head in torment and shame, the gnawing at her heart going on. And he too was tortured with shame, and ultimate dislike, and with acute pity for her, because he did not want to meet her eyes, he did not want to receive her flare of recognition. The bride and bridegroom were married, the party went into the vestry. Hermione crowded involuntarily up against Birkin, to touch him. And he endured it. Outside, Gudrun and Ursula listened for their father�s playing on the organ. He would enjoy playing a wedding march. Now the married pair were coming! The bells were ringing, making the air shake. Ursula wondered if the trees and the flowers could feel the vibration, and what they thought of it, this strange motion in the air. The bride was quite demure on the arm of the bridegroom, who stared up into the sky before him, shutting and opening his eyes unconsciously, as if he were neither here nor there. He looked rather comical, blinking and trying to be in the scene, when emotionally he was violated by his exposure to a crowd. He looked a typical naval officer, manly, and up to his duty. Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt, triumphant look, like the fallen angels restored, yet still subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm. And he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it were his fate, without question. Gerald Crich came, fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost happy appearance. Gudrun rose sharply and went away. She could not bear it. She wanted to be alone, to know this strange, sharp inoculation that had changed the whole temper of her blood. CHAPTER II. SHORTLANDS The Brangwens went home to Beldover, the wedding-party gathered at Shortlands, the Criches� home. It was a long, low old house, a sort of manor farm, that spread along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little lake of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping meadow that might be a park, because of the large, solitary trees that stood here and there, across the water of the narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the colliery valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and picturesque, very peaceful, and the house had a charm of its own. It was crowded now with the family and the wedding guests. The father, who was not well, withdrew to rest. Gerald was host. He stood in the homely entrance hall, friendly and easy, attending to the men. He seemed to take pleasure in his social functions, he smiled, and was abundant in hospitality. The women wandered about in a little confusion, chased hither and thither by the three married daughters of the house. All the while there could be heard the characteristic, imperious voice of one Crich woman or another calling �Helen, come here a minute,� �Marjory, I want you�here.� �Oh, I say, Mrs Witham�.� There was a great rustling of skirts, swift glimpses of smartly-dressed women, a child danced through the hall and back again, a maidservant came and went hurriedly. Meanwhile the men stood in calm little groups, chatting, smoking, pretending to pay no heed to the rustling animation of the women�s world. But they could not really talk, because of the glassy ravel of women�s excited, cold laughter and running voices. They waited, uneasy, suspended, rather bored. But Gerald remained as if genial and happy, unaware that he was waiting or unoccupied, knowing himself the very pivot of the occasion. Suddenly Mrs Crich came noiselessly into the room, peering about with her strong, clear face. She was still wearing her hat, and her sac coat of blue silk. �What is it, mother?� said Gerald. �Nothing, nothing!� she answered vaguely. And she went straight towards Birkin, who was talking to a Crich brother-in-law. �How do you do, Mr Birkin,� she said, in her low voice, that seemed to take no count of her guests. She held out her hand to him. �Oh Mrs Crich,� replied Birkin, in his readily-changing voice, �I couldn�t come to you before.� �I don�t know half the people here,� she said, in her low voice. Her son-in-law moved uneasily away. �And you don�t like strangers?� laughed Birkin. �I myself can never see why one should take account of people, just because they happen to be in the room with one: why _should_ I know they are there?� �Why indeed, why indeed!� said Mrs Crich, in her low, tense voice. �Except that they _are_ there. _I_ don�t know people whom I find in the house. The children introduce them to me��Mother, this is Mr So-and-so.� I am no further. What has Mr So-and-so to do with his own name?�and what have I to do with either him or his name?� She looked up at Birkin. She startled him. He was flattered too that she came to talk to him, for she took hardly any notice of anybody. He looked down at her tense clear face, with its heavy features, but he was afraid to look into her heavy-seeing blue eyes. He noticed instead how her hair looped in slack, slovenly strands over her rather beautiful ears, which were not quite clean. Neither was her neck perfectly clean. Even in that he seemed to belong to her, rather than to the rest of the company; though, he thought to himself, he was always well washed, at any rate at the neck and ears. He smiled faintly, thinking these things. Yet he was tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within the camp of the other people. He resembled a deer, that throws one ear back upon the trail behind, and one ear forward, to know what is ahead. �People don�t really matter,� he said, rather unwilling to continue. The mother looked up at him with sudden, dark interrogation, as if doubting his sincerity. �How do you mean, _matter?_� she asked sharply. �Not many people are anything at all,� he answered, forced to go deeper than he wanted to. �They jingle and giggle. It would be much better if they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don�t exist, they aren�t there.� She watched him steadily while he spoke. �But we didn�t imagine them,� she said sharply. �There�s nothing to imagine, that�s why they don�t exist.� �Well,� she said, �I would hardly go as far as that. There they are, whether they exist or no. It doesn�t rest with me to decide on their existence. I only know that I can�t be expected to take count of them all. You can�t expect me to know them, just because they happen to be there. As far as _I_ go they might as well not be there.� �Exactly,� he replied. �Mightn�t they?� she asked again. �Just as well,� he repeated. And there was a little pause. �Except that they _are_ there, and that�s a nuisance,� she said. �There are my sons-in-law,� she went on, in a sort of monologue. �Now Laura�s got married, there�s another. And I really don�t know John from James yet. They come up to me and call me mother. I know what they will say��how are you, mother?� I ought to say, �I am not your mother, in any sense.� But what is the use? There they are. I have had children of my own. I suppose I know them from another woman�s children.� �One would suppose so,� he said. She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting perhaps that she was talking to him. And she lost her thread. She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was looking for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons. �Are my children all there?� she asked him abruptly. He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps. �I scarcely know them, except Gerald,� he replied. �Gerald!� she exclaimed. �He�s the most wanting of them all. You�d never think it, to look at him now, would you?� �No,� said Birkin. The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at him heavily for some time. �Ay,� she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable, that sounded profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he dared not realise. And Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting him. But she returned on her traces. �I should like him to have a friend,� she said. �He has never had a friend.� Birkin looked down into her eyes, which were blue, and watching heavily. He could not understand them. �Am I my brother�s keeper?� he said to himself, almost flippantly. Then he remembered, with a slight shock, that that was Cain�s cry. And Gerald was Cain, if anybody. Not that he was Cain, either, although he had slain his brother. There was such a thing as pure accident, and the consequences did not attach to one, even though one had killed one�s brother in such wise. Gerald as a boy had accidentally killed his brother. What then? Why seek to draw a brand and a curse across the life that had caused the accident? A man can live by accident, and die by accident. Or can he not? Is every man�s life subject to pure accident, is it only the race, the genus, the species, that has a universal reference? Or is this not true, is there no such thing as pure accident? Has _everything_ that happens a universal significance? Has it? Birkin, pondering as he stood there, had forgotten Mrs Crich, as she had forgotten him. He did not believe that there was any such thing as accident. It all hung together, in the deepest sense. Just as he had decided this, one of the Crich daughters came up, saying: �Won�t you come and take your hat off, mother dear? We shall be sitting down to eat in a minute, and it�s a formal occasion, darling, isn�t it?� She drew her arm through her mother�s, and they went away. Birkin immediately went to talk to the nearest man. The gong sounded for the luncheon. The men looked up, but no move was made to the dining-room. The women of the house seemed not to feel that the sound had meaning for them. Five minutes passed by. The elderly manservant, Crowther, appeared in the doorway exasperatedly. He looked with appeal at Gerald. The latter took up a large, curved conch shell, that lay on a shelf, and without reference to anybody, blew a shattering blast. It was a strange rousing noise, that made the heart beat. The summons was almost magical. Everybody came running, as if at a signal. And then the crowd in one impulse moved to the dining-room. Gerald waited a moment, for his sister to play hostess. He knew his mother would pay no attention to her duties. But his sister merely crowded to her seat. Therefore the young man, slightly too dictatorial, directed the guests to their places. There was a moment�s lull, as everybody looked at the _hors d�oeuvres_ that were being handed round. And out of this lull, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, with her long hair down her back, said in a calm, self-possessed voice: �Gerald, you forget father, when you make that unearthly noise.� �Do I?� he answered. And then, to the company, �Father is lying down, he is not quite well.� �How is he, really?� called one of the married daughters, peeping round the immense wedding cake that towered up in the middle of the table shedding its artificial flowers. �He has no pain, but he feels tired,� replied Winifred, the girl with the hair down her back. The wine was filled, and everybody was talking boisterously. At the far end of the table sat the mother, with her loosely-looped hair. She had Birkin for a neighbour. Sometimes she glanced fiercely down the rows of faces, bending forwards and staring unceremoniously. And she would say in a low voice to Birkin: �Who is that young man?� �I don�t know,� Birkin answered discreetly. �Have I seen him before?� she asked. �I don�t think so. _I_ haven�t,� he replied. And she was satisfied. Her eyes closed wearily, a peace came over her face, she looked like a queen in repose. Then she started, a little social smile came on her face, for a moment she looked the pleasant hostess. For a moment she bent graciously, as if everyone were welcome and delightful. And then immediately the shadow came back, a sullen, eagle look was on her face, she glanced from under her brows like a sinister creature at bay, hating them all. �Mother,� called Diana, a handsome girl a little older than Winifred, �I may have wine, mayn�t I?� �Yes, you may have wine,� replied the mother automatically, for she was perfectly indifferent to the question. And Diana beckoned to the footman to fill her glass. �Gerald shouldn�t forbid me,� she said calmly, to the company at large. �All right, Di,� said her brother amiably. And she glanced challenge at him as she drank from her glass. There was a strange freedom, that almost amounted to anarchy, in the house. It was rather a resistance to authority, than liberty. Gerald had some command, by mere force of personality, not because of any granted position. There was a quality in his voice, amiable but dominant, that cowed the others, who were all younger than he. Hermione was having a discussion with the bridegroom about nationality. �No,� she said, �I think that the appeal to patriotism is a mistake. It is like one house of business rivalling another house of business.� �Well you can hardly say that, can you?� exclaimed Gerald, who had a real _passion_ for discussion. �You couldn�t call a race a business concern, could you?�and nationality roughly corresponds to race, I think. I think it is _meant_ to.� There was a moment�s pause. Gerald and Hermione were always strangely but politely and evenly inimical. �_Do_ you think race corresponds with nationality?� she asked musingly, with expressionless indecision. Birkin knew she was waiting for him to participate. And dutifully he spoke up. �I think Gerald is right�race is the essential element in nationality, in Europe at least,� he said. Again Hermione paused, as if to allow this statement to cool. Then she said with strange assumption of authority: �Yes, but even so, is the patriotic appeal an appeal to the racial instinct? Is it not rather an appeal to the proprietory instinct, the _commercial_ instinct? And isn�t this what we mean by nationality?� �Probably,� said Birkin, who felt that such a discussion was out of place and out of time. But Gerald was now on the scent of argument. �A race may have its commercial aspect,� he said. �In fact it must. It is like a family. You _must_ make provision. And to make provision you have got to strive against other families, other nations. I don�t see why you shouldn�t.� Again Hermione made a pause, domineering and cold, before she replied: �Yes, I think it is always wrong to provoke a spirit of rivalry. It makes bad blood. And bad blood accumulates.� �But you can�t do away with the spirit of emulation altogether?� said Gerald. �It is one of the necessary incentives to production and improvement.� �Yes,� came Hermione�s sauntering response. �I think you can do away with it.� �I must say,� said Birkin, �I detest the spirit of emulation.� Hermione was biting a piece of bread, pulling it from between her teeth with her fingers, in a slow, slightly derisive movement. She turned to Birkin. �You do hate it, yes,� she said, intimate and gratified. �Detest it,� he repeated. �Yes,� she murmured, assured and satisfied. �But,� Gerald insisted, �you don�t allow one man to take away his neighbour�s living, so why should you allow one nation to take away the living from another nation?� There was a long slow murmur from Hermione before she broke into speech, saying with a laconic indifference: �It is not always a question of possessions, is it? It is not all a question of goods?� Gerald was nettled by this implication of vulgar materialism. �Yes, more or less,� he retorted. �If I go and take a man�s hat from off his head, that hat becomes a symbol of that man�s liberty. When he fights me for his hat, he is fighting me for his liberty.� Hermione was nonplussed. �Yes,� she said, irritated. �But that way of arguing by imaginary instances is not supposed to be genuine, is it? A man does _not_ come and take my hat from off my head, does he?� �Only because the law prevents him,� said Gerald. �Not only,� said Birkin. �Ninety-nine men out of a hundred don�t want my hat.� �That�s a matter of opinion,� said Gerald. �Or the hat,� laughed the bridegroom. �And if he does want my hat, such as it is,� said Birkin, �why, surely it is open to me to decide, which is a greater loss to me, my hat, or my liberty as a free and indifferent man. If I am compelled to offer fight, I lose the latter. It is a question which is worth more to me, my pleasant liberty of conduct, or my hat.� �Yes,� said Hermione, watching Birkin strangely. �Yes.� �But would you let somebody come and snatch your hat off your head?� the bride asked of Hermione. The face of the tall straight woman turned slowly and as if drugged to this new speaker. �No,� she replied, in a low inhuman tone, that seemed to contain a chuckle. �No, I shouldn�t let anybody take my hat off my head.� �How would you prevent it?� asked Gerald. �I don�t know,� replied Hermione slowly. �Probably I should kill him.� There was a strange chuckle in her tone, a dangerous and convincing humour in her bearing. �Of course,� said Gerald, �I can see Rupert�s point. It is a question to him whether his hat or his peace of mind is more important.� �Peace of body,� said Birkin. �Well, as you like there,� replied Gerald. �But how are you going to decide this for a nation?� �Heaven preserve me,� laughed Birkin. �Yes, but suppose you have to?� Gerald persisted. �Then it is the same. If the national crown-piece is an old hat, then the thieving gent may have it.� �But _can_ the national or racial hat be an old hat?� insisted Gerald. �Pretty well bound to be, I believe,� said Birkin. �I�m not so sure,� said Gerald. �I don�t agree, Rupert,� said Hermione. �All right,� said Birkin. �I�m all for the old national hat,� laughed Gerald. �And a fool you look in it,� cried Diana, his pert sister who was just in her teens. �Oh, we�re quite out of our depths with these old hats,� cried Laura Crich. �Dry up now, Gerald. We�re going to drink toasts. Let us drink toasts. Toasts�glasses, glasses�now then, toasts! Speech! Speech!� Birkin, thinking about race or national death, watched his glass being filled with champagne. The bubbles broke at the rim, the man withdrew, and feeling a sudden thirst at the sight of the fresh wine, Birkin drank up his glass. A queer little tension in the room roused him. He felt a sharp constraint. �Did I do it by accident, or on purpose?� he asked himself. And he decided that, according to the vulgar phrase, he had done it �accidentally on purpose.� He looked round at the hired footman. And the hired footman came, with a silent step of cold servant-like disapprobation. Birkin decided that he detested toasts, and footmen, and assemblies, and mankind altogether, in most of its aspects. Then he rose to make a speech. But he was somehow disgusted. At length it was over, the meal. Several men strolled out into the garden. There was a lawn, and flower-beds, and at the boundary an iron fence shutting off the little field or park. The view was pleasant; a highroad curving round the edge of a low lake, under the trees. In the spring air, the water gleamed and the opposite woods were purplish with new life. Charming Jersey cattle came to the fence, breathing hoarsely from their velvet muzzles at the human beings, expecting perhaps a crust. Birkin leaned on the fence. A cow was breathing wet hotness on his hand. �Pretty cattle, very pretty,� said Marshall, one of the brothers-in-law. �They give the best milk you can have.� �Yes,� said Birkin. �Eh, my little beauty, eh, my beauty!� said Marshall, in a queer high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions of laughter in his stomach. �Who won the race, Lupton?� he called to the bridegroom, to hide the fact that he was laughing. The bridegroom took his cigar from his mouth. �The race?� he exclaimed. Then a rather thin smile came over his face. He did not want to say anything about the flight to the church door. �We got there together. At least she touched first, but I had my hand on her shoulder.� �What�s this?� asked Gerald. Birkin told him about the race of the bride and the bridegroom. �H�m!� said Gerald, in disapproval. �What made you late then?� �Lupton would talk about the immortality of the soul,� said Birkin, �and then he hadn�t got a button-hook.� �Oh God!� cried Marshall. �The immortality of the soul on your wedding day! Hadn�t you got anything better to occupy your mind?� �What�s wrong with it?� asked the bridegroom, a clean-shaven naval man, flushing sensitively. �Sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married. _The immortality of the soul!_� repeated the brother-in-law, with most killing emphasis. But he fell quite flat. �And what did you decide?� asked Gerald, at once pricking up his ears at the thought of a metaphysical discussion. �You don�t want a soul today, my boy,� said Marshall. �It�d be in your road.� �Christ! Marshall, go and talk to somebody else,� cried Gerald, with sudden impatience. �By God, I�m willing,� said Marshall, in a temper. �Too much bloody soul and talk altogether�� He withdrew in a dudgeon, Gerald staring after him with angry eyes, that grew gradually calm and amiable as the stoutly-built form of the other man passed into the distance. �There�s one thing, Lupton,� said Gerald, turning suddenly to the bridegroom. �Laura won�t have brought such a fool into the family as Lottie did.� �Comfort yourself with that,� laughed Birkin. �I take no notice of them,� laughed the bridegroom. �What about this race then�who began it?� Gerald asked. �We were late. Laura was at the top of the churchyard steps when our cab came up. She saw Lupton bolting towards her. And she fled. But why do you look so cross? Does it hurt your sense of the family dignity?� �It does, rather,� said Gerald. �If you�re doing a thing, do it properly, and if you�re not going to do it properly, leave it alone.� �Very nice aphorism,� said Birkin. �Don�t you agree?� asked Gerald. �Quite,� said Birkin. �Only it bores me rather, when you become aphoristic.� �Damn you, Rupert, you want all the aphorisms your own way,� said Gerald. �No. I want them out of the way, and you�re always shoving them in it.� Gerald smiled grimly at this humorism. Then he made a little gesture of dismissal, with his eyebrows. �You don�t believe in having any standard of behaviour at all, do you?� he challenged Birkin, censoriously. �Standard�no. I hate standards. But they�re necessary for the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he likes.� �But what do you mean by being himself?� said Gerald. �Is that an aphorism or a cliché?� �I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was perfect good form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a masterpiece in good form. It�s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on one�s impulses�and it�s the only really gentlemanly thing to do�provided you�re fit to do it.� �You don�t expect me to take you seriously, do you?� asked Gerald. �Yes, Gerald, you�re one of the very few people I do expect that of.� �Then I�m afraid I can�t come up to your expectations here, at any rate. You think people should just do as they like.� �I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And they only like to do the collective thing.� �And I,� said Gerald grimly, �shouldn�t like to be in a world of people who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. We should have everybody cutting everybody else�s throat in five minutes.� �That means _you_ would like to be cutting everybody�s throat,� said Birkin. �How does that follow?� asked Gerald crossly. �No man,� said Birkin, �cuts another man�s throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.� �Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,� said Gerald to Birkin. �As a matter of fact, none of us wants our throat cut, and most other people would like to cut it for us�some time or other�� �It�s a nasty view of things, Gerald,� said Birkin, �and no wonder you are afraid of yourself and your own unhappiness.� �How am I afraid of myself?� said Gerald; �and I don�t think I am unhappy.� �You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit, and imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for you,� Birkin said. �How do you make that out?� said Gerald. �From you,� said Birkin. There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence. And they really kept it to the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness. CHAPTER III. CLASS-ROOM A school-day was drawing to a close. In the class-room the last lesson was in progress, peaceful and still. It was elementary botany. The desks were littered with catkins, hazel and willow, which the children had been sketching. But the sky had come overdark, as the end of the afternoon approached: there was scarcely light to draw any more. Ursula stood in front of the class, leading the children by questions to understand the structure and the meaning of the catkins. A heavy, copper-coloured beam of light came in at the west window, gilding the outlines of the children�s heads with red gold, and falling on the wall opposite in a rich, ruddy illumination. Ursula, however, was scarcely conscious of it. She was busy, the end of the day was here, the work went on as a peaceful tide that is at flood, hushed to retire. This day had gone by like so many more, in an activity that was like a trance. At the end there was a little haste, to finish what was in hand. She was pressing the children with questions, so that they should know all they were to know, by the time the gong went. She stood in shadow in front of the class, with catkins in her hand, and she leaned towards the children, absorbed in the passion of instruction. She heard, but did not notice the click of the door. Suddenly she started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish. �Did I startle you?� said Birkin, shaking hands with her. �I thought you had heard me come in.� �No,� she faltered, scarcely able to speak. He laughed, saying he was sorry. She wondered why it amused him. �It is so dark,� he said. �Shall we have the light?� And moving aside, he switched on the strong electric lights. The class-room was distinct and hard, a strange place after the soft dim magic that filled it before he came. Birkin turned curiously to look at Ursula. Her eyes were round and wondering, bewildered, her mouth quivered slightly. She looked like one who is suddenly wakened. There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of dawn shining from her face. He looked at her with a new pleasure, feeling gay in his heart, irresponsible. �You are doing catkins?� he asked, picking up a piece of hazel from a scholar�s desk in front of him. �Are they as far out as this? I hadn�t noticed them this year.� He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand. �The red ones too!� he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that came from the female bud. Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars� books. Ursula watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that hushed the activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world. His presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air. Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker of his voice. �Give them some crayons, won�t you?� he said, �so that they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I�d chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasise.� �I haven�t any crayons,� said Ursula. �There will be some somewhere�red and yellow, that�s all you want.� Ursula sent out a boy on a quest. �It will make the books untidy,� she said to Birkin, flushing deeply. �Not very,� he said. �You must mark in these things obviously. It�s the fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record. What�s the fact?�red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a face�two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth�so�� And he drew a figure on the blackboard. At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the door. It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin went and opened to her. �I saw your car,� she said to him. �Do you mind my coming to find you? I wanted to see you when you were on duty.� She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave a short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers. �How do you do, Miss Brangwen,� sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. �Do you mind my coming in?� Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if summing her up. �Oh no,� said Ursula. �Are you _sure?_� repeated Hermione, with complete _sang-froid_, and an odd, half-bullying effrontery. �Oh no, I like it awfully,� laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be intimate? This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin. �What are you doing?� she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion. �Catkins,� he replied. �Really!� she said. �And what do you learn about them?� She spoke all the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion, as if making game of the whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin�s attention to it. She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high collar, and the inside of the cloak, was lined with dark fur. Beneath she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture. �Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have you ever noticed them?� he asked her. And he came close and pointed them out to her, on the sprig she held. �No,� she replied. �What are they?� �Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins, they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.� �Do they, do they!� repeated Hermione, looking closely. �From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from the long danglers.� �Little red flames, little red flames,� murmured Hermione to herself. And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of which the red flickers of the stigma issued. �Aren�t they beautiful? I think they�re so beautiful,� she said, moving close to Birkin, and pointing to the red filaments with her long, white finger. �Had you never noticed them before?� he asked. �No, never before,� she replied. �And now you will always see them,� he said. �Now I shall always see them,� she repeated. �Thank you so much for showing me. I think they�re so beautiful�little red flames�� Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate attraction for her. The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at last the class was dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the table, with her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, her long white face pushed up, not attending to anything. Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking from the brilliantly-lighted room on to the grey, colourless outside, where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula put away her things in the cupboard. At length Hermione rose and came near to her. �Your sister has come home?� she said. �Yes,� said Ursula. �And does she like being back in Beldover?� �No,� said Ursula. �No, I wonder she can bear it. It takes all my strength, to bear the ugliness of this district, when I stay here. Won�t you come and see me? Won�t you come with your sister to stay at Breadalby for a few days?�do�� �Thank you very much,� said Ursula. �Then I will write to you,� said Hermione. �You think your sister will come? I should be so glad. I think she is wonderful. I think some of her work is really wonderful. I have two water-wagtails, carved in wood, and painted�perhaps you have seen it?� �No,� said Ursula. �I think it is perfectly wonderful�like a flash of instinct.� �Her little carvings _are_ strange,� said Ursula. �Perfectly beautiful�full of primitive passion�� �Isn�t it queer that she always likes little things?�she must always work small things, that one can put between one�s hands, birds and tiny animals. She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the world that way�why is it, do you think?� Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long, detached scrutinising gaze that excited the younger woman. �Yes,� said Hermione at length. �It is curious. The little things seem to be more subtle to her�� �But they aren�t, are they? A mouse isn�t any more subtle than a lion, is it?� Again Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long scrutiny, as if she were following some train of thought of her own, and barely attending to the other�s speech. �I don�t know,� she replied. �Rupert, Rupert,� she sang mildly, calling him to her. He approached in silence. �Are little things more subtle than big things?� she asked, with the odd grunt of laughter in her voice, as if she were making game of him in the question. �Dunno,� he said. �I hate subtleties,� said Ursula. Hermione looked at her slowly. �Do you?� she said. �I always think they are a sign of weakness,� said Ursula, up in arms, as if her prestige were threatened. Hermione took no notice. Suddenly her face puckered, her brow was knit with thought, she seemed twisted in troublesome effort for utterance. �Do you really think, Rupert,� she asked, as if Ursula were not present, �do you really think it is worth while? Do you really think the children are better for being roused to consciousness?� A dark flash went over his face, a silent fury. He was hollow-cheeked and pale, almost unearthly. And the woman, with her serious, conscience-harrowing question tortured him on the quick. �They are not roused to consciousness,� he said. �Consciousness comes to them, willy-nilly.� �But do you think they are better for having it quickened, stimulated? Isn�t it better that they should remain unconscious of the hazel, isn�t it better that they should see as a whole, without all this pulling to pieces, all this knowledge?� �Would you rather, for yourself, know or not know, that the little red flowers are there, putting out for the pollen?� he asked harshly. His voice was brutal, scornful, cruel. Hermione remained with her face lifted up, abstracted. He hung silent in irritation. �I don�t know,� she replied, balancing mildly. �I don�t know.� �But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,� he broke out. She slowly looked at him. �Is it?� she said. �To know, that is your all, that is your life�you have only this, this knowledge,� he cried. �There is only one tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.� Again she was some time silent. �Is there?� she said at last, with the same untouched calm. And then in a tone of whimsical inquisitiveness: �What fruit, Rupert?� �The eternal apple,� he replied in exasperation, hating his own metaphors. �Yes,� she said. There was a look of exhaustion about her. For some moments there was silence. Then, pulling herself together with a convulsed movement, Hermione resumed, in a sing-song, casual voice: �But leaving me apart, Rupert; do you think the children are better, richer, happier, for all this knowledge; do you really think they are? Or is it better to leave them untouched, spontaneous. Hadn�t they better be animals, simple animals, crude, violent, _anything_, rather than this self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous.� They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat she resumed, �Hadn�t they better be anything than grow up crippled, crippled in their souls, crippled in their feelings�so thrown back�so turned back on themselves�incapable�� Hermione clenched her fist like one in a trance��of any spontaneous action, always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never carried away.� Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody��never carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn�t _anything_ better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all, than this, this _nothingness_�� �But do you think it is knowledge that makes us unliving and self-conscious?� he asked irritably. She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly. �Yes,� she said. She paused, watching him all the while, her eyes vague. Then she wiped her fingers across her brow, with a vague weariness. It irritated him bitterly. �It is the mind,� she said, �and that is death.� She raised her eyes slowly to him: �Isn�t the mind�� she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, �isn�t it our death? Doesn�t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?� �Not because they have too much mind, but too little,� he said brutally. �Are you _sure?_� she cried. �It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.� �Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,� he cried. But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic interrogation. �When we have knowledge, don�t we lose everything but knowledge?� she asked pathetically. �If I know about the flower, don�t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren�t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren�t we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.� �You are merely making words,� he said; �knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don�t want to _be_ an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary�and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts�you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won�t be conscious of what _actually_ is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture.� Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood covered with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated each other. �It�s all that Lady of Shalott business,� he said, in his strong abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. �You�ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and �passion.�� He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle. �But your passion is a lie,� he went on violently. �It isn�t passion at all, it is your _will_. It�s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven�t got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to _know_.� He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an impulse to kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a passionate voice speaking. �Spontaneous!� he cried. �You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You�d be verily deliberately spontaneous�that�s you. Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you�ll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography�looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.� There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems, in the light of his words. She was pale and abstracted. �But do you really _want_ sensuality?� she asked, puzzled. Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation. �Yes,� he said, �that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfilment�the great dark knowledge you can�t have in your head�the dark involuntary being. It is death to one�s self�but it is the coming into being of another.� �But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?� she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases. �In the blood,� he answered; �when the mind and the known world is drowned in darkness everything must go�there must be the deluge. Then you find yourself a palpable body of darkness, a demon�� �But why should I be a demon�?� she asked. ��_Woman wailing for her demon lover_��� he quoted��why, I don�t know.� Hermione roused herself as from a death�annihilation. �He is such a _dreadful_ satanist, isn�t he?� she drawled to Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended on a shrill little laugh of pure ridicule. The two women were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness. The laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from Hermione, jeering him as if he were a neuter. �No,� he said. �You are the real devil who won�t let life exist.� She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent, supercilious. �You know all about it, don�t you?� she said, with slow, cold, cunning mockery. �Enough,� he replied, his face fixing fine and clear like steel. A horrible despair, and at the same time a sense of release, liberation, came over Hermione. She turned with a pleasant intimacy to Ursula. �You are sure you will come to Breadalby?� she said, urging. �Yes, I should like to very much,� replied Ursula. Hermione looked down at her, gratified, reflecting, and strangely absent, as if possessed, as if not quite there. �I�m so glad,� she said, pulling herself together. �Some time in about a fortnight. Yes? I will write to you here, at the school, shall I? Yes. And you�ll be sure to come? Yes. I shall be so glad. Good-bye! Good-bye!� Hermione held out her hand and looked into the eyes of the other woman. She knew Ursula as an immediate rival, and the knowledge strangely exhilarated her. Also she was taking leave. It always gave her a sense of strength, advantage, to be departing and leaving the other behind. Moreover she was taking the man with her, if only in hate. Birkin stood aside, fixed and unreal. But now, when it was his turn to bid good-bye, he began to speak again. �There�s the whole difference in the world,� he said, �between the actual sensual being, and the vicious mental-deliberate profligacy our lot goes in for. In our night-time, there�s always the electricity switched on, we watch ourselves, we get it all in the head, really. You�ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition. You�ve got to do it. You�ve got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into being. �But we have got such a conceit of ourselves�that�s where it is. We are so conceited, and so unproud. We�ve got no pride, we�re all conceit, so conceited in our own papier-maché realised selves. We�d rather die than give up our little self-righteous self-opinionated self-will.� There was silence in the room. Both women were hostile and resentful. He sounded as if he were addressing a meeting. Hermione merely paid no attention, stood with her shoulders tight in a shrug of dislike. Ursula was watching him as if furtively, not really aware of what she was seeing. There was a great physical attractiveness in him�a curious hidden richness, that came through his thinness and his pallor like another voice, conveying another knowledge of him. It was in the curves of his brows and his chin, rich, fine, exquisite curves, the powerful beauty of life itself. She could not say what it was. But there was a sense of richness and of liberty. �But we are sensual enough, without making ourselves so, aren�t we?� she asked, turning to him with a certain golden laughter flickering under her greenish eyes, like a challenge. And immediately the queer, careless, terribly attractive smile came over his eyes and brows, though his mouth did not relax. �No,� he said, �we aren�t. We�re too full of ourselves.� �Surely it isn�t a matter of conceit,� she cried. �That and nothing else.� She was frankly puzzled. �Don�t you think that people are most conceited of all about their sensual powers?� she asked. �That�s why they aren�t sensual�only sensuous�which is another matter. They�re _always_ aware of themselves�and they�re so conceited, that rather than release themselves, and live in another world, from another centre, they�d�� �You want your tea, don�t you,� said Hermione, turning to Ursula with a gracious kindliness. �You�ve worked all day�� Birkin stopped short. A spasm of anger and chagrin went over Ursula. His face set. And he bade good-bye, as if he had ceased to notice her. They were gone. Ursula stood looking at the door for some moments. Then she put out the lights. And having done so, she sat down again in her chair, absorbed and lost. And then she began to cry, bitterly, bitterly weeping: but whether for misery or joy, she never knew. CHAPTER IV. DIVER The week passed away. On the Saturday it rained, a soft drizzling rain that held off at times. In one of the intervals Gudrun and Ursula set out for a walk, going towards Willey Water. The atmosphere was grey and translucent, the birds sang sharply on the young twigs, the earth would be quickening and hastening in growth. The two girls walked swiftly, gladly, because of the soft, subtle rush of morning that filled the wet haze. By the road the black-thorn was in blossom, white and wet, its tiny amber grains burning faintly in the white smoke of blossom. Purple twigs were darkly luminous in the grey air, high hedges glowed like living shadows, hovering nearer, coming into creation. The morning was full of a new creation. When the sisters came to Willey Water, the lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric activity in sound came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping one against the other, and water mysteriously plashing, issuing from the lake. The two girls drifted swiftly along. In front of them, at the corner of the lake, near the road, was a mossy boat-house under a walnut tree, and a little landing-stage where a boat was moored, wavering like a shadow on the still grey water, below the green, decayed poles. All was shadowy with coming summer. Suddenly, from the boat-house, a white figure ran out, frightening in its swift sharp transit, across the old landing-stage. It launched in a white arc through the air, there was a bursting of the water, and among the smooth ripples a swimmer was making out to space, in a centre of faintly heaving motion. The whole otherworld, wet and remote, he had to himself. He could move into the pure translucency of the grey, uncreated water. Gudrun stood by the stone wall, watching. �How I envy him,� she said, in low, desirous tones. �Ugh!� shivered Ursula. �So cold!� �Yes, but how good, how really fine, to swim out there!� The sisters stood watching the swimmer move further into the grey, moist, full space of the water, pulsing with his own small, invading motion, and arched over with mist and dim woods. �Don�t you wish it were you?� asked Gudrun, looking at Ursula. �I do,� said Ursula. �But I�m not sure�it�s so wet.� �No,� said Gudrun, reluctantly. She stood watching the motion on the bosom of the water, as if fascinated. He, having swum a certain distance, turned round and was swimming on his back, looking along the water at the two girls by the wall. In the faint wash of motion, they could see his ruddy face, and could feel him watching them. �It is Gerald Crich,� said Ursula. �I know,� replied Gudrun. And she stood motionless gazing over the water at the face which washed up and down on the flood, as he swam steadily. From his separate element he saw them and he exulted to himself because of his own advantage, his possession of a world to himself. He was immune and perfect. He loved his own vigorous, thrusting motion, and the violent impulse of the very cold water against his limbs, buoying him up. He could see the girls watching him a way off, outside, and that pleased him. He lifted his arm from the water, in a sign to them. �He is waving,� said Ursula. �Yes,� replied Gudrun. They watched him. He waved again, with a strange movement of recognition across the difference. �Like a Nibelung,� laughed Ursula. Gudrun said nothing, only stood still looking over the water. Gerald suddenly turned, and was swimming away swiftly, with a side stroke. He was alone now, alone and immune in the middle of the waters, which he had all to himself. He exulted in his isolation in the new element, unquestioned and unconditioned. He was happy, thrusting with his legs and all his body, without bond or connection anywhere, just himself in the watery world. Gudrun envied him almost painfully. Even this momentary possession of pure isolation and fluidity seemed to her so terribly desirable that she felt herself as if damned, out there on the high-road. �God, what it is to be a man!� she cried. �What?� exclaimed Ursula in surprise. �The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!� cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. �You�re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven�t the _thousand_ obstacles a woman has in front of her.� Ursula wondered what was in Gudrun�s mind, to occasion this outburst. She could not understand. �What do you want to do?� she asked. �Nothing,� cried Gudrun, in swift refutation. �But supposing I did. Supposing I want to swim up that water. It is impossible, it is one of the impossibilities of life, for me to take my clothes off now and jump in. But isn�t it _ridiculous_, doesn�t it simply prevent our living!� She was so hot, so flushed, so furious, that Ursula was puzzled. The two sisters went on, up the road. They were passing between the trees just below Shortlands. They looked up at the long, low house, dim and glamorous in the wet morning, its cedar trees slanting before the windows. Gudrun seemed to be studying it closely. �Don�t you think it�s attractive, Ursula?� asked Gudrun. �Very,� said Ursula. �Very peaceful and charming.� �It has form, too�it has a period.� �What period?� �Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, don�t you think?� Ursula laughed. �Don�t you think so?� repeated Gudrun. �Perhaps. But I don�t think the Criches fit the period. I know Gerald is putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house, and is making all kinds of latest improvements.� Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly. �Of course,� she said, �that�s quite inevitable.� �Quite,� laughed Ursula. �He is several generations of youngness at one go. They hate him for it. He takes them all by the scruff of the neck, and fairly flings them along. He�ll have to die soon, when he�s made every possible improvement, and there will be nothing more to improve. He�s got _go_, anyhow.� �Certainly, he�s got go,� said Gudrun. �In fact I�ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his _go_ go to, what becomes of it?� �Oh I know,� said Ursula. �It goes in applying the latest appliances!� �Exactly,� said Gudrun. �You know he shot his brother?� said Ursula. �Shot his brother?� cried Gudrun, frowning as if in disapprobation. �Didn�t you know? Oh yes!�I thought you knew. He and his brother were playing together with a gun. He told his brother to look down the gun, and it was loaded, and blew the top of his head off. Isn�t it a horrible story?� �How fearful!� cried Gudrun. �But it is long ago?� �Oh yes, they were quite boys,� said Ursula. �I think it is one of the most horrible stories I know.� �And he of course did not know that the gun was loaded?� �Yes. You see it was an old thing that had been lying in the stable for years. Nobody dreamed it would ever go off, and of course, no one imagined it was loaded. But isn�t it dreadful, that it should happen?� �Frightful!� cried Gudrun. �And isn�t it horrible too to think of such a thing happening to one, when one was a child, and having to carry the responsibility of it all through one�s life. Imagine it, two boys playing together�then this comes upon them, for no reason whatever�out of the air. Ursula, it�s very frightening! Oh, it�s one of the things I can�t bear. Murder, that is thinkable, because there�s a will behind it. But a thing like that to _happen_ to one�� �Perhaps there _was_ an unconscious will behind it,� said Ursula. �This playing at killing has some primitive _desire_ for killing in it, don�t you think?� �Desire!� said Gudrun, coldly, stiffening a little. �I can�t see that they were even playing at killing. I suppose one boy said to the other, �You look down the barrel while I pull the trigger, and see what happens.� It seems to me the purest form of accident.� �No,� said Ursula. �I couldn�t pull the trigger of the emptiest gun in the world, not if some-one were looking down the barrel. One instinctively doesn�t do it�one can�t.� Gudrun was silent for some moments, in sharp disagreement. �Of course,� she said coldly. �If one is a woman, and grown up, one�s instinct prevents one. But I cannot see how that applies to a couple of boys playing together.� Her voice was cold and angry. �Yes,� persisted Ursula. At that moment they heard a woman�s voice a few yards off say loudly: �Oh damn the thing!� They went forward and saw Laura Crich and Hermione Roddice in the field on the other side of the hedge, and Laura Crich struggling with the gate, to get out. Ursula at once hurried up and helped to lift the gate. �Thanks so much,� said Laura, looking up flushed and amazon-like, yet rather confused. �It isn�t right on the hinges.� �No,� said Ursula. �And they�re so heavy.� �Surprising!� cried Laura. �How do you do,� sang Hermione, from out of the field, the moment she could make her voice heard. �It�s nice now. Are you going for a walk? Yes. Isn�t the young green beautiful? So beautiful�quite burning. Good morning�good morning�you�ll come and see me?�thank you so much�next week�yes�good-bye, g-o-o-d b-y-e.� Gudrun and Ursula stood and watched her slowly waving her head up and down, and waving her hand slowly in dismissal, smiling a strange affected smile, making a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to her eyes. Then they moved off, as if they had been dismissed like inferiors. The four women parted. As soon as they had gone far enough, Ursula said, her cheeks burning, �I do think she�s impudent.� �Who, Hermione Roddice?� asked Gudrun. �Why?� �The way she treats one�impudence!� �Why, Ursula, what did you notice that was so impudent?� asked Gudrun rather coldly. �Her whole manner. Oh, it�s impossible, the way she tries to bully one. Pure bullying. She�s an impudent woman. �You�ll come and see me,� as if we should be falling over ourselves for the privilege.� �I can�t understand, Ursula, what you are so much put out about,� said Gudrun, in some exasperation. �One knows those women are impudent�these free women who have emancipated themselves from the aristocracy.� �But it is so _unnecessary_�so vulgar,� cried Ursula. �No, I don�t see it. And if I did�pour moi, elle n�existe pas. I don�t grant her the power to be impudent to me.� �Do you think she likes you?� asked Ursula. �Well, no, I shouldn�t think she did.� �Then why does she ask you to go to Breadalby and stay with her?� Gudrun lifted her shoulders in a low shrug. �After all, she�s got the sense to know we�re not just the ordinary run,� said Gudrun. �Whatever she is, she�s not a fool. And I�d rather have somebody I detested, than the ordinary woman who keeps to her own set. Hermione Roddice does risk herself in some respects.� Ursula pondered this for a time. �I doubt it,� she replied. �Really she risks nothing. I suppose we ought to admire her for knowing she _can_ invite us�school teachers�and risk nothing.� �Precisely!� said Gudrun. �Think of the myriads of women that daren�t do it. She makes the most of her privileges�that�s something. I suppose, really, we should do the same, in her place.� �No,� said Ursula. �No. It would bore me. I couldn�t spend my time playing her games. It�s infra dig.� The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other. �Of course,� cried Ursula suddenly, �she ought to thank her stars if we will go and see her. You are perfectly beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful than ever she is or was, and to my thinking, a thousand times more beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural, like a flower, always old, thought-out; and we _are_ more intelligent than most people.� �Undoubtedly!� said Gudrun. �And it ought to be admitted, simply,� said Ursula. �Certainly it ought,� said Gudrun. �But you�ll find that the really chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so perfectly commonplace and like the person in the street, that you really are a masterpiece of humanity, not the person in the street actually, but the artistic creation of her�� �How awful!� cried Ursula. �Yes, Ursula, it _is_ awful, in most respects. You daren�t be anything that isn�t amazingly _à terre_, so much _à terre_ that it is the artistic creation of ordinariness.� �It�s very dull to create oneself into nothing better,� laughed Ursula. �Very dull!� retorted Gudrun. �Really Ursula, it is dull, that�s just the word. One longs to be high-flown, and make speeches like Corneille, after it.� Gudrun was becoming flushed and excited over her own cleverness. �Strut,� said Ursula. �One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.� �Exactly,� cried Gudrun, �a swan among geese.� �They are all so busy playing the ugly duckling,� cried Ursula, with mocking laughter. �And I don�t feel a bit like a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese�I can�t help it. They make one feel so. And I don�t care what _they_ think of me. _Je m�en fiche._� Gudrun looked up at Ursula with a queer, uncertain envy and dislike. �Of course, the only thing to do is to despise them all�just all,� she said. The sisters went home again, to read and talk and work, and wait for Monday, for school. Ursula often wondered what else she waited for, besides the beginning and end of the school week, and the beginning and end of the holidays. This was a whole life! Sometimes she had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this. But she never really accepted it. Her spirit was active, her life like a shoot that is growing steadily, but which has not yet come above ground. CHAPTER V. IN THE TRAIN One day at this time Birkin was called to London. He was not very fixed in his abode. He had rooms in Nottingham, because his work lay chiefly in that town. But often he was in London, or in Oxford. He moved about a great deal, his life seemed uncertain, without any definite rhythm, any organic meaning. On the platform of the railway station he saw Gerald Crich, reading a newspaper, and evidently waiting for the train. Birkin stood some distance off, among the people. It was against his instinct to approach anybody. From time to time, in a manner characteristic of him, Gerald lifted his head and looked round. Even though he was reading the newspaper closely, he must keep a watchful eye on his external surroundings. There seemed to be a dual consciousness running in him. He was thinking vigorously of something he read in the newspaper, and at the same time his eye ran over the surfaces of the life round him, and he missed nothing. Birkin, who was watching him, was irritated by his duality. He noticed too, that Gerald seemed always to be at bay against everybody, in spite of his queer, genial, social manner when roused. Now Birkin started violently at seeing this genial look flash on to Gerald�s face, at seeing Gerald approaching with hand outstretched. �Hallo, Rupert, where are you going?� �London. So are you, I suppose.� �Yes�� Gerald�s eyes went over Birkin�s face in curiosity. �We�ll travel together if you like,� he said. �Don�t you usually go first?� asked Birkin. �I can�t stand the crowd,� replied Gerald. �But third�ll be all right. There�s a restaurant car, we can have some tea.� The two men looked at the station clock, having nothing further to say. �What were you reading in the paper?� Birkin asked. Gerald looked at him quickly. �Isn�t it funny, what they _do_ put in the newspapers,� he said. �Here are two leaders�� he held out his _Daily Telegraph_, �full of the ordinary newspaper cant�� he scanned the columns down��and then there�s this little�I dunno what you�d call it, essay, almost�appearing with the leaders, and saying there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin�� �I suppose that�s a bit of newspaper cant, as well,� said Birkin. �It sounds as if the man meant it, and quite genuinely,� said Gerald. �Give it to me,� said Birkin, holding out his hand for the paper. The train came, and they went on board, sitting on either side a little table, by the window, in the restaurant car. Birkin glanced over his paper, then looked up at Gerald, who was waiting for him. �I believe the man means it,� he said, �as far as he means anything.� �And do you think it�s true? Do you think we really want a new gospel?� asked Gerald. Birkin shrugged his shoulders. �I think the people who say they want a new religion are the last to accept anything new. They want novelty right enough. But to stare straight at this life that we�ve brought upon ourselves, and reject it, absolutely smash up the old idols of ourselves, that we sh�ll never do. You�ve got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear�even in the self.� Gerald watched him closely. �You think we ought to break up this life, just start and let fly?� he asked. �This life. Yes I do. We�ve got to bust it completely, or shrivel inside it, as in a tight skin. For it won�t expand any more.� There was a queer little smile in Gerald�s eyes, a look of amusement, calm and curious. �And how do you propose to begin? I suppose you mean, reform the whole order of society?� he asked. Birkin had a slight, tense frown between the brows. He too was impatient of the conversation. �I don�t propose at all,� he replied. �When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.� The little smile began to die out of Gerald�s eyes, and he said, looking with a cool stare at Birkin: �So you really think things are very bad?� �Completely bad.� The smile appeared again. �In what way?� �Every way,� said Birkin. �We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.� Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this tirade. �Would you have us live without houses�return to nature?� he asked. �I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do�and what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else, there would be something else.� Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin. �Don�t you think the collier�s _pianoforte_, as you call it, is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the collier�s life?� �Higher!� cried Birkin. �Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier�s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more important than if you cooked only your own dinner.� �I suppose I am,� laughed Gerald. �Can�t you see,� said Birkin, �that to help my neighbour to eat is no more than eating myself. �I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat��and what then? Why should every man decline the whole verb. First person singular is enough for me.� �You�ve got to start with material things,� said Gerald. Which statement Birkin ignored. �And we�ve got to live for _something_, we�re not just cattle that can graze and have done with it,� said Gerald. �Tell me,� said Birkin. �What do you live for?� Gerald�s face went baffled. �What do I live for?� he repeated. �I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.� �And what�s your work? Getting so many more thousands of tons of coal out of the earth every day. And when we�ve got all the coal we want, and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed and eaten, and we�re all warm and our bellies are filled and we�re listening to the young lady performing on the pianoforte�what then? What then, when you�ve made a real fair start with your material things?� Gerald sat laughing at the words and the mocking humour of the other man. But he was cogitating too. �We haven�t got there yet,� he replied. �A good many people are still waiting for the rabbit and the fire to cook it.� �So while you get the coal I must chase the rabbit?� said Birkin, mocking at Gerald. �Something like that,� said Gerald. Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of productivity. �Gerald,� he said, �I rather hate you.� �I know you do,� said Gerald. �Why do you?� Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes. �I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,� he said at last. �Do you ever consciously detest me�hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.� Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say. �I may, of course, hate you sometimes,� he said. �But I�m not aware of it�never acutely aware of it, that is.� �So much the worse,� said Birkin. Gerald watched him with curious eyes. He could not quite make him out. �So much the worse, is it?� he repeated. There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on. In Birkin�s face was a little irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the brows, keen and difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after. Suddenly Birkin�s eyes looked straight and overpowering into those of the other man. �What do you think is the aim and object of your life, Gerald?� he asked. Again Gerald was taken aback. He could not think what his friend was getting at. Was he poking fun, or not? �At this moment, I couldn�t say off-hand,� he replied, with faintly ironic humour. �Do you think love is the be-all and the end-all of life?� Birkin asked, with direct, attentive seriousness. �Of my own life?� said Gerald. �Yes.� There was a really puzzled pause. �I can�t say,� said Gerald. �It hasn�t been, so far.� �What has your life been, so far?� �Oh�finding out things for myself�and getting experiences�and making things _go_.� Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel. �I find,� he said, �that one needs some one _really_ pure single activity�I should call love a single pure activity. But I _don�t_ really love anybody�not now.� �Have you ever really loved anybody?� asked Gerald. �Yes and no,� replied Birkin. �Not finally?� said Gerald. �Finally�finally�no,� said Birkin. �Nor I,� said Gerald. �And do you want to?� said Birkin. Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic look into the eyes of the other man. �I don�t know,� he said. �I do�I want to love,� said Birkin. �You do?� �Yes. I want the finality of love.� �The finality of love,� repeated Gerald. And he waited for a moment. �Just one woman?� he added. The evening light, flooding yellow along the fields, lit up Birkin�s face with a tense, abstract steadfastness. Gerald still could not make it out. �Yes, one woman,� said Birkin. But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident. �I don�t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my life,� said Gerald. �Not the centre and core of it�the love between you and a woman?� asked Birkin. Gerald�s eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the other man. �I never quite feel it that way,� he said. �You don�t? Then wherein does life centre, for you?� �I don�t know�that�s what I want somebody to tell me. As far as I can make out, it doesn�t centre at all. It is artificially held _together_ by the social mechanism.� Birkin pondered as if he would crack something. �I know,� he said, �it just doesn�t centre. The old ideals are dead as nails�nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman�sort of ultimate marriage�and there isn�t anything else.� �And you mean if there isn�t the woman, there�s nothing?� said Gerald. �Pretty well that�seeing there�s no God.� �Then we�re hard put to it,� said Gerald. And he turned to look out of the window at the flying, golden landscape. Birkin could not help seeing how beautiful and soldierly his face was, with a certain courage to be indifferent. �You think its heavy odds against us?� said Birkin. �If we�ve got to make our life up out of a woman, one woman, woman only, yes, I do,� said Gerald. �I don�t believe I shall ever make up _my_ life, at that rate.� Birkin watched him almost angrily. �You are a born unbeliever,� he said. �I only feel what I feel,� said Gerald. And he looked again at Birkin almost sardonically, with his blue, manly, sharp-lighted eyes. Birkin�s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter. �It troubles me very much, Gerald,� he said, wrinkling his brows. �I can see it does,� said Gerald, uncovering his mouth in a manly, quick, soldierly laugh. Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He wanted to be near him, he wanted to be within his sphere of influence. There was something very congenial to him in Birkin. But yet, beyond this, he did not take much notice. He felt that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and more durable truths than any the other man knew. He felt himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing warmth and venality and brilliant warm utterance he loved in his friend. It was the rich play of words and quick interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better. Birkin knew this. He knew that Gerald wanted to be _fond_ of him without taking him seriously. And this made him go hard and cold. As the train ran on, he sat looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as nothing to him. Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: �Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away�time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn�t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.� Gerald interrupted him by asking, �Where are you staying in London?� Birkin looked up. �With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat, and stop there when I like.� �Good idea�have a place more or less your own,� said Gerald. �Yes. But I don�t care for it much. I�m tired of the people I am bound to find there.� �What kind of people?� �Art�music�London Bohemia�the most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world�perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation�but negatively something, at any rate.� �What are they?�painters, musicians?� �Painters, musicians, writers�hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.� �All loose?� said Gerald. Birkin could see his curiosity roused. �In one way. Most bound, in another. For all their shockingness, all on one note.� He looked at Gerald, and saw how his blue eyes were lit up with a little flame of curious desire. He saw too how good-looking he was. Gerald was attractive, his blood seemed fluid and electric. His blue eyes burned with a keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a beautiful passivity in all his body, his moulding. �We might see something of each other�I am in London for two or three days,� said Gerald. �Yes,� said Birkin, �I don�t want to go to the theatre, or the music hall�you�d better come round to the flat, and see what you can make of Halliday and his crowd.� �Thanks�I should like to,� laughed Gerald. �What are you doing tonight?� �I promised to meet Halliday at the Pompadour. It�s a bad place, but there is nowhere else.� �Where is it?� asked Gerald. �Piccadilly Circus.� �Oh yes�well, shall I come round there?� �By all means, it might amuse you.� The evening was falling. They had passed Bedford. Birkin watched the country, and was filled with a sort of hopelessness. He always felt this, on approaching London. His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness. ��Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles��� he was murmuring to himself, like a man condemned to death. Gerald, who was very subtly alert, wary in all his senses, leaned forward and asked smilingly: �What were you saying?� Birkin glanced at him, laughed, and repeated: ��Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles, Over pastures where the something something sheep Half asleep��� Gerald also looked now at the country. And Birkin, who, for some reason was now tired and dispirited, said to him: �I always feel doomed when the train is running into London. I feel such a despair, so hopeless, as if it were the end of the world.� �Really!� said Gerald. �And does the end of the world frighten you?� Birkin lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug. �I don�t know,� he said. �It does while it hangs imminent and doesn�t fall. But people give me a bad feeling�very bad.� There was a roused glad smile in Gerald�s eyes. �Do they?� he said. And he watched the other man critically. In a few minutes the train was running through the disgrace of outspread London. Everybody in the carriage was on the alert, waiting to escape. At last they were under the huge arch of the station, in the tremendous shadow of the town. Birkin shut himself together�he was in now. The two men went together in a taxi-cab. �Don�t you feel like one of the damned?� asked Birkin, as they sat in a little, swiftly-running enclosure, and watched the hideous great street. �No,� laughed Gerald. �It is real death,� said Birkin. CHAPTER VI. CR�ME DE MENTHE They met again in the café several hours later. Gerald went through the push doors into the large, lofty room where the faces and heads of the drinkers showed dimly through the haze of smoke, reflected more dimly, and repeated ad infinitum in the great mirrors on the walls, so that one seemed to enter a vague, dim world of shadowy drinkers humming within an atmosphere of blue tobacco smoke. There was, however, the red plush of the seats to give substance within the bubble of pleasure. Gerald moved in his slow, observant, glistening-attentive motion down between the tables and the people whose shadowy faces looked up as he passed. He seemed to be entering in some strange element, passing into an illuminated new region, among a host of licentious souls. He was pleased, and entertained. He looked over all the dim, evanescent, strangely illuminated faces that bent across the tables. Then he saw Birkin rise and signal to him. At Birkin�s table was a girl with dark, soft, fluffy hair cut short in the artist fashion, hanging level and full almost like the Egyptian princess�s. She was small and delicately made, with warm colouring and large, dark hostile eyes. There was a delicacy, almost a beauty in all her form, and at the same time a certain attractive grossness of spirit, that made a little spark leap instantly alight in Gerald�s eyes. Birkin, who looked muted, unreal, his presence left out, introduced her as Miss Darrington. She gave her hand with a sudden, unwilling movement, looking all the while at Gerald with a dark, exposed stare. A glow came over him as he sat down. The waiter appeared. Gerald glanced at the glasses of the other two. Birkin was drinking something green, Miss Darrington had a small liqueur glass that was empty save for a tiny drop. �Won�t you have some more�?� �Brandy,� she said, sipping her last drop and putting down the glass. The waiter disappeared. �No,� she said to Birkin. �He doesn�t know I�m back. He�ll be terrified when he sees me here.� She spoke her r�s like w�s, lisping with a slightly babyish pronunciation which was at once affected and true to her character. Her voice was dull and toneless. �Where is he then?� asked Birkin. �He�s doing a private show at Lady Snellgrove�s,� said the girl. �Warens is there too.� There was a pause. �Well, then,� said Birkin, in a dispassionate protective manner, �what do you intend to do?� The girl paused sullenly. She hated the question. �I don�t intend to do anything,� she replied. �I shall look for some sittings tomorrow.� �Who shall you go to?� asked Birkin. �I shall go to Bentley�s first. But I believe he�s angwy with me for running away.� �That is from the Madonna?� �Yes. And then if he doesn�t want me, I know I can get work with Carmarthen.� �Carmarthen?� �Lord Carmarthen�he does photographs.� �Chiffon and shoulders�� �Yes. But he�s awfully decent.� There was a pause. �And what are you going to do about Julius?� he asked. �Nothing,� she said. �I shall just ignore him.� �You�ve done with him altogether?� But she turned aside her face sullenly, and did not answer the question. Another young man came hurrying up to the table. �Hallo Birkin! Hallo _Pussum_, when did you come back?� he said eagerly. �Today.� �Does Halliday know?� �I don�t know. I don�t care either.� �Ha-ha! The wind still sits in that quarter, does it? Do you mind if I come over to this table?� �I�m talking to Wupert, do you mind?� she replied, coolly and yet appealingly, like a child. �Open confession�good for the soul, eh?� said the young man. �Well, so long.� And giving a sharp look at Birkin and at Gerald, the young man moved off, with a swing of his coat skirts. All this time Gerald had been completely ignored. And yet he felt that the girl was physically aware of his proximity. He waited, listened, and tried to piece together the conversation. �Are you staying at the flat?� the girl asked, of Birkin. �For three days,� replied Birkin. �And you?� �I don�t know yet. I can always go to Bertha�s.� There was a silence. Suddenly the girl turned to Gerald, and said, in a rather formal, polite voice, with the distant manner of a woman who accepts her position as a social inferior, yet assumes intimate _camaraderie_ with the male she addresses: �Do you know London well?� �I can hardly say,� he laughed. �I�ve been up a good many times, but I was never in this place before.� �You�re not an artist, then?� she said, in a tone that placed him an outsider. �No,� he replied. �He�s a soldier, and an explorer, and a Napoleon of industry,� said Birkin, giving Gerald his credentials for Bohemia. �Are you a soldier?� asked the girl, with a cold yet lively curiosity. �No, I resigned my commission,� said Gerald, �some years ago.� �He was in the last war,� said Birkin. �Were you really?� said the girl. �And then he explored the Amazon,� said Birkin, �and now he is ruling over coal-mines.� The girl looked at Gerald with steady, calm curiosity. He laughed, hearing himself described. He felt proud too, full of male strength. His blue, keen eyes were lit up with laughter, his ruddy face, with its sharp fair hair, was full of satisfaction, and glowing with life. He piqued her. �How long are you staying?� she asked him. �A day or two,� he replied. �But there is no particular hurry.� Still she stared into his face with that slow, full gaze which was so curious and so exciting to him. He was acutely and delightfully conscious of himself, of his own attractiveness. He felt full of strength, able to give off a sort of electric power. And he was aware of her dark, hot-looking eyes upon him. She had beautiful eyes, dark, fully-opened, hot, naked in their looking at him. And on them there seemed to float a film of disintegration, a sort of misery and sullenness, like oil on water. She wore no hat in the heated café, her loose, simple jumper was strung on a string round her neck. But it was made of rich peach-coloured crêpe-de-chine, that hung heavily and softly from her young throat and her slender wrists. Her appearance was simple and complete, really beautiful, because of her regularity and form, her soft dark hair falling full and level on either side of her head, her straight, small, softened features, Egyptian in the slight fulness of their curves, her slender neck and the simple, rich-coloured smock hanging on her slender shoulders. She was very still, almost null, in her manner, apart and watchful. She appealed to Gerald strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. But she was waiting in her separation, given. They talked banalities for some time. Suddenly Birkin said: �There�s Julius!� and he half rose to his feet, motioning to the newcomer. The girl, with a curious, almost evil motion, looked round over her shoulder without moving her body. Gerald watched her dark, soft hair swing over her ears. He felt her watching intensely the man who was approaching, so he looked too. He saw a pale, full-built young man with rather long, solid fair hair hanging from under his black hat, moving cumbrously down the room, his face lit up with a smile at once naive and warm, and vapid. He approached towards Birkin, with a haste of welcome. It was not till he was quite close that he perceived the girl. He recoiled, went pale, and said, in a high squealing voice: �Pussum, what are _you_ doing here?� The café looked up like animals when they hear a cry. Halliday hung motionless, an almost imbecile smile flickering palely on his face. The girl only stared at him with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was limited by him. �Why have you come back?� repeated Halliday, in the same high, hysterical voice. �I told you not to come back.� The girl did not answer, only stared in the same viscous, heavy fashion, straight at him, as he stood recoiled, as if for safety, against the next table. �You know you wanted her to come back�come and sit down,� said Birkin to him. �No I didn�t want her to come back, and I told her not to come back. What have you come for, Pussum?� �For nothing from _you_,� she said in a heavy voice of resentment. �Then why have you come back at _all?_� cried Halliday, his voice rising to a kind of squeal. �She comes as she likes,� said Birkin. �Are you going to sit down, or are you not?� �No, I won�t sit down with Pussum,� cried Halliday. �I won�t hurt you, you needn�t be afraid,� she said to him, very curtly, and yet with a sort of protectiveness towards him, in her voice. Halliday came and sat at the table, putting his hand on his heart, and crying: �Oh, it�s given me such a turn! Pussum, I wish you wouldn�t do these things. Why did you come back?� �Not for anything from you,� she repeated. �You�ve said that before,� he cried in a high voice. She turned completely away from him, to Gerald Crich, whose eyes were shining with a subtle amusement. �Were you ever vewy much afwaid of the savages?� she asked in her calm, dull childish voice. �No�never very much afraid. On the whole they�re harmless�they�re not born yet, you can�t feel really afraid of them. You know you can manage them.� �Do you weally? Aren�t they very fierce?� �Not very. There aren�t many fierce things, as a matter of fact. There aren�t many things, neither people nor animals, that have it in them to be really dangerous.� �Except in herds,� interrupted Birkin. �Aren�t there really?� she said. �Oh, I thought savages were all so dangerous, they�d have your life before you could look round.� �Did you?� he laughed. �They are over-rated, savages. They�re too much like other people, not exciting, after the first acquaintance.� �Oh, it�s not so very wonderfully brave then, to be an explorer?� �No. It�s more a question of hardships than of terrors.� �Oh! And weren�t you ever afraid?� �In my life? I don�t know. Yes, I�m afraid of some things�of being shut up, locked up anywhere�or being fastened. I�m afraid of being bound hand and foot.� She looked at him steadily with her dark eyes, that rested on him and roused him so deeply, that it left his upper self quite calm. It was rather delicious, to feel her drawing his self-revelations from him, as from the very innermost dark marrow of his body. She wanted to know. And her dark eyes seemed to be looking through into his naked organism. He felt, she was compelled to him, she was fated to come into contact with him, must have the seeing him and knowing him. And this roused a curious exultance. Also he felt, she must relinquish herself into his hands, and be subject to him. She was so profane, slave-like, watching him, absorbed by him. It was not that she was interested in what he said; she was absorbed by his self-revelation, by _him_, she wanted the secret of him, the experience of his male being. Gerald�s face was lit up with an uncanny smile, full of light and rousedness, yet unconscious. He sat with his arms on the table, his sunbrowned, rather sinister hands, that were animal and yet very shapely and attractive, pushed forward towards her. And they fascinated her. And she knew, she watched her own fascination. Other men had come to the table, to talk with Birkin and Halliday. Gerald said in a low voice, apart, to Pussum: �Where have you come back from?� �From the country,� replied Pussum, in a very low, yet fully resonant voice. Her face closed hard. Continually she glanced at Halliday, and then a black flare came over her eyes. The heavy, fair young man ignored her completely; he was really afraid of her. For some moments she would be unaware of Gerald. He had not conquered her yet. �And what has Halliday to do with it?� he asked, his voice still muted. She would not answer for some seconds. Then she said, unwillingly: �He made me go and live with him, and now he wants to throw me over. And yet he won�t let me go to anybody else. He wants me to live hidden in the country. And then he says I persecute him, that he can�t get rid of me.� �Doesn�t know his own mind,� said Gerald. �He hasn�t any mind, so he can�t know it,� she said. �He waits for what somebody tells him to do. He never does anything he wants to do himself�because he doesn�t know what he wants. He�s a perfect baby.� Gerald looked at Halliday for some moments, watching the soft, rather degenerate face of the young man. Its very softness was an attraction; it was a soft, warm, corrupt nature, into which one might plunge with gratification. �But he has no hold over you, has he?� Gerald asked. �You see he _made_ me go and live with him, when I didn�t want to,� she replied. �He came and cried to me, tears, you never saw so many, saying _he couldn�t_ bear it unless I went back to him. And he wouldn�t go away, he would have stayed for ever. He made me go back. Then every time he behaves in this fashion. And now I�m going to have a baby, he wants to give me a hundred pounds and send me into the country, so that he would never see me nor hear of me again. But I�m not going to do it, after�� A queer look came over Gerald�s face. �Are you going to have a child?� he asked incredulous. It seemed, to look at her, impossible, she was so young and so far in spirit from any childbearing. She looked full into his face, and her dark, inchoate eyes had now a furtive look, and a look of a knowledge of evil, dark and indomitable. A flame ran secretly to his heart. �Yes,� she said. �Isn�t it beastly?� �Don�t you want it?� he asked. �I don�t,� she replied emphatically. �But�� he said, �how long have you known?� �Ten weeks,� she said. All the time she kept her dark, inchoate eyes full upon him. He remained silent, thinking. Then, switching off and becoming cold, he asked, in a voice full of considerate kindness: �Is there anything we can eat here? Is there anything you would like?� �Yes,� she said, �I should adore some oysters.� �All right,� he said. �We�ll have oysters.� And he beckoned to the waiter. Halliday took no notice, until the little plate was set before her. Then suddenly he cried: �Pussum, you can�t eat oysters when you�re drinking brandy.� �What has it go to do with you?� she asked. �Nothing, nothing,� he cried. �But you can�t eat oysters when you�re drinking brandy.� �I�m not drinking brandy,� she replied, and she sprinkled the last drops of her liqueur over his face. He gave an odd squeal. She sat looking at him, as if indifferent. �Pussum, why do you do that?� he cried in panic. He gave Gerald the impression that he was terrified of her, and that he loved his terror. He seemed to relish his own horror and hatred of her, turn it over and extract every flavour from it, in real panic. Gerald thought him a strange fool, and yet piquant. �But Pussum,� said another man, in a very small, quick Eton voice, �you promised not to hurt him.� �I haven�t hurt him,� she answered. �What will you drink?� the young man asked. He was dark, and smooth-skinned, and full of a stealthy vigour. �I don�t like porter, Maxim,� she replied. �You must ask for champagne,� came the whispering, gentlemanly voice of the other. Gerald suddenly realised that this was a hint to him. �Shall we have champagne?� he asked, laughing. �Yes please, dwy,� she lisped childishly. Gerald watched her eating the oysters. She was delicate and finicking in her eating, her fingers were fine and seemed very sensitive in the tips, so she put her food apart with fine, small motions, she ate carefully, delicately. It pleased him very much to see her, and it irritated Birkin. They were all drinking champagne. Maxim, the prim young Russian with the smooth, warm-coloured face and black, oiled hair was the only one who seemed to be perfectly calm and sober. Birkin was white and abstract, unnatural, Gerald was smiling with a constant bright, amused, cold light in his eyes, leaning a little protectively towards the Pussum, who was very handsome, and soft, unfolded like some red lotus in dreadful flowering nakedness, vainglorious now, flushed with wine and with the excitement of men. Halliday looked foolish. One glass of wine was enough to make him drunk and giggling. Yet there was always a pleasant, warm naïveté about him, that made him attractive. �I�m not afwaid of anything except black-beetles,� said the Pussum, looking up suddenly and staring with her black eyes, on which there seemed an unseeing film of flame, fully upon Gerald. He laughed dangerously, from the blood. Her childish speech caressed his nerves, and her burning, filmed eyes, turned now full upon him, oblivious of all her antecedents, gave him a sort of licence. �I�m not,� she protested. �I�m not afraid of other things. But black-beetles�ugh!� she shuddered convulsively, as if the very thought were too much to bear. �Do you mean,� said Gerald, with the punctiliousness of a man who has been drinking, �that you are afraid of the sight of a black-beetle, or you are afraid of a black-beetle biting you, or doing you some harm?� �Do they bite?� cried the girl. �How perfectly loathsome!� exclaimed Halliday. �I don�t know,� replied Gerald, looking round the table. �Do black-beetles bite? But that isn�t the point. Are you afraid of their biting, or is it a metaphysical antipathy?� The girl was looking full upon him all the time with inchoate eyes. �Oh, I think they�re beastly, they�re horrid,� she cried. �If I see one, it gives me the creeps all over. If one were to crawl on me, I�m _sure_ I should die�I�m sure I should.� �I hope not,� whispered the young Russian. �I�m sure I should, Maxim,� she asseverated. �Then one won�t crawl on you,� said Gerald, smiling and knowing. In some strange way he understood her. �It�s metaphysical, as Gerald says,� Birkin stated. There was a little pause of uneasiness. �And are you afraid of nothing else, Pussum?� asked the young Russian, in his quick, hushed, elegant manner. �Not weally,� she said. �I am afwaid of some things, but not weally the same. I�m not afwaid of _blood_.� �Not afwaid of blood!� exclaimed a young man with a thick, pale, jeering face, who had just come to the table and was drinking whisky. The Pussum turned on him a sulky look of dislike, low and ugly. �Aren�t you really afraid of blud?� the other persisted, a sneer all over his face. �No, I�m not,� she retorted. �Why, have you ever seen blood, except in a dentist�s spittoon?� jeered the young man. �I wasn�t speaking to you,� she replied rather superbly. �You can answer me, can�t you?� he said. For reply, she suddenly jabbed a knife across his thick, pale hand. He started up with a vulgar curse. �Show�s what you are,� said the Pussum in contempt. �Curse you,� said the young man, standing by the table and looking down at her with acrid malevolence. �Stop that,� said Gerald, in quick, instinctive command. The young man stood looking down at her with sardonic contempt, a cowed, self-conscious look on his thick, pale face. The blood began to flow from his hand. �Oh, how horrible, take it away!� squealed Halliday, turning green and averting his face. �D�you feel ill?� asked the sardonic young man, in some concern. �Do you feel ill, Julius? Garn, it�s nothing, man, don�t give her the pleasure of letting her think she�s performed a feat�don�t give her the satisfaction, man�it�s just what she wants.� �Oh!� squealed Halliday. �He�s going to cat, Maxim,� said the Pussum warningly. The suave young Russian rose and took Halliday by the arm, leading him away. Birkin, white and diminished, looked on as if he were displeased. The wounded, sardonic young man moved away, ignoring his bleeding hand in the most conspicuous fashion. �He�s an awful coward, really,� said the Pussum to Gerald. �He�s got such an influence over Julius.� �Who is he?� asked Gerald. �He�s a Jew, really. I can�t bear him.� �Well, he�s quite unimportant. But what�s wrong with Halliday?� �Julius�s the most awful coward you�ve ever seen,� she cried. �He always faints if I lift a knife�he�s tewwified of me.� �H�m!� said Gerald. �They�re all afwaid of me,� she said. �Only the Jew thinks he�s going to show his courage. But he�s the biggest coward of them all, really, because he�s afwaid what people will think about him�and Julius doesn�t care about that.� �They�ve a lot of valour between them,� said Gerald good-humouredly. The Pussum looked at him with a slow, slow smile. She was very handsome, flushed, and confident in dreadful knowledge. Two little points of light glinted on Gerald�s eyes. �Why do they call you Pussum, because you�re like a cat?� he asked her. �I expect so,� she said. The smile grew more intense on his face. �You are, rather; or a young, female panther.� �Oh God, Gerald!� said Birkin, in some disgust. They both looked uneasily at Birkin. �You�re silent tonight, Wupert,� she said to him, with a slight insolence, being safe with the other man. Halliday was coming back, looking forlorn and sick. �Pussum,� he said, �I wish you wouldn�t do these things�Oh!� He sank in his chair with a groan. �You�d better go home,� she said to him. �I _will_ go home,� he said. �But won�t you all come along. Won�t you come round to the flat?� he said to Gerald. �I should be so glad if you would. Do�that�ll be splendid. I say?� He looked round for a waiter. �Get me a taxi.� Then he groaned again. �Oh I do feel�perfectly ghastly! Pussum, you see what you do to me.� �Then why are you such an idiot?� she said with sullen calm. �But I�m not an idiot! Oh, how awful! Do come, everybody, it will be so splendid. Pussum, you are coming. What? Oh but you _must_ come, yes, you must. What? Oh, my dear girl, don�t make a fuss now, I feel perfectly�Oh, it�s so ghastly�Ho!�er! Oh!� �You know you can�t drink,� she said to him, coldly. �I tell you it isn�t drink�it�s your disgusting behaviour, Pussum, it�s nothing else. Oh, how awful! Libidnikov, do let us go.� �He�s only drunk one glass�only one glass,� came the rapid, hushed voice of the young Russian. They all moved off to the door. The girl kept near to Gerald, and seemed to be at one in her motion with him. He was aware of this, and filled with demon-satisfaction that his motion held good for two. He held her in the hollow of his will, and she was soft, secret, invisible in her stirring there. They crowded five of them into the taxi-cab. Halliday lurched in first, and dropped into his seat against the other window. Then the Pussum took her place, and Gerald sat next to her. They heard the young Russian giving orders to the driver, then they were all seated in the dark, crowded close together, Halliday groaning and leaning out of the window. They felt the swift, muffled motion of the car. The Pussum sat near to Gerald, and she seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness, and concentrated at the base of his spine like a fearful source of power. Meanwhile her voice sounded out reedy and nonchalant, as she talked indifferently with Birkin and with Maxim. Between her and Gerald was this silence and this black, electric comprehension in the darkness. Then she found his hand, and grasped it in her own firm, small clasp. It was so utterly dark, and yet such a naked statement, that rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain, he was no longer responsible. Still her voice rang on like a bell, tinged with a tone of mockery. And as she swung her head, her fine mane of hair just swept his face, and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity. But the great centre of his force held steady, a magnificent pride to him, at the base of his spine. They arrived at a large block of buildings, went up in a lift, and presently a door was being opened for them by a Hindu. Gerald looked in surprise, wondering if he were a gentleman, one of the Hindus down from Oxford, perhaps. But no, he was the man-servant. �Make tea, Hasan,� said Halliday. �There is a room for me?� said Birkin. To both of which questions the man grinned, and murmured. He made Gerald uncertain, because, being tall and slender and reticent, he looked like a gentleman. �Who is your servant?� he asked of Halliday. �He looks a swell.� �Oh yes�that�s because he�s dressed in another man�s clothes. He�s anything but a swell, really. We found him in the road, starving. So I took him here, and another man gave him clothes. He�s anything but what he seems to be�his only advantage is that he can�t speak English and can�t understand it, so he�s perfectly safe.� �He�s very dirty,� said the young Russian swiftly and silently. Directly, the man appeared in the doorway. �What is it?� said Halliday. The Hindu grinned, and murmured shyly: �Want to speak to master.� Gerald watched curiously. The fellow in the doorway was goodlooking and clean-limbed, his bearing was calm, he looked elegant, aristocratic. Yet he was half a savage, grinning foolishly. Halliday went out into the corridor to speak with him. �What?� they heard his voice. �What? What do you say? Tell me again. What? Want money? Want _more_ money? But what do you want money for?� There was the confused sound of the Hindu�s talking, then Halliday appeared in the room, smiling also foolishly, and saying: �He says he wants money to buy underclothing. Can anybody lend me a shilling? Oh thanks, a shilling will do to buy all the underclothes he wants.� He took the money from Gerald and went out into the passage again, where they heard him saying, �You can�t want more money, you had three and six yesterday. You mustn�t ask for any more. Bring the tea in quickly.� Gerald looked round the room. It was an ordinary London sitting-room in a flat, evidently taken furnished, rather common and ugly. But there were several negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing, the carved negroes looked almost like the f�tus of a human being. One was a woman sitting naked in a strange posture, and looking tortured, her abdomen stuck out. The young Russian explained that she was sitting in child-birth, clutching the ends of the band that hung from her neck, one in each hand, so that she could bear down, and help labour. The strange, transfixed, rudimentary face of the woman again reminded Gerald of a f�tus, it was also rather wonderful, conveying the suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond the limits of mental consciousness. �Aren�t they rather obscene?� he asked, disapproving. �I don�t know,� murmured the other rapidly. �I have never defined the obscene. I think they are very good.� Gerald turned away. There were one or two new pictures in the room, in the Futurist manner; there was a large piano. And these, with some ordinary London lodging-house furniture of the better sort, completed the whole. The Pussum had taken off her hat and coat, and was seated on the sofa. She was evidently quite at home in the house, but uncertain, suspended. She did not quite know her position. Her alliance for the time being was with Gerald, and she did not know how far this was admitted by any of the men. She was considering how she should carry off the situation. She was determined to have her experience. Now, at this eleventh hour, she was not to be baulked. Her face was flushed as with battle, her eye was brooding but inevitable. The man came in with tea and a bottle of Kümmel. He set the tray on a little table before the couch. �Pussum,� said Halliday, �pour out the tea.� She did not move. �Won�t you do it?� Halliday repeated, in a state of nervous apprehension. �I�ve not come back here as it was before,� she said. �I only came because the others wanted me to, not for your sake.� �My dear Pussum, you know you are your own mistress. I don�t want you to do anything but use the flat for your own convenience�you know it, I�ve told you so many times.� She did not reply, but silently, reservedly reached for the tea-pot. They all sat round and drank tea. Gerald could feel the electric connection between him and her so strongly, as she sat there quiet and withheld, that another set of conditions altogether had come to pass. Her silence and her immutability perplexed him. _How_ was he going to come to her? And yet he felt it quite inevitable. He trusted completely to the current that held them. His perplexity was only superficial, new conditions reigned, the old were surpassed; here one did as one was possessed to do, no matter what it was. Birkin rose. It was nearly one o�clock. �I�m going to bed,� he said. �Gerald, I�ll ring you up in the morning at your place or you ring me up here.� �Right,� said Gerald, and Birkin went out. When he was well gone, Halliday said in a stimulated voice, to Gerald: �I say, won�t you stay here�oh do!� �You can�t put everybody up,� said Gerald. �Oh but I can, perfectly�there are three more beds besides mine�do stay, won�t you. Everything is quite ready�there is always somebody here�I always put people up�I love having the house crowded.� �But there are only two rooms,� said the Pussum, in a cold, hostile voice, �now Rupert�s here.� �I know there are only two rooms,� said Halliday, in his odd, high way of speaking. �But what does that matter?� He was smiling rather foolishly, and he spoke eagerly, with an insinuating determination. �Julius and I will share one room,� said the Russian in his discreet, precise voice. Halliday and he were friends since Eton. �It�s very simple,� said Gerald, rising and pressing back his arms, stretching himself. Then he went again to look at one of the pictures. Every one of his limbs was turgid with electric force, and his back was tense like a tiger�s, with slumbering fire. He was very proud. The Pussum rose. She gave a black look at Halliday, black and deadly, which brought the rather foolishly pleased smile to that young man�s face. Then she went out of the room, with a cold good-night to them all generally. There was a brief interval, they heard a door close, then Maxim said, in his refined voice: �That�s all right.� He looked significantly at Gerald, and said again, with a silent nod: �That�s all right�you�re all right.� Gerald looked at the smooth, ruddy, comely face, and at the strange, significant eyes, and it seemed as if the voice of the young Russian, so small and perfect, sounded in the blood rather than in the air. �_I�m_ all right then,� said Gerald. �Yes! Yes! You�re all right,� said the Russian. Halliday continued to smile, and to say nothing. Suddenly the Pussum appeared again in the door, her small, childish face looking sullen and vindictive. �I know you want to catch me out,� came her cold, rather resonant voice. �But I don�t care, I don�t care how much you catch me out.� She turned and was gone again. She had been wearing a loose dressing-gown of purple silk, tied round her waist. She looked so small and childish and vulnerable, almost pitiful. And yet the black looks of her eyes made Gerald feel drowned in some potent darkness that almost frightened him. The men lit another cigarette and talked casually. CHAPTER VII. FETISH In the morning Gerald woke late. He had slept heavily. Pussum was still asleep, sleeping childishly and pathetically. There was something small and curled up and defenceless about her, that roused an unsatisfied flame of passion in the young man�s blood, a devouring avid pity. He looked at her again. But it would be too cruel to wake her. He subdued himself, and went away. Hearing voices coming from the sitting-room, Halliday talking to Libidnikov, he went to the door and glanced in. He had on a silk wrap of a beautiful bluish colour, with an amethyst hem. To his surprise he saw the two young men by the fire, stark naked. Halliday looked up, rather pleased. �Good-morning,� he said. �Oh�did you want towels?� And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a strange, white figure between the unliving furniture. He came back with the towels, and took his former position, crouching seated before the fire on the fender. �Don�t you love to feel the fire on your skin?� he said. �It _is_ rather pleasant,� said Gerald. �How perfectly splendid it must be to be in a climate where one could do without clothing altogether,� said Halliday. �Yes,� said Gerald, �if there weren�t so many things that sting and bite.� �That�s a disadvantage,� murmured Maxim. Gerald looked at him, and with a slight revulsion saw the human animal, golden skinned and bare, somehow humiliating. Halliday was different. He had a rather heavy, slack, broken beauty, white and firm. He was like a Christ in a Pietà. The animal was not there at all, only the heavy, broken beauty. And Gerald realised how Halliday�s eyes were beautiful too, so blue and warm and confused, broken also in their expression. The fireglow fell on his heavy, rather bowed shoulders, he sat slackly crouched on the fender, his face was uplifted, weak, perhaps slightly disintegrate, and yet with a moving beauty of its own. �Of course,� said Maxim, �you�ve been in hot countries where the people go about naked.� �Oh really!� exclaimed Halliday. �Where?� �South America�Amazon,� said Gerald. �Oh but how perfectly splendid! It�s one of the things I want most to do�to live from day to day without _ever_ putting on any sort of clothing whatever. If I could do that, I should feel I had lived.� �But why?� said Gerald. �I can�t see that it makes so much difference.� �Oh, I think it would be perfectly splendid. I�m sure life would be entirely another thing�entirely different, and perfectly wonderful.� �But why?� asked Gerald. �Why should it?� �Oh�one would _feel_ things instead of merely looking at them. I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I�m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual�we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I�m sure that is entirely wrong.� �Yes, that is true, that is true,� said the Russian. Gerald glanced at him, and saw him, his suave, golden coloured body with the black hair growing fine and freely, like tendrils, and his limbs like smooth plant-stems. He was so healthy and well-made, why did he make one ashamed, why did one feel repelled? Why should Gerald even dislike it, why did it seem to him to detract from his own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So uninspired! thought Gerald. Birkin suddenly appeared in the doorway, in white pyjamas and wet hair, and a towel over his arm. He was aloof and white, and somehow evanescent. �There�s the bath-room now, if you want it,� he said generally, and was going away again, when Gerald called: �I say, Rupert!� �What?� The single white figure appeared again, a presence in the room. �What do you think of that figure there? I want to know,� Gerald asked. Birkin, white and strangely ghostly, went over to the carved figure of the negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched in a strange, clutching posture, her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast. �It is art,� said Birkin. �Very beautiful, it�s very beautiful,� said the Russian. They all drew near to look. Gerald looked at the group of men, the Russian golden and like a water-plant, Halliday tall and heavily, brokenly beautiful, Birkin very white and indefinite, not to be assigned, as he looked closely at the carven woman. Strangely elated, Gerald also lifted his eyes to the face of the wooden figure. And his heart contracted. He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew her. �Why is it art?� Gerald asked, shocked, resentful. �It conveys a complete truth,� said Birkin. �It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.� �But you can�t call it _high_ art,� said Gerald. �High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.� �What culture?� Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing. �Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate _physical_ consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.� But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing. �You like the wrong things, Rupert,� he said, �things against yourself.� �Oh, I know, this isn�t everything,� Birkin replied, moving away. When Gerald went back to his room from the bath, he also carried his clothes. He was so conventional at home, that when he was really away, and on the loose, as now, he enjoyed nothing so much as full outrageousness. So he strode with his blue silk wrap over his arm and felt defiant. The Pussum lay in her bed, motionless, her round, dark eyes like black, unhappy pools. He could only see the black, bottomless pools of her eyes. Perhaps she suffered. The sensation of her inchoate suffering roused the old sharp flame in him, a mordant pity, a passion almost of cruelty. �You are awake now,� he said to her. �What time is it?� came her muted voice. She seemed to flow back, almost like liquid, from his approach, to sink helplessly away from him. Her inchoate look of a violated slave, whose fulfilment lies in her further and further violation, made his nerves quiver with acutely desirable sensation. After all, his was the only will, she was the passive substance of his will. He tingled with the subtle, biting sensation. And then he knew, he must go away from her, there must be pure separation between them. It was a quiet and ordinary breakfast, the four men all looking very clean and bathed. Gerald and the Russian were both correct and _comme il faut_ in appearance and manner, Birkin was gaunt and sick, and looked a failure in his attempt to be a properly dressed man, like Gerald and Maxim. Halliday wore tweeds and a green flannel shirt, and a rag of a tie, which was just right for him. The Hindu brought in a great deal of soft toast, and looked exactly the same as he had looked the night before, statically the same. At the end of the breakfast the Pussum appeared, in a purple silk wrap with a shimmering sash. She had recovered herself somewhat, but was mute and lifeless still. It was a torment to her when anybody spoke to her. Her face was like a small, fine mask, sinister too, masked with unwilling suffering. It was almost midday. Gerald rose and went away to his business, glad to get out. But he had not finished. He was coming back again at evening, they were all dining together, and he had booked seats for the party, excepting Birkin, at a music-hall. At night they came back to the flat very late again, again flushed with drink. Again the man-servant�who invariably disappeared between the hours of ten and twelve at night�came in silently and inscrutably with tea, bending in a slow, strange, leopard-like fashion to put the tray softly on the table. His face was immutable, aristocratic-looking, tinged slightly with grey under the skin; he was young and good-looking. But Birkin felt a slight sickness, looking at him, and feeling the slight greyness as an ash or a corruption, in the aristocratic inscrutability of expression a nauseating, bestial stupidity. Again they talked cordially and rousedly together. But already a certain friability was coming over the party, Birkin was mad with irritation, Halliday was turning in an insane hatred against Gerald, the Pussum was becoming hard and cold, like a flint knife, and Halliday was laying himself out to her. And her intention, ultimately, was to capture Halliday, to have complete power over him. In the morning they all stalked and lounged about again. But Gerald could feel a strange hostility to himself, in the air. It roused his obstinacy, and he stood up against it. He hung on for two more days. The result was a nasty and insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening. Halliday turned with absurd animosity upon Gerald, in the café. There was a row. Gerald was on the point of knocking-in Halliday�s face; when he was filled with sudden disgust and indifference, and he went away, leaving Halliday in a foolish state of gloating triumph, the Pussum hard and established, and Maxim standing clear. Birkin was absent, he had gone out of town again. Gerald was piqued because he had left without giving the Pussum money. It was true, she did not care whether he gave her money or not, and he knew it. But she would have been glad of ten pounds, and he would have been _very_ glad to give them to her. Now he felt in a false position. He went away chewing his lips to get at the ends of his short clipped moustache. He knew the Pussum was merely glad to be rid of him. She had got her Halliday whom she wanted. She wanted him completely in her power. Then she would marry him. She wanted to marry him. She had set her will on marrying Halliday. She never wanted to hear of Gerald again; unless, perhaps, she were in difficulty; because after all, Gerald was what she called a man, and these others, Halliday, Libidnikov, Birkin, the whole Bohemian set, they were only half men. But it was half men she could deal with. She felt sure of herself with them. The real men, like Gerald, put her in her place too much. Still, she respected Gerald, she really respected him. She had managed to get his address, so that she could appeal to him in time of distress. She knew he wanted to give her money. She would perhaps write to him on that inevitable rainy day. CHAPTER VIII. BREADALBY Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. In front, it looked over a lawn, over a few trees, down to a string of fish-ponds in the hollow of the silent park. At the back were trees, among which were to be found the stables, and the big kitchen garden, behind which was a wood. It was a very quiet place, some miles from the high-road, back from the Derwent Valley, outside the show scenery. Silent and forsaken, the golden stucco showed between the trees, the house-front looked down the park, unchanged and unchanging. Of late, however, Hermione had lived a good deal at the house. She had turned away from London, away from Oxford, towards the silence of the country. Her father was mostly absent, abroad, she was either alone in the house, with her visitors, of whom there were always several, or she had with her her brother, a bachelor, and a Liberal member of Parliament. He always came down when the House was not sitting, seemed always to be present in Breadalby, although he was most conscientious in his attendance to duty. The summer was just coming in when Ursula and Gudrun went to stay the second time with Hermione. Coming along in the car, after they had entered the park, they looked across the dip, where the fish-ponds lay in silence, at the pillared front of the house, sunny and small like an English drawing of the old school, on the brow of the green hill, against the trees. There were small figures on the green lawn, women in lavender and yellow moving to the shade of the enormous, beautifully balanced cedar tree. �Isn�t it complete!� said Gudrun. �It is as final as an old aquatint.� She spoke with some resentment in her voice, as if she were captivated unwillingly, as if she must admire against her will. �Do you love it?� asked Ursula. �I don�t _love_ it, but in its way, I think it is quite complete.� The motor-car ran down the hill and up again in one breath, and they were curving to the side door. A parlour-maid appeared, and then Hermione, coming forward with her pale face lifted, and her hands outstretched, advancing straight to the newcomers, her voice singing: �Here you are�I�m so glad to see you�� she kissed Gudrun��so glad to see you�� she kissed Ursula and remained with her arm round her. �Are you very tired?� �Not at all tired,� said Ursula. �Are you tired, Gudrun?� �Not at all, thanks,� said Gudrun. �No�� drawled Hermione. And she stood and looked at them. The two girls were embarrassed because she would not move into the house, but must have her little scene of welcome there on the path. The servants waited. �Come in,� said Hermione at last, having fully taken in the pair of them. Gudrun was the more beautiful and attractive, she had decided again, Ursula was more physical, more womanly. She admired Gudrun�s dress more. It was of green poplin, with a loose coat above it, of broad, dark-green and dark-brown stripes. The hat was of a pale, greenish straw, the colour of new hay, and it had a plaited ribbon of black and orange, the stockings were dark green, the shoes black. It was a good get-up, at once fashionable and individual. Ursula, in dark blue, was more ordinary, though she also looked well. Hermione herself wore a dress of prune-coloured silk, with coral beads and coral coloured stockings. But her dress was both shabby and soiled, even rather dirty. �You would like to see your rooms now, wouldn�t you! Yes. We will go up now, shall we?� Ursula was glad when she could be left alone in her room. Hermione lingered so long, made such a stress on one. She stood so near to one, pressing herself near upon one, in a way that was most embarrassing and oppressive. She seemed to hinder one�s workings. Lunch was served on the lawn, under the great tree, whose thick, blackish boughs came down close to the grass. There were present a young Italian woman, slight and fashionable, a young, athletic-looking Miss Bradley, a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh, horse-laugh, there was Rupert Birkin, and then a woman secretary, a Fräulein März, young and slim and pretty. The food was very good, that was one thing. Gudrun, critical of everything, gave it her full approval. Ursula loved the situation, the white table by the cedar tree, the scent of new sunshine, the little vision of the leafy park, with far-off deer feeding peacefully. There seemed a magic circle drawn about the place, shutting out the present, enclosing the delightful, precious past, trees and deer and silence, like a dream. But in spirit she was unhappy. The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was only emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the elderly sociologist, whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient, seemed to be thoroughly happy. Birkin was down in the mouth. Hermione appeared, with amazing persistence, to wish to ridicule him and make him look ignominious in the eyes of everybody. And it was surprising how she seemed to succeed, how helpless he seemed against her. He looked completely insignificant. Ursula and Gudrun, both very unused, were mostly silent, listening to the slow, rhapsodic sing-song of Hermione, or the verbal sallies of Sir Joshua, or the prattle of Fräulein, or the responses of the other two women. Luncheon was over, coffee was brought out on the grass, the party left the table and sat about in lounge chairs, in the shade or in the sunshine as they wished. Fräulein departed into the house, Hermione took up her embroidery, the little Contessa took a book, Miss Bradley was weaving a basket out of fine grass, and there they all were on the lawn in the early summer afternoon, working leisurely and spattering with half-intellectual, deliberate talk. Suddenly there was the sound of the brakes and the shutting off of a motor-car. �There�s Salsie!� sang Hermione, in her slow, amusing sing-song. And laying down her work, she rose slowly, and slowly passed over the lawn, round the bushes, out of sight. �Who is it?� asked Gudrun. �Mr Roddice�Miss Roddice�s brother�at least, I suppose it�s he,� said Sir Joshua. �Salsie, yes, it is her brother,� said the little Contessa, lifting her head for a moment from her book, and speaking as if to give information, in her slightly deepened, guttural English. They all waited. And then round the bushes came the tall form of Alexander Roddice, striding romantically like a Meredith hero who remembers Disraeli. He was cordial with everybody, he was at once a host, with an easy, offhand hospitality that he had learned for Hermione�s friends. He had just come down from London, from the House. At once the atmosphere of the House of Commons made itself felt over the lawn: the Home Secretary had said such and such a thing, and he, Roddice, on the other hand, thought such and such a thing, and had said so-and-so to the PM. Now Hermione came round the bushes with Gerald Crich. He had come along with Alexander. Gerald was presented to everybody, was kept by Hermione for a few moments in full view, then he was led away, still by Hermione. He was evidently her guest of the moment. There had been a split in the Cabinet; the minister for Education had resigned owing to adverse criticism. This started a conversation on education. �Of course,� said Hermione, lifting her face like a rhapsodist, �there _can_ be no reason, no _excuse_ for education, except the joy and beauty of knowledge in itself.� She seemed to rumble and ruminate with subterranean thoughts for a minute, then she proceeded: �Vocational education _isn�t_ education, it is the close of education.� Gerald, on the brink of discussion, sniffed the air with delight and prepared for action. �Not necessarily,� he said. �But isn�t education really like gymnastics, isn�t the end of education the production of a well-trained, vigorous, energetic mind?� �Just as athletics produce a healthy body, ready for anything,� cried Miss Bradley, in hearty accord. Gudrun looked at her in silent loathing. �Well�� rumbled Hermione, �I don�t know. To me the pleasure of knowing is so great, so _wonderful_�nothing has meant so much to me in all life, as certain knowledge�no, I am sure�nothing.� �What knowledge, for example, Hermione?� asked Alexander. Hermione lifted her face and rumbled� �M�m�m�I don�t know . . . But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so _uplifted_, so _unbounded_ . . .� Birkin looked at her in a white fury. �What do you want to feel unbounded for?� he said sarcastically. �You don�t want to _be_ unbounded.� Hermione recoiled in offence. �Yes, but one does have that limitless feeling,� said Gerald. �It�s like getting on top of the mountain and seeing the Pacific.� �Silent upon a peak in Dariayn,� murmured the Italian, lifting her face for a moment from her book. �Not necessarily in Dariayn,� said Gerald, while Ursula began to laugh. Hermione waited for the dust to settle, and then she said, untouched: �Yes, it is the greatest thing in life�_to know_. It is really to be happy, to be _free_.� �Knowledge is, of course, liberty,� said Mattheson. �In compressed tabloids,� said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff little body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologist as a flat bottle, containing tabloids of compressed liberty. That pleased her. Sir Joshua was labelled and placed forever in her mind. �What does that mean, Rupert?� sang Hermione, in a calm snub. �You can only have knowledge, strictly,� he replied, �of things concluded, in the past. It�s like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.� �_Can_ one have knowledge only of the past?� asked the Baronet, pointedly. �Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for instance, knowledge of the past?� �Yes,� said Birkin. �There is a most beautiful thing in my book,� suddenly piped the little Italian woman. �It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes down the street.� There was a general laugh in the company. Miss Bradley went and looked over the shoulder of the Contessa. �See!� said the Contessa. �Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street,� she read. Again there was a loud laugh, the most startling of which was the Baronet�s, which rattled out like a clatter of falling stones. �What is the book?� asked Alexander, promptly. �Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev,� said the little foreigner, pronouncing every syllable distinctly. She looked at the cover, to verify herself. �An old American edition,� said Birkin. �Ha!�of course�translated from the French,� said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. �_Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue._� He looked brightly round the company. �I wonder what the �hurriedly� was,� said Ursula. They all began to guess. And then, to the amazement of everybody, the maid came hurrying with a large tea-tray. The afternoon had passed so swiftly. After tea, they were all gathered for a walk. �Would you like to come for a walk?� said Hermione to each of them, one by one. And they all said yes, feeling somehow like prisoners marshalled for exercise. Birkin only refused. �Will you come for a walk, Rupert?� �No, Hermione.� �But are you _sure?_� �Quite sure.� There was a second�s hesitation. �And why not?� sang Hermione�s question. It made her blood run sharp, to be thwarted in even so trifling a matter. She intended them all to walk with her in the park. �Because I don�t like trooping off in a gang,� he said. Her voice rumbled in her throat for a moment. Then she said, with a curious stray calm: �Then we�ll leave a little boy behind, if he�s sulky.� And she looked really gay, while she insulted him. But it merely made him stiff. She trailed off to the rest of the company, only turning to wave her handkerchief to him, and to chuckle with laughter, singing out: �Good-bye, good-bye, little boy.� �Good-bye, impudent hag,� he said to himself. They all went through the park. Hermione wanted to show them the wild daffodils on a little slope. �This way, this way,� sang her leisurely voice at intervals. And they had all to come this way. The daffodils were pretty, but who could see them? Ursula was stiff all over with resentment by this time, resentment of the whole atmosphere. Gudrun, mocking and objective, watched and registered everything. They looked at the shy deer, and Hermione talked to the stag, as if he too were a boy she wanted to wheedle and fondle. He was male, so she must exert some kind of power over him. They trailed home by the fish-ponds, and Hermione told them about the quarrel of two male swans, who had striven for the love of the one lady. She chuckled and laughed as she told how the ousted lover had sat with his head buried under his wing, on the gravel. When they arrived back at the house, Hermione stood on the lawn and sang out, in a strange, small, high voice that carried very far: �Rupert! Rupert!� The first syllable was high and slow, the second dropped down. �Roo-o-opert.� But there was no answer. A maid appeared. �Where is Mr Birkin, Alice?� asked the mild straying voice of Hermione. But under the straying voice, what a persistent, almost insane _will!_ �I think he�s in his room, madam.� �Is he?� Hermione went slowly up the stairs, along the corridor, singing out in her high, small call: �Ru-oo-pert! Ru-oo pert!� She came to his door, and tapped, still crying: �Roo-pert.� �Yes,� sounded his voice at last. �What are you doing?� The question was mild and curious. There was no answer. Then he opened the door. �We�ve come back,� said Hermione. �The daffodils are _so_ beautiful.� �Yes,� he said, �I�ve seen them.� She looked at him with her long, slow, impassive look, along her cheeks. �Have you?� she echoed. And she remained looking at him. She was stimulated above all things by this conflict with him, when he was like a sulky boy, helpless, and she had him safe at Breadalby. But underneath she knew the split was coming, and her hatred of him was subconscious and intense. �What were you doing?� she reiterated, in her mild, indifferent tone. He did not answer, and she made her way, almost unconsciously into his room. He had taken a Chinese drawing of geese from the boudoir, and was copying it, with much skill and vividness. �You are copying the drawing,� she said, standing near the table, and looking down at his work. �Yes. How beautifully you do it! You like it very much, don�t you?� �It�s a marvellous drawing,� he said. �Is it? I�m so glad you like it, because I�ve always been fond of it. The Chinese Ambassador gave it me.� �I know,� he said. �But why do you copy it?� she asked, casual and sing-song. �Why not do something original?� �I want to know it,� he replied. �One gets more of China, copying this picture, than reading all the books.� �And what do you get?� She was at once roused, she laid as it were violent hands on him, to extract his secrets from him. She _must_ know. It was a dreadful tyranny, an obsession in her, to know all he knew. For some time he was silent, hating to answer her. Then, compelled, he began: �I know what centres they live from�what they perceive and feel�the hot, stinging centrality of a goose in the flux of cold water and mud�the curious bitter stinging heat of a goose�s blood, entering their own blood like an inoculation of corruptive fire�fire of the cold-burning mud�the lotus mystery.� Hermione looked at him along her narrow, pallid cheeks. Her eyes were strange and drugged, heavy under their heavy, drooping lids. Her thin bosom shrugged convulsively. He stared back at her, devilish and unchanging. With another strange, sick convulsion, she turned away, as if she were sick, could feel dissolution setting-in in her body. For with her mind she was unable to attend to his words, he caught her, as it were, beneath all her defences, and destroyed her with some insidious occult potency. �Yes,� she said, as if she did not know what she were saying. �Yes,� and she swallowed, and tried to regain her mind. But she could not, she was witless, decentralised. Use all her will as she might, she could not recover. She suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse, that has no presence, no connection. He remained hard and vindictive. Hermione came down to dinner strange and sepulchral, her eyes heavy and full of sepulchral darkness, strength. She had put on a dress of stiff old greenish brocade, that fitted tight and made her look tall and rather terrible, ghastly. In the gay light of the drawing-room she was uncanny and oppressive. But seated in the half-light of the dining-room, sitting stiffly before the shaded candles on the table, she seemed a power, a presence. She listened and attended with a drugged attention. The party was gay and extravagant in appearance, everybody had put on evening dress except Birkin and Joshua Mattheson. The little Italian Contessa wore a dress of tissue, of orange and gold and black velvet in soft wide stripes, Gudrun was emerald green with strange net-work, Ursula was in yellow with dull silver veiling, Miss Bradley was of grey, crimson and jet, Fräulein März wore pale blue. It gave Hermione a sudden convulsive sensation of pleasure, to see these rich colours under the candle-light. She was aware of the talk going on, ceaselessly, Joshua�s voice dominating; of the ceaseless pitter-patter of women�s light laughter and responses; of the brilliant colours and the white table and the shadow above and below; and she seemed in a swoon of gratification, convulsed with pleasure and yet sick, like a _revenant_. She took very little part in the conversation, yet she heard it all, it was all hers. They all went together into the drawing-room, as if they were one family, easily, without any attention to ceremony. Fräulein handed the coffee, everybody smoked cigarettes, or else long warden pipes of white clay, of which a sheaf was provided. �Will you smoke?�cigarettes or pipe?� asked Fräulein prettily. There was a circle of people, Sir Joshua with his eighteenth-century appearance, Gerald the amused, handsome young Englishman, Alexander tall and the handsome politician, democratic and lucid, Hermione strange like a long Cassandra, and the women lurid with colour, all dutifully smoking their long white pipes, and sitting in a half-moon in the comfortable, soft-lighted drawing-room, round the logs that flickered on the marble hearth. The talk was very often political or sociological, and interesting, curiously anarchistic. There was an accumulation of powerful force in the room, powerful and destructive. Everything seemed to be thrown into the melting pot, and it seemed to Ursula they were all witches, helping the pot to bubble. There was an elation and a satisfaction in it all, but it was cruelly exhausting for the newcomers, this ruthless mental pressure, this powerful, consuming, destructive mentality that emanated from Joshua and Hermione and Birkin and dominated the rest. But a sickness, a fearful nausea gathered possession of Hermione. There was a lull in the talk, as it was arrested by her unconscious but all-powerful will. �Salsie, won�t you play something?� said Hermione, breaking off completely. �Won�t somebody dance? Gudrun, you will dance, won�t you? I wish you would. _Anche tu, Palestra, ballerai?�sì, per piacere._ You too, Ursula.� Hermione rose and slowly pulled the gold-embroidered band that hung by the mantel, clinging to it for a moment, then releasing it suddenly. Like a priestess she looked, unconscious, sunk in a heavy half-trance. A servant came, and soon reappeared with armfuls of silk robes and shawls and scarves, mostly oriental, things that Hermione, with her love for beautiful extravagant dress, had collected gradually. �The three women will dance together,� she said. �What shall it be?� asked Alexander, rising briskly. �_Vergini Delle Rocchette_,� said the Contessa at once. �They are so languid,� said Ursula. �The three witches from Macbeth,� suggested Fräulein usefully. It was finally decided to do Naomi and Ruth and Orpah. Ursula was Naomi, Gudrun was Ruth, the Contessa was Orpah. The idea was to make a little ballet, in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky. The Contessa was ready first, Alexander went to the piano, a space was cleared. Orpah, in beautiful oriental clothes, began slowly to dance the death of her husband. Then Ruth came, and they wept together, and lamented, then Naomi came to comfort them. It was all done in dumb show, the women danced their emotion in gesture and motion. The little drama went on for a quarter of an hour. Ursula was beautiful as Naomi. All her men were dead, it remained to her only to stand alone in indomitable assertion, demanding nothing. Ruth, woman-loving, loved her. Orpah, a vivid, sensational, subtle widow, would go back to the former life, a repetition. The interplay between the women was real and rather frightening. It was strange to see how Gudrun clung with heavy, desperate passion to Ursula, yet smiled with subtle malevolence against her, how Ursula accepted silently, unable to provide any more either for herself or for the other, but dangerous and indomitable, refuting her grief. Hermione loved to watch. She could see the Contessa�s rapid, stoat-like sensationalism, Gudrun�s ultimate but treacherous cleaving to the woman in her sister, Ursula�s dangerous helplessness, as if she were helplessly weighted, and unreleased. �That was very beautiful,� everybody cried with one accord. But Hermione writhed in her soul, knowing what she could not know. She cried out for more dancing, and it was her will that set the Contessa and Birkin moving mockingly in Malbrouk. Gerald was excited by the desperate cleaving of Gudrun to Naomi. The essence of that female, subterranean recklessness and mockery penetrated his blood. He could not forget Gudrun�s lifted, offered, cleaving, reckless, yet withal mocking weight. And Birkin, watching like a hermit crab from its hole, had seen the brilliant frustration and helplessness of Ursula. She was rich, full of dangerous power. She was like a strange unconscious bud of powerful womanhood. He was unconsciously drawn to her. She was his future. Alexander played some Hungarian music, and they all danced, seized by the spirit. Gerald was marvellously exhilarated at finding himself in motion, moving towards Gudrun, dancing with feet that could not yet escape from the waltz and the two-step, but feeling his force stir along his limbs and his body, out of captivity. He did not know yet how to dance their convulsive, rag-time sort of dancing, but he knew how to begin. Birkin, when he could get free from the weight of the people present, whom he disliked, danced rapidly and with a real gaiety. And how Hermione hated him for this irresponsible gaiety. �Now I see,� cried the Contessa excitedly, watching his purely gay motion, which he had all to himself. �Mr Birkin, he is a changer.� Hermione looked at her slowly, and shuddered, knowing that only a foreigner could have seen and have said this. �_Cosa vuol�dire, Palestra?_� she asked, sing-song. �Look,� said the Contessa, in Italian. �He is not a man, he is a chameleon, a creature of change.� �He is not a man, he is treacherous, not one of us,� said itself over in Hermione�s consciousness. And her soul writhed in the black subjugation to him, because of his power to escape, to exist, other than she did, because he was not consistent, not a man, less than a man. She hated him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul. The house being full, Gerald was given the smaller room, really the dressing-room, communicating with Birkin�s bedroom. When they all took their candles and mounted the stairs, where the lamps were burning subduedly, Hermione captured Ursula and brought her into her own bedroom, to talk to her. A sort of constraint came over Ursula in the big, strange bedroom. Hermione seemed to be bearing down on her, awful and inchoate, making some appeal. They were looking at some Indian silk shirts, gorgeous and sensual in themselves, their shape, their almost corrupt gorgeousness. And Hermione came near, and her bosom writhed, and Ursula was for a moment blank with panic. And for a moment Hermione�s haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other, there was again a sort of crash, a crashing down. And Ursula picked up a shirt of rich red and blue silk, made for a young princess of fourteen, and was crying mechanically: �Isn�t it wonderful�who would dare to put those two strong colours together�� Then Hermione�s maid entered silently and Ursula, overcome with dread, escaped, carried away by powerful impulse. Birkin went straight to bed. He was feeling happy, and sleepy. Since he had danced he was happy. But Gerald would talk to him. Gerald, in evening dress, sat on Birkin�s bed when the other lay down, and must talk. �Who are those two Brangwens?� Gerald asked. �They live in Beldover.� �In Beldover! Who are they then?� �Teachers in the Grammar School.� There was a pause. �They are!� exclaimed Gerald at length. �I thought I had seen them before.� �It disappoints you?� said Birkin. �Disappoints me! No�but how is it Hermione has them here?� �She knew Gudrun in London�that�s the younger one, the one with the darker hair�she�s an artist�does sculpture and modelling.� �She�s not a teacher in the Grammar School, then�only the other?� �Both�Gudrun art mistress, Ursula a class mistress.� �And what�s the father?� �Handicraft instructor in the schools.� �Really!� �Class-barriers are breaking down!� Gerald was always uneasy under the slightly jeering tone of the other. �That their father is handicraft instructor in a school! What does it matter to me?� Birkin laughed. Gerald looked at his face, as it lay there laughing and bitter and indifferent on the pillow, and he could not go away. �I don�t suppose you will see very much more of Gudrun, at least. She is a restless bird, she�ll be gone in a week or two,� said Birkin. �Where will she go?� �London, Paris, Rome�heaven knows. I always expect her to sheer off to Damascus or San Francisco; she�s a bird of paradise. God knows what she�s got to do with Beldover. It goes by contraries, like dreams.� Gerald pondered for a few moments. �How do you know her so well?� he asked. �I knew her in London,� he replied, �in the Algernon Strange set. She�ll know about Pussum and Libidnikov and the rest�even if she doesn�t know them personally. She was never quite that set�more conventional, in a way. I�ve known her for two years, I suppose.� �And she makes money, apart from her teaching?� asked Gerald. �Some�irregularly. She can sell her models. She has a certain _réclame_.� �How much for?� �A guinea, ten guineas.� �And are they good? What are they?� �I think sometimes they are marvellously good. That is hers, those two wagtails in Hermione�s boudoir�you�ve seen them�they are carved in wood and painted.� �I thought it was savage carving again.� �No, hers. That�s what they are�animals and birds, sometimes odd small people in everyday dress, really rather wonderful when they come off. They have a sort of funniness that is quite unconscious and subtle.� �She might be a well-known artist one day?� mused Gerald. �She might. But I think she won�t. She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously�she must never be too serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won�t give herself away�she�s always on the defensive. That�s what I can�t stand about her type. By the way, how did things go off with Pussum after I left you? I haven�t heard anything.� �Oh, rather disgusting. Halliday turned objectionable, and I only just saved myself from jumping in his stomach, in a real old-fashioned row.� Birkin was silent. �Of course,� he said, �Julius is somewhat insane. On the one hand he�s had religious mania, and on the other, he is fascinated by obscenity. Either he is a pure servant, washing the feet of Christ, or else he is making obscene drawings of Jesus�action and reaction�and between the two, nothing. He is really insane. He wants a pure lily, another girl, with a baby face, on the one hand, and on the other, he _must_ have the Pussum, just to defile himself with her.� �That�s what I can�t make out,� said Gerald. �Does he love her, the Pussum, or doesn�t he?� �He neither does nor doesn�t. She is the harlot, the actual harlot of adultery to him. And he�s got a craving to throw himself into the filth of her. Then he gets up and calls on the name of the lily of purity, the baby-faced girl, and so enjoys himself all round. It�s the old story�action and reaction, and nothing between.� �I don�t know,� said Gerald, after a pause, �that he does insult the Pussum so very much. She strikes me as being rather foul.� �But I thought you liked her,� exclaimed Birkin. �I always felt fond of her. I never had anything to do with her, personally, that�s true.� �I liked her all right, for a couple of days,� said Gerald. �But a week of her would have turned me over. There�s a certain smell about the skin of those women, that in the end is sickening beyond words�even if you like it at first.� �I know,� said Birkin. Then he added, rather fretfully, �But go to bed, Gerald. God knows what time it is.� Gerald looked at his watch, and at length rose off the bed, and went to his room. But he returned in a few minutes, in his shirt. �One thing,� he said, seating himself on the bed again. �We finished up rather stormily, and I never had time to give her anything.� �Money?� said Birkin. �She�ll get what she wants from Halliday or from one of her acquaintances.� �But then,� said Gerald, �I�d rather give her her dues and settle the account.� �She doesn�t care.� �No, perhaps not. But one feels the account is left open, and one would rather it were closed.� �Would you?� said Birkin. He was looking at the white legs of Gerald, as the latter sat on the side of the bed in his shirt. They were white-skinned, full, muscular legs, handsome and decided. Yet they moved Birkin with a sort of pathos, tenderness, as if they were childish. �I think I�d rather close the account,� said Gerald, repeating himself vaguely. �It doesn�t matter one way or another,� said Birkin. �You always say it doesn�t matter,� said Gerald, a little puzzled, looking down at the face of the other man affectionately. �Neither does it,� said Birkin. �But she was a decent sort, really�� �Render unto Cæsarina the things that are Cæsarina�s,� said Birkin, turning aside. It seemed to him Gerald was talking for the sake of talking. �Go away, it wearies me�it�s too late at night,� he said. �I wish you�d tell me something that _did_ matter,� said Gerald, looking down all the time at the face of the other man, waiting for something. But Birkin turned his face aside. �All right then, go to sleep,� said Gerald, and he laid his hand affectionately on the other man�s shoulder, and went away. In the morning when Gerald awoke and heard Birkin move, he called out: �I still think I ought to give the Pussum ten pounds.� �Oh God!� said Birkin, �don�t be so matter-of-fact. Close the account in your own soul, if you like. It is there you can�t close it.� �How do you know I can�t?� �Knowing you.� Gerald meditated for some moments. �It seems to me the right thing to do, you know, with the Pussums, is to pay them.� �And the right thing for mistresses: keep them. And the right thing for wives: live under the same roof with them. _Integer vitae scelerisque purus_�� said Birkin. �There�s no need to be nasty about it,� said Gerald. �It bores me. I�m not interested in your peccadilloes.� �And I don�t care whether you are or not�I am.� The morning was again sunny. The maid had been in and brought the water, and had drawn the curtains. Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly out on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic, belonging to the past. He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were�the lovely accomplished past�this house, so still and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace. And then, what a snare and a delusion, this beauty of static things�what a horrible, dead prison Breadalby really was, what an intolerable confinement, the peace! Yet it was better than the sordid scrambling conflict of the present. If only one might create the future after one�s own heart�for a little pure truth, a little unflinching application of simple truth to life, the heart cried out ceaselessly. �I can�t see what you will leave me at all, to be interested in,� came Gerald�s voice from the lower room. �Neither the Pussums, nor the mines, nor anything else.� �You be interested in what you can, Gerald. Only I�m not interested myself,� said Birkin. �What am I to do at all, then?� came Gerald�s voice. �What you like. What am I to do myself?� In the silence Birkin could feel Gerald musing this fact. �I�m blest if I know,� came the good-humoured answer. �You see,� said Birkin, �part of you wants the Pussum, and nothing but the Pussum, part of you wants the mines, the business, and nothing but the business�and there you are�all in bits�� �And part of me wants something else,� said Gerald, in a queer, quiet, real voice. �What?� said Birkin, rather surprised. �That�s what I hoped you could tell me,� said Gerald. There was a silence for some time. �I can�t tell you�I can�t find my own way, let alone yours. You might marry,� Birkin replied. �Who�the Pussum?� asked Gerald. �Perhaps,� said Birkin. And he rose and went to the window. �That is your panacea,� said Gerald. �But you haven�t even tried it on yourself yet, and you are sick enough.� �I am,� said Birkin. �Still, I shall come right.� �Through marriage?� �Yes,� Birkin answered obstinately. �And no,� added Gerald. �No, no, no, my boy.� There was a silence between them, and a strange tension of hostility. They always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free each of the other. Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each other. �_Salvator femininus_,� said Gerald, satirically. �Why not?� said Birkin. �No reason at all,� said Gerald, �if it really works. But whom will you marry?� �A woman,� said Birkin. �Good,� said Gerald. Birkin and Gerald were the last to come down to breakfast. Hermione liked everybody to be early. She suffered when she felt her day was diminished, she felt she had missed her life. She seemed to grip the hours by the throat, to force her life from them. She was rather pale and ghastly, as if left behind, in the morning. Yet she had her power, her will was strangely pervasive. With the entrance of the two young men a sudden tension was felt. She lifted her face, and said, in her amused sing-song: �Good morning! Did you sleep well? I�m so glad.� And she turned away, ignoring them. Birkin, who knew her well, saw that she intended to discount his existence. �Will you take what you want from the sideboard?� said Alexander, in a voice slightly suggesting disapprobation. �I hope the things aren�t cold. Oh no! Do you mind putting out the flame under the chafing-dish, Rupert? Thank you.� Even Alexander was rather authoritative where Hermione was cool. He took his tone from her, inevitably. Birkin sat down and looked at the table. He was so used to this house, to this room, to this atmosphere, through years of intimacy, and now he felt in complete opposition to it all, it had nothing to do with him. How well he knew Hermione, as she sat there, erect and silent and somewhat bemused, and yet so potent, so powerful! He knew her statically, so finally, that it was almost like a madness. It was difficult to believe one was not mad, that one was not a figure in the hall of kings in some Egyptian tomb, where the dead all sat immemorial and tremendous. How utterly he knew Joshua Mattheson, who was talking in his harsh, yet rather mincing voice, endlessly, endlessly, always with a strong mentality working, always interesting, and yet always known, everything he said known beforehand, however novel it was, and clever. Alexander the up-to-date host, so bloodlessly free-and-easy, Fräulein so prettily chiming in just as she should, the little Italian Countess taking notice of everybody, only playing her little game, objective and cold, like a weasel watching everything, and extracting her own amusement, never giving herself in the slightest; then Miss Bradley, heavy and rather subservient, treated with cool, almost amused contempt by Hermione, and therefore slighted by everybody�how known it all was, like a game with the figures set out, the same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as they were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving round in one of the innumerable permutations that make up the game. But the game is known, its going on is like a madness, it is so exhausted. There was Gerald, an amused look on his face; the game pleased him. There was Gudrun, watching with steady, large, hostile eyes; the game fascinated her, and she loathed it. There was Ursula, with a slightly startled look on her face, as if she were hurt, and the pain were just outside her consciousness. Suddenly Birkin got up and went out. �That�s enough,� he said to himself involuntarily. Hermione knew his motion, though not in her consciousness. She lifted her heavy eyes and saw him lapse suddenly away, on a sudden, unknown tide, and the waves broke over her. Only her indomitable will remained static and mechanical, she sat at the table making her musing, stray remarks. But the darkness had covered her, she was like a ship that has gone down. It was finished for her too, she was wrecked in the darkness. Yet the unfailing mechanism of her will worked on, she had that activity. �Shall we bathe this morning?� she said, suddenly looking at them all. �Splendid,� said Joshua. �It is a perfect morning.� �Oh, it is beautiful,� said Fräulein. �Yes, let us bathe,� said the Italian woman. �We have no bathing suits,� said Gerald. �Have mine,� said Alexander. �I must go to church and read the lessons. They expect me.� �Are you a Christian?� asked the Italian Countess, with sudden interest. �No,� said Alexander. �I�m not. But I believe in keeping up the old institutions.� �They are so beautiful,� said Fräulein daintily. �Oh, they are,� cried Miss Bradley. They all trailed out on to the lawn. It was a sunny, soft morning in early summer, when life ran in the world subtly, like a reminiscence. The church bells were ringing a little way off, not a cloud was in the sky, the swans were like lilies on the water below, the peacocks walked with long, prancing steps across the shadow and into the sunshine of the grass. One wanted to swoon into the by-gone perfection of it all. �Good-bye,� called Alexander, waving his gloves cheerily, and he disappeared behind the bushes, on his way to church. �Now,� said Hermione, �shall we all bathe?� �I won�t,� said Ursula. �You don�t want to?� said Hermione, looking at her slowly. �No. I don�t want to,� said Ursula. �Nor I,� said Gudrun. �What about my suit?� asked Gerald. �I don�t know,� laughed Hermione, with an odd, amused intonation. �Will a handkerchief do�a large handkerchief?� �That will do,� said Gerald. �Come along then,� sang Hermione. The first to run across the lawn was the little Italian, small and like a cat, her white legs twinkling as she went, ducking slightly her head, that was tied in a gold silk kerchief. She tripped through the gate and down the grass, and stood, like a tiny figure of ivory and bronze, at the water�s edge, having dropped off her towelling, watching the swans, which came up in surprise. Then out ran Miss Bradley, like a large, soft plum in her dark-blue suit. Then Gerald came, a scarlet silk kerchief round his loins, his towels over his arms. He seemed to flaunt himself a little in the sun, lingering and laughing, strolling easily, looking white but natural in his nakedness. Then came Sir Joshua, in an overcoat, and lastly Hermione, striding with stiff grace from out of a great mantle of purple silk, her head tied up in purple and gold. Handsome was her stiff, long body, her straight-stepping white legs, there was a static magnificence about her as she let the cloak float loosely away from her striding. She crossed the lawn like some strange memory, and passed slowly and statelily towards the water. There were three ponds, in terraces descending the valley, large and smooth and beautiful, lying in the sun. The water ran over a little stone wall, over small rocks, splashing down from one pond to the level below. The swans had gone out on to the opposite bank, the reeds smelled sweet, a faint breeze touched the skin. Gerald had dived in, after Sir Joshua, and had swum to the end of the pond. There he climbed out and sat on the wall. There was a dive, and the little Countess was swimming like a rat, to join him. They both sat in the sun, laughing and crossing their arms on their breasts. Sir Joshua swam up to them, and stood near them, up to his arm-pits in the water. Then Hermione and Miss Bradley swam over, and they sat in a row on the embankment. �Aren�t they terrifying? Aren�t they really terrifying?� said Gudrun. �Don�t they look saurian? They are just like great lizards. Did you ever see anything like Sir Joshua? But really, Ursula, he belongs to the primeval world, when great lizards crawled about.� Gudrun looked in dismay on Sir Joshua, who stood up to the breast in the water, his long, greyish hair washed down into his eyes, his neck set into thick, crude shoulders. He was talking to Miss Bradley, who, seated on the bank above, plump and big and wet, looked as if she might roll and slither in the water almost like one of the slithering sealions in the Zoo. Ursula watched in silence. Gerald was laughing happily, between Hermione and the Italian. He reminded her of Dionysos, because his hair was really yellow, his figure so full and laughing. Hermione, in her large, stiff, sinister grace, leaned near him, frightening, as if she were not responsible for what she might do. He knew a certain danger in her, a convulsive madness. But he only laughed the more, turning often to the little Countess, who was flashing up her face at him. They all dropped into the water, and were swimming together like a shoal of seals. Hermione was powerful and unconscious in the water, large and slow and powerful. Palestra was quick and silent as a water rat, Gerald wavered and flickered, a white natural shadow. Then, one after the other, they waded out, and went up to the house. But Gerald lingered a moment to speak to Gudrun. �You don�t like the water?� he said. She looked at him with a long, slow inscrutable look, as he stood before her negligently, the water standing in beads all over his skin. �I like it very much,� she replied. He paused, expecting some sort of explanation. �And you swim?� �Yes, I swim.� Still he would not ask her why she would not go in then. He could feel something ironic in her. He walked away, piqued for the first time. �Why wouldn�t you bathe?� he asked her again, later, when he was once more the properly-dressed young Englishman. She hesitated a moment before answering, opposing his persistence. �Because I didn�t like the crowd,� she replied. He laughed, her phrase seemed to re-echo in his consciousness. The flavour of her slang was piquant to him. Whether he would or not, she signified the real world to him. He wanted to come up to her standards, fulfil her expectations. He knew that her criterion was the only one that mattered. The others were all outsiders, instinctively, whatever they might be socially. And Gerald could not help it, he was bound to strive to come up to her criterion, fulfil her idea of a man and a human-being. After lunch, when all the others had withdrawn, Hermione and Gerald and Birkin lingered, finishing their talk. There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state _were_ broken and destroyed, then, out of the chaos, what then? The great social idea, said Sir Joshua, was the _social_ equality of man. No, said Gerald, the idea was, that every man was fit for his own little bit of a task�let him do that, and then please himself. The unifying principle was the work in hand. Only work, the business of production, held men together. It was mechanical, but then society _was_ a mechanism. Apart from work they were isolated, free to do as they liked. �Oh!� cried Gudrun. �Then we shan�t have names any more�we shall be like the Germans, nothing but Herr Obermeister and Herr Untermeister. I can imagine it��I am Mrs Colliery-Manager Crich�I am Mrs Member-of-Parliament Roddice. I am Miss Art-Teacher Brangwen.� Very pretty that.� �Things would work very much better, Miss Art-Teacher Brangwen,� said Gerald. �What things, Mr Colliery-Manager Crich? The relation between you and me, _par exemple?_� �Yes, for example,� cried the Italian. �That which is between men and women�!� �That is non-social,� said Birkin, sarcastically. �Exactly,� said Gerald. �Between me and a woman, the social question does not enter. It is my own affair.� �A ten-pound note on it,� said Birkin. �You don�t admit that a woman is a social being?� asked Ursula of Gerald. �She is both,� said Gerald. �She is a social being, as far as society is concerned. But for her own private self, she is a free agent, it is her own affair, what she does.� �But won�t it be rather difficult to arrange the two halves?� asked Ursula. �Oh no,� replied Gerald. �They arrange themselves naturally�we see it now, everywhere.� �Don�t you laugh so pleasantly till you�re out of the wood,� said Birkin. Gerald knitted his brows in momentary irritation. �Was I laughing?� he said. �_If_,� said Hermione at last, �we could only realise, that in the _spirit_ we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there�the rest wouldn�t matter, there would be no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only destroys.� This speech was received in silence, and almost immediately the party rose from the table. But when the others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter declamation, saying: �It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit�it is only the _social_ differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We�re all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie�your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars�therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality. �But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on _that_. One man isn�t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically _other_, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world�s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: �Now you�ve got what you want�you�ve got your fair share of the world�s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don�t obstruct me.�� Hermione was looking at him with leering eyes, along her cheeks. He could feel violent waves of hatred and loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. She heard his words in her unconscious self, _consciously_ she was as if deafened, she paid no heed to them. �It _sounds_ like megalomania, Rupert,� said Gerald, genially. Hermione gave a queer, grunting sound. Birkin stood back. �Yes, let it,� he said suddenly, the whole tone gone out of his voice, that had been so insistent, bearing everybody down. And he went away. But he felt, later, a little compunction. He had been violent, cruel with poor Hermione. He wanted to recompense her, to make it up. He had hurt her, he had been vindictive. He wanted to be on good terms with her again. He went into her boudoir, a remote and very cushiony place. She was sitting at her table writing letters. She lifted her face abstractedly when he entered, watched him go to the sofa, and sit down. Then she looked down at her paper again. He took up a large volume which he had been reading before, and became minutely attentive to his author. His back was towards Hermione. She could not go on with her writing. Her whole mind was a chaos, darkness breaking in upon it, and herself struggling to gain control with her will, as a swimmer struggles with the swirling water. But in spite of her efforts she was borne down, darkness seemed to break over her, she felt as if her heart was bursting. The terrible tension grew stronger and stronger, it was most fearful agony, like being walled up. And then she realised that his presence was the wall, his presence was destroying her. Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall�she must break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life to the last. It must be done, or she must perish most horribly. Terrible shocks ran over her body, like shocks of electricity, as if many volts of electricity suddenly struck her down. She was aware of him sitting silently there, an unthinkable evil obstruction. Only this blotted out her mind, pressed out her very breathing, his silent, stooping back, the back of his head. A terrible voluptuous thrill ran down her arms�she was going to know her voluptuous consummation. Her arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it round in her hand as she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious. Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head. But her fingers were in the way and deadened the blow. Nevertheless, down went his head on the table on which his book lay, the stone slid aside and over his ear, it was one convulsion of pure bliss for her, lit up by the crushed pain of her fingers. But it was not somehow complete. She lifted her arm high to aim once more, straight down on the head that lay dazed on the table. She must smash it, it must be smashed before her ecstasy was consummated, fulfilled for ever. A thousand lives, a thousand deaths mattered nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect ecstasy. She was not swift, she could only move slowly. A strong spirit in him woke him and made him lift his face and twist to look at her. Her arm was raised, the hand clasping the ball of lapis lazuli. It was her left hand, he realised again with horror that she was left-handed. Hurriedly, with a burrowing motion, he covered his head under the thick volume of Thucydides, and the blow came down, almost breaking his neck, and shattering his heart. He was shattered, but he was not afraid. Twisting round to face her he pushed the table over and got away from her. He was like a flask that is smashed to atoms, he seemed to himself that he was all fragments, smashed to bits. Yet his movements were perfectly coherent and clear, his soul was entire and unsurprised. �No you don�t, Hermione,� he said in a low voice. �I don�t let you.� He saw her standing tall and livid and attentive, the stone clenched tense in her hand. �Stand away and let me go,� he said, drawing near to her. As if pressed back by some hand, she stood away, watching him all the time without changing, like a neutralised angel confronting him. �It is not good,� he said, when he had gone past her. �It isn�t I who will die. You hear?� He kept his face to her as he went out, lest she should strike again. While he was on his guard, she dared not move. And he was on his guard, she was powerless. So he had gone, and left her standing. She remained perfectly rigid, standing as she was for a long time. Then she staggered to the couch and lay down, and went heavily to sleep. When she awoke, she remembered what she had done, but it seemed to her, she had only hit him, as any woman might do, because he tortured her. She was perfectly right. She knew that, spiritually, she was right. In her own infallible purity, she had done what must be done. She was right, she was pure. A drugged, almost sinister religious expression became permanent on her face. Birkin, barely conscious, and yet perfectly direct in his motion, went out of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to the hills. The brilliant day had become overcast, spots of rain were falling. He wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young fir-trees, budding with soft paws. It was rather wet everywhere, there was a stream running down at the bottom of the valley, which was gloomy, or seemed gloomy. He was aware that he could not regain his consciousness, that he was moving in a sort of darkness. Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hillside, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact. But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one�s belly and cover one�s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one�s thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one�s shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one�s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges�this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one�s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy! As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he thought about Hermione and the blow. He could feel a pain on the side of his head. But after all, what did it matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness, so lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman�not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad. It was quite right of Hermione to want to kill him. What had he to do with her? Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self. It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not matter, so one knew where one belonged. He knew now where he belonged. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous. He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying. As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being adhere to humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He loved now the soft, delicate vegetation, that was so cool and perfect. He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state. He was aware of the pain in his head becoming more and more difficult every minute. He was walking now along the road to the nearest station. It was raining and he had no hat. But then plenty of cranks went out nowadays without hats, in the rain. He wondered again how much of his heaviness of heart, a certain depression, was due to fear, fear lest anybody should have seen him naked lying against the vegetation. What a dread he had of mankind, of other people! It amounted almost to horror, to a sort of dream terror�his horror of being observed by some other people. If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegetation and be quite happy and unquestioned, by himself. He had better send a note to Hermione: she might trouble about him, and he did not want the onus of this. So at the station, he wrote saying: I will go on to town�I don�t want to come back to Breadalby for the present. But it is quite all right�I don�t want you to mind having biffed me, in the least. Tell the others it is just one of my moods. You were quite right, to biff me�because I know you wanted to. So there�s the end of it. In the train, however, he felt ill. Every motion was insufferable pain, and he was sick. He dragged himself from the station into a cab, feeling his way step by step, like a blind man, and held up only by a dim will. For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let Hermione know, and she thought he was sulking; there was a complete estrangement between them. She became rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive righteousness. She lived in and by her own self-esteem, conviction of her own rightness of spirit. CHAPTER IX. COAL-DUST Going home from school in the afternoon, the Brangwen girls descended the hill between the picturesque cottages of Willey Green till they came to the railway crossing. There they found the gate shut, because the colliery train was rumbling nearer. They could hear the small locomotive panting hoarsely as it advanced with caution between the embankments. The one-legged man in the little signal-hut by the road stared out from his security, like a crab from a snail-shell. Whilst the two girls waited, Gerald Crich trotted up on a red Arab mare. He rode well and softly, pleased with the delicate quivering of the creature between his knees. And he was very picturesque, at least in Gudrun�s eyes, sitting soft and close on the slender red mare, whose long tail flowed on the air. He saluted the two girls, and drew up at the crossing to wait for the gate, looking down the railway for the approaching train. In spite of her ironic smile at his picturesqueness, Gudrun liked to look at him. He was well-set and easy, his face with its warm tan showed up his whitish, coarse moustache, and his blue eyes were full of sharp light as he watched the distance. The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks, hidden. The mare did not like it. She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise. But Gerald pulled her back and held her head to the gate. The sharp blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her. The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise struck through her till she was rocking with terror. She recoiled like a spring let go. But a glistening, half-smiling look came into Gerald�s face. He brought her back again, inevitably. The noise was released, the little locomotive with her clanking steel connecting-rod emerged on the highroad, clanking sharply. The mare rebounded like a drop of water from hot iron. Ursula and Gudrun pressed back into the hedge, in fear. But Gerald was heavy on the mare, and forced her back. It seemed as if he sank into her magnetically, and could thrust her back against herself. �The fool!� cried Ursula loudly. �Why doesn�t he ride away till it�s gone by?� Gudrun was looking at him with black-dilated, spellbound eyes. But he sat glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will, nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other, over the rails of the crossing. The locomotive, as if wanting to see what could be done, put on the brakes, and back came the trucks rebounding on the iron buffers, striking like horrible cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful strident concussions. The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted up on a wind of terror. Then suddenly her fore feet struck out, as she convulsed herself utterly away from the horror. Back she went, and the two girls clung to each other, feeling she must fall backwards on top of him. But he leaned forward, his face shining with fixed amusement, and at last he brought her down, sank her down, and was bearing her back to the mark. But as strong as the pressure of his compulsion was the repulsion of her utter terror, throwing her back away from the railway, so that she spun round and round, on two legs, as if she were in the centre of some whirlwind. It made Gudrun faint with poignant dizziness, which seemed to penetrate to her heart. �No�! No�! Let her go! Let her go, you fool, you _fool_�!� cried Ursula at the top of her voice, completely outside herself. And Gudrun hated her bitterly for being outside herself. It was unendurable that Ursula�s voice was so powerful and naked. A sharpened look came on Gerald�s face. He bit himself down on the mare like a keen edge biting home, and _forced_ her round. She roared as she breathed, her nostrils were two wide, hot holes, her mouth was apart, her eyes frenzied. It was a repulsive sight. But he held on her unrelaxed, with an almost mechanical relentlessness, keen as a sword pressing in to her. Both man and horse were sweating with violence. Yet he seemed calm as a ray of cold sunshine. Meanwhile the eternal trucks were rumbling on, very slowly, treading one after the other, one after the other, like a disgusting dream that has no end. The connecting chains were grinding and squeaking as the tension varied, the mare pawed and struck away mechanically now, her terror fulfilled in her, for now the man encompassed her; her paws were blind and pathetic as she beat the air, the man closed round her, and brought her down, almost as if she were part of his own physique. �And she�s bleeding! She�s bleeding!� cried Ursula, frantic with opposition and hatred of Gerald. She alone understood him perfectly, in pure opposition. Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the mare, and she turned white. And then on the very wound the bright spurs came down, pressing relentlessly. The world reeled and passed into nothingness for Gudrun, she could not know any more. When she recovered, her soul was calm and cold, without feeling. The trucks were still rumbling by, and the man and the mare were still fighting. But she herself was cold and separate, she had no more feeling for them. She was quite hard and cold and indifferent. They could see the top of the hooded guard�s-van approaching, the sound of the trucks was diminishing, there was hope of relief from the intolerable noise. The heavy panting of the half-stunned mare sounded automatically, the man seemed to be relaxing confidently, his will bright and unstained. The guard�s-van came up, and passed slowly, the guard staring out in his transition on the spectacle in the road. And, through the man in the closed wagon, Gudrun could see the whole scene spectacularly, isolated and momentary, like a vision isolated in eternity. Lovely, grateful silence seemed to trail behind the receding train. How sweet the silence is! Ursula looked with hatred on the buffers of the diminishing wagon. The gatekeeper stood ready at the door of his hut, to proceed to open the gate. But Gudrun sprang suddenly forward, in front of the struggling horse, threw off the latch and flung the gates asunder, throwing one-half to the keeper, and running with the other half, forwards. Gerald suddenly let go the horse and leaped forwards, almost on to Gudrun. She was not afraid. As he jerked aside the mare�s head, Gudrun cried, in a strange, high voice, like a gull, or like a witch screaming out from the side of the road: �I should think you�re proud.� The words were distinct and formed. The man, twisting aside on his dancing horse, looked at her in some surprise, some wondering interest. Then the mare�s hoofs had danced three times on the drum-like sleepers of the crossing, and man and horse were bounding springily, unequally up the road. The two girls watched them go. The gate-keeper hobbled thudding over the logs of the crossing, with his wooden leg. He had fastened the gate. Then he also turned, and called to the girls: �A masterful young jockey, that; �ll have his own road, if ever anybody would.� �Yes,� cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice. �Why couldn�t he take the horse away, till the trucks had gone by? He�s a fool, and a bully. Does he think it�s manly, to torture a horse? It�s a living thing, why should he bully it and torture it?� There was a pause, then the gate-keeper shook his head, and replied: �Yes, it�s as nice a little mare as you could set eyes on�beautiful little thing, beautiful. Now you couldn�t see his father treat any animal like that�not you. They�re as different as they welly can be, Gerald Crich and his father�two different men, different made.� Then there was a pause. �But why does he do it?� cried Ursula, �why does he? Does he think he�s grand, when he�s bullied a sensitive creature, ten times as sensitive as himself?� Again there was a cautious pause. Then again the man shook his head, as if he would say nothing, but would think the more. �I expect he�s got to train the mare to stand to anything,� he replied. �A pure-bred Harab�not the sort of breed as is used to round here�different sort from our sort altogether. They say as he got her from Constantinople.� �He would!� said Ursula. �He�d better have left her to the Turks, I�m sure they would have had more decency towards her.� The man went in to drink his can of tea, the girls went on down the lane, that was deep in soft black dust. Gudrun was as if numbed in her mind by the sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down into the living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure control; a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible. On the left, as the girls walked silently, the coal-mine lifted its great mounds and its patterned head-stocks, the black railway with the trucks at rest looked like a harbour just below, a large bay of railroad with anchored wagons. Near the second level-crossing, that went over many bright rails, was a farm belonging to the collieries, and a great round globe of iron, a disused boiler, huge and rusty and perfectly round, stood silently in a paddock by the road. The hens were pecking round it, some chickens were balanced on the drinking trough, wagtails flew away in among trucks, from the water. On the other side of the wide crossing, by the road-side, was a heap of pale-grey stones for mending the roads, and a cart standing, and a middle-aged man with whiskers round his face was leaning on his shovel, talking to a young man in gaiters, who stood by the horse�s head. Both men were facing the crossing. They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in the near distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon. Both wore light, gay summer dresses, Ursula had an orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow, Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose, the figures of the two women seemed to glitter in progress over the wide bay of the railway crossing, white and orange and yellow and rose glittering in motion across a hot world silted with coal-dust. The two men stood quite still in the heat, watching. The elder was a short, hard-faced energetic man of middle age, the younger a labourer of twenty-three or so. They stood in silence watching the advance of the sisters. They watched whilst the girls drew near, and whilst they passed, and whilst they receded down the dusty road, that had dwellings on one side, and dusty young corn on the other. Then the elder man, with the whiskers round his face, said in a prurient manner to the young man: �What price that, eh? She�ll do, won�t she?� �Which?� asked the young man, eagerly, with a laugh. �Her with the red stockings. What d�you say? I�d give my week�s wages for five minutes; what!�just for five minutes.� Again the young man laughed. �Your missis �ud have summat to say to you,� he replied. Gudrun had turned round and looked at the two men. They were to her sinister creatures, standing watching after her, by the heap of pale grey slag. She loathed the man with whiskers round his face. �You�re first class, you are,� the man said to her, and to the distance. �Do you think it would be worth a week�s wages?� said the younger man, musing. �Do I? I�d put �em bloody-well down this second�� The younger man looked after Gudrun and Ursula objectively, as if he wished to calculate what there might be, that was worth his week�s wages. He shook his head with fatal misgiving. �No,� he said. �It�s not worth that to me.� �Isn�t?� said the old man. �By God, if it isn�t to me!� And he went on shovelling his stones. The girls descended between the houses with slate roofs and blackish brick walls. The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses. On the roads silted with black dust, the rich light fell more warmly, more heavily, over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast, from the glowing close of day. �It has a foul kind of beauty, this place,� said Gudrun, evidently suffering from fascination. �Can�t you feel in some way, a thick, hot attraction in it? I can. And it quite stupifies me.� They were passing between blocks of miners� dwellings. In the back yards of several dwellings, a miner could be seen washing himself in the open on this hot evening, naked down to the loins, his great trousers of moleskin slipping almost away. Miners already cleaned were sitting on their heels, with their backs near the walls, talking and silent in pure physical well-being, tired, and taking physical rest. Their voices sounded out with strong intonation, and the broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood. It seemed to envelop Gudrun in a labourer�s caress, there was in the whole atmosphere a resonance of physical men, a glamorous thickness of labour and maleness, surcharged in the air. But it was universal in the district, and therefore unnoticed by the inhabitants. To Gudrun, however, it was potent and half-repulsive. She could never tell why Beldover was so utterly different from London and the south, why one�s whole feelings were different, why one seemed to live in another sphere. Now she realised that this was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, cold and iron. It was the same every evening when she came home, she seemed to move through a wave of disruptive force, that was given off from the presence of thousands of vigorous, underworld, half-automatised colliers, and which went to the brain and the heart, awaking a fatal desire, and a fatal callousness. There came over her a nostalgia for the place. She hated it, she knew how utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless. Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a machine. And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She struggled to get more and more into accord with the atmosphere of the place, she craved to get her satisfaction of it. She felt herself drawn out at evening into the main street of the town, that was uncreated and ugly, and yet surcharged with this same potent atmosphere of intense, dark callousness. There were always miners about. They moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of abstraction and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt faces. They belonged to another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices were full of an intolerable deep resonance, like a machine�s burring, a music more maddening than the siren�s long ago. She found herself, with the rest of the common women, drawn out on Friday evenings to the little market. Friday was pay-day for the colliers, and Friday night was market night. Every woman was abroad, every man was out, shopping with his wife, or gathering with his pals. The pavements were dark for miles around with people coming in, the little market-place on the crown of the hill, and the main street of Beldover were black with thickly-crowded men and women. It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene flares, which threw a ruddy light on the grave faces of the purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract faces of the men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men, mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with almost lavish freedom. The carts that came could not pass through. They had to wait, the driver calling and shouting, till the dense crowd would make way. Everywhere, young fellows from the outlying districts were making conversation with the girls, standing in the road and at the corners. The doors of the public-houses were open and full of light, men passed in and out in a continual stream, everywhere men were calling out to one another, or crossing to meet one another, or standing in little gangs and circles, discussing, endlessly discussing. The sense of talk, buzzing, jarring, half-secret, the endless mining and political wrangling, vibrated in the air like discordant machinery. And it was their voices which affected Gudrun almost to swooning. They aroused a strange, nostalgic ache of desire, something almost demoniacal, never to be fulfilled. Like any other common girl of the district, Gudrun strolled up and down, up and down the length of the brilliant two-hundred paces of the pavement nearest the market-place. She knew it was a vulgar thing to do; her father and mother could not bear it; but the nostalgia came over her, she must be among the people. Sometimes she sat among the louts in the cinema: rakish-looking, unattractive louts they were. Yet she must be among them. And, like any other common lass, she found her �boy.� It was an electrician, one of the electricians introduced according to Gerald�s new scheme. He was an earnest, clever man, a scientist with a passion for sociology. He lived alone in a cottage, in lodgings, in Willey Green. He was a gentleman, and sufficiently well-to-do. His landlady spread the reports about him; he _would_ have a large wooden tub in his bedroom, and every time he came in from work, he _would_ have pails and pails of water brought up, to bathe in, then he put on clean shirt and under-clothing _every_ day, and clean silk socks; fastidious and exacting he was in these respects, but in every other way, most ordinary and unassuming. Gudrun knew all these things. The Brangwen�s house was one to which the gossip came naturally and inevitably. Palmer was in the first place a friend of Ursula�s. But in his pale, elegant, serious face there showed the same nostalgia that Gudrun felt. He too must walk up and down the street on Friday evening. So he walked with Gudrun, and a friendship was struck up between them. But he was not in love with Gudrun; he _really_ wanted Ursula, but for some strange reason, nothing could happen between her and him. He liked to have Gudrun about, as a fellow-mind�but that was all. And she had no real feeling for him. He was a scientist, he had to have a woman to back him. But he was really impersonal, he had the fineness of an elegant piece of machinery. He was too cold, too destructive to care really for women, too great an egoist. He was polarised by the men. Individually he detested and despised them. In the mass they fascinated him, as machinery fascinated him. They were a new sort of machinery to him�but incalculable, incalculable. So Gudrun strolled the streets with Palmer, or went to the cinema with him. And his long, pale, rather elegant face flickered as he made his sarcastic remarks. There they were, the two of them: two elegants in one sense: in the other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the people, teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in the will. Sometimes Gudrun would start aside, see it all, see how she was sinking in. And then she was filled with a fury of contempt and anger. She felt she was sinking into one mass with the rest�all so close and intermingled and breathless. It was horrible. She stifled. She prepared for flight, feverishly she flew to her work. But soon she let go. She started off into the country�the darkish, glamorous country. The spell was beginning to work again. CHAPTER X. SKETCH-BOOK One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at the remote end of the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark lurid colours, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze. But she could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she _knew_ how they rose out of the mud, she _knew_ how they thrust out from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air. Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near the water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a jewel-life, a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and breathing with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there was a halo round them; ah, when they came tumbling nearer they were orangetips, and it was the orange that had made the halo. Ursula rose and drifted away, unconscious like the butterflies. Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of surging water-plants, sat crouched on the shoal, drawing, not looking up for a long time, and then staring unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent stems. Her feet were bare, her hat lay on the bank opposite. She started out of her trance, hearing the knocking of oars. She looked round. There was a boat with a gaudy Japanese parasol, and a man in white, rowing. The woman was Hermione, and the man was Gerald. She knew it instantly. And instantly she perished in the keen _frisson_ of anticipation, an electric vibration in her veins, intense, much more intense than that which was always humming low in the atmosphere of Beldover. Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers. He started out of the mud. He was master. She saw his back, the movement of his white loins. But not that�it was the whiteness he seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing. He seemed to stoop to something. His glistening, whitish hair seemed like the electricity of the sky. �There�s Gudrun,� came Hermione�s voice floating distinct over the water. �We will go and speak to her. Do you mind?� Gerald looked round and saw the girl standing by the water�s edge, looking at him. He pulled the boat towards her, magnetically, without thinking of her. In his world, his conscious world, she was still nobody. He knew that Hermione had a curious pleasure in treading down all the social differences, at least apparently, and he left it to her. �How do you do, Gudrun?� sang Hermione, using the Christian name in the fashionable manner. �What are you doing?� �How do you do, Hermione? I _was_ sketching.� �Were you?� The boat drifted nearer, till the keel ground on the bank. �May we see? I should like to _so_ much.� It was no use resisting Hermione�s deliberate intention. �Well�� said Gudrun reluctantly, for she always hated to have her unfinished work exposed��there�s nothing in the least interesting.� �Isn�t there? But let me see, will you?� Gudrun reached out the sketch-book, Gerald stretched from the boat to take it. And as he did so, he remembered Gudrun�s last words to him, and her face lifted up to him as he sat on the swerving horse. An intensification of pride went over his nerves, because he felt, in some way she was compelled by him. The exchange of feeling between them was strong and apart from their consciousness. And as if in a spell, Gudrun was aware of his body, stretching and surging like the marsh-fire, stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem. Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the blood faint in her veins, her mind went dim and unconscious. And he rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence. He looked round at the boat. It was drifting off a little. He lifted the oar to bring it back. And the exquisite pleasure of slowly arresting the boat, in the heavy-soft water, was complete as a swoon. �_That�s_ what you have done,� said Hermione, looking searchingly at the plants on the shore, and comparing with Gudrun�s drawing. Gudrun looked round in the direction of Hermione�s long, pointing finger. �That is it, isn�t it?� repeated Hermione, needing confirmation. �Yes,� said Gudrun automatically, taking no real heed. �Let me look,� said Gerald, reaching forward for the book. But Hermione ignored him, he must not presume, before she had finished. But he, his will as unthwarted and as unflinching as hers, stretched forward till he touched the book. A little shock, a storm of revulsion against him, shook Hermione unconsciously. She released the book when he had not properly got it, and it tumbled against the side of the boat and bounced into the water. �There!� sang Hermione, with a strange ring of malevolent victory. �I�m so sorry, so awfully sorry. Can�t you get it, Gerald?� This last was said in a note of anxious sneering that made Gerald�s veins tingle with fine hate for her. He leaned far out of the boat, reaching down into the water. He could feel his position was ridiculous, his loins exposed behind him. �It is of no importance,� came the strong, clanging voice of Gudrun. She seemed to touch him. But he reached further, the boat swayed violently. Hermione, however, remained unperturbed. He grasped the book, under the water, and brought it up, dripping. �I�m so dreadfully sorry�dreadfully sorry,� repeated Hermione. �I�m afraid it was all my fault.� �It�s of no importance�really, I assure you�it doesn�t matter in the least,� said Gudrun loudly, with emphasis, her face flushed scarlet. And she held out her hand impatiently for the wet book, to have done with the scene. Gerald gave it to her. He was not quite himself. �I�m so dreadfully sorry,� repeated Hermione, till both Gerald and Gudrun were exasperated. �Is there nothing that can be done?� �In what way?� asked Gudrun, with cool irony. �Can�t we save the drawings?� There was a moment�s pause, wherein Gudrun made evident all her refutation of Hermione�s persistence. �I assure you,� said Gudrun, with cutting distinctness, �the drawings are quite as good as ever they were, for my purpose. I want them only for reference.� �But can�t I give you a new book? I wish you�d let me do that. I feel so truly sorry. I feel it was all my fault.� �As far as I saw,� said Gudrun, �it wasn�t your fault at all. If there was any _fault_, it was Mr Crich�s. But the whole thing is _entirely_ trivial, and it really is ridiculous to take any notice of it.� Gerald watched Gudrun closely, whilst she repulsed Hermione. There was a body of cold power in her. He watched her with an insight that amounted to clairvoyance. He saw her a dangerous, hostile spirit, that could stand undiminished and unabated. It was so finished, and of such perfect gesture, moreover. �I�m awfully glad if it doesn�t matter,� he said; �if there�s no real harm done.� She looked back at him, with her fine blue eyes, and signalled full into his spirit, as she said, her voice ringing with intimacy almost caressive now it was addressed to him: �Of course, it doesn�t matter in the _least_.� The bond was established between them, in that look, in her tone. In her tone, she made the understanding clear�they were of the same kind, he and she, a sort of diabolic freemasonry subsisted between them. Henceforward, she knew, she had her power over him. Wherever they met, they would be secretly associated. And he would be helpless in the association with her. Her soul exulted. �Good-bye! I�m so glad you forgive me. Gooood-bye!� Hermione sang her farewell, and waved her hand. Gerald automatically took the oar and pushed off. But he was looking all the time, with a glimmering, subtly-smiling admiration in his eyes, at Gudrun, who stood on the shoal shaking the wet book in her hand. She turned away and ignored the receding boat. But Gerald looked back as he rowed, beholding her, forgetting what he was doing. �Aren�t we going too much to the left?� sang Hermione, as she sat ignored under her coloured parasol. Gerald looked round without replying, the oars balanced and glancing in the sun. �I think it�s all right,� he said good-humouredly, beginning to row again without thinking of what he was doing. And Hermione disliked him extremely for his good-humoured obliviousness, she was nullified, she could not regain ascendancy. CHAPTER XI. AN ISLAND Meanwhile Ursula had wandered on from Willey Water along the course of the bright little stream. The afternoon was full of larks� singing. On the bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots flowered by the water. There was a rousedness and a glancing everywhere. She strayed absorbedly on, over the brooks. She wanted to go to the mill-pond above. The big mill-house was deserted, save for a labourer and his wife who lived in the kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-yard and through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank by the sluice. When she got to the top, to see the old, velvety surface of the pond before her, she noticed a man on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It was Birkin sawing and hammering away. She stood at the head of the sluice, looking at him. He was unaware of anybody�s presence. He looked very busy, like a wild animal, active and intent. She felt she ought to go away, he would not want her. He seemed to be so much occupied. But she did not want to go away. Therefore she moved along the bank till he would look up. Which he soon did. The moment he saw her, he dropped his tools and came forward, saying: �How do you do? I�m making the punt water-tight. Tell me if you think it is right.� She went along with him. �You are your father�s daughter, so you can tell me if it will do,� he said. She bent to look at the patched punt. �I am sure I am my father�s daughter,� she said, fearful of having to judge. �But I don�t know anything about carpentry. It _looks_ right, don�t you think?� �Yes, I think. I hope it won�t let me to the bottom, that�s all. Though even so, it isn�t a great matter, I should come up again. Help me to get it into the water, will you?� With combined efforts they turned over the heavy punt and set it afloat. �Now,� he said, �I�ll try it and you can watch what happens. Then if it carries, I�ll take you over to the island.� �Do,� she cried, watching anxiously. The pond was large, and had that perfect stillness and the dark lustre of very deep water. There were two small islands overgrown with bushes and a few trees, towards the middle. Birkin pushed himself off, and veered clumsily in the pond. Luckily the punt drifted so that he could catch hold of a willow bough, and pull it to the island. �Rather overgrown,� he said, looking into the interior, �but very nice. I�ll come and fetch you. The boat leaks a little.� In a moment he was with her again, and she stepped into the wet punt. �It�ll float us all right,� he said, and man�uvred again to the island. They landed under a willow tree. She shrank from the little jungle of rank plants before her, evil-smelling figwort and hemlock. But he explored into it. �I shall mow this down,� he said, �and then it will be romantic�like Paul et Virginie.� �Yes, one could have lovely Watteau picnics here,� cried Ursula with enthusiasm. His face darkened. �I don�t want Watteau picnics here,� he said. �Only your Virginie,� she laughed. �Virginie enough,� he smiled wryly. �No, I don�t want her either.� Ursula looked at him closely. She had not seen him since Breadalby. He was very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face. �You have been ill; haven�t you?� she asked, rather repulsed. �Yes,� he replied coldly. They had sat down under the willow tree, and were looking at the pond, from their retreat on the island. �Has it made you frightened?� she asked. �What of?� he asked, turning his eyes to look at her. Something in him, inhuman and unmitigated, disturbed her, and shook her out of her ordinary self. �It _is_ frightening to be very ill, isn�t it?� she said. �It isn�t pleasant,� he said. �Whether one is really afraid of death, or not, I have never decided. In one mood, not a bit, in another, very much.� �But doesn�t it make you feel ashamed? I think it makes one so ashamed, to be ill�illness is so terribly humiliating, don�t you think?� He considered for some minutes. �Maybe,� he said. �Though one knows all the time one�s life isn�t really right, at the source. That�s the humiliation. I don�t see that the illness counts so much, after that. One is ill because one doesn�t live properly�can�t. It�s the failure to live that makes one ill, and humiliates one.� �But do you fail to live?� she asked, almost jeering. �Why yes�I don�t make much of a success of my days. One seems always to be bumping one�s nose against the blank wall ahead.� Ursula laughed. She was frightened, and when she was frightened she always laughed and pretended to be jaunty. �Your poor nose!� she said, looking at that feature of his face. �No wonder it�s ugly,� he replied. She was silent for some minutes, struggling with her own self-deception. It was an instinct in her, to deceive herself. �But _I�m_ happy�I think life is _awfully_ jolly,� she said. �Good,� he answered, with a certain cold indifference. She reached for a bit of paper which had wrapped a small piece of chocolate she had found in her pocket, and began making a boat. He watched her without heeding her. There was something strangely pathetic and tender in her moving, unconscious finger-tips, that were agitated and hurt, really. �I _do_ enjoy things�don�t you?� she asked. �Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can�t get right, at the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I _can�t_ get straight anyhow. I don�t know what really to _do_. One must do something somewhere.� �Why should you always be _doing?_� she retorted. �It is so plebeian. I think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.� �I quite agree,� he said, �if one has burst into blossom. But I can�t get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn�t nourished. Curse it, it isn�t even a bud. It is a contravened knot.� Again she laughed. He was so very fretful and exasperated. But she was anxious and puzzled. How was one to get out, anyhow. There must be a way out somewhere. There was a silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She reached for another bit of chocolate paper, and began to fold another boat. �And why is it,� she asked at length, �that there is no flowering, no dignity of human life now?� �The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush�and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn�t true that they have any significance�their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.� �But there _are_ good people,� protested Ursula. �Good enough for the life of today. But mankind is a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people.� Ursula could not help stiffening herself against this, it was too picturesque and final. But neither could she help making him go on. �And if it is so, _why_ is it?� she asked, hostile. They were rousing each other to a fine passion of opposition. �Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won�t fall off the tree when they�re ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is over-past, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.� There was a long pause. His voice had become hot and very sarcastic. Ursula was troubled and bewildered, they were both oblivious of everything but their own immersion. �But even if everybody is wrong�where are _you_ right?� she cried, �where are you any better?� �I?�I�m not right,� he cried back. �At least my only rightness lies in the fact that I know it. I detest what I am, outwardly. I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in _saying_ this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest�and see what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren�t stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.� �But,� said Ursula sadly, �that doesn�t alter the fact that love is the greatest, does it? What they _do_ doesn�t alter the truth of what they say, does it?� �Completely, because if what they say _were_ true, then they couldn�t help fulfilling it. But they maintain a lie, and so they run amok at last. It�s a lie to say that love is the greatest. You might as well say that hate is the greatest, since the opposite of everything balances. What people want is hate�hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love, they get it. They distil themselves with nitroglycerine, all the lot of them, out of very love. It�s the lie that kills. If we want hate, let us have it�death, murder, torture, violent destruction�let us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no _absolute_ loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an infinite weight of mortal lies.� �So you�d like everybody in the world destroyed?� said Ursula. �I should indeed.� �And the world empty of people?� �Yes truly. You yourself, don�t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?� The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And really it _was_ attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the _really_ desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted. But still, she was dissatisfied with _him_. �But,� she objected, �you�d be dead yourself, so what good would it do you?� �I would die like a shot, to know that the earth would really be cleaned of all the people. It is the most beautiful and freeing thought. Then there would _never_ be another foul humanity created, for a universal defilement.� �No,� said Ursula, �there would be nothing.� �What! Nothing? Just because humanity was wiped out? You flatter yourself. There�d be everything.� �But how, if there were no people?� �Do you think that creation depends on _man!_ It merely doesn�t. There are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. Man is a mistake, he must go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn�t interrupt them�and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.� It pleased Ursula, what he said, pleased her very much, as a phantasy. Of course it was only a pleasant fancy. She herself knew too well the actuality of humanity, its hideous actuality. She knew it could not disappear so cleanly and conveniently. It had a long way to go yet, a long and hideous way. Her subtle, feminine, demoniacal soul knew it well. �If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation�like the ichthyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;�things straight out of the fire.� �But man will never be gone,� she said, with insidious, diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. �The world will go with him.� �Ah no,� he answered, �not so. I believe in the proud angels and the demons that are our fore-runners. They will destroy us, because we are not proud enough. The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do. And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells�they are a sign that pure creation takes place�even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage�it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings. It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.� Ursula watched him as he talked. There seemed a certain impatient fury in him, all the while, and at the same time a great amusement in everything, and a final tolerance. And it was this tolerance she mistrusted, not the fury. She saw that, all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the world. And this knowledge, whilst it comforted her heart somewhere with a little self-satisfaction, stability, yet filled her with a certain sharp contempt and hate of him. She wanted him to herself, she hated the Salvator Mundi touch. It was something diffuse and generalised about him, which she could not stand. He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself as completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution. �But,� she said, �you believe in individual love, even if you don�t believe in loving humanity�?� �I don�t believe in love at all�that is, any more than I believe in hate, or in grief. Love is one of the emotions like all the others�and so it is all right whilst you feel it. But I can�t see how it becomes an absolute. It is just part of human relationships, no more. And it is only part of _any_ human relationship. And why one should be required _always_ to feel it, any more than one always feels sorrow or distant joy, I cannot conceive. Love isn�t a desideratum�it is an emotion you feel or you don�t feel, according to circumstance.� �Then why do you care about people at all?� she asked, �if you don�t believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?� �Why do I? Because I can�t get away from it.� �Because you love it,� she persisted. It irritated him. �If I do love it,� he said, �it is my disease.� �But it is a disease you don�t want to be cured of,� she said, with some cold sneering. He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him. �And if you don�t believe in love, what _do_ you believe in?� she asked mocking. �Simply in the end of the world, and grass?� He was beginning to feel a fool. �I believe in the unseen hosts,� he said. �And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and birds? Your world is a poor show.� �Perhaps it is,� he said, cool and superior now he was offended, assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his distance. Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She looked at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain priggish Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness. And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful, desirable life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man: and there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a Salvator Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest type. He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness. �The point about love,� he said, his consciousness quickly adjusting itself, �is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it. It ought to be prescribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea.� There was a beam of understanding between them. �But it always means the same thing,� she said. �Ah God, no, let it not mean that any more,� he cried. �Let the old meanings go.� �But still it is love,� she persisted. A strange, wicked yellow light shone at him in her eyes. He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing. �No,� he said, �it isn�t. Spoken like that, never in the world. You�ve no business to utter the word.� �I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the Covenant at the right moment,� she mocked. Again they looked at each other. She suddenly sprang up, turned her back to him, and walked away. He too rose slowly and went to the water�s edge, where, crouching, he began to amuse himself unconsciously. Picking a daisy he dropped it on the pond, so that the stem was a keel, the flower floated like a little water lily, staring with its open face up to the sky. It turned slowly round, in a slow, slow Dervish dance, as it veered away. He watched it, then dropped another daisy into the water, and after that another, and sat watching them with bright, absolved eyes, crouching near on the bank. Ursula turned to look. A strange feeling possessed her, as if something were taking place. But it was all intangible. And some sort of control was being put on her. She could not know. She could only watch the brilliant little discs of the daisies veering slowly in travel on the dark, lustrous water. The little flotilla was drifting into the light, a company of white specks in the distance. �Do let us go to the shore, to follow them,� she said, afraid of being any longer imprisoned on the island. And they pushed off in the punt. She was glad to be on the free land again. She went along the bank towards the sluice. The daisies were scattered broadcast on the pond, tiny radiant things, like an exaltation, points of exaltation here and there. Why did they move her so strongly and mystically? �Look,� he said, �your boat of purple paper is escorting them, and they are a convoy of rafts.� Some of the daisies came slowly towards her, hesitating, making a shy bright little cotillion on the dark clear water. Their gay bright candour moved her so much as they came near, that she was almost in tears. �Why are they so lovely,� she cried. �Why do I think them so lovely?� �They are nice flowers,� he said, her emotional tones putting a constraint on him. �You know that a daisy is a company of florets, a concourse, become individual. Don�t the botanists put it highest in the line of development? I believe they do.� �The compositæ, yes, I think so,� said Ursula, who was never very sure of anything. Things she knew perfectly well, at one moment, seemed to become doubtful the next. �Explain it so, then,� he said. �The daisy is a perfect little democracy, so it�s the highest of flowers, hence its charm.� �No,� she cried, �no�never. It isn�t democratic.� �No,� he admitted. �It�s the golden mob of the proletariat, surrounded by a showy white fence of the idle rich.� �How hateful�your hateful social orders!� she cried. �Quite! It�s a daisy�we�ll leave it alone.� �Do. Let it be a dark horse for once,� she said: �if anything can be a dark horse to you,� she added satirically. They stood aside, forgetful. As if a little stunned, they both were motionless, barely conscious. The little conflict into which they had fallen had torn their consciousness and left them like two impersonal forces, there in contact. He became aware of the lapse. He wanted to say something, to get on to a new more ordinary footing. �You know,� he said, �that I am having rooms here at the mill? Don�t you think we can have some good times?� �Oh are you?� she said, ignoring all his implication of admitted intimacy. He adjusted himself at once, became normally distant. �If I find I can live sufficiently by myself,� he continued, �I shall give up my work altogether. It has become dead to me. I don�t believe in the humanity I pretend to be part of, I don�t care a straw for the social ideals I live by, I hate the dying organic form of social mankind�so it can�t be anything but trumpery, to work at education. I shall drop it as soon as I am clear enough�tomorrow perhaps�and be by myself.� �Have you enough to live on?� asked Ursula. �Yes�I�ve about four hundred a year. That makes it easy for me.� There was a pause. �And what about Hermione?� asked Ursula. �That�s over, finally�a pure failure, and never could have been anything else.� �But you still know each other?� �We could hardly pretend to be strangers, could we?� There was a stubborn pause. �But isn�t that a half-measure?� asked Ursula at length. �I don�t think so,� he said. �You�ll be able to tell me if it is.� Again there was a pause of some minutes� duration. He was thinking. �One must throw everything away, everything�let everything go, to get the one last thing one wants,� he said. �What thing?� she asked in challenge. �I don�t know�freedom together,� he said. She had wanted him to say �love.� There was heard a loud barking of the dogs below. He seemed disturbed by it. She did not notice. Only she thought he seemed uneasy. �As a matter of fact,� he said, in rather a small voice, �I believe that is Hermione come now, with Gerald Crich. She wanted to see the rooms before they are furnished.� �I know,� said Ursula. �She will superintend the furnishing for you.� �Probably. Does it matter?� �Oh no, I should think not,� said Ursula. �Though personally, I can�t bear her. I think she is a lie, if you like, you who are always talking about lies.� Then she ruminated for a moment, when she broke out: �Yes, and I do mind if she furnishes your rooms�I do mind. I mind that you keep her hanging on at all.� He was silent now, frowning. �Perhaps,� he said. �I don�t _want_ her to furnish the rooms here�and I don�t keep her hanging on. Only, I needn�t be churlish to her, need I? At any rate, I shall have to go down and see them now. You�ll come, won�t you?� �I don�t think so,� she said coldly and irresolutely. �Won�t you? Yes do. Come and see the rooms as well. Do come.� CHAPTER XII. CARPETING He set off down the bank, and she went unwillingly with him. Yet she would not have stayed away, either. �We know each other well, you and I, already,� he said. She did not answer. In the large darkish kitchen of the mill, the labourer�s wife was talking shrilly to Hermione and Gerald, who stood, he in white and she in a glistening bluish foulard, strangely luminous in the dusk of the room; whilst from the cages on the walls, a dozen or more canaries sang at the top of their voices. The cages were all placed round a small square window at the back, where the sunshine came in, a beautiful beam, filtering through green leaves of a tree. The voice of Mrs Salmon shrilled against the noise of the birds, which rose ever more wild and triumphant, and the woman�s voice went up and up against them, and the birds replied with wild animation. �Here�s Rupert!� shouted Gerald in the midst of the din. He was suffering badly, being very sensitive in the ear. �O-o-h them birds, they won�t let you speak�!� shrilled the labourer�s wife in disgust. �I�ll cover them up.� And she darted here and there, throwing a duster, an apron, a towel, a table-cloth over the cages of the birds. �Now will you stop it, and let a body speak for your row,� she said, still in a voice that was too high. The party watched her. Soon the cages were covered, they had a strange funereal look. But from under the towels odd defiant trills and bubblings still shook out. �Oh, they won�t go on,� said Mrs Salmon reassuringly. �They�ll go to sleep now.� �Really,� said Hermione, politely. �They will,� said Gerald. �They will go to sleep automatically, now the impression of evening is produced.� �Are they so easily deceived?� cried Ursula. �Oh, yes,� replied Gerald. �Don�t you know the story of Fabre, who, when he was a boy, put a hen�s head under her wing, and she straight away went to sleep? It�s quite true.� �And did that make him a naturalist?� asked Birkin. �Probably,� said Gerald. Meanwhile Ursula was peeping under one of the cloths. There sat the canary in a corner, bunched and fluffed up for sleep. �How ridiculous!� she cried. �It really thinks the night has come! How absurd! Really, how can one have any respect for a creature that is so easily taken in!� �Yes,� sang Hermione, coming also to look. She put her hand on Ursula�s arm and chuckled a low laugh. �Yes, doesn�t he look comical?� she chuckled. �Like a stupid husband.� Then, with her hand still on Ursula�s arm, she drew her away, saying, in her mild sing-song: �How did you come here? We saw Gudrun too.� �I came to look at the pond,� said Ursula, �and I found Mr Birkin there.� �Did you? This is quite a Brangwen land, isn�t it!� �I�m afraid I hoped so,� said Ursula. �I ran here for refuge, when I saw you down the lake, just putting off.� �Did you! And now we�ve run you to earth.� Hermione�s eyelids lifted with an uncanny movement, amused but overwrought. She had always her strange, rapt look, unnatural and irresponsible. �I was going on,� said Ursula. �Mr Birkin wanted me to see the rooms. Isn�t it delightful to live here? It is perfect.� �Yes,� said Hermione, abstractedly. Then she turned right away from Ursula, ceased to know her existence. �How do you feel, Rupert?� she sang in a new, affectionate tone, to Birkin. �Very well,� he replied. �Were you quite comfortable?� The curious, sinister, rapt look was on Hermione�s face, she shrugged her bosom in a convulsed movement, and seemed like one half in a trance. �Quite comfortable,� he replied. There was a long pause, whilst Hermione looked at him for a long time, from under her heavy, drugged eyelids. �And you think you�ll be happy here?� she said at last. �I�m sure I shall.� �I�m sure I shall do anything for him as I can,� said the labourer�s wife. �And I�m sure our master will; so I _hope_ he�ll find himself comfortable.� Hermione turned and looked at her slowly. �Thank you so much,� she said, and then she turned completely away again. She recovered her position, and lifting her face towards him, and addressing him exclusively, she said: �Have you measured the rooms?� �No,� he said, �I�ve been mending the punt.� �Shall we do it now?� she said slowly, balanced and dispassionate. �Have you got a tape measure, Mrs Salmon?� he said, turning to the woman. �Yes sir, I think I can find one,� replied the woman, bustling immediately to a basket. �This is the only one I�ve got, if it will do.� Hermione took it, though it was offered to him. �Thank you so much,� she said. �It will do very nicely. Thank you so much.� Then she turned to Birkin, saying with a little gay movement: �Shall we do it now, Rupert?� �What about the others, they�ll be bored,� he said reluctantly. �Do you mind?� said Hermione, turning to Ursula and Gerald vaguely. �Not in the least,� they replied. �Which room shall we do first?� she said, turning again to Birkin, with the same gaiety, now she was going to _do_ something with him. �We�ll take them as they come,� he said. �Should I be getting your teas ready, while you do that?� said the labourer�s wife, also gay because _she_ had something to do. �Would you?� said Hermione, turning to her with the curious motion of intimacy that seemed to envelop the woman, draw her almost to Hermione�s breast, and which left the others standing apart. �I should be so glad. Where shall we have it?� �Where would you like it? Shall it be in here, or out on the grass?� �Where shall we have tea?� sang Hermione to the company at large. �On the bank by the pond. And _we�ll_ carry the things up, if you�ll just get them ready, Mrs Salmon,� said Birkin. �All right,� said the pleased woman. The party moved down the passage into the front room. It was empty, but clean and sunny. There was a window looking on to the tangled front garden. �This is the dining-room,� said Hermione. �We�ll measure it this way, Rupert�you go down there�� �Can�t I do it for you,� said Gerald, coming to take the end of the tape. �No, thank you,� cried Hermione, stooping to the ground in her bluish, brilliant foulard. It was a great joy to her to _do_ things, and to have the ordering of the job, with Birkin. He obeyed her subduedly. Ursula and Gerald looked on. It was a peculiarity of Hermione�s, that at every moment, she had one intimate, and turned all the rest of those present into onlookers. This raised her into a state of triumph. They measured and discussed in the dining-room, and Hermione decided what the floor coverings must be. It sent her into a strange, convulsed anger, to be thwarted. Birkin always let her have her way, for the moment. Then they moved across, through the hall, to the other front room, that was a little smaller than the first. �This is the study,� said Hermione. �Rupert, I have a rug that I want you to have for here. Will you let me give it to you? Do�I want to give it you.� �What is it like?� he asked ungraciously. �You haven�t seen it. It is chiefly rose red, then blue, a metallic, mid-blue, and a very soft dark blue. I think you would like it. Do you think you would?� �It sounds very nice,� he replied. �What is it? Oriental? With a pile?� �Yes. Persian! It is made of camel�s hair, silky. I think it is called Bergamos�twelve feet by seven�. Do you think it will do?� �It would _do_,� he said. �But why should you give me an expensive rug? I can manage perfectly well with my old Oxford Turkish.� �But may I give it to you? Do let me.� �How much did it cost?� She looked at him, and said: �I don�t remember. It was quite cheap.� He looked at her, his face set. �I don�t want to take it, Hermione,� he said. �Do let me give it to the rooms,� she said, going up to him and putting her hand on his arm lightly, pleadingly. �I shall be so disappointed.� �You know I don�t want you to give me things,� he repeated helplessly. �I don�t want to give you _things_,� she said teasingly. �But will you have this?� �All right,� he said, defeated, and she triumphed. They went upstairs. There were two bedrooms to correspond with the rooms downstairs. One of them was half furnished, and Birkin had evidently slept there. Hermione went round the room carefully, taking in every detail, as if absorbing the evidence of his presence, in all the inanimate things. She felt the bed and examined the coverings. �Are you _sure_ you were quite comfortable?� she said, pressing the pillow. �Perfectly,� he replied coldly. �And were you warm? There is no down quilt. I am sure you need one. You mustn�t have a great pressure of clothes.� �I�ve got one,� he said. �It is coming down.� They measured the rooms, and lingered over every consideration. Ursula stood at the window and watched the woman carrying the tea up the bank to the pond. She hated the palaver Hermione made, she wanted to drink tea, she wanted anything but this fuss and business. At last they all mounted the grassy bank, to the picnic. Hermione poured out tea. She ignored now Ursula�s presence. And Ursula, recovering from her ill-humour, turned to Gerald saying: �Oh, I hated you so much the other day, Mr Crich,� �What for?� said Gerald, wincing slightly away. �For treating your horse so badly. Oh, I hated you so much!� �What did he do?� sang Hermione. �He made his lovely sensitive Arab horse stand with him at the railway-crossing whilst a horrible lot of trucks went by; and the poor thing, she was in a perfect frenzy, a perfect agony. It was the most horrible sight you can imagine.� �Why did you do it, Gerald?� asked Hermione, calm and interrogative. �She must learn to stand�what use is she to me in this country, if she shies and goes off every time an engine whistles.� �But why inflict unnecessary torture?� said Ursula. �Why make her stand all that time at the crossing? You might just as well have ridden back up the road, and saved all that horror. Her sides were bleeding where you had spurred her. It was too horrible�!� Gerald stiffened. �I have to use her,� he replied. �And if I�m going to be sure of her at _all_, she�ll have to learn to stand noises.� �Why should she?� cried Ursula in a passion. �She is a living creature, why should she stand anything, just because you choose to make her? She has as much right to her own being, as you have to yours.� �There I disagree,� said Gerald. �I consider that mare is there for my use. Not because I bought her, but because that is the natural order. It is more natural for a man to take a horse and use it as he likes, than for him to go down on his knees to it, begging it to do as it wishes, and to fulfil its own marvellous nature.� Ursula was just breaking out, when Hermione lifted her face and began, in her musing sing-song: �I do think�I do really think we must have the _courage_ to use the lower animal life for our needs. I do think there is something wrong, when we look on every living creature as if it were ourselves. I do feel, that it is false to project our own feelings on every animate creature. It is a lack of discrimination, a lack of criticism.� �Quite,� said Birkin sharply. �Nothing is so detestable as the maudlin attributing of human feelings and consciousness to animals.� �Yes,� said Hermione, wearily, �we must really take a position. Either we are going to use the animals, or they will use us.� �That�s a fact,� said Gerald. �A horse has got a will like a man, though it has no _mind_ strictly. And if your will isn�t master, then the horse is master of you. And this is a thing I can�t help. I can�t help being master of the horse.� �If only we could learn how to use our will,� said Hermione, �we could do anything. The will can cure anything, and put anything right. That I am convinced of�if only we use the will properly, intelligibly.� �What do you mean by using the will properly?� said Birkin. �A very great doctor taught me,� she said, addressing Ursula and Gerald vaguely. �He told me for instance, that to cure oneself of a bad habit, one should _force_ oneself to do it, when one would not do it�make oneself do it�and then the habit would disappear.� �How do you mean?� said Gerald. �If you bite your nails, for example. Then, when you don�t want to bite your nails, bite them, make yourself bite them. And you would find the habit was broken.� �Is that so?� said Gerald. �Yes. And in so many things, I have _made_ myself well. I was a very queer and nervous girl. And by learning to use my will, simply by using my will, I _made_ myself right.� Ursula looked all the while at Hermione, as she spoke in her slow, dispassionate, and yet strangely tense voice. A curious thrill went over the younger woman. Some strange, dark, convulsive power was in Hermione, fascinating and repelling. �It is fatal to use the will like that,� cried Birkin harshly, �disgusting. Such a will is an obscenity.� Hermione looked at him for a long time, with her shadowed, heavy eyes. Her face was soft and pale and thin, almost phosphorescent, her jaw was lean. �I�m sure it isn�t,� she said at length. There always seemed an interval, a strange split between what she seemed to feel and experience, and what she actually said and thought. She seemed to catch her thoughts at length from off the surface of a maelstrom of chaotic black emotions and reactions, and Birkin was always filled with repulsion, she caught so infallibly, her will never failed her. Her voice was always dispassionate and tense, and perfectly confident. Yet she shuddered with a sense of nausea, a sort of seasickness that always threatened to overwhelm her mind. But her mind remained unbroken, her will was still perfect. It almost sent Birkin mad. But he would never, never dare to break her will, and let loose the maelstrom of her subconsciousness, and see her in her ultimate madness. Yet he was always striking at her. �And of course,� he said to Gerald, �horses _haven�t_ got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no _one_ will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely�and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock�you know that, if ever you�ve felt a horse bolt, while you�ve been driving it.� �I have felt a horse bolt while I was driving it,� said Gerald, �but it didn�t make me know it had two wills. I only knew it was frightened.� Hermione had ceased to listen. She simply became oblivious when these subjects were started. �Why should a horse want to put itself in the human power?� asked Ursula. �That is quite incomprehensible to me. I don�t believe it ever wanted it.� �Yes it did. It�s the last, perhaps highest, love-impulse: resign your will to the higher being,� said Birkin. �What curious notions you have of love,� jeered Ursula. �And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.� �Then I�m a bolter,� said Ursula, with a burst of laughter. �It�s a dangerous thing to domesticate even horses, let alone women,� said Birkin. �The dominant principle has some rare antagonists.� �Good thing too,� said Ursula. �Quite,� said Gerald, with a faint smile. �There�s more fun.� Hermione could bear no more. She rose, saying in her easy sing-song: �Isn�t the evening beautiful! I get filled sometimes with such a great sense of beauty, that I feel I can hardly bear it.� Ursula, to whom she had appealed, rose with her, moved to the last impersonal depths. And Birkin seemed to her almost a monster of hateful arrogance. She went with Hermione along the bank of the pond, talking of beautiful, soothing things, picking the gentle cowslips. �Wouldn�t you like a dress,� said Ursula to Hermione, �of this yellow spotted with orange�a cotton dress?� �Yes,� said Hermione, stopping and looking at the flower, letting the thought come home to her and soothe her. �Wouldn�t it be pretty? I should _love_ it.� And she turned smiling to Ursula, in a feeling of real affection. But Gerald remained with Birkin, wanting to probe him to the bottom, to know what he meant by the dual will in horses. A flicker of excitement danced on Gerald�s face. Hermione and Ursula strayed on together, united in a sudden bond of deep affection and closeness. �I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really _do_ want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness. Don�t you feel it, don�t you feel you _can�t_ be tortured into any more knowledge?� said Hermione, stopping in front of Ursula, and turning to her with clenched fists thrust downwards. �Yes,� said Ursula. �I do. I am sick of all this poking and prying.� �I�m so glad you are. Sometimes,� said Hermione, again stopping arrested in her progress and turning to Ursula, �sometimes I wonder if I _ought_ to submit to all this realisation, if I am not being weak in rejecting it. But I feel I _can�t_�I _can�t_. It seems to destroy _everything_. All the beauty and the�and the true holiness is destroyed�and I feel I can�t live without them.� �And it would be simply wrong to live without them,� cried Ursula. �No, it is so _irreverent_ to think that everything must be realised in the head. Really, something must be left to the Lord, there always is and always will be.� �Yes,� said Hermione, reassured like a child, �it should, shouldn�t it? And Rupert�� she lifted her face to the sky, in a muse��he _can_ only tear things to pieces. He really _is_ like a boy who must pull everything to pieces to see how it is made. And I can�t think it is right�it does seem so irreverent, as you say.� �Like tearing open a bud to see what the flower will be like,� said Ursula. �Yes. And that kills everything, doesn�t it? It doesn�t allow any possibility of flowering.� �Of course not,� said Ursula. �It is purely destructive.� �It is, isn�t it!� Hermione looked long and slow at Ursula, seeming to accept confirmation from her. Then the two women were silent. As soon as they were in accord, they began mutually to mistrust each other. In spite of herself, Ursula felt herself recoiling from Hermione. It was all she could do to restrain her revulsion. They returned to the men, like two conspirators who have withdrawn to come to an agreement. Birkin looked up at them. Ursula hated him for his cold watchfulness. But he said nothing. �Shall we be going?� said Hermione. �Rupert, you are coming to Shortlands to dinner? Will you come at once, will you come now, with us?� �I�m not dressed,� replied Birkin. �And you know Gerald stickles for convention.� �I don�t stickle for it,� said Gerald. �But if you�d got as sick as I have of rowdy go-as-you-please in the house, you�d prefer it if people were peaceful and conventional, at least at meals.� �All right,� said Birkin. �But can�t we wait for you while you dress?� persisted Hermione. �If you like.� He rose to go indoors. Ursula said she would take her leave. �Only,� she said, turning to Gerald, �I must say that, however man is lord of the beast and the fowl, I still don�t think he has any right to violate the feelings of the inferior creation. I still think it would have been much more sensible and nice of you if you�d trotted back up the road while the train went by, and been considerate.� �I see,� said Gerald, smiling, but somewhat annoyed. �I must remember another time.� �They all think I�m an interfering female,� thought Ursula to herself, as she went away. But she was in arms against them. She ran home plunged in thought. She had been very much moved by Hermione, she had really come into contact with her, so that there was a sort of league between the two women. And yet she could not bear her. But she put the thought away. �She�s really good,� she said to herself. �She really wants what is right.� And she tried to feel at one with Hermione, and to shut off from Birkin. She was strictly hostile to him. But she was held to him by some bond, some deep principle. This at once irritated her and saved her. Only now and again, violent little shudders would come over her, out of her subconsciousness, and she knew it was the fact that she had stated her challenge to Birkin, and he had, consciously or unconsciously, accepted. It was a fight to the death between them�or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say. CHAPTER XIII. MINO The days went by, and she received no sign. Was he going to ignore her, was he going to take no further notice of her secret? A dreary weight of anxiety and acrid bitterness settled on her. And yet Ursula knew she was only deceiving herself, and that he _would_ proceed. She said no word to anybody. Then, sure enough, there came a note from him, asking if she would come to tea with Gudrun, to his rooms in town. �Why does he ask Gudrun as well?� she asked herself at once. �Does he want to protect himself, or does he think I would not go alone?� She was tormented by the thought that he wanted to protect himself. But at the end of all, she only said to herself: �I don�t want Gudrun to be there, because I want him to say something more to me. So I shan�t tell Gudrun anything about it, and I shall go alone. Then I shall know.� She found herself sitting on the tram-car, mounting up the hill going out of the town, to the place where he had his lodging. She seemed to have passed into a kind of dream world, absolved from the conditions of actuality. She watched the sordid streets of the town go by beneath her, as if she were a spirit disconnected from the material universe. What had it all to do with her? She was palpitating and formless within the flux of the ghost life. She could not consider any more, what anybody would say of her or think about her. People had passed out of her range, she was absolved. She had fallen strange and dim, out of the sheath of the material life, as a berry falls from the only world it has ever known, down out of the sheath on to the real unknown. Birkin was standing in the middle of the room, when she was shown in by the landlady. He too was moved outside himself. She saw him agitated and shaken, a frail, unsubstantial body silent like the node of some violent force, that came out from him and shook her almost into a swoon. �You are alone?� he said. �Yes�Gudrun could not come.� He instantly guessed why. And they were both seated in silence, in the terrible tension of the room. She was aware that it was a pleasant room, full of light and very restful in its form�aware also of a fuchsia tree, with dangling scarlet and purple flowers. �How nice the fuchsias are!� she said, to break the silence. �Aren�t they! Did you think I had forgotten what I said?� A swoon went over Ursula�s mind. �I don�t want you to remember it�if you don�t want to,� she struggled to say, through the dark mist that covered her. There was silence for some moments. �No,� he said. �It isn�t that. Only�if we are going to know each other, we must pledge ourselves for ever. If we are going to make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and infallible about it.� There was a clang of mistrust and almost anger in his voice. She did not answer. Her heart was too much contracted. She could not have spoken. Seeing she was not going to reply, he continued, almost bitterly, giving himself away: �I can�t say it is love I have to offer�and it isn�t love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder�and rarer.� There was a silence, out of which she said: �You mean you don�t love me?� She suffered furiously, saying that. �Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn�t true. I don�t know. At any rate, I don�t feel the emotion of love for you�no, and I don�t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.� �Love gives out in the last issues?� she asked, feeling numb to the lips. �Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn�t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does _not_ meet and mingle, and never can.� She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness. �And you mean you can�t love?� she asked, in trepidation. �Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.� She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could not submit. �But how do you know�if you have never _really_ loved?� she asked. �It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.� �Then there is no love,� cried Ursula. �Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there _is_ no love.� Ursula was given over to this statement for some moments. Then she half rose from her chair, saying, in a final, repellent voice: �Then let me go home�what am I doing here?� �There is the door,� he said. �You are a free agent.� He was suspended finely and perfectly in this extremity. She hung motionless for some seconds, then she sat down again. �If there is no love, what is there?� she cried, almost jeering. �Something,� he said, looking at her, battling with his soul, with all his might. �What?� He was silent for a long time, unable to be in communication with her while she was in this state of opposition. �There is,� he said, in a voice of pure abstraction; �a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you�not in the emotional, loving plane�but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman,�so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever�because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.� Ursula listened to this speech, her mind dumb and almost senseless, what he said was so unexpected and so untoward. �It is just purely selfish,� she said. �If it is pure, yes. But it isn�t selfish at all. Because I don�t _know_ what I want of you. I deliver _myself_ over to the unknown, in coming to you, I am without reserves or defences, stripped entirely, into the unknown. Only there needs the pledge between us, that we will both cast off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in us.� She pondered along her own line of thought. �But it is because you love me, that you want me?� she persisted. �No it isn�t. It is because I believe in you�if I _do_ believe in you.� �Aren�t you sure?� she laughed, suddenly hurt. He was looking at her steadfastly, scarcely heeding what she said. �Yes, I must believe in you, or else I shouldn�t be here saying this,� he replied. �But that is all the proof I have. I don�t feel any very strong belief at this particular moment.� She disliked him for this sudden relapse into weariness and faithlessness. �But don�t you think me good-looking?� she persisted, in a mocking voice. He looked at her, to see if he felt that she was good-looking. �I don�t _feel_ that you�re good-looking,� he said. �Not even attractive?� she mocked, bitingly. He knitted his brows in sudden exasperation. �Don�t you see that it�s not a question of visual appreciation in the least,� he cried. �I don�t _want_ to see you. I�ve seen plenty of women, I�m sick and weary of seeing them. I want a woman I don�t see.� �I�m sorry I can�t oblige you by being invisible,� she laughed. �Yes,� he said, �you are invisible to me, if you don�t force me to be visually aware of you. But I don�t want to see you or hear you.� �What did you ask me to tea for, then?� she mocked. But he would take no notice of her. He was talking to himself. �I want to find you, where you don�t know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly. But I don�t want your good looks, and I don�t want your womanly feelings, and I don�t want your thoughts nor opinions nor your ideas�they are all bagatelles to me.� �You are very conceited, Monsieur,� she mocked. �How do you know what my womanly feelings are, or my thoughts or my ideas? You don�t even know what I think of you now.� �Nor do I care in the slightest.� �I think you are very silly. I think you want to tell me you love me, and you go all this way round to do it.� �All right,� he said, looking up with sudden exasperation. �Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don�t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.� �Is it really persiflage?� she mocked, her face really relaxing into laughter. She interpreted it, that he had made a deep confession of love to her. But he was so absurd in his words, also. They were silent for many minutes, she was pleased and elated like a child. His concentration broke, he began to look at her simply and naturally. �What I want is a strange conjunction with you�� he said quietly; �not meeting and mingling�you are quite right�but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings�as the stars balance each other.� She looked at him. He was very earnest, and earnestness was always rather ridiculous, commonplace, to her. It made her feel unfree and uncomfortable. Yet she liked him so much. But why drag in the stars. �Isn�t this rather sudden?� she mocked. He began to laugh. �Best to read the terms of the contract, before we sign,� he said. A young grey cat that had been sleeping on the sofa jumped down and stretched, rising on its long legs, and arching its slim back. Then it sat considering for a moment, erect and kingly. And then, like a dart, it had shot out of the room, through the open window-doors, and into the garden. �What�s he after?� said Birkin, rising. The young cat trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels. He looked casually down on her. So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door, crouching in a wonderful, soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a shadow. He, going statelily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of her face. She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a minute she drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her, and gave her a light handsome cuff. She subsided at once, submissively. �She is a wild cat,� said Birkin. �She has come in from the woods.� The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, half way down the garden. There she paused to look round. The Mino turned his face in pure superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque young perfection. The wild cat�s round, green, wondering eyes were staring all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards the kitchen. In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid back, unquestioning. He walked after her, and cuffed her once or twice, leisurely, with sudden little blows of his magic white paws. �Now why does he do that?� cried Ursula in indignation. �They are on intimate terms,� said Birkin. �And is that why he hits her?� �Yes,� laughed Birkin, �I think he wants to make it quite obvious to her.� �Isn�t it horrid of him!� she cried; and going out into the garden she called to the Mino: �Stop it, don�t bully. Stop hitting her.� The stray cat vanished like a swift, invisible shadow. The Mino glanced at Ursula, then looked from her disdainfully to his master. �Are you a bully, Mino?� Birkin asked. The young slim cat looked at him, and slowly narrowed its eyes. Then it glanced away at the landscape, looking into the distance as if completely oblivious of the two human beings. �Mino,� said Ursula, �I don�t like you. You are a bully like all males.� �No,� said Birkin, �he is justified. He is not a bully. He is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the wind. I am with him entirely. He wants superfine stability.� �Yes, I know!� cried Ursula. �He wants his own way�I know what your fine words work down to�bossiness, I call it, bossiness.� The young cat again glanced at Birkin in disdain of the noisy woman. �I quite agree with you, Miciotto,� said Birkin to the cat. �Keep your male dignity, and your higher understanding.� Again the Mino narrowed his eyes as if he were looking at the sun. Then, suddenly affecting to have no connection at all with the two people, he went trotting off, with assumed spontaneity and gaiety, his tail erect, his white feet blithe. �Now he will find the belle sauvage once more, and entertain her with his superior wisdom,� laughed Birkin. Ursula looked at the man who stood in the garden with his hair blowing and his eyes smiling ironically, and she cried: �Oh it makes me so cross, this assumption of male superiority! And it is such a lie! One wouldn�t mind if there were any justification for it.� �The wild cat,� said Birkin, �doesn�t mind. She perceives that it is justified.� �Does she!� cried Ursula. �And tell it to the Horse Marines.� �To them also.� �It is just like Gerald Crich with his horse�a lust for bullying�a real _Wille zur Macht_�so base, so petty.� �I agree that the _Wille zur Macht_ is a base and petty thing. But with the Mino, it is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding _rapport_ with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos. It is a _volonté de pouvoir_, if you like, a will to ability, taking _pouvoir_ as a verb.� �Ah�! Sophistries! It�s the old Adam.� �Oh yes. Adam kept Eve in the indestructible paradise, when he kept her single with himself, like a star in its orbit.� �Yes�yes�� cried Ursula, pointing her finger at him. �There you are�a star in its orbit! A satellite�a satellite of Mars�that�s what she is to be! There�there�you�ve given yourself away! You want a satellite, Mars and his satellite! You�ve said it�you�ve said it�you�ve dished yourself!� He stood smiling in frustration and amusement and irritation and admiration and love. She was so quick, and so lambent, like discernible fire, and so vindictive, and so rich in her dangerous flamy sensitiveness. �I�ve not said it at all,� he replied, �if you will give me a chance to speak.� �No, no!� she cried. �I won�t let you speak. You�ve said it, a satellite, you�re not going to wriggle out of it. You�ve said it.� �You�ll never believe now that I _haven�t_ said it,� he answered. �I neither implied nor indicated nor mentioned a satellite, nor intended a satellite, never.� �_You prevaricator!_� she cried, in real indignation. �Tea is ready, sir,� said the landlady from the doorway. They both looked at her, very much as the cats had looked at them, a little while before. �Thank you, Mrs Daykin.� An interrupted silence fell over the two of them, a moment of breach. �Come and have tea,� he said. �Yes, I should love it,� she replied, gathering herself together. They sat facing each other across the tea table. �I did not say, nor imply, a satellite. I meant two single equal stars balanced in conjunction�� �You gave yourself away, you gave away your little game completely,� she cried, beginning at once to eat. He saw that she would take no further heed of his expostulation, so he began to pour the tea. �What _good_ things to eat!� she cried. �Take your own sugar,� he said. He handed her her cup. He had everything so nice, such pretty cups and plates, painted with mauve-lustre and green, also shapely bowls and glass plates, and old spoons, on a woven cloth of pale grey and black and purple. It was very rich and fine. But Ursula could see Hermione�s influence. �Your things are so lovely!� she said, almost angrily. �_I_ like them. It gives me real pleasure to use things that are attractive in themselves�pleasant things. And Mrs Daykin is good. She thinks everything is wonderful, for my sake.� �Really,� said Ursula, �landladies are better than wives, nowadays. They certainly _care_ a great deal more. It is much more beautiful and complete here now, than if you were married.� �But think of the emptiness within,� he laughed. �No,� she said. �I am jealous that men have such perfect landladies and such beautiful lodgings. There is nothing left them to desire.� �In the house-keeping way, we�ll hope not. It is disgusting, people marrying for a home.� �Still,� said Ursula, �a man has very little need for a woman now, has he?� �In outer things, maybe�except to share his bed and bear his children. But essentially, there is just the same need as there ever was. Only nobody takes the trouble to be essential.� �How essential?� she said. �I do think,� he said, �that the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people�a bond. And the immediate bond is between man and woman.� �But it�s such old hat,� said Ursula. �Why should love be a bond? No, I�m not having any.� �If you are walking westward,� he said, �you forfeit the northern and eastward and southern direction. If you admit a unison, you forfeit all the possibilities of chaos.� �But love is freedom,� she declared. �Don�t cant to me,� he replied. �Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It�s a freedom _together_, if you like.� �No,� she said, �love includes everything.� �Sentimental cant,� he replied. �You want the state of chaos, that�s all. It is ultimate nihilism, this freedom-in-love business, this freedom which is love and love which is freedom. As a matter of fact, if you enter into a pure unison, it is irrevocable, and it is never pure till it is irrevocable. And when it is irrevocable, it is one way, like the path of a star.� �Ha!� she cried bitterly. �It is the old dead morality.� �No,� he said, �it is the law of creation. One is committed. One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other�for ever. But it is not selfless�it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity�like a star balanced with another star.� �I don�t trust you when you drag in the stars,� she said. �If you were quite true, it wouldn�t be necessary to be so far-fetched.� �Don�t trust me then,� he said, angry. �It is enough that I trust myself.� �And that is where you make another mistake,� she replied. �You _don�t_ trust yourself. You don�t fully believe yourself what you are saying. You don�t really want this conjunction, otherwise you wouldn�t talk so much about it, you�d get it.� He was suspended for a moment, arrested. �How?� he said. �By just loving,� she retorted in defiance. He was still a moment, in anger. Then he said: �I tell you, I don�t believe in love like that. I tell you, you want love to administer to your egoism, to subserve you. Love is a process of subservience with you�and with everybody. I hate it.� �No,� she cried, pressing back her head like a cobra, her eyes flashing. �It is a process of pride�I want to be proud�� �Proud and subservient, proud and subservient, I know you,� he retorted dryly. �Proud and subservient, then subservient to the proud�I know you and your love. It is a tick-tack, tick-tack, a dance of opposites.� �Are you sure?� she mocked wickedly, �what my love is?� �Yes, I am,� he retorted. �So cocksure!� she said. �How can anybody ever be right, who is so cocksure? It shows you are wrong.� He was silent in chagrin. They had talked and struggled till they were both wearied out. �Tell me about yourself and your people,� he said. And she told him about the Brangwens, and about her mother, and about Skrebensky, her first love, and about her later experiences. He sat very still, watching her as she talked. And he seemed to listen with reverence. Her face was beautiful and full of baffled light as she told him all the things that had hurt her or perplexed her so deeply. He seemed to warm and comfort his soul at the beautiful light of her nature. �If she _really_ could pledge herself,� he thought to himself, with passionate insistence but hardly any hope. Yet a curious little irresponsible laughter appeared in his heart. �We have all suffered so much,� he mocked, ironically. She looked up at him, and a flash of wild gaiety went over her face, a strange flash of yellow light coming from her eyes. �Haven�t we!� she cried, in a high, reckless cry. �It is almost absurd, isn�t it?� �Quite absurd,� he said. �Suffering bores me, any more.� �So it does me.� He was almost afraid of the mocking recklessness of her splendid face. Here was one who would go to the whole lengths of heaven or hell, whichever she had to go. And he mistrusted her, he was afraid of a woman capable of such abandon, such dangerous thoroughness of destructivity. Yet he chuckled within himself also. She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder, looking down at him with strange golden-lighted eyes, very tender, but with a curious devilish look lurking underneath. �Say you love me, say �my love� to me,� she pleaded. He looked back into her eyes, and saw. His face flickered with sardonic comprehension. �I love you right enough,� he said, grimly. �But I want it to be something else.� �But why? But why?� she insisted, bending her wonderful luminous face to him. �Why isn�t it enough?� �Because we can go one better,� he said, putting his arms round her. �No, we can�t,� she said, in a strong, voluptuous voice of yielding. �We can only love each other. Say �my love� to me, say it, say it.� She put her arms round his neck. He enfolded her, and kissed her subtly, murmuring in a subtle voice of love, and irony, and submission: �Yes,�my love, yes,�my love. Let love be enough then. I love you then�I love you. I�m bored by the rest.� �Yes,� she murmured, nestling very sweet and close to him. CHAPTER XIV. WATER-PARTY Every year Mr Crich gave a more or less public water-party on the lake. There was a little pleasure-launch on Willey Water and several rowing boats, and guests could take tea either in the marquee that was set up in the grounds of the house, or they could picnic in the shade of the great walnut tree at the boat-house by the lake. This year the staff of the Grammar-School was invited, along with the chief officials of the firm. Gerald and the younger Criches did not care for this party, but it had become customary now, and it pleased the father, as being the only occasion when he could gather some people of the district together in festivity with him. For he loved to give pleasures to his dependents and to those poorer than himself. But his children preferred the company of their own equals in wealth. They hated their inferiors� humility or gratitude or awkwardness. Nevertheless they were willing to attend at this festival, as they had done almost since they were children, the more so, as they all felt a little guilty now, and unwilling to thwart their father any more, since he was so ill in health. Therefore, quite cheerfully Laura prepared to take her mother�s place as hostess, and Gerald assumed responsibility for the amusements on the water. Birkin had written to Ursula saying he expected to see her at the party, and Gudrun, although she scorned the patronage of the Criches, would nevertheless accompany her mother and father if the weather were fine. The day came blue and full of sunshine, with little wafts of wind. The sisters both wore dresses of white crêpe, and hats of soft grass. But Gudrun had a sash of brilliant black and pink and yellow colour wound broadly round her waist, and she had pink silk stockings, and black and pink and yellow decoration on the brim of her hat, weighing it down a little. She carried also a yellow silk coat over her arm, so that she looked remarkable, like a painting from the Salon. Her appearance was a sore trial to her father, who said angrily: �Don�t you think you might as well get yourself up for a Christmas cracker, an� ha� done with it?� But Gudrun looked handsome and brilliant, and she wore her clothes in pure defiance. When people stared at her, and giggled after her, she made a point of saying loudly, to Ursula: �_Regarde, regarde ces gens-là! Ne sont-ils pas des hiboux incroyables?_� And with the words of French in her mouth, she would look over her shoulder at the giggling party. �No, really, it�s impossible!� Ursula would reply distinctly. And so the two girls took it out of their universal enemy. But their father became more and more enraged. Ursula was all snowy white, save that her hat was pink, and entirely without trimming, and her shoes were dark red, and she carried an orange-coloured coat. And in this guise they were walking all the way to Shortlands, their father and mother going in front. They were laughing at their mother, who, dressed in a summer material of black and purple stripes, and wearing a hat of purple straw, was setting forth with much more of the shyness and trepidation of a young girl than her daughters ever felt, walking demurely beside her husband, who, as usual, looked rather crumpled in his best suit, as if he were the father of a young family and had been holding the baby whilst his wife got dressed. �Look at the young couple in front,� said Gudrun calmly. Ursula looked at her mother and father, and was suddenly seized with uncontrollable laughter. The two girls stood in the road and laughed till the tears ran down their faces, as they caught sight again of the shy, unworldly couple of their parents going on ahead. �We are roaring at you, mother,� called Ursula, helplessly following after her parents. Mrs Brangwen turned round with a slightly puzzled, exasperated look. �Oh indeed!� she said. �What is there so very funny about _me_, I should like to know?� She could not understand that there could be anything amiss with her appearance. She had a perfect calm sufficiency, an easy indifference to any criticism whatsoever, as if she were beyond it. Her clothes were always rather odd, and as a rule slip-shod, yet she wore them with a perfect ease and satisfaction. Whatever she had on, so long as she was barely tidy, she was right, beyond remark; such an aristocrat she was by instinct. �You look so stately, like a country Baroness,� said Ursula, laughing with a little tenderness at her mother�s naive puzzled air. �_Just_ like a country Baroness!� chimed in Gudrun. Now the mother�s natural hauteur became self-conscious, and the girls shrieked again. �Go home, you pair of idiots, great giggling idiots!� cried the father inflamed with irritation. �Mm-m-er!� booed Ursula, pulling a face at his crossness. The yellow lights danced in his eyes, he leaned forward in real rage. �Don�t be so silly as to take any notice of the great gabies,� said Mrs Brangwen, turning on her way. �I�ll see if I�m going to be followed by a pair of giggling yelling jackanapes�� he cried vengefully. The girls stood still, laughing helplessly at his fury, upon the path beside the hedge. �Why you�re as silly as they are, to take any notice,� said Mrs Brangwen also becoming angry now he was really enraged. �There are some people coming, father,� cried Ursula, with mocking warning. He glanced round quickly, and went on to join his wife, walking stiff with rage. And the girls followed, weak with laughter. When the people had passed by, Brangwen cried in a loud, stupid voice: �I�m going back home if there�s any more of this. I�m damned if I�m going to be made a fool of in this fashion, in the public road.� He was really out of temper. At the sound of his blind, vindictive voice, the laughter suddenly left the girls, and their hearts contracted with contempt. They hated his words �in the public road.� What did they care for the public road? But Gudrun was conciliatory. �But we weren�t laughing to _hurt_ you,� she cried, with an uncouth gentleness which made her parents uncomfortable. �We were laughing because we�re fond of you.� �We�ll walk on in front, if they are _so_ touchy,� said Ursula, angry. And in this wise they arrived at Willey Water. The lake was blue and fair, the meadows sloped down in sunshine on one side, the thick dark woods dropped steeply on the other. The little pleasure-launch was fussing out from the shore, twanging its music, crowded with people, flapping its paddles. Near the boat-house was a throng of gaily-dressed persons, small in the distance. And on the high-road, some of the common people were standing along the hedge, looking at the festivity beyond, enviously, like souls not admitted to paradise. �My eye!� said Gudrun, _sotto voce_, looking at the motley of guests, �there�s a pretty crowd if you like! Imagine yourself in the midst of that, my dear.� Gudrun�s apprehensive horror of people in the mass unnerved Ursula. �It looks rather awful,� she said anxiously. �And imagine what they�ll be like�_imagine!_� said Gudrun, still in that unnerving, subdued voice. Yet she advanced determinedly. �I suppose we can get away from them,� said Ursula anxiously. �We�re in a pretty fix if we can�t,� said Gudrun. Her extreme ironic loathing and apprehension was very trying to Ursula. �We needn�t stay,� she said. �I certainly shan�t stay five minutes among that little lot,� said Gudrun. They advanced nearer, till they saw policemen at the gates. �Policemen to keep you in, too!� said Gudrun. �My word, this is a beautiful affair.� �We�d better look after father and mother,� said Ursula anxiously. �Mother�s _perfectly_ capable of getting through this little celebration,� said Gudrun with some contempt. But Ursula knew that her father felt uncouth and angry and unhappy, so she was far from her ease. They waited outside the gate till their parents came up. The tall, thin man in his crumpled clothes was unnerved and irritable as a boy, finding himself on the brink of this social function. He did not feel a gentleman, he did not feel anything except pure exasperation. Ursula took her place at his side, they gave their tickets to the policeman, and passed in on to the grass, four abreast; the tall, hot, ruddy-dark man with his narrow boyish brow drawn with irritation, the fresh-faced, easy woman, perfectly collected though her hair was slipping on one side, then Gudrun, her eyes round and dark and staring, her full soft face impassive, almost sulky, so that she seemed to be backing away in antagonism even whilst she was advancing; and then Ursula, with the odd, brilliant, dazzled look on her face, that always came when she was in some false situation. Birkin was the good angel. He came smiling to them with his affected social grace, that somehow was never _quite_ right. But he took off his hat and smiled at them with a real smile in his eyes, so that Brangwen cried out heartily in relief: �How do you do? You�re better, are you?� �Yes, I�m better. How do you do, Mrs Brangwen? I know Gudrun and Ursula very well.� His eyes smiled full of natural warmth. He had a soft, flattering manner with women, particularly with women who were not young. �Yes,� said Mrs Brangwen, cool but yet gratified. �I have heard them speak of you often enough.� He laughed. Gudrun looked aside, feeling she was being belittled. People were standing about in groups, some women were sitting in the shade of the walnut tree, with cups of tea in their hands, a waiter in evening dress was hurrying round, some girls were simpering with parasols, some young men, who had just come in from rowing, were sitting cross-legged on the grass, coatless, their shirt-sleeves rolled up in manly fashion, their hands resting on their white flannel trousers, their gaudy ties floating about, as they laughed and tried to be witty with the young damsels. �Why,� thought Gudrun churlishly, �don�t they have the manners to put their coats on, and not to assume such intimacy in their appearance.� She abhorred the ordinary young man, with his hair plastered back, and his easy-going chumminess. Hermione Roddice came up, in a handsome gown of white lace, trailing an enormous silk shawl blotched with great embroidered flowers, and balancing an enormous plain hat on her head. She looked striking, astonishing, almost macabre, so tall, with the fringe of her great cream-coloured vividly-blotched shawl trailing on the ground after her, her thick hair coming low over her eyes, her face strange and long and pale, and the blotches of brilliant colour drawn round her. �Doesn�t she look _weird!_� Gudrun heard some girls titter behind her. And she could have killed them. �How do you do!� sang Hermione, coming up very kindly, and glancing slowly over Gudrun�s father and mother. It was a trying moment, exasperating for Gudrun. Hermione was really so strongly entrenched in her class superiority, she could come up and know people out of simple curiosity, as if they were creatures on exhibition. Gudrun would do the same herself. But she resented being in the position when somebody might do it to her. Hermione, very remarkable, and distinguishing the Brangwens very much, led them along to where Laura Crich stood receiving the guests. �This is Mrs Brangwen,� sang Hermione, and Laura, who wore a stiff embroidered linen dress, shook hands and said she was glad to see her. Then Gerald came up, dressed in white, with a black and brown blazer, and looking handsome. He too was introduced to the Brangwen parents, and immediately he spoke to Mrs Brangwen as if she were a lady, and to Brangwen as if he were _not_ a gentleman. Gerald was so obvious in his demeanour. He had to shake hands with his left hand, because he had hurt his right, and carried it, bandaged up, in the pocket of his jacket. Gudrun was _very_ thankful that none of her party asked him what was the matter with the hand. The steam launch was fussing in, all its music jingling, people calling excitedly from on board. Gerald went to see to the debarkation, Birkin was getting tea for Mrs Brangwen, Brangwen had joined a Grammar-School group, Hermione was sitting down by their mother, the girls went to the landing-stage to watch the launch come in. She hooted and tooted gaily, then her paddles were silent, the ropes were thrown ashore, she drifted in with a little bump. Immediately the passengers crowded excitedly to come ashore. �Wait a minute, wait a minute,� shouted Gerald in sharp command. They must wait till the boat was tight on the ropes, till the small gangway was put out. Then they streamed ashore, clamouring as if they had come from America. �Oh it�s _so_ nice!� the young girls were crying. �It�s quite lovely.� The waiters from on board ran out to the boat-house with baskets, the captain lounged on the little bridge. Seeing all safe, Gerald came to Gudrun and Ursula. �You wouldn�t care to go on board for the next trip, and have tea there?� he asked. �No thanks,� said Gudrun coldly. �You don�t care for the water?� �For the water? Yes, I like it very much.� He looked at her, his eyes searching. �You don�t care for going on a launch, then?� She was slow in answering, and then she spoke slowly. �No,� she said. �I can�t say that I do.� Her colour was high, she seemed angry about something. �_Un peu trop de monde_,� said Ursula, explaining. �Eh? _Trop de monde!_� He laughed shortly. �Yes there�s a fair number of �em.� Gudrun turned on him brilliantly. �Have you ever been from Westminster Bridge to Richmond on one of the Thames steamers?� she cried. �No,� he said, �I can�t say I have.� �Well, it�s one of the most _vile_ experiences I�ve ever had.� She spoke rapidly and excitedly, the colour high in her cheeks. �There was absolutely nowhere to sit down, nowhere, a man just above sang �Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep� the _whole_ way; he was blind and he had a small organ, one of those portable organs, and he expected money; so you can imagine what _that_ was like; there came a constant smell of luncheon from below, and puffs of hot oily machinery; the journey took hours and hours and hours; and for miles, literally for miles, dreadful boys ran with us on the shore, in that _awful_ Thames mud, going in _up to the waist_�they had their trousers turned back, and they went up to their hips in that indescribable Thames mud, their faces always turned to us, and screaming, exactly like carrion creatures, screaming ��Ere y�are sir, �ere y�are sir, �ere y�are sir,� exactly like some foul carrion objects, perfectly obscene; and paterfamilias on board, laughing when the boys went right down in that awful mud, occasionally throwing them a ha�penny. And if you�d seen the intent look on the faces of these boys, and the way they darted in the filth when a coin was flung�really, no vulture or jackal could dream of approaching them, for foulness. I _never_ would go on a pleasure boat again�never.� Gerald watched her all the time she spoke, his eyes glittering with faint rousedness. It was not so much what she said; it was she herself who roused him, roused him with a small, vivid pricking. �Of course,� he said, �every civilised body is bound to have its vermin.� �Why?� cried Ursula. �I don�t have vermin.� �And it�s not that�it�s the _quality_ of the whole thing�paterfamilias laughing and thinking it sport, and throwing the ha�pennies, and materfamilias spreading her fat little knees and eating, continually eating�� replied Gudrun. �Yes,� said Ursula. �It isn�t the boys so much who are vermin; it�s the people themselves, the whole body politic, as you call it.� Gerald laughed. �Never mind,� he said. �You shan�t go on the launch.� Gudrun flushed quickly at his rebuke. There were a few moments of silence. Gerald, like a sentinel, was watching the people who were going on to the boat. He was very good-looking and self-contained, but his air of soldierly alertness was rather irritating. �Will you have tea here then, or go across to the house, where there�s a tent on the lawn?� he asked. �Can�t we have a rowing boat, and get out?� asked Ursula, who was always rushing in too fast. �To get out?� smiled Gerald. �You see,� cried Gudrun, flushing at Ursula�s outspoken rudeness, �we don�t know the people, we are almost _complete_ strangers here.� �Oh, I can soon set you up with a few acquaintances,� he said easily. Gudrun looked at him, to see if it were ill-meant. Then she smiled at him. �Ah,� she said, �you know what we mean. Can�t we go up there, and explore that coast?� She pointed to a grove on the hillock of the meadow-side, near the shore half way down the lake. �That looks perfectly lovely. We might even bathe. Isn�t it beautiful in this light. Really, it�s like one of the reaches of the Nile�as one imagines the Nile.� Gerald smiled at her factitious enthusiasm for the distant spot. �You�re sure it�s far enough off?� he asked ironically, adding at once: �Yes, you might go there, if we could get a boat. They seem to be all out.� He looked round the lake and counted the rowing boats on its surface. �How lovely it would be!� cried Ursula wistfully. �And don�t you want tea?� he said. �Oh,� said Gudrun, �we could just drink a cup, and be off.� He looked from one to the other, smiling. He was somewhat offended�yet sporting. �Can you manage a boat pretty well?� he asked. �Yes,� replied Gudrun, coldly, �pretty well.� �Oh yes,� cried Ursula. �We can both of us row like water-spiders.� �You can? There�s a light little canoe of mine, that I didn�t take out for fear somebody should drown themselves. Do you think you�d be safe in that?� �Oh perfectly,� said Gudrun. �What an angel!� cried Ursula. �Don�t, for _my_ sake, have an accident�because I�m responsible for the water.� �Sure,� pledged Gudrun. �Besides, we can both swim quite well,� said Ursula. �Well�then I�ll get them to put you up a tea-basket, and you can picnic all to yourselves,�that�s the idea, isn�t it?� �How fearfully good! How frightfully nice if you could!� cried Gudrun warmly, her colour flushing up again. It made the blood stir in his veins, the subtle way she turned to him and infused her gratitude into his body. �Where�s Birkin?� he said, his eyes twinkling. �He might help me to get it down.� �But what about your hand? Isn�t it hurt?� asked Gudrun, rather muted, as if avoiding the intimacy. This was the first time the hurt had been mentioned. The curious way she skirted round the subject sent a new, subtle caress through his veins. He took his hand out of his pocket. It was bandaged. He looked at it, then put it in his pocket again. Gudrun quivered at the sight of the wrapped up paw. �Oh I can manage with one hand. The canoe is as light as a feather,� he said. �There�s Rupert!�Rupert!� Birkin turned from his social duties and came towards them. �What have you done to it?� asked Ursula, who had been aching to put the question for the last half hour. �To my hand?� said Gerald. �I trapped it in some machinery.� �Ugh!� said Ursula. �And did it hurt much?� �Yes,� he said. �It did at the time. It�s getting better now. It crushed the fingers.� �Oh,� cried Ursula, as if in pain, �I hate people who hurt themselves. I can _feel_ it.� And she shook her hand. �What do you want?� said Birkin. The two men carried down the slim brown boat, and set it on the water. �You�re quite sure you�ll be safe in it?� Gerald asked. �Quite sure,� said Gudrun. �I wouldn�t be so mean as to take it, if there was the slightest doubt. But I�ve had a canoe at Arundel, and I assure you I�m perfectly safe.� So saying, having given her word like a man, she and Ursula entered the frail craft, and pushed gently off. The two men stood watching them. Gudrun was paddling. She knew the men were watching her, and it made her slow and rather clumsy. The colour flew in her face like a flag. �Thanks awfully,� she called back to him, from the water, as the boat slid away. �It�s lovely�like sitting in a leaf.� He laughed at the fancy. Her voice was shrill and strange, calling from the distance. He watched her as she paddled away. There was something childlike about her, trustful and deferential, like a child. He watched her all the while, as she rowed. And to Gudrun it was a real delight, in make-belief, to be the childlike, clinging woman to the man who stood there on the quay, so good-looking and efficient in his white clothes, and moreover the most important man she knew at the moment. She did not take any notice of the wavering, indistinct, lambent Birkin, who stood at his side. One figure at a time occupied the field of her attention. The boat rustled lightly along the water. They passed the bathers whose striped tents stood between the willows of the meadow�s edge, and drew along the open shore, past the meadows that sloped golden in the light of the already late afternoon. Other boats were stealing under the wooded shore opposite, they could hear people�s laughter and voices. But Gudrun rowed on towards the clump of trees that balanced perfect in the distance, in the golden light. The sisters found a little place where a tiny stream flowed into the lake, with reeds and flowery marsh of pink willow herb, and a gravelly bank to the side. Here they ran delicately ashore, with their frail boat, the two girls took off their shoes and stockings and went through the water�s edge to the grass. The tiny ripples of the lake were warm and clear, they lifted their boat on to the bank, and looked round with joy. They were quite alone in a forsaken little stream-mouth, and on the knoll just behind was the clump of trees. �We will bathe just for a moment,� said Ursula, �and then we�ll have tea.� They looked round. Nobody could notice them, or could come up in time to see them. In less than a minute Ursula had thrown off her clothes and had slipped naked into the water, and was swimming out. Quickly, Gudrun joined her. They swam silently and blissfully for a few minutes, circling round their little stream-mouth. Then they slipped ashore and ran into the grove again, like nymphs. �How lovely it is to be free,� said Ursula, running swiftly here and there between the tree trunks, quite naked, her hair blowing loose. The grove was of beech-trees, big and splendid, a steel-grey scaffolding of trunks and boughs, with level sprays of strong green here and there, whilst through the northern side the distance glimmered open as through a window. When they had run and danced themselves dry, the girls quickly dressed and sat down to the fragrant tea. They sat on the northern side of the grove, in the yellow sunshine facing the slope of the grassy hill, alone in a little wild world of their own. The tea was hot and aromatic, there were delicious little sandwiches of cucumber and of caviare, and winy cakes. �Are you happy, Prune?� cried Ursula in delight, looking at her sister. �Ursula, I�m perfectly happy,� replied Gudrun gravely, looking at the westering sun. �So am I.� When they were together, doing the things they enjoyed, the two sisters were quite complete in a perfect world of their own. And this was one of the perfect moments of freedom and delight, such as children alone know, when all seems a perfect and blissful adventure. When they had finished tea, the two girls sat on, silent and serene. Then Ursula, who had a beautiful strong voice, began to sing to herself, softly: ��nnchen von Tharau.� Gudrun listened, as she sat beneath the trees, and the yearning came into her heart. Ursula seemed so peaceful and sufficient unto herself, sitting there unconsciously crooning her song, strong and unquestioned at the centre of her own universe. And Gudrun felt herself outside. Always this desolating, agonised feeling, that she was outside of life, an onlooker, whilst Ursula was a partaker, caused Gudrun to suffer from a sense of her own negation, and made her, that she must always demand the other to be aware of her, to be in connection with her. �Do you mind if I do Dalcroze to that tune, Hurtler?� she asked in a curious muted tone, scarce moving her lips. �What did you say?� asked Ursula, looking up in peaceful surprise. �Will you sing while I do Dalcroze?� said Gudrun, suffering at having to repeat herself. Ursula thought a moment, gathering her straying wits together. �While you do�?� she asked vaguely. �Dalcroze movements,� said Gudrun, suffering tortures of self-consciousness, even because of her sister. �Oh Dalcroze! I couldn�t catch the name. _Do_�I should love to see you,� cried Ursula, with childish surprised brightness. �What shall I sing?� �Sing anything you like, and I�ll take the rhythm from it.� But Ursula could not for her life think of anything to sing. However, she suddenly began, in a laughing, teasing voice: �My love�is a high-born lady�� Gudrun, looking as if some invisible chain weighed on her hands and feet, began slowly to dance in the eurythmic manner, pulsing and fluttering rhythmically with her feet, making slower, regular gestures with her hands and arms, now spreading her arms wide, now raising them above her head, now flinging them softly apart, and lifting her face, her feet all the time beating and running to the measure of the song, as if it were some strange incantation, her white, rapt form drifting here and there in a strange impulsive rhapsody, seeming to be lifted on a breeze of incantation, shuddering with strange little runs. Ursula sat on the grass, her mouth open in her singing, her eyes laughing as if she thought it was a great joke, but a yellow light flashing up in them, as she caught some of the unconscious ritualistic suggestion of the complex shuddering and waving and drifting of her sister�s white form, that was clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence. �My love is a high-born lady�She is-s-s�rather dark than shady�� rang out Ursula�s laughing, satiric song, and quicker, fiercer went Gudrun in the dance, stamping as if she were trying to throw off some bond, flinging her hands suddenly and stamping again, then rushing with face uplifted and throat full and beautiful, and eyes half closed, sightless. The sun was low and yellow, sinking down, and in the sky floated a thin, ineffectual moon. Ursula was quite absorbed in her song, when suddenly Gudrun stopped and said mildly, ironically: �Ursula!� �Yes?� said Ursula, opening her eyes out of the trance. Gudrun was standing still and pointing, a mocking smile on her face, towards the side. �Ugh!� cried Ursula in sudden panic, starting to her feet. �They�re quite all right,� rang out Gudrun�s sardonic voice. On the left stood a little cluster of Highland cattle, vividly coloured and fleecy in the evening light, their horns branching into the sky, pushing forward their muzzles inquisitively, to know what it was all about. Their eyes glittered through their tangle of hair, their naked nostrils were full of shadow. �Won�t they do anything?� cried Ursula in fear. Gudrun, who was usually frightened of cattle, now shook her head in a queer, half-doubtful, half-sardonic motion, a faint smile round her mouth. �Don�t they look charming, Ursula?� cried Gudrun, in a high, strident voice, something like the scream of a seagull. �Charming,� cried Ursula in trepidation. �But won�t they do anything to us?� Again Gudrun looked back at her sister with an enigmatic smile, and shook her head. �I�m sure they won�t,� she said, as if she had to convince herself also, and yet, as if she were confident of some secret power in herself, and had to put it to the test. �Sit down and sing again,� she called in her high, strident voice. �I�m frightened,� cried Ursula, in a pathetic voice, watching the group of sturdy short cattle, that stood with their knees planted, and watched with their dark, wicked eyes, through the matted fringe of their hair. Nevertheless, she sank down again, in her former posture. �They are quite safe,� came Gudrun�s high call. �Sing something, you�ve only to sing something.� It was evident she had a strange passion to dance before the sturdy, handsome cattle. Ursula began to sing, in a false quavering voice: �Way down in Tennessee�� She sounded purely anxious. Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a strange palpitating dance towards the cattle, lifting her body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some little frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms, her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and falling and reaching and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as in some voluptuous ecstasy towards them, whilst she drifted imperceptibly nearer, an uncanny white figure, towards them, carried away in its own rapt trance, ebbing in strange fluctuations upon the cattle, that waited, and ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from her, watching all the time as if hypnotised, their bare horns branching in the clear light, as the white figure of the woman ebbed upon them, in the slow, hypnotising convulsion of the dance. She could feel them just in front of her, it was as if she had the electric pulse from their breasts running into her hands. Soon she would touch them, actually touch them. A terrible shiver of fear and pleasure went through her. And all the while, Ursula, spell-bound, kept up her high-pitched thin, irrelevant song, which pierced the fading evening like an incantation. Gudrun could hear the cattle breathing heavily with helpless fear and fascination. Oh, they were brave little beasts, these wild Scotch bullocks, wild and fleecy. Suddenly one of them snorted, ducked its head, and backed. �Hue! Hi-eee!� came a sudden loud shout from the edge of the grove. The cattle broke and fell back quite spontaneously, went running up the hill, their fleece waving like fire to their motion. Gudrun stood suspended out on the grass, Ursula rose to her feet. It was Gerald and Birkin come to find them, and Gerald had cried out to frighten off the cattle. �What do you think you�re doing?� he now called, in a high, wondering vexed tone. �Why have you come?� came back Gudrun�s strident cry of anger. �What do you think you were doing?� Gerald repeated, automatically. �We were doing eurythmics,� laughed Ursula, in a shaken voice. Gudrun stood aloof looking at them with large dark eyes of resentment, suspended for a few moments. Then she walked away up the hill, after the cattle, which had gathered in a little, spell-bound cluster higher up. �Where are you going?� Gerald called after her. And he followed her up the hill-side. The sun had gone behind the hill, and shadows were clinging to the earth, the sky above was full of travelling light. �A poor song for a dance,� said Birkin to Ursula, standing before her with a sardonic, flickering laugh on his face. And in another second, he was singing softly to himself, and dancing a grotesque step-dance in front of her, his limbs and body shaking loose, his face flickering palely, a constant thing, whilst his feet beat a rapid mocking tattoo, and his body seemed to hang all loose and quaking in between, like a shadow. �I think we�ve all gone mad,� she said, laughing rather frightened. �Pity we aren�t madder,� he answered, as he kept up the incessant shaking dance. Then suddenly he leaned up to her and kissed her fingers lightly, putting his face to hers and looking into her eyes with a pale grin. She stepped back, affronted. �Offended�?� he asked ironically, suddenly going quite still and reserved again. �I thought you liked the light fantastic.� �Not like that,� she said, confused and bewildered, almost affronted. Yet somewhere inside her she was fascinated by the sight of his loose, vibrating body, perfectly abandoned to its own dropping and swinging, and by the pallid, sardonic-smiling face above. Yet automatically she stiffened herself away, and disapproved. It seemed almost an obscenity, in a man who talked as a rule so very seriously. �Why not like that?� he mocked. And immediately he dropped again into the incredibly rapid, slack-waggling dance, watching her malevolently. And moving in the rapid, stationary dance, he came a little nearer, and reached forward with an incredibly mocking, satiric gleam on his face, and would have kissed her again, had she not started back. �No, don�t!� she cried, really afraid. �Cordelia after all,� he said satirically. She was stung, as if this were an insult. She knew he intended it as such, and it bewildered her. �And you,� she cried in retort, �why do you always take your soul in your mouth, so frightfully full?� �So that I can spit it out the more readily,� he said, pleased by his own retort. Gerald Crich, his face narrowing to an intent gleam, followed up the hill with quick strides, straight after Gudrun. The cattle stood with their noses together on the brow of a slope, watching the scene below, the men in white hovering about the white forms of the women, watching above all Gudrun, who was advancing slowly towards them. She stood a moment, glancing back at Gerald, and then at the cattle. Then in a sudden motion, she lifted her arms and rushed sheer upon the long-horned bullocks, in shuddering irregular runs, pausing for a second and looking at them, then lifting her hands and running forward with a flash, till they ceased pawing the ground, and gave way, snorting with terror, lifting their heads from the ground and flinging themselves away, galloping off into the evening, becoming tiny in the distance, and still not stopping. Gudrun remained staring after them, with a mask-like defiant face. �Why do you want to drive them mad?� asked Gerald, coming up with her. She took no notice of him, only averted her face from him. �It�s not safe, you know,� he persisted. �They�re nasty, when they do turn.� �Turn where? Turn away?� she mocked loudly. �No,� he said, �turn against you.� �Turn against _me?_� she mocked. He could make nothing of this. �Anyway, they gored one of the farmer�s cows to death, the other day,� he said. �What do I care?� she said. �_I_ cared though,� he replied, �seeing that they�re my cattle.� �How are they yours! You haven�t swallowed them. Give me one of them now,� she said, holding out her hand. �You know where they are,� he said, pointing over the hill. �You can have one if you�d like it sent to you later on.� She looked at him inscrutably. �You think I�m afraid of you and your cattle, don�t you?� she asked. His eyes narrowed dangerously. There was a faint domineering smile on his face. �Why should I think that?� he said. She was watching him all the time with her dark, dilated, inchoate eyes. She leaned forward and swung round her arm, catching him a light blow on the face with the back of her hand. �That�s why,� she said, mocking. And she felt in her soul an unconquerable desire for deep violence against him. She shut off the fear and dismay that filled her conscious mind. She wanted to do as she did, she was not going to be afraid. He recoiled from the slight blow on his face. He became deadly pale, and a dangerous flame darkened his eyes. For some seconds he could not speak, his lungs were so suffused with blood, his heart stretched almost to bursting with a great gush of ungovernable emotion. It was as if some reservoir of black emotion had burst within him, and swamped him. �You have struck the first blow,� he said at last, forcing the words from his lungs, in a voice so soft and low, it sounded like a dream within her, not spoken in the outer air. �And I shall strike the last,� she retorted involuntarily, with confident assurance. He was silent, he did not contradict her. She stood negligently, staring away from him, into the distance. On the edge of her consciousness the question was asking itself, automatically: �Why _are_ you behaving in this _impossible_ and ridiculous fashion.� But she was sullen, she half shoved the question out of herself. She could not get it clean away, so she felt self-conscious. Gerald, very pale, was watching her closely. His eyes were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming. She turned suddenly on him. �It�s you who make me behave like this, you know,� she said, almost suggestive. �I? How?� he said. But she turned away, and set off towards the lake. Below, on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk. The launch was being illuminated. All round, shadow was gathering from the trees. Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes, was following down the open grassy slope. Gudrun waited for him to come up. Then she softly put out her hand and touched him, saying softly: �Don�t be angry with me.� A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious. Yet he stammered: �I�m not angry with you. I�m in love with you.� His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical control, to save himself. She laughed a silvery little mockery, yet intolerably caressive. �That�s one way of putting it,� she said. The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss of all his control, was too much for him. He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if his hand were iron. �It�s all right, then, is it?� he said, holding her arrested. She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her blood ran cold. �Yes, it�s all right,� she said softly, as if drugged, her voice crooning and witch-like. He walked on beside her, a striding, mindless body. But he recovered a little as he went. He suffered badly. He had killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain. They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and laughing. Birkin had been teasing Ursula. �Do you smell this little marsh?� he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them. �It�s rather nice,� she said. �No,� he replied, �alarming.� �Why alarming?� she laughed. �It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,� he said, �putting forth lilies and snakes, and the _ignis fatuus_, and rolling all the time onward. That�s what we never take into count�that it rolls onwards.� �What does?� �The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real reality�� �But what other? I don�t see any other,� said Ursula. �It is your reality, nevertheless,� he said; �that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls�the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this�our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.� �You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?� asked Ursula. �I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,� he replied. �When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution�then the snakes and swans and lotus�marsh-flowers�and Gudrun and Gerald�born in the process of destructive creation.� �And you and me�?� she asked. �Probably,� he replied. �In part, certainly. Whether we are that, _in toto_, I don�t yet know.� �You mean we are flowers of dissolution�_fleurs du mal?_ I don�t feel as if I were,� she protested. He was silent for a time. �I don�t feel as if we were, _altogether_,� he replied. �Some people are pure flowers of dark corruption�lilies. But there ought to be some roses, warm and flamy. You know Herakleitos says �a dry soul is best.� I know so well what that means. Do you?� �I�m not sure,� Ursula replied. �But what if people _are_ all flowers of dissolution�when they�re flowers at all�what difference does it make?� �No difference�and all the difference. Dissolution rolls on, just as production does,� he said. �It is a progressive process�and it ends in universal nothing�the end of the world, if you like. But why isn�t the end of the world as good as the beginning?� �I suppose it isn�t,� said Ursula, rather angry. �Oh yes, ultimately,� he said. �It means a new cycle of creation after�but not for us. If it is the end, then we are of the end�_fleurs du mal_ if you like. If we are _fleurs du mal_, we are not roses of happiness, and there you are.� �But I think I am,� said Ursula. �I think I am a rose of happiness.� �Ready-made?� he asked ironically. �No�real,� she said, hurt. �If we are the end, we are not the beginning,� he said. �Yes we are,� she said. �The beginning comes out of the end.� �After it, not out of it. After us, not out of us.� �You are a devil, you know, really,� she said. �You want to destroy our hope. You _want_ us to be deathly.� �No,� he said, �I only want us to _know_ what we are.� �Ha!� she cried in anger. �You only want us to know death.� �You�re quite right,� said the soft voice of Gerald, out of the dusk behind. Birkin rose. Gerald and Gudrun came up. They all began to smoke, in the moments of silence. One after another, Birkin lighted their cigarettes. The match flickered in the twilight, and they were all smoking peacefully by the water-side. The lake was dim, the light dying from off it, in the midst of the dark land. The air all round was intangible, neither here nor there, and there was an unreal noise of banjoes, or suchlike music. As the golden swim of light overhead died out, the moon gained brightness, and seemed to begin to smile forth her ascendancy. The dark woods on the opposite shore melted into universal shadow. And amid this universal under-shadow, there was a scattered intrusion of lights. Far down the lake were fantastic pale strings of colour, like beads of wan fire, green and red and yellow. The music came out in a little puff, as the launch, all illuminated, veered into the great shadow, stirring her outlines of half-living lights, puffing out her music in little drifts. All were lighting up. Here and there, close against the faint water, and at the far end of the lake, where the water lay milky in the last whiteness of the sky, and there was no shadow, solitary, frail flames of lanterns floated from the unseen boats. There was a sound of oars, and a boat passed from the pallor into the darkness under the wood, where her lanterns seemed to kindle into fire, hanging in ruddy lovely globes. And again, in the lake, shadowy red gleams hovered in reflection about the boat. Everywhere were these noiseless ruddy creatures of fire drifting near the surface of the water, caught at by the rarest, scarce visible reflections. Birkin brought the lanterns from the bigger boat, and the four shadowy white figures gathered round, to light them. Ursula held up the first, Birkin lowered the light from the rosy, glowing cup of his hands, into the depths of the lantern. It was kindled, and they all stood back to look at the great blue moon of light that hung from Ursula�s hand, casting a strange gleam on her face. It flickered, and Birkin went bending over the well of light. His face shone out like an apparition, so unconscious, and again, something demoniacal. Ursula was dim and veiled, looming over him. �That is all right,� said his voice softly. She held up the lantern. It had a flight of storks streaming through a turquoise sky of light, over a dark earth. �This is beautiful,� she said. �Lovely,� echoed Gudrun, who wanted to hold one also, and lift it up full of beauty. �Light one for me,� she said. Gerald stood by her, incapacitated. Birkin lit the lantern she held up. Her heart beat with anxiety, to see how beautiful it would be. It was primrose yellow, with tall straight flowers growing darkly from their dark leaves, lifting their heads into the primrose day, while butterflies hovered about them, in the pure clear light. Gudrun gave a little cry of excitement, as if pierced with delight. �Isn�t it beautiful, oh, isn�t it beautiful!� Her soul was really pierced with beauty, she was translated beyond herself. Gerald leaned near to her, into her zone of light, as if to see. He came close to her, and stood touching her, looking with her at the primrose-shining globe. And she turned her face to his, that was faintly bright in the light of the lantern, and they stood together in one luminous union, close together and ringed round with light, all the rest excluded. Birkin looked away, and went to light Ursula�s second lantern. It had a pale ruddy sea-bottom, with black crabs and sea-weed moving sinuously under a transparent sea, that passed into flamy ruddiness above. �You�ve got the heavens above, and the waters under the earth,� said Birkin to her. �Anything but the earth itself,� she laughed, watching his live hands that hovered to attend to the light. �I�m dying to see what my second one is,� cried Gudrun, in a vibrating rather strident voice, that seemed to repel the others from her. Birkin went and kindled it. It was of a lovely deep blue colour, with a red floor, and a great white cuttle-fish flowing in white soft streams all over it. The cuttle-fish had a face that stared straight from the heart of the light, very fixed and coldly intent. �How truly terrifying!� exclaimed Gudrun, in a voice of horror. Gerald, at her side, gave a low laugh. �But isn�t it really fearful!� she cried in dismay. Again he laughed, and said: �Change it with Ursula, for the crabs.� Gudrun was silent for a moment. �Ursula,� she said, �could you bear to have this fearful thing?� �I think the colouring is _lovely_,� said Ursula. �So do I,� said Gudrun. �But could you _bear_ to have it swinging to your boat? Don�t you want to destroy it _at once?_� �Oh no,� said Ursula. �I don�t want to destroy it.� �Well do you mind having it instead of the crabs? Are you sure you don�t mind?� Gudrun came forward to exchange lanterns. �No,� said Ursula, yielding up the crabs and receiving the cuttle-fish. Yet she could not help feeling rather resentful at the way in which Gudrun and Gerald should assume a right over her, a precedence. �Come then,� said Birkin. �I�ll put them on the boats.� He and Ursula were moving away to the big boat. �I suppose you�ll row me back, Rupert,� said Gerald, out of the pale shadow of the evening. �Won�t you go with Gudrun in the canoe?� said Birkin. �It�ll be more interesting.� There was a moment�s pause. Birkin and Ursula stood dimly, with their swinging lanterns, by the water�s edge. The world was all illusive. �Is that all right?� said Gudrun to him. �It�ll suit _me_ very well,� he said. �But what about you, and the rowing? I don�t see why you should pull me.� �Why not?� she said. �I can pull you as well as I could pull Ursula.� By her tone he could tell she wanted to have him in the boat to herself, and that she was subtly gratified that she should have power over them both. He gave himself, in a strange, electric submission. She handed him the lanterns, whilst she went to fix the cane at the end of the canoe. He followed after her, and stood with the lanterns dangling against his white-flannelled thighs, emphasising the shadow around. �Kiss me before we go,� came his voice softly from out of the shadow above. She stopped her work in real, momentary astonishment. �But why?� she exclaimed, in pure surprise. �Why?� he echoed, ironically. And she looked at him fixedly for some moments. Then she leaned forward and kissed him, with a slow, luxurious kiss, lingering on the mouth. And then she took the lanterns from him, while he stood swooning with the perfect fire that burned in all his joints. They lifted the canoe into the water, Gudrun took her place, and Gerald pushed off. �Are you sure you don�t hurt your hand, doing that?� she asked, solicitous. �Because I could have done it _perfectly_.� �I don�t hurt myself,� he said in a low, soft voice, that caressed her with inexpressible beauty. And she watched him as he sat near her, very near to her, in the stern of the canoe, his legs coming towards hers, his feet touching hers. And she paddled softly, lingeringly, longing for him to say something meaningful to her. But he remained silent. �You like this, do you?� she said, in a gentle, solicitous voice. He laughed shortly. �There is a space between us,� he said, in the same low, unconscious voice, as if something were speaking out of him. And she was as if magically aware of their being balanced in separation, in the boat. She swooned with acute comprehension and pleasure. �But I�m very near,� she said caressively, gaily. �Yet distant, distant,� he said. Again she was silent with pleasure, before she answered, speaking with a reedy, thrilled voice: �Yet we cannot very well change, whilst we are on the water.� She caressed him subtly and strangely, having him completely at her mercy. A dozen or more boats on the lake swung their rosy and moon-like lanterns low on the water, that reflected as from a fire. In the distance, the steamer twanged and thrummed and washed with her faintly-splashing paddles, trailing her strings of coloured lights, and occasionally lighting up the whole scene luridly with an effusion of fireworks, Roman candles and sheafs of stars and other simple effects, illuminating the surface of the water, and showing the boats creeping round, low down. Then the lovely darkness fell again, the lanterns and the little threaded lights glimmered softly, there was a muffled knocking of oars and a waving of music. Gudrun paddled almost imperceptibly. Gerald could see, not far ahead, the rich blue and the rose globes of Ursula�s lanterns swaying softly cheek to cheek as Birkin rowed, and iridescent, evanescent gleams chasing in the wake. He was aware, too, of his own delicately coloured lights casting their softness behind him. Gudrun rested her paddle and looked round. The canoe lifted with the lightest ebbing of the water. Gerald�s white knees were very near to her. �Isn�t it beautiful!� she said softly, as if reverently. She looked at him, as he leaned back against the faint crystal of the lantern-light. She could see his face, although it was a pure shadow. But it was a piece of twilight. And her breast was keen with passion for him, he was so beautiful in his male stillness and mystery. It was a certain pure effluence of maleness, like an aroma from his softly, firmly moulded contours, a certain rich perfection of his presence, that touched her with an ecstasy, a thrill of pure intoxication. She loved to look at him. For the present she did not want to touch him, to know the further, satisfying substance of his living body. He was purely intangible, yet so near. Her hands lay on the paddle like slumber, she only wanted to see him, like a crystal shadow, to feel his essential presence. �Yes,� he said vaguely. �It is very beautiful.� He was listening to the faint near sounds, the dropping of water-drops from the oar-blades, the slight drumming of the lanterns behind him, as they rubbed against one another, the occasional rustling of Gudrun�s full skirt, an alien land noise. His mind was almost submerged, he was almost transfused, lapsed out for the first time in his life, into the things about him. For he always kept such a keen attentiveness, concentrated and unyielding in himself. Now he had let go, imperceptibly he was melting into oneness with the whole. It was like pure, perfect sleep, his first great sleep of life. He had been so insistent, so guarded, all his life. But here was sleep, and peace, and perfect lapsing out. �Shall I row to the landing-stage?� asked Gudrun wistfully. �Anywhere,� he answered. �Let it drift.� �Tell me then, if we are running into anything,� she replied, in that very quiet, toneless voice of sheer intimacy. �The lights will show,� he said. So they drifted almost motionless, in silence. He wanted silence, pure and whole. But she was uneasy yet for some word, for some assurance. �Nobody will miss you?� she asked, anxious for some communication. �Miss me?� he echoed. �No! Why?� �I wondered if anybody would be looking for you.� �Why should they look for me?� And then he remembered his manners. �But perhaps you want to get back,� he said, in a changed voice. �No, I don�t want to get back,� she replied. �No, I assure you.� �You�re quite sure it�s all right for you?� �Perfectly all right.� And again they were still. The launch twanged and hooted, somebody was singing. Then as if the night smashed, suddenly there was a great shout, a confusion of shouting, warring on the water, then the horrid noise of paddles reversed and churned violently. Gerald sat up, and Gudrun looked at him in fear. �Somebody in the water,� he said, angrily, and desperately, looking keenly across the dusk. �Can you row up?� �Where, to the launch?� asked Gudrun, in nervous panic. �Yes.� �You�ll tell me if I don�t steer straight,� she said, in nervous apprehension. �You keep pretty level,� he said, and the canoe hastened forward. The shouting and the noise continued, sounding horrid through the dusk, over the surface of the water. �Wasn�t this _bound_ to happen?� said Gudrun, with heavy hateful irony. But he hardly heard, and she glanced over her shoulder to see her way. The half-dark waters were sprinkled with lovely bubbles of swaying lights, the launch did not look far off. She was rocking her lights in the early night. Gudrun rowed as hard as she could. But now that it was a serious matter, she seemed uncertain and clumsy in her stroke, it was difficult to paddle swiftly. She glanced at his face. He was looking fixedly into the darkness, very keen and alert and single in himself, instrumental. Her heart sank, she seemed to die a death. �Of course,� she said to herself, �nobody will be drowned. Of course they won�t. It would be too extravagant and sensational.� But her heart was cold, because of his sharp impersonal face. It was as if he belonged naturally to dread and catastrophe, as if he were himself again. Then there came a child�s voice, a girl�s high, piercing shriek: �Di�Di�Di�Di�Oh Di�Oh Di�Oh Di!� The blood ran cold in Gudrun�s veins. �It�s Diana, is it,� muttered Gerald. �The young monkey, she�d have to be up to some of her tricks.� And he glanced again at the paddle, the boat was not going quickly enough for him. It made Gudrun almost helpless at the rowing, this nervous stress. She kept up with all her might. Still the voices were calling and answering. �Where, where? There you are�that�s it. Which? No�No-o-o. Damn it all, here, _here_�� Boats were hurrying from all directions to the scene, coloured lanterns could be seen waving close to the surface of the lake, reflections swaying after them in uneven haste. The steamer hooted again, for some unknown reason. Gudrun�s boat was travelling quickly, the lanterns were swinging behind Gerald. And then again came the child�s high, screaming voice, with a note of weeping and impatience in it now: �Di�Oh Di�Oh Di�Di�!� It was a terrible sound, coming through the obscure air of the evening. �You�d be better if you were in bed, Winnie,� Gerald muttered to himself. He was stooping unlacing his shoes, pushing them off with the foot. Then he threw his soft hat into the bottom of the boat. �You can�t go into the water with your hurt hand,� said Gudrun, panting, in a low voice of horror. �What? It won�t hurt.� He had struggled out of his jacket, and had dropped it between his feet. He sat bare-headed, all in white now. He felt the belt at his waist. They were nearing the launch, which stood still big above them, her myriad lamps making lovely darts, and sinuous running tongues of ugly red and green and yellow light on the lustrous dark water, under the shadow. �Oh get her out! Oh Di, _darling!_ Oh get her out! Oh Daddy, Oh Daddy!� moaned the child�s voice, in distraction. Somebody was in the water, with a life belt. Two boats paddled near, their lanterns swinging ineffectually, the boats nosing round. �Hi there�Rockley!�hi there!� �Mr Gerald!� came the captain�s terrified voice. �Miss Diana�s in the water.� �Anybody gone in for her?� came Gerald�s sharp voice. �Young Doctor Brindell, sir.� �Where?� �Can�t see no signs of them, sir. Everybody�s looking, but there�s nothing so far.� There was a moment�s ominous pause. �Where did she go in?� �I think�about where that boat is,� came the uncertain answer, �that one with red and green lights.� �Row there,� said Gerald quietly to Gudrun. �Get her out, Gerald, oh get her out,� the child�s voice was crying anxiously. He took no heed. �Lean back that way,� said Gerald to Gudrun, as he stood up in the frail boat. �She won�t upset.� In another moment, he had dropped clean down, soft and plumb, into the water. Gudrun was swaying violently in her boat, the agitated water shook with transient lights, she realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. She knew he was gone out of the world, there was merely the same world, and absence, his absence. The night seemed large and vacuous. Lanterns swayed here and there, people were talking in an undertone on the launch and in the boats. She could hear Winifred moaning: �_Oh do find her Gerald, do find her_,� and someone trying to comfort the child. Gudrun paddled aimlessly here and there. The terrible, massive, cold, boundless surface of the water terrified her beyond words. Would he never come back? She felt she must jump into the water too, to know the horror also. She started, hearing someone say: �There he is.� She saw the movement of his swimming, like a water-rat. And she rowed involuntarily to him. But he was near another boat, a bigger one. Still she rowed towards him. She must be very near. She saw him�he looked like a seal. He looked like a seal as he took hold of the side of the boat. His fair hair was washed down on his round head, his face seemed to glisten suavely. She could hear him panting. Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, made her want to die, to die. The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed into the boat, his back rounded and soft�ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty! He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and that she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her. �Put the lights out, we shall see better,� came his voice, sudden and mechanical and belonging to the world of man. She could scarcely believe there was a world of man. She leaned round and blew out her lanterns. They were difficult to blow out. Everywhere the lights were gone save the coloured points on the sides of the launch. The bluey-grey, early night spread level around, the moon was overhead, there were shadows of boats here and there. Again there was a splash, and he was gone under. Gudrun sat, sick at heart, frightened of the great, level surface of the water, so heavy and deadly. She was so alone, with the level, unliving field of the water stretching beneath her. It was not a good isolation, it was a terrible, cold separation of suspense. She was suspended upon the surface of the insidious reality until such time as she also should disappear beneath it. Then she knew, by a stirring of voices, that he had climbed out again, into a boat. She sat wanting connection with him. Strenuously she claimed her connection with him, across the invisible space of the water. But round her heart was an isolation unbearable, through which nothing would penetrate. �Take the launch in. It�s no use keeping her there. Get lines for the dragging,� came the decisive, instrumental voice, that was full of the sound of the world. The launch began gradually to beat the waters. �Gerald! Gerald!� came the wild crying voice of Winifred. He did not answer. Slowly the launch drifted round in a pathetic, clumsy circle, and slunk away to the land, retreating into the dimness. The wash of her paddles grew duller. Gudrun rocked in her light boat, and dipped the paddle automatically to steady herself. �Gudrun?� called Ursula�s voice. �Ursula!� The boats of the two sisters pulled together. �Where is Gerald?� said Gudrun. �He�s dived again,� said Ursula plaintively. �And I know he ought not, with his hurt hand and everything.� �I�ll take him in home this time,� said Birkin. The boats swayed again from the wash of steamer. Gudrun and Ursula kept a look-out for Gerald. �There he is!� cried Ursula, who had the sharpest eyes. He had not been long under. Birkin pulled towards him, Gudrun following. He swam slowly, and caught hold of the boat with his wounded hand. It slipped, and he sank back. �Why don�t you help him?� cried Ursula sharply. He came again, and Birkin leaned to help him in to the boat. Gudrun again watched Gerald climb out of the water, but this time slowly, heavily, with the blind clambering motions of an amphibious beast, clumsy. Again the moon shone with faint luminosity on his white wet figure, on the stooping back and the rounded loins. But it looked defeated now, his body, it clambered and fell with slow clumsiness. He was breathing hoarsely too, like an animal that is suffering. He sat slack and motionless in the boat, his head blunt and blind like a seal�s, his whole appearance inhuman, unknowing. Gudrun shuddered as she mechanically followed his boat. Birkin rowed without speaking to the landing-stage. �Where are you going?� Gerald asked suddenly, as if just waking up. �Home,� said Birkin. �Oh no!� said Gerald imperiously. �We can�t go home while they�re in the water. Turn back again, I�m going to find them.� The women were frightened, his voice was so imperative and dangerous, almost mad, not to be opposed. �No!� said Birkin. �You can�t.� There was a strange fluid compulsion in his voice. Gerald was silent in a battle of wills. It was as if he would kill the other man. But Birkin rowed evenly and unswerving, with an inhuman inevitability. �Why should you interfere?� said Gerald, in hate. Birkin did not answer. He rowed towards the land. And Gerald sat mute, like a dumb beast, panting, his teeth chattering, his arms inert, his head like a seal�s head. They came to the landing-stage. Wet and naked-looking, Gerald climbed up the few steps. There stood his father, in the night. �Father!� he said. �Yes my boy? Go home and get those things off.� �We shan�t save them, father,� said Gerald. �There�s hope yet, my boy.� �I�m afraid not. There�s no knowing where they are. You can�t find them. And there�s a current, as cold as hell.� �We�ll let the water out,� said the father. �Go home you and look to yourself. See that he�s looked after, Rupert,� he added in a neutral voice. �Well father, I�m sorry. I�m sorry. I�m afraid it�s my fault. But it can�t be helped; I�ve done what I could for the moment. I could go on diving, of course�not much, though�and not much use�� He moved away barefoot, on the planks of the platform. Then he trod on something sharp. �Of course, you�ve got no shoes on,� said Birkin. �His shoes are here!� cried Gudrun from below. She was making fast her boat. Gerald waited for them to be brought to him. Gudrun came with them. He pulled them on his feet. �If you once die,� he said, �then when it�s over, it�s finished. Why come to life again? There�s room under that water there for thousands.� �Two is enough,� she said murmuring. He dragged on his second shoe. He was shivering violently, and his jaw shook as he spoke. �That�s true,� he said, �maybe. But it�s curious how much room there seems, a whole universe under there; and as cold as hell, you�re as helpless as if your head was cut off.� He could scarcely speak, he shook so violently. �There�s one thing about our family, you know,� he continued. �Once anything goes wrong, it can never be put right again�not with us. I�ve noticed it all my life�you can�t put a thing right, once it has gone wrong.� They were walking across the high-road to the house. �And do you know, when you are down there, it is so cold, actually, and so endless, so different really from what it is on top, so endless�you wonder how it is so many are alive, why we�re up here. Are you going? I shall see you again, shan�t I? Good-night, and thank you. Thank you very much!� The two girls waited a while, to see if there were any hope. The moon shone clearly overhead, with almost impertinent brightness, the small dark boats clustered on the water, there were voices and subdued shouts. But it was all to no purpose. Gudrun went home when Birkin returned. He was commissioned to open the sluice that let out the water from the lake, which was pierced at one end, near the high-road, thus serving as a reservoir to supply with water the distant mines, in case of necessity. �Come with me,� he said to Ursula, �and then I will walk home with you, when I�ve done this.� He called at the water-keeper�s cottage and took the key of the sluice. They went through a little gate from the high-road, to the head of the water, where was a great stone basin which received the overflow, and a flight of stone steps descended into the depths of the water itself. At the head of the steps was the lock of the sluice-gate. The night was silver-grey and perfect, save for the scattered restless sound of voices. The grey sheen of the moonlight caught the stretch of water, dark boats plashed and moved. But Ursula�s mind ceased to be receptive, everything was unimportant and unreal. Birkin fixed the iron handle of the sluice, and turned it with a wrench. The cogs began slowly to rise. He turned and turned, like a slave, his white figure became distinct. Ursula looked away. She could not bear to see him winding heavily and laboriously, bending and rising mechanically like a slave, turning the handle. Then, a real shock to her, there came a loud splashing of water from out of the dark, tree-filled hollow beyond the road, a splashing that deepened rapidly to a harsh roar, and then became a heavy, booming noise of a great body of water falling solidly all the time. It occupied the whole of the night, this great steady booming of water, everything was drowned within it, drowned and lost. Ursula seemed to have to struggle for her life. She put her hands over her ears, and looked at the high bland moon. �Can�t we go now?� she cried to Birkin, who was watching the water on the steps, to see if it would get any lower. It seemed to fascinate him. He looked at her and nodded. The little dark boats had moved nearer, people were crowding curiously along the hedge by the high-road, to see what was to be seen. Birkin and Ursula went to the cottage with the key, then turned their backs on the lake. She was in great haste. She could not bear the terrible crushing boom of the escaping water. �Do you think they are dead?� she cried in a high voice, to make herself heard. �Yes,� he replied. �Isn�t it horrible!� He paid no heed. They walked up the hill, further and further away from the noise. �Do you mind very much?� she asked him. �I don�t mind about the dead,� he said, �once they are dead. The worst of it is, they cling on to the living, and won�t let go.� She pondered for a time. �Yes,� she said. �The _fact_ of death doesn�t really seem to matter much, does it?� �No,� he said. �What does it matter if Diana Crich is alive or dead?� �Doesn�t it?� she said, shocked. �No, why should it? Better she were dead�she�ll be much more real. She�ll be positive in death. In life she was a fretting, negated thing.� �You are rather horrible,� murmured Ursula. �No! I�d rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living somehow, was all wrong. As for the young man, poor devil�he�ll find his way out quickly instead of slowly. Death is all right�nothing better.� �Yet you don�t want to die,� she challenged him. He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to her in its change: �I should like to be through with it�I should like to be through with the death process.� �And aren�t you?� asked Ursula nervously. They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said, slowly, as if afraid: �There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn�t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death�our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world.� Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed to catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted to hear, but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to yield there, where he wanted her, to yield as it were her very identity. �Why should love be like sleep?� she asked sadly. �I don�t know. So that it is like death�I _do_ want to die from this life�and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over like a naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone, and new air around one, that has never been breathed before.� She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other. And she seemed to feel his gesture through her blood, and she drew back, even though her desire sent her forward. �But,� she said gravely, �didn�t you say you wanted something that was _not_ love�something beyond love?� He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken. Whichever way one moved, if one were to move forwards, one must break a way through. And to know, to give utterance, was to break a way through the walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out. �I don�t want love,� he said. �I don�t want to know you. I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different. One shouldn�t talk when one is tired and wretched. One Hamletises, and it seems a lie. Only believe me when I show you a bit of healthy pride and insouciance. I hate myself serious.� �Why shouldn�t you be serious?� she said. He thought for a minute, then he said, sulkily: �I don�t know.� Then they walked on in silence, at outs. He was vague and lost. �Isn�t it strange,� she said, suddenly putting her hand on his arm, with a loving impulse, �how we always talk like this! I suppose we do love each other, in some way.� �Oh yes,� he said; �too much.� She laughed almost gaily. �You�d have to have it your own way, wouldn�t you?� she teased. �You could never take it on trust.� He changed, laughed softly, and turned and took her in his arms, in the middle of the road. �Yes,� he said softly. And he kissed her face and brow, slowly, gently, with a sort of delicate happiness which surprised her extremely, and to which she could not respond. They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their stillness. Yet she held back from them. It was like strange moths, very soft and silent, settling on her from the darkness of her soul. She was uneasy. She drew away. �Isn�t somebody coming?� she said. So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards Beldover. Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she stopped and held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with hard, fierce kisses of passion. In spite of his otherness, the old blood beat up in him. �Not this, not this,� he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him. And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing. But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question. Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home away from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the old fire of burning passion. Far away, far away, there seemed to be a small lament in the darkness. But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion, that had blazed up anew like a new spell of life. �I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a word-bag,� he said in triumph, scorning his other self. Yet somewhere far off and small, the other hovered. The men were still dragging the lake when he got back. He stood on the bank and heard Gerald�s voice. The water was still booming in the night, the moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive. The lake was sinking. There came the raw smell of the banks, in the night air. Up at Shortlands there were lights in the windows, as if nobody had gone to bed. On the landing-stage was the old doctor, the father of the young man who was lost. He stood quite silent, waiting. Birkin also stood and watched, Gerald came up in a boat. �You still here, Rupert?� he said. �We can�t get them. The bottom slopes, you know, very steep. The water lies between two very sharp slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will take you. It isn�t as if it was a level bottom. You never know where you are, with the dragging.� �Is there any need for you to be working?� said Birkin. �Wouldn�t it be much better if you went to bed?� �To bed! Good God, do you think I should sleep? We�ll find �em, before I go away from here.� �But the men would find them just the same without you�why should you insist?� Gerald looked up at him. Then he put his hand affectionately on Birkin�s shoulder, saying: �Don�t you bother about me, Rupert. If there�s anybody�s health to think about, it�s yours, not mine. How do you feel yourself?� �Very well. But you, you spoil your own chance of life�you waste your best self.� Gerald was silent for a moment. Then he said: �Waste it? What else is there to do with it?� �But leave this, won�t you? You force yourself into horrors, and put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck. Come away now.� �A mill-stone of beastly memories!� Gerald repeated. Then he put his hand again affectionately on Birkin�s shoulder. �God, you�ve got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.� Birkin�s heart sank. He was irritated and weary of having a telling way of putting things. �Won�t you leave it? Come over to my place��he urged as one urges a drunken man. �No,� said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man�s shoulder. �Thanks very much, Rupert�I shall be glad to come tomorrow, if that�ll do. You understand, don�t you? I want to see this job through. But I�ll come tomorrow, right enough. Oh, I�d rather come and have a chat with you than�than do anything else, I verily believe. Yes, I would. You mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know.� �What do I mean, more than I know?� asked Birkin irritably. He was acutely aware of Gerald�s hand on his shoulder. And he did not want this altercation. He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly misery. �I�ll tell you another time,� said Gerald coaxingly. �Come along with me now�I want you to come,� said Birkin. There was a pause, intense and real. Birkin wondered why his own heart beat so heavily. Then Gerald�s fingers gripped hard and communicative into Birkin�s shoulder, as he said: �No, I�ll see this job through, Rupert. Thank you�I know what you mean. We�re all right, you know, you and me.� �I may be all right, but I�m sure you�re not, mucking about here,� said Birkin. And he went away. The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn. Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him. �She killed him,� said Gerald. The moon sloped down the sky and sank at last. The lake was sunk to quarter size, it had horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw rottenish water. Dawn roused faintly behind the eastern hill. The water still boomed through the sluice. As the birds were whistling for the first morning, and the hills at the back of the desolate lake stood radiant with the new mists, there was a straggling procession up to Shortlands, men bearing the bodies on a stretcher, Gerald going beside them, the two grey-bearded fathers following in silence. Indoors the family was all sitting up, waiting. Somebody must go to tell the mother, in her room. The doctor in secret struggled to bring back his son, till he himself was exhausted. Over all the outlying district was a hush of dreadful excitement on that Sunday morning. The colliery people felt as if this catastrophe had happened directly to themselves, indeed they were more shocked and frightened than if their own men had been killed. Such a tragedy in Shortlands, the high home of the district! One of the young mistresses, persisting in dancing on the cabin roof of the launch, wilful young madam, drowned in the midst of the festival, with the young doctor! Everywhere on the Sunday morning, the colliers wandered about, discussing the calamity. At all the Sunday dinners of the people, there seemed a strange presence. It was as if the angel of death were very near, there was a sense of the supernatural in the air. The men had excited, startled faces, the women looked solemn, some of them had been crying. The children enjoyed the excitement at first. There was an intensity in the air, almost magical. Did all enjoy it? Did all enjoy the thrill? Gudrun had wild ideas of rushing to comfort Gerald. She was thinking all the time of the perfect comforting, reassuring thing to say to him. She was shocked and frightened, but she put that away, thinking of how she should deport herself with Gerald: act her part. That was the real thrill: how she should act her part. Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was capable of nothing. She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the accident, but her estranged air looked like trouble. She merely sat by herself, whenever she could, and longed to see him again. She wanted him to come to the house,�she would not have it otherwise, he must come at once. She was waiting for him. She stayed indoors all day, waiting for him to knock at the door. Every minute, she glanced automatically at the window. He would be there. CHAPTER XV. SUNDAY EVENING As the day wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, harder to bear than death. �Unless something happens,� she said to herself, in the perfect lucidity of final suffering, �I shall die. I am at the end of my line of life.� She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug. Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that she was near to death. She had travelled all her life along the line of fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew all she had to know, she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into death. And one must fulfil one�s development to the end, must carry the adventure to its conclusion. And the next step was over the border into death. So it was then! There was a certain peace in the knowledge. After all, when one was fulfilled, one was happiest in falling into death, as a bitter fruit plunges in its ripeness downwards. Death is a great consummation, a consummating experience. It is a development from life. That we know, while we are yet living. What then need we think for further? One can never see beyond the consummation. It is enough that death is a great and conclusive experience. Why should we ask what comes after the experience, when the experience is still unknown to us? Let us die, since the great experience is the one that follows now upon all the rest, death, which is the next great crisis in front of which we have arrived. If we wait, if we baulk the issue, we do but hang about the gates in undignified uneasiness. There it is, in front of us, as in front of Sappho, the illimitable space. Thereinto goes the journey. Have we not the courage to go on with our journey, must we cry �I daren�t�? On ahead we will go, into death, and whatever death may mean. If a man can see the next step to be taken, why should he fear the next but one? Why ask about the next but one? Of the next step we are certain. It is the step into death. �I shall die�I shall quickly die,� said Ursula to herself, clear as if in a trance, clear, calm, and certain beyond human certainty. But somewhere behind, in the twilight, there was a bitter weeping and a hopelessness. That must not be attended to. One must go where the unfaltering spirit goes, there must be no baulking the issue, because of fear. No baulking the issue, no listening to the lesser voices. If the deepest desire be now, to go on into the unknown of death, shall one forfeit the deepest truth for one more shallow? �Then let it end,� she said to herself. It was a decision. It was not a question of taking one�s life�she would _never_ kill herself, that was repulsive and violent. It was a question of _knowing_ the nextcstep. And the next step led into the space of death. Did it?�or was there�? Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside the fire. And then the thought came back. The space of death! Could she give herself to it? Ah yes�it was a sleep. She had had enough. So long she had held out; and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to resist any more. In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was dark. She could feel, within the darkness, the terrible assertion of her body, the unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that is too much, the far-off, awful nausea of dissolution set in within the body. �Does the body correspond so immediately with the spirit?� she asked herself. And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation of the integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as well. Unless I set my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of life, fix myself and remain static, cut off from living, absolved within my own will. But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move on with the invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanised life. Life indeed may be ignominious, shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying. Tomorrow was Monday. Monday, the beginning of another school-week! Another shameful, barren school-week, mere routine and mechanical activity. Was not the adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance. How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be found? No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a rotary motion, mechanised, cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for from life�it was the same in all countries and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look out on to the great dark sky of death with elation, as one had looked out of the classroom window as a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside. Now one was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner within this sordid vast edifice of life, and there was no escape, save in death. But what a joy! What a gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea they turned into a murderous alley and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they claimed too, shared it up, parcelled it out to certain owners, they trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep between the spiky walls through a labyrinth of life. But the great, dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in face of it. How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness of death. Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority. Ursula sat quite still and quite forgotten, alone by the fire in the drawing-room. The children were playing in the kitchen, all the others were gone to church. And she was gone into the ultimate darkness of her own soul. She was startled by hearing the bell ring, away in the kitchen, the children came scudding along the passage in delicious alarm. �Ursula, there�s somebody.� �I know. Don�t be silly,� she replied. She too was startled, almost frightened. She dared hardly go to the door. Birkin stood on the threshold, his rain-coat turned up to his ears. He had come now, now she was gone far away. She was aware of the rainy night behind him. �Oh is it you?� she said. �I am glad you are at home,� he said in a low voice, entering the house. �They are all gone to church.� He took off his coat and hung it up. The children were peeping at him round the corner. �Go and get undressed now, Billy and Dora,� said Ursula. �Mother will be back soon, and she�ll be disappointed if you�re not in bed.� The children, in a sudden angelic mood, retired without a word. Birkin and Ursula went into the drawing-room. The fire burned low. He looked at her and wondered at the luminous delicacy of her beauty, and the wide shining of her eyes. He watched from a distance, with wonder in his heart, she seemed transfigured with light. �What have you been doing all day?� he asked her. �Only sitting about,� she said. He looked at her. There was a change in her. But she was separate from him. She remained apart, in a kind of brightness. They both sat silent in the soft light of the lamp. He felt he ought to go away again, he ought not to have come. Still he did not gather enough resolution to move. But he was _de trop_, her mood was absent and separate. Then there came the voices of the two children calling shyly outside the door, softly, with self-excited timidity: �Ursula! Ursula!� She rose and opened the door. On the threshold stood the two children in their long nightgowns, with wide-eyed, angelic faces. They were being very good for the moment, playing the rôle perfectly of two obedient children. �Shall you take us to bed!� said Billy, in a loud whisper. �Why you _are_ angels tonight,� she said softly. �Won�t you come and say good-night to Mr Birkin?� The children merged shyly into the room, on bare feet. Billy�s face was wide and grinning, but there was a great solemnity of being good in his round blue eyes. Dora, peeping from the floss of her fair hair, hung back like some tiny Dryad, that has no soul. �Will you say good-night to me?� asked Birkin, in a voice that was strangely soft and smooth. Dora drifted away at once, like a leaf lifted on a breath of wind. But Billy went softly forward, slow and willing, lifting his pinched-up mouth implicitly to be kissed. Ursula watched the full, gathered lips of the man gently touch those of the boy, so gently. Then Birkin lifted his fingers and touched the boy�s round, confiding cheek, with a faint touch of love. Neither spoke. Billy seemed angelic like a cherub boy, or like an acolyte, Birkin was a tall, grave angel looking down to him. �Are you going to be kissed?� Ursula broke in, speaking to the little girl. But Dora edged away like a tiny Dryad that will not be touched. �Won�t you say good-night to Mr Birkin? Go, he�s waiting for you,� said Ursula. But the girl-child only made a little motion away from him. �Silly Dora, silly Dora!� said Ursula. Birkin felt some mistrust and antagonism in the small child. He could not understand it. �Come then,� said Ursula. �Let us go before mother comes.� �Who�ll hear us say our prayers?� asked Billy anxiously. �Whom you like.� �Won�t you?� �Yes, I will.� �Ursula?� �Well Billy?� �Is it _whom_ you like?� �That�s it.� �Well what is _whom_?� �It�s the accusative of who.� There was a moment�s contemplative silence, then the confiding: �Is it?� Birkin smiled to himself as he sat by the fire. When Ursula came down he sat motionless, with his arms on his knees. She saw him, how he was motionless and ageless, like some crouching idol, some image of a deathly religion. He looked round at her, and his face, very pale and unreal, seemed to gleam with a whiteness almost phosphorescent. �Don�t you feel well?� she asked, in indefinable repulsion. �I hadn�t thought about it.� �But don�t you know without thinking about it?� He looked at her, his eyes dark and swift, and he saw her revulsion. He did not answer her question. �Don�t you know whether you are unwell or not, without thinking about it?� she persisted. �Not always,� he said coldly. �But don�t you think that�s very wicked?� �Wicked?� �Yes. I think it�s _criminal_ to have so little connection with your own body that you don�t even know when you are ill.� He looked at her darkly. �Yes,� he said. �Why don�t you stay in bed when you are seedy? You look perfectly ghastly.� �Offensively so?� he asked ironically. �Yes, quite offensive. Quite repelling.� �Ah!! Well that�s unfortunate.� �And it�s raining, and it�s a horrible night. Really, you shouldn�t be forgiven for treating your body like it�you _ought_ to suffer, a man who takes as little notice of his body as that.� ��takes as little notice of his body as that,� he echoed mechanically. This cut her short, and there was silence. The others came in from church, and the two had the girls to face, then the mother and Gudrun, and then the father and the boy. �Good-evening,� said Brangwen, faintly surprised. �Came to see me, did you?� �No,� said Birkin, �not about anything, in particular, that is. The day was dismal, and I thought you wouldn�t mind if I called in.� �It _has_ been a depressing day,� said Mrs Brangwen sympathetically. At that moment the voices of the children were heard calling from upstairs: �Mother! Mother!� She lifted her face and answered mildly into the distance: �I shall come up to you in a minute, Doysie.� Then to Birkin: �There is nothing fresh at Shortlands, I suppose? Ah,� she sighed, �no, poor things, I should think not.� �You�ve been over there today, I suppose?� asked the father. �Gerald came round to tea with me, and I walked back with him. The house is overexcited and unwholesome, I thought.� �I should think they were people who hadn�t much restraint,� said Gudrun. �Or too much,� Birkin answered. �Oh yes, I�m sure,� said Gudrun, almost vindictively, �one or the other.� �They all feel they ought to behave in some unnatural fashion,� said Birkin. �When people are in grief, they would do better to cover their faces and keep in retirement, as in the old days.� �Certainly!� cried Gudrun, flushed and inflammable. �What can be worse than this public grief�what is more horrible, more false! If _grief_ is not private, and hidden, what is?� �Exactly,� he said. �I felt ashamed when I was there and they were all going about in a lugubrious false way, feeling they must not be natural or ordinary.� �Well�� said Mrs Brangwen, offended at this criticism, �it isn�t so easy to bear a trouble like that.� And she went upstairs to the children. He remained only a few minutes longer, then took his leave. When he was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life. It was so completely incomprehensible and irrational. She did not know _why_ she hated him, her hate was quite abstract. She had only realised with a shock that stunned her, that she was overcome by this pure transportation. He was the enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and jewel-like, the quintessence of all that was inimical. She thought of his face, white and purely wrought, and of his eyes that had such a dark, constant will of assertion, and she touched her own forehead, to feel if she were mad, she was so transfigured in white flame of essential hate. It was not temporal, her hatred, she did not hate him for this or for that; she did not want to do anything to him, to have any connection with him. Her relation was ultimate and utterly beyond words, the hate was so pure and gemlike. It was as if he were a beam of essential enmity, a beam of light that did not only destroy her, but denied her altogether, revoked her whole world. She saw him as a clear stroke of uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like being whose existence defined her own non-existence. When she heard he was ill again, her hatred only intensified itself a few degrees, if that were possible. It stunned her and annihilated her, but she could not escape it. She could not escape this transfiguration of hatred that had come upon her. CHAPTER XVI. MAN TO MAN He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times take one�s chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were satisfied in life. He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action. On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons. He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him. But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up. It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable. She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he not know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience, claiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering. By her very suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her everlasting prisoner. And Ursula, Ursula was the same�or the inverse. She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it herself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession. It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or wholeness. And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us of the mixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two stars. In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The process of singling into individuality resulted into the great polarisation of sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the other. But the separation was imperfect even them. And so our world-cycle passes. There is now to come the new day, when we are beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised. But there is no longer any of the horrible merging, mingling self-abnegation of love. There is only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other. In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarised. Each has a single, separate being, with its own laws. The man has his pure freedom, the woman hers. Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit. Each admits the different nature in the other. So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill. He liked sometimes to be ill enough to take to his bed. For then he got better very quickly, and things came to him clear and sure. Whilst he was laid up, Gerald came to see him. The two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other. Gerald�s eyes were quick and restless, his whole manner tense and impatient, he seemed strung up to some activity. According to conventionality, he wore black clothes, he looked formal, handsome and _comme il faut_. His hair was fair almost to whiteness, sharp like splinters of light, his face was keen and ruddy, his body seemed full of northern energy. Gerald really loved Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was too unreal;�clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken seriously, not quite to be counted as a man among men. �Why are you laid up again?� he asked kindly, taking the sick man�s hand. It was always Gerald who was protective, offering the warm shelter of his physical strength. �For my sins, I suppose,� Birkin said, smiling a little ironically. �For your sins? Yes, probably that is so. You should sin less, and keep better in health?� �You�d better teach me.� He looked at Gerald with ironic eyes. �How are things with you?� asked Birkin. �With me?� Gerald looked at Birkin, saw he was serious, and a warm light came into his eyes. �I don�t know that they�re any different. I don�t see how they could be. There�s nothing to change.� �I suppose you are conducting the business as successfully as ever, and ignoring the demand of the soul.� �That�s it,� said Gerald. �At least as far as the business is concerned. I couldn�t say about the soul, I�am sure.� �No.� �Surely you don�t expect me to?� laughed Gerald. �No. How are the rest of your affairs progressing, apart from the business?� �The rest of my affairs? What are those? I couldn�t say; I don�t know what you refer to.� �Yes, you do,� said Birkin. �Are you gloomy or cheerful? And what about Gudrun Brangwen?� �What about her?� A confused look came over Gerald. �Well,� he added, �I don�t know. I can only tell you she gave me a hit over the face last time I saw her.� �A hit over the face! What for?� �That I couldn�t tell you, either.� �Really! But when?� �The night of the party�when Diana was drowned. She was driving the cattle up the hill, and I went after her�you remember.� �Yes, I remember. But what made her do that? You didn�t definitely ask her for it, I suppose?� �I? No, not that I know of. I merely said to her, that it was dangerous to drive those Highland bullocks�as it _is_. She turned in such a way, and said��I suppose you think I�m afraid of you and your cattle, don�t you?� So I asked her �why,� and for answer she flung me a back-hander across the face.� Birkin laughed quickly, as if it pleased him. Gerald looked at him, wondering, and began to laugh as well, saying: �I didn�t laugh at the time, I assure you. I was never so taken aback in my life.� �And weren�t you furious?� �Furious? I should think I was. I�d have murdered her for two pins.� �H�m!� ejaculated Birkin. �Poor Gudrun, wouldn�t she suffer afterwards for having given herself away!� He was hugely delighted. �Would she suffer?� asked Gerald, also amused now. Both men smiled in malice and amusement. �Badly, I should think; seeing how self-conscious she is.� �She is self-conscious, is she? Then what made her do it? For I certainly think it was quite uncalled-for, and quite unjustified.� �I suppose it was a sudden impulse.� �Yes, but how do you account for her having such an impulse? I�d done her no harm.� Birkin shook his head. �The Amazon suddenly came up in her, I suppose,� he said. �Well,� replied Gerald, �I�d rather it had been the Orinoco.� They both laughed at the poor joke. Gerald was thinking how Gudrun had said she would strike the last blow too. But some reserve made him keep this back from Birkin. �And you resent it?� Birkin asked. �I don�t resent it. I don�t care a tinker�s curse about it.� He was silent a moment, then he added, laughing. �No, I�ll see it through, that�s all. She seemed sorry afterwards.� �Did she? You�ve not met since that night?� Gerald�s face clouded. �No,� he said. �We�ve been�you can imagine how it�s been, since the accident.� �Yes. Is it calming down?� �I don�t know. It�s a shock, of course. But I don�t believe mother minds. I really don�t believe she takes any notice. And what�s so funny, she used to be all for the children�nothing mattered, nothing whatever mattered but the children. And now, she doesn�t take any more notice than if it was one of the servants.� �No? Did it upset _you_ very much?� �It�s a shock. But I don�t feel it very much, really. I don�t feel any different. We�ve all got to die, and it doesn�t seem to make any great difference, anyhow, whether you die or not. I can�t feel any _grief_, you know. It leaves me cold. I can�t quite account for it.� �You don�t care if you die or not?� asked Birkin. Gerald looked at him with eyes blue as the blue-fibred steel of a weapon. He felt awkward, but indifferent. As a matter of fact, he did care terribly, with a great fear. �Oh,� he said, �I don�t want to die, why should I? But I never trouble. The question doesn�t seem to be on the carpet for me at all. It doesn�t interest me, you know.� �_Timor mortis conturbat me_,� quoted Birkin, adding��No, death doesn�t really seem the point any more. It curiously doesn�t concern one. It�s like an ordinary tomorrow.� Gerald looked closely at his friend. The eyes of the two men met, and an unspoken understanding was exchanged. Gerald narrowed his eyes, his face was cool and unscrupulous as he looked at Birkin, impersonally, with a vision that ended in a point in space, strangely keen-eyed and yet blind. �If death isn�t the point,� he said, in a strangely abstract, cold, fine voice��what is?� He sounded as if he had been found out. �What is?� re-echoed Birkin. And there was a mocking silence. �There�s long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we disappear,� said Birkin. �There is,� said Gerald. �But what sort of way?� He seemed to press the other man for knowledge which he himself knew far better than Birkin did. �Right down the slopes of degeneration�mystic, universal degeneration. There are many stages of pure degradation to go through: agelong. We live on long after our death, and progressively, in progressive devolution.� Gerald listened with a faint, fine smile on his face, all the time, as if, somewhere, he knew so much better than Birkin, all about this: as if his own knowledge were direct and personal, whereas Birkin�s was a matter of observation and inference, not quite hitting the nail on the head:�though aiming near enough at it. But he was not going to give himself away. If Birkin could get at the secrets, let him. Gerald would never help him. Gerald would be a dark horse to the end. �Of course,� he said, with a startling change of conversation, �it is father who really feels it. It will finish him. For him the world collapses. All his care now is for Winnie�he must save Winnie. He says she ought to be sent away to school, but she won�t hear of it, and he�ll never do it. Of course she _is_ in rather a queer way. We�re all of us curiously bad at living. We can do things�but we can�t get on with life at all. It�s curious�a family failing.� �She oughtn�t to be sent away to school,� said Birkin, who was considering a new proposition. �She oughtn�t. Why?� �She�s a queer child�a special child, more special even than you. And in my opinion special children should never be sent away to school. Only moderately ordinary children should be sent to school�so it seems to me.� �I�m inclined to think just the opposite. I think it would probably make her more normal if she went away and mixed with other children.� �She wouldn�t mix, you see. _You_ never really mixed, did you? And she wouldn�t be willing even to pretend to. She�s proud, and solitary, and naturally apart. If she has a single nature, why do you want to make her gregarious?� �No, I don�t want to make her anything. But I think school would be good for her.� �Was it good for you?� Gerald�s eyes narrowed uglily. School had been torture to him. Yet he had not questioned whether one should go through this torture. He seemed to believe in education through subjection and torment. �I hated it at the time, but I can see it was necessary,� he said. �It brought me into line a bit�and you can�t live unless you do come into line somewhere.� �Well,� said Birkin, �I begin to think that you can�t live unless you keep entirely out of the line. It�s no good trying to toe the line, when your one impulse is to smash up the line. Winnie is a special nature, and for special natures you must give a special world.� �Yes, but where�s your special world?� said Gerald. �Make it. Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. As a matter of fact, two exceptional people make another world. You and I, we make another, separate world. You don�t _want_ a world same as your brothers-in-law. It�s just the special quality you value. Do you _want_ to be normal or ordinary! It�s a lie. You want to be free and extraordinary, in an extraordinary world of liberty.� Gerald looked at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would never openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one direction�much more. And this gave him his gentle love for the other man, as if Birkin were in some way young, innocent, child-like: so amazingly clever, but incurably innocent. �Yet you are so banal as to consider me chiefly a freak,� said Birkin pointedly. �A freak!� exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the cunning bud. �No�I never consider you a freak.� And he watched the other man with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. �I feel,� Gerald continued, �that there is always an element of uncertainty about you�perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But I�m never sure of you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had no soul.� He looked at Birkin with penetrating eyes. Birkin was amazed. He thought he had all the soul in the world. He stared in amazement. And Gerald, watching, saw the amazing attractive goodliness of his eyes, a young, spontaneous goodness that attracted the other man infinitely, yet filled him with bitter chagrin, because he mistrusted it so much. He knew Birkin could do without him�could forget, and not suffer. This was always present in Gerald�s consciousness, filling him with bitter unbelief: this consciousness of the young, animal-like spontaneity of detachment. It seemed almost like hypocrisy and lying, sometimes, oh, often, on Birkin�s part, to talk so deeply and importantly. Quite other things were going through Birkin�s mind. Suddenly he saw himself confronted with another problem�the problem of love and eternal conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary�it had been a necessity inside himself all his life�to love a man purely and fully. Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it. He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost in brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts. �You know how the old German knights used to swear a _Blutbruderschaft_,� he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes. �Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other�s blood into the cut?� said Gerald. �Yes�and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives. That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it.� He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked down at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction. �We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?� pleaded Birkin. �We will swear to stand by each other�be true to each other�ultimately�infallibly�given to each other, organically�without possibility of taking back.� Birkin sought hard to express himself. But Gerald hardly listened. His face shone with a certain luminous pleasure. He was pleased. But he kept his reserve. He held himself back. �Shall we swear to each other, one day?� said Birkin, putting out his hand towards Gerald. Gerald just touched the extended fine, living hand, as if withheld and afraid. �We�ll leave it till I understand it better,� he said, in a voice of excuse. Birkin watched him. A little sharp disappointment, perhaps a touch of contempt came into his heart. �Yes,� he said. �You must tell me what you think, later. You know what I mean? Not sloppy emotionalism. An impersonal union that leaves one free.� They lapsed both into silence. Birkin was looking at Gerald all the time. He seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, which he usually saw in Gerald, and which usually he liked so much, but the man himself, complete, and as if fated, doomed, limited. This strange sense of fatality in Gerald, as if he were limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal halfness, which to himself seemed wholeness, always overcame Birkin after their moments of passionate approach, and filled him with a sort of contempt, or boredom. It was the insistence on the limitation which so bored Birkin in Gerald. Gerald could never fly away from himself, in real indifferent gaiety. He had a clog, a sort of monomania. There was silence for a time. Then Birkin said, in a lighter tone, letting the stress of the contact pass: �Can�t you get a good governess for Winifred?�somebody exceptional?� �Hermione Roddice suggested we should ask Gudrun to teach her to draw and to model in clay. You know Winnie is astonishingly clever with that plasticine stuff. Hermione declares she is an artist.� Gerald spoke in the usual animated, chatty manner, as if nothing unusual had passed. But Birkin�s manner was full of reminder. �Really! I didn�t know that. Oh well then, if Gudrun _would_ teach her, it would be perfect�couldn�t be anything better�if Winifred is an artist. Because Gudrun somewhere is one. And every true artist is the salvation of every other.� �I thought they got on so badly, as a rule.� �Perhaps. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in. If you can arrange _that_ for Winifred, it is perfect.� �But you think she wouldn�t come?� �I don�t know. Gudrun is rather self-opinionated. She won�t go cheap anywhere. Or if she does, she�ll pretty soon take herself back. So whether she would condescend to do private teaching, particularly here, in Beldover, I don�t know. But it would be just the thing. Winifred has got a special nature. And if you can put into her way the means of being self-sufficient, that is the best thing possible. She�ll never get on with the ordinary life. You find it difficult enough yourself, and she is several skins thinner than you are. It is awful to think what her life will be like unless she does find a means of expression, some way of fulfilment. You can see what mere leaving it to fate brings. You can see how much marriage is to be trusted to�look at your own mother.� �Do you think mother is abnormal?� �No! I think she only wanted something more, or other than the common run of life. And not getting it, she has gone wrong perhaps.� �After producing a brood of wrong children,� said Gerald gloomily. �No more wrong than any of the rest of us,� Birkin replied. �The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves, take them one by one.� �Sometimes I think it is a curse to be alive,� said Gerald with sudden impotent anger. �Well,� said Birkin, �why not! Let it be a curse sometimes to be alive�at other times it is anything but a curse. You�ve got plenty of zest in it really.� �Less than you�d think,� said Gerald, revealing a strange poverty in his look at the other man. There was silence, each thinking his own thoughts. �I don�t see what she has to distinguish between teaching at the Grammar School, and coming to teach Win,� said Gerald. �The difference between a public servant and a private one. The only nobleman today, king and only aristocrat, is the public, the public. You are quite willing to serve the public�but to be a private tutor�� �I don�t want to serve either�� �No! And Gudrun will probably feel the same.� Gerald thought for a few minutes. Then he said: �At all events, father won�t make her feel like a private servant. He will be fussy and greatful enough.� �So he ought. And so ought all of you. Do you think you can hire a woman like Gudrun Brangwen with money? She is your equal like anything�probably your superior.� �Is she?� said Gerald. �Yes, and if you haven�t the guts to know it, I hope she�ll leave you to your own devices.� �Nevertheless,� said Gerald, �if she is my equal, I wish she weren�t a teacher, because I don�t think teachers as a rule are my equal.� �Nor do I, damn them. But am I a teacher because I teach, or a parson because I preach?� Gerald laughed. He was always uneasy on this score. He did not _want_ to claim social superiority, yet he _would_ not claim intrinsic personal superiority, because he would never base his standard of values on pure being. So he wobbled upon a tacit assumption of social standing. No, Birkin wanted him to accept the fact of intrinsic difference between human beings, which he did not intend to accept. It was against his social honour, his principle. He rose to go. �I�ve been neglecting my business all this while,� he said smiling. �I ought to have reminded you before,� Birkin replied, laughing and mocking. �I knew you�d say something like that,� laughed Gerald, rather uneasily. �Did you?� �Yes, Rupert. It wouldn�t do for us all to be like you are�we should soon be in the cart. When I am above the world, I shall ignore all businesses.� �Of course, we�re not in the cart now,� said Birkin, satirically. �Not as much as you make out. At any rate, we have enough to eat and drink�� �And be satisfied,� added Birkin. Gerald came near the bed and stood looking down at Birkin whose throat was exposed, whose tossed hair fell attractively on the warm brow, above the eyes that were so unchallenged and still in the satirical face. Gerald, full-limbed and turgid with energy, stood unwilling to go, he was held by the presence of the other man. He had not the power to go away. �So,� said Birkin. �Good-bye.� And he reached out his hand from under the bed-clothes, smiling with a glimmering look. �Good-bye,� said Gerald, taking the warm hand of his friend in a firm grasp. �I shall come again. I miss you down at the mill.� �I�ll be there in a few days,� said Birkin. The eyes of the two men met again. Gerald�s, that were keen as a hawk�s, were suffused now with warm light and with unadmitted love, Birkin looked back as out of a darkness, unsounded and unknown, yet with a kind of warmth, that seemed to flow over Gerald�s brain like a fertile sleep. �Good-bye then. There�s nothing I can do for you?� �Nothing, thanks.� Birkin watched the black-clothed form of the other man move out of the door, the bright head was gone, he turned over to sleep. CHAPTER XVII. THE INDUSTRIAL MAGNATE In Beldover, there was both for Ursula and for Gudrun an interval. It seemed to Ursula as if Birkin had gone out of her for the time, he had lost his significance, he scarcely mattered in her world. She had her own friends, her own activities, her own life. She turned back to the old ways with zest, away from him. And Gudrun, after feeling every moment in all her veins conscious of Gerald Crich, connected even physically with him, was now almost indifferent to the thought of him. She was nursing new schemes for going away and trying a new form of life. All the time, there was something in her urging her to avoid the final establishing of a relationship with Gerald. She felt it would be wiser and better to have no more than a casual acquaintance with him. She had a scheme for going to St Petersburg, where she had a friend who was a sculptor like herself, and who lived with a wealthy Russian whose hobby was jewel-making. The emotional, rather rootless life of the Russians appealed to her. She did not want to go to Paris. Paris was dry, and essentially boring. She would like to go to Rome, Munich, Vienna, or to St Petersburg or Moscow. She had a friend in St Petersburg and a friend in Munich. To each of these she wrote, asking about rooms. She had a certain amount of money. She had come home partly to save, and now she had sold several pieces of work, she had been praised in various shows. She knew she could become quite the �go� if she went to London. But she knew London, she wanted something else. She had seventy pounds, of which nobody knew anything. She would move soon, as soon as she heard from her friends. Her nature, in spite of her apparent placidity and calm, was profoundly restless. The sisters happened to call in a cottage in Willey Green to buy honey. Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath, asked the girls into her too cosy, too tidy kitchen. There was a cat-like comfort and cleanliness everywhere. �Yes, Miss Brangwen,� she said, in her slightly whining, insinuating voice, �and how do you like being back in the old place, then?� Gudrun, whom she addressed, hated her at once. �I don�t care for it,� she replied abruptly. �You don�t? Ay, well, I suppose you found a difference from London. You like life, and big, grand places. Some of us has to be content with Willey Green and Beldover. And what do you think of our Grammar School, as there�s so much talk about?� �What do I think of it?� Gudrun looked round at her slowly. �Do you mean, do I think it�s a good school?� �Yes. What is your opinion of it?� �I _do_ think it�s a good school.� Gudrun was very cold and repelling. She knew the common people hated the school. �Ay, you do, then! I�ve heard so much, one way and the other. It�s nice to know what those that�s in it feel. But opinions vary, don�t they? Mr Crich up at Highclose is all for it. Ay, poor man, I�m afraid he�s not long for this world. He�s very poorly.� �Is he worse?� asked Ursula. �Eh, yes�since they lost Miss Diana. He�s gone off to a shadow. Poor man, he�s had a world of trouble.� �Has he?� asked Gudrun, faintly ironic. �He has, a world of trouble. And as nice and kind a gentleman as ever you could wish to meet. His children don�t take after him.� �I suppose they take after their mother?� said Ursula. �In many ways.� Mrs Krik lowered her voice a little. �She was a proud haughty lady when she came into these parts�my word, she was that! She mustn�t be looked at, and it was worth your life to speak to her.� The woman made a dry, sly face. �Did you know her when she was first married?� �Yes, I knew her. I nursed three of her children. And proper little terrors they were, little fiends�that Gerald was a demon if ever there was one, a proper demon, ay, at six months old.� A curious malicious, sly tone came into the woman�s voice. �Really,� said Gudrun. �That wilful, masterful�he�d mastered one nurse at six months. Kick, and scream, and struggle like a demon. Many�s the time I�ve pinched his little bottom for him, when he was a child in arms. Ay, and he�d have been better if he�d had it pinched oftener. But she wouldn�t have them corrected�no-o, wouldn�t hear of it. I can remember the rows she had with Mr Crich, my word. When he�d got worked up, properly worked up till he could stand no more, he�d lock the study door and whip them. But she paced up and down all the while like a tiger outside, like a tiger, with very murder in her face. She had a face that could _look_ death. And when the door was opened, she�d go in with her hands lifted��What have you been doing to _my_ children, you coward.� She was like one out of her mind. I believe he was frightened of her; he had to be driven mad before he�d lift a finger. Didn�t the servants have a life of it! And didn�t we used to be thankful when one of them caught it. They were the torment of your life.� �Really!� said Gudrun. �In every possible way. If you wouldn�t let them smash their pots on the table, if you wouldn�t let them drag the kitten about with a string round its neck, if you wouldn�t give them whatever they asked for, every mortal thing�then there was a shine on, and their mother coming in asking��What�s the matter with him? What have you done to him? What is it, Darling?� And then she�d turn on you as if she�d trample you under her feet. But she didn�t trample on me. I was the only one that could do anything with her demons�for she wasn�t going to be bothered with them herself. No, _she_ took no trouble for them. But they must just have their way, they mustn�t be spoken to. And Master Gerald was the beauty. I left when he was a year and a half, I could stand no more. But I pinched his little bottom for him when he was in arms, I did, when there was no holding him, and I�m not sorry I did�� Gudrun went away in fury and loathing. The phrase, �I pinched his little bottom for him,� sent her into a white, stony fury. She could not bear it, she wanted to have the woman taken out at once and strangled. And yet there the phrase was lodged in her mind for ever, beyond escape. She felt, one day, she would _have_ to tell him, to see how he took it. And she loathed herself for the thought. But at Shortlands the life-long struggle was coming to a close. The father was ill and was going to die. He had bad internal pains, which took away all his attentive life, and left him with only a vestige of his consciousness. More and more a silence came over him, he was less and less acutely aware of his surroundings. The pain seemed to absorb his activity. He knew it was there, he knew it would come again. It was like something lurking in the darkness within him. And he had not the power, or the will, to seek it out and to know it. There it remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent. And when it tore him he crouched in silent subjection under it, and when it left him alone again, he refused to know of it. It was within the darkness, let it remain unknown. So he never admitted it, except in a secret corner of himself, where all his never-revealed fears and secrets were accumulated. For the rest, he had a pain, it went away, it made no difference. It even stimulated him, excited him. But it gradually absorbed his life. Gradually it drew away all his potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life and drew him away into the darkness. And in this twilight of his life little remained visible to him. The business, his work, that was gone entirely. His public interests had disappeared as if they had never been. Even his family had become extraneous to him, he could only remember, in some slight non-essential part of himself, that such and such were his children. But it was historical fact, not vital to him. He had to make an effort to know their relation to him. Even his wife barely existed. She indeed was like the darkness, like the pain within him. By some strange association, the darkness that contained the pain and the darkness that contained his wife were identical. All his thoughts and understandings became blurred and fused, and now his wife and the consuming pain were the same dark secret power against him, that he never faced. He never drove the dread out of its lair within him. He only knew that there was a dark place, and something inhabiting this darkness which issued from time to time and rent him. But he dared not penetrate and drive the beast into the open. He had rather ignore its existence. Only, in his vague way, the dread was his wife, the destroyer, and it was the pain, the destruction, a darkness which was one and both. He very rarely saw his wife. She kept her room. Only occasionally she came forth, with her head stretched forward, and in her low, possessed voice, she asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of more than thirty years: �Well, I don�t think I�m any the worse, dear.� But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit, frightened almost to the verge of death. But all his life, he had been so constant to his lights, he had never broken down. He would die even now without breaking down, without knowing what his feelings were, towards her. All his life, he had said: �Poor Christiana, she has such a strong temper.� With unbroken will, he had stood by this position with regard to her, he had substituted pity for all his hostility, pity had been his shield and his safeguard, and his infallible weapon. And still, in his consciousness, he was sorry for her, her nature was so violent and so impatient. But now his pity, with his life, was wearing thin, and the dread almost amounting to horror, was rising into being. But before the armour of his pity really broke, he would die, as an insect when its shell is cracked. This was his final resource. Others would live on, and know the living death, the ensuing process of hopeless chaos. He would not. He denied death its victory. He had been so constant to his lights, so constant to charity, and to his love for his neighbour. Perhaps he had loved his neighbour even better than himself�which is going one further than the commandment. Always, this flame had burned in his heart, sustaining him through everything, the welfare of the people. He was a large employer of labour, he was a great mine-owner. And he had never lost this from his heart, that in Christ he was one with his workmen. Nay, he had felt inferior to them, as if they through poverty and labour were nearer to God than he. He had always the unacknowledged belief, that it was his workmen, the miners, who held in their hands the means of salvation. To move nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must gravitate towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God made manifest. In them he worshipped the highest, the great, sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity. And all the while, his wife had opposed him like one of the great demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey, with the fascinating beauty and abstraction of a hawk, she had beat against the bars of his philanthropy, and like a hawk in a cage, she had sunk into silence. By force of circumstance, because all the world combined to make the cage unbreakable, he had been too strong for her, he had kept her prisoner. And because she was his prisoner, his passion for her had always remained keen as death. He had always loved her, loved her with intensity. Within the cage, she was denied nothing, she was given all licence. But she had gone almost mad. Of wild and overweening temper, she could not bear the humiliation of her husband�s soft, half-appealing kindness to everybody. He was not deceived by the poor. He knew they came and sponged on him, and whined to him, the worse sort; the majority, luckily for him, were much too proud to ask for anything, much too independent to come knocking at his door. But in Beldover, as everywhere else, there were the whining, parasitic, foul human beings who come crawling after charity, and feeding on the living body of the public like lice. A kind of fire would go over Christiana Crich�s brain, as she saw two more pale-faced, creeping women in objectionable black clothes, cringing lugubriously up the drive to the door. She wanted to set the dogs on them, �Hi Rip! Hi Ring! Ranger! At �em boys, set �em off.� But Crowther, the butler, with all the rest of the servants, was Mr Crich�s man. Nevertheless, when her husband was away, she would come down like a wolf on the crawling supplicants: �What do you people want? There is nothing for you here. You have no business on the drive at all. Simpson, drive them away and let no more of them through the gate.� The servants had to obey her. And she would stand watching with an eye like the eagle�s, whilst the groom in clumsy confusion drove the lugubrious persons down the drive, as if they were rusty fowls, scuttling before him. But they learned to know, from the lodge-keeper, when Mrs Crich was away, and they timed their visits. How many times, in the first years, would Crowther knock softly at the door: �Person to see you, sir.� �What name?� �Grocock, sir.� �What do they want?� The question was half impatient, half gratified. He liked hearing appeals to his charity. �About a child, sir.� �Show them into the library, and tell them they shouldn�t come after eleven o�clock in the morning.� �Why do you get up from dinner?�send them off,� his wife would say abruptly. �Oh, I can�t do that. It�s no trouble just to hear what they have to say.� �How many more have been here today? Why don�t you establish open house for them? They would soon oust me and the children.� �You know dear, it doesn�t hurt me to hear what they have to say. And if they really are in trouble�well, it is my duty to help them out of it.� �It�s your duty to invite all the rats in the world to gnaw at your bones.� �Come, Christiana, it isn�t like that. Don�t be uncharitable.� But she suddenly swept out of the room, and out to the study. There sat the meagre charity-seekers, looking as if they were at the doctor�s. �Mr Crich can�t see you. He can�t see you at this hour. Do you think he is your property, that you can come whenever you like? You must go away, there is nothing for you here.� The poor people rose in confusion. But Mr Crich, pale and black-bearded and deprecating, came behind her, saying: �Yes, I don�t like you coming as late as this. I�ll hear any of you in the morning part of the day, but I can�t really do with you after. What�s amiss then, Gittens. How is your Missis?� �Why, she�s sunk very low, Mester Crich, she�s a�most gone, she is�� Sometimes, it seemed to Mrs Crich as if her husband were some subtle funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people. It seemed to her he was never satisfied unless there was some sordid tale being poured out to him, which he drank in with a sort of mournful, sympathetic satisfaction. He would have no _raison d�être_ if there were no lugubrious miseries in the world, as an undertaker would have no meaning if there were no funerals. Mrs Crich recoiled back upon herself, she recoiled away from this world of creeping democracy. A band of tight, baleful exclusion fastened round her heart, her isolation was fierce and hard, her antagonism was passive but terribly pure, like that of a hawk in a cage. As the years went on, she lost more and more count of the world, she seemed rapt in some glittering abstraction, almost purely unconscious. She would wander about the house and about the surrounding country, staring keenly and seeing nothing. She rarely spoke, she had no connection with the world. And she did not even think. She was consumed in a fierce tension of opposition, like the negative pole of a magnet. And she bore many children. For, as time went on, she never opposed her husband in word or deed. She took no notice of him, externally. She submitted to him, let him take what he wanted and do as he wanted with her. She was like a hawk that sullenly submits to everything. The relation between her and her husband was wordless and unknown, but it was deep, awful, a relation of utter inter-destruction. And he, who triumphed in the world, he became more and more hollow in his vitality, the vitality was bled from within him, as by some hæmorrhage. She was hulked like a hawk in a cage, but her heart was fierce and undiminished within her, though her mind was destroyed. So to the last he would go to her and hold her in his arms sometimes, before his strength was all gone. The terrible white, destructive light that burned in her eyes only excited and roused him. Till he was bled to death, and then he dreaded her more than anything. But he always said to himself, how happy he had been, how he had loved her with a pure and consuming love ever since he had known her. And he thought of her as pure, chaste; the white flame which was known to him alone, the flame of her sex, was a white flower of snow to his mind. She was a wonderful white snow-flower, which he had desired infinitely. And now he was dying with all his ideas and interpretations intact. They would only collapse when the breath left his body. Till then they would be pure truths for him. Only death would show the perfect completeness of the lie. Till death, she was his white snow-flower. He had subdued her, and her subjugation was to him an infinite chastity in her, a virginity which he could never break, and which dominated him as by a spell. She had let go the outer world, but within herself she was unbroken and unimpaired. She only sat in her room like a moping, dishevelled hawk, motionless, mindless. Her children, for whom she had been so fierce in her youth, now meant scarcely anything to her. She had lost all that, she was quite by herself. Only Gerald, the gleaming, had some existence for her. But of late years, since he had become head of the business, he too was forgotten. Whereas the father, now he was dying, turned for compassion to Gerald. There had always been opposition between the two of them. Gerald had feared and despised his father, and to a great extent had avoided him all through boyhood and young manhood. And the father had felt very often a real dislike of his eldest son, which, never wanting to give way to, he had refused to acknowledge. He had ignored Gerald as much as possible, leaving him alone. Since, however, Gerald had come home and assumed responsibility in the firm, and had proved such a wonderful director, the father, tired and weary of all outside concerns, had put all his trust of these things in his son, implicitly, leaving everything to him, and assuming a rather touching dependence on the young enemy. This immediately roused a poignant pity and allegiance in Gerald�s heart, always shadowed by contempt and by unadmitted enmity. For Gerald was in reaction against Charity; and yet he was dominated by it, it assumed supremacy in the inner life, and he could not confute it. So he was partly subject to that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it. Now he could not save himself. A certain pity and grief and tenderness for his father overcame him, in spite of the deeper, more sullen hostility. The father won shelter from Gerald through compassion. But for love he had Winifred. She was his youngest child, she was the only one of his children whom he had ever closely loved. And her he loved with all the great, overweening, sheltering love of a dying man. He wanted to shelter her infinitely, infinitely, to wrap her in warmth and love and shelter, perfectly. If he could save her she should never know one pain, one grief, one hurt. He had been so right all his life, so constant in his kindness and his goodness. And this was his last passionate righteousness, his love for the child Winifred. Some things troubled him yet. The world had passed away from him, as his strength ebbed. There were no more poor and injured and humble to protect and succour. These were all lost to him. There were no more sons and daughters to trouble him, and to weigh on him as an unnatural responsibility. These too had faded out of reality. All these things had fallen out of his hands, and left him free. There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow, prowling step, her head bent forward. But this he put away. Even his life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the inner horror. Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay. It would never break forth openly. Death would come first. Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he could be sure. Since the death of Diana, and the development of his illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost to obsession. It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart. She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father�s dark hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous. She was like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her, really. She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful affection for a few things�for her father, and for her animals in particular. But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a faint contraction like resentment on her face: �Has he?� Then she took no more notice. She only disliked the servant who would force bad news on her, and wanted her to be sorry. She wished not to know, and that seemed her chief motive. She avoided her mother, and most of the members of her family. She _loved_ her Daddy, because he wanted her always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and irresponsible in her presence. She liked Gerald, because he was so self-contained. She loved people who would make life a game for her. She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once. For she accepted her equals wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or continuity, and existed simply moment by moment. The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her father�s final passionate solicitude. When Mr Crich heard that Gudrun Brangwen might come to help Winifred with her drawing and modelling he saw a road to salvation for his child. He believed that Winifred had talent, he had seen Gudrun, he knew that she was an exceptional person. He could give Winifred into her hands as into the hands of a right being. Here was a direction and a positive force to be lent to his child, he need not leave her directionless and defenceless. If he could but graft the girl on to some tree of utterance before he died, he would have fulfilled his responsibility. And here it could be done. He did not hesitate to appeal to Gudrun. Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald experienced more and more a sense of exposure. His father after all had stood for the living world to him. Whilst his father lived Gerald was not responsible for the world. But now his father was passing away, Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him. He did not inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father, the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration. Gerald was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart. He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction. And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of Birkin�s talk, and of Gudrun�s penetrating being, he had lost entirely that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set. He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action. During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom. The days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of heroes, or spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly the circumstances of his own life, so much that he never really saw Beldover and the colliery valley. He turned his face entirely away from the blackened mining region that stretched away on the right hand of Shortlands, he turned entirely to the country and the woods beyond Willey Water. It was true that the panting and rattling of the coal mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his earliest childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides against the grounds of the house. The world was really a wilderness where one hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a condition of savage freedom. Then he had been sent away to school, which was so much death to him. He refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university. He had spent a certain time at Bonn, at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity had been aroused in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a curious objective fashion, as if it were an amusement to him. Then he must try war. Then he must travel into the savage regions that had so attracted him. The result was, he found humanity very much alike everywhere, and to a mind like his, curious and cold, the savage was duller, less exciting than the European. So he took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas, and ideas of reform. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were never more than a mental amusement. Their interest lay chiefly in the reaction against the positive order, the destructive reaction. He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines. His father asked him to help in the firm. Gerald had been educated in the science of mining, and it had never interested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort of exultation, he laid hold of the world. There was impressed photographically on his consciousness the great industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of it. Down the valley ran the colliery railway, linking mine with mine. Down the railway ran the trains, short trains of heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty wagons, each one bearing in big white letters the initials: �C. B. & Co.� These white letters on all the wagons he had seen since his first childhood, and it was as if he had never seen them, they were so familiar, and so ignored. Now at last he saw his own name written on the wall. Now he had a vision of power. So many wagons, bearing his initial, running all over the country. He saw them as he entered London in the train, he saw them at Dover. So far his power ramified. He looked at Beldover, at Selby, at Whatmore, at Lethley Bank, the great colliery villages which depended entirely on his mines. They were hideous and sordid, during his childhood they had been sores in his consciousness. And now he saw them with pride. Four raw new towns, and many ugly industrial hamlets were crowded under his dependence. He saw the stream of miners flowing along the causeways from the mines at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened, slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate to his will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little market-top on Friday nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human beings that were making their purchases and doing their weekly spending. They were all subordinate to him. They were ugly and uncouth, but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine. They made way for his motor-car automatically, slowly. He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered. Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry, was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest was by-play. The mines were there, they were old. They were giving out, it did not pay to work the seams. There was talk of closing down two of them. It was at this point that Gerald arrived on the scene. He looked around. There lay the mines. They were old, obsolete. They were like old lions, no more good. He looked again. Pah! the mines were nothing but the clumsy efforts of impure minds. There they lay, abortions of a half-trained mind. Let the idea of them be swept away. He cleared his brain of them, and thought only of the coal in the under earth. How much was there? There was plenty of coal. The old workings could not get at it, that was all. Then break the neck of the old workings. The coal lay there in its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter, as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will of man. The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the archgod of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man�s will was the absolute, the only absolute. And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits of victory were mere results. It was not for the sake of money that Gerald took over the mines. He did not care about money, fundamentally. He was neither ostentatious nor luxurious, neither did he care about social position, not finally. What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. His will was now, to take the coal out of the earth, profitably. The profit was merely the condition of victory, but the victory itself lay in the feat achieved. He vibrated with zest before the challenge. Every day he was in the mines, examining, testing, he consulted experts, he gradually gathered the whole situation into his mind, as a general grasps the plan of his campaign. Then there was need for a complete break. The mines were run on an old system, an obsolete idea. The initial idea had been, to obtain as much money from the earth as would make the owners comfortably rich, would allow the workmen sufficient wages and good conditions, and would increase the wealth of the country altogether. Gerald�s father, following in the second generation, having a sufficient fortune, had thought only of the men. The mines, for him, were primarily great fields to produce bread and plenty for all the hundreds of human beings gathered about them. He had lived and striven with his fellow owners to benefit the men every time. And the men had been benefited in their fashion. There were few poor, and few needy. All was plenty, because the mines were good and easy to work. And the miners, in those days, finding themselves richer than they might have expected, felt glad and triumphant. They thought themselves well-off, they congratulated themselves on their good-fortune, they remembered how their fathers had starved and suffered, and they felt that better times had come. They were grateful to those others, the pioneers, the new owners, who had opened out the pits, and let forth this stream of plenty. But man is never satisfied, and so the miners, from gratitude to their owners, passed on to murmuring. Their sufficiency decreased with knowledge, they wanted more. Why should the master be so out-of-all-proportion rich? There was a crisis when Gerald was a boy, when the Masters� Federation closed down the mines because the men would not accept a reduction. This lock-out had forced home the new conditions to Thomas Crich. Belonging to the Federation, he had been compelled by his honour to close the pits against his men. He, the father, the Patriarch, was forced to deny the means of life to his sons, his people. He, the rich man who would hardly enter heaven because of his possessions, must now turn upon the poor, upon those who were nearer Christ than himself, those who were humble and despised and closer to perfection, those who were manly and noble in their labours, and must say to them: �Ye shall neither labour nor eat bread.� It was this recognition of the state of war which really broke his heart. He wanted his industry to be run on love. Oh, he wanted love to be the directing power even of the mines. And now, from under the cloak of love, the sword was cynically drawn, the sword of mechanical necessity. This really broke his heart. He must have the illusion and now the illusion was destroyed. The men were not against _him_, but they were against the masters. It was war, and willy nilly he found himself on the wrong side, in his own conscience. Seething masses of miners met daily, carried away by a new religious impulse. The idea flew through them: �All men are equal on earth,� and they would carry the idea to its material fulfilment. After all, is it not the teaching of Christ? And what is an idea, if not the germ of action in the material world. �All men are equal in spirit, they are all sons of God. Whence then this obvious _disquality_?� It was a religious creed pushed to its material conclusion. Thomas Crich at least had no answer. He could but admit, according to his sincere tenets, that the disquality was wrong. But he could not give up his goods, which were the stuff of disquality. So the men would fight for their rights. The last impulses of the last religious passion left on earth, the passion for equality, inspired them. Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy war, with a smoke of cupidity. How disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of possessions? But the God was the machine. Each man claimed equality in the Godhead of the great productive machine. Every man equally was part of this Godhead. But somehow, somewhere, Thomas Crich knew this was false. When the machine is the Godhead, and production or work is worship, then the most mechanical mind is purest and highest, the representative of God on earth. And the rest are subordinate, each according to his degree. Riots broke out, Whatmore pit-head was in flames. This was the pit furthest in the country, near the woods. Soldiers came. From the windows of Shortlands, on that fatal day, could be seen the flare of fire in the sky not far off, and now the little colliery train, with the workmen�s carriages which were used to convey the miners to the distant Whatmore, was crossing the valley full of soldiers, full of redcoats. Then there was the far-off sound of firing, then the later news that the mob was dispersed, one man was shot dead, the fire was put out. Gerald, who was a boy, was filled with the wildest excitement and delight. He longed to go with the soldiers to shoot the men. But he was not allowed to go out of the lodge gates. At the gates were stationed sentries with guns. Gerald stood near them in delight, whilst gangs of derisive miners strolled up and down the lanes, calling and jeering: �Now then, three ha�porth o� coppers, let�s see thee shoot thy gun.� Insults were chalked on the walls and the fences, the servants left. And all this while Thomas Crich was breaking his heart, and giving away hundreds of pounds in charity. Everywhere there was free food, a surfeit of free food. Anybody could have bread for asking, and a loaf cost only three-ha�pence. Every day there was a free tea somewhere, the children had never had so many treats in their lives. On Friday afternoon great basketfuls of buns and cakes were taken into the schools, and great pitchers of milk, the schoolchildren had what they wanted. They were sick with eating too much cake and milk. And then it came to an end, and the men went back to work. But it was never the same as before. There was a new situation created, a new idea reigned. Even in the machine, there should be equality. No part should be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal. The instinct for chaos had entered. Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of man, the will for chaos. Gerald was a boy at the time of the strike, but he longed to be a man, to fight the colliers. The father however was trapped between two half-truths, and broken. He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and equal with all men. He even wanted to give away all he had, to the poor. Yet he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly that he must keep his goods and keep his authority. This was as divine a necessity in him, as the need to give away all he possessed�more divine, even, since this was the necessity he acted upon. Yet because he did _not_ act on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of chagrin because he must forfeit it. He wanted to be a father of loving kindness and sacrificial benevolence. The colliers shouted to him about his thousands a year. They would not be deceived. When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position. He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian attitude of love and self-sacrifice was old hat. He knew that position and authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant about it. They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they were functionally necessary. They were not the be-all and the end-all. It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously controlled. This was merely as it happened. As well get excited because a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole universe wheels round the sun. After all, it would be mere silliness to say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them separately, as the sun. Such an assertion is made merely in the desire of chaos. Without bothering to _think_ to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody. So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order. In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not define to himself at all clearly what harmony was. The word pleased him, he felt he had come to his own conclusions. And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation. Immediately he _saw_ the firm, he realised what he could do. He had a fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed. This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will. And for this fight with matter, one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism so subtle and harmonious in its workings that it represents the single mind of man, and by its relentless repetition of given movement, will accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he had to subjugate. There were two opposites, his will and the resistant Matter of the earth. And between these he could establish the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition, repetition _ad infinitum_, hence eternal and infinite. He found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-principle of perfect co-ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated motion, like the spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning, as the revolving of the universe may be called a productive spinning, a productive repetition through eternity, to infinity. And this is the God-motion, this productive repetition _ad infinitum_. And Gerald was the God of the machine, _Deus ex Machina_. And the whole productive will of man was the Godhead. He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted, timeless, a Godhead in process. He had to begin with the mines. The terms were given: first the resistant Matter of the underground; then the instruments of its subjugation, instruments human and metallic; and finally his own pure will, his own mind. It would need a marvellous adjustment of myriad instruments, human, animal, metallic, kinetic, dynamic, a marvellous casting of myriad tiny wholes into one great perfect entirety. And then, in this case there was perfection attained, the will of the highest was perfectly fulfilled, the will of mankind was perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically contra-distinguished against inanimate Matter, was not the history of mankind just the history of the conquest of the one by the other? The miners were overreached. While they were still in the toils of divine equality of man, Gerald had passed on, granted essentially their case, and proceeded in his quality of human being to fulfil the will of mankind as a whole. He merely represented the miners in a higher sense when he perceived that the only way to fulfil perfectly the will of man was to establish the perfect, inhuman machine. But he represented them very essentially, they were far behind, out of date, squabbling for their material equality. The desire had already transmuted into this new and greater desire, for a perfect intervening mechanism between man and Matter, the desire to translate the Godhead into pure mechanism. As soon as Gerald entered the firm, the convulsion of death ran through the old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel eruptions. Terrible and inhuman were his examinations into every detail; there was no privacy he would spare, no old sentiment but he would turn it over. The old grey managers, the old grey clerks, the doddering old pensioners, he looked at them, and removed them as so much lumber. The whole concern seemed like a hospital of invalid employees. He had no emotional qualms. He arranged what pensions were necessary, he looked for efficient substitutes, and when these were found, he substituted them for the old hands. �I�ve a pitiful letter here from Letherington,� his father would say, in a tone of deprecation and appeal. �Don�t you think the poor fellow might keep on a little longer. I always fancied he did very well.� �I�ve got a man in his place now, father. He�ll be happier out of it, believe me. You think his allowance is plenty, don�t you?� �It is not the allowance that he wants, poor man. He feels it very much, that he is superannuated. Says he thought he had twenty more years of work in him yet.� �Not of this kind of work I want. He doesn�t understand.� The father sighed. He wanted not to know any more. He believed the pits would have to be overhauled if they were to go on working. And after all, it would be worst in the long run for everybody, if they must close down. So he could make no answer to the appeals of his old and trusty servants, he could only repeat �Gerald says.� So the father drew more and more out of the light. The whole frame of the real life was broken for him. He had been right according to his lights. And his lights had been those of the great religion. Yet they seemed to have become obsolete, to be superseded in the world. He could not understand. He only withdrew with his lights into an inner room, into the silence. The beautiful candles of belief, that would not do to light the world any more, they would still burn sweetly and sufficiently in the inner room of his soul, and in the silence of his retirement. Gerald rushed into the reform of the firm, beginning with the office. It was needful to economise severely, to make possible the great alterations he must introduce. �What are these widows� coals?� he asked. �We have always allowed all widows of men who worked for the firm a load of coals every three months.� �They must pay cost price henceforward. The firm is not a charity institution, as everybody seems to think.� Widows, these stock figures of sentimental humanitarianism, he felt a dislike at the thought of them. They were almost repulsive. Why were they not immolated on the pyre of the husband, like the sati in India? At any rate, let them pay the cost of their coals. In a thousand ways he cut down the expenditure, in ways so fine as to be hardly noticeable to the men. The miners must pay for the cartage of their coals, heavy cartage too; they must pay for their tools, for the sharpening, for the care of lamps, for the many trifling things that made the bill of charges against every man mount up to a shilling or so in the week. It was not grasped very definitely by the miners, though they were sore enough. But it saved hundreds of pounds every week for the firm. Gradually Gerald got hold of everything. And then began the great reform. Expert engineers were introduced in every department. An enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness. But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of chaos. Gerald was satisfied. He knew the colliers said they hated him. But he had long ceased to hate them. When they streamed past him at evening, their heavy boots slurring on the pavement wearily, their shoulders slightly distorted, they took no notice of him, they gave him no greeting whatever, they passed in a grey-black stream of unemotional acceptance. They were not important to him, save as instruments, nor he to them, save as a supreme instrument of control. As miners they had their being, he had his being as director. He admired their qualities. But as men, personalities, they were just accidents, sporadic little unimportant phenomena. And tacitly, the men agreed to this. For Gerald agreed to it in himself. He had succeeded. He had converted the industry into a new and terrible purity. There was a greater output of coal than ever, the wonderful and delicate system ran almost perfectly. He had a set of really clever engineers, both mining and electrical, and they did not cost much. A highly educated man cost very little more than a workman. His managers, who were all rare men, were no more expensive than the old bungling fools of his father�s days, who were merely colliers promoted. His chief manager, who had twelve hundred a year, saved the firm at least five thousand. The whole system was now so perfect that Gerald was hardly necessary any more. It was so perfect that sometimes a strange fear came over him, and he did not know what to do. He went on for some years in a sort of trance of activity. What he was doing seemed supreme, he was almost like a divinity. He was a pure and exalted activity. But now he had succeeded�he had finally succeeded. And once or twice lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of. He looked at his own face. There it was, shapely and healthy and the same as ever, yet somehow, it was not real, it was a mask. He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a composition mask. His eyes were blue and keen as ever, and as firm in their sockets. Yet he was not sure that they were not blue false bubbles that would burst in a moment and leave clear annihilation. He could see the darkness in them, as if they were only bubbles of darkness. He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a purely meaningless babble lapping round a darkness. But his will yet held good, he was able to go away and read, and think about things. He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy. His mind was very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent, sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic reason was breaking, giving way now, at this crisis. And it was a strain. He knew there was no equilibrium. He would have to go in some direction, shortly, to find relief. Only Birkin kept the fear definitely off him, saved him his quick sufficiency in life, by the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the quintessence of faith. But then Gerald must always come away from Birkin, as from a Church service, back to the outside real world of work and life. There it was, it did not alter, and words were futilities. He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work and material life. And it became more and more difficult, such a strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a vacuum, and outside were an awful tension. He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. After a debauch with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and forgetful. The devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women nowadays. He didn�t care about them any more. A Pussum was all right in her way, but she was an exceptional case, and even she mattered extremely little. No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any more. He felt that his _mind_ needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused. CHAPTER XVIII. RABBIT Gudrun knew that it was a critical thing for her to go to Shortlands. She knew it was equivalent to accepting Gerald Crich as a lover. And though she hung back, disliking the condition, yet she knew she would go on. She equivocated. She said to herself, in torment recalling the blow and the kiss, �after all, what is it? What is a kiss? What even is a blow? It is an instant, vanished at once. I can go to Shortlands just for a time, before I go away, if only to see what it is like.� For she had an insatiable curiosity to see and to know everything. She also wanted to know what Winifred was really like. Having heard the child calling from the steamer in the night, she felt some mysterious connection with her. Gudrun talked with the father in the library. Then he sent for his daughter. She came accompanied by Mademoiselle. �Winnie, this is Miss Brangwen, who will be so kind as to help you with your drawing and making models of your animals,� said the father. The child looked at Gudrun for a moment with interest, before she came forward and with face averted offered her hand. There was a complete _sang-froid_ and indifference under Winifred�s childish reserve, a certain irresponsible callousness. �How do you do?� said the child, not lifting her face. �How do you do?� said Gudrun. Then Winifred stood aside, and Gudrun was introduced to Mademoiselle. �You have a fine day for your walk,� said Mademoiselle, in a bright manner. �_Quite_ fine,� said Gudrun. Winifred was watching from her distance. She was as if amused, but rather unsure as yet what this new person was like. She saw so many new persons, and so few who became real to her. Mademoiselle was of no count whatever, the child merely put up with her, calmly and easily, accepting her little authority with faint scorn, compliant out of childish arrogance of indifference. �Well, Winifred,� said the father, �aren�t you glad Miss Brangwen has come? She makes animals and birds in wood and in clay, that the people in London write about in the papers, praising them to the skies.� Winifred smiled slightly. �Who told you, Daddie?� she asked. �Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.� �Do you know them?� Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint challenge. �Yes,� said Gudrun. Winifred readjusted herself a little. She had been ready to accept Gudrun as a sort of servant. Now she saw it was on terms of friendship they were intended to meet. She was rather glad. She had so many half inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good-humour. Gudrun was very calm. She also did not take these things very seriously. A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her. However, Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself. Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her. The first meetings went off with a certain humiliating clumsiness. Neither Winifred nor her instructress had any social grace. Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets. On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference. She had a pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved. �Let us draw Looloo,� said Gudrun, �and see if we can get his Looliness, shall we?� �Darling!� cried Winifred, rushing to the dog, that sat with contemplative sadness on the hearth, and kissing its bulging brow. �Darling one, will you be drawn? Shall its mummy draw its portrait?� Then she chuckled gleefully, and turning to Gudrun, said: �Oh let�s!� They proceeded to get pencils and paper, and were ready. �Beautifullest,� cried Winifred, hugging the dog, �sit still while its mummy draws its beautiful portrait.� The dog looked up at her with grievous resignation in its large, prominent eyes. She kissed it fervently, and said: �I wonder what mine will be like. It�s sure to be awful.� As she sketched she chuckled to herself, and cried out at times: �Oh darling, you�re so beautiful!� And again chuckling, she rushed to embrace the dog, in penitence, as if she were doing him some subtle injury. He sat all the time with the resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety face. She drew slowly, with a wicked concentration in her eyes, her head on one side, an intense stillness over her. She was as if working the spell of some enchantment. Suddenly she had finished. She looked at the dog, and then at her drawing, and then cried, with real grief for the dog, and at the same time with a wicked exultation: �My beautiful, why did they?� She took her paper to the dog, and held it under his nose. He turned his head aside as in chagrin and mortification, and she impulsively kissed his velvety bulging forehead. ��s a Loolie, �s a little Loozie! Look at his portrait, darling, look at his portrait, that his mother has done of him.� She looked at her paper and chuckled. Then, kissing the dog once more, she rose and came gravely to Gudrun, offering her the paper. It was a grotesque little diagram of a grotesque little animal, so wicked and so comical, a slow smile came over Gudrun�s face, unconsciously. And at her side Winifred chuckled with glee, and said: �It isn�t like him, is it? He�s much lovelier than that. He�s _so_ beautiful-mmm, Looloo, my sweet darling.� And she flew off to embrace the chagrined little dog. He looked up at her with reproachful, saturnine eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being. Then she flew back to her drawing, and chuckled with satisfaction. �It isn�t like him, is it?� she said to Gudrun. �Yes, it�s very like him,� Gudrun replied. The child treasured her drawing, carried it about with her, and showed it, with a silent embarrassment, to everybody. �Look,� she said, thrusting the paper into her father�s hand. �Why that�s Looloo!� he exclaimed. And he looked down in surprise, hearing the almost inhuman chuckle of the child at his side. Gerald was away from home when Gudrun first came to Shortlands. But the first morning he came back he watched for her. It was a sunny, soft morning, and he lingered in the garden paths, looking at the flowers that had come out during his absence. He was clean and fit as ever, shaven, his fair hair scrupulously parted at the side, bright in the sunshine, his short, fair moustache closely clipped, his eyes with their humorous kind twinkle, which was so deceptive. He was dressed in black, his clothes sat well on his well-nourished body. Yet as he lingered before the flower-beds in the morning sunshine, there was a certain isolation, a fear about him, as of something wanting. Gudrun came up quickly, unseen. She was dressed in blue, with woollen yellow stockings, like the Bluecoat boys. He glanced up in surprise. Her stockings always disconcerted him, the pale-yellow stockings and the heavy heavy black shoes. Winifred, who had been playing about the garden with Mademoiselle and the dogs, came flitting towards Gudrun. The child wore a dress of black-and-white stripes. Her hair was rather short, cut round and hanging level in her neck. �We�re going to do Bismarck, aren�t we?� she said, linking her hand through Gudrun�s arm. �Yes, we�re going to do Bismarck. Do you want to?� �Oh yes-oh I do! I want most awfully to do Bismarck. He looks _so_ splendid this morning, so _fierce_. He�s almost as big as a lion.� And the child chuckled sardonically at her own hyperbole. �He�s a real king, he really is.� �_Bonjour, Mademoiselle,_� said the little French governess, wavering up with a slight bow, a bow of the sort that Gudrun loathed, insolent. �_Winifred veut tant faire le portrait de Bismarck�! Oh, mais toute la matiné_e��We will do Bismarck this morning!��_Bismarck, Bismarck, toujours Bismarck! C�est un lapin, n�est-ce pas, mademoiselle?_� �_Oui, c�est un grand lapin blanc et noir. Vous ne l�avez pas vu?_� said Gudrun in her good, but rather heavy French. �_Non, mademoiselle, Winifred n�a jamais voulu me le faire voir. Tant de fois je le lui ai demandé, �Qu�est ce donc que ce Bismarck, Winifred?� Mais elle n�a pas voulu me le dire. Son Bismarck, c�etait un mystère._� �_Oui, c�est un mystère, vraiment un mystère!_ Miss Brangwen, say that Bismarck is a mystery,� cried Winifred. �Bismarck, is a mystery, _Bismarck, c�est un mystère, der Bismarck, er ist ein Wunder_,� said Gudrun, in mocking incantation. �_Ja, er ist ein Wunder_,� repeated Winifred, with odd seriousness, under which lay a wicked chuckle. �_Ist er auch ein Wunder?_� came the slightly insolent sneering of Mademoiselle. �_Doch!_� said Winifred briefly, indifferent. �_Doch ist er nicht ein König._ Beesmarck, he was not a king, Winifred, as you have said. He was only�_il n�était que chancelier._� �_Qu�est ce qu�un chancelier?_� said Winifred, with slightly contemptuous indifference. �A _chancelier_ is a chancellor, and a chancellor is, I believe, a sort of judge,� said Gerald coming up and shaking hands with Gudrun. �You�ll have made a song of Bismarck soon,� said he. Mademoiselle waited, and discreetly made her inclination, and her greeting. �So they wouldn�t let you see Bismarck, Mademoiselle?� he said. �_Non, Monsieur._� �Ay, very mean of them. What are you going to do to him, Miss Brangwen? I want him sent to the kitchen and cooked.� �Oh no,� cried Winifred. �We�re going to draw him,� said Gudrun. �Draw him and quarter him and dish him up,� he said, being purposely fatuous. �Oh no,� cried Winifred with emphasis, chuckling. Gudrun detected the tang of mockery in him, and she looked up and smiled into his face. He felt his nerves caressed. Their eyes met in knowledge. �How do you like Shortlands?� he asked. �Oh, very much,� she said, with nonchalance. �Glad you do. Have you noticed these flowers?� He led her along the path. She followed intently. Winifred came, and the governess lingered in the rear. They stopped before some veined salpiglossis flowers. �Aren�t they wonderful?� she cried, looking at them absorbedly. Strange how her reverential, almost ecstatic admiration of the flowers caressed his nerves. She stooped down, and touched the trumpets, with infinitely fine and delicate-touching finger-tips. It filled him with ease to see her. When she rose, her eyes, hot with the beauty of the flowers, looked into his. �What are they?� she asked. �Sort of petunia, I suppose,� he answered. �I don�t really know them.� �They are quite strangers to me,� she said. They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her. She was aware of Mademoiselle standing near, like a little French beetle, observant and calculating. She moved away with Winifred, saying they would go to find Bismarck. Gerald watched them go, looking all the while at the soft, full, still body of Gudrun, in its silky cashmere. How silky and rich and soft her body must be. An excess of appreciation came over his mind, she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful. He wanted only to come to her, nothing more. He was only this, this being that should come to her, and be given to her. At the same time he was finely and acutely aware of Mademoiselle�s neat, brittle finality of form. She was like some elegant beetle with thin ankles, perched on her high heels, her glossy black dress perfectly correct, her dark hair done high and admirably. How repulsive her completeness and her finality was! He loathed her. Yet he did admire her. She was perfectly correct. And it did rather annoy him, that Gudrun came dressed in startling colours, like a macaw, when the family was in mourning. Like a macaw she was! He watched the lingering way she took her feet from the ground. And her ankles were pale yellow, and her dress a deep blue. Yet it pleased him. It pleased him very much. He felt the challenge in her very attire�she challenged the whole world. And he smiled as to the note of a trumpet. Gudrun and Winifred went through the house to the back, where were the stables and the out-buildings. Everywhere was still and deserted. Mr Crich had gone out for a short drive, the stableman had just led round Gerald�s horse. The two girls went to the hutch that stood in a corner, and looked at the great black-and-white rabbit. �Isn�t he beautiful! Oh, do look at him listening! Doesn�t he look silly!� she laughed quickly, then added �Oh, do let�s do him listening, do let us, he listens with so much of himself;�don�t you darling Bismarck?� �Can we take him out?� said Gudrun. �He�s very strong. He really is extremely strong.� She looked at Gudrun, her head on one side, in odd calculating mistrust. �But we�ll try, shall we?� �Yes, if you like. But he�s a fearful kicker!� They took the key to unlock the door. The rabbit exploded in a wild rush round the hutch. �He scratches most awfully sometimes,� cried Winifred in excitement. �Oh do look at him, isn�t he wonderful!� The rabbit tore round the hutch in a hurry. �Bismarck!� cried the child, in rousing excitement. �How _dreadful_ you are! You are beastly.� Winifred looked up at Gudrun with some misgiving in her wild excitement. Gudrun smiled sardonically with her mouth. Winifred made a strange crooning noise of unaccountable excitement. �Now he�s still!� she cried, seeing the rabbit settled down in a far corner of the hutch. �Shall we take him now?� she whispered excitedly, mysteriously, looking up at Gudrun and edging very close. �Shall we get him now?�� she chuckled wickedly to herself. They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms� length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind. �Bismarck, Bismarck, you are behaving terribly,� said Winifred in a rather frightened voice, �Oh, do put him down, he�s beastly.� Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the mindlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her. Gerald came round as she was trying to capture the flying rabbit under her arm. He saw, with subtle recognition, her sullen passion of cruelty. �You should let one of the men do that for you,� he said hurrying up. �Oh, he�s _so_ horrid!� cried Winifred, almost frantic. He held out his nervous, sinewy hand and took the rabbit by the ears, from Gudrun. �It�s most _fearfully_ strong,� she cried, in a high voice, like the crying a seagull, strange and vindictive. The rabbit made itself into a ball in the air, and lashed out, flinging itself into a bow. It really seemed demoniacal. Gudrun saw Gerald�s body tighten, saw a sharp blindness come into his eyes. �I know these beggars of old,� he said. The long, demon-like beast lashed out again, spread on the air as if it were flying, looking something like a dragon, then closing up again, inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man�s body, strung to its efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came up in him. Swift as lightning he drew back and brought his free hand down like a hawk on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there came the unearthly abhorrent scream of a rabbit in the fear of death. It made one immense writhe, tore his wrists and his sleeves in a final convulsion, all its belly flashed white in a whirlwind of paws, and then he had slung it round and had it under his arm, fast. It cowered and skulked. His face was gleaming with a smile. �You wouldn�t think there was all that force in a rabbit,� he said, looking at Gudrun. And he saw her eyes black as night in her pallid face, she looked almost unearthly. The scream of the rabbit, after the violent tussle, seemed to have torn the veil of her consciousness. He looked at her, and the whitish, electric gleam in his face intensified. �I don�t really like him,� Winifred was crooning. �I don�t care for him as I do for Loozie. He�s hateful really.� A smile twisted Gudrun�s face, as she recovered. She knew she was revealed. �Don�t they make the most fearful noise when they scream?� she cried, the high note in her voice, like a seagull�s cry. �Abominable,� he said. �He shouldn�t be so silly when he has to be taken out,� Winifred was saying, putting out her hand and touching the rabbit tentatively, as it skulked under his arm, motionless as if it were dead. �He�s not dead, is he Gerald?� she asked. �No, he ought to be,� he said. �Yes, he ought!� cried the child, with a sudden flush of amusement. And she touched the rabbit with more confidence. �His heart is beating _so_ fast. Isn�t he funny? He really is.� �Where do you want him?� asked Gerald. �In the little green court,� she said. Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange, darkened eyes, strained with underworld knowledge, almost supplicating, like those of a creature which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition. And he felt he ought to say something, to cover it. He had the power of lightning in his nerves, she seemed like a soft recipient of his magical, hideous white fire. He was unconfident, he had qualms of fear. �Did he hurt you?� he asked. �No,� she said. �He�s an insensible beast,� he said, turning his face away. They came to the little court, which was shut in by old red walls in whose crevices wall-flowers were growing. The grass was soft and fine and old, a level floor carpeting the court, the sky was blue overhead. Gerald tossed the rabbit down. It crouched still and would not move. Gudrun watched it with faint horror. �Why doesn�t it move?� she cried. �It�s skulking,� he said. She looked up at him, and a slight sinister smile contracted her white face. �Isn�t it a _fool!_� she cried. �Isn�t it a sickening _fool?_� The vindictive mockery in her voice made his brain quiver. Glancing up at him, into his eyes, she revealed again the mocking, white-cruel recognition. There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both. They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries. �How many scratches have you?� he asked, showing his hard forearm, white and hard and torn in red gashes. �How really vile!� she cried, flushing with a sinister vision. �Mine is nothing.� She lifted her arm and showed a deep red score down the silken white flesh. �What a devil!� he exclaimed. But it was as if he had had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her, deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. �It doesn�t hurt you very much, does it?� he asked, solicitous. �Not at all,� she cried. And suddenly the rabbit, which had been crouching as if it were a flower, so still and soft, suddenly burst into life. Round and round the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains. They all stood in amazement, smiling uncannily, as if the rabbit were obeying some unknown incantation. Round and round it flew, on the grass under the old red walls like a storm. And then quite suddenly it settled down, hobbled among the grass, and sat considering, its nose twitching like a bit of fluff in the wind. After having considered for a few minutes, a soft bunch with a black, open eye, which perhaps was looking at them, perhaps was not, it hobbled calmly forward and began to nibble the grass with that mean motion of a rabbit�s quick eating. �It�s mad,� said Gudrun. �It is most decidedly mad.� He laughed. �The question is,� he said, �what is madness? I don�t suppose it is rabbit-mad.� �Don�t you think it is?� she asked. �No. That�s what it is to be a rabbit.� There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. This thwarted her, and contravened her, for the moment. �God be praised we aren�t rabbits,� she said, in a high, shrill voice. The smile intensified a little, on his face. �Not rabbits?� he said, looking at her fixedly. Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition. �Ah Gerald,� she said, in a strong, slow, almost man-like way. ��All that, and more.� Her eyes looked up at him with shocking nonchalance. He felt again as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally. He turned aside. �Eat, eat my darling!� Winifred was softly conjuring the rabbit, and creeping forward to touch it. It hobbled away from her. �Let its mother stroke its fur then, darling, because it is so mysterious�� CHAPTER XIX. MOONY After his illness Birkin went to the south of France for a time. He did not write, nobody heard anything of him. Ursula, left alone, felt as if everything were lapsing out. There seemed to be no hope in the world. One was a tiny little rock with the tide of nothingness rising higher and higher She herself was real, and only herself�just like a rock in a wash of flood-water. The rest was all nothingness. She was hard and indifferent, isolated in herself. There was nothing for it now, but contemptuous, resistant indifference. All the world was lapsing into a grey wish-wash of nothingness, she had no contact and no connection anywhere. She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people. She loved only children and animals: children she loved passionately, but coldly. They made her want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life. But this very love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her. She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was single and to itself, magical. It was not referred away to some detestable social principle. It was incapable of soulfulness and tragedy, which she detested so profoundly. She could be very pleasant and flattering, almost subservient, to people she met. But no one was taken in. Instinctively each felt her contemptuous mockery of the human being in himself, or herself. She had a profound grudge against the human being. That which the word �human� stood for was despicable and repugnant to her. Mostly her heart was closed in this hidden, unconscious strain of contemptuous ridicule. She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love. This was her idea of herself. But the strange brightness of her presence, a marvellous radiance of intrinsic vitality, was a luminousness of supreme repudiation, nothing but repudiation. Yet, at moments, she yielded and softened, she wanted pure love, only pure love. This other, this state of constant unfailing repudiation, was a strain, a suffering also. A terrible desire for pure love overcame her again. She went out one evening, numbed by this constant essential suffering. Those who are timed for destruction must die now. The knowledge of this reached a finality, a finishing in her. And the finality released her. If fate would carry off in death or downfall all those who were timed to go, why need she trouble, why repudiate any further. She was free of it all, she could seek a new union elsewhere. Ursula set off to Willey Green, towards the mill. She came to Willey Water. It was almost full again, after its period of emptiness. Then she turned off through the woods. The night had fallen, it was dark. But she forgot to be afraid, she who had such great sources of fear. Among the trees, far from any human beings, there was a sort of magic peace. The more one could find a pure loneliness, with no taint of people, the better one felt. She was in reality terrified, horrified in her apprehension of people. She started, noticing something on her right hand, between the tree trunks. It was like a great presence, watching her, dodging her. She started violently. It was only the moon, risen through the thin trees. But it seemed so mysterious, with its white and deathly smile. And there was no avoiding it. Night or day, one could not escape the sinister face, triumphant and radiant like this moon, with a high smile. She hurried on, cowering from the white planet. She would just see the pond at the mill before she went home. Not wanting to go through the yard, because of the dogs, she turned off along the hill-side to descend on the pond from above. The moon was transcendent over the bare, open space, she suffered from being exposed to it. There was a glimmer of nightly rabbits across the ground. The night was as clear as crystal, and very still. She could hear a distant coughing of a sheep. So she swerved down to the steep, tree-hidden bank above the pond, where the alders twisted their roots. She was glad to pass into the shade out of the moon. There she stood, at the top of the fallen-away bank, her hand on the rough trunk of a tree, looking at the water, that was perfect in its stillness, floating the moon upon it. But for some reason she disliked it. It did not give her anything. She listened for the hoarse rustle of the sluice. And she wished for something else out of the night, she wanted another night, not this moon-brilliant hardness. She could feel her soul crying out in her, lamenting desolately. She saw a shadow moving by the water. It would be Birkin. He had come back then, unawares. She accepted it without remark, nothing mattered to her. She sat down among the roots of the alder tree, dim and veiled, hearing the sound of the sluice like dew distilling audibly into the night. The islands were dark and half revealed, the reeds were dark also, only some of them had a little frail fire of reflection. A fish leaped secretly, revealing the light in the pond. This fire of the chill night breaking constantly on to the pure darkness, repelled her. She wished it were perfectly dark, perfectly, and noiseless and without motion. Birkin, small and dark also, his hair tinged with moonlight, wandered nearer. He was quite near, and yet he did not exist in her. He did not know she was there. Supposing he did something he would not wish to be seen doing, thinking he was quite private? But there, what did it matter? What did the small privacies matter? How could it matter, what he did? How can there be any secrets, we are all the same organisms? How can there be any secrecy, when everything is known to all of us? He was touching unconsciously the dead husks of flowers as he passed by, and talking disconnectedly to himself. �You can�t go away,� he was saying. �There _is_ no away. You only withdraw upon yourself.� He threw a dead flower-husk on to the water. �An antiphony�they lie, and you sing back to them. There wouldn�t have to be any truth, if there weren�t any lies. Then one needn�t assert anything�� He stood still, looking at the water, and throwing upon it the husks of the flowers. �Cybele�curse her! The accursed Syria Dea! Does one begrudge it her? What else is there�?� Ursula wanted to laugh loudly and hysterically, hearing his isolated voice speaking out. It was so ridiculous. He stood staring at the water. Then he stooped and picked up a stone, which he threw sharply at the pond. Ursula was aware of the bright moon leaping and swaying, all distorted, in her eyes. It seemed to shoot out arms of fire like a cuttle-fish, like a luminous polyp, palpitating strongly before her. And his shadow on the border of the pond, was watching for a few moments, then he stooped and groped on the ground. Then again there was a burst of sound, and a burst of brilliant light, the moon had exploded on the water, and was flying asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire. Rapidly, like white birds, the fires all broken rose across the pond, fleeing in clamorous confusion, battling with the flock of dark waves that were forcing their way in. The furthest waves of light, fleeing out, seemed to be clamouring against the shore for escape, the waves of darkness came in heavily, running under towards the centre. But at the centre, the heart of all, was still a vivid, incandescent quivering of a white moon not quite destroyed, a white body of fire writhing and striving and not even now broken open, not yet violated. It seemed to be drawing itself together with strange, violent pangs, in blind effort. It was getting stronger, it was re-asserting itself, the inviolable moon. And the rays were hastening in in thin lines of light, to return to the strengthened moon, that shook upon the water in triumphant reassumption. Birkin stood and watched, motionless, till the pond was almost calm, the moon was almost serene. Then, satisfied of so much, he looked for more stones. She felt his invisible tenacity. And in a moment again, the broken lights scattered in explosion over her face, dazzling her; and then, almost immediately, came the second shot. The moon leapt up white and burst through the air. Darts of bright light shot asunder, darkness swept over the centre. There was no moon, only a battlefield of broken lights and shadows, running close together. Shadows, dark and heavy, struck again and again across the place where the heart of the moon had been, obliterating it altogether. The white fragments pulsed up and down, and could not find where to go, apart and brilliant on the water like the petals of a rose that a wind has blown far and wide. Yet again, they were flickering their way to the centre, finding the path blindly, enviously. And again, all was still, as Birkin and Ursula watched. The waters were loud on the shore. He saw the moon regathering itself insidiously, saw the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments, in a pulse and in effort of return. And he was not satisfied. Like a madness, he must go on. He got large stones, and threw them, one after the other, at the white-burning centre of the moon, till there was nothing but a rocking of hollow noise, and a pond surged up, no moon any more, only a few broken flakes tangled and glittering broadcast in the darkness, without aim or meaning, a darkened confusion, like a black and white kaleidoscope tossed at random. The hollow night was rocking and crashing with noise, and from the sluice came sharp, regular flashes of sound. Flakes of light appeared here and there, glittering tormented among the shadows, far off, in strange places; among the dripping shadow of the willow on the island. Birkin stood and listened and was satisfied. Ursula was dazed, her mind was all gone. She felt she had fallen to the ground and was spilled out, like water on the earth. Motionless and spent she remained in the gloom. Though even now she was aware, unseeing, that in the darkness was a little tumult of ebbing flakes of light, a cluster dancing secretly in a round, twining and coming steadily together. They were gathering a heart again, they were coming once more into being. Gradually the fragments caught together re-united, heaving, rocking, dancing, falling back as in panic, but working their way home again persistently, making semblance of fleeing away when they had advanced, but always flickering nearer, a little closer to the mark, the cluster growing mysteriously larger and brighter, as gleam after gleam fell in with the whole, until a ragged rose, a distorted, frayed moon was shaking upon the waters again, re-asserted, renewed, trying to recover from its convulsion, to get over the disfigurement and the agitation, to be whole and composed, at peace. Birkin lingered vaguely by the water. Ursula was afraid that he would stone the moon again. She slipped from her seat and went down to him, saying: �You won�t throw stones at it any more, will you?� �How long have you been there?� �All the time. You won�t throw any more stones, will you?� �I wanted to see if I could make it be quite gone off the pond,� he said. �Yes, it was horrible, really. Why should you hate the moon? It hasn�t done you any harm, has it?� �Was it hate?� he said. And they were silent for a few minutes. �When did you come back?� she said. �Today.� �Why did you never write?� �I could find nothing to say.� �Why was there nothing to say?� �I don�t know. Why are there no daffodils now?� �No.� Again there was a space of silence. Ursula looked at the moon. It had gathered itself together, and was quivering slightly. �Was it good for you, to be alone?� she asked. �Perhaps. Not that I know much. But I got over a good deal. Did you do anything important?� �No. I looked at England, and thought I�d done with it.� �Why England?� he asked in surprise. �I don�t know, it came like that.� �It isn�t a question of nations,� he said. �France is far worse.� �Yes, I know. I felt I�d done with it all.� They went and sat down on the roots of the trees, in the shadow. And being silent, he remembered the beauty of her eyes, which were sometimes filled with light, like spring, suffused with wonderful promise. So he said to her, slowly, with difficulty: �There is a golden light in you, which I wish you would give me.� It was as if he had been thinking of this for some time. She was startled, she seemed to leap clear of him. Yet also she was pleased. �What kind of a light,� she asked. But he was shy, and did not say any more. So the moment passed for this time. And gradually a feeling of sorrow came over her. �My life is unfulfilled,� she said. �Yes,� he answered briefly, not wanting to hear this. �And I feel as if nobody could ever really love me,� she said. But he did not answer. �You think, don�t you,� she said slowly, �that I only want physical things? It isn�t true. I want you to serve my spirit.� �I know you do. I know you don�t want physical things by themselves. But, I want you to give me�to give your spirit to me�that golden light which is you�which you don�t know�give it me�� After a moment�s silence she replied: �But how can I, you don�t love me! You only want your own ends. You don�t want to serve _me_, and yet you want me to serve you. It is so one-sided!� It was a great effort to him to maintain this conversation, and to press for the thing he wanted from her, the surrender of her spirit. �It is different,� he said. �The two kinds of service are so different. I serve you in another way�not through _yourself_�somewhere else. But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves�to be really together because we _are_ together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.� �No,� she said, pondering. �You are just egocentric. You never have any enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you.� But this only made him shut off from her. �Ah well,� he said, �words make no matter, any way. The thing _is_ between us, or it isn�t.� �You don�t even love me,� she cried. �I do,� he said angrily. �But I want�� His mind saw again the lovely golden light of spring transfused through her eyes, as through some wonderful window. And he wanted her to be with him there, in this world of proud indifference. But what was the good of telling her he wanted this company in proud indifference. What was the good of talking, any way? It must happen beyond the sound of words. It was merely ruinous to try to work her by conviction. This was a paradisal bird that could never be netted, it must fly by itself to the heart. �I always think I am going to be loved�and then I am let down. You _don�t_ love me, you know. You don�t want to serve me. You only want yourself.� A shiver of rage went over his veins, at this repeated: �You don�t want to serve me.� All the paradisal disappeared from him. �No,� he said, irritated, �I don�t want to serve you, because there is nothing there to serve. What you want me to serve, is nothing, mere nothing. It isn�t even you, it is your mere female quality. And I wouldn�t give a straw for your female ego�it�s a rag doll.� �Ha!� she laughed in mockery. �That�s all you think of me, is it? And then you have the impudence to say you love me.� She rose in anger, to go home. You want the paradisal unknowing,� she said, turning round on him as he still sat half-visible in the shadow. �I know what that means, thank you. You want me to be your thing, never to criticise you or to have anything to say for myself. You want me to be a mere _thing_ for you! No thank you! _If_ you want that, there are plenty of women who will give it to you. There are plenty of women who will lie down for you to walk over them�_go_ to them then, if that�s what you want�go to them.� �No,� he said, outspoken with anger. �I want you to drop your assertive _will_, your frightened apprehensive self-insistence, that is what I want. I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.� �Let myself go!� she re-echoed in mockery. �I can let myself go, easily enough. It is you who can�t let yourself go, it is you who hang on to yourself as if it were your only treasure. _You�you_ are the Sunday school teacher�_You_�you preacher.� The amount of truth that was in this made him stiff and unheeding of her. �I don�t mean let yourself go in the Dionysic ecstatic way,� he said. �I know you can do that. But I hate ecstasy, Dionysic or any other. It�s like going round in a squirrel cage. I want you not to care about yourself, just to be there and not to care about yourself, not to insist�be glad and sure and indifferent.� �Who insists?� she mocked. �Who is it that keeps on insisting? It isn�t _me!_� There was a weary, mocking bitterness in her voice. He was silent for some time. �I know,� he said. �While ever either of us insists to the other, we are all wrong. But there we are, the accord doesn�t come.� They sat in stillness under the shadow of the trees by the bank. The night was white around them, they were in the darkness, barely conscious. Gradually, the stillness and peace came over them. She put her hand tentatively on his. Their hands clasped softly and silently, in peace. �Do you really love me?� she said. He laughed. �I call that your war-cry,� he replied, amused. �Why!� she cried, amused and really wondering. �Your insistence�Your war-cry��A Brangwen, A Brangwen��an old battle-cry. Yours is, �Do you love me? Yield knave, or die.�� �No,� she said, pleading, �not like that. Not like that. But I must know that you love me, mustn�t I?� �Well then, know it and have done with it.� �But do you?� �Yes, I do. I love you, and I know it�s final. It is final, so why say any more about it.� She was silent for some moments, in delight and doubt. �Are you sure?� she said, nestling happily near to him. �Quite sure�so now have done�accept it and have done.� She was nestled quite close to him. �Have done with what?� she murmured, happily. �With bothering,� he said. She clung nearer to him. He held her close, and kissed her softly, gently. It was such peace and heavenly freedom, just to fold her and kiss her gently, and not to have any thoughts or any desires or any will, just to be still with her, to be perfectly still and together, in a peace that was not sleep, but content in bliss. To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness. For a long time she nestled to him, and he kissed her softly, her hair, her face, her ears, gently, softly, like dew falling. But this warm breath on her ears disturbed her again, kindled the old destructive fires. She cleaved to him, and he could feel his blood changing like quicksilver. �But we�ll be still, shall we?� he said. �Yes,� she said, as if submissively. And she continued to nestle against him. But in a little while she drew away and looked at him. �I must be going home,� she said. �Must you�how sad,� he replied. She leaned forward and put up her mouth to be kissed. �Are you really sad?� she murmured, smiling. �Yes,� he said, �I wish we could stay as we were, always.� �Always! Do you?� she murmured, as he kissed her. And then, out of a full throat, she crooned �Kiss me! Kiss me!� And she cleaved close to him. He kissed her many times. But he too had his idea and his will. He wanted only gentle communion, no other, no passion now. So that soon she drew away, put on her hat and went home. The next day however, he felt wistful and yearning. He thought he had been wrong, perhaps. Perhaps he had been wrong to go to her with an idea of what he wanted. Was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of a profound yearning? If the latter, how was it he was always talking about sensual fulfilment? The two did not agree very well. Suddenly he found himself face to face with a situation. It was as simple as this: fatally simple. On the one hand, he knew he did not want a further sensual experience�something deeper, darker, than ordinary life could give. He remembered the African fetishes he had seen at Halliday�s so often. There came back to him one, a statuette about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul�s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle�s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution. This was why her face looked like a beetle�s: this was why the Egyptians worshipped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the principle of knowledge in dissolution and corruption. There is a long way we can travel, after the death-break: after that point when the soul in intense suffering breaks, breaks away from its organic hold like a leaf that falls. We fall from the connection with life and hope, we lapse from pure integral being, from creation and liberty, and we fall into the long, long African process of purely sensual understanding, knowledge in the mystery of dissolution. He realised now that this is a long process�thousands of years it takes, after the death of the creative spirit. He realised that there were great mysteries to be unsealed, sensual, mindless, dreadful mysteries, far beyond the phallic cult. How far, in their inverted culture, had these West Africans gone beyond phallic knowledge? Very, very far. Birkin recalled again the female figure: the elongated, long, long body, the curious unexpected heavy buttocks, the long, imprisoned neck, the face with tiny features like a beetle�s. This was far beyond any phallic knowledge, sensual subtle realities far beyond the scope of phallic investigation. There remained this way, this awful African process, to be fulfilled. It would be done differently by the white races. The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun-rays. Was this then all that remained? Was there left now nothing but to break off from the happy creative being, was the time up? Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north? Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow? Birkin was frightened. He was tired too, when he had reached this length of speculation. Suddenly his strange, strained attention gave way, he could not attend to these mysteries any more. There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single being, the individual soul taking precedence over love and desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovely state of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields. There was the other way, the remaining way. And he must run to follow it. He thought of Ursula, how sensitive and delicate she really was, her skin so over-fine, as if one skin were wanting. She was really so marvellously gentle and sensitive. Why did he ever forget it? He must go to her at once. He must ask her to marry him. They must marry at once, and so make a definite pledge, enter into a definite communion. He must set out at once and ask her, this moment. There was no moment to spare. He drifted on swiftly to Beldover, half-unconscious of his own movement. He saw the town on the slope of the hill, not straggling, but as if walled-in with the straight, final streets of miners� dwellings, making a great square, and it looked like Jerusalem to his fancy. The world was all strange and transcendent. Rosalind opened the door to him. She started slightly, as a young girl will, and said: �Oh, I�ll tell father.� With which she disappeared, leaving Birkin in the hall, looking at some reproductions from Picasso, lately introduced by Gudrun. He was admiring the almost wizard, sensuous apprehension of the earth, when Will Brangwen appeared, rolling down his shirt sleeves. �Well,� said Brangwen, �I�ll get a coat.� And he too disappeared for a moment. Then he returned, and opened the door of the drawing-room, saying: �You must excuse me, I was just doing a bit of work in the shed. Come inside, will you.� Birkin entered and sat down. He looked at the bright, reddish face of the other man, at the narrow brow and the very bright eyes, and at the rather sensual lips that unrolled wide and expansive under the black cropped moustache. How curious it was that this was a human being! What Brangwen thought himself to be, how meaningless it was, confronted with the reality of him. Birkin could see only a strange, inexplicable, almost patternless collection of passions and desires and suppressions and traditions and mechanical ideas, all cast unfused and disunited into this slender, bright-faced man of nearly fifty, who was as unresolved now as he was at twenty, and as uncreated. How could he be the parent of Ursula, when he was not created himself. He was not a parent. A slip of living flesh had been transmitted through him, but the spirit had not come from him. The spirit had not come from any ancestor, it had come out of the unknown. A child is the child of the mystery, or it is uncreated. �The weather�s not so bad as it has been,� said Brangwen, after waiting a moment. There was no connection between the two men. �No,� said Birkin. �It was full moon two days ago.� �Oh! You believe in the moon then, affecting the weather?� �No, I don�t think I do. I don�t really know enough about it.� �You know what they say? The moon and the weather may change together, but the change of the moon won�t change the weather.� �Is that it?� said Birkin. �I hadn�t heard it.� There was a pause. Then Birkin said: �Am I hindering you? I called to see Ursula, really. Is she at home?� �I don�t believe she is. I believe she�s gone to the library. I�ll just see.� Birkin could hear him enquiring in the dining-room. �No,� he said, coming back. �But she won�t be long. You wanted to speak to her?� Birkin looked across at the other man with curious calm, clear eyes. �As a matter of fact,� he said, �I wanted to ask her to marry me.� A point of light came on the golden-brown eyes of the elder man. �O-oh?� he said, looking at Birkin, then dropping his eyes before the calm, steadily watching look of the other: �Was she expecting you then?� �No,� said Birkin. �No? I didn�t know anything of this sort was on foot�� Brangwen smiled awkwardly. Birkin looked back at him, and said to himself: �I wonder why it should be �on foot�!� Aloud he said: �No, it�s perhaps rather sudden.� At which, thinking of his relationship with Ursula, he added��but I don�t know�� �Quite sudden, is it? Oh!� said Brangwen, rather baffled and annoyed. �In one way,� replied Birkin, ��not in another.� There was a moment�s pause, after which Brangwen said: �Well, she pleases herself�� �Oh yes!� said Birkin, calmly. A vibration came into Brangwen�s strong voice, as he replied: �Though I shouldn�t want her to be in too big a hurry, either. It�s no good looking round afterwards, when it�s too late.� �Oh, it need never be too late,� said Birkin, �as far as that goes.� �How do you mean?� asked the father. �If one repents being married, the marriage is at an end,� said Birkin. �You think so?� �Yes.� �Ay, well that may be your way of looking at it.� Birkin, in silence, thought to himself: �So it may. As for _your_ way of looking at it, William Brangwen, it needs a little explaining.� �I suppose,� said Brangwen, �you know what sort of people we are? What sort of a bringing-up she�s had?� ��She�,� thought Birkin to himself, remembering his childhood�s corrections, �is the cat�s mother.� �Do I know what sort of a bringing-up she�s had?� he said aloud. He seemed to annoy Brangwen intentionally. �Well,� he said, �she�s had everything that�s right for a girl to have�as far as possible, as far as we could give it her.� �I�m sure she has,� said Birkin, which caused a perilous full-stop. The father was becoming exasperated. There was something naturally irritant to him in Birkin�s mere presence. �And I don�t want to see her going back on it all,� he said, in a clanging voice. �Why?� said Birkin. This monosyllable exploded in Brangwen�s brain like a shot. �Why! _I_ don�t believe in your new-fangled ways and new-fangled ideas�in and out like a frog in a gallipot. It would never do for me.� Birkin watched him with steady emotionless eyes. The radical antagnoism in the two men was rousing. �Yes, but are my ways and ideas new-fangled?� asked Birkin. �Are they?� Brangwen caught himself up. �I�m not speaking of you in particular,� he said. �What I mean is that my children have been brought up to think and do according to the religion I was brought up in myself, and I don�t want to see them going away from _that_.� There was a dangerous pause. �And beyond that�?� asked Birkin. The father hesitated, he was in a nasty position. �Eh? What do you mean? All I want to say is that my daughter��he tailed off into silence, overcome by futility. He knew that in some way he was off the track. �Of course,� said Birkin, �I don�t want to hurt anybody or influence anybody. Ursula does exactly as she pleases.� There was a complete silence, because of the utter failure in mutual understanding. Birkin felt bored. Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes. The eyes of the younger man rested on the face of the elder. Brangwen looked up, and saw Birkin looking at him. His face was covered with inarticulate anger and humiliation and sense of inferiority in strength. �And as for beliefs, that�s one thing,� he said. �But I�d rather see my daughters dead tomorrow than that they should be at the beck and call of the first man that likes to come and whistle for them.� A queer painful light came into Birkin�s eyes. �As to that,� he said, �I only know that it�s much more likely that it�s I who am at the beck and call of the woman, than she at mine.� Again there was a pause. The father was somewhat bewildered. �I know,� he said, �she�ll please herself�she always has done. I�ve done my best for them, but that doesn�t matter. They�ve got themselves to please, and if they can help it they�ll please nobody _but_ themselves. But she�s a right to consider her mother, and me as well�� Brangwen was thinking his own thoughts. �And I tell you this much, I would rather bury them, than see them getting into a lot of loose ways such as you see everywhere nowadays. I�d rather bury them�� �Yes but, you see,� said Birkin slowly, rather wearily, bored again by this new turn, �they won�t give either you or me the chance to bury them, because they�re not to be buried.� Brangwen looked at him in a sudden flare of impotent anger. �Now, Mr Birkin,� he said, �I don�t know what you�ve come here for, and I don�t know what you�re asking for. But my daughters are my daughters�and it�s my business to look after them while I can.� Birkin�s brows knitted suddenly, his eyes concentrated in mockery. But he remained perfectly stiff and still. There was a pause. �I�ve nothing against your marrying Ursula,� Brangwen began at length. �It�s got nothing to do with me, she�ll do as she likes, me or no me.� Birkin turned away, looking out of the window and letting go his consciousness. After all, what good was this? It was hopeless to keep it up. He would sit on till Ursula came home, then speak to her, then go away. He would not accept trouble at the hands of her father. It was all unnecessary, and he himself need not have provoked it. The two men sat in complete silence, Birkin almost unconscious of his own whereabouts. He had come to ask her to marry him�well then, he would wait on, and ask her. As for what she said, whether she accepted or not, he did not think about it. He would say what he had come to say, and that was all he was conscious of. He accepted the complete insignificance of this household, for him. But everything now was as if fated. He could see one thing ahead, and no more. From the rest, he was absolved entirely for the time being. It had to be left to fate and chance to resolve the issues. At length they heard the gate. They saw her coming up the steps with a bundle of books under her arm. Her face was bright and abstracted as usual, with the abstraction, that look of being not quite _there_, not quite present to the facts of reality, that galled her father so much. She had a maddening faculty of assuming a light of her own, which excluded the reality, and within which she looked radiant as if in sunshine. They heard her go into the dining-room, and drop her armful of books on the table. �Did you bring me that Girl�s Own?� cried Rosalind. �Yes, I brought it. But I forgot which one it was you wanted.� �You would,� cried Rosalind angrily. �It�s right for a wonder.� Then they heard her say something in a lowered tone. �Where?� cried Ursula. Again her sister�s voice was muffled. Brangwen opened the door, and called, in his strong, brazen voice: �Ursula.� She appeared in a moment, wearing her hat. �Oh how do you do!� she cried, seeing Birkin, and all dazzled as if taken by surprise. He wondered at her, knowing she was aware of his presence. She had her queer, radiant, breathless manner, as if confused by the actual world, unreal to it, having a complete bright world of her self alone. �Have I interrupted a conversation?� she asked. �No, only a complete silence,� said Birkin. �Oh,� said Ursula, vaguely, absent. Their presence was not vital to her, she was withheld, she did not take them in. It was a subtle insult that never failed to exasperate her father. �Mr Birkin came to speak to _you_, not to me,� said her father. �Oh, did he!� she exclaimed vaguely, as if it did not concern her. Then, recollecting herself, she turned to him rather radiantly, but still quite superficially, and said: �Was it anything special?� �I hope so,� he said, ironically. ��To propose to you, according to all accounts,� said her father. �Oh,� said Ursula. �Oh,� mocked her father, imitating her. �Have you nothing more to say?� She winced as if violated. �Did you really come to propose to me?� she asked of Birkin, as if it were a joke. �Yes,� he said. �I suppose I came to propose.� He seemed to fight shy of the last word. �Did you?� she cried, with her vague radiance. He might have been saying anything whatsoever. She seemed pleased. �Yes,� he answered. �I wanted to�I wanted you to agree to marry me.� She looked at him. His eyes were flickering with mixed lights, wanting something of her, yet not wanting it. She shrank a little, as if she were exposed to his eyes, and as if it were a pain to her. She darkened, her soul clouded over, she turned aside. She had been driven out of her own radiant, single world. And she dreaded contact, it was almost unnatural to her at these times. �Yes,� she said vaguely, in a doubting, absent voice. Birkin�s heart contracted swiftly, in a sudden fire of bitterness. It all meant nothing to her. He had been mistaken again. She was in some self-satisfied world of her own. He and his hopes were accidentals, violations to her. It drove her father to a pitch of mad exasperation. He had had to put up with this all his life, from her. �Well, what do you say?� he cried. She winced. Then she glanced down at her father, half-frightened, and she said: �I didn�t speak, did I?� as if she were afraid she might have committed herself. �No,� said her father, exasperated. �But you needn�t look like an idiot. You�ve got your wits, haven�t you?� She ebbed away in silent hostility. �I�ve got my wits, what does that mean?� she repeated, in a sullen voice of antagonism. �You heard what was asked you, didn�t you?� cried her father in anger. �Of course I heard.� �Well then, can�t you answer?� thundered her father. �Why should I?� At the impertinence of this retort, he went stiff. But he said nothing. �No,� said Birkin, to help out the occasion, �there�s no need to answer at once. You can say when you like.� Her eyes flashed with a powerful light. �Why should I say anything?� she cried. �You do this off your _own_ bat, it has nothing to do with me. Why do you both want to bully me?� �Bully you! Bully you!� cried her father, in bitter, rancorous anger. �Bully you! Why, it�s a pity you can�t be bullied into some sense and decency. Bully you! _You�ll_ see to that, you self-willed creature.� She stood suspended in the middle of the room, her face glimmering and dangerous. She was set in satisfied defiance. Birkin looked up at her. He too was angry. �But none is bullying you,� he said, in a very soft dangerous voice also. �Oh yes,� she cried. �You both want to force me into something.� �That is an illusion of yours,� he said ironically. �Illusion!� cried her father. �A self-opinionated fool, that�s what she is.� Birkin rose, saying: �However, we�ll leave it for the time being.� And without another word, he walked out of the house. �You fool! You fool!� her father cried to her, with extreme bitterness. She left the room, and went upstairs, singing to herself. But she was terribly fluttered, as after some dreadful fight. From her window, she could see Birkin going up the road. He went in such a blithe drift of rage, that her mind wondered over him. He was ridiculous, but she was afraid of him. She was as if escaped from some danger. Her father sat below, powerless in humiliation and chagrin. It was as if he were possessed with all the devils, after one of these unaccountable conflicts with Ursula. He hated her as if his only reality were in hating her to the last degree. He had all hell in his heart. But he went away, to escape himself. He knew he must despair, yield, give in to despair, and have done. Ursula�s face closed, she completed herself against them all. Recoiling upon herself, she became hard and self-completed, like a jewel. She was bright and invulnerable, quite free and happy, perfectly liberated in her self-possession. Her father had to learn not to see her blithe obliviousness, or it would have sent him mad. She was so radiant with all things, in her possession of perfect hostility. She would go on now for days like this, in this bright frank state of seemingly pure spontaneity, so essentially oblivious of the existence of anything but herself, but so ready and facile in her interest. Ah it was a bitter thing for a man to be near her, and her father cursed his fatherhood. But he must learn not to see her, not to know. She was perfectly stable in resistance when she was in this state: so bright and radiant and attractive in her pure opposition, so very pure, and yet mistrusted by everybody, disliked on every hand. It was her voice, curiously clear and repellent, that gave her away. Only Gudrun was in accord with her. It was at these times that the intimacy between the two sisters was most complete, as if their intelligence were one. They felt a strong, bright bond of understanding between them, surpassing everything else. And during all these days of blind bright abstraction and intimacy of his two daughters, the father seemed to breathe an air of death, as if he were destroyed in his very being. He was irritable to madness, he could not rest, his daughters seemed to be destroying him. But he was inarticulate and helpless against them. He was forced to breathe the air of his own death. He cursed them in his soul, and only wanted, that they should be removed from him. They continued radiant in their easy female transcendancy, beautiful to look at. They exchanged confidences, they were intimate in their revelations to the last degree, giving each other at last every secret. They withheld nothing, they told everything, till they were over the border of evil. And they armed each other with knowledge, they extracted the subtlest flavours from the apple of knowledge. It was curious how their knowledge was complementary, that of each to that of the other. Ursula saw her men as sons, pitied their yearning and admired their courage, and wondered over them as a mother wonders over her child, with a certain delight in their novelty. But to Gudrun, they were the opposite camp. She feared them and despised them, and respected their activities even overmuch. �Of course,� she said easily, �there is a quality of life in Birkin which is quite remarkable. There is an extraordinary rich spring of life in him, really amazing, the way he can give himself to things. But there are so many things in life that he simply doesn�t know. Either he is not aware of their existence at all, or he dismisses them as merely negligible�things which are vital to the other person. In a way, he is not clever enough, he is too intense in spots.� �Yes,� cried Ursula, �too much of a preacher. He is really a priest.� �Exactly! He can�t hear what anybody else has to say�he simply cannot hear. His own voice is so loud.� �Yes. He cries you down.� �He cries you down,� repeated Gudrun. �And by mere force of violence. And of course it is hopeless. Nobody is convinced by violence. It makes talking to him impossible�and living with him I should think would be more than impossible.� �You don�t think one could live with him� asked Ursula. �I think it would be too wearing, too exhausting. One would be shouted down every time, and rushed into his way without any choice. He would want to control you entirely. He cannot allow that there is any other mind than his own. And then the real clumsiness of his mind is its lack of self-criticism. No, I think it would be perfectly intolerable.� �Yes,� assented Ursula vaguely. She only half agreed with Gudrun. �The nuisance is,� she said, �that one would find almost any man intolerable after a fortnight.� �It�s perfectly dreadful,� said Gudrun. �But Birkin�he is too positive. He couldn�t bear it if you called your soul your own. Of him that is strictly true.� �Yes,� said Ursula. �You must have _his_ soul.� �Exactly! And what can you conceive more deadly?� This was all so true, that Ursula felt jarred to the bottom of her soul with ugly distaste. She went on, with the discord jarring and jolting through her, in the most barren of misery. Then there started a revulsion from Gudrun. She finished life off so thoroughly, she made things so ugly and so final. As a matter of fact, even if it were as Gudrun said, about Birkin, other things were true as well. But Gudrun would draw two lines under him and cross him out like an account that is settled. There he was, summed up, paid for, settled, done with. And it was such a lie. This finality of Gudrun�s, this dispatching of people and things in a sentence, it was all such a lie. Ursula began to revolt from her sister. One day as they were walking along the lane, they saw a robin sitting on the top twig of a bush, singing shrilly. The sisters stood to look at him. An ironical smile flickered on Gudrun�s face. �Doesn�t he feel important?� smiled Gudrun. �Doesn�t he!� exclaimed Ursula, with a little ironical grimace. �Isn�t he a little Lloyd George of the air!� �Isn�t he! Little Lloyd George of the air! That�s just what they are,� cried Gudrun in delight. Then for days, Ursula saw the persistent, obtrusive birds as stout, short politicians lifting up their voices from the platform, little men who must make themselves heard at any cost. But even from this there came the revulsion. Some yellowhammers suddenly shot along the road in front of her. And they looked to her so uncanny and inhuman, like flaring yellow barbs shooting through the air on some weird, living errand, that she said to herself: �After all, it is impudence to call them little Lloyd Georges. They are really unknown to us, they are the unknown forces. It is impudence to look at them as if they were the same as human beings. They are of another world. How stupid anthropomorphism is! Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making herself the measure of everything, making everything come down to human standards. Rupert is quite right, human beings are boring, painting the universe with their own image. The universe is non-human, thank God.� It seemed to her irreverence, destructive of all true life, to make little Lloyd Georges of the birds. It was such a lie towards the robins, and such a defamation. Yet she had done it herself. But under Gudrun�s influence: so she exonerated herself. So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she turned in spirit towards Birkin again. She had not seen him since the fiasco of his proposal. She did not want to, because she did not want the question of her acceptance thrust upon her. She knew what Birkin meant when he asked her to marry him; vaguely, without putting it into speech, she knew. She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he wanted. And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that she herself wanted. She was not at all sure that it was this mutual unison in separateness that she wanted. She wanted unspeakable intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down�ah, like a life-draught. She made great professions, to herself, of her willingness to warm his foot-soles between her breasts, after the fashion of the nauseous Meredith poem. But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon. And subtly enough, she knew he would never abandon himself _finally_ to her. He did not believe in final self-abandonment. He said it openly. It was his challenge. She was prepared to fight him for it. For she believed in an absolute surrender to love. She believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was _more_ than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was _everything_. Man must render himself up to her. He must be quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be _her man_ utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave�whether she wanted it or not. CHAPTER XX. GLADIATORIAL After the fiasco of the proposal, Birkin had hurried blindly away from Beldover, in a whirl of fury. He felt he had been a complete fool, that the whole scene had been a farce of the first water. But that did not trouble him at all. He was deeply, mockingly angry that Ursula persisted always in this old cry: �Why do you want to bully me?� and in her bright, insolent abstraction. He went straight to Shortlands. There he found Gerald standing with his back to the fire, in the library, as motionless as a man is, who is completely and emptily restless, utterly hollow. He had done all the work he wanted to do�and now there was nothing. He could go out in the car, he could run to town. But he did not want to go out in the car, he did not want to run to town, he did not want to call on the Thirlbys. He was suspended motionless, in an agony of inertia, like a machine that is without power. This was very bitter to Gerald, who had never known what boredom was, who had gone from activity to activity, never at a loss. Now, gradually, everything seemed to be stopping in him. He did not want any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no one for the moment to drink with. Nor was there a woman. And he knew Birkin was out. So there was nothing to do but to bear the stress of his own emptiness. When he saw Birkin his face lit up in a sudden, wonderful smile. �By God, Rupert,� he said, �I�d just come to the conclusion that nothing in the world mattered except somebody to take the edge off one�s being alone: the right somebody.� The smile in his eyes was very astonishing, as he looked at the other man. It was the pure gleam of relief. His face was pallid and even haggard. �The right woman, I suppose you mean,� said Birkin spitefully. �Of course, for choice. Failing that, an amusing man.� He laughed as he said it. Birkin sat down near the fire. �What were you doing?� he asked. �I? Nothing. I�m in a bad way just now, everything�s on edge, and I can neither work nor play. I don�t know whether it�s a sign of old age, I�m sure.� �You mean you are bored?� �Bored, I don�t know. I can�t apply myself. And I feel the devil is either very present inside me, or dead.� Birkin glanced up and looked in his eyes. �You should try hitting something,� he said. Gerald smiled. �Perhaps,� he said. �So long as it was something worth hitting.� �Quite!� said Birkin, in his soft voice. There was a long pause during which each could feel the presence of the other. �One has to wait,� said Birkin. �Ah God! Waiting! What are we waiting for?� �Some old Johnny says there are three cures for _ennui_, sleep, drink, and travel,� said Birkin. �All cold eggs,� said Gerald. �In sleep, you dream, in drink you curse, and in travel you yell at a porter. No, work and love are the two. When you�re not at work you should be in love.� �Be it then,� said Birkin. �Give me the object,� said Gerald. �The possibilities of love exhaust themselves.� �Do they? And then what?� �Then you die,� said Gerald. �So you ought,� said Birkin. �I don�t see it,� replied Gerald. He took his hands out of his trousers pockets, and reached for a cigarette. He was tense and nervous. He lit the cigarette over a lamp, reaching forward and drawing steadily. He was dressed for dinner, as usual in the evening, although he was alone. �There�s a third one even to your two,� said Birkin. �Work, love, and fighting. You forget the fight.� �I suppose I do,� said Gerald. �Did you ever do any boxing�?� �No, I don�t think I did,� said Birkin. �Ay�� Gerald lifted his head and blew the smoke slowly into the air. �Why?� said Birkin. �Nothing. I thought we might have a round. It is perhaps true, that I want something to hit. It�s a suggestion.� �So you think you might as well hit me?� said Birkin. �You? Well! Perhaps�! In a friendly kind of way, of course.� �Quite!� said Birkin, bitingly. Gerald stood leaning back against the mantel-piece. He looked down at Birkin, and his eyes flashed with a sort of terror like the eyes of a stallion, that are bloodshot and overwrought, turned glancing backwards in a stiff terror. �I fell that if I don�t watch myself, I shall find myself doing something silly,� he said. �Why not do it?� said Birkin coldly. Gerald listened with quick impatience. He kept glancing down at Birkin, as if looking for something from the other man. �I used to do some Japanese wrestling,� said Birkin. �A Jap lived in the same house with me in Heidelberg, and he taught me a little. But I was never much good at it.� �You did!� exclaimed Gerald. �That�s one of the things I�ve never ever seen done. You mean jiu-jitsu, I suppose?� �Yes. But I am no good at those things�they don�t interest me.� �They don�t? They do me. What�s the start?� �I�ll show you what I can, if you like,� said Birkin. �You will?� A queer, smiling look tightened Gerald�s face for a moment, as he said, �Well, I�d like it very much.� �Then we�ll try jiu-jitsu. Only you can�t do much in a starched shirt.� �Then let us strip, and do it properly. Hold a minute�� He rang the bell, and waited for the butler. �Bring a couple of sandwiches and a syphon,� he said to the man, �and then don�t trouble me any more tonight�or let anybody else.� The man went. Gerald turned to Birkin with his eyes lighted. �And you used to wrestle with a Jap?� he said. �Did you strip?� �Sometimes.� �You did! What was he like then, as a wrestler?� �Good, I believe. I am no judge. He was very quick and slippery and full of electric fire. It is a remarkable thing, what a curious sort of fluid force they seem to have in them, those people�not like a human grip�like a polyp�� Gerald nodded. �I should imagine so,� he said, �to look at them. They repel me, rather.� �Repel and attract, both. They are very repulsive when they are cold, and they look grey. But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction�a curious kind of full electric fluid�like eels.� �Well�yes�probably.� The man brought in the tray and set it down. �Don�t come in any more,� said Gerald. The door closed. �Well then,� said Gerald; �shall we strip and begin? Will you have a drink first?� �No, I don�t want one.� �Neither do I.� Gerald fastened the door and pushed the furniture aside. The room was large, there was plenty of space, it was thickly carpeted. Then he quickly threw off his clothes, and waited for Birkin. The latter, white and thin, came over to him. Birkin was more a presence than a visible object, Gerald was aware of him completely, but not really visually. Whereas Gerald himself was concrete and noticeable, a piece of pure final substance. �Now,� said Birkin, �I will show you what I learned, and what I remember. You let me take you so�� And his hands closed on the naked body of the other man. In another moment, he had Gerald swung over lightly and balanced against his knee, head downwards. Relaxed, Gerald sprang to his feet with eyes glittering. �That�s smart,� he said. �Now try again.� So the two men began to struggle together. They were very dissimilar. Birkin was tall and narrow, his bones were very thin and fine. Gerald was much heavier and more plastic. His bones were strong and round, his limbs were rounded, all his contours were beautifully and fully moulded. He seemed to stand with a proper, rich weight on the face of the earth, whilst Birkin seemed to have the centre of gravitation in his own middle. And Gerald had a rich, frictional kind of strength, rather mechanical, but sudden and invincible, whereas Birkin was abstract as to be almost intangible. He impinged invisibly upon the other man, scarcely seeming to touch him, like a garment, and then suddenly piercing in a tense fine grip that seemed to penetrate into the very quick of Gerald�s being. They stopped, they discussed methods, they practised grips and throws, they became accustomed to each other, to each other�s rhythm, they got a kind of mutual physical understanding. And then again they had a real struggle. They seemed to drive their white flesh deeper and deeper against each other, as if they would break into a oneness. Birkin had a great subtle energy, that would press upon the other man with an uncanny force, weigh him like a spell put upon him. Then it would pass, and Gerald would heave free, with white, heaving, dazzling movements. So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense. He seemed to penetrate into Gerald�s more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection, always seizing with some rapid necromantic fore-knowledge every motion of the other flesh, converting and counteracting it, playing upon the limbs and trunk of Gerald like some hard wind. It was as if Birkin�s whole physical intelligence interpenetrated into Gerald�s body, as if his fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man, like some potency, casting a fine net, a prison, through the muscles into the very depths of Gerald�s physical being. So they wrestled swiftly, rapturously, intent and mindless at last, two essential white figures working into a tighter closer oneness of struggle, with a strange, octopus-like knotting and flashing of limbs in the subdued light of the room; a tense white knot of flesh gripped in silence between the walls of old brown books. Now and again came a sharp gasp of breath, or a sound like a sigh, then the rapid thudding of movement on the thickly-carpeted floor, then the strange sound of flesh escaping under flesh. Often, in the white interlaced knot of violent living being that swayed silently, there was no head to be seen, only the swift, tight limbs, the solid white backs, the physical junction of two bodies clinched into oneness. Then would appear the gleaming, ruffled head of Gerald, as the struggle changed, then for a moment the dun-coloured, shadow-like head of the other man would lift up from the conflict, the eyes wide and dreadful and sightless. At length Gerald lay back inert on the carpet, his breast rising in great slow panting, whilst Birkin kneeled over him, almost unconscious. Birkin was much more exhausted. He caught little, short breaths, he could scarcely breathe any more. The earth seemed to tilt and sway, and a complete darkness was coming over his mind. He did not know what happened. He slid forward quite unconscious, over Gerald, and Gerald did not notice. Then he was half-conscious again, aware only of the strange tilting and sliding of the world. The world was sliding, everything was sliding off into the darkness. And he was sliding, endlessly, endlessly away. He came to consciousness again, hearing an immense knocking outside. What could be happening, what was it, the great hammer-stroke resounding through the house? He did not know. And then it came to him that it was his own heart beating. But that seemed impossible, the noise was outside. No, it was inside himself, it was his own heart. And the beating was painful, so strained, surcharged. He wondered if Gerald heard it. He did not know whether he were standing or lying or falling. When he realised that he had fallen prostrate upon Gerald�s body he wondered, he was surprised. But he sat up, steadying himself with his hand and waiting for his heart to become stiller and less painful. It hurt very much, and took away his consciousness. Gerald however was still less conscious than Birkin. They waited dimly, in a sort of not-being, for many uncounted, unknown minutes. �Of course�� panted Gerald, �I didn�t have to be rough�with you�I had to keep back�my force�� Birkin heard the sound as if his own spirit stood behind him, outside him, and listened to it. His body was in a trance of exhaustion, his spirit heard thinly. His body could not answer. Only he knew his heart was getting quieter. He was divided entirely between his spirit, which stood outside, and knew, and his body, that was a plunging, unconscious stroke of blood. �I could have thrown you�using violence�� panted Gerald. �But you beat me right enough.� �Yes,� said Birkin, hardening his throat and producing the words in the tension there, �you�re much stronger than I�you could beat me�easily.� Then he relaxed again to the terrible plunging of his heart and his blood. �It surprised me,� panted Gerald, �what strength you�ve got. Almost supernatural.� �For a moment,� said Birkin. He still heard as if it were his own disembodied spirit hearing, standing at some distance behind him. It drew nearer however, his spirit. And the violent striking of blood in his chest was sinking quieter, allowing his mind to come back. He realised that he was leaning with all his weight on the soft body of the other man. It startled him, because he thought he had withdrawn. He recovered himself, and sat up. But he was still vague and unestablished. He put out his hand to steady himself. It touched the hand of Gerald, that was lying out on the floor. And Gerald�s hand closed warm and sudden over Birkin�s, they remained exhausted and breathless, the one hand clasped closely over the other. It was Birkin whose hand, in swift response, had closed in a strong, warm clasp over the hand of the other. Gerald�s clasp had been sudden and momentaneous. The normal consciousness however was returning, ebbing back. Birkin could breathe almost naturally again. Gerald�s hand slowly withdrew, Birkin slowly, dazedly rose to his feet and went towards the table. He poured out a whiskey and soda. Gerald also came for a drink. �It was a real set-to, wasn�t it?� said Birkin, looking at Gerald with darkened eyes. �God, yes,� said Gerald. He looked at the delicate body of the other man, and added: �It wasn�t too much for you, was it?� �No. One ought to wrestle and strive and be physically close. It makes one sane.� �You do think so?� �I do. Don�t you?� �Yes,� said Gerald. There were long spaces of silence between their words. The wrestling had some deep meaning to them�an unfinished meaning. �We are mentally, spiritually intimate, therefore we should be more or less physically intimate too�it is more whole.� �Certainly it is,� said Gerald. Then he laughed pleasantly, adding: �It�s rather wonderful to me.� He stretched out his arms handsomely. �Yes,� said Birkin. �I don�t know why one should have to justify oneself.� �No.� The two men began to dress. �I think also that you are beautiful,� said Birkin to Gerald, �and that is enjoyable too. One should enjoy what is given.� �You think I am beautiful�how do you mean, physically?� asked Gerald, his eyes glistening. �Yes. You have a northern kind of beauty, like light refracted from snow�and a beautiful, plastic form. Yes, that is there to enjoy as well. We should enjoy everything.� Gerald laughed in his throat, and said: �That�s certainly one way of looking at it. I can say this much, I feel better. It has certainly helped me. Is this the Bruderschaft you wanted?� �Perhaps. Do you think this pledges anything?� �I don�t know,� laughed Gerald. �At any rate, one feels freer and more open now�and that is what we want.� �Certainly,� said Gerald. They drew to the fire, with the decanters and the glasses and the food. �I always eat a little before I go to bed,� said Gerald. �I sleep better.� �I should not sleep so well,� said Birkin. �No? There you are, we are not alike. I�ll put a dressing-gown on.� Birkin remained alone, looking at the fire. His mind had reverted to Ursula. She seemed to return again into his consciousness. Gerald came down wearing a gown of broad-barred, thick black-and-green silk, brilliant and striking. �You are very fine,� said Birkin, looking at the full robe. �It was a caftan in Bokhara,� said Gerald. �I like it.� �I like it too.� Birkin was silent, thinking how scrupulous Gerald was in his attire, how expensive too. He wore silk socks, and studs of fine workmanship, and silk underclothing, and silk braces. Curious! This was another of the differences between them. Birkin was careless and unimaginative about his own appearance. �Of course you,� said Gerald, as if he had been thinking; �there�s something curious about you. You�re curiously strong. One doesn�t expect it, it is rather surprising.� Birkin laughed. He was looking at the handsome figure of the other man, blond and comely in the rich robe, and he was half thinking of the difference between it and himself�so different; as far, perhaps, apart as man from woman, yet in another direction. But really it was Ursula, it was the woman who was gaining ascendance over Birkin�s being, at this moment. Gerald was becoming dim again, lapsing out of him. �Do you know,� he said suddenly, �I went and proposed to Ursula Brangwen tonight, that she should marry me.� He saw the blank shining wonder come over Gerald�s face. �You did?� �Yes. Almost formally�speaking first to her father, as it should be, in the world�though that was accident�or mischief.� Gerald only stared in wonder, as if he did not grasp. �You don�t mean to say that you seriously went and asked her father to let you marry her?� �Yes,� said Birkin, �I did.� �What, had you spoken to her before about it, then?� �No, not a word. I suddenly thought I would go there and ask her�and her father happened to come instead of her�so I asked him first.� �If you could have her?� concluded Gerald. �Ye-es, that.� �And you didn�t speak to her?� �Yes. She came in afterwards. So it was put to her as well.� �It was! And what did she say then? You�re an engaged man?� �No,�she only said she didn�t want to be bullied into answering.� �She what?� �Said she didn�t want to be bullied into answering.� ��Said she didn�t want to be bullied into answering!� Why, what did she mean by that?� Birkin raised his shoulders. �Can�t say,� he answered. �Didn�t want to be bothered just then, I suppose.� �But is this really so? And what did you do then?� �I walked out of the house and came here.� �You came straight here?� �Yes.� Gerald stared in amazement and amusement. He could not take it in. �But is this really true, as you say it now?� �Word for word.� �It is?� He leaned back in his chair, filled with delight and amusement. �Well, that�s good,� he said. �And so you came here to wrestle with your good angel, did you?� �Did I?� said Birkin. �Well, it looks like it. Isn�t that what you did?� Now Birkin could not follow Gerald�s meaning. �And what�s going to happen?� said Gerald. �You�re going to keep open the proposition, so to speak?� �I suppose so. I vowed to myself I would see them all to the devil. But I suppose I shall ask her again, in a little while.� Gerald watched him steadily. �So you�re fond of her then?� he asked. �I think�I love her,� said Birkin, his face going very still and fixed. Gerald glistened for a moment with pleasure, as if it were something done specially to please him. Then his face assumed a fitting gravity, and he nodded his head slowly. �You know,� he said, �I always believed in love�true love. But where does one find it nowadays?� �I don�t know,� said Birkin. �Very rarely,� said Gerald. Then, after a pause, �I�ve never felt it myself�not what I should call love. I�ve gone after women�and been keen enough over some of them. But I�ve never felt _love_. I don�t believe I�ve ever felt as much _love_ for a woman, as I have for you�not _love_. You understand what I mean?� �Yes. I�m sure you�ve never loved a woman.� �You feel that, do you? And do you think I ever shall? You understand what I mean?� He put his hand to his breast, closing his fist there, as if he would draw something out. �I mean that�that I can�t express what it is, but I know it.� �What is it, then?� asked Birkin. �You see, I can�t put it into words. I mean, at any rate, something abiding, something that can�t change�� His eyes were bright and puzzled. �Now do you think I shall ever feel that for a woman?� he said, anxiously. Birkin looked at him, and shook his head. �I don�t know,� he said. �I could not say.� Gerald had been on the _qui vive_, as awaiting his fate. Now he drew back in his chair. �No,� he said, �and neither do I, and neither do I.� �We are different, you and I,� said Birkin. �I can�t tell your life.� �No,� said Gerald, �no more can I. But I tell you�I begin to doubt it!� �That you will ever love a woman?� �Well�yes�what you would truly call love�� �You doubt it?� �Well�I begin to.� There was a long pause. �Life has all kinds of things,� said Birkin. �There isn�t only one road.� �Yes, I believe that too. I believe it. And mind you, I don�t care how it is with me�I don�t care how it is�so long as I don�t feel�� he paused, and a blank, barren look passed over his face, to express his feeling��so long as I feel I�ve _lived_, somehow�and I don�t care how it is�but I want to feel that�� �Fulfilled,� said Birkin. �We-ell, perhaps it is fulfilled; I don�t use the same words as you.� �It is the same.� CHAPTER XXI. THRESHOLD Gudrun was away in London, having a little show of her work, with a friend, and looking round, preparing for flight from Beldover. Come what might she would be on the wing in a very short time. She received a letter from Winifred Crich, ornamented with drawings. �Father also has been to London, to be examined by the doctors. It made him very tired. They say he must rest a very great deal, so he is mostly in bed. He brought me a lovely tropical parrot in faience, of Dresden ware, also a man ploughing, and two mice climbing up a stalk, also in faience. The mice were Copenhagen ware. They are the best, but mice don�t shine so much, otherwise they are very good, their tails are slim and long. They all shine nearly like glass. Of course it is the glaze, but I don�t like it. Gerald likes the man ploughing the best, his trousers are torn, he is ploughing with an ox, being I suppose a German peasant. It is all grey and white, white shirt and grey trousers, but very shiny and clean. Mr Birkin likes the girl best, under the hawthorn blossom, with a lamb, and with daffodils painted on her skirts, in the drawing room. But that is silly, because the lamb is not a real lamb, and she is silly too. �Dear Miss Brangwen, are you coming back soon, you are very much missed here. I enclose a drawing of father sitting up in bed. He says he hopes you are not going to forsake us. Oh dear Miss Brangwen, I am sure you won�t. Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world. We might carve them in holly-wood, playing against a background of green leaves. Oh do let us, for they are most beautiful. �Father says we might have a studio. Gerald says we could easily have a beautiful one over the stables, it would only need windows to be put in the slant of the roof, which is a simple matter. Then you could stay here all day and work, and we could live in the studio, like two real artists, like the man in the picture in the hall, with the frying-pan and the walls all covered with drawings. I long to be free, to live the free life of an artist. Even Gerald told father that only an artist is free, because he lives in a creative world of his own�� Gudrun caught the drift of the family intentions, in this letter. Gerald wanted her to be attached to the household at Shortlands, he was using Winifred as his stalking-horse. The father thought only of his child, he saw a rock of salvation in Gudrun. And Gudrun admired him for his perspicacity. The child, moreover, was really exceptional. Gudrun was quite content. She was quite willing, given a studio, to spend her days at Shortlands. She disliked the Grammar School already thoroughly, she wanted to be free. If a studio were provided, she would be free to go on with her work, she would await the turn of events with complete serenity. And she was really interested in Winifred, she would be quite glad to understand the girl. So there was quite a little festivity on Winifred�s account, the day Gudrun returned to Shortlands. �You should make a bunch of flowers to give to Miss Brangwen when she arrives,� Gerald said smiling to his sister. �Oh no,� cried Winifred, �it�s silly.� �Not at all. It is a very charming and ordinary attention.� �Oh, it is silly,� protested Winifred, with all the extreme _mauvaise honte_ of her years. Nevertheless, the idea appealed to her. She wanted very much to carry it out. She flitted round the green-houses and the conservatory looking wistfully at the flowers on their stems. And the more she looked, the more she _longed_ to have a bunch of the blossoms she saw, the more fascinated she became with her little vision of ceremony, and the more consumedly shy and self-conscious she grew, till she was almost beside herself. She could not get the idea out of her mind. It was as if some haunting challenge prompted her, and she had not enough courage to take it up. So again she drifted into the green-houses, looking at the lovely roses in their pots, and at the virginal cyclamens, and at the mystic white clusters of a creeper. The beauty, oh the beauty of them, and oh the paradisal bliss, if she should have a perfect bouquet and could give it to Gudrun the next day. Her passion and her complete indecision almost made her ill. At last she slid to her father�s side. �Daddie�� she said. �What, my precious?� But she hung back, the tears almost coming to her eyes, in her sensitive confusion. Her father looked at her, and his heart ran hot with tenderness, an anguish of poignant love. �What do you want to say to me, my love?� �Daddie�!� her eyes smiled laconically��isn�t it silly if I give Miss Brangwen some flowers when she comes?� The sick man looked at the bright, knowing eyes of his child, and his heart burned with love. �No, darling, that�s not silly. It�s what they do to queens.� This was not very reassuring to Winifred. She half suspected that queens in themselves were a silliness. Yet she so wanted her little romantic occasion. �Shall I then?� she asked. �Give Miss Brangwen some flowers? Do, Birdie. Tell Wilson I say you are to have what you want.� The child smiled a small, subtle, unconscious smile to herself, in anticipation of her way. �But I won�t get them till tomorrow,� she said. �Not till tomorrow, Birdie. Give me a kiss then�� Winifred silently kissed the sick man, and drifted out of the room. She again went the round of the green-houses and the conservatory, informing the gardener, in her high, peremptory, simple fashion, of what she wanted, telling him all the blooms she had selected. �What do you want these for?� Wilson asked. �I want them,� she said. She wished servants did not ask questions. �Ay, you�ve said as much. But what do you want them for, for decoration, or to send away, or what?� �I want them for a presentation bouquet.� �A presentation bouquet! Who�s coming then?�the Duchess of Portland?� �No.� �Oh, not her? Well you�ll have a rare poppy-show if you put all the things you�ve mentioned into your bouquet.� �Yes, I want a rare poppy-show.� �You do! Then there�s no more to be said.� The next day Winifred, in a dress of silvery velvet, and holding a gaudy bunch of flowers in her hand, waited with keen impatience in the schoolroom, looking down the drive for Gudrun�s arrival. It was a wet morning. Under her nose was the strange fragrance of hot-house flowers, the bunch was like a little fire to her, she seemed to have a strange new fire in her heart. This slight sense of romance stirred her like an intoxicant. At last she saw Gudrun coming, and she ran downstairs to warn her father and Gerald. They, laughing at her anxiety and gravity, came with her into the hall. The man-servant came hastening to the door, and there he was, relieving Gudrun of her umbrella, and then of her raincoat. The welcoming party hung back till their visitor entered the hall. Gudrun was flushed with the rain, her hair was blown in loose little curls, she was like a flower just opened in the rain, the heart of the blossom just newly visible, seeming to emit a warmth of retained sunshine. Gerald winced in spirit, seeing her so beautiful and unknown. She was wearing a soft blue dress, and her stockings were of dark red. Winifred advanced with odd, stately formality. �We are so glad you�ve come back,� she said. �These are your flowers.� She presented the bouquet. �Mine!� cried Gudrun. She was suspended for a moment, then a vivid flush went over her, she was as if blinded for a moment with a flame of pleasure. Then her eyes, strange and flaming, lifted and looked at the father, and at Gerald. And again Gerald shrank in spirit, as if it would be more than he could bear, as her hot, exposed eyes rested on him. There was something so revealed, she was revealed beyond bearing, to his eyes. He turned his face aside. And he felt he would not be able to avert her. And he writhed under the imprisonment. Gudrun put her face into the flowers. �But how beautiful they are!� she said, in a muffled voice. Then, with a strange, suddenly revealed passion, she stooped and kissed Winifred. Mr Crich went forward with his hand held out to her. �I was afraid you were going to run away from us,� he said, playfully. Gudrun looked up at him with a luminous, roguish, unknown face. �Really!� she replied. �No, I didn�t want to stay in London.� Her voice seemed to imply that she was glad to get back to Shortlands, her tone was warm and subtly caressing. �That is a good thing,� smiled the father. �You see you are very welcome here among us.� Gudrun only looked into his face with dark-blue, warm, shy eyes. She was unconsciously carried away by her own power. �And you look as if you came home in every possible triumph,� Mr Crich continued, holding her hand. �No,� she said, glowing strangely. �I haven�t had any triumph till I came here.� �Ah, come, come! We�re not going to hear any of those tales. Haven�t we read notices in the newspaper, Gerald?� �You came off pretty well,� said Gerald to her, shaking hands. �Did you sell anything?� �No,� she said, �not much.� �Just as well,� he said. She wondered what he meant. But she was all aglow with her reception, carried away by this little flattering ceremonial on her behalf. �Winifred,� said the father, �have you a pair of shoes for Miss Brangwen? You had better change at once�� Gudrun went out with her bouquet in her hand. �Quite a remarkable young woman,� said the father to Gerald, when she had gone. �Yes,� replied Gerald briefly, as if he did not like the observation. Mr Crich liked Gudrun to sit with him for half an hour. Usually he was ashy and wretched, with all the life gnawed out of him. But as soon as he rallied, he liked to make believe that he was just as before, quite well and in the midst of life�not of the outer world, but in the midst of a strong essential life. And to this belief, Gudrun contributed perfectly. With her, he could get by stimulation those precious half-hours of strength and exaltation and pure freedom, when he seemed to live more than he had ever lived. She came to him as he lay propped up in the library. His face was like yellow wax, his eyes darkened, as it were sightless. His black beard, now streaked with grey, seemed to spring out of the waxy flesh of a corpse. Yet the atmosphere about him was energetic and playful. Gudrun subscribed to this, perfectly. To her fancy, he was just an ordinary man. Only his rather terrible appearance was photographed upon her soul, away beneath her consciousness. She knew that, in spite of his playfulness, his eyes could not change from their darkened vacancy, they were the eyes of a man who is dead. �Ah, this is Miss Brangwen,� he said, suddenly rousing as she entered, announced by the man-servant. �Thomas, put Miss Brangwen a chair here�that�s right.� He looked at her soft, fresh face with pleasure. It gave him the illusion of life. �Now, you will have a glass of sherry and a little piece of cake. Thomas�� �No thank you,� said Gudrun. And as soon as she had said it, her heart sank horribly. The sick man seemed to fall into a gap of death, at her contradiction. She ought to play up to him, not to contravene him. In an instant she was smiling her rather roguish smile. �I don�t like sherry very much,� she said. �But I like almost anything else.� The sick man caught at this straw instantly. �Not sherry! No! Something else! What then? What is there, Thomas?� �Port wine�curacçao�� �I would love some curaçao�� said Gudrun, looking at the sick man confidingly. �You would. Well then Thomas, curaçao�and a little cake, or a biscuit?� �A biscuit,� said Gudrun. She did not want anything, but she was wise. �Yes.� He waited till she was settled with her little glass and her biscuit. Then he was satisfied. �You have heard the plan,� he said with some excitement, �for a studio for Winifred, over the stables?� �No!� exclaimed Gudrun, in mock wonder. �Oh!�I thought Winnie wrote it to you, in her letter!� �Oh�yes�of course. But I thought perhaps it was only her own little idea�� Gudrun smiled subtly, indulgently. The sick man smiled also, elated. �Oh no. It is a real project. There is a good room under the roof of the stables�with sloping rafters. We had thought of converting it into a studio.� �How _very_ nice that would be!� cried Gudrun, with excited warmth. The thought of the rafters stirred her. �You think it would? Well, it can be done.� �But how perfectly splendid for Winifred! Of course, it is just what is needed, if she is to work at all seriously. One must have one�s workshop, otherwise one never ceases to be an amateur.� �Is that so? Yes. Of course, I should like you to share it with Winifred.� �Thank you _so_ much.� Gudrun knew all these things already, but she must look shy and very grateful, as if overcome. �Of course, what I should like best, would be if you could give up your work at the Grammar School, and just avail yourself of the studio, and work there�well, as much or as little as you liked�� He looked at Gudrun with dark, vacant eyes. She looked back at him as if full of gratitude. These phrases of a dying man were so complete and natural, coming like echoes through his dead mouth. �And as to your earnings�you don�t mind taking from me what you have taken from the Education Committee, do you? I don�t want you to be a loser.� �Oh,� said Gudrun, �if I can have the studio and work there, I can earn money enough, really I can.� �Well,� he said, pleased to be the benefactor, �we can see about all that. You wouldn�t mind spending your days here?� �If there were a studio to work in,� said Gudrun, �I could ask for nothing better.� �Is that so?� He was really very pleased. But already he was getting tired. She could see the grey, awful semi-consciousness of mere pain and dissolution coming over him again, the torture coming into the vacancy of his darkened eyes. It was not over yet, this process of death. She rose softly saying: �Perhaps you will sleep. I must look for Winifred.� She went out, telling the nurse that she had left him. Day by day the tissue of the sick man was further and further reduced, nearer and nearer the process came, towards the last knot which held the human being in its unity. But this knot was hard and unrelaxed, the will of the dying man never gave way. He might be dead in nine-tenths, yet the remaining tenth remained unchanged, till it too was torn apart. With his will he held the unit of himself firm, but the circle of his power was ever and ever reduced, it would be reduced to a point at last, then swept away. To adhere to life, he must adhere to human relationships, and he caught at every straw. Winifred, the butler, the nurse, Gudrun, these were the people who meant all to him, in these last resources. Gerald, in his father�s presence, stiffened with repulsion. It was so, to a less degree, with all the other children except Winifred. They could not see anything but the death, when they looked at their father. It was as if some subterranean dislike overcame them. They could not see the familiar face, hear the familiar voice. They were overwhelmed by the antipathy of visible and audible death. Gerald could not breathe in his father�s presence. He must get out at once. And so, in the same way, the father could not bear the presence of his son. It sent a final irritation through the soul of the dying man. The studio was made ready, Gudrun and Winifred moved in. They enjoyed so much the ordering and the appointing of it. And now they need hardly be in the house at all. They had their meals in the studio, they lived there safely. For the house was becoming dreadful. There were two nurses in white, flitting silently about, like heralds of death. The father was confined to his bed, there was a come and go of _sotto voce_ sisters and brothers and children. Winifred was her father�s constant visitor. Every morning, after breakfast, she went into his room when he was washed and propped up in bed, to spend half an hour with him. �Are you better, Daddie?� she asked him invariably. And invariably he answered: �Yes, I think I�m a little better, pet.� She held his hand in both her own, lovingly and protectively. And this was very dear to him. She ran in again as a rule at lunch time, to tell him the course of events, and every evening, when the curtains were drawn, and his room was cosy, she spent a long time with him. Gudrun was gone home, Winifred was alone in the house: she liked best to be with her father. They talked and prattled at random, he always as if he were well, just the same as when he was going about. So that Winifred, with a child�s subtle instinct for avoiding the painful things, behaved as if nothing serious was the matter. Instinctively, she withheld her attention, and was happy. Yet in her remoter soul, she knew as well as the adults knew: perhaps better. Her father was quite well in his make-belief with her. But when she went away, he relapsed under the misery of his dissolution. But still there were these bright moments, though as his strength waned, his faculty for attention grew weaker, and the nurse had to send Winifred away, to save him from exhaustion. He never admitted that he was going to die. He knew it was so, he knew it was the end. Yet even to himself he did not admit it. He hated the fact, mortally. His will was rigid. He could not bear being overcome by death. For him, there was no death. And yet, at times, he felt a great need to cry out and to wail and complain. He would have liked to cry aloud to Gerald, so that his son should be horrified out of his composure. Gerald was instinctively aware of this, and he recoiled, to avoid any such thing. This uncleanness of death repelled him too much. One should die quickly, like the Romans, one should be master of one�s fate in dying as in living. He was convulsed in the clasp of this death of his father�s, as in the coils of the great serpent of Laocoön. The great serpent had got the father, and the son was dragged into the embrace of horrifying death along with him. He resisted always. And in some strange way, he was a tower of strength to his father. The last time the dying man asked to see Gudrun he was grey with near death. Yet he must see someone, he must, in the intervals of consciousness, catch into connection with the living world, lest he should have to accept his own situation. Fortunately he was most of his time dazed and half gone. And he spent many hours dimly thinking of the past, as it were, dimly re-living his old experiences. But there were times even to the end when he was capable of realising what was happening to him in the present, the death that was on him. And these were the times when he called in outside help, no matter whose. For to realise this death that he was dying was a death beyond death, never to be borne. It was an admission never to be made. Gudrun was shocked by his appearance, and by the darkened, almost disintegrated eyes, that still were unconquered and firm. �Well,� he said in his weakened voice, �and how are you and Winifred getting on?� �Oh, very well indeed,� replied Gudrun. There were slight dead gaps in the conversation, as if the ideas called up were only elusive straws floating on the dark chaos of the sick man�s dying. �The studio answers all right?� he said. �Splendid. It couldn�t be more beautiful and perfect,� said Gudrun. She waited for what he would say next. �And you think Winifred has the makings of a sculptor?� It was strange how hollow the words were, meaningless. �I�m sure she has. She will do good things one day.� �Ah! Then her life won�t be altogether wasted, you think?� Gudrun was rather surprised. �Sure it won�t!� she exclaimed softly. �That�s right.� Again Gudrun waited for what he would say. �You find life pleasant, it is good to live, isn�t it?� he asked, with a pitiful faint smile that was almost too much for Gudrun. �Yes,� she smiled�she would lie at random��I get a pretty good time I believe.� �That�s right. A happy nature is a great asset.� Again Gudrun smiled, though her soul was dry with repulsion. Did one have to die like this�having the life extracted forcibly from one, whilst one smiled and made conversation to the end? Was there no other way? Must one go through all the horror of this victory over death, the triumph of the integral will, that would not be broken till it disappeared utterly? One must, it was the only way. She admired the self-possession and the control of the dying man exceedingly. But she loathed the death itself. She was glad the everyday world held good, and she need not recognise anything beyond. �You are quite all right here?�nothing we can do for you?�nothing you find wrong in your position?� �Except that you are too good to me,� said Gudrun. �Ah, well, the fault of that lies with yourself,� he said, and he felt a little exultation, that he had made this speech. He was still so strong and living! But the nausea of death began to creep back on him, in reaction. Gudrun went away, back to Winifred. Mademoiselle had left, Gudrun stayed a good deal at Shortlands, and a tutor came in to carry on Winifred�s education. But he did not live in the house, he was connected with the Grammar School. One day, Gudrun was to drive with Winifred and Gerald and Birkin to town, in the car. It was a dark, showery day. Winifred and Gudrun were ready and waiting at the door. Winifred was very quiet, but Gudrun had not noticed. Suddenly the child asked, in a voice of unconcern: �Do you think my father�s going to die, Miss Brangwen?� Gudrun started. �I don�t know,� she replied. �Don�t you truly?� �Nobody knows for certain. He _may_ die, of course.� The child pondered a few moments, then she asked: �But do you _think_ he will die?� It was put almost like a question in geography or science, insistent, as if she would force an admission from the adult. The watchful, slightly triumphant child was almost diabolical. �Do I think he will die?� repeated Gudrun. �Yes, I do.� But Winifred�s large eyes were fixed on her, and the girl did not move. �He is very ill,� said Gudrun. A small smile came over Winifred�s face, subtle and sceptical. �_I_ don�t believe he will,� the child asserted, mockingly, and she moved away into the drive. Gudrun watched the isolated figure, and her heart stood still. Winifred was playing with a little rivulet of water, absorbedly as if nothing had been said. �I�ve made a proper dam,� she said, out of the moist distance. Gerald came to the door from out of the hall behind. �It is just as well she doesn�t choose to believe it,� he said. Gudrun looked at him. Their eyes met; and they exchanged a sardonic understanding. �Just as well,� said Gudrun. He looked at her again, and a fire flickered up in his eyes. �Best to dance while Rome burns, since it must burn, don�t you think?� he said. She was rather taken aback. But, gathering herself together, she replied: �Oh�better dance than wail, certainly.� �So I think.� And they both felt the subterranean desire to let go, to fling away everything, and lapse into a sheer unrestraint, brutal and licentious. A strange black passion surged up pure in Gudrun. She felt strong. She felt her hands so strong, as if she could tear the world asunder with them. She remembered the abandonments of Roman licence, and her heart grew hot. She knew she wanted this herself also�or something, something equivalent. Ah, if that which was unknown and suppressed in her were once let loose, what an orgiastic and satisfying event it would be. And she wanted it, she trembled slightly from the proximity of the man, who stood just behind her, suggestive of the same black licentiousness that rose in herself. She wanted it with him, this unacknowledged frenzy. For a moment the clear perception of this preoccupied her, distinct and perfect in its final reality. Then she shut it off completely, saying: �We might as well go down to the lodge after Winifred�we can get in the car there.� �So we can,� he answered, going with her. They found Winifred at the lodge admiring the litter of purebred white puppies. The girl looked up, and there was a rather ugly, unseeing cast in her eyes as she turned to Gerald and Gudrun. She did not want to see them. �Look!� she cried. �Three new puppies! Marshall says this one seems perfect. Isn�t it a sweetling? But it isn�t so nice as its mother.� She turned to caress the fine white bull-terrier bitch that stood uneasily near her. �My dearest Lady Crich,� she said, �you are beautiful as an angel on earth. Angel�angel�don�t you think she�s good enough and beautiful enough to go to heaven, Gudrun? They will be in heaven, won�t they�and _especially_ my darling Lady Crich! Mrs Marshall, I say!� �Yes, Miss Winifred?� said the woman, appearing at the door. �Oh do call this one Lady Winifred, if she turns out perfect, will you? Do tell Marshall to call it Lady Winifred.� �I�ll tell him�but I�m afraid that�s a gentleman puppy, Miss Winifred.� �Oh _no!_� There was the sound of a car. �There�s Rupert!� cried the child, and she ran to the gate. Birkin, driving his car, pulled up outside the lodge gate. �We�re ready!� cried Winifred. �I want to sit in front with you, Rupert. May I?� �I�m afraid you�ll fidget about and fall out,� he said. �No I won�t. I do want to sit in front next to you. It makes my feet so lovely and warm, from the engines.� Birkin helped her up, amused at sending Gerald to sit by Gudrun in the body of the car. �Have you any news, Rupert?� Gerald called, as they rushed along the lanes. �News?� exclaimed Birkin. �Yes,� Gerald looked at Gudrun, who sat by his side, and he said, his eyes narrowly laughing, �I want to know whether I ought to congratulate him, but I can�t get anything definite out of him.� Gudrun flushed deeply. �Congratulate him on what?� she asked. �There was some mention of an engagement�at least, he said something to me about it.� Gudrun flushed darkly. �You mean with Ursula?� she said, in challenge. �Yes. That is so, isn�t it?� �I don�t think there�s any engagement,� said Gudrun, coldly. �That so? Still no developments, Rupert?� he called. �Where? Matrimonial? No.� �How�s that?� called Gudrun. Birkin glanced quickly round. There was irritation in his eyes also. �Why?� he replied. �What do you think of it, Gudrun?� �Oh,� she cried, determined to fling her stone also into the pool, since they had begun, �I don�t think she wants an engagement. Naturally, she�s a bird that prefers the bush.� Gudrun�s voice was clear and gong-like. It reminded Rupert of her father�s, so strong and vibrant. �And I,� said Birkin, his face playful but yet determined, �I want a binding contract, and am not keen on love, particularly free love.� They were both amused. _Why_ this public avowal? Gerald seemed suspended a moment, in amusement. �Love isn�t good enough for you?� he called. �No!� shouted Birkin. �Ha, well that�s being over-refined,� said Gerald, and the car ran through the mud. �What�s the matter, really?� said Gerald, turning to Gudrun. This was an assumption of a sort of intimacy that irritated Gudrun almost like an affront. It seemed to her that Gerald was deliberately insulting her, and infringing on the decent privacy of them all. �What is it?� she said, in her high, repellent voice. �Don�t ask me!�I know nothing about _ultimate_ marriage, I assure you: or even penultimate.� �Only the ordinary unwarrantable brand!� replied Gerald. �Just so�same here. I am no expert on marriage, and degrees of ultimateness. It seems to be a bee that buzzes loudly in Rupert�s bonnet.� �Exactly! But that is his trouble, exactly! Instead of wanting a woman for herself, he wants his _ideas_ fulfilled. Which, when it comes to actual practice, is not good enough.� �Oh no. Best go slap for what�s womanly in woman, like a bull at a gate.� Then he seemed to glimmer in himself. �You think love is the ticket, do you?� he asked. �Certainly, while it lasts�you only can�t insist on permanency,� came Gudrun�s voice, strident above the noise. �Marriage or no marriage, ultimate or penultimate or just so-so?�take the love as you find it.� �As you please, or as you don�t please,� she echoed. �Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.� His eyes were flickering on her all the time. She felt as is he were kissing her freely and malevolently. It made the colour burn in her cheeks, but her heart was quite firm and unfailing. �You think Rupert is off his head a bit?� Gerald asked. Her eyes flashed with acknowledgment. �As regards a woman, yes,� she said, �I do. There _is_ such a thing as two people being in love for the whole of their lives�perhaps. But marriage is neither here nor there, even then. If they are in love, well and good. If not�why break eggs about it!� �Yes,� said Gerald. �That�s how it strikes me. But what about Rupert?� �I can�t make out�neither can he nor anybody. He seems to think that if you marry you can get through marriage into a third heaven, or something�all very vague.� �Very! And who wants a third heaven? As a matter of fact, Rupert has a great yearning to be _safe_�to tie himself to the mast.� �Yes. It seems to me he�s mistaken there too,� said Gudrun. �I�m sure a mistress is more likely to be faithful than a wife�just because she is her _own_ mistress. No�he says he believes that a man and wife can go further than any other two beings�but _where_, is not explained. They can know each other, heavenly and hellish, but particularly hellish, so perfectly that they go beyond heaven and hell�into�there it all breaks down�into nowhere.� �Into Paradise, he says,� laughed Gerald. Gudrun shrugged her shoulders. �_Je m�en fiche_ of your Paradise!� she said. �Not being a Mohammedan,� said Gerald. Birkin sat motionless, driving the car, quite unconscious of what they said. And Gudrun, sitting immediately behind him, felt a sort of ironic pleasure in thus exposing him. �He says,� she added, with a grimace of irony, �that you can find an eternal equilibrium in marriage, if you accept the unison, and still leave yourself separate, don�t try to fuse.� �Doesn�t inspire me,� said Gerald. �That�s just it,� said Gudrun. �I believe in love, in a real _abandon_, if you�re capable of it,� said Gerald. �So do I,� said she. �And so does Rupert, too�though he is always shouting.� �No,� said Gudrun. �He won�t abandon himself to the other person. You can�t be sure of him. That�s the trouble I think.� �Yet he wants marriage! Marriage�_et puis?_� �_Le paradis!_� mocked Gudrun. Birkin, as he drove, felt a creeping of the spine, as if somebody was threatening his neck. But he shrugged with indifference. It began to rain. Here was a change. He stopped the car and got down to put up the hood. CHAPTER XXII. WOMAN TO WOMAN They came to the town, and left Gerald at the railway station. Gudrun and Winifred were to come to tea with Birkin, who expected Ursula also. In the afternoon, however, the first person to turn up was Hermione. Birkin was out, so she went in the drawing-room, looking at his books and papers, and playing on the piano. Then Ursula arrived. She was surprised, unpleasantly so, to see Hermione, of whom she had heard nothing for some time. �It is a surprise to see you,� she said. �Yes,� said Hermione��I�ve been away at Aix�� �Oh, for your health?� �Yes.� The two women looked at each other. Ursula resented Hermione�s long, grave, downward-looking face. There was something of the stupidity and the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it. �She�s got a horse-face,� Ursula said to herself, �she runs between blinkers.� It did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny. There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist. Like the moon, one half of her was lost to life. Her self was all in her head, she did not know what it was spontaneously to run or move, like a fish in the water, or a weasel on the grass. She must always _know_. But Ursula only suffered from Hermione�s one-sidedness. She only felt Hermione�s cool evidence, which seemed to put her down as nothing. Hermione, who brooded and brooded till she was exhausted with the ache of her effort at consciousness, spent and ashen in her body, who gained so slowly and with such effort her final and barren conclusions of knowledge, was apt, in the presence of other women, whom she thought simply female, to wear the conclusions of her bitter assurance like jewels which conferred on her an unquestionable distinction, established her in a higher order of life. She was apt, mentally, to condescend to women such as Ursula, whom she regarded as purely emotional. Poor Hermione, it was her one possession, this aching certainty of hers, it was her only justification. She must be confident here, for God knows, she felt rejected and deficient enough elsewhere. In the life of thought, of the spirit, she was one of the elect. And she wanted to be universal. But there was a devastating cynicism at the bottom of her. She did not believe in her own universals�they were sham. She did not believe in the inner life�it was a trick, not a reality. She did not believe in the spiritual world�it was an affectation. In the last resort, she believed in Mammon, the flesh, and the devil�these at least were not sham. She was a priestess without belief, without conviction, suckled in a creed outworn, and condemned to the reiteration of mysteries that were not divine to her. Yet there was no escape. She was a leaf upon a dying tree. What help was there then, but to fight still for the old, withered truths, to die for the old, outworn belief, to be a sacred and inviolate priestess of desecrated mysteries? The old great truths _had_ been true. And she was a leaf of the old great tree of knowledge that was withering now. To the old and last truth then she must be faithful even though cynicism and mockery took place at the bottom of her soul. �I am so glad to see you,� she said to Ursula, in her slow voice, that was like an incantation. �You and Rupert have become quite friends?� �Oh yes,� said Ursula. �He is always somewhere in the background.� Hermione paused before she answered. She saw perfectly well the other woman�s vaunt: it seemed truly vulgar. �Is he?� she said slowly, and with perfect equanimity. �And do you think you will marry?� The question was so calm and mild, so simple and bare and dispassionate that Ursula was somewhat taken aback, rather attracted. It pleased her almost like a wickedness. There was some delightful naked irony in Hermione. �Well,� replied Ursula, �_He_ wants to, awfully, but I�m not so sure.� Hermione watched her with slow calm eyes. She noted this new expression of vaunting. How she envied Ursula a certain unconscious positivity! even her vulgarity! �Why aren�t you sure?� she asked, in her easy sing song. She was perfectly at her ease, perhaps even rather happy in this conversation. �You don�t really love him?� Ursula flushed a little at the mild impertinence of this question. And yet she could not definitely take offence. Hermione seemed so calmly and sanely candid. After all, it was rather great to be able to be so sane. �He says it isn�t love he wants,� she replied. �What is it then?� Hermione was slow and level. �He wants me really to accept him in marriage.� Hermione was silent for some time, watching Ursula with slow, pensive eyes. �Does he?� she said at length, without expression. Then, rousing, �And what is it you don�t want? You don�t want marriage?� �No�I don�t�not really. I don�t want to give the sort of _submission_ he insists on. He wants me to give myself up�and I simply don�t feel that I _can_ do it.� Again there was a long pause, before Hermione replied: �Not if you don�t want to.� Then again there was silence. Hermione shuddered with a strange desire. Ah, if only he had asked _her_ to subserve him, to be his slave! She shuddered with desire. �You see I can�t�� �But exactly in what does�� They had both begun at once, they both stopped. Then, Hermione, assuming priority of speech, resumed as if wearily: �To what does he want you to submit?� �He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally�I really don�t know _what_ he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated�physically�not the human being. You see he says one thing one day, and another the next�and he always contradicts himself�� �And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,� said Hermione slowly. �Yes,� cried Ursula. �As if there were no one but himself concerned. That makes it so impossible.� But immediately she began to retract. �He insists on my accepting God knows what in _him_,� she resumed. �He wants me to accept _him_ as�as an absolute�But it seems to me he doesn�t want to _give_ anything. He doesn�t want real warm intimacy�he won�t have it�he rejects it. He won�t let me think, really, and he won�t let me _feel_�he hates feelings.� There was a long pause, bitter for Hermione. Ah, if only he would have made this demand of her? Her he _drove_ into thought, drove inexorably into knowledge�and then execrated her for it. �He wants me to sink myself,� Ursula resumed, �not to have any being of my own�� �Then why doesn�t he marry an odalisk?� said Hermione in her mild sing-song, �if it is that he wants.� Her long face looked sardonic and amused. �Yes,� said Ursula vaguely. After all, the tiresome thing was, he did not want an odalisk, he did not want a slave. Hermione would have been his slave�there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself before a man�a man who worshipped her, however, and admitted her as the supreme thing. He did not want an odalisk. He wanted a woman to _take_ something from him, to give herself up so much that she could take the last realities of him, the last facts, the last physical facts, physical and unbearable. And if she did, would he acknowledge her? Would he be able to acknowledge her through everything, or would he use her just as his instrument, use her for his own private satisfaction, not admitting her? That was what the other men had done. They had wanted their own show, and they would not admit her, they turned all she was into nothingness. Just as Hermione now betrayed herself as a woman. Hermione was like a man, she believed only in men�s things. She betrayed the woman in herself. And Birkin, would he acknowledge, or would he deny her? �Yes,� said Hermione, as each woman came out of her own separate reverie. �It would be a mistake�I think it would be a mistake�� �To marry him?� asked Ursula. �Yes,� said Hermione slowly��I think you need a man�soldierly, strong-willed�� Hermione held out her hand and clenched it with rhapsodic intensity. �You should have a man like the old heroes�you need to stand behind him as he goes into battle, you need to _see_ his strength, and to _hear_ his shout�. You need a man physically strong, and virile in his will, _not_ a sensitive man�.� There was a break, as if the pythoness had uttered the oracle, and now the woman went on, in a rhapsody-wearied voice: �And you see, Rupert isn�t this, he isn�t. He is frail in health and body, he needs great, great care. Then he is so changeable and unsure of himself�it requires the greatest patience and understanding to help him. And I don�t think you are patient. You would have to be prepared to suffer�dreadfully. I can�t _tell_ you how much suffering it would take to make him happy. He lives an _intensely_ spiritual life, at times�too, too wonderful. And then come the reactions. I can�t speak of what I have been through with him. We have been together so long, I really do know him, I _do_ know what he is. And I feel I must say it; I feel it would be perfectly _disastrous_ for you to marry him�for you even more than for him.� Hermione lapsed into bitter reverie. �He is so uncertain, so unstable�he wearies, and then reacts. I couldn�t _tell_ you what his reactions are. I couldn�t _tell_ you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day�a little latter he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant, always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good to bad, bad to good. And nothing is so devastating, nothing�� �Yes,� said Ursula humbly, �you must have suffered.� An unearthly light came on Hermione�s face. She clenched her hand like one inspired. �And one must be willing to suffer�willing to suffer for him hourly, daily�if you are going to help him, if he is to keep true to anything at all�� �And I don�t _want_ to suffer hourly and daily,� said Ursula. �I don�t, I should be ashamed. I think it is degrading not to be happy.� Hermione stopped and looked at her a long time. �Do you?� she said at last. And this utterance seemed to her a mark of Ursula�s far distance from herself. For to Hermione suffering was the greatest reality, come what might. Yet she too had a creed of happiness. �Yes,� she said. �One _should_ be happy�� But it was a matter of will. �Yes,� said Hermione, listlessly now, �I can only feel that it would be disastrous, disastrous�at least, to marry in a hurry. Can�t you be together without marriage? Can�t you go away and live somewhere without marriage? I do feel that marriage would be fatal, for both of you. I think for you even more than for him�and I think of his health�� �Of course,� said Ursula, �I don�t care about marriage�it isn�t really important to me�it�s he who wants it.� �It is his idea for the moment,� said Hermione, with that weary finality, and a sort of _si jeunesse savait_ infallibility. There was a pause. Then Ursula broke into faltering challenge. �You think I�m merely a physical woman, don�t you?� �No indeed,� said Hermione. �No, indeed! But I think you are vital and young�it isn�t a question of years, or even of experience�it is almost a question of race. Rupert is race-old, he comes of an old race�and you seem to me so young, you come of a young, inexperienced race.� �Do I!� said Ursula. �But I think he is awfully young, on one side.� �Yes, perhaps childish in many respects. Nevertheless�� They both lapsed into silence. Ursula was filled with deep resentment and a touch of hopelessness. �It isn�t true,� she said to herself, silently addressing her adversary. �It isn�t true. And it is _you_ who want a physically strong, bullying man, not I. It is you who want an unsensitive man, not I. You _don�t_ know anything about Rupert, not really, in spite of the years you have had with him. You don�t give him a woman�s love, you give him an ideal love, and that is why he reacts away from you. You don�t know. You only know the dead things. Any kitchen maid would know something about him, you don�t know. What do you think your knowledge is but dead understanding, that doesn�t mean a thing. You are so false, and untrue, how could you know anything? What is the good of your talking about love�you untrue spectre of a woman! How can you know anything, when you don�t believe? You don�t believe in yourself and your own womanhood, so what good is your conceited, shallow cleverness�!� The two women sat on in antagonistic silence. Hermione felt injured, that all her good intention, all her offering, only left the other woman in vulgar antagonism. But then, Ursula could not understand, never would understand, could never be more than the usual jealous and unreasonable female, with a good deal of powerful female emotion, female attraction, and a fair amount of female understanding, but no mind. Hermione had decided long ago that where there was no mind, it was useless to appeal for reason�one had merely to ignore the ignorant. And Rupert�he had now reacted towards the strongly female, healthy, selfish woman�it was his reaction for the time being�there was no helping it all. It was all a foolish backward and forward, a violent oscillation that would at length be too violent for his coherency, and he would smash and be dead. There was no saving him. This violent and directionless reaction between animalism and spiritual truth would go on in him till he tore himself in two between the opposite directions, and disappeared meaninglessly out of life. It was no good�he too was without unity, without _mind_, in the ultimate stages of living; not quite man enough to make a destiny for a woman. They sat on till Birkin came in and found them together. He felt at once the antagonism in the atmosphere, something radical and insuperable, and he bit his lip. But he affected a bluff manner. �Hello, Hermione, are you back again? How do you feel?� �Oh, better. And how are you�you don�t look well�� �Oh!�I believe Gudrun and Winnie Crich are coming in to tea. At least they said they were. We shall be a tea-party. What train did you come by, Ursula?� It was rather annoying to see him trying to placate both women at once. Both women watched him, Hermione with deep resentment and pity for him, Ursula very impatient. He was nervous and apparently in quite good spirits, chattering the conventional commonplaces. Ursula was amazed and indignant at the way he made small-talk; he was adept as any _fat_ in Christendom. She became quite stiff, she would not answer. It all seemed to her so false and so belittling. And still Gudrun did not appear. �I think I shall go to Florence for the winter,� said Hermione at length. �Will you?� he answered. �But it is so cold there.� �Yes, but I shall stay with Palestra. It is quite comfortable.� �What takes you to Florence?� �I don�t know,� said Hermione slowly. Then she looked at him with her slow, heavy gaze. �Barnes is starting his school of æsthetics, and Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on the Italian national policy�� �Both rubbish,� he said. �No, I don�t think so,� said Hermione. �Which do you admire, then?� �I admire both. Barnes is a pioneer. And then I am interested in Italy, in her coming to national consciousness.� �I wish she�d come to something different from national consciousness, then,� said Birkin; �especially as it only means a sort of commercial-industrial consciousness. I hate Italy and her national rant. And I think Barnes is an amateur.� Hermione was silent for some moments, in a state of hostility. But yet, she had got Birkin back again into her world! How subtle her influence was, she seemed to start his irritable attention into her direction exclusively, in one minute. He was her creature. �No,� she said, �you are wrong.� Then a sort of tension came over her, she raised her face like the pythoness inspired with oracles, and went on, in rhapsodic manner: �_Il Sandro mi scrive che ha accolto il più grande entusiasmo, tutti i giovani, e fanciulle e ragazzi, sono tutti_�� She went on in Italian, as if, in thinking of the Italians she thought in their language. He listened with a shade of distaste to her rhapsody, then he said: �For all that, I don�t like it. Their nationalism is just industrialism�that and a shallow jealousy I detest so much.� �I think you are wrong�I think you are wrong�� said Hermione. �It seems to me purely spontaneous and beautiful, the modern Italian�s _passion_, for it is a passion, for Italy, _l�Italia_�� �Do you know Italy well?� Ursula asked of Hermione. Hermione hated to be broken in upon in this manner. Yet she answered mildly: �Yes, pretty well. I spent several years of my girlhood there, with my mother. My mother died in Florence.� �Oh.� There was a pause, painful to Ursula and to Birkin. Hermione however seemed abstracted and calm. Birkin was white, his eyes glowed as if he were in a fever, he was far too over-wrought. How Ursula suffered in this tense atmosphere of strained wills! Her head seemed bound round by iron bands. Birkin rang the bell for tea. They could not wait for Gudrun any longer. When the door was opened, the cat walked in. �Micio! Micio!� called Hermione, in her slow, deliberate sing-song. The young cat turned to look at her, then, with his slow and stately walk he advanced to her side. �_Vieni�vieni quá_,� Hermione was saying, in her strange caressive, protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior. �_Vieni dire Buon� Giorno alla zia. Mi ricordi, mi ricordi bene�non è vero, piccolo? � vero che mi ricordi? � vero?_� And slowly she rubbed his head, slowly and with ironic indifference. �Does he understand Italian?� said Ursula, who knew nothing of the language. �Yes,� said Hermione at length. �His mother was Italian. She was born in my waste-paper basket in Florence, on the morning of Rupert�s birthday. She was his birthday present.� Tea was brought in. Birkin poured out for them. It was strange how inviolable was the intimacy which existed between him and Hermione. Ursula felt that she was an outsider. The very tea-cups and the old silver was a bond between Hermione and Birkin. It seemed to belong to an old, past world which they had inhabited together, and in which Ursula was a foreigner. She was almost a parvenue in their old cultured milieu. Her convention was not their convention, their standards were not her standards. But theirs were established, they had the sanction and the grace of age. He and she together, Hermione and Birkin, were people of the same old tradition, the same withered deadening culture. And she, Ursula, was an intruder. So they always made her feel. Hermione poured a little cream into a saucer. The simple way she assumed her rights in Birkin�s room maddened and discouraged Ursula. There was a fatality about it, as if it were bound to be. Hermione lifted the cat and put the cream before him. He planted his two paws on the edge of the table and bent his gracious young head to drink. �_Sicuro che capisce italiano_,� sang Hermione, �_non l�avrà dimenticato, la lingua della Mamma._� She lifted the cat�s head with her long, slow, white fingers, not letting him drink, holding him in her power. It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being. He blinked forbearingly, with a male, bored expression, licking his whiskers. Hermione laughed in her short, grunting fashion. �_Ecco, il bravo ragazzo, com� è superbo, questo!_� She made a vivid picture, so calm and strange with the cat. She had a true static impressiveness, she was a social artist in some ways. The cat refused to look at her, indifferently avoided her fingers, and began to drink again, his nose down to the cream, perfectly balanced, as he lapped with his odd little click. �It�s bad for him, teaching him to eat at table,� said Birkin. �Yes,� said Hermione, easily assenting. Then, looking down at the cat, she resumed her old, mocking, humorous sing-song. �_Ti imparano fare brutte cose, brutte cose_�� She lifted the Mino�s white chin on her forefinger, slowly. The young cat looked round with a supremely forbearing air, avoided seeing anything, withdrew his chin, and began to wash his face with his paw. Hermione grunted her laughter, pleased. �_Bel giovanotto_�� she said. The cat reached forward again and put his fine white paw on the edge of the saucer. Hermione lifted it down with delicate slowness. This deliberate, delicate carefulness of movement reminded Ursula of Gudrun. �_No! Non è permesso di mettere il zampino nel tondinetto. Non piace al babbo. Un signor gatto così selvatico�!_� And she kept her finger on the softly planted paw of the cat, and her voice had the same whimsical, humorous note of bullying. Ursula had her nose out of joint. She wanted to go away now. It all seemed no good. Hermione was established for ever, she herself was ephemeral and had not yet even arrived. �I will go now,� she said suddenly. Birkin looked at her almost in fear�he so dreaded her anger. �But there is no need for such hurry,� he said. �Yes,� she answered. �I will go.� And turning to Hermione, before there was time to say any more, she held out her hand and said �Good-bye.� �Good-bye�� sang Hermione, detaining the hand. �Must you really go now?� �Yes, I think I�ll go,� said Ursula, her face set, and averted from Hermione�s eyes. �You think you will�� But Ursula had got her hand free. She turned to Birkin with a quick, almost jeering: �Good-bye,� and she was opening the door before he had time to do it for her. When she got outside the house she ran down the road in fury and agitation. It was strange, the unreasoning rage and violence Hermione roused in her, by her very presence. Ursula knew she gave herself away to the other woman, she knew she looked ill-bred, uncouth, exaggerated. But she did not care. She only ran up the road, lest she should go back and jeer in the faces of the two she had left behind. For they outraged her. CHAPTER XXIII. EXCURSE Next day Birkin sought Ursula out. It happened to be the half-day at the Grammar School. He appeared towards the end of the morning, and asked her, would she drive with him in the afternoon. She consented. But her face was closed and unresponding, and his heart sank. The afternoon was fine and dim. He was driving the motor-car, and she sat beside him. But still her face was closed against him, unresponding. When she became like this, like a wall against him, his heart contracted. His life now seemed so reduced, that he hardly cared any more. At moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents�like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously-male or female? Why form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what it was worth? And yet, still, he was damned and doomed to the old effort at serious living. �Look,� he said, �what I bought.� The car was running along a broad white road, between autumn trees. He gave her a little bit of screwed-up paper. She took it and opened it. �How lovely,� she cried. She examined the gift. �How perfectly lovely!� she cried again. �But why do you give them me?� She put the question offensively. His face flickered with bored irritation. He shrugged his shoulders slightly. �I wanted to,� he said, coolly. �But why? Why should you?� �Am I called on to find reasons?� he asked. There was a silence, whilst she examined the rings that had been screwed up in the paper. �I think they are _beautiful_,� she said, �especially this. This is wonderful�� It was a round opal, red and fiery, set in a circle of tiny rubies. �You like that best?� he said. �I think I do.� �I like the sapphire,� he said. �This?� It was a rose-shaped, beautiful sapphire, with small brilliants. �Yes,� she said, �it is lovely.� She held it in the light. �Yes, perhaps it _is_ the best�� �The blue�� he said. �Yes, wonderful�� He suddenly swung the car out of the way of a farm-cart. It tilted on the bank. He was a careless driver, yet very quick. But Ursula was frightened. There was always that something regardless in him which terrified her. She suddenly felt he might kill her, by making some dreadful accident with the motor-car. For a moment she was stony with fear. �Isn�t it rather dangerous, the way you drive?� she asked him. �No, it isn�t dangerous,� he said. And then, after a pause: �Don�t you like the yellow ring at all?� It was a squarish topaz set in a frame of steel, or some other similar mineral, finely wrought. �Yes,� she said, �I do like it. But why did you buy these rings?� �I wanted them. They are second-hand.� �You bought them for yourself?� �No. Rings look wrong on my hands.� �Why did you buy them then?� �I bought them to give to you.� �But why? Surely you ought to give them to Hermione! You belong to her.� He did not answer. She remained with the jewels shut in her hand. She wanted to try them on her fingers, but something in her would not let her. And moreover, she was afraid her hands were too large, she shrank from the mortification of a failure to put them on any but her little finger. They travelled in silence through the empty lanes. Driving in a motor-car excited her, she forgot his presence even. �Where are we?� she asked suddenly. �Not far from Worksop.� �And where are we going?� �Anywhere.� It was the answer she liked. She opened her hand to look at the rings. They gave her _such_ pleasure, as they lay, the three circles, with their knotted jewels, entangled in her palm. She would have to try them on. She did so secretly, unwilling to let him see, so that he should not know her finger was too large for them. But he saw nevertheless. He always saw, if she wanted him not to. It was another of his hateful, watchful characteristics. Only the opal, with its thin wire loop, would go on her ring finger. And she was superstitious. No, there was ill-portent enough, she would not accept this ring from him in pledge. �Look,� she said, putting forward her hand, that was half-closed and shrinking. �The others don�t fit me.� He looked at the red-glinting, soft stone, on her over-sensitive skin. �Yes,� he said. �But opals are unlucky, aren�t they?� she said wistfully. �No. I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what _luck_ would bring? I don�t.� �But why?� she laughed. And, consumed with a desire to see how the other rings would look on her hand, she put them on her little finger. �They can be made a little bigger,� he said. �Yes,� she replied, doubtfully. And she sighed. She knew that, in accepting the rings, she was accepting a pledge. Yet fate seemed more than herself. She looked again at the jewels. They were very beautiful to her eyes�not as ornament, or wealth, but as tiny fragments of loveliness. �I�m glad you bought them,� she said, putting her hand, half unwillingly, gently on his arm. He smiled, slightly. He wanted her to come to him. But he was angry at the bottom of his soul, and indifferent. He knew she had a passion for him, really. But it was not finally interesting. There were depths of passion when one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional. Whereas Ursula was still at the emotional personal level�always so abominably personal. He had taken her as he had never been taken himself. He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame�like a demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting finally. As for her, when would she so much go beyond herself as to accept him at the quick of death? She now became quite happy. The motor-car ran on, the afternoon was soft and dim. She talked with lively interest, analysing people and their motives�Gudrun, Gerald. He answered vaguely. He was not very much interested any more in personalities and in people�people were all different, but they were all enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation, he said; there were only about two great ideas, two great streams of activity remaining, with various forms of reaction therefrom. The reactions were all varied in various people, but they followed a few great laws, and intrinsically there was no difference. They acted and reacted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer mystically interesting. They were all essentially alike, the differences were only variations on a theme. None of them transcended the given terms. Ursula did not agree�people were still an adventure to her�but�perhaps not as much as she tried to persuade herself. Perhaps there was something mechanical, now, in her interest. Perhaps also her interest was destructive, her analysing was a real tearing to pieces. There was an under-space in her where she did not care for people and their idiosyncracies, even to destroy them. She seemed to touch for a moment this undersilence in herself, she became still, and she turned for a moment purely to Birkin. �Won�t it be lovely to go home in the dark?� she said. �We might have tea rather late�shall we?�and have high tea? Wouldn�t that be rather nice?� �I promised to be at Shortlands for dinner,� he said. �But�it doesn�t matter�you can go tomorrow�� �Hermione is there,� he said, in rather an uneasy voice. �She is going away in two days. I suppose I ought to say good-bye to her. I shall never see her again.� Ursula drew away, closed in a violent silence. He knitted his brows, and his eyes began to sparkle again in anger. �You don�t mind, do you?� he asked irritably. �No, I don�t care. Why should I? Why should I mind?� Her tone was jeering and offensive. �That�s what I ask myself,� he said; �why _should_ you mind! But you seem to.� His brows were tense with violent irritation. �I _assure_ you I don�t, I don�t mind in the least. Go where you belong�it�s what I want you to do.� �Ah you fool!� he cried, �with your �go where you belong.� It�s finished between Hermione and me. She means much more to _you_, if it comes to that, than she does to me. For you can only revolt in pure reaction from her�and to be her opposite is to be her counterpart.� �Ah, opposite!� cried Ursula. �I know your dodges. I am not taken in by your word-twisting. You belong to Hermione and her dead show. Well, if you do, you do. I don�t blame you. But then you�ve nothing to do with me. In his inflamed, overwrought exasperation, he stopped the car, and they sat there, in the middle of the country lane, to have it out. It was a crisis of war between them, so they did not see the ridiculousness of their situation. �If you weren�t a fool, if only you weren�t a fool,� he cried in bitter despair, �you�d see that one could be decent, even when one has been wrong. I _was_ wrong to go on all those years with Hermione�it was a deathly process. But after all, one can have a little human decency. But no, you would tear my soul out with your jealousy at the very mention of Hermione�s name.� �I jealous! _I_�jealous! You _are_ mistaken if you think that. I�m not jealous in the least of Hermione, she is nothing to me, not _that!_� And Ursula snapped her fingers. �No, it�s you who are a liar. It�s you who must return, like a dog to his vomit. It is what Hermione _stands for_ that I _hate_. I _hate_ it. It is lies, it is false, it is death. But you want it, you can�t help it, you can�t help yourself. You belong to that old, deathly way of living�then go back to it. But don�t come to me, for I�ve nothing to do with it.� And in the stress of her violent emotion, she got down from the car and went to the hedgerow, picking unconsciously some flesh-pink spindleberries, some of which were burst, showing their orange seeds. �Ah, you are a fool,� he cried, bitterly, with some contempt. �Yes, I am. I _am_ a fool. And thank God for it. I�m too big a fool to swallow your cleverness. God be praised. You go to your women�go to them�they are your sort�you�ve always had a string of them trailing after you�and you always will. Go to your spiritual brides�but don�t come to me as well, because I�m not having any, thank you. You�re not satisfied, are you? Your spiritual brides can�t give you what you want, they aren�t common and fleshy enough for you, aren�t they? So you come to me, and keep them in the background! You will marry me for daily use. But you�ll keep yourself well provided with spiritual brides in the background. I know your dirty little game.� Suddenly a flame ran over her, and she stamped her foot madly on the road, and he winced, afraid that she would strike him. �And _I, I�m_ not spiritual enough, _I�m_ not as spiritual as that Hermione�!� Her brows knitted, her eyes blazed like a tiger�s. �Then _go_ to her, that�s all I say, _go_ to her, _go_. Ha, she spiritual�_spiritual_, she! A dirty materialist as she is. _She_ spiritual? What does she care for, what is her spirituality? What _is_ it?� Her fury seemed to blaze out and burn his face. He shrank a little. �I tell you it�s _dirt, dirt_, and nothing _but_ dirt. And it�s dirt you want, you crave for it. Spiritual! Is _that_ spiritual, her bullying, her conceit, her sordid materialism? She�s a fishwife, a fishwife, she is such a materialist. And all so sordid. What does she work out to, in the end, with all her social passion, as you call it. Social passion�what social passion has she?�show it me!�where is it? She wants petty, immediate _power_, she wants the illusion that she is a great woman, that is all. In her soul she�s a devilish unbeliever, common as dirt. That�s what she is at the bottom. And all the rest is pretence�but you love it. You love the sham spirituality, it�s your food. And why? Because of the dirt underneath. Do you think I don�t know the foulness of your sex life�and her�s?�I do. And it�s that foulness you want, you liar. Then have it, have it. You�re such a liar.� She turned away, spasmodically tearing the twigs of spindleberry from the hedge, and fastening them, with vibrating fingers, in the bosom of her coat. He stood watching in silence. A wonderful tenderness burned in him, at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time he was full of rage and callousness. �This is a degrading exhibition,� he said coolly. �Yes, degrading indeed,� she said. �But more to me than to you.� �Since you choose to degrade yourself,� he said. Again the flash came over her face, the yellow lights concentrated in her eyes. �_You!_� she cried. �You! You truth-lover! You purity-monger! It _stinks_, your truth and your purity. It stinks of the offal you feed on, you scavenger dog, you eater of corpses. You are foul, _foul_�and you must know it. Your purity, your candour, your goodness�yes, thank you, we�ve had some. What you are is a foul, deathly thing, obscene, that�s what you are, obscene and perverse. You, and love! You may well say, you don�t want love. No, you want _yourself_, and dirt, and death�that�s what you want. You are so _perverse_, so death-eating. And then�� �There�s a bicycle coming,� he said, writhing under her loud denunciation. She glanced down the road. �I don�t care,� she cried. Nevertheless she was silent. The cyclist, having heard the voices raised in altercation, glanced curiously at the man, and the woman, and at the standing motor-car as he passed. ��Afternoon,� he said, cheerfully. �Good-afternoon,� replied Birkin coldly. They were silent as the man passed into the distance. A clearer look had come over Birkin�s face. He knew she was in the main right. He knew he was perverse, so spiritual on the one hand, and in some strange way, degraded, on the other. But was she herself any better? Was anybody any better? �It may all be true, lies and stink and all,� he said. �But Hermione�s spiritual intimacy is no rottener than your emotional-jealous intimacy. One can preserve the decencies, even to one�s enemies: for one�s own sake. Hermione is my enemy�to her last breath! That�s why I must bow her off the field.� �You! You and your enemies and your bows! A pretty picture you make of yourself. But it takes nobody in but yourself. I _jealous! I!_ What I say,� her voice sprang into flame, �I say because it is _true_, do you see, because you are _you_, a foul and false liar, a whited sepulchre. That�s why I say it. And _you_ hear it.� �And be grateful,� he added, with a satirical grimace. �Yes,� she cried, �and if you have a spark of decency in you, be grateful.� �Not having a spark of decency, however�� he retorted. �No,� she cried, �you haven�t a _spark_. And so you can go your way, and I�ll go mine. It�s no good, not the slightest. So you can leave me now, I don�t want to go any further with you�leave me�� �You don�t even know where you are,� he said. �Oh, don�t bother, I assure you I shall be all right. I�ve got ten shillings in my purse, and that will take me back from anywhere _you_ have brought me to.� She hesitated. The rings were still on her fingers, two on her little finger, one on her ring finger. Still she hesitated. �Very good,� he said. �The only hopeless thing is a fool.� �You are quite right,� she said. Still she hesitated. Then an ugly, malevolent look came over her face, she pulled the rings from her fingers, and tossed them at him. One touched his face, the others hit his coat, and they scattered into the mud. �And take your rings,� she said, �and go and buy yourself a female elsewhere�there are plenty to be had, who will be quite glad to share your spiritual mess,�or to have your physical mess, and leave your spiritual mess to Hermione.� With which she walked away, desultorily, up the road. He stood motionless, watching her sullen, rather ugly walk. She was sullenly picking and pulling at the twigs of the hedge as she passed. She grew smaller, she seemed to pass out of his sight. A darkness came over his mind. Only a small, mechanical speck of consciousness hovered near him. He felt tired and weak. Yet also he was relieved. He gave up his old position. He went and sat on the bank. No doubt Ursula was right. It was true, really, what she said. He knew that his spirituality was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in self-destruction. There really _was_ a certain stimulant in self-destruction, for him�especially when it was translated spiritually. But then he knew it�he knew it, and had done. And was not Ursula�s way of emotional intimacy, emotional and physical, was it not just as dangerous as Hermione�s abstract spiritual intimacy? Fusion, fusion, this horrible fusion of two beings, which every woman and most men insisted on, was it not nauseous and horrible anyhow, whether it was a fusion of the spirit or of the emotional body? Hermione saw herself as the perfect Idea, to which all men must come: And Ursula was the perfect Womb, the bath of birth, to which all men must come! And both were horrible. Why could they not remain individuals, limited by their own limits? Why this dreadful all-comprehensiveness, this hateful tyranny? Why not leave the other being, free, why try to absorb, or melt, or merge? One might abandon oneself utterly to the _moments_, but not to any other being. He could not bear to see the rings lying in the pale mud of the road. He picked them up, and wiped them unconsciously on his hands. They were the little tokens of the reality of beauty, the reality of happiness in warm creation. But he had made his hands all dirty and gritty. There was a darkness over his mind. The terrible knot of consciousness that had persisted there like an obsession was broken, gone, his life was dissolved in darkness over his limbs and his body. But there was a point of anxiety in his heart now. He wanted her to come back. He breathed lightly and regularly like an infant, that breathes innocently, beyond the touch of responsibility. She was coming back. He saw her drifting desultorily under the high hedge, advancing towards him slowly. He did not move, he did not look again. He was as if asleep, at peace, slumbering and utterly relaxed. She came up and stood before him, hanging her head. �See what a flower I found you,� she said, wistfully holding a piece of purple-red bell-heather under his face. He saw the clump of coloured bells, and the tree-like, tiny branch: also her hands, with their over-fine, over-sensitive skin. �Pretty!� he said, looking up at her with a smile, taking the flower. Everything had become simple again, quite simple, the complexity gone into nowhere. But he badly wanted to cry: except that he was weary and bored by emotion. Then a hot passion of tenderness for her filled his heart. He stood up and looked into her face. It was new and oh, so delicate in its luminous wonder and fear. He put his arms round her, and she hid her face on his shoulder. It was peace, just simple peace, as he stood folding her quietly there on the open lane. It was peace at last. The old, detestable world of tension had passed away at last, his soul was strong and at ease. She looked up at him. The wonderful yellow light in her eyes now was soft and yielded, they were at peace with each other. He kissed her, softly, many, many times. A laugh came into her eyes. �Did I abuse you?� she asked. He smiled too, and took her hand, that was so soft and given. �Never mind,� she said, �it is all for the good.� He kissed her again, softly, many times. �Isn�t it?� she said. �Certainly,� he replied. �Wait! I shall have my own back.� She laughed suddenly, with a wild catch in her voice, and flung her arms around him. �You are mine, my love, aren�t you?� she cried straining him close. �Yes,� he said, softly. His voice was so soft and final, she went very still, as if under a fate which had taken her. Yes, she acquiesced�but it was accomplished without her acquiescence. He was kissing her quietly, repeatedly, with a soft, still happiness that almost made her heart stop beating. �My love!� she cried, lifting her face and looking with frightened, gentle wonder of bliss. Was it all real? But his eyes were beautiful and soft and immune from stress or excitement, beautiful and smiling lightly to her, smiling with her. She hid her face on his shoulder, hiding before him, because he could see her so completely. She knew he loved her, and she was afraid, she was in a strange element, a new heaven round about her. She wished he were passionate, because in passion she was at home. But this was so still and frail, as space is more frightening than force. Again, quickly, she lifted her head. �Do you love me?� she said, quickly, impulsively. �Yes,� he replied, not heeding her motion, only her stillness. She knew it was true. She broke away. �So you ought,� she said, turning round to look at the road. �Did you find the rings?� �Yes.� �Where are they?� �In my pocket.� She put her hand into his pocket and took them out. She was restless. �Shall we go?� she said. �Yes,� he answered. And they mounted to the car once more, and left behind them this memorable battle-field. They drifted through the wild, late afternoon, in a beautiful motion that was smiling and transcendent. His mind was sweetly at ease, the life flowed through him as from some new fountain, he was as if born out of the cramp of a womb. �Are you happy?� she asked him, in her strange, delighted way. �Yes,� he said. �So am I,� she cried in sudden ecstacy, putting her arm round him and clutching him violently against her, as he steered the motor-car. �Don�t drive much more,� she said. �I don�t want you to be always doing something.� �No,� he said. �We�ll finish this little trip, and then we�ll be free.� �We will, my love, we will,� she cried in delight, kissing him as he turned to her. He drove on in a strange new wakefulness, the tension of his consciousness broken. He seemed to be conscious all over, all his body awake with a simple, glimmering awareness, as if he had just come awake, like a thing that is born, like a bird when it comes out of an egg, into a new universe. They dropped down a long hill in the dusk, and suddenly Ursula recognised on her right hand, below in the hollow, the form of Southwell Minster. �Are we here!� she cried with pleasure. The rigid, sombre, ugly cathedral was settling under the gloom of the coming night, as they entered the narrow town, the golden lights showed like slabs of revelation, in the shop-windows. �Father came here with mother,� she said, �when they first knew each other. He loves it�he loves the Minster. Do you?� �Yes. It looks like quartz crystals sticking up out of the dark hollow. We�ll have our high tea at the Saracen�s Head.� As they descended, they heard the Minster bells playing a hymn, when the hour had struck six. Glory to thee my God this night For all the blessings of the light� So, to Ursula�s ear, the tune fell out, drop by drop, from the unseen sky on to the dusky town. It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding. It was all so far off. She stood in the old yard of the inn, smelling of straw and stables and petrol. Above, she could see the first stars. What was it all? This was no actual world, it was the dream-world of one�s childhood�a great circumscribed reminiscence. The world had become unreal. She herself was a strange, transcendent reality. They sat together in a little parlour by the fire. �Is it true?� she said, wondering. �What?� �Everything�is everything true?� �The best is true,� he said, grimacing at her. �Is it?� she replied, laughing, but unassured. She looked at him. He seemed still so separate. New eyes were opened in her soul. She saw a strange creature from another world, in him. It was as if she were enchanted, and everything were metamorphosed. She recalled again the old magic of the Book of Genesis, where the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. And he was one of these, one of these strange creatures from the beyond, looking down at her, and seeing she was fair. He stood on the hearth-rug looking at her, at her face that was upturned exactly like a flower, a fresh, luminous flower, glinting faintly golden with the dew of the first light. And he was smiling faintly as if there were no speech in the world, save the silent delight of flowers in each other. Smilingly they delighted in each other�s presence, pure presence, not to be thought of, even known. But his eyes had a faintly ironical contraction. And she was drawn to him strangely, as in a spell. Kneeling on the hearth-rug before him, she put her arms round his loins, and put her face against his thigh. Riches! Riches! She was overwhelmed with a sense of a heavenful of riches. �We love each other,� she said in delight. �More than that,� he answered, looking down at her with his glimmering, easy face. Unconsciously, with her sensitive fingertips, she was tracing the back of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his life-motion, there, at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other, something more. This was release at last. She had had lovers, she had known passion. But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are in the beginning. Her face was now one dazzle of released, golden light, as she looked up at him, and laid her hands full on his thighs, behind, as he stood before her. He looked down at her with a rich bright brow like a diadem above his eyes. She was beautiful as a new marvellous flower opened at his knees, a paradisal flower she was, beyond womanhood, such a flower of luminousness. Yet something was tight and unfree in him. He did not like this crouching, this radiance�not altogether. It was all achieved, for her. She had found one of the sons of God from the Beginning, and he had found one of the first most luminous daughters of men. She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into herself. She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction. �My love,� she cried, lifting her face to him, her eyes, her mouth open in transport. �My love,� he answered, bending and kissing her, always kissing her. She closed her hands over the full, rounded body of his loins, as he stooped over her, she seemed to touch the quick of the mystery of darkness that was bodily him. She seemed to faint beneath, and he seemed to faint, stooping over her. It was a perfect passing away for both of them, and at the same time the most intolerable accession into being, the marvellous fullness of immediate gratification, overwhelming, out-flooding from the source of the deepest life-force, the darkest, deepest, strangest life-source of the human body, at the back and base of the loins. After a lapse of stillness, after the rivers of strange dark fluid richness had passed over her, flooding, carrying away her mind and flooding down her spine and down her knees, past her feet, a strange flood, sweeping away everything and leaving her an essential new being, she was left quite free, she was free in complete ease, her complete self. So she rose, stilly and blithe, smiling at him. He stood before her, glimmering, so awfully real, that her heart almost stopped beating. He stood there in his strange, whole body, that had its marvellous fountains, like the bodies of the sons of God who were in the beginning. There were strange fountains of his body, more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man�s body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches. They were glad, and they could forget perfectly. They laughed, and went to the meal provided. There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large broad-faced cut ham, eggs and cresses and red beet-root, and medlars and apple-tart, and tea. �What _good_ things!� she cried with pleasure. �How noble it looks!�shall I pour out the tea?�� She was usually nervous and uncertain at performing these public duties, such as giving tea. But today she forgot, she was at her ease, entirely forgetting to have misgivings. The tea-pot poured beautifully from a proud slender spout. Her eyes were warm with smiles as she gave him his tea. She had learned at last to be still and perfect. �Everything is ours,� she said to him. �Everything,� he answered. She gave a queer little crowing sound of triumph. �I�m so glad!� she cried, with unspeakable relief. �So am I,� he said. �But I�m thinking we�d better get out of our responsibilities as quick as we can.� �What responsibilities?� she asked, wondering. �We must drop our jobs, like a shot.� A new understanding dawned into her face. �Of course,� she said, �there�s that.� �We must get out,� he said. �There�s nothing for it but to get out, quick.� She looked at him doubtfully across the table. �But where?� she said. �I don�t know,� he said. �We�ll just wander about for a bit.� Again she looked at him quizzically. �I should be perfectly happy at the Mill,� she said. �It�s very near the old thing,� he said. �Let us wander a bit.� His voice could be so soft and happy-go-lucky, it went through her veins like an exhilaration. Nevertheless she dreamed of a valley, and wild gardens, and peace. She had a desire too for splendour�an aristocratic extravagant splendour. Wandering seemed to her like restlessness, dissatisfaction. �Where will you wander to?� she asked. �I don�t know. I feel as if I would just meet you and we�d set off�just towards the distance.� �But where can one go?� she asked anxiously. �After all, there _is_ only the world, and none of it is very distant.� �Still,� he said, �I should like to go with you�nowhere. It would be rather wandering just to nowhere. That�s the place to get to�nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world�s somewheres, into our own nowhere.� Still she meditated. �You see, my love,� she said, �I�m so afraid that while we are only people, we�ve got to take the world that�s given�because there isn�t any other.� �Yes there is,� he said. �There�s somewhere where we can be free�somewhere where one needn�t wear much clothes�none even�where one meets a few people who have gone through enough, and can take things for granted�where you be yourself, without bothering. There is somewhere�there are one or two people�� �But where�?� she sighed. �Somewhere�anywhere. Let�s wander off. That�s the thing to do�let�s wander off.� �Yes�� she said, thrilled at the thought of travel. But to her it was only travel. �To be free,� he said. �To be free, in a free place, with a few other people!� �Yes,� she said wistfully. Those �few other people� depressed her. �It isn�t really a locality, though,� he said. �It�s a perfected relation between you and me, and others�the perfect relation�so that we are free together.� �It is, my love, isn�t it,� she said. �It�s you and me. It�s you and me, isn�t it?� She stretched out her arms to him. He went across and stooped to kiss her face. Her arms closed round him again, her hands spread upon his shoulders, moving slowly there, moving slowly on his back, down his back slowly, with a strange recurrent, rhythmic motion, yet moving slowly down, pressing mysteriously over his loins, over his flanks. The sense of the awfulness of riches that could never be impaired flooded her mind like a swoon, a death in most marvellous possession, mystic-sure. She possessed him so utterly and intolerably, that she herself lapsed out. And yet she was only sitting still in the chair, with her hands pressed upon him, and lost. Again he softly kissed her. �We shall never go apart again,� he murmured quietly. And she did not speak, but only pressed her hands firmer down upon the source of darkness in him. They decided, when they woke again from the pure swoon, to write their resignations from the world of work there and then. She wanted this. He rang the bell, and ordered note-paper without a printed address. The waiter cleared the table. �Now then,� he said, �yours first. Put your home address, and the date�then �Director of Education, Town Hall�Sir�� Now then!�I don�t know how one really stands�I suppose one could get out of it in less than month�Anyhow �Sir�I beg to resign my post as classmistress in the Willey Green Grammar School. I should be very grateful if you would liberate me as soon as possible, without waiting for the expiration of the month�s notice.� That�ll do. Have you got it? Let me look. �Ursula Brangwen.� Good! Now I�ll write mine. I ought to give them three months, but I can plead health. I can arrange it all right.� He sat and wrote out his formal resignation. �Now,� he said, when the envelopes were sealed and addressed, �shall we post them here, both together? I know Jackie will say, �Here�s a coincidence!� when he receives them in all their identity. Shall we let him say it, or not?� �I don�t care,� she said. �No�?� he said, pondering. �It doesn�t matter, does it?� she said. �Yes,� he replied. �Their imaginations shall not work on us. I�ll post yours here, mine after. I cannot be implicated in their imaginings.� He looked at her with his strange, non-human singleness. �Yes, you are right,� she said. She lifted her face to him, all shining and open. It was as if he might enter straight into the source of her radiance. His face became a little distracted. �Shall we go?� he said. �As you like,� she replied. They were soon out of the little town, and running through the uneven lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and the butt of a barn. �Are you going to Shortlands to dinner?� Ursula asked him suddenly. He started. �Good God!� he said. �Shortlands! Never again. Not that. Besides we should be too late.� �Where are we going then�to the Mill?� �If you like. Pity to go anywhere on this good dark night. Pity to come out of it, really. Pity we can�t stop in the good darkness. It is better than anything ever would be�this good immediate darkness.� She sat wondering. The car lurched and swayed. She knew there was no leaving him, the darkness held them both and contained them, it was not to be surpassed. Besides she had a full mystic knowledge of his suave loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave, and in this knowledge there was some of the inevitability and the beauty of fate, fate which one asks for, which one accepts in full. He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car. He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity. It was very difficult to speak, it was so perfect to sit in this pure living silence, subtle, full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force, upheld immemorially in timeless force, like the immobile, supremely potent Egyptians, seated forever in their living, subtle silence. �We need not go home,� he said. �This car has seats that let down and make a bed, and we can lift the hood.� She was glad and frightened. She cowered near to him. �But what about them at home?� she said. �Send a telegram.� Nothing more was said. They ran on in silence. But with a sort of second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination. For he had the free intelligence to direct his own ends. His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed, slumbering head. A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his pure Egyptian concentration in darkness. They came to a village that lined along the road. The car crept slowly along, until he saw the post-office. Then he pulled up. �I will send a telegram to your father,� he said. �I will merely say �spending the night in town,� shall I?� �Yes,� she answered. She did not want to be disturbed into taking thought. She watched him move into the post-office. It was also a shop, she saw. Strange, he was. Even as he went into the lighted, public place he remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable. There he was! In a strange uplift of elation she saw him, the being never to be revealed, awful in its potency, mystic and real. This dark, subtle reality of him, never to be translated, liberated her into perfection, her own perfected being. She too was dark and fulfilled in silence. He came out, throwing some packages into the car. �There is some bread, and cheese, and raisins, and apples, and hard chocolate,� he said, in his voice that was as if laughing, because of the unblemished stillness and force which was the reality in him. She would have to touch him. To speak, to see, was nothing. It was a travesty to look and to comprehend the man there. Darkness and silence must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is death of knowledge, the reality of surety in not-knowing. Soon they had run on again into the darkness. She did not ask where they were going, she did not care. She sat in a fullness and a pure potency that was like apathy, mindless and immobile. She was next to him, and hung in a pure rest, as a star is hung, balanced unthinkably. Still there remained a dark lambency of anticipation. She would touch him. With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslatable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation. And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him, and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being. They would give each other this star-equilibrium which alone is freedom. She saw that they were running among trees�great old trees with dying bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The motor-car advanced slowly. �Where are we?� she whispered. �In Sherwood Forest.� It was evident he knew the place. He drove softly, watching. Then they came to a green road between the trees. They turned cautiously round, and were advancing between the oaks of the forest, down a green lane. The green lane widened into a little circle of grass, where there was a small trickle of water at the bottom of a sloping bank. The car stopped. �We will stay here,� he said, �and put out the lights.� He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure night, with shadows of trees like realities of other, nightly being. He threw a rug on to the bracken, and they sat in stillness and mindless silence. There were faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance, no possible disturbance, the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness. She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness. They slept the chilly night through under the hood of the car, a night of unbroken sleep. It was already high day when he awoke. They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge. CHAPTER XXIV. DEATH AND LOVE Thomas Crich died slowly, terribly slowly. It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break. The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly. He was only half conscious�a thin strand of consciousness linking the darkness of death with the light of day. Yet his will was unbroken, he was integral, complete. Only he must have perfect stillness about him. Any presence but that of the nurses was a strain and an effort to him now. Every morning Gerald went into the room, hoping to find his father passed away at last. Yet always he saw the same transparent face, the same dread dark hair on the waxen forehead, and the awful, inchoate dark eyes, which seemed to be decomposing into formless darkness, having only a tiny grain of vision within them. And always, as the dark, inchoate eyes turned to him, there passed through Gerald�s bowels a burning stroke of revolt, that seemed to resound through his whole being, threatening to break his mind with its clangour, and making him mad. Every morning, the son stood there, erect and taut with life, gleaming in his blondness. The gleaming blondness of his strange, imminent being put the father into a fever of fretful irritation. He could not bear to meet the uncanny, downward look of Gerald�s blue eyes. But it was only for a moment. Each on the brink of departure, the father and son looked at each other, then parted. For a long time Gerald preserved a perfect _sang-froid_, he remained quite collected. But at last, fear undermined him. He was afraid of some horrible collapse in himself. He had to stay and see this thing through. Some perverse will made him watch his father drawn over the borders of life. And yet, now, every day, the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through the bowels of the son struck a further inflammation. Gerald went about all day with a tendency to cringe, as if there were the point of a sword of Damocles pricking the nape of his neck. There was no escape�he was bound up with his father, he had to see him through. And the father�s will never relaxed or yielded to death. It would have to snap when death at last snapped it,�if it did not persist after a physical death. In the same way, the will of the son never yielded. He stood firm and immune, he was outside this death and this dying. It was a trial by ordeal. Could he stand and see his father slowly dissolve and disappear in death, without once yielding his will, without once relenting before the omnipotence of death. Like a Red Indian undergoing torture, Gerald would experience the whole process of slow death without wincing or flinching. He even triumphed in it. He somehow _wanted_ this death, even forced it. It was as if he himself were dealing the death, even when he most recoiled in horror. Still, he would deal it, he would triumph through death. But in the stress of this ordeal, Gerald too lost his hold on the outer, daily life. That which was much to him, came to mean nothing. Work, pleasure�it was all left behind. He went on more or less mechanically with his business, but this activity was all extraneous. The real activity was this ghastly wrestling for death in his own soul. And his own will should triumph. Come what might, he would not bow down or submit or acknowledge a master. He had no master in death. But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to be destroyed, so that life was a hollow shell all round him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find reinforcements, otherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul. His will held his outer life, his outer mind, his outer being unbroken and unchanged. But the pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly. In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He threw away everything now�he only wanted the relation established with her. He would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her. He would stand about the room, aimlessly picking up the implements, the lumps of clay, the little figures she had cast�they were whimsical and grotesque�looking at them without perceiving them. And she felt him following her, dogging her heels like a doom. She held away from him, and yet she knew he drew always a little nearer, a little nearer. �I say,� he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthinking, uncertain way, �won�t you stay to dinner tonight? I wish you would.� She started slightly. He spoke to her like a man making a request of another man. �They�ll be expecting me at home,� she said. �Oh, they won�t mind, will they?� he said. �I should be awfully glad if you�d stay.� Her long silence gave consent at last. �I�ll tell Thomas, shall I?� he said. �I must go almost immediately after dinner,� she said. It was a dark, cold evening. There was no fire in the drawing-room, they sat in the library. He was mostly silent, absent, and Winifred talked little. But when Gerald did rouse himself, he smiled and was pleasant and ordinary with her. Then there came over him again the long blanks, of which he was not aware. She was very much attracted by him. He looked so preoccupied, and his strange, blank silences, which she could not read, moved her and made her wonder over him, made her feel reverential towards him. But he was very kind. He gave her the best things at the table, he had a bottle of slightly sweet, delicious golden wine brought out for dinner, knowing she would prefer it to the burgundy. She felt herself esteemed, needed almost. As they took coffee in the library, there was a soft, very soft knocking at the door. He started, and called �Come in.� The timbre of his voice, like something vibrating at high pitch, unnerved Gudrun. A nurse in white entered, half hovering in the doorway like a shadow. She was very good-looking, but strangely enough, shy and self-mistrusting. �The doctor would like to speak to you, Mr Crich,� she said, in her low, discreet voice. �The doctor!� he said, starting up. �Where is he?� �He is in the dining-room.� �Tell him I�m coming.� He drank up his coffee, and followed the nurse, who had dissolved like a shadow. �Which nurse was that?� asked Gudrun. �Miss Inglis�I like her best,� replied Winifred. After a while Gerald came back, looking absorbed by his own thoughts, and having some of that tension and abstraction which is seen in a slightly drunken man. He did not say what the doctor had wanted him for, but stood before the fire, with his hands behind his back, and his face open and as if rapt. Not that he was really thinking�he was only arrested in pure suspense inside himself, and thoughts wafted through his mind without order. �I must go now and see Mama,� said Winifred, �and see Dadda before he goes to sleep.� She bade them both good-night. Gudrun also rose to take her leave. �You needn�t go yet, need you?� said Gerald, glancing quickly at the clock. �It is early yet. I�ll walk down with you when you go. Sit down, don�t hurry away.� Gudrun sat down, as if, absent as he was, his will had power over her. She felt almost mesmerised. He was strange to her, something unknown. What was he thinking, what was he feeling, as he stood there so rapt, saying nothing? He kept her�she could feel that. He would not let her go. She watched him in humble submissiveness. �Had the doctor anything new to tell you?� she asked, softly, at length, with that gentle, timid sympathy which touched a keen fibre in his heart. He lifted his eyebrows with a negligent, indifferent expression. �No�nothing new,� he replied, as if the question were quite casual, trivial. �He says the pulse is very weak indeed, very intermittent�but that doesn�t necessarily mean much, you know.� He looked down at her. Her eyes were dark and soft and unfolded, with a stricken look that roused him. �No,� she murmured at length. �I don�t understand anything about these things.� �Just as well not,� he said. �I say, won�t you have a cigarette?�do!� He quickly fetched the box, and held her a light. Then he stood before her on the hearth again. �No,� he said, �we�ve never had much illness in the house, either�not till father.� He seemed to meditate a while. Then looking down at her, with strangely communicative blue eyes, that filled her with dread, he continued: �It�s something you don�t reckon with, you know, till it is there. And then you realise that it was there all the time�it was always there�you understand what I mean?�the possibility of this incurable illness, this slow death.� He moved his feet uneasily on the marble hearth, and put his cigarette to his mouth, looking up at the ceiling. �I know,� murmured Gudrun: �it is dreadful.� He smoked without knowing. Then he took the cigarette from his lips, bared his teeth, and putting the tip of his tongue between his teeth spat off a grain of tobacco, turning slightly aside, like a man who is alone, or who is lost in thought. �I don�t know what the effect actually _is_, on one,� he said, and again he looked down at her. Her eyes were dark and stricken with knowledge, looking into his. He saw her submerged, and he turned aside his face. �But I absolutely am not the same. There�s nothing left, if you understand what I mean. You seem to be clutching at the void�and at the same time you are void yourself. And so you don�t know what to _do_.� �No,� she murmured. A heavy thrill ran down her nerves, heavy, almost pleasure, almost pain. �What can be done?� she added. He turned, and flipped the ash from his cigarette on to the great marble hearth-stones, that lay bare in the room, without fender or bar. �I don�t know, I�m sure,� he replied. �But I do think you�ve got to find some way of resolving the situation�not because you want to, but because you�ve _got_ to, otherwise you�re done. The whole of everything, and yourself included, is just on the point of caving in, and you are just holding it up with your hands. Well, it�s a situation that obviously can�t continue. You can�t stand holding the roof up with your hands, for ever. You know that sooner or later you�ll _have_ to let go. Do you understand what I mean? And so something�s got to be done, or there�s a universal collapse�as far as you yourself are concerned.� He shifted slightly on the hearth, crunching a cinder under his heel. He looked down at it. Gudrun was aware of the beautiful old marble panels of the fireplace, swelling softly carved, round him and above him. She felt as if she were caught at last by fate, imprisoned in some horrible and fatal trap. �But what _can_ be done?� she murmured humbly. �You must use me if I can be of any help at all�but how can I? I don�t see how I _can_ help you.� He looked down at her critically. �I don�t want you to _help_,� he said, slightly irritated, �because there�s nothing to be _done_. I only want sympathy, do you see: I want somebody I can talk to sympathetically. That eases the strain. And there _is_ nobody to talk to sympathetically. That�s the curious thing. There _is_ nobody. There�s Rupert Birkin. But then he _isn�t_ sympathetic, he wants to _dictate_. And that is no use whatsoever.� She was caught in a strange snare. She looked down at her hands. Then there was the sound of the door softly opening. Gerald started. He was chagrined. It was his starting that really startled Gudrun. Then he went forward, with quick, graceful, intentional courtesy. �Oh, mother!� he said. �How nice of you to come down. How are you?� The elderly woman, loosely and bulkily wrapped in a purple gown, came forward silently, slightly hulked, as usual. Her son was at her side. He pushed her up a chair, saying �You know Miss Brangwen, don�t you?� The mother glanced at Gudrun indifferently. �Yes,� she said. Then she turned her wonderful, forget-me-not blue eyes up to her son, as she slowly sat down in the chair he had brought her. �I came to ask you about your father,� she said, in her rapid, scarcely-audible voice. �I didn�t know you had company.� �No? Didn�t Winifred tell you? Miss Brangwen stayed to dinner, to make us a little more lively�� Mrs Crich turned slowly round to Gudrun, and looked at her, but with unseeing eyes. �I�m afraid it would be no treat to her.� Then she turned again to her son. �Winifred tells me the doctor had something to say about your father. What is it?� �Only that the pulse is very weak�misses altogether a good many times�so that he might not last the night out,� Gerald replied. Mrs Crich sat perfectly impassive, as if she had not heard. Her bulk seemed hunched in the chair, her fair hair hung slack over her ears. But her skin was clear and fine, her hands, as she sat with them forgotten and folded, were quite beautiful, full of potential energy. A great mass of energy seemed decaying up in that silent, hulking form. She looked up at her son, as he stood, keen and soldierly, near to her. Her eyes were most wonderfully blue, bluer than forget-me-nots. She seemed to have a certain confidence in Gerald, and to feel a certain motherly mistrust of him. �How are _you?_� she muttered, in her strangely quiet voice, as if nobody should hear but him. �You�re not getting into a state, are you? You�re not letting it make you hysterical?� The curious challenge in the last words startled Gudrun. �I don�t think so, mother,� he answered, rather coldly cheery. �Somebody�s got to see it through, you know.� �Have they? Have they?� answered his mother rapidly. �Why should _you_ take it on yourself? What have you got to do, seeing it through. It will see itself through. You are not needed.� �No, I don�t suppose I can do any good,� he answered. �It�s just how it affects us, you see.� �You like to be affected�don�t you? It�s quite nuts for you? You would have to be important. You have no need to stop at home. Why don�t you go away!� These sentences, evidently the ripened grain of many dark hours, took Gerald by surprise. �I don�t think it�s any good going away now, mother, at the last minute,� he said, coldly. �You take care,� replied his mother. �You mind _yourself_�that�s your business. You take too much on yourself. You mind _yourself_, or you�ll find yourself in Queer Street, that�s what will happen to you. You�re hysterical, always were.� �I�m all right, mother,� he said. �There�s no need to worry about _me_, I assure you.� �Let the dead bury their dead�don�t go and bury yourself along with them�that�s what I tell you. I know you well enough.� He did not answer this, not knowing what to say. The mother sat bunched up in silence, her beautiful white hands, that had no rings whatsoever, clasping the pommels of her arm-chair. �You can�t do it,� she said, almost bitterly. �You haven�t the nerve. You�re as weak as a cat, really�always were. Is this young woman staying here?� �No,� said Gerald. �She is going home tonight.� �Then she�d better have the dog-cart. Does she go far?� �Only to Beldover.� �Ah!� The elderly woman never looked at Gudrun, yet she seemed to take knowledge of her presence. �You are inclined to take too much on yourself, Gerald,� said the mother, pulling herself to her feet, with a little difficulty. �Will you go, mother?� he asked, politely. �Yes, I�ll go up again,� she replied. Turning to Gudrun, she bade her �Good-night.� Then she went slowly to the door, as if she were unaccustomed to walking. At the door she lifted her face to him, implicitly. He kissed her. �Don�t come any further with me,� she said, in her barely audible voice. �I don�t want you any further.� He bade her good-night, watched her across to the stairs and mount slowly. Then he closed the door and came back to Gudrun. Gudrun rose also, to go. �A queer being, my mother,� he said. �Yes,� replied Gudrun. �She has her own thoughts.� �Yes,� said Gudrun. Then they were silent. �You want to go?� he asked. �Half a minute, I�ll just have a horse put in�� �No,� said Gudrun. �I want to walk.� He had promised to walk with her down the long, lonely mile of drive, and she wanted this. �You might _just_ as well drive,� he said. �I�d _much rather_ walk,� she asserted, with emphasis. �You would! Then I will come along with you. You know where your things are? I�ll put boots on.� He put on a cap, and an overcoat over his evening dress. They went out into the night. �Let us light a cigarette,� he said, stopping in a sheltered angle of the porch. �You have one too.� So, with the scent of tobacco on the night air, they set off down the dark drive that ran between close-cut hedges through sloping meadows. He wanted to put his arm round her. If he could put his arm round her, and draw her against him as they walked, he would equilibriate himself. For now he felt like a pair of scales, the half of which tips down and down into an indefinite void. He must recover some sort of balance. And here was the hope and the perfect recovery. Blind to her, thinking only of himself, he slipped his arm softly round her waist, and drew her to him. Her heart fainted, feeling herself taken. But then, his arm was so strong, she quailed under its powerful close grasp. She died a little death, and was drawn against him as they walked down the stormy darkness. He seemed to balance her perfectly in opposition to himself, in their dual motion of walking. So, suddenly, he was liberated and perfect, strong, heroic. He put his hand to his mouth and threw his cigarette away, a gleaming point, into the unseen hedge. Then he was quite free to balance her. �That�s better,� he said, with exultancy. The exultation in his voice was like a sweetish, poisonous drug to her. Did she then mean so much to him! She sipped the poison. �Are you happier?� she asked, wistfully. �Much better,� he said, in the same exultant voice, �and I was rather far gone.� She nestled against him. He felt her all soft and warm, she was the rich, lovely substance of his being. The warmth and motion of her walk suffused through him wonderfully. �I�m _so_ glad if I help you,� she said. �Yes,� he answered. �There�s nobody else could do it, if you wouldn�t.� �That is true,� she said to herself, with a thrill of strange, fatal elation. As they walked, he seemed to lift her nearer and nearer to himself, till she moved upon the firm vehicle of his body. He was so strong, so sustaining, and he could not be opposed. She drifted along in a wonderful interfusion of physical motion, down the dark, blowy hillside. Far across shone the little yellow lights of Beldover, many of them, spread in a thick patch on another dark hill. But he and she were walking in perfect, isolated darkness, outside the world. �But how much do you care for me!� came her voice, almost querulous. �You see, I don�t know, I don�t understand!� �How much!� His voice rang with a painful elation. �I don�t know either�but everything.� He was startled by his own declaration. It was true. So he stripped himself of every safeguard, in making this admission to her. He cared everything for her�she was everything. �But I can�t believe it,� said her low voice, amazed, trembling. She was trembling with doubt and exultance. This was the thing she wanted to hear, only this. Yet now she heard it, heard the strange clapping vibration of truth in his voice as he said it, she could not believe. She could not believe�she did not believe. Yet she believed, triumphantly, with fatal exultance. �Why not?� he said. �Why don�t you believe it? It�s true. It is true, as we stand at this moment�� he stood still with her in the wind; �I care for nothing on earth, or in heaven, outside this spot where we are. And it isn�t my own presence I care about, it is all yours. I�d sell my soul a hundred times�but I couldn�t bear not to have you here. I couldn�t bear to be alone. My brain would burst. It is true.� He drew her closer to him, with definite movement. �No,� she murmured, afraid. Yet this was what she wanted. Why did she so lose courage? They resumed their strange walk. They were such strangers�and yet they were so frightfully, unthinkably near. It was like a madness. Yet it was what she wanted, it was what she wanted. They had descended the hill, and now they were coming to the square arch where the road passed under the colliery railway. The arch, Gudrun knew, had walls of squared stone, mossy on one side with water that trickled down, dry on the other side. She had stood under it to hear the train rumble thundering over the logs overhead. And she knew that under this dark and lonely bridge the young colliers stood in the darkness with their sweethearts, in rainy weather. And so she wanted to stand under the bridge with _her_ sweetheart, and be kissed under the bridge in the invisible darkness. Her steps dragged as she drew near. So, under the bridge, they came to a standstill, and he lifted her upon his breast. His body vibrated taut and powerful as he closed upon her and crushed her, breathless and dazed and destroyed, crushed her upon his breast. Ah, it was terrible, and perfect. Under this bridge, the colliers pressed their lovers to their breast. And now, under the bridge, the master of them all pressed her to himself! And how much more powerful and terrible was his embrace than theirs, how much more concentrated and supreme his love was, than theirs in the same sort! She felt she would swoon, die, under the vibrating, inhuman tension of his arms and his body�she would pass away. Then the unthinkable high vibration slackened and became more undulating. He slackened and drew her with him to stand with his back to the wall. She was almost unconscious. So the colliers� lovers would stand with their backs to the walls, holding their sweethearts and kissing them as she was being kissed. Ah, but would their kisses be fine and powerful as the kisses of the firm-mouthed master? Even the keen, short-cut moustache�the colliers would not have that. And the colliers� sweethearts would, like herself, hang their heads back limp over their shoulder, and look out from the dark archway, at the close patch of yellow lights on the unseen hill in the distance, or at the vague form of trees, and at the buildings of the colliery wood-yard, in the other direction. His arms were fast around her, he seemed to be gathering her into himself, her warmth, her softness, her adorable weight, drinking in the suffusion of her physical being, avidly. He lifted her, and seemed to pour her into himself, like wine into a cup. �This is worth everything,� he said, in a strange, penetrating voice. So she relaxed, and seemed to melt, to flow into him, as if she were some infinitely warm and precious suffusion filling into his veins, like an intoxicant. Her arms were round his neck, he kissed her and held her perfectly suspended, she was all slack and flowing into him, and he was the firm, strong cup that receives the wine of her life. So she lay cast upon him, stranded, lifted up against him, melting and melting under his kisses, melting into his limbs and bones, as if he were soft iron becoming surcharged with her electric life. Till she seemed to swoon, gradually her mind went, and she passed away, everything in her was melted down and fluid, and she lay still, become contained by him, sleeping in him as lightning sleeps in a pure, soft stone. So she was passed away and gone in him, and he was perfected. When she opened her eyes again, and saw the patch of lights in the distance, it seemed to her strange that the world still existed, that she was standing under the bridge resting her head on Gerald�s breast. Gerald�who was he? He was the exquisite adventure, the desirable unknown to her. She looked up, and in the darkness saw his face above her, his shapely, male face. There seemed a faint, white light emitted from him, a white aura, as if he were visitor from the unseen. She reached up, like Eve reaching to the apples on the tree of knowledge, and she kissed him, though her passion was a transcendent fear of the thing he was, touching his face with her infinitely delicate, encroaching wondering fingers. Her fingers went over the mould of his face, over his features. How perfect and foreign he was�ah how dangerous! Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. This was the glistening, forbidden apple, this face of a man. She kissed him, putting her fingers over his face, his eyes, his nostrils, over his brows and his ears, to his neck, to know him, to gather him in by touch. He was so firm, and shapely, with such satisfying, inconceivable shapeliness, strange, yet unutterably clear. He was such an unutterable enemy, yet glistening with uncanny white fire. She wanted to touch him and touch him and touch him, till she had him all in her hands, till she had strained him into her knowledge. Ah, if she could have the precious _knowledge_ of him, she would be filled, and nothing could deprive her of this. For he was so unsure, so risky in the common world of day. �You are so _beautiful_,� she murmured in her throat. He wondered, and was suspended. But she felt him quiver, and she came down involuntarily nearer upon him. He could not help himself. Her fingers had him under their power. The fathomless, fathomless desire they could evoke in him was deeper than death, where he had no choice. But she knew now, and it was enough. For the time, her soul was destroyed with the exquisite shock of his invisible fluid lightning. She knew. And this knowledge was a death from which she must recover. How much more of him was there to know? Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body. Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge. But for the present it was enough, enough, as much as her soul could bear. Too much, and she would shatter herself, she would fill the fine vial of her soul too quickly, and it would break. Enough now�enough for the time being. There were all the after days when her hands, like birds, could feed upon the fields of him mystical plastic form�till then enough. And even he was glad to be checked, rebuked, held back. For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired. They walked on towards the town, towards where the lamps threaded singly, at long intervals down the dark high-road of the valley. They came at length to the gate of the drive. �Don�t come any further,� she said. �You�d rather I didn�t?� he asked, relieved. He did not want to go up the public streets with her, his soul all naked and alight as it was. �Much rather�good-night.� She held out her hand. He grasped it, then touched the perilous, potent fingers with his lips. �Good-night,� he said. �Tomorrow.� And they parted. He went home full of the strength and the power of living desire. But the next day, she did not come, she sent a note that she was kept indoors by a cold. Here was a torment! But he possessed his soul in some sort of patience, writing a brief answer, telling her how sorry he was not to see her. The day after this, he stayed at home�it seemed so futile to go down to the office. His father could not live the week out. And he wanted to be at home, suspended. Gerald sat on a chair by the window in his father�s room. The landscape outside was black and winter-sodden. His father lay grey and ashen on the bed, a nurse moved silently in her white dress, neat and elegant, even beautiful. There was a scent of eau-de-Cologne in the room. The nurse went out of the room, Gerald was alone with death, facing the winter-black landscape. �Is there much more water in Denley?� came the faint voice, determined and querulous, from the bed. The dying man was asking about a leakage from Willey Water into one of the pits. �Some more�we shall have to run off the lake,� said Gerald. �Will you?� The faint voice filtered to extinction. There was dead stillness. The grey-faced, sick man lay with eyes closed, more dead than death. Gerald looked away. He felt his heart was seared, it would perish if this went on much longer. Suddenly he heard a strange noise. Turning round, he saw his father�s eyes wide open, strained and rolling in a frenzy of inhuman struggling. Gerald started to his feet, and stood transfixed in horror. �Wha-a-ah-h-h�� came a horrible choking rattle from his father�s throat, the fearful, frenzied eye, rolling awfully in its wild fruitless search for help, passed blindly over Gerald, then up came the dark blood and mess pumping over the face of the agonised being. The tense body relaxed, the head fell aside, down the pillow. Gerald stood transfixed, his soul echoing in horror. He would move, but he could not. He could not move his limbs. His brain seemed to re-echo, like a pulse. The nurse in white softly entered. She glanced at Gerald, then at the bed. �Ah!� came her soft whimpering cry, and she hurried forward to the dead man. �Ah-h!� came the slight sound of her agitated distress, as she stood bending over the bedside. Then she recovered, turned, and came for towel and sponge. She was wiping the dead face carefully, and murmuring, almost whimpering, very softly: �Poor Mr Crich!�Poor Mr Crich! Poor Mr Crich!� �Is he dead?� clanged Gerald�s sharp voice. �Oh yes, he�s gone,� replied the soft, moaning voice of the nurse, as she looked up at Gerald�s face. She was young and beautiful and quivering. A strange sort of grin went over Gerald�s face, over the horror. And he walked out of the room. He was going to tell his mother. On the landing he met his brother Basil. �He�s gone, Basil,� he said, scarcely able to subdue his voice, not to let an unconscious, frightening exultation sound through. �What?� cried Basil, going pale. Gerald nodded. Then he went on to his mother�s room. She was sitting in her purple gown, sewing, very slowly sewing, putting in a stitch then another stitch. She looked up at Gerald with her blue undaunted eyes. �Father�s gone,� he said. �He�s dead? Who says so?� �Oh, you know, mother, if you see him.� She put her sewing down, and slowly rose. �Are you going to see him?� he asked. �Yes,� she said By the bedside the children already stood in a weeping group. �Oh, mother!� cried the daughters, almost in hysterics, weeping loudly. But the mother went forward. The dead man lay in repose, as if gently asleep, so gently, so peacefully, like a young man sleeping in purity. He was still warm. She stood looking at him in gloomy, heavy silence, for some time. �Ay,� she said bitterly, at length, speaking as if to the unseen witnesses of the air. �You�re dead.� She stood for some minutes in silence, looking down. �Beautiful,� she asserted, �beautiful as if life had never touched you�never touched you. God send I look different. I hope I shall look my years, when I am dead. Beautiful, beautiful,� she crooned over him. �You can see him in his teens, with his first beard on his face. A beautiful soul, beautiful�� Then there was a tearing in her voice as she cried: �None of you look like this, when you are dead! Don�t let it happen again.� It was a strange, wild command from out of the unknown. Her children moved unconsciously together, in a nearer group, at the dreadful command in her voice. The colour was flushed bright in her cheek, she looked awful and wonderful. �Blame me, blame me if you like, that he lies there like a lad in his teens, with his first beard on his face. Blame me if you like. But you none of you know.� She was silent in intense silence. Then there came, in a low, tense voice: �If I thought that the children I bore would lie looking like that in death, I�d strangle them when they were infants, yes�� �No, mother,� came the strange, clarion voice of Gerald from the background, �we are different, we don�t blame you.� She turned and looked full in his eyes. Then she lifted her hands in a strange half-gesture of mad despair. �Pray!� she said strongly. �Pray for yourselves to God, for there�s no help for you from your parents.� �Oh mother!� cried her daughters wildly. But she had turned and gone, and they all went quickly away from each other. When Gudrun heard that Mr Crich was dead, she felt rebuked. She had stayed away lest Gerald should think her too easy of winning. And now, he was in the midst of trouble, whilst she was cold. The following day she went up as usual to Winifred, who was glad to see her, glad to get away into the studio. The girl had wept, and then, too frightened, had turned aside to avoid any more tragic eventuality. She and Gudrun resumed work as usual, in the isolation of the studio, and this seemed an immeasurable happiness, a pure world of freedom, after the aimlessness and misery of the house. Gudrun stayed on till evening. She and Winifred had dinner brought up to the studio, where they ate in freedom, away from all the people in the house. After dinner Gerald came up. The great high studio was full of shadow and a fragrance of coffee. Gudrun and Winifred had a little table near the fire at the far end, with a white lamp whose light did not travel far. They were a tiny world to themselves, the two girls surrounded by lovely shadows, the beams and rafters shadowy over-head, the benches and implements shadowy down the studio. �You are cosy enough here,� said Gerald, going up to them. There was a low brick fireplace, full of fire, an old blue Turkish rug, the little oak table with the lamp and the white-and-blue cloth and the dessert, and Gudrun making coffee in an odd brass coffee-maker, and Winifred scalding a little milk in a tiny saucepan. �Have you had coffee?� said Gudrun. �I have, but I�ll have some more with you,� he replied. �Then you must have it in a glass�there are only two cups,� said Winifred. �It is the same to me,� he said, taking a chair and coming into the charmed circle of the girls. How happy they were, how cosy and glamorous it was with them, in a world of lofty shadows! The outside world, in which he had been transacting funeral business all the day was completely wiped out. In an instant he snuffed glamour and magic. They had all their things very dainty, two odd and lovely little cups, scarlet and solid gilt, and a little black jug with scarlet discs, and the curious coffee-machine, whose spirit-flame flowed steadily, almost invisibly. There was the effect of rather sinister richness, in which Gerald at once escaped himself. They all sat down, and Gudrun carefully poured out the coffee. �Will you have milk?� she asked calmly, yet nervously poising the little black jug with its big red dots. She was always so completely controlled, yet so bitterly nervous. �No, I won�t,� he replied. So, with a curious humility, she placed him the little cup of coffee, and herself took the awkward tumbler. She seemed to want to serve him. �Why don�t you give me the glass�it is so clumsy for you,� he said. He would much rather have had it, and seen her daintily served. But she was silent, pleased with the disparity, with her self-abasement. �You are quite _en ménage_,� he said. �Yes. We aren�t really at home to visitors,� said Winifred. �You�re not? Then I�m an intruder?� For once he felt his conventional dress was out of place, he was an outsider. Gudrun was very quiet. She did not feel drawn to talk to him. At this stage, silence was best�or mere light words. It was best to leave serious things aside. So they talked gaily and lightly, till they heard the man below lead out the horse, and call it to �back-back!� into the dog-cart that was to take Gudrun home. So she put on her things, and shook hands with Gerald, without once meeting his eyes. And she was gone. The funeral was detestable. Afterwards, at the tea-table, the daughters kept saying��He was a good father to us�the best father in the world��or else��We shan�t easily find another man as good as father was.� Gerald acquiesced in all this. It was the right conventional attitude, and, as far as the world went, he believed in the conventions. He took it as a matter of course. But Winifred hated everything, and hid in the studio, and cried her heart out, and wished Gudrun would come. Luckily everybody was going away. The Criches never stayed long at home. By dinner-time, Gerald was left quite alone. Even Winifred was carried off to London, for a few days with her sister Laura. But when Gerald was really left alone, he could not bear it. One day passed by, and another. And all the time he was like a man hung in chains over the edge of an abyss. Struggle as he might, he could not turn himself to the solid earth, he could not get footing. He was suspended on the edge of a void, writhing. Whatever he thought of, was the abyss�whether it were friends or strangers, or work or play, it all showed him only the same bottomless void, in which his heart swung perishing. There was no escape, there was nothing to grasp hold of. He must writhe on the edge of the chasm, suspended in chains of invisible physical life. At first he was quiet, he kept still, expecting the extremity to pass away, expecting to find himself released into the world of the living, after this extremity of penance. But it did not pass, and a crisis gained upon him. As the evening of the third day came on, his heart rang with fear. He could not bear another night. Another night was coming on, for another night he was to be suspended in chain of physical life, over the bottomless pit of nothingness. And he could not bear it. He could not bear it. He was frightened deeply, and coldly, frightened in his soul. He did not believe in his own strength any more. He could not fall into this infinite void, and rise again. If he fell, he would be gone for ever. He must withdraw, he must seek reinforcements. He did not believe in his own single self, any further than this. After dinner, faced with the ultimate experience of his own nothingness, he turned aside. He pulled on his boots, put on his coat, and set out to walk in the night. It was dark and misty. He went through the wood, stumbling and feeling his way to the Mill. Birkin was away. Good�he was half glad. He turned up the hill, and stumbled blindly over the wild slopes, having lost the path in the complete darkness. It was boring. Where was he going? No matter. He stumbled on till he came to a path again. Then he went on through another wood. His mind became dark, he went on automatically. Without thought or sensation, he stumbled unevenly on, out into the open again, fumbling for stiles, losing the path, and going along the hedges of the fields till he came to the outlet. And at last he came to the high road. It had distracted him to struggle blindly through the maze of darkness. But now, he must take a direction. And he did not even know where he was. But he must take a direction now. Nothing would be resolved by merely walking, walking away. He had to take a direction. He stood still on the road, that was high in the utterly dark night, and he did not know where he was. It was a strange sensation, his heart beating, and ringed round with the utterly unknown darkness. So he stood for some time. Then he heard footsteps, and saw a small, swinging light. He immediately went towards this. It was a miner. �Can you tell me,� he said, �where this road goes?� �Road? Ay, it goes ter Whatmore.� �Whatmore! Oh thank you, that�s right. I thought I was wrong. Good-night.� �Good-night,� replied the broad voice of the miner. Gerald guessed where he was. At least, when he came to Whatmore, he would know. He was glad to be on a high road. He walked forward as in a sleep of decision. That was Whatmore Village�? Yes, the King�s Head�and there the hall gates. He descended the steep hill almost running. Winding through the hollow, he passed the Grammar School, and came to Willey Green Church. The churchyard! He halted. Then in another moment he had clambered up the wall and was going among the graves. Even in this darkness he could see the heaped pallor of old white flowers at his feet. This then was the grave. He stooped down. The flowers were cold and clammy. There was a raw scent of chrysanthemums and tube-roses, deadened. He felt the clay beneath, and shrank, it was so horribly cold and sticky. He stood away in revulsion. Here was one centre then, here in the complete darkness beside the unseen, raw grave. But there was nothing for him here. No, he had nothing to stay here for. He felt as if some of the clay were sticking cold and unclean, on his heart. No, enough of this. Where then?�home? Never! It was no use going there. That was less than no use. It could not be done. There was somewhere else to go. Where? A dangerous resolve formed in his heart, like a fixed idea. There was Gudrun�she would be safe in her home. But he could get at her�he would get at her. He would not go back tonight till he had come to her, if it cost him his life. He staked his all on this throw. He set off walking straight across the fields towards Beldover. It was so dark, nobody could ever see him. His feet were wet and cold, heavy with clay. But he went on persistently, like a wind, straight forward, as if to his fate. There were great gaps in his consciousness. He was conscious that he was at Winthorpe hamlet, but quite unconscious how he had got there. And then, as in a dream, he was in the long street of Beldover, with its street-lamps. There was a noise of voices, and of a door shutting loudly, and being barred, and of men talking in the night. The �Lord Nelson� had just closed, and the drinkers were going home. He had better ask one of these where she lived�for he did not know the side streets at all. �Can you tell me where Somerset Drive is?� he asked of one of the uneven men. �Where what?� replied the tipsy miner�s voice. �Somerset Drive.� �Somerset Drive!�I�ve heard o� such a place, but I couldn�t for my life say where it is. Who might you be wanting?� �Mr Brangwen�William Brangwen.� �William Brangwen�?�?� �Who teaches at the Grammar School, at Willey Green�his daughter teaches there too.� �O-o-o-oh, Brangwen! _Now_ I�ve got you. Of _course_, William Brangwen! Yes, yes, he�s got two lasses as teachers, aside hisself. Ay, that�s him�that�s him! Why certainly I know where he lives, back your life I do! Yi�_what_ place do they ca� it?� �Somerset Drive,� repeated Gerald patiently. He knew his own colliers fairly well. �Somerset Drive, for certain!� said the collier, swinging his arm as if catching something up. �Somerset Drive�yi! I couldn�t for my life lay hold o� the lercality o� the place. Yis, I know the place, to be sure I do�� He turned unsteadily on his feet, and pointed up the dark, nigh-deserted road. �You go up theer�an� you ta�e th� first�yi, th� first turnin� on your left�o� that side�past Withamses tuffy shop�� �_I_ know,� said Gerald. �Ay! You go down a bit, past wheer th� water-man lives�and then Somerset Drive, as they ca� it, branches off on �t right hand side�an� there�s nowt but three houses in it, no more than three, I believe,�an� I�m a�most certain as theirs is th� last�th� last o� th� three�you see�� �Thank you very much,� said Gerald. �Good-night.� And he started off, leaving the tipsy man there standing rooted. Gerald went past the dark shops and houses, most of them sleeping now, and twisted round to the little blind road that ended on a field of darkness. He slowed down, as he neared his goal, not knowing how he should proceed. What if the house were closed in darkness? But it was not. He saw a big lighted window, and heard voices, then a gate banged. His quick ears caught the sound of Birkin�s voice, his keen eyes made out Birkin, with Ursula standing in a pale dress on the step of the garden path. Then Ursula stepped down, and came along the road, holding Birkin�s arm. Gerald went across into the darkness and they dawdled past him, talking happily, Birkin�s voice low, Ursula�s high and distinct. Gerald went quickly to the house. The blinds were drawn before the big, lighted window of the dining-room. Looking up the path at the side he could see the door left open, shedding a soft, coloured light from the hall lamp. He went quickly and silently up the path, and looked up into the hall. There were pictures on the walls, and the antlers of a stag�and the stairs going up on one side�and just near the foot of the stairs the half opened door of the dining-room. With heart drawn fine, Gerald stepped into the hall, whose floor was of coloured tiles, went quickly and looked into the large, pleasant room. In a chair by the fire, the father sat asleep, his head tilted back against the side of the big oak chimney piece, his ruddy face seen foreshortened, the nostrils open, the mouth fallen a little. It would take the merest sound to wake him. Gerald stood a second suspended. He glanced down the passage behind him. It was all dark. Again he was suspended. Then he went swiftly upstairs. His senses were so finely, almost supernaturally keen, that he seemed to cast his own will over the half-unconscious house. He came to the first landing. There he stood, scarcely breathing. Again, corresponding to the door below, there was a door again. That would be the mother�s room. He could hear her moving about in the candlelight. She would be expecting her husband to come up. He looked along the dark landing. Then, silently, on infinitely careful feet, he went along the passage, feeling the wall with the extreme tips of his fingers. There was a door. He stood and listened. He could hear two people�s breathing. It was not that. He went stealthily forward. There was another door, slightly open. The room was in darkness. Empty. Then there was the bathroom, he could smell the soap and the heat. Then at the end another bedroom�one soft breathing. This was she. With an almost occult carefulness he turned the door handle, and opened the door an inch. It creaked slightly. Then he opened it another inch�then another. His heart did not beat, he seemed to create a silence about himself, an obliviousness. He was in the room. Still the sleeper breathed softly. It was very dark. He felt his way forward inch by inch, with his feet and hands. He touched the bed, he could hear the sleeper. He drew nearer, bending close as if his eyes would disclose whatever there was. And then, very near to his face, to his fear, he saw the round, dark head of a boy. He recovered, turned round, saw the door ajar, a faint light revealed. And he retreated swiftly, drew the door to without fastening it, and passed rapidly down the passage. At the head of the stairs he hesitated. There was still time to flee. But it was unthinkable. He would maintain his will. He turned past the door of the parental bedroom like a shadow, and was climbing the second flight of stairs. They creaked under his weight�it was exasperating. Ah what disaster, if the mother�s door opened just beneath him, and she saw him! It would have to be, if it were so. He held the control still. He was not quite up these stairs when he heard a quick running of feet below, the outer door was closed and locked, he heard Ursula�s voice, then the father�s sleepy exclamation. He pressed on swiftly to the upper landing. Again a door was ajar, a room was empty. Feeling his way forward, with the tips of his fingers, travelling rapidly, like a blind man, anxious lest Ursula should come upstairs, he found another door. There, with his preternaturally fine sense alert, he listened. He heard someone moving in bed. This would be she. Softly now, like one who has only one sense, the tactile sense, he turned the latch. It clicked. He held still. The bed-clothes rustled. His heart did not beat. Then again he drew the latch back, and very gently pushed the door. It made a sticking noise as it gave. �Ursula?� said Gudrun�s voice, frightened. He quickly opened the door and pushed it behind him. �Is it you, Ursula?� came Gudrun�s frightened voice. He heard her sitting up in bed. In another moment she would scream. �No, it�s me,� he said, feeling his way towards her. �It is I, Gerald.� She sat motionless in her bed in sheer astonishment. She was too astonished, too much taken by surprise, even to be afraid. �Gerald!� she echoed, in blank amazement. He had found his way to the bed, and his outstretched hand touched her warm breast blindly. She shrank away. �Let me make a light,� she said, springing out. He stood perfectly motionless. He heard her touch the match-box, he heard her fingers in their movement. Then he saw her in the light of a match, which she held to the candle. The light rose in the room, then sank to a small dimness, as the flame sank down on the candle, before it mounted again. She looked at him, as he stood near the other side of the bed. His cap was pulled low over his brow, his black overcoat was buttoned close up to his chin. His face was strange and luminous. He was inevitable as a supernatural being. When she had seen him, she knew. She knew there was something fatal in the situation, and she must accept it. Yet she must challenge him. �How did you come up?� she asked. �I walked up the stairs�the door was open.� She looked at him. �I haven�t closed this door, either,� he said. She walked swiftly across the room, and closed her door, softly, and locked it. Then she came back. She was wonderful, with startled eyes and flushed cheeks, and her plait of hair rather short and thick down her back, and her long, fine white night-dress falling to her feet. She saw that his boots were all clayey, even his trousers were plastered with clay. And she wondered if he had made footprints all the way up. He was a very strange figure, standing in her bedroom, near the tossed bed. �Why have you come?� she asked, almost querulous. �I wanted to,� he replied. And this she could see from his face. It was fate. �You are so muddy,� she said, in distaste, but gently. He looked down at his feet. �I was walking in the dark,� he replied. But he felt vividly elated. There was a pause. He stood on one side of the tumbled bed, she on the other. He did not even take his cap from his brows. �And what do you want of me,� she challenged. He looked aside, and did not answer. Save for the extreme beauty and mystic attractiveness of this distinct, strange face, she would have sent him away. But his face was too wonderful and undiscovered to her. It fascinated her with the fascination of pure beauty, cast a spell on her, like nostalgia, an ache. �What do you want of me?� she repeated in an estranged voice. He pulled off his cap, in a movement of dream-liberation, and went across to her. But he could not touch her, because she stood barefoot in her night-dress, and he was muddy and damp. Her eyes, wide and large and wondering, watched him, and asked him the ultimate question. �I came�because I must,� he said. �Why do you ask?� She looked at him in doubt and wonder. �I must ask,� she said. He shook his head slightly. �There is no answer,� he replied, with strange vacancy. There was about him a curious, and almost godlike air of simplicity and native directness. He reminded her of an apparition, the young Hermes. �But why did you come to me?� she persisted. �Because�it has to be so. If there weren�t you in the world, then _I_ shouldn�t be in the world, either.� She stood looking at him, with large, wide, wondering, stricken eyes. His eyes were looking steadily into hers all the time, and he seemed fixed in an odd supernatural steadfastness. She sighed. She was lost now. She had no choice. �Won�t you take off your boots,� she said. �They must be wet.� He dropped his cap on a chair, unbuttoned his overcoat, lifting up his chin to unfasten the throat buttons. His short, keen hair was ruffled. He was so beautifully blond, like wheat. He pulled off his overcoat. Quickly he pulled off his jacket, pulled loose his black tie, and was unfastening his studs, which were headed each with a pearl. She listened, watching, hoping no one would hear the starched linen crackle. It seemed to snap like pistol shots. He had come for vindication. She let him hold her in his arms, clasp her close against him. He found in her an infinite relief. Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. It was wonderful, marvellous, it was a miracle. This was the ever-recurrent miracle of his life, at the knowledge of which he was lost in an ecstasy of relief and wonder. And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist. The terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation. As he drew nearer to her, he plunged deeper into her enveloping soft warmth, a wonderful creative heat that penetrated his veins and gave him life again. He felt himself dissolving and sinking to rest in the bath of her living strength. It seemed as if her heart in her breast were a second unconquerable sun, into the glow and creative strength of which he plunged further and further. All his veins, that were murdered and lacerated, healed softly as life came pulsing in, stealing invisibly in to him as if it were the all-powerful effluence of the sun. His blood, which seemed to have been drawn back into death, came ebbing on the return, surely, beautifully, powerfully. He felt his limbs growing fuller and flexible with life, his body gained an unknown strength. He was a man again, strong and rounded. And he was a child, so soothed and restored and full of gratitude. And she, she was the great bath of life, he worshipped her. Mother and substance of all life she was. And he, child and man, received of her and was made whole. His pure body was almost killed. But the miraculous, soft effluence of her breast suffused over him, over his seared, damaged brain, like a healing lymph, like a soft, soothing flow of life itself, perfect as if he were bathed in the womb again. His brain was hurt, seared, the tissue was as if destroyed. He had not known how hurt he was, how his tissue, the very tissue of his brain was damaged by the corrosive flood of death. Now, as the healing lymph of her effluence flowed through him, he knew how destroyed he was, like a plant whose tissue is burst from inwards by a frost. He buried his small, hard head between her breasts, and pressed her breasts against him with his hands. And she with quivering hands pressed his head against her, as he lay suffused out, and she lay fully conscious. The lovely creative warmth flooded through him like a sleep of fecundity within the womb. Ah, if only she would grant him the flow of this living effluence, he would be restored, he would be complete again. He was afraid she would deny him before it was finished. Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, and she could not put him away. And his seared, ruined membrane relaxed, softened, that which was seared and stiff and blasted yielded again, became soft and flexible, palpitating with new life. He was infinitely grateful, as to God, or as an infant is at its mother�s breast. He was glad and grateful like a delirium, as he felt his own wholeness come over him again, as he felt the full, unutterable sleep coming over him, the sleep of complete exhaustion and restoration. But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness. She lay motionless, with wide eyes staring motionless into the darkness, whilst he was sunk away in sleep, his arms round her. She seemed to be hearing waves break on a hidden shore, long, slow, gloomy waves, breaking with the rhythm of fate, so monotonously that it seemed eternal. This endless breaking of slow, sullen waves of fate held her life a possession, whilst she lay with dark, wide eyes looking into the darkness. She could see so far, as far as eternity�yet she saw nothing. She was suspended in perfect consciousness�and of what was she conscious? This mood of extremity, when she lay staring into eternity, utterly suspended, and conscious of everything, to the last limits, passed and left her uneasy. She had lain so long motionless. She moved, she became self-conscious. She wanted to look at him, to see him. But she dared not make a light, because she knew he would wake, and she did not want to break his perfect sleep, that she knew he had got of her. She disengaged herself, softly, and rose up a little to look at him. There was a faint light, it seemed to her, in the room. She could just distinguish his features, as he slept the perfect sleep. In this darkness, she seemed to see him so distinctly. But he was far off, in another world. Ah, she could shriek with torment, he was so far off, and perfected, in another world. She seemed to look at him as at a pebble far away under clear dark water. And here was she, left with all the anguish of consciousness, whilst he was sunk deep into the other element of mindless, remote, living shadow-gleam. He was beautiful, far-off, and perfected. They would never be together. Ah, this awful, inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being! There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world, whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the outer darkness. She lay in intense and vivid consciousness, an exhausting superconsciousness. The church clock struck the hours, it seemed to her, in quick succession. She heard them distinctly in the tension of her vivid consciousness. And he slept as if time were one moment, unchanging and unmoving. She was exhausted, wearied. Yet she must continue in this state of violent active superconsciousness. She was conscious of everything�her childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the unrealised influences and all the happenings she had not understood, pertaining to herself, to her family, to her friends, her lovers, her acquaintances, everybody. It was as if she drew a glittering rope of knowledge out of the sea of darkness, drew and drew and drew it out of the fathomless depths of the past, and still it did not come to an end, there was no end to it, she must haul and haul at the rope of glittering consciousness, pull it out phosphorescent from the endless depths of the unconsciousness, till she was weary, aching, exhausted, and fit to break, and yet she had not done. Ah, if only she might wake him! She turned uneasily. When could she rouse him and send him away? When could she disturb him? And she relapsed into her activity of automatic consciousness, that would never end. But the time was drawing near when she could wake him. It was like a release. The clock had struck four, outside in the night. Thank God the night had passed almost away. At five he must go, and she would be released. Then she could relax and fill her own place. Now she was driven up against his perfect sleeping motion like a knife white-hot on a grindstone. There was something monstrous about him, about his juxtaposition against her. The last hour was the longest. And yet, at last it passed. Her heart leapt with relief�yes, there was the slow, strong stroke of the church clock�at last, after this night of eternity. She waited to catch each slow, fatal reverberation. �Three�four�five!� There, it was finished. A weight rolled off her. She raised herself, leaned over him tenderly, and kissed him. She was sad to wake him. After a few moments, she kissed him again. But he did not stir. The darling, he was so deep in sleep! What a shame to take him out of it. She let him lie a little longer. But he must go�he must really go. With full over-tenderness she took his face between her hands, and kissed his eyes. The eyes opened, he remained motionless, looking at her. Her heart stood still. To hide her face from his dreadful opened eyes, in the darkness, she bent down and kissed him, whispering: �You must go, my love.� But she was sick with terror, sick. He put his arms round her. Her heart sank. �But you must go, my love. It�s late.� �What time is it?� he said. Strange, his man�s voice. She quivered. It was an intolerable oppression to her. �Past five o�clock,� she said. But he only closed his arms round her again. Her heart cried within her in torture. She disengaged herself firmly. �You really must go,� she said. �Not for a minute,� he said. She lay still, nestling against him, but unyielding. �Not for a minute,� he repeated, clasping her closer. �Yes,� she said, unyielding, �I�m afraid if you stay any longer.� There was a certain coldness in her voice that made him release her, and she broke away, rose and lit the candle. That then was the end. He got up. He was warm and full of life and desire. Yet he felt a little bit ashamed, humiliated, putting on his clothes before her, in the candle-light. For he felt revealed, exposed to her, at a time when she was in some way against him. It was all very difficult to understand. He dressed himself quickly, without collar or tie. Still he felt full and complete, perfected. She thought it humiliating to see a man dressing: the ridiculous shirt, the ridiculous trousers and braces. But again an idea saved her. �It is like a workman getting up to go to work,� thought Gudrun. �And I am like a workman�s wife.� But an ache like nausea was upon her: a nausea of him. He pushed his collar and tie into his overcoat pocket. Then he sat down and pulled on his boots. They were sodden, as were his socks and trouser-bottoms. But he himself was quick and warm. �Perhaps you ought to have put your boots on downstairs,� she said. At once, without answering, he pulled them off again, and stood holding them in his hand. She had thrust her feet into slippers, and flung a loose robe round her. She was ready. She looked at him as he stood waiting, his black coat buttoned to the chin, his cap pulled down, his boots in his hand. And the passionate almost hateful fascination revived in her for a moment. It was not exhausted. His face was so warm-looking, wide-eyed and full of newness, so perfect. She felt old, old. She went to him heavily, to be kissed. He kissed her quickly. She wished his warm, expressionless beauty did not so fatally put a spell on her, compel her and subjugate her. It was a burden upon her, that she resented, but could not escape. Yet when she looked at his straight man�s brows, and at his rather small, well-shaped nose, and at his blue, indifferent eyes, she knew her passion for him was not yet satisfied, perhaps never could be satisfied. Only now she was weary, with an ache like nausea. She wanted him gone. They went downstairs quickly. It seemed they made a prodigious noise. He followed her as, wrapped in her vivid green wrap, she preceded him with the light. She suffered badly with fear, lest her people should be roused. He hardly cared. He did not care now who knew. And she hated this in him. One _must_ be cautious. One must preserve oneself. She led the way to the kitchen. It was neat and tidy, as the woman had left it. He looked up at the clock�twenty minutes past five Then he sat down on a chair to put on his boots. She waited, watching his every movement. She wanted it to be over, it was a great nervous strain on her. He stood up�she unbolted the back door, and looked out. A cold, raw night, not yet dawn, with a piece of a moon in the vague sky. She was glad she need not go out. �Good-bye then,� he murmured. �I�ll come to the gate,� she said. And again she hurried on in front, to warn him of the steps. And at the gate, once more she stood on the step whilst he stood below her. �Good-bye,� she whispered. He kissed her dutifully, and turned away. She suffered torments hearing his firm tread going so distinctly down the road. Ah, the insensitiveness of that firm tread! She closed the gate, and crept quickly and noiselessly back to bed. When she was in her room, and the door closed, and all safe, she breathed freely, and a great weight fell off her. She nestled down in bed, in the groove his body had made, in the warmth he had left. And excited, worn-out, yet still satisfied, she fell soon into a deep, heavy sleep. Gerald walked quickly through the raw darkness of the coming dawn. He met nobody. His mind was beautifully still and thoughtless, like a still pool, and his body full and warm and rich. He went quickly along towards Shortlands, in a grateful self-sufficiency. CHAPTER XXV. MARRIAGE OR NOT The Brangwen family was going to move from Beldover. It was necessary now for the father to be in town. Birkin had taken out a marriage licence, yet Ursula deferred from day to day. She would not fix any definite time�she still wavered. Her month�s notice to leave the Grammar School was in its third week. Christmas was not far off. Gerald waited for the Ursula-Birkin marriage. It was something crucial to him. �Shall we make it a double-barrelled affair?� he said to Birkin one day. �Who for the second shot?� asked Birkin. �Gudrun and me,� said Gerald, the venturesome twinkle in his eyes. Birkin looked at him steadily, as if somewhat taken aback. �Serious�or joking?� he asked. �Oh, serious. Shall I? Shall Gudrun and I rush in along with you?� �Do by all means,� said Birkin. �I didn�t know you�d got that length.� �What length?� said Gerald, looking at the other man, and laughing. �Oh yes, we�ve gone all the lengths.� �There remains to put it on a broad social basis, and to achieve a high moral purpose,� said Birkin. �Something like that: the length and breadth and height of it,� replied Gerald, smiling. �Oh well,� said Birkin, �it�s a very admirable step to take, I should say.� Gerald looked at him closely. �Why aren�t you enthusiastic?� he asked. �I thought you were such dead nuts on marriage.� Birkin lifted his shoulders. �One might as well be dead nuts on noses. There are all sorts of noses, snub and otherwise�� Gerald laughed. �And all sorts of marriage, also snub and otherwise?� he said. �That�s it.� �And you think if I marry, it will be snub?� asked Gerald quizzically, his head a little on one side. Birkin laughed quickly. �How do I know what it will be!� he said. �Don�t lambaste me with my own parallels�� Gerald pondered a while. �But I should like to know your opinion, exactly,� he said. �On your marriage?�or marrying? Why should you want my opinion? I�ve got no opinions. I�m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It�s a mere question of convenience.� Still Gerald watched him closely. �More than that, I think,� he said seriously. �However you may be bored by the ethics of marriage, yet really to marry, in one�s own personal case, is something critical, final�� �You mean there is something final in going to the registrar with a woman?� �If you�re coming back with her, I do,� said Gerald. �It is in some way irrevocable.� �Yes, I agree,� said Birkin. �No matter how one regards legal marriage, yet to enter into the married state, in one�s own personal instance, is final�� �I believe it is,� said Birkin, �somewhere.� �The question remains then, should one do it,� said Gerald. Birkin watched him narrowly, with amused eyes. �You are like Lord Bacon, Gerald,� he said. �You argue it like a lawyer�or like Hamlet�s to-be-or-not-to-be. If I were you I would _not_ marry: but ask Gudrun, not me. You�re not marrying me, are you?� Gerald did not heed the latter part of this speech. �Yes,� he said, �one must consider it coldly. It is something critical. One comes to the point where one must take a step in one direction or another. And marriage is one direction�� �And what is the other?� asked Birkin quickly. Gerald looked up at him with hot, strangely-conscious eyes, that the other man could not understand. �I can�t say,� he replied. �If I knew _that_�� He moved uneasily on his feet, and did not finish. �You mean if you knew the alternative?� asked Birkin. �And since you don�t know it, marriage is a _pis aller._� Gerald looked up at Birkin with the same hot, constrained eyes. �One does have the feeling that marriage is a _pis aller_,� he admitted. �Then don�t do it,� said Birkin. �I tell you,� he went on, �the same as I�ve said before, marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. _�goïsme à deux_ is nothing to it. It�s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy�it�s the most repulsive thing on earth.� �I quite agree,� said Gerald. �There�s something inferior about it. But as I say, what�s the alternative.� �One should avoid this _home_ instinct. It�s not an instinct, it�s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a _home_.� �I agree really,� said Gerald. �But there�s no alternative.� �We�ve got to find one. I do believe in a permanent union between a man and a woman. Chopping about is merely an exhaustive process. But a permanent relation between a man and a woman isn�t the last word�it certainly isn�t.� �Quite,� said Gerald. �In fact,� said Birkin, �because the relation between man and woman is made the supreme and exclusive relationship, that�s where all the tightness and meanness and insufficiency comes in.� �Yes, I believe you,� said Gerald. �You�ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the _additional_ perfect relationship between man and man�additional to marriage.� �I can never see how they can be the same,� said Gerald. �Not the same�but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.� �I know,� said Gerald, �you believe something like that. Only I can�t _feel_ it, you see.� He put his hand on Birkin�s arm, with a sort of deprecating affection. And he smiled as if triumphantly. He was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him. He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this. And marriage was the seal of his condemnation. He was willing to be sealed thus in the underworld, like a soul damned but living forever in damnation. But he would not make any pure relationship with any other soul. He could not. Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. This he would do. The other way was to accept Rupert�s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman. If he pledged himself with the man he would later be able to pledge himself with the woman: not merely in legal marriage, but in absolute, mystic marriage. Yet he could not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert�s offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to be committed. CHAPTER XXVI. A CHAIR There was a jumble market every Monday afternoon in the old market-place in town. Ursula and Birkin strayed down there one afternoon. They had been talking of furniture, and they wanted to see if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of rubbish collected on the cobble-stones. The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls under a wall. It was in a poor quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end, a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side, and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness. Now and again a great chocolate-and-yellow tramcar ground round a difficult bend under the hosiery factory. Ursula was superficially thrilled when she found herself out among the common people, in the jumbled place piled with old bedding, heaps of old iron, shabby crockery in pale lots, muffled lots of unthinkable clothing. She and Birkin went unwillingly down the narrow aisle between the rusty wares. He was looking at the goods, she at the people. She excitedly watched a young woman, who was going to have a baby, and who was turning over a mattress and making a young man, down-at-heel and dejected, feel it also. So secretive and active and anxious the young woman seemed, so reluctant, slinking, the young man. He was going to marry her because she was having a child. When they had felt the mattress, the young woman asked the old man seated on a stool among his wares, how much it was. He told her, and she turned to the young man. The latter was ashamed, and selfconscious. He turned his face away, though he left his body standing there, and muttered aside. And again the woman anxiously and actively fingered the mattress and added up in her mind and bargained with the old, unclean man. All the while, the young man stood by, shamefaced and down-at-heel, submitting. �Look,� said Birkin, �there is a pretty chair.� �Charming!� cried Ursula. �Oh, charming.� It was an arm-chair of simple wood, probably birch, but of such fine delicacy of grace, standing there on the sordid stones, it almost brought tears to the eyes. It was square in shape, of the purest, slender lines, and four short lines of wood in the back, that reminded Ursula of harpstrings. �It was once,� said Birkin, �gilded�and it had a cane seat. Somebody has nailed this wooden seat in. Look, here is a trifle of the red that underlay the gilt. The rest is all black, except where the wood is worn pure and glossy. It is the fine unity of the lines that is so attractive. Look, how they run and meet and counteract. But of course the wooden seat is wrong�it destroys the perfect lightness and unity in tension the cane gave. I like it though�� �Ah yes,� said Ursula, �so do I.� �How much is it?� Birkin asked the man. �Ten shillings.� �And you will send it�?� It was bought. �So beautiful, so pure!� Birkin said. �It almost breaks my heart.� They walked along between the heaps of rubbish. �My beloved country�it had something to express even when it made that chair.� �And hasn�t it now?� asked Ursula. She was always angry when he took this tone. �No, it hasn�t. When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, even Jane Austen�s England�it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.� �It isn�t true,� cried Ursula. �Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? _Really_, I don�t think so much of Jane Austen�s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like�� �It could afford to be materialistic,� said Birkin, �because it had the power to be something other�which we haven�t. We are materialistic because we haven�t the power to be anything else�try as we may, we can�t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.� Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else. �And I hate your past. I�m sick of it,� she cried. �I believe I even hate that old chair, though it _is_ beautiful. It isn�t _my_ sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I�m sick of the beloved past.� �Not so sick as I am of the accursed present,� he said. �Yes, just the same. I hate the present�but I don�t want the past to take its place�I don�t want that old chair.� He was rather angry for a moment. Then he looked at the sky shining beyond the tower of the public baths, and he seemed to get over it all. He laughed. �All right,� he said, �then let us not have it. I�m sick of it all, too. At any rate one can�t go on living on the old bones of beauty.� �One can�t,� she cried. �I _don�t_ want old things.� �The truth is, we don�t want things at all,� he replied. �The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.� This startled her for a moment. Then she replied: �So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.� �Not somewhere�anywhere,� he said. �One should just live anywhere�not have a definite place. I don�t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is _complete_, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone.� She clung to his arm as they walked away from the market. �But what are we going to do?� she said. �We must live somehow. And I do want some beauty in my surroundings. I want a sort of natural _grandeur_ even, _splendour_.� �You�ll never get it in houses and furniture�or even clothes. Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.� She stood in the street contemplating. �And we are never to have a complete place of our own�never a home?� she said. �Pray God, in this world, no,� he answered. �But there�s only this world,� she objected. He spread out his hands with a gesture of indifference. �Meanwhile, then, we�ll avoid having things of our own,� he said. �But you�ve just bought a chair,� she said. �I can tell the man I don�t want it,� he replied. She pondered again. Then a queer little movement twitched her face. �No,� she said, �we don�t want it. I�m sick of old things.� �New ones as well,� he said. They retraced their steps. There�in front of some furniture, stood the young couple, the woman who was going to have a baby, and the narrow-faced youth. She was fair, rather short, stout. He was of medium height, attractively built. His dark hair fell sideways over his brow, from under his cap, he stood strangely aloof, like one of the damned. �Let us give it to _them_,� whispered Ursula. �Look they are getting a home together.� �_I_ won�t aid abet them in it,� he said petulantly, instantly sympathising with the aloof, furtive youth, against the active, procreant female. �Oh yes,� cried Ursula. �It�s right for them�there�s nothing else for them.� �Very well,� said Birkin, �you offer it to them. I�ll watch.� Ursula went rather nervously to the young couple, who were discussing an iron washstand�or rather, the man was glancing furtively and wonderingly, like a prisoner, at the abominable article, whilst the woman was arguing. �We bought a chair,� said Ursula, �and we don�t want it. Would you have it? We should be glad if you would.� The young couple looked round at her, not believing that she could be addressing them. �Would you care for it?� repeated Ursula. �It�s really _very_ pretty�but�but�� she smiled rather dazzlingly. The young couple only stared at her, and looked significantly at each other, to know what to do. And the man curiously obliterated himself, as if he could make himself invisible, as a rat can. �We wanted to _give_ it to you,� explained Ursula, now overcome with confusion and dread of them. She was attracted by the young man. He was a still, mindless creature, hardly a man at all, a creature that the towns have produced, strangely pure-bred and fine in one sense, furtive, quick, subtle. His lashes were dark and long and fine over his eyes, that had no mind in them, only a dreadful kind of subject, inward consciousness, glazed and dark. His dark brows and all his lines, were finely drawn. He would be a dreadful, but wonderful lover to a woman, so marvellously contributed. His legs would be marvellously subtle and alive, under the shapeless, trousers, he had some of the fineness and stillness and silkiness of a dark-eyed, silent rat. Ursula had apprehended him with a fine _frisson_ of attraction. The full-built woman was staring offensively. Again Ursula forgot him. �Won�t you have the chair?� she said. The man looked at her with a sideways look of appreciation, yet far-off, almost insolent. The woman drew herself up. There was a certain costermonger richness about her. She did not know what Ursula was after, she was on her guard, hostile. Birkin approached, smiling wickedly at seeing Ursula so nonplussed and frightened. �What�s the matter?� he said, smiling. His eyelids had dropped slightly, there was about him the same suggestive, mocking secrecy that was in the bearing of the two city creatures. The man jerked his head a little on one side, indicating Ursula, and said, with curious amiable, jeering warmth: �What she warnt?�eh?� An odd smile writhed his lips. Birkin looked at him from under his slack, ironical eyelids. �To give you a chair�that�with the label on it,� he said, pointing. The man looked at the object indicated. There was a curious hostility in male, outlawed understanding between the two men. �What�s she warnt to give it _us_ for, guvnor,� he replied, in a tone of free intimacy that insulted Ursula. �Thought you�d like it�it�s a pretty chair. We bought it and don�t want it. No need for you to have it, don�t be frightened,� said Birkin, with a wry smile. The man glanced up at him, half inimical, half recognising. �Why don�t you want it for yourselves, if you�ve just bought it?� asked the woman coolly. ��Taint good enough for you, now you�ve had a look at it. Frightened it�s got something in it, eh?� She was looking at Ursula, admiringly, but with some resentment. �I�d never thought of that,� said Birkin. �But no, the wood�s too thin everywhere.� �You see,� said Ursula, her face luminous and pleased. �_We_ are just going to get married, and we thought we�d buy things. Then we decided, just now, that we wouldn�t have furniture, we�d go abroad.� The full-built, slightly blowsy city girl looked at the fine face of the other woman, with appreciation. They appreciated each other. The youth stood aside, his face expressionless and timeless, the thin line of the black moustache drawn strangely suggestive over his rather wide, closed mouth. He was impassive, abstract, like some dark suggestive presence, a gutter-presence. �It�s all right to be some folks,� said the city girl, turning to her own young man. He did not look at her, but he smiled with the lower part of his face, putting his head aside in an odd gesture of assent. His eyes were unchanging, glazed with darkness. �Cawsts something to chynge your mind,� he said, in an incredibly low accent. �Only ten shillings this time,� said Birkin. The man looked up at him with a grimace of a smile, furtive, unsure. �Cheap at �arf a quid, guvnor,� he said. �Not like getting divawced.� �We�re not married yet,� said Birkin. �No, no more aren�t we,� said the young woman loudly. �But we shall be, a Saturday.� Again she looked at the young man with a determined, protective look, at once overbearing and very gentle. He grinned sicklily, turning away his head. She had got his manhood, but Lord, what did he care! He had a strange furtive pride and slinking singleness. �Good luck to you,� said Birkin. �Same to you,� said the young woman. Then, rather tentatively: �When�s yours coming off, then?� Birkin looked round at Ursula. �It�s for the lady to say,� he replied. �We go to the registrar the moment she�s ready.� Ursula laughed, covered with confusion and bewilderment. �No �urry,� said the young man, grinning suggestive. �Oh, don�t break your neck to get there,� said the young woman. ��Slike when you�re dead�you�re long time married.� The young man turned aside as if this hit him. �The longer the better, let us hope,� said Birkin. �That�s it, guvnor,� said the young man admiringly. �Enjoy it while it larsts�niver whip a dead donkey.� �Only when he�s shamming dead,� said the young woman, looking at her young man with caressive tenderness of authority. �Aw, there�s a difference,� he said satirically. �What about the chair?� said Birkin. �Yes, all right,� said the woman. They trailed off to the dealer, the handsome but abject young fellow hanging a little aside. �That�s it,� said Birkin. �Will you take it with you, or have the address altered.� �Oh, Fred can carry it. Make him do what he can for the dear old �ome.� �Mike use of �im,� said Fred, grimly humorous, as he took the chair from the dealer. His movements were graceful, yet curiously abject, slinking. ��Ere�s mother�s cosy chair,� he said. �Warnts a cushion.� And he stood it down on the market stones. �Don�t you think it�s pretty?� laughed Ursula. �Oh, I do,� said the young woman. ��Ave a sit in it, you�ll wish you�d kept it,� said the young man. Ursula promptly sat down in the middle of the market-place. �Awfully comfortable,� she said. �But rather hard. You try it.� She invited the young man to a seat. But he turned uncouthly, awkwardly aside, glancing up at her with quick bright eyes, oddly suggestive, like a quick, live rat. �Don�t spoil him,� said the young woman. �He�s not used to arm-chairs, �e isn�t.� The young man turned away, and said, with averted grin: �Only warnts legs on �is.� The four parted. The young woman thanked them. �Thank you for the chair�it�ll last till it gives way.� �Keep it for an ornyment,� said the young man. �Good afternoon�good afternoon,� said Ursula and Birkin. �Goo�-luck to you,� said the young man, glancing and avoiding Birkin�s eyes, as he turned aside his head. The two couples went asunder, Ursula clinging to Birkin�s arm. When they had gone some distance, she glanced back and saw the young man going beside the full, easy young woman. His trousers sank over his heels, he moved with a sort of slinking evasion, more crushed with odd self-consciousness now he had the slim old arm-chair to carry, his arm over the back, the four fine, square tapering legs swaying perilously near the granite setts of the pavement. And yet he was somewhere indomitable and separate, like a quick, vital rat. He had a queer, subterranean beauty, repulsive too. �How strange they are!� said Ursula. �Children of men,� he said. �They remind me of Jesus: �The meek shall inherit the earth.�� �But they aren�t the meek,� said Ursula. �Yes, I don�t know why, but they are,� he replied. They waited for the tramcar. Ursula sat on top and looked out on the town. The dusk was just dimming the hollows of crowded houses. �And are they going to inherit the earth?� she said. �Yes�they.� �Then what are we going to do?� she asked. �We�re not like them�are we? We�re not the meek?� �No. We�ve got to live in the chinks they leave us.� �How horrible!� cried Ursula. �I don�t want to live in chinks.� �Don�t worry,� he said. �They are the children of men, they like market-places and street-corners best. That leaves plenty of chinks.� �All the world,� she said. �Ah no�but some room.� The tramcar mounted slowly up the hill, where the ugly winter-grey masses of houses looked like a vision of hell that is cold and angular. They sat and looked. Away in the distance was an angry redness of sunset. It was all cold, somehow small, crowded, and like the end of the world. �I don�t mind it even then,� said Ursula, looking at the repulsiveness of it all. �It doesn�t concern me.� �No more it does,� he replied, holding her hand. �One needn�t see. One goes one�s way. In my world it is sunny and spacious�� �It is, my love, isn�t it?� she cried, hugging near to him on the top of the tramcar, so that the other passengers stared at them. �And we will wander about on the face of the earth,� he said, �and we�ll look at the world beyond just this bit.� There was a long silence. Her face was radiant like gold, as she sat thinking. �I don�t want to inherit the earth,� she said. �I don�t want to inherit anything.� He closed his hand over hers. �Neither do I. I want to be disinherited.� She clasped his fingers closely. �We won�t care about _anything_,� she said. He sat still, and laughed. �And we�ll be married, and have done with them,� she added. Again he laughed. �It�s one way of getting rid of everything,� she said, �to get married.� �And one way of accepting the whole world,� he added. �A whole other world, yes,� she said happily. �Perhaps there�s Gerald�and Gudrun�� he said. �If there is there is, you see,� she said. �It�s no good our worrying. We can�t really alter them, can we?� �No,� he said. �One has no right to try�not with the best intentions in the world.� �Do you try to force them?� she asked. �Perhaps,� he said. �Why should I want him to be free, if it isn�t his business?� She paused for a time. �We can�t _make_ him happy, anyhow,� she said. �He�d have to be it of himself.� �I know,� he said. �But we want other people with us, don�t we?� �Why should we?� she asked. �I don�t know,� he said uneasily. �One has a hankering after a sort of further fellowship.� �But why?� she insisted. �Why should you hanker after other people? Why should you need them?� This hit him right on the quick. His brows knitted. �Does it end with just our two selves?� he asked, tense. �Yes�what more do you want? If anybody likes to come along, let them. But why must you run after them?� His face was tense and unsatisfied. �You see,� he said, �I always imagine our being really happy with some few other people�a little freedom with people.� She pondered for a moment. �Yes, one does want that. But it must _happen_. You can�t do anything for it with your will. You always seem to think you can _force_ the flowers to come out. People must love us because they love us�you can�t _make_ them.� �I know,� he said. �But must one take no steps at all? Must one just go as if one were alone in the world�the only creature in the world?� �You�ve got me,� she said. �Why should you _need_ others? Why must you force people to agree with you? Why can�t you be single by yourself, as you are always saying? You try to bully Gerald�as you tried to bully Hermione. You must learn to be alone. And it�s so horrid of you. You�ve got me. And yet you want to force other people to love you as well. You do try to bully them to love you. And even then, you don�t want their love.� His face was full of real perplexity. �Don�t I?� he said. �It�s the problem I can�t solve. I _know_ I want a perfect and complete relationship with you: and we�ve nearly got it�we really have. But beyond that. _Do_ I want a real, ultimate relationship with Gerald? Do I want a final almost extra-human relationship with him�a relationship in the ultimate of me and him�or don�t I?� She looked at him for a long time, with strange bright eyes, but she did not answer. CHAPTER XXVII. FLITTING That evening Ursula returned home very bright-eyed and wondrous�which irritated her people. Her father came home at suppertime, tired after the evening class, and the long journey home. Gudrun was reading, the mother sat in silence. Suddenly Ursula said to the company at large, in a bright voice, �Rupert and I are going to be married tomorrow.� Her father turned round, stiffly. �You what?� he said. �Tomorrow!� echoed Gudrun. �Indeed!� said the mother. But Ursula only smiled wonderfully, and did not reply. �Married tomorrow!� cried her father harshly. �What are you talking about.� �Yes,� said Ursula. �Why not?� Those two words, from her, always drove him mad. �Everything is all right�we shall go to the registrar�s office�� There was a second�s hush in the room, after Ursula�s blithe vagueness. �_Really_, Ursula!� said Gudrun. �Might we ask why there has been all this secrecy?� demanded the mother, rather superbly. �But there hasn�t,� said Ursula. �You knew.� �Who knew?� now cried the father. �Who knew? What do you mean by your �you knew�?� He was in one of his stupid rages, she instantly closed against him. �Of course you knew,� she said coolly. �You knew we were going to get married.� There was a dangerous pause. �We knew you were going to get married, did we? Knew! Why, does anybody know anything about you, you shifty bitch!� �Father!� cried Gudrun, flushing deep in violent remonstrance. Then, in a cold, but gentle voice, as if to remind her sister to be tractable: �But isn�t it a _fearfully_ sudden decision, Ursula?� she asked. �No, not really,� replied Ursula, with the same maddening cheerfulness. �He�s been _wanting_ me to agree for weeks�he�s had the licence ready. Only I�I wasn�t ready in myself. Now I am ready�is there anything to be disagreeable about?� �Certainly not,� said Gudrun, but in a tone of cold reproof. �You are perfectly free to do as you like.� ��Ready in yourself��_yourself_, that�s all that matters, isn�t it! �I wasn�t ready in myself,�� he mimicked her phrase offensively. �You and _yourself_, you�re of some importance, aren�t you?� She drew herself up and set back her throat, her eyes shining yellow and dangerous. �I am to myself,� she said, wounded and mortified. �I know I am not to anybody else. You only wanted to _bully_ me�you never cared for my happiness.� He was leaning forward watching her, his face intense like a spark. �Ursula, what are you saying? Keep your tongue still,� cried her mother. Ursula swung round, and the lights in her eyes flashed. �No, I won�t,� she cried. �I won�t hold my tongue and be bullied. What does it matter which day I get married�what does it _matter!_ It doesn�t affect anybody but myself.� Her father was tense and gathered together like a cat about to spring. �Doesn�t it?� he cried, coming nearer to her. She shrank away. �No, how can it?� she replied, shrinking but stubborn. �It doesn�t matter to _me_ then, what you do�what becomes of you?� he cried, in a strange voice like a cry. The mother and Gudrun stood back as if hypnotised. �No,� stammered Ursula. Her father was very near to her. �You only want to�� She knew it was dangerous, and she stopped. He was gathered together, every muscle ready. �What?� he challenged. �Bully me,� she muttered, and even as her lips were moving, his hand had caught her smack at the side of the face and she was sent up against the door. �Father!� cried Gudrun in a high voice, �it is impossible!� He stood unmoving. Ursula recovered, her hand was on the door handle. She slowly drew herself up. He seemed doubtful now. �It�s true,� she declared, with brilliant tears in her eyes, her head lifted up in defiance. �What has your love meant, what did it ever mean?�bullying, and denial�it did�� He was advancing again with strange, tense movements, and clenched fist, and the face of a murderer. But swift as lightning she had flashed out of the door, and they heard her running upstairs. He stood for a moment looking at the door. Then, like a defeated animal, he turned and went back to his seat by the fire. Gudrun was very white. Out of the intense silence, the mother�s voice was heard saying, cold and angry: �Well, you shouldn�t take so much notice of her.� Again the silence fell, each followed a separate set of emotions and thoughts. Suddenly the door opened again: Ursula, dressed in hat and furs, with a small valise in her hand: �Good-bye!� she said, in her maddening, bright, almost mocking tone. �I�m going.� And in the next instant the door was closed, they heard the outer door, then her quick steps down the garden path, then the gate banged, and her light footfall was gone. There was a silence like death in the house. Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a dumb, heart-broken, child�s anguish, all the way on the road, and in the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no extenuation. Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to Birkin�s landlady at the door. �Good evening! Is Mr Birkin in? Can I see him?� �Yes, he�s in. He�s in his study.� Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice. �Hello!� he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the valise in her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who wept without showing many traces, like a child. �Do I look a sight?� she said, shrinking. �No�why? Come in,� he took the bag from her hand and they went into the study. There�immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that remembers again, and the tears came rushing up. �What�s the matter?� he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting. �What�s the matter?� he said again, when she was quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that cannot tell. �What is it, then?� he asked. Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair. �Father hit me,� she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright. �What for?� he said. She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips. �Why?� he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice. She looked round at him, rather defiantly. �Because I said I was going to be married tomorrow, and he bullied me.� �Why did he bully you?� Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up. �Because I said he didn�t care�and he doesn�t, it�s only his domineeringness that�s hurt�� she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound. �It isn�t quite true,� he said. �And even so, you shouldn�t _say_ it.� �It _is_ true�it _is_ true,� she wept, �and I won�t be bullied by his pretending it�s love�when it _isn�t_�he doesn�t care, how can he�no, he can�t�� He sat in silence. She moved him beyond himself. �Then you shouldn�t rouse him, if he can�t,� replied Birkin quietly. �And I _have_ loved him, I have,� she wept. �I�ve loved him always, and he�s always done this to me, he has�� �It�s been a love of opposition, then,� he said. �Never mind�it will be all right. It�s nothing desperate.� �Yes,� she wept, �it is, it is.� �Why?� �I shall never see him again�� �Not immediately. Don�t cry, you had to break with him, it had to be�don�t cry.� He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet cheeks gently. �Don�t cry,� he repeated, �don�t cry any more.� He held her head close against him, very close and quiet. At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and frightened. �Don�t you want me?� she asked. �Want you?� His darkened, steady eyes puzzled her and did not give her play. �Do you wish I hadn�t come?� she asked, anxious now again for fear she might be out of place. �No,� he said. �I wish there hadn�t been the violence�so much ugliness�but perhaps it was inevitable.� She watched him in silence. He seemed deadened. �But where shall I stay?� she asked, feeling humiliated. He thought for a moment. �Here, with me,� he said. �We�re married as much today as we shall be tomorrow.� �But�� �I�ll tell Mrs Varley,� he said. �Never mind now.� He sat looking at her. She could feel his darkened steady eyes looking at her all the time. It made her a little bit frightened. She pushed her hair off her forehead nervously. �Do I look ugly?� she said. And she blew her nose again. A small smile came round his eyes. �No,� he said, �fortunately.� And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her, he could only bear to hide her against himself. Now; washed all clean by her tears, she was new and frail like a flower just unfolded, a flower so new, so tender, so made perfect by inner light, that he could not bear to look at her, he must hide her against himself, cover his eyes against her. She had the perfect candour of creation, something translucent and simple, like a radiant, shining flower that moment unfolded in primal blessedness. She was so new, so wonder-clear, so undimmed. And he was so old, so steeped in heavy memories. Her soul was new, undefined and glimmering with the unseen. And his soul was dark and gloomy, it had only one grain of living hope, like a grain of mustard seed. But this one living grain in him matched the perfect youth in her. �I love you,� he whispered as he kissed her, and trembled with pure hope, like a man who is born again to a wonderful, lively hope far exceeding the bounds of death. She could not know how much it meant to him, how much he meant by the few words. Almost childish, she wanted proof, and statement, even over-statement, for everything seemed still uncertain, unfixed to her. But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life. All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How could he tell her of the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light! How could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said �Your nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.� But it sounded like lies, and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with truth, �I love you, I love you,� it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say �I� when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter. In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality. Nor can I say �I love you,� when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts. But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss. They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her, she wrote to her father and mother. Her mother replied, not her father. She did not go back to school. She stayed with Birkin in his rooms, or at the Mill, moving with him as he moved. But she did not see anybody, save Gudrun and Gerald. She was all strange and wondering as yet, but relieved as by dawn. Gerald sat talking to her one afternoon in the warm study down at the Mill. Rupert had not yet come home. �You are happy?� Gerald asked her, with a smile. �Very happy!� she cried, shrinking a little in her brightness. �Yes, one can see it.� �Can one?� cried Ursula in surprise. He looked up at her with a communicative smile. �Oh yes, plainly.� She was pleased. She meditated a moment. �And can you see that Rupert is happy as well?� He lowered his eyelids, and looked aside. �Oh yes,� he said. �Really!� �Oh yes.� He was very quiet, as if it were something not to be talked about by him. He seemed sad. She was very sensitive to suggestion. She asked the question he wanted her to ask. �Why don�t you be happy as well?� she said. �You could be just the same.� He paused a moment. �With Gudrun?� he asked. �Yes!� she cried, her eyes glowing. But there was a strange tension, an emphasis, as if they were asserting their wishes, against the truth. �You think Gudrun would have me, and we should be happy?� he said. �Yes, I�m _sure!_� she cried. Her eyes were round with delight. Yet underneath she was constrained, she knew her own insistence. �Oh, I�m _so_ glad,� she added. He smiled. �What makes you glad?� he said. �For _her_ sake,� she replied. �I�m sure you�d�you�re the right man for her.� �You are?� he said. �And do you think she would agree with you?� �Oh yes!� she exclaimed hastily. Then, upon reconsideration, very uneasy: �Though Gudrun isn�t so very simple, is she? One doesn�t know her in five minutes, does one? She�s not like me in that.� She laughed at him with her strange, open, dazzled face. �You think she�s not much like you?� Gerald asked. She knitted her brows. �Oh, in many ways she is. But I never know what she will do when anything new comes.� �You don�t?� said Gerald. He was silent for some moments. Then he moved tentatively. �I was going to ask her, in any case, to go away with me at Christmas,� he said, in a very small, cautious voice. �Go away with you? For a time, you mean?� �As long as she likes,� he said, with a deprecating movement. They were both silent for some minutes. �Of course,� said Ursula at last, �she _might_ just be willing to rush into marriage. You can see.� �Yes,� smiled Gerald. �I can see. But in case she won�t�do you think she would go abroad with me for a few days�or for a fortnight?� �Oh yes,� said Ursula. �I�d ask her.� �Do you think we might all go together?� �All of us?� Again Ursula�s face lighted up. �It would be rather fun, don�t you think?� �Great fun,� he said. �And then you could see,� said Ursula. �What?� �How things went. I think it is best to take the honeymoon before the wedding�don�t you?� She was pleased with this _mot_. He laughed. �In certain cases,� he said. �I�d rather it were so in my own case.� �Would you!� exclaimed Ursula. Then doubtingly, �Yes, perhaps you�re right. One should please oneself.� Birkin came in a little later, and Ursula told him what had been said. �Gudrun!� exclaimed Birkin. �She�s a born mistress, just as Gerald is a born lover�_amant en titre_. If as somebody says all women are either wives or mistresses, then Gudrun is a mistress.� �And all men either lovers or husbands,� cried Ursula. �But why not both?� �The one excludes the other,� he laughed. �Then I want a lover,� cried Ursula. �No you don�t,� he said. �But I do,� she wailed. He kissed her, and laughed. It was two days after this that Ursula was to go to fetch her things from the house in Beldover. The removal had taken place, the family had gone. Gudrun had rooms in Willey Green. Ursula had not seen her parents since her marriage. She wept over the rupture, yet what was the good of making it up! Good or not good, she could not go to them. So her things had been left behind and she and Gudrun were to walk over for them, in the afternoon. It was a wintry afternoon, with red in the sky, when they arrived at the house. The windows were dark and blank, already the place was frightening. A stark, void entrance-hall struck a chill to the hearts of the girls. �I don�t believe I dare have come in alone,� said Ursula. �It frightens me.� �Ursula!� cried Gudrun. �Isn�t it amazing! Can you believe you lived in this place and never felt it? How I lived here a day without dying of terror, I cannot conceive!� They looked in the big dining-room. It was a good-sized room, but now a cell would have been lovelier. The large bay windows were naked, the floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of pale boarding. In the faded wallpaper were dark patches where furniture had stood, where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some cardboard box? In the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper. �Imagine that we passed our days here!� said Ursula. �I know,� cried Gudrun. �It is too appalling. What must we be like, if we are the contents of _this!_� �Vile!� said Ursula. �It really is.� And she recognised half-burnt covers of �Vogue��half-burnt representations of women in gowns�lying under the grate. They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in nothingness. The kitchen did look more substantial, because of the red-tiled floor and the stove, but it was cold and horrid. The two girls tramped hollowly up the bare stairs. Every sound re-echoed under their hearts. They tramped down the bare corridor. Against the wall of Ursula�s bedroom were her things�a trunk, a work-basket, some books, loose coats, a hat-box, standing desolate in the universal emptiness of the dusk. �A cheerful sight, aren�t they?� said Ursula, looking down at her forsaken possessions. �Very cheerful,� said Gudrun. The two girls set to, carrying everything down to the front door. Again and again they made the hollow, re-echoing transit. The whole place seemed to resound about them with a noise of hollow, empty futility. In the distance the empty, invisible rooms sent forth a vibration almost of obscenity. They almost fled with the last articles, into the out-of-door. But it was cold. They were waiting for Birkin, who was coming with the car. They went indoors again, and upstairs to their parents� front bedroom, whose windows looked down on the road, and across the country at the black-barred sunset, black and red barred, without light. They sat down in the window-seat, to wait. Both girls were looking over the room. It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful. �Really,� said Ursula, �this room _couldn�t_ be sacred, could it?� Gudrun looked over it with slow eyes. �Impossible,� she replied. �When I think of their lives�father�s and mother�s, their love, and their marriage, and all of us children, and our bringing-up�would you have such a life, Prune?� �I wouldn�t, Ursula.� �It all seems so _nothing_�their two lives�there�s no meaning in it. Really, if they had _not_ met, and _not_ married, and not lived together�it wouldn�t have mattered, would it?� �Of course�you can�t tell,� said Gudrun. �No. But if I thought my life was going to be like it�Prune,� she caught Gudrun�s arm, �I should run.� Gudrun was silent for a few moments. �As a matter of fact, one cannot contemplate the ordinary life�one cannot contemplate it,� replied Gudrun. �With you, Ursula, it is quite different. You will be out of it all, with Birkin. He�s a special case. But with the ordinary man, who has his life fixed in one place, marriage is just impossible. There may be, and there _are_, thousands of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very thought of it sends me _mad_. One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free�one must not become 7, Pinchbeck Street�or Somerset Drive�or Shortlands. No man will be sufficient to make that good�no man! To marry, one must have a free lance, or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Glücksritter. A man with a position in the social world�well, it is just impossible, impossible!� �What a lovely word�a Glücksritter!� said Ursula. �So much nicer than a soldier of fortune.� �Yes, isn�t it?� said Gudrun. �I�d tilt the world with a Glücksritter. But a home, an establishment! Ursula, what would it mean?�think!� �I know,� said Ursula. �We�ve had one home�that�s enough for me.� �Quite enough,� said Gudrun. �The little grey home in the west,� quoted Ursula ironically. �Doesn�t it sound grey, too,� said Gudrun grimly. They were interrupted by the sound of the car. There was Birkin. Ursula was surprised that she felt so lit up, that she became suddenly so free from the problems of grey homes in the west. They heard his heels click on the hall pavement below. �Hello!� he called, his voice echoing alive through the house. Ursula smiled to herself. _He_ was frightened of the place too. �Hello! Here we are,� she called downstairs. And they heard him quickly running up. �This is a ghostly situation,� he said. �These houses don�t have ghosts�they�ve never had any personality, and only a place with personality can have a ghost,� said Gudrun. �I suppose so. Are you both weeping over the past?� �We are,� said Gudrun, grimly. Ursula laughed. �Not weeping that it�s gone, but weeping that it ever _was_,� she said. �Oh,� he replied, relieved. He sat down for a moment. There was something in his presence, Ursula thought, lambent and alive. It made even the impertinent structure of this null house disappear. �Gudrun says she could not bear to be married and put into a house,� said Ursula meaningful�they knew this referred to Gerald. He was silent for some moments. �Well,� he said, �if you know beforehand you couldn�t stand it, you�re safe.� �Quite!� said Gudrun. �Why _does_ every woman think her aim in life is to have a hubby and a little grey home in the west? Why is this the goal of life? Why should it be?� said Ursula. �_Il faut avoir le respect de ses bêtises_,� said Birkin. �But you needn�t have the respect for the _bêtise_ before you�ve committed it,� laughed Ursula. �Ah then, _des bêtises du papa?_� �_Et de la maman_,� added Gudrun satirically. �_Et des voisins_,� said Ursula. They all laughed, and rose. It was getting dark. They carried the things to the car. Gudrun locked the door of the empty house. Birkin had lighted the lamps of the automobile. It all seemed very happy, as if they were setting out. �Do you mind stopping at Coulsons. I have to leave the key there,� said Gudrun. �Right,� said Birkin, and they moved off. They stopped in the main street. The shops were just lighted, the last miners were passing home along the causeways, half-visible shadows in their grey pit-dirt, moving through the blue air. But their feet rang harshly in manifold sound, along the pavement. How pleased Gudrun was to come out of the shop, and enter the car, and be borne swiftly away into the downhill of palpable dusk, with Ursula and Birkin! What an adventure life seemed at this moment! How deeply, how suddenly she envied Ursula! Life for her was so quick, and an open door�so reckless as if not only this world, but the world that was gone and the world to come were nothing to her. Ah, if she could be _just like that_, it would be perfect. For always, except in her moments of excitement, she felt a want within herself. She was unsure. She had felt that now, at last, in Gerald�s strong and violent love, she was living fully and finally. But when she compared herself with Ursula, already her soul was jealous, unsatisfied. She was not satisfied�she was never to be satisfied. What was she short of now? It was marriage�it was the wonderful stability of marriage. She did want it, let her say what she might. She had been lying. The old idea of marriage was right even now�marriage and the home. Yet her mouth gave a little grimace at the words. She thought of Gerald and Shortlands�marriage and the home! Ah well, let it rest! He meant a great deal to her�but�! Perhaps it was not in her to marry. She was one of life�s outcasts, one of the drifting lives that have no root. No, no it could not be so. She suddenly conjured up a rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed her. This picture she entitled �Home.� It would have done for the Royal Academy. �Come with us to tea�_do_,� said Ursula, as they ran nearer to the cottage of Willey Green. �Thanks awfully�but I _must_ go in�� said Gudrun. She wanted very much to go on with Ursula and Birkin. That seemed like life indeed to her. Yet a certain perversity would not let her. �Do come�yes, it would be so nice,� pleaded Ursula. �I�m awfully sorry�I should love to�but I can�t�really�� She descended from the car in trembling haste. �Can�t you really!� came Ursula�s regretful voice. �No, really I can�t,� responded Gudrun�s pathetic, chagrined words out of the dusk. �All right, are you?� called Birkin. �Quite!� said Gudrun. �Good-night!� �Good-night,� they called. �Come whenever you like, we shall be glad,� called Birkin. �Thank you very much,� called Gudrun, in the strange, twanging voice of lonely chagrin that was very puzzling to him. She turned away to her cottage gate, and they drove on. But immediately she stood to watch them, as the car ran vague into the distance. And as she went up the path to her strange house, her heart was full of incomprehensible bitterness. In her parlour was a long-case clock, and inserted into its dial was a ruddy, round, slant-eyed, joyous-painted face, that wagged over with the most ridiculous ogle when the clock ticked, and back again with the same absurd glad-eye at the next tick. All the time the absurd smooth, brown-ruddy face gave her an obtrusive �glad-eye.� She stood for minutes, watching it, till a sort of maddened disgust overcame her, and she laughed at herself hollowly. And still it rocked, and gave her the glad-eye from one side, then from the other, from one side, then from the other. Ah, how unhappy she was! In the midst of her most active happiness, ah, how unhappy she was! She glanced at the table. Gooseberry jam, and the same home-made cake with too much soda in it! Still, gooseberry jam was good, and one so rarely got it. All the evening she wanted to go to the Mill. But she coldly refused to allow herself. She went the next afternoon instead. She was happy to find Ursula alone. It was a lovely, intimate secluded atmosphere. They talked endlessly and delightedly. �Aren�t you _fearfully_ happy here?� said Gudrun to her sister glancing at her own bright eyes in the mirror. She always envied, almost with resentment, the strange positive fullness that subsisted in the atmosphere around Ursula and Birkin. How really beautifully this room is done,� she said aloud. �This hard plaited matting�what a lovely colour it is, the colour of cool light!� And it seemed to her perfect. �Ursula,� she said at length, in a voice of question and detachment, �did you know that Gerald Crich had suggested our going away all together at Christmas?� �Yes, he�s spoken to Rupert.� A deep flush dyed Gudrun�s cheek. She was silent a moment, as if taken aback, and not knowing what to say. �But don�t you think,� she said at last, �it is _amazingly cool!_� Ursula laughed. �I like him for it,� she said. Gudrun was silent. It was evident that, whilst she was almost mortified by Gerald�s taking the liberty of making such a suggestion to Birkin, yet the idea itself attracted her strongly. �There�s a rather lovely simplicity about Gerald, I think,� said Ursula, �so defiant, somehow! Oh, I think he�s _very_ lovable.� Gudrun did not reply for some moments. She had still to get over the feeling of insult at the liberty taken with her freedom. �What did Rupert say�do you know?� she asked. �He said it would be most awfully jolly,� said Ursula. Again Gudrun looked down, and was silent. �Don�t you think it would?� said Ursula, tentatively. She was never quite sure how many defences Gudrun was having round herself. Gudrun raised her face with difficulty and held it averted. �I think it _might_ be awfully jolly, as you say,� she replied. �But don�t you think it was an unpardonable liberty to take�to talk of such things to Rupert�who after all�you see what I mean, Ursula�they might have been two men arranging an outing with some little _type_ they�d picked up. Oh, I think it�s unforgivable, quite!� She used the French word �_type_.� Her eyes flashed, her soft face was flushed and sullen. Ursula looked on, rather frightened, frightened most of all because she thought Gudrun seemed rather common, really like a little _type_. But she had not the courage quite to think this�not right out. �Oh no,� she cried, stammering. �Oh no�not at all like that�oh no! No, I think it�s rather beautiful, the friendship between Rupert and Gerald. They just are simple�they say anything to each other, like brothers.� Gudrun flushed deeper. She could not _bear_ it that Gerald gave her away�even to Birkin. �But do you think even brothers have any right to exchange confidences of that sort?� she asked, with deep anger. �Oh yes,� said Ursula. �There�s never anything said that isn�t perfectly straightforward. No, the thing that�s amazed me most in Gerald�how perfectly simple and direct he can be! And you know, it takes rather a big man. Most of them _must_ be indirect, they are such cowards.� But Gudrun was still silent with anger. She wanted the absolute secrecy kept, with regard to her movements. �Won�t you go?� said Ursula. �Do, we might all be so happy! There is something I _love_ about Gerald�he�s _much_ more lovable than I thought him. He�s free, Gudrun, he really is.� Gudrun�s mouth was still closed, sullen and ugly. She opened it at length. �Do you know where he proposes to go?� she asked. �Yes�to the Tyrol, where he used to go when he was in Germany�a lovely place where students go, small and rough and lovely, for winter sport!� Through Gudrun�s mind went the angry thought��they know everything.� �Yes,� she said aloud, �about forty kilometres from Innsbruck, isn�t it?� �I don�t know exactly where�but it would be lovely, don�t you think, high in the perfect snow�?� �Very lovely!� said Gudrun, sarcastically. Ursula was put out. �Of course,� she said, �I think Gerald spoke to Rupert so that it shouldn�t seem like an outing with a _type_�� �I know, of course,� said Gudrun, �that he quite commonly does take up with that sort.� �Does he!� said Ursula. �Why how do you know?� �I know of a model in Chelsea,� said Gudrun coldly. Now Ursula was silent. �Well,� she said at last, with a doubtful laugh, �I hope he has a good time with her.� At which Gudrun looked more glum. CHAPTER XXVIII. GUDRUN IN THE POMPADOUR Christmas drew near, all four prepared for flight. Birkin and Ursula were busy packing their few personal things, making them ready to be sent off, to whatever country and whatever place they might choose at last. Gudrun was very much excited. She loved to be on the wing. She and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall, and afterwards to the Pompadour Café. Gudrun hated the Café, yet she always went back to it, as did most of the artists of her acquaintance. She loathed its atmosphere of petty vice and petty jealousy and petty art. Yet she always called in again, when she was in town. It was as if she _had_ to return to this small, slow, central whirlpool of disintegration and dissolution: just give it a look. She sat with Gerald drinking some sweetish liqueur, and staring with black, sullen looks at the various groups of people at the tables. She would greet nobody, but young men nodded to her frequently, with a kind of sneering familiarity. She cut them all. And it gave her pleasure to sit there, cheeks flushed, eyes black and sullen, seeing them all objectively, as put away from her, like creatures in some menagerie of apish degraded souls. God, what a foul crew they were! Her blood beat black and thick in her veins with rage and loathing. Yet she must sit and watch, watch. One or two people came to speak to her. From every side of the Café, eyes turned half furtively, half jeeringly at her, men looking over their shoulders, women under their hats. The old crowd was there, Carlyon in his corner with his pupils and his girl, Halliday and Libidnikov and the Pussum�they were all there. Gudrun watched Gerald. She watched his eyes linger a moment on Halliday, on Halliday�s party. These last were on the look-out�they nodded to him, he nodded again. They giggled and whispered among themselves. Gerald watched them with the steady twinkle in his eyes. They were urging the Pussum to something. She at last rose. She was wearing a curious dress of dark silk splashed and spattered with different colours, a curious motley effect. She was thinner, her eyes were perhaps hotter, more disintegrated. Otherwise she was just the same. Gerald watched her with the same steady twinkle in his eyes as she came across. She held out her thin brown hand to him. �How are you?� she said. He shook hands with her, but remained seated, and let her stand near him, against the table. She nodded blackly to Gudrun, whom she did not know to speak to, but well enough by sight and reputation. �I am very well,� said Gerald. �And you?� �Oh I�m all wight. What about Wupert?� �Rupert? He�s very well, too.� �Yes, I don�t mean that. What about him being married?� �Oh�yes, he is married.� The Pussum�s eyes had a hot flash. �Oh, he�s weally bwought it off then, has he? When was he married?� �A week or two ago.� �Weally! He�s never written.� �No.� �No. Don�t you think it�s too bad?� This last was in a tone of challenge. The Pussum let it be known by her tone, that she was aware of Gudrun�s listening. �I suppose he didn�t feel like it,� replied Gerald. �But why didn�t he?� pursued the Pussum. This was received in silence. There was an ugly, mocking persistence in the small, beautiful figure of the short-haired girl, as she stood near Gerald. �Are you staying in town long?� she asked. �Tonight only.� �Oh, only tonight. Are you coming over to speak to Julius?� �Not tonight.� �Oh very well. I�ll tell him then.� Then came her touch of diablerie. �You�re looking awf�lly fit.� �Yes�I feel it.� Gerald was quite calm and easy, a spark of satiric amusement in his eye. �Are you having a good time?� This was a direct blow for Gudrun, spoken in a level, toneless voice of callous ease. �Yes,� he replied, quite colourlessly. �I�m awf�lly sorry you aren�t coming round to the flat. You aren�t very faithful to your fwiends.� �Not very,� he said. She nodded them both �Good-night�, and went back slowly to her own set. Gudrun watched her curious walk, stiff and jerking at the loins. They heard her level, toneless voice distinctly. �He won�t come over;�he is otherwise engaged,� it said. There was more laughter and lowered voices and mockery at the table. �Is she a friend of yours?� said Gudrun, looking calmly at Gerald. �I�ve stayed at Halliday�s flat with Birkin,� he said, meeting her slow, calm eyes. And she knew that the Pussum was one of his mistresses�and he knew she knew. She looked round, and called for the waiter. She wanted an iced cocktail, of all things. This amused Gerald�he wondered what was up. The Halliday party was tipsy, and malicious. They were talking out loudly about Birkin, ridiculing him on every point, particularly on his marriage. �Oh, _don�t_ make me think of Birkin,� Halliday was squealing. �He makes me perfectly sick. He is as bad as Jesus. �Lord, _what_ must I do to be saved!�� He giggled to himself tipsily. �Do you remember,� came the quick voice of the Russian, �the letters he used to send. �Desire is holy��� �Oh yes!� cried Halliday. �Oh, how perfectly splendid. Why, I�ve got one in my pocket. I�m sure I have.� He took out various papers from his pocket book. �I�m sure I�ve�_hic! Oh dear!_�got one.� Gerald and Gudrun were watching absorbedly. �Oh yes, how perfectly�_hic!_�splendid! Don�t make me laugh, Pussum, it gives me the hiccup. Hic!�� They all giggled. �What did he say in that one?� the Pussum asked, leaning forward, her dark, soft hair falling and swinging against her face. There was something curiously indecent, obscene, about her small, longish, dark skull, particularly when the ears showed. �Wait�oh do wait! _No-o_, I won�t give it to you, I�ll read it aloud. I�ll read you the choice bits,�_hic!_ Oh dear! Do you think if I drink water it would take off this hiccup? _Hic!_ Oh, I feel perfectly helpless.� �Isn�t that the letter about uniting the dark and the light�and the Flux of Corruption?� asked Maxim, in his precise, quick voice. �I believe so,� said the Pussum. �Oh is it? I�d forgotten�_hic!_�it was that one,� Halliday said, opening the letter. �_Hic!_ Oh yes. How perfectly splendid! This is one of the best. �There is a phase in every race��� he read in the sing-song, slow, distinct voice of a clergyman reading the Scriptures, ��When the desire for destruction overcomes every other desire. In the individual, this desire is ultimately a desire for destruction in the self��_hic!_�� he paused and looked up. �I hope he�s going ahead with the destruction of himself,� said the quick voice of the Russian. Halliday giggled, and lolled his head back, vaguely. �There�s not much to destroy in him,� said the Pussum. �He�s so thin already, there�s only a fag-end to start on.� �Oh, isn�t it beautiful! I love reading it! I believe it has cured my hiccup!� squealed Halliday. �Do let me go on. �It is a desire for the reduction process in oneself, a reducing back to the origin, a return along the Flux of Corruption, to the original rudimentary conditions of being�!� Oh, but I _do_ think it is wonderful. It almost supersedes the Bible�� �Yes�Flux of Corruption,� said the Russian, �I remember that phrase.� �Oh, he was always talking about Corruption,� said the Pussum. �He must be corrupt himself, to have it so much on his mind.� �Exactly!� said the Russian. �Do let me go on! Oh, this is a perfectly wonderful piece! But do listen to this. �And in the great retrogression, the reducing back of the created body of life, we get knowledge, and beyond knowledge, the phosphorescent ecstasy of acute sensation.� Oh, I do think these phrases are too absurdly wonderful. Oh but don�t you think they _are_�they�re nearly as good as Jesus. �And if, Julius, you want this ecstasy of reduction with the Pussum, you must go on till it is fulfilled. But surely there is in you also, somewhere, the living desire for positive creation, relationships in ultimate faith, when all this process of active corruption, with all its flowers of mud, is transcended, and more or less finished�� I do wonder what the flowers of mud are. Pussum, you are a flower of mud.� �Thank you�and what are you?� �Oh, I�m another, surely, according to this letter! We�re all flowers of mud�_fleurs�hic! du mal!_ It�s perfectly wonderful, Birkin harrowing Hell�harrowing the Pompadour�_Hic!_� �Go on�go on,� said Maxim. �What comes next? It�s really very interesting.� �I think it�s awful cheek to write like that,� said the Pussum. �Yes�yes, so do I,� said the Russian. �He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man�go on reading.� �Surely,� Halliday intoned, ��surely goodness and mercy hath followed me all the days of my life��� he broke off and giggled. Then he began again, intoning like a clergyman. ��Surely there will come an end in us to this desire�for the constant going apart,�this passion for putting asunder�everything�ourselves, reducing ourselves part from part�reacting in intimacy only for destruction,�using sex as a great reducing agent, reducing the two great elements of male and female from their highly complex unity�reducing the old ideas, going back to the savages for our sensations,�always seeking to _lose_ ourselves in some ultimate black sensation, mindless and infinite�burning only with destructive fires, raging on with the hope of being burnt out utterly��� �I want to go,� said Gudrun to Gerald, as she signalled the waiter. Her eyes were flashing, her cheeks were flushed. The strange effect of Birkin�s letter read aloud in a perfect clerical sing-song, clear and resonant, phrase by phrase, made the blood mount into her head as if she were mad. She rose, whilst Gerald was paying the bill, and walked over to Halliday�s table. They all glanced up at her. �Excuse me,� she said. �Is that a genuine letter you are reading?� �Oh yes,� said Halliday. �Quite genuine.� �May I see?� Smiling foolishly he handed it to her, as if hypnotised. �Thank you,� she said. And she turned and walked out of the Café with the letter, all down the brilliant room, between the tables, in her measured fashion. It was some moments before anybody realised what was happening. From Halliday�s table came half articulate cries, then somebody booed, then all the far end of the place began booing after Gudrun�s retreating form. She was fashionably dressed in blackish-green and silver, her hat was brilliant green, like the sheen on an insect, but the brim was soft dark green, a falling edge with fine silver, her coat was dark green, lustrous, with a high collar of grey fur, and great fur cuffs, the edge of her dress showed silver and black velvet, her stockings and shoes were silver grey. She moved with slow, fashionable indifference to the door. The porter opened obsequiously for her, and, at her nod, hurried to the edge of the pavement and whistled for a taxi. The two lights of a vehicle almost immediately curved round towards her, like two eyes. Gerald had followed in wonder, amid all the booing, not having caught her misdeed. He heard the Pussum�s voice saying: �Go and get it back from her. I never heard of such a thing! Go and get it back from her. Tell Gerald Crich�there he goes�go and make him give it up.� Gudrun stood at the door of the taxi, which the man held open for her. �To the hotel?� she asked, as Gerald came out, hurriedly. �Where you like,� he answered. �Right!� she said. Then to the driver, �Wagstaff�s�Barton Street.� The driver bowed his head, and put down the flag. Gudrun entered the taxi, with the deliberate cold movement of a woman who is well-dressed and contemptuous in her soul. Yet she was frozen with overwrought feelings. Gerald followed her. �You�ve forgotten the man,� she said cooly, with a slight nod of her hat. Gerald gave the porter a shilling. The man saluted. They were in motion. �What was all the row about?� asked Gerald, in wondering excitement. �I walked away with Birkin�s letter,� she said, and he saw the crushed paper in her hand. His eyes glittered with satisfaction. �Ah!� he said. �Splendid! A set of jackasses!� �I could have _killed_ them!� she cried in passion. �_Dogs!_�they are dogs! Why is Rupert such a _fool_ as to write such letters to them? Why does he give himself away to such _canaille?_ It�s a thing that _cannot be borne._� Gerald wondered over her strange passion. And she could not rest any longer in London. They must go by the morning train from Charing Cross. As they drew over the bridge, in the train, having glimpses of the river between the great iron girders, she cried: �I feel I could _never_ see this foul town again�I couldn�t _bear_ to come back to it.� CHAPTER XXIX. CONTINENTAL Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away. She was not herself,�she was not anything. She was something that is going to be�soon�soon�very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent. She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all vague and indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved them apart. She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from Dover to Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all like a sleep. And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, she felt her soul stirring to awake from its anæsthetic sleep. �Let us go forward, shall we?� said Birkin. He wanted to be at the tip of their projection. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and turned their faces to the unfathomed night in front. They went right to the bows of the softly plunging vessel. In the complete obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where a great rope was coiled up. It was quite near the very point of the ship, near the black, unpierced space ahead. There they sat down, folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and become one substance. It was very cold, and the darkness was palpable. One of the ship�s crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not really visible. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. He felt their presence, and stopped, unsure�then bent forward. When his face was near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. Then he withdrew like a phantom. And they watched him without making any sound. They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. There was no sky, no earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping motion, they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling through dark, fathomless space. They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that had been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of this pure trajectory through the surpassing darkness. The ship�s prow cleaved on, with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night, without knowing, without seeing, only surging on. In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over everything. In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to glow on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. Her heart was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey of darkness, sweet like the warmth of day, a light which was not shed on the world, only on the unknown paradise towards which she was going, a sweetness of habitation, a delight of living quite unknown, but hers infallibly. In her transport she lifted her face suddenly to him, and he touched it with his lips. So cold, so fresh, so sea-clear her face was, it was like kissing a flower that grows near the surf. But he did not know the ecstasy of bliss in fore-knowledge that she knew. To him, the wonder of this transit was overwhelming. He was falling through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across the chasm between the worlds. The world was torn in two, and he was plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable rift. What was beyond was not yet for him. He was overcome by the trajectory. In a trance he lay enfolding Ursula round about. His face was against her fine, fragile hair, he breathed its fragrance with the sea and the profound night. And his soul was at peace; yielded, as he fell into the unknown. This was the first time that an utter and absolute peace had entered his heart, now, in this final transit out of life. When there came some stir on the deck, they roused. They stood up. How stiff and cramped they were, in the night-time! And yet the paradisal glow on her heart, and the unutterable peace of darkness in his, this was the all-in-all. They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the darkness. This was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor the peace of his. It was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not quite the old world. For the peace and the bliss in their hearts was enduring. Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters �OSTEND,� standing in the darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, then scrawling a chalk-mark. It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter coming behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open night again�ah, a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman agitation through the dark-grey air, spectres were running along the darkness between the train. �Köln�Berlin�� Ursula made out on the boards hung on the high train on one side. �Here we are,� said Birkin. And on her side she saw: �Elsass�Lothringen�Luxembourg, Metz�Basle.� �That was it, Basle!� The porter came up. �_� Bâle�deuxième classe?�Voilà!_� And he clambered into the high train. They followed. The compartments were already some of them taken. But many were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was tipped. �_Nous avons encore�?_� said Birkin, looking at his watch and at the porter. �_Encore une demi-heure._� With which, in his blue blouse, he disappeared. He was ugly and insolent. �Come,� said Birkin. �It is cold. Let us eat.� There was a coffee-wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery coffee, and ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were such a wide bite that it almost dislocated Ursula�s jaw; and they walked beside the high trains. It was all so strange, so extremely desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate, forlorn, nowhere�grey, dreary nowhere. At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made out the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent. They pulled up surprisingly soon�Bruges! Then on through the level darkness, with glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and deserted high-roads. She sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He pale, immobile like a _revenant_ himself, looked sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes. Then his eyes opened again, dark as the darkness outside. A flash of a few lights on the darkness�Ghent station! A few more spectres moving outside on the platform�then the bell�then motion again through the level darkness. Ursula saw a man with a lantern come out of a farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! In one life-time one travelled through æons. The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm�she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on the face�and now when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger�was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself. They were at Brussels�half an hour for breakfast. They got down. On the great station clock it said six o�clock. They had coffee and rolls and honey in the vast desert refreshment room, so dreary, always so dreary, dirty, so spacious, such desolation of space. But she washed her face and hands in hot water, and combed her hair�that was a blessing. Soon they were in the train again and moving on. The greyness of dawn began. There were several people in the compartment, large florid Belgian business-men with long brown beards, talking incessantly in an ugly French she was too tired to follow. It seemed the train ran by degrees out of the darkness into a faint light, then beat after beat into the day. Ah, how weary it was! Faintly, the trees showed, like shadows. Then a house, white, had a curious distinctness. How was it? Then she saw a village�there were always houses passing. This was an old world she was still journeying through, winter-heavy and dreary. There was plough-land and pasture, and copses of bare trees, copses of bushes, and homesteads naked and work-bare. No new earth had come to pass. She looked at Birkin�s face. It was white and still and eternal, too eternal. She linked her fingers imploringly in his, under the cover of her rug. His fingers responded, his eyes looked back at her. How dark, like a night, his eyes were, like another world beyond! Oh, if he were the world as well, if only the world were he! If only he could call a world into being, that should be their own world! The Belgians left, the train ran on, through Luxembourg, through Alsace-Lorraine, through Metz. But she was blind, she could see no more. Her soul did not look out. They came at last to Basle, to the hotel. It was all a drifting trance, from which she never came to. They went out in the morning, before the train departed. She saw the street, the river, she stood on the bridge. But it all meant nothing. She remembered some shops�one full of pictures, one with orange velvet and ermine. But what did these signify?�nothing. She was not at ease till they were in the train again. Then she was relieved. So long as they were moving onwards, she was satisfied. They came to Zürich, then, before very long, ran under the mountains, that were deep in snow. At last she was drawing near. This was the other world now. Innsbruck was wonderful, deep in snow, and evening. They drove in an open sledge over the snow: the train had been so hot and stifling. And the hotel, with the golden light glowing under the porch, seemed like a home. They laughed with pleasure when they were in the hall. The place seemed full and busy. �Do you know if Mr and Mrs Crich�English�from Paris, have arrived?� Birkin asked in German. The porter reflected a moment, and was just going to answer, when Ursula caught sight of Gudrun sauntering down the stairs, wearing her dark glossy coat, with grey fur. �Gudrun! Gudrun!� she called, waving up the well of the staircase. �Shu-hu!� Gudrun looked over the rail, and immediately lost her sauntering, diffident air. Her eyes flashed. �Really�Ursula!� she cried. And she began to move downstairs as Ursula ran up. They met at a turn and kissed with laughter and exclamations inarticulate and stirring. �But!� cried Gudrun, mortified. �We thought it was _tomorrow_ you were coming! I wanted to come to the station.� �No, we�ve come today!� cried Ursula. �Isn�t it lovely here!� �Adorable!� said Gudrun. �Gerald�s just gone out to get something. Ursula, aren�t you _fearfully_ tired?� �No, not so very. But I look a filthy sight, don�t I!� �No, you don�t. You look almost perfectly fresh. I like that fur cap _immensely!_� She glanced over Ursula, who wore a big soft coat with a collar of deep, soft, blond fur, and a soft blond cap of fur. �And you!� cried Ursula. �What do you think _you_ look like!� Gudrun assumed an unconcerned, expressionless face. �Do you like it?� she said. �It�s _very_ fine!� cried Ursula, perhaps with a touch of satire. �Go up�or come down,� said Birkin. For there the sisters stood, Gudrun with her hand on Ursula�s arm, on the turn of the stairs half way to the first landing, blocking the way and affording full entertainment to the whole of the hall below, from the door porter to the plump Jew in black clothes. The two young women slowly mounted, followed by Birkin and the waiter. �First floor?� asked Gudrun, looking back over her shoulder. �Second Madam�the lift!� the waiter replied. And he darted to the elevator to forestall the two women. But they ignored him, as, chattering without heed, they set to mount the second flight. Rather chagrined, the waiter followed. It was curious, the delight of the sisters in each other, at this meeting. It was as if they met in exile, and united their solitary forces against all the world. Birkin looked on with some mistrust and wonder. When they had bathed and changed, Gerald came in. He looked shining like the sun on frost. �Go with Gerald and smoke,� said Ursula to Birkin. �Gudrun and I want to talk.� Then the sisters sat in Gudrun�s bedroom, and talked clothes, and experiences. Gudrun told Ursula the experience of the Birkin letter in the café. Ursula was shocked and frightened. �Where is the letter?� she asked. �I kept it,� said Gudrun. �You�ll give it me, won�t you?� she said. But Gudrun was silent for some moments, before she replied: �Do you really want it, Ursula?� �I want to read it,� said Ursula. �Certainly,� said Gudrun. Even now, she could not admit, to Ursula, that she wanted to keep it, as a memento, or a symbol. But Ursula knew, and was not pleased. So the subject was switched off. �What did you do in Paris?� asked Ursula. �Oh,� said Gudrun laconically��the usual things. We had a _fine_ party one night in Fanny Bath�s studio.� �Did you? And you and Gerald were there! Who else? Tell me about it.� �Well,� said Gudrun. �There�s nothing particular to tell. You know Fanny is _frightfully_ in love with that painter, Billy Macfarlane. He was there�so Fanny spared nothing, she spent _very_ freely. It was really remarkable! Of course, everybody got fearfully drunk�but in an interesting way, not like that filthy London crowd. The fact is these were all people that matter, which makes all the difference. There was a Roumanian, a fine chap. He got completely drunk, and climbed to the top of a high studio ladder, and gave the most marvellous address�really, Ursula, it was wonderful! He began in French�_La vie, c�est une affaire d�âmes impériales_�in a most beautiful voice�he was a fine-looking chap�but he had got into Roumanian before he had finished, and not a soul understood. But Donald Gilchrist was worked to a frenzy. He dashed his glass to the ground, and declared, by God, he was glad he had been born, by God, it was a miracle to be alive. And do you know, Ursula, so it was�� Gudrun laughed rather hollowly. �But how was Gerald among them all?� asked Ursula. �Gerald! Oh, my word, he came out like a dandelion in the sun! _He�s_ a whole saturnalia in himself, once he is roused. I shouldn�t like to say whose waist his arm did not go round. Really, Ursula, he seems to reap the women like a harvest. There wasn�t one that would have resisted him. It was too amazing! Can you understand it?� Ursula reflected, and a dancing light came into her eyes. �Yes,� she said. �I can. He is such a whole-hogger.� �Whole-hogger! I should think so!� exclaimed Gudrun. �But it is true, Ursula, every woman in the room was ready to surrender to him. Chanticleer isn�t in it�even Fanny Bath, who is _genuinely_ in love with Billy Macfarlane! I never was more amazed in my life! And you know, afterwards�I felt I was a whole _roomful_ of women. I was no more myself to him, than I was Queen Victoria. I was a whole roomful of women at once. It was most astounding! But my eye, I�d caught a Sultan that time�� Gudrun�s eyes were flashing, her cheek was hot, she looked strange, exotic, satiric. Ursula was fascinated at once�and yet uneasy. They had to get ready for dinner. Gudrun came down in a daring gown of vivid green silk and tissue of gold, with green velvet bodice and a strange black-and-white band round her hair. She was really brilliantly beautiful and everybody noticed her. Gerald was in that full-blooded, gleaming state when he was most handsome. Birkin watched them with quick, laughing, half-sinister eyes, Ursula quite lost her head. There seemed a spell, almost a blinding spell, cast round their table, as if they were lighted up more strongly than the rest of the dining-room. �Don�t you love to be in this place?� cried Gudrun. �Isn�t the snow wonderful! Do you notice how it exalts everything? It is simply marvellous. One really does feel _übermenschlich_�more than human.� �One does,� cried Ursula. �But isn�t that partly the being out of England?� �Oh, of course,� cried Gudrun. �One could never feel like this in England, for the simple reason that the damper is _never_ lifted off one, there. It is quite impossible really to let go, in England, of that I am assured.� And she turned again to the food she was eating. She was fluttering with vivid intensity. �It�s quite true,� said Gerald, �it never is quite the same in England. But perhaps we don�t want it to be�perhaps it�s like bringing the light a little too near the powder-magazine, to let go altogether, in England. One is afraid what might happen, if _everybody else_ let go.� �My God!� cried Gudrun. �But wouldn�t it be wonderful, if all England did suddenly go off like a display of fireworks.� �It couldn�t,� said Ursula. �They are all too damp, the powder is damp in them.� �I�m not so sure of that,� said Gerald. �Nor I,� said Birkin. �When the English really begin to go off, _en masse_, it�ll be time to shut your ears and run.� �They never will,� said Ursula. �We�ll see,� he replied. �Isn�t it marvellous,� said Gudrun, �how thankful one can be, to be out of one�s country. I cannot believe myself, I am so transported, the moment I set foot on a foreign shore. I say to myself �Here steps a new creature into life.�� �Don�t be too hard on poor old England,� said Gerald. �Though we curse it, we love it really.� To Ursula, there seemed a fund of cynicism in these words. �We may,� said Birkin. �But it�s a damnably uncomfortable love: like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a complication of diseases, for which there is no hope.� Gudrun looked at him with dilated dark eyes. �You think there is no hope?� she asked, in her pertinent fashion. But Birkin backed away. He would not answer such a question. �Any hope of England�s becoming real? God knows. It�s a great actual unreality now, an aggregation into unreality. It might be real, if there were no Englishmen.� �You think the English will have to disappear?� persisted Gudrun. It was strange, her pointed interest in his answer. It might have been her own fate she was inquiring after. Her dark, dilated eyes rested on Birkin, as if she could conjure the truth of the future out of him, as out of some instrument of divination. He was pale. Then, reluctantly, he answered: �Well�what else is in front of them, but disappearance? They�ve got to disappear from their own special brand of Englishness, anyhow.� Gudrun watched him as if in a hypnotic state, her eyes wide and fixed on him. �But in what way do you mean, disappear?�� she persisted. �Yes, do you mean a change of heart?� put in Gerald. �I don�t mean anything, why should I?� said Birkin. �I�m an Englishman, and I�ve paid the price of it. I can�t talk about England�I can only speak for myself.� �Yes,� said Gudrun slowly, �you love England immensely, _immensely_, Rupert.� �And leave her,� he replied. �No, not for good. You�ll come back,� said Gerald, nodding sagely. �They say the lice crawl off a dying body,� said Birkin, with a glare of bitterness. �So I leave England.� �Ah, but you�ll come back,� said Gudrun, with a sardonic smile. �_Tant pis pour moi_,� he replied. �Isn�t he angry with his mother country!� laughed Gerald, amused. �Ah, a patriot!� said Gudrun, with something like a sneer. Birkin refused to answer any more. Gudrun watched him still for a few seconds. Then she turned away. It was finished, her spell of divination in him. She felt already purely cynical. She looked at Gerald. He was wonderful like a piece of radium to her. She felt she could consume herself and know _all_, by means of this fatal, living metal. She smiled to herself at her fancy. And what would she do with herself, when she had destroyed herself? For if spirit, if integral being is destructible, Matter is indestructible. He was looking bright and abstracted, puzzled, for the moment. She stretched out her beautiful arm, with its fluff of green tulle, and touched his chin with her subtle, artist�s fingers. �What are they then?� she asked, with a strange, knowing smile. �What?� he replied, his eyes suddenly dilating with wonder. �Your thoughts.� Gerald looked like a man coming awake. �I think I had none,� he said. �Really!� she said, with grave laughter in her voice. And to Birkin it was as if she killed Gerald, with that touch. �Ah but,� cried Gudrun, �let us drink to Britannia�let us drink to Britannia.� It seemed there was wild despair in her voice. Gerald laughed, and filled the glasses. �I think Rupert means,� he said, �that _nationally_ all Englishmen must die, so that they can exist individually and�� �Super-nationally�� put in Gudrun, with a slight ironic grimace, raising her glass. The next day, they descended at the tiny railway station of Hohenhausen, at the end of the tiny valley railway. It was snow everywhere, a white, perfect cradle of snow, new and frozen, sweeping up on either side, black crags, and white sweeps of silver towards the blue pale heavens. As they stepped out on the naked platform, with only snow around and above, Gudrun shrank as if it chilled her heart. �My God, Jerry,� she said, turning to Gerald with sudden intimacy, �you�ve done it now.� �What?� She made a faint gesture, indicating the world on either hand. �Look at it!� She seemed afraid to go on. He laughed. They were in the heart of the mountains. From high above, on either side, swept down the white fold of snow, so that one seemed small and tiny in a valley of pure concrete heaven, all strangely radiant and changeless and silent. �It makes one feel so small and alone,� said Ursula, turning to Birkin and laying her hand on his arm. �You�re not sorry you�ve come, are you?� said Gerald to Gudrun. She looked doubtful. They went out of the station between banks of snow. �Ah,� said Gerald, sniffing the air in elation, �this is perfect. There�s our sledge. We�ll walk a bit�we�ll run up the road.� Gudrun, always doubtful, dropped her heavy coat on the sledge, as he did his, and they set off. Suddenly she threw up her head and set off scudding along the road of snow, pulling her cap down over her ears. Her blue, bright dress fluttered in the wind, her thick scarlet stockings were brilliant above the whiteness. Gerald watched her: she seemed to be rushing towards her fate, and leaving him behind. He let her get some distance, then, loosening his limbs, he went after her. Everywhere was deep and silent snow. Great snow-eaves weighed down the broad-roofed Tyrolese houses, that were sunk to the window-sashes in snow. Peasant-women, full-skirted, wearing each a cross-over shawl, and thick snow-boots, turned in the way to look at the soft, determined girl running with such heavy fleetness from the man, who was overtaking her, but not gaining any power over her. They passed the inn with its painted shutters and balcony, a few cottages, half buried in the snow; then the snow-buried silent sawmill by the roofed bridge, which crossed the hidden stream, over which they ran into the very depth of the untouched sheets of snow. It was a silence and a sheer whiteness exhilarating to madness. But the perfect silence was most terrifying, isolating the soul, surrounding the heart with frozen air. �It�s a marvellous place, for all that,� said Gudrun, looking into his eyes with a strange, meaning look. His soul leapt. �Good,� he said. A fierce electric energy seemed to flow over all his limbs, his muscles were surcharged, his hands felt hard with strength. They walked along rapidly up the snow-road, that was marked by withered branches of trees stuck in at intervals. He and she were separate, like opposite poles of one fierce energy. But they felt powerful enough to leap over the confines of life into the forbidden places, and back again. Birkin and Ursula were running along also, over the snow. He had disposed of the luggage, and they had a little start of the sledges. Ursula was excited and happy, but she kept turning suddenly to catch hold of Birkin�s arm, to make sure of him. �This is something I never expected,� she said. �It is a different world, here.� They went on into a snow meadow. There they were overtaken by the sledge, that came tinkling through the silence. It was another mile before they came upon Gudrun and Gerald on the steep up-climb, beside the pink, half-buried shrine. Then they passed into a gulley, where were walls of black rock and a river filled with snow, and a still blue sky above. Through a covered bridge they went, drumming roughly over the boards, crossing the snow-bed once more, then slowly up and up, the horses walking swiftly, the driver cracking his long whip as he walked beside, and calling his strange wild _hue-hue!_, the walls of rock passing slowly by, till they emerged again between slopes and masses of snow. Up and up, gradually they went, through the cold shadow-radiance of the afternoon, silenced by the imminence of the mountains, the luminous, dazing sides of snow that rose above them and fell away beneath. They came forth at last in a little high table-land of snow, where stood the last peaks of snow like the heart petals of an open rose. In the midst of the last deserted valleys of heaven stood a lonely building with brown wooden walls and white heavy roof, deep and deserted in the waste of snow, like a dream. It stood like a rock that had rolled down from the last steep slopes, a rock that had taken the form of a house, and was now half-buried. It was unbelievable that one could live there uncrushed by all this terrible waste of whiteness and silence and clear, upper, ringing cold. Yet the sledges ran up in fine style, people came to the door laughing and excited, the floor of the hostel rang hollow, the passage was wet with snow, it was a real, warm interior. The newcomers tramped up the bare wooden stairs, following the serving woman. Gudrun and Gerald took the first bedroom. In a moment they found themselves alone in a bare, smallish, close-shut room that was all of golden-coloured wood, floor, walls, ceiling, door, all of the same warm gold panelling of oiled pine. There was a window opposite the door, but low down, because the roof sloped. Under the slope of the ceiling were the table with wash-hand bowl and jug, and across, another table with mirror. On either side the door were two beds piled high with an enormous blue-checked overbolster, enormous. This was all�no cupboard, none of the amenities of life. Here they were shut up together in this cell of golden-coloured wood, with two blue checked beds. They looked at each other and laughed, frightened by this naked nearness of isolation. A man knocked and came in with the luggage. He was a sturdy fellow with flattish cheek-bones, rather pale, and with coarse fair moustache. Gudrun watched him put down the bags, in silence, then tramp heavily out. �It isn�t too rough, is it?� Gerald asked. The bedroom was not very warm, and she shivered slightly. �It is wonderful,� she equivocated. �Look at the colour of this panelling�it�s wonderful, like being inside a nut.� He was standing watching her, feeling his short-cut moustache, leaning back slightly and watching her with his keen, undaunted eyes, dominated by the constant passion, that was like a doom upon him. She went and crouched down in front of the window, curious. �Oh, but this�!� she cried involuntarily, almost in pain. In front was a valley shut in under the sky, the last huge slopes of snow and black rock, and at the end, like the navel of the earth, a white-folded wall, and two peaks glimmering in the late light. Straight in front ran the cradle of silent snow, between the great slopes that were fringed with a little roughness of pine-trees, like hair, round the base. But the cradle of snow ran on to the eternal closing-in, where the walls of snow and rock rose impenetrable, and the mountain peaks above were in heaven immediate. This was the centre, the knot, the navel of the world, where the earth belonged to the skies, pure, unapproachable, impassable. It filled Gudrun with a strange rapture. She crouched in front of the window, clenching her face in her hands, in a sort of trance. At last she had arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last she folded her venture and settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow, and was gone. Gerald bent above her and was looking out over her shoulder. Already he felt he was alone. She was gone. She was completely gone, and there was icy vapour round his heart. He saw the blind valley, the great cul-de-sac of snow and mountain peaks, under the heaven. And there was no way out. The terrible silence and cold and the glamorous whiteness of the dusk wrapped him round, and she remained crouching before the window, as at a shrine, a shadow. �Do you like it?� he asked, in a voice that sounded detached and foreign. At least she might acknowledge he was with her. But she only averted her soft, mute face a little from his gaze. And he knew that there were tears in her eyes, her own tears, tears of her strange religion, that put him to nought. Quite suddenly, he put his hand under her chin and lifted up her face to him. Her dark blue eyes, in their wetness of tears, dilated as if she was startled in her very soul. They looked at him through their tears in terror and a little horror. His light blue eyes were keen, small-pupilled and unnatural in their vision. Her lips parted, as she breathed with difficulty. The passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the ringing of a bronze bell, so strong and unflawed and indomitable. His knees tightened to bronze as he hung above her soft face, whose lips parted and whose eyes dilated in a strange violation. In the grasp of his hand her chin was unutterably soft and silken. He felt strong as winter, his hands were living metal, invincible and not to be turned aside. His heart rang like a bell clanging inside him. He took her up in his arms. She was soft and inert, motionless. All the while her eyes, in which the tears had not yet dried, were dilated as if in a kind of swoon of fascination and helplessness. He was superhumanly strong, and unflawed, as if invested with supernatural force. He lifted her close and folded her against him. Her softness, her inert, relaxed weight lay against his own surcharged, bronze-like limbs in a heaviness of desirability that would destroy him, if he were not fulfilled. She moved convulsively, recoiling away from him. His heart went up like a flame of ice, he closed over her like steel. He would destroy her rather than be denied. But the overweening power of his body was too much for her. She relaxed again, and lay loose and soft, panting in a little delirium. And to him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forego one second of this pang of unsurpassable bliss. �My God,� he said to her, his face drawn and strange, transfigured, �what next?� She lay perfectly still, with a still, child-like face and dark eyes, looking at him. She was lost, fallen right away. �I shall always love you,� he said, looking at her. But she did not hear. She lay, looking at him as at something she could never understand, never: as a child looks at a grown-up person, without hope of understanding, only submitting. He kissed her, kissed her eyes shut, so that she could not look any more. He wanted something now, some recognition, some sign, some admission. But she only lay silent and child-like and remote, like a child that is overcome and cannot understand, only feels lost. He kissed her again, giving up. �Shall we go down and have coffee and _Kuchen?_� he asked. The twilight was falling slate-blue at the window. She closed her eyes, closed away the monotonous level of dead wonder, and opened them again to the every-day world. �Yes,� she said briefly, regaining her will with a click. She went again to the window. Blue evening had fallen over the cradle of snow and over the great pallid slopes. But in the heaven the peaks of snow were rosy, glistening like transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in the heavenly upper-world, so lovely and beyond. Gudrun saw all their loveliness, she _knew_ how immortally beautiful they were, great pistils of rose-coloured, snow-fed fire in the blue twilight of the heaven. She could _see_ it, she knew it, but she was not of it. She was divorced, debarred, a soul shut out. With a last look of remorse, she turned away, and was doing her hair. He had unstrapped the luggage, and was waiting, watching her. She knew he was watching her. It made her a little hasty and feverish in her precipitation. They went downstairs, both with a strange other-world look on their faces, and with a glow in their eyes. They saw Birkin and Ursula sitting at the long table in a corner, waiting for them. �How good and simple they look together,� Gudrun thought, jealously. She envied them some spontaneity, a childish sufficiency to which she herself could never approach. They seemed such children to her. �Such good _Kranzkuchen!_� cried Ursula greedily. �So good!� �Right,� said Gudrun. �Can we have _Kaffee mit Kranzkuchen?_� she added to the waiter. And she seated herself on the bench beside Gerald. Birkin, looking at them, felt a pain of tenderness for them. �I think the place is really wonderful, Gerald,� he said; �_prachtvoll_ and _wunderbar_ and _wunderschön_ and _unbeschreiblich_ and all the other German adjectives.� Gerald broke into a slight smile. �_I_ like it,� he said. The tables, of white scrubbed wood, were placed round three sides of the room, as in a Gasthaus. Birkin and Ursula sat with their backs to the wall, which was of oiled wood, and Gerald and Gudrun sat in the corner next them, near to the stove. It was a fairly large place, with a tiny bar, just like a country inn, but quite simple and bare, and all of oiled wood, ceilings and walls and floor, the only furniture being the tables and benches going round three sides, the great green stove, and the bar and the doors on the fourth side. The windows were double, and quite uncurtained. It was early evening. The coffee came�hot and good�and a whole ring of cake. �A whole _Kuchen!_� cried Ursula. �They give you more than us! I want some of yours.� There were other people in the place, ten altogether, so Birkin had found out: two artists, three students, a man and wife, and a Professor and two daughters�all Germans. The four English people, being newcomers, sat in their coign of vantage to watch. The Germans peeped in at the door, called a word to the waiter, and went away again. It was not meal-time, so they did not come into this dining-room, but betook themselves, when their boots were changed, to the _Reunionsaal._ The English visitors could hear the occasional twanging of a zither, the strumming of a piano, snatches of laughter and shouting and singing, a faint vibration of voices. The whole building being of wood, it seemed to carry every sound, like a drum, but instead of increasing each particular noise, it decreased it, so that the sound of the zither seemed tiny, as if a diminutive zither were playing somewhere, and it seemed the piano must be a small one, like a little spinet. The host came when the coffee was finished. He was a Tyrolese, broad, rather flat-cheeked, with a pale, pock-marked skin and flourishing moustaches. �Would you like to go to the _Reunionsaal_ to be introduced to the other ladies and gentlemen?� he asked, bending forward and smiling, showing his large, strong teeth. His blue eyes went quickly from one to the other�he was not quite sure of his ground with these English people. He was unhappy too because he spoke no English and he was not sure whether to try his French. �Shall we go to the _Reunionsaal_, and be introduced to the other people?� repeated Gerald, laughing. There was a moment�s hesitation. �I suppose we�d better�better break the ice,� said Birkin. The women rose, rather flushed. And the Wirt�s black, beetle-like, broad-shouldered figure went on ignominiously in front, towards the noise. He opened the door and ushered the four strangers into the play-room. Instantly a silence fell, a slight embarrassment came over the company. The newcomers had a sense of many blond faces looking their way. Then, the host was bowing to a short, energetic-looking man with large moustaches, and saying in a low voice: �_Herr Professor, darf ich vorstellen_�� The Herr Professor was prompt and energetic. He bowed low to the English people, smiling, and began to be a comrade at once. �_Nehmen die Herrschaften teil an unserer Unterhaltung?_� he said, with a vigorous suavity, his voice curling up in the question. The four English people smiled, lounging with an attentive uneasiness in the middle of the room. Gerald, who was spokesman, said that they would willingly take part in the entertainment. Gudrun and Ursula, laughing, excited, felt the eyes of all the men upon them, and they lifted their heads and looked nowhere, and felt royal. The Professor announced the names of those present, _sans cérémonie_. There was a bowing to the wrong people and to the right people. Everybody was there, except the man and wife. The two tall, clear-skinned, athletic daughters of the professor, with their plain-cut, dark blue blouses and loden skirts, their rather long, strong necks, their clear blue eyes and carefully banded hair, and their blushes, bowed and stood back; the three students bowed very low, in the humble hope of making an impression of extreme good-breeding; then there was a thin, dark-skinned man with full eyes, an odd creature, like a child, and like a troll, quick, detached; he bowed slightly; his companion, a large fair young man, stylishly dressed, blushed to the eyes and bowed very low. It was over. �Herr Loerke was giving us a recitation in the Cologne dialect,� said the Professor. �He must forgive us for interrupting him,� said Gerald, �we should like very much to hear it.� There was instantly a bowing and an offering of seats. Gudrun and Ursula, Gerald and Birkin sat in the deep sofas against the wall. The room was of naked oiled panelling, like the rest of the house. It had a piano, sofas and chairs, and a couple of tables with books and magazines. In its complete absence of decoration, save for the big, blue stove, it was cosy and pleasant. Herr Loerke was the little man with the boyish figure, and the round, full, sensitive-looking head, and the quick, full eyes, like a mouse�s. He glanced swiftly from one to the other of the strangers, and held himself aloof. �Please go on with the recitation,� said the Professor, suavely, with his slight authority. Loerke, who was sitting hunched on the piano stool, blinked and did not answer. �It would be a great pleasure,� said Ursula, who had been getting the sentence ready, in German, for some minutes. Then, suddenly, the small, unresponding man swung aside, towards his previous audience and broke forth, exactly as he had broken off; in a controlled, mocking voice, giving an imitation of a quarrel between an old Cologne woman and a railway guard. His body was slight and unformed, like a boy�s, but his voice was mature, sardonic, its movement had the flexibility of essential energy, and of a mocking penetrating understanding. Gudrun could not understand a word of his monologue, but she was spell-bound, watching him. He must be an artist, nobody else could have such fine adjustment and singleness. The Germans were doubled up with laughter, hearing his strange droll words, his droll phrases of dialect. And in the midst of their paroxysms, they glanced with deference at the four English strangers, the elect. Gudrun and Ursula were forced to laugh. The room rang with shouts of laughter. The blue eyes of the Professor�s daughters were swimming over with laughter-tears, their clear cheeks were flushed crimson with mirth, their father broke out in the most astonishing peals of hilarity, the students bowed their heads on their knees in excess of joy. Ursula looked round amazed, the laughter was bubbling out of her involuntarily. She looked at Gudrun. Gudrun looked at her, and the two sisters burst out laughing, carried away. Loerke glanced at them swiftly, with his full eyes. Birkin was sniggering involuntarily. Gerald Crich sat erect, with a glistening look of amusement on his face. And the laughter crashed out again, in wild paroxysms, the Professor�s daughters were reduced to shaking helplessness, the veins of the Professor�s neck were swollen, his face was purple, he was strangled in ultimate, silent spasms of laughter. The students were shouting half-articulated words that tailed off in helpless explosions. Then suddenly the rapid patter of the artist ceased, there were little whoops of subsiding mirth, Ursula and Gudrun were wiping their eyes, and the Professor was crying loudly. �_Das war ausgezeichnet, das war famos_�� �_Wirklich famos_,� echoed his exhausted daughters, faintly. �And we couldn�t understand it,� cried Ursula. �_Oh leider, leider!_� cried the Professor. �You couldn�t understand it?� cried the Students, let loose at last in speech with the newcomers. �_Ja, das ist wirklich schade, das ist schade, gnädige Frau. Wissen Sie_�� The mixture was made, the newcomers were stirred into the party, like new ingredients, the whole room was alive. Gerald was in his element, he talked freely and excitedly, his face glistened with a strange amusement. Perhaps even Birkin, in the end, would break forth. He was shy and withheld, though full of attention. Ursula was prevailed upon to sing �Annie Lowrie,� as the Professor called it. There was a hush of _extreme_ deference. She had never been so flattered in her life. Gudrun accompanied her on the piano, playing from memory. Ursula had a beautiful ringing voice, but usually no confidence, she spoiled everything. This evening she felt conceited and untrammelled. Birkin was well in the background, she shone almost in reaction, the Germans made her feel fine and infallible, she was liberated into overweening self-confidence. She felt like a bird flying in the air, as her voice soared out, enjoying herself extremely in the balance and flight of the song, like the motion of a bird�s wings that is up in the wind, sliding and playing on the air, she played with sentimentality, supported by rapturous attention. She was very happy, singing that song by herself, full of a conceit of emotion and power, working upon all those people, and upon herself, exerting herself with gratification, giving immeasurable gratification to the Germans. At the end, the Germans were all touched with admiring, delicious melancholy, they praised her in soft, reverent voices, they could not say too much. �_Wie schön, wie rührend! Ach, die Schottischen Lieder, sie haben so viel Stimmung! Aber die gnädige Frau hat eine wunderbare Stimme; die gnädige Frau ist wirklich eine Künstlerin, aber wirklich!_� She was dilated and brilliant, like a flower in the morning sun. She felt Birkin looking at her, as if he were jealous of her, and her breasts thrilled, her veins were all golden. She was as happy as the sun that has just opened above clouds. And everybody seemed so admiring and radiant, it was perfect. After dinner she wanted to go out for a minute, to look at the world. The company tried to dissuade her�it was so terribly cold. But just to look, she said. They all four wrapped up warmly, and found themselves in a vague, unsubstantial outdoors of dim snow and ghosts of an upper-world, that made strange shadows before the stars. It was indeed cold, bruisingly, frighteningly, unnaturally cold. Ursula could not believe the air in her nostrils. It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness. Yet it was wonderful, an intoxication, a silence of dim, unrealised snow, of the invisible intervening between her and the visible, between her and the flashing stars. She could see Orion sloping up. How wonderful he was, wonderful enough to make one cry aloud. And all around was this cradle of snow, and there was firm snow underfoot, that struck with heavy cold through her boot-soles. It was night, and silence. She imagined she could hear the stars. She imagined distinctly she could hear the celestial, musical motion of the stars, quite near at hand. She seemed like a bird flying amongst their harmonious motion. And she clung close to Birkin. Suddenly she realised she did not know what he was thinking. She did not know where he was ranging. �My love!� she said, stopping to look at him. His face was pale, his eyes dark, there was a faint spark of starlight on them. And he saw her face soft and upturned to him, very near. He kissed her softly. �What then?� he asked. �Do you love me?� she asked. �Too much,� he answered quietly. She clung a little closer. �Not too much,� she pleaded. �Far too much,� he said, almost sadly. �And does it make you sad, that I am everything to you?� she asked, wistful. He held her close to him, kissing her, and saying, scarcely audible: �No, but I feel like a beggar�I feel poor.� She was silent, looking at the stars now. Then she kissed him. �Don�t be a beggar,� she pleaded, wistfully. �It isn�t ignominious that you love me.� �It is ignominious to feel poor, isn�t it?� he replied. �Why? Why should it be?� she asked. He only stood still, in the terribly cold air that moved invisibly over the mountain tops, folding her round with his arms. �I couldn�t bear this cold, eternal place without you,� he said. �I couldn�t bear it, it would kill the quick of my life.� She kissed him again, suddenly. �Do you hate it?� she asked, puzzled, wondering. �If I couldn�t come near to you, if you weren�t here, I should hate it. I couldn�t bear it,� he answered. �But the people are nice,� she said. �I mean the stillness, the cold, the frozen eternality,� he said. She wondered. Then her spirit came home to him, nestling unconscious in him. �Yes, it is good we are warm and together,� she said. And they turned home again. They saw the golden lights of the hotel glowing out in the night of snow-silence, small in the hollow, like a cluster of yellow berries. It seemed like a bunch of sun-sparks, tiny and orange in the midst of the snow-darkness. Behind, was a high shadow of a peak, blotting out the stars, like a ghost. They drew near to their home. They saw a man come from the dark building, with a lighted lantern which swung golden, and made that his dark feet walked in a halo of snow. He was a small, dark figure in the darkened snow. He unlatched the door of an outhouse. A smell of cows, hot, animal, almost like beef, came out on the heavily cold air. There was a glimpse of two cattle in their dark stalls, then the door was shut again, and not a chink of light showed. It had reminded Ursula again of home, of the Marsh, of her childhood, and of the journey to Brussels, and, strangely, of Anton Skrebensky. Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should �remember�! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper notes, sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of reality, where she had never existed before. Even Gudrun was a separate unit, separate, separate, having nothing to do with this self, this Ursula, in her new world of reality. That old shadow-world, the actuality of the past�ah, let it go! She rose free on the wings of her new condition. Gudrun and Gerald had not come in. They had walked up the valley straight in front of the house, not like Ursula and Birkin, on to the little hill at the right. Gudrun was driven by a strange desire. She wanted to plunge on and on, till she came to the end of the valley of snow. Then she wanted to climb the wall of white finality, climb over, into the peaks that sprang up like sharp petals in the heart of the frozen, mysterious navel of the world. She felt that there, over the strange blind, terrible wall of rocky snow, there in the navel of the mystic world, among the final cluster of peaks, there, in the infolded navel of it all, was her consummation. If she could but come there, alone, and pass into the infolded navel of eternal snow and of uprising, immortal peaks of snow and rock, she would be a oneness with all, she would be herself the eternal, infinite silence, the sleeping, timeless, frozen centre of the All. They went back to the house, to the _Reunionsaal_. She was curious to see what was going on. The men there made her alert, roused her curiosity. It was a new taste of life for her, they were so prostrate before her, yet so full of life. The party was boisterous; they were dancing all together, dancing the _Schuhplatteln_, the Tyrolese dance of the clapping hands and tossing the partner in the air at the crisis. The Germans were all proficient�they were from Munich chiefly. Gerald also was quite passable. There were three zithers twanging away in a corner. It was a scene of great animation and confusion. The Professor was initiating Ursula into the dance, stamping, clapping, and swinging her high, with amazing force and zest. When the crisis came even Birkin was behaving manfully with one of the Professor�s fresh, strong daughters, who was exceedingly happy. Everybody was dancing, there was the most boisterous turmoil. Gudrun looked on with delight. The solid wooden floor resounded to the knocking heels of the men, the air quivered with the clapping hands and the zither music, there was a golden dust about the hanging lamps. Suddenly the dance finished, Loerke and the students rushed out to bring in drinks. There was an excited clamour of voices, a clinking of mug-lids, a great crying of �_Prosit�Prosit!_� Loerke was everywhere at once, like a gnome, suggesting drinks for the women, making an obscure, slightly risky joke with the men, confusing and mystifying the waiter. He wanted very much to dance with Gudrun. From the first moment he had seen her, he wanted to make a connection with her. Instinctively she felt this, and she waited for him to come up. But a kind of sulkiness kept him away from her, so she thought he disliked her. �Will you _schuhplätteln, gnädige Frau?_� said the large, fair youth, Loerke�s companion. He was too soft, too humble for Gudrun�s taste. But she wanted to dance, and the fair youth, who was called Leitner, was handsome enough in his uneasy, slightly abject fashion, a humility that covered a certain fear. She accepted him as a partner. The zithers sounded out again, the dance began. Gerald led them, laughing, with one of the Professor�s daughters. Ursula danced with one of the students, Birkin with the other daughter of the Professor, the Professor with Frau Kramer, and the rest of the men danced together, with quite as much zest as if they had had women partners. Because Gudrun had danced with the well-built, soft youth, his companion, Loerke, was more pettish and exasperated than ever, and would not even notice her existence in the room. This piqued her, but she made up to herself by dancing with the Professor, who was strong as a mature, well-seasoned bull, and as full of coarse energy. She could not bear him, critically, and yet she enjoyed being rushed through the dance, and tossed up into the air, on his coarse, powerful impetus. The Professor enjoyed it too, he eyed her with strange, large blue eyes, full of galvanic fire. She hated him for the seasoned, semi-paternal animalism with which he regarded her, but she admired his weight of strength. The room was charged with excitement and strong, animal emotion. Loerke was kept away from Gudrun, to whom he wanted to speak, as by a hedge of thorns, and he felt a sardonic ruthless hatred for this young love-companion, Leitner, who was his penniless dependent. He mocked the youth, with an acid ridicule, that made Leitner red in the face and impotent with resentment. Gerald, who had now got the dance perfectly, was dancing again with the younger of the Professor�s daughters, who was almost dying of virgin excitement, because she thought Gerald so handsome, so superb. He had her in his power, as if she were a palpitating bird, a fluttering, flushing, bewildered creature. And it made him smile, as she shrank convulsively between his hands, violently, when he must throw her into the air. At the end, she was so overcome with prostrate love for him, that she could scarcely speak sensibly at all. Birkin was dancing with Ursula. There were odd little fires playing in his eyes, he seemed to have turned into something wicked and flickering, mocking, suggestive, quite impossible. Ursula was frightened of him, and fascinated. Clear, before her eyes, as in a vision, she could see the sardonic, licentious mockery of his eyes, he moved towards her with subtle, animal, indifferent approach. The strangeness of his hands, which came quick and cunning, inevitably to the vital place beneath her breasts, and, lifting with mocking, suggestive impulse, carried her through the air as if without strength, through blackmagic, made her swoon with fear. For a moment she revolted, it was horrible. She would break the spell. But before the resolution had formed she had submitted again, yielded to her fear. He knew all the time what he was doing, she could see it in his smiling, concentrated eyes. It was his responsibility, she would leave it to him. When they were alone in the darkness, she felt the strange, licentiousness of him hovering upon her. She was troubled and repelled. Why should he turn like this? �What is it?� she asked in dread. But his face only glistened on her, unknown, horrible. And yet she was fascinated. Her impulse was to repel him violently, break from this spell of mocking brutishness. But she was too fascinated, she wanted to submit, she wanted to know. What would he do to her? He was so attractive, and so repulsive at one. The sardonic suggestivity that flickered over his face and looked from his narrowed eyes, made her want to hide, to hide herself away from him and watch him from somewhere unseen. �Why are you like this?� she demanded again, rousing against him with sudden force and animosity. The flickering fires in his eyes concentrated as he looked into her eyes. Then the lids drooped with a faint motion of satiric contempt. Then they rose again to the same remorseless suggestivity. And she gave way, he might do as he would. His licentiousness was repulsively attractive. But he was self-responsible, she would see what it was. They might do as they liked�this she realised as she went to sleep. How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What was degrading? Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he was so unabashed and unrestrained. Wasn�t it rather horrible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so�she balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added�so bestial? So bestial, they two!�so degraded! She winced. But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful thing she had not experienced. Yet she was unabashed, she was herself. Why not? She was free, when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her. Gudrun, who had been watching Gerald in the _Reunionsaal_, suddenly thought: �He should have all the women he can�it is his nature. It is absurd to call him monogamous�he is naturally promiscuous. That is his nature.� The thought came to her involuntarily. It shocked her somewhat. It was as if she had seen some new _Mene! Mene!_ upon the wall. Yet it was merely true. A voice seemed to have spoken it to her so clearly, that for the moment she believed in inspiration. �It is really true,� she said to herself again. She knew quite well she had believed it all along. She knew it implicitly. But she must keep it dark�almost from herself. She must keep it completely secret. It was knowledge for her alone, and scarcely even to be admitted to herself. The deep resolve formed in her, to combat him. One of them must triumph over the other. Which should it be? Her soul steeled itself with strength. Almost she laughed within herself, at her confidence. It woke a certain keen, half contemptuous pity, tenderness for him: she was so ruthless. Everybody retired early. The Professor and Loerke went into a small lounge to drink. They both watched Gudrun go along the landing by the railing upstairs. �_Ein schönes Frauenzimmer_,� said the Professor. �_Ja!_� asserted Loerke, shortly. Gerald walked with his queer, long wolf-steps across the bedroom to the window, stooped and looked out, then rose again, and turned to Gudrun, his eyes sharp with an abstract smile. He seemed very tall to her, she saw the glisten of his whitish eyebrows, that met between his brows. �How do you like it?� he said. He seemed to be laughing inside himself, quite unconsciously. She looked at him. He was a phenomenon to her, not a human being: a sort of creature, greedy. �I like it very much,� she replied. �Who do you like best downstairs?� he asked, standing tall and glistening above her, with his glistening stiff hair erect. �Who do I like best?� she repeated, wanting to answer his question, and finding it difficult to collect herself. �Why I don�t know, I don�t know enough about them yet, to be able to say. Who do _you_ like best?� �Oh, I don�t care�I don�t like or dislike any of them. It doesn�t matter about me. I wanted to know about you.� �But why?� she asked, going rather pale. The abstract, unconscious smile in his eyes was intensified. �I wanted to know,� he said. She turned aside, breaking the spell. In some strange way, she felt he was getting power over her. �Well, I can�t tell you already,� she said. She went to the mirror to take out the hairpins from her hair. She stood before the mirror every night for some minutes, brushing her fine dark hair. It was part of the inevitable ritual of her life. He followed her, and stood behind her. She was busy with bent head, taking out the pins and shaking her warm hair loose. When she looked up, she saw him in the glass standing behind her, watching unconsciously, not consciously seeing her, and yet watching, with finepupilled eyes that _seemed_ to smile, and which were not really smiling. She started. It took all her courage for her to continue brushing her hair, as usual, for her to pretend she was at her ease. She was far, far from being at her ease with him. She beat her brains wildly for something to say to him. �What are your plans for tomorrow?� she asked nonchalantly, whilst her heart was beating so furiously, her eyes were so bright with strange nervousness, she felt he could not but observe. But she knew also that he was completely blind, blind as a wolf looking at her. It was a strange battle between her ordinary consciousness and his uncanny, black-art consciousness. �I don�t know,� he replied, �what would you like to do?� He spoke emptily, his mind was sunk away. �Oh,� she said, with easy protestation, �I�m ready for anything�anything will be fine for _me_, I�m sure.� And to herself she was saying: �God, why am I so nervous�why are you so nervous, you fool. If he sees it I�m done for forever�you _know_ you�re done for forever, if he sees the absurd state you�re in.� And she smiled to herself as if it were all child�s play. Meanwhile her heart was plunging, she was almost fainting. She could see him, in the mirror, as he stood there behind her, tall and over-arching�blond and terribly frightening. She glanced at his reflection with furtive eyes, willing to give anything to save him from knowing she could see him. He did not know she could see his reflection. He was looking unconsciously, glisteningly down at her head, from which the hair fell loose, as she brushed it with wild, nervous hand. She held her head aside and brushed and brushed her hair madly. For her life, she could not turn round and face him. For her life, _she could not_. And the knowledge made her almost sink to the ground in a faint, helpless, spent. She was aware of his frightening, impending figure standing close behind her, she was aware of his hard, strong, unyielding chest, close upon her back. And she felt she could not bear it any more, in a few minutes she would fall down at his feet, grovelling at his feet, and letting him destroy her. The thought pricked up all her sharp intelligence and presence of mind. She dared not turn round to him�and there he stood motionless, unbroken. Summoning all her strength, she said, in a full, resonant, nonchalant voice, that was forced out with all her remaining self-control: �Oh, would you mind looking in that bag behind there and giving me my�� Here her power fell inert. �My what�my what�?� she screamed in silence to herself. But he had started round, surprised and startled that she should ask him to look in her bag, which she always kept so _very_ private to herself. She turned now, her face white, her dark eyes blazing with uncanny, overwrought excitement. She saw him stooping to the bag, undoing the loosely buckled strap, unattentive. �Your what?� he asked. �Oh, a little enamel box�yellow�with a design of a cormorant plucking her breast�� She went towards him, stooping her beautiful, bare arm, and deftly turned some of her things, disclosing the box, which was exquisitely painted. �That is it, see,� she said, taking it from under his eyes. And he was baffled now. He was left to fasten up the bag, whilst she swiftly did up her hair for the night, and sat down to unfasten her shoes. She would not turn her back to him any more. He was baffled, frustrated, but unconscious. She had the whip hand over him now. She knew he had not realised her terrible panic. Her heart was beating heavily still. Fool, fool that she was, to get into such a state! How she thanked God for Gerald�s obtuse blindness. Thank God he could see nothing. She sat slowly unlacing her shoes, and he too commenced to undress. Thank God that crisis was over. She felt almost fond of him now, almost in love with him. �Ah, Gerald,� she laughed, caressively, teasingly, �Ah, what a fine game you played with the Professor�s daughter�didn�t you now?� �What game?� he asked, looking round. �_Isn�t_ she in love with you�oh _dear_, isn�t she in love with you!� said Gudrun, in her gayest, most attractive mood. �I shouldn�t think so,� he said. �Shouldn�t think so!� she teased. �Why the poor girl is lying at this moment overwhelmed, dying with love for you. She thinks you�re _wonderful_�oh marvellous, beyond what man has ever been. _really_, isn�t it funny?� �Why funny, what is funny?� he asked. �Why to see you working it on her,� she said, with a half reproach that confused the male conceit in him. �Really Gerald, the poor girl�!� �I did nothing to her,� he said. �Oh, it was too shameful, the way you simply swept her off her feet.� �That was _Schuhplatteln_,� he replied, with a bright grin. �Ha�ha�ha!� laughed Gudrun. Her mockery quivered through his muscles with curious re-echoes. When he slept he seemed to crouch down in the bed, lapped up in his own strength, that yet was hollow. And Gudrun slept strongly, a victorious sleep. Suddenly, she was almost fiercely awake. The small timber room glowed with the dawn, that came upwards from the low window. She could see down the valley when she lifted her head: the snow with a pinkish, half-revealed magic, the fringe of pine-trees at the bottom of the slope. And one tiny figure moved over the vaguely-illuminated space. She glanced at his watch; it was seven o�clock. He was still completely asleep. And she was so hard awake, it was almost frightening�a hard, metallic wakefulness. She lay looking at him. He slept in the subjection of his own health and defeat. She was overcome by a sincere regard for him. Till now, she was afraid before him. She lay and thought about him, what he was, what he represented in the world. A fine, independent will, he had. She thought of the revolution he had worked in the mines, in so short a time. She knew that, if he were confronted with any problem, any hard actual difficulty, he would overcome it. If he laid hold of any idea, he would carry it through. He had the faculty of making order out of confusion. Only let him grip hold of a situation, and he would bring to pass an inevitable conclusion. For a few moments she was borne away on the wild wings of ambition. Gerald, with his force of will and his power for comprehending the actual world, should be set to solve the problems of the day, the problem of industrialism in the modern world. She knew he would, in the course of time, effect the changes he desired, he could re-organise the industrial system. She knew he could do it. As an instrument, in these things, he was marvellous, she had never seen any man with his potentiality. He was unaware of it, but she knew. He only needed to be hitched on, he needed that his hand should be set to the task, because he was so unconscious. And this she could do. She would marry him, he would go into Parliament in the Conservative interest, he would clear up the great muddle of labour and industry. He was so superbly fearless, masterful, he knew that every problem could be worked out, in life as in geometry. And he would care neither about himself nor about anything but the pure working out of the problem. He was very pure, really. Her heart beat fast, she flew away on wings of elation, imagining a future. He would be a Napoleon of peace, or a Bismarck�and she the woman behind him. She had read Bismarck�s letters, and had been deeply moved by them. And Gerald would be freer, more dauntless than Bismarck. But even as she lay in fictitious transport, bathed in the strange, false sunshine of hope in life, something seemed to snap in her, and a terrible cynicism began to gain upon her, blowing in like a wind. Everything turned to irony with her: the last flavour of everything was ironical. When she felt her pang of undeniable reality, this was when she knew the hard irony of hopes and ideas. She lay and looked at him, as he slept. He was sheerly beautiful, he was a perfect instrument. To her mind, he was a pure, inhuman, almost superhuman instrument. His instrumentality appealed so strongly to her, she wished she were God, to use him as a tool. And at the same instant, came the ironical question: �What for?� She thought of the colliers� wives, with their linoleum and their lace curtains and their little girls in high-laced boots. She thought of the wives and daughters of the pit-managers, their tennis-parties, and their terrible struggles to be superior each to the other, in the social scale. There was Shortlands with its meaningless distinction, the meaningless crowd of the Criches. There was London, the House of Commons, the extant social world. My God! Young as she was, Gudrun had touched the whole pulse of social England. She had no ideas of rising in the world. She knew, with the perfect cynicism of cruel youth, that to rise in the world meant to have one outside show instead of another, the advance was like having a spurious half-crown instead of a spurious penny. The whole coinage of valuation was spurious. Yet of course, her cynicism knew well enough that, in a world where spurious coin was current, a bad sovereign was better than a bad farthing. But rich and poor, she despised both alike. Already she mocked at herself for her dreams. They could be fulfilled easily enough. But she recognised too well, in her spirit, the mockery of her own impulses. What did she care, that Gerald had created a richly-paying industry out of an old worn-out concern? What did she care? The worn-out concern and the rapid, splendidly organised industry, they were bad money. Yet of course, she cared a great deal, outwardly�and outwardly was all that mattered, for inwardly was a bad joke. Everything was intrinsically a piece of irony to her. She leaned over Gerald and said in her heart, with compassion: �Oh, my dear, my dear, the game isn�t worth even you. You are a fine thing really�why should you be used on such a poor show!� Her heart was breaking with pity and grief for him. And at the same moment, a grimace came over her mouth, of mocking irony at her own unspoken tirade. Ah, what a farce it was! She thought of Parnell and Katherine O�Shea. Parnell! After all, who can take the nationalisation of Ireland seriously? Who can take political Ireland really seriously, whatever it does? And who can take political England seriously? Who can? Who can care a straw, really, how the old patched-up Constitution is tinkered at any more? Who cares a button for our national ideas, any more than for our national bowler hat? Aha, it is all old hat, it is all old bowler hat! That�s all it is, Gerald, my young hero. At any rate we�ll spare ourselves the nausea of stirring the old broth any more. You be beautiful, my Gerald, and reckless. There _are_ perfect moments. Wake up, Gerald, wake up, convince me of the perfect moments. Oh, convince me, I need it. He opened his eyes, and looked at her. She greeted him with a mocking, enigmatic smile in which was a poignant gaiety. Over his face went the reflection of the smile, he smiled, too, purely unconsciously. That filled her with extraordinary delight, to see the smile cross his face, reflected from her face. She remembered that was how a baby smiled. It filled her with extraordinary radiant delight. �You�ve done it,� she said. �What?� he asked, dazed. �Convinced me.� And she bent down, kissing him passionately, passionately, so that he was bewildered. He did not ask her of what he had convinced her, though he meant to. He was glad she was kissing him. She seemed to be feeling for his very heart to touch the quick of him. And he wanted her to touch the quick of his being, he wanted that most of all. Outside, somebody was singing, in a manly, reckless handsome voice: �Mach mir auf, mach mir auf, du Stolze, Mach mir ein Feuer von Holze. Vom Regen bin ich nass Vom Regen bin ich nass�� Gudrun knew that that song would sound through her eternity, sung in a manly, reckless, mocking voice. It marked one of her supreme moments, the supreme pangs of her nervous gratification. There it was, fixed in eternity for her. The day came fine and bluish. There was a light wind blowing among the mountain tops, keen as a rapier where it touched, carrying with it a fine dust of snow-powder. Gerald went out with the fine, blind face of a man who is in his state of fulfilment. Gudrun and he were in perfect static unity this morning, but unseeing and unwitting. They went out with a toboggan, leaving Ursula and Birkin to follow. Gudrun was all scarlet and royal blue�a scarlet jersey and cap, and a royal blue skirt and stockings. She went gaily over the white snow, with Gerald beside her, in white and grey, pulling the little toboggan. They grew small in the distance of snow, climbing the steep slope. For Gudrun herself, she seemed to pass altogether into the whiteness of the snow, she became a pure, thoughtless crystal. When she reached the top of the slope, in the wind, she looked round, and saw peak beyond peak of rock and snow, bluish, transcendent in heaven. And it seemed to her like a garden, with the peaks for pure flowers, and her heart gathering them. She had no separate consciousness for Gerald. She held on to him as they went sheering down over the keen slope. She felt as if her senses were being whetted on some fine grindstone, that was keen as flame. The snow sprinted on either side, like sparks from a blade that is being sharpened, the whiteness round about ran swifter, swifter, in pure flame the white slope flew against her, and she fused like one molten, dancing globule, rushed through a white intensity. Then there was a great swerve at the bottom, when they swung as it were in a fall to earth, in the diminishing motion. They came to rest. But when she rose to her feet, she could not stand. She gave a strange cry, turned and clung to him, sinking her face on his breast, fainting in him. Utter oblivion came over her, as she lay for a few moments abandoned against him. �What is it?� he was saying. �Was it too much for you?� But she heard nothing. When she came to, she stood up and looked round, astonished. Her face was white, her eyes brilliant and large. �What is it?� he repeated. �Did it upset you?� She looked at him with her brilliant eyes that seemed to have undergone some transfiguration, and she laughed, with a terrible merriment. �No,� she cried, with triumphant joy. �It was the complete moment of my life.� And she looked at him with her dazzling, overweening laughter, like one possessed. A fine blade seemed to enter his heart, but he did not care, or take any notice. But they climbed up the slope again, and they flew down through the white flame again, splendidly, splendidly. Gudrun was laughing and flashing, powdered with snow-crystals, Gerald worked perfectly. He felt he could guide the toboggan to a hair-breadth, almost he could make it pierce into the air and right into the very heart of the sky. It seemed to him the flying sledge was but his strength spread out, he had but to move his arms, the motion was his own. They explored the great slopes, to find another slide. He felt there must be something better than they had known. And he found what he desired, a perfect long, fierce sweep, sheering past the foot of a rock and into the trees at the base. It was dangerous, he knew. But then he knew also he would direct the sledge between his fingers. The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow. Gerald�s eyes became hard and strange, and as he went by on his skis he was more like some powerful, fateful sigh than a man, his muscles elastic in a perfect, soaring trajectory, his body projected in pure flight, mindless, soulless, whirling along one perfect line of force. Luckily there came a day of snow, when they must all stay indoors: otherwise Birkin said, they would all lose their faculties, and begin to utter themselves in cries and shrieks, like some strange, unknown species of snow-creatures. It happened in the afternoon that Ursula sat in the _Reunionsaal_ talking to Loerke. The latter had seemed unhappy lately. He was lively and full of mischievous humour, as usual. But Ursula had thought he was sulky about something. His partner, too, the big, fair, good-looking youth, was ill at ease, going about as if he belonged to nowhere, and was kept in some sort of subjection, against which he was rebelling. Loerke had hardly talked to Gudrun. His associate, on the other hand, had paid her constantly a soft, over-deferential attention. Gudrun wanted to talk to Loerke. He was a sculptor, and she wanted to hear his view of his art. And his figure attracted her. There was the look of a little wastrel about him, that intrigued her, and an old man�s look, that interested her, and then, beside this, an uncanny singleness, a quality of being by himself, not in contact with anybody else, that marked out an artist to her. He was a chatterer, a magpie, a maker of mischievous word-jokes, that were sometimes very clever, but which often were not. And she could see in his brown, gnome�s eyes, the black look of inorganic misery, which lay behind all his small buffoonery. His figure interested her�the figure of a boy, almost a street arab. He made no attempt to conceal it. He always wore a simple loden suit, with knee breeches. His legs were thin, and he made no attempt to disguise the fact: which was of itself remarkable, in a German. And he never ingratiated himself anywhere, not in the slightest, but kept to himself, for all his apparent playfulness. Leitner, his companion, was a great sportsman, very handsome with his big limbs and his blue eyes. Loerke would go toboganning or skating, in little snatches, but he was indifferent. And his fine, thin nostrils, the nostrils of a pure-bred street arab, would quiver with contempt at Leitner�s splothering gymnastic displays. It was evident that the two men who had travelled and lived together, sharing the same bedroom, had now reached the stage of loathing. Leitner hated Loerke with an injured, writhing, impotent hatred, and Loerke treated Leitner with a fine-quivering contempt and sarcasm. Soon the two would have to go apart. Already they were rarely together. Leitner ran attaching himself to somebody or other, always deferring, Loerke was a good deal alone. Out of doors he wore a Westphalian cap, a close brown-velvet head with big brown velvet flaps down over his ears, so that he looked like a lop-eared rabbit, or a troll. His face was brown-red, with a dry, bright skin, that seemed to crinkle with his mobile expressions. His eyes were arresting�brown, full, like a rabbit�s, or like a troll�s, or like the eyes of a lost being, having a strange, dumb, depraved look of knowledge, and a quick spark of uncanny fire. Whenever Gudrun had tried to talk to him he had shied away unresponsive, looking at her with his watchful dark eyes, but entering into no relation with her. He had made her feel that her slow French and her slower German, were hateful to him. As for his own inadequate English, he was much too awkward to try it at all. But he understood a good deal of what was said, nevertheless. And Gudrun, piqued, left him alone. This afternoon, however, she came into the lounge as he was talking to Ursula. His fine, black hair somehow reminded her of a bat, thin as it was on his full, sensitive-looking head, and worn away at the temples. He sat hunched up, as if his spirit were bat-like. And Gudrun could see he was making some slow confidence to Ursula, unwilling, a slow, grudging, scanty self-revelation. She went and sat by her sister. He looked at her, then looked away again, as if he took no notice of her. But as a matter of fact, she interested him deeply. �Isn�t it interesting, Prune,� said Ursula, turning to her sister, �Herr Loerke is doing a great frieze for a factory in Cologne, for the outside, the street.� She looked at him, at his thin, brown, nervous hands, that were prehensile, and somehow like talons, like �griffes,� inhuman. �What _in?_� she asked. �_Aus was?_� repeated Ursula. �_Granit_,� he replied. It had become immediately a laconic series of question and answer between fellow craftsmen. �What is the relief?� asked Gudrun. �_Alto relievo._� �And at what height?� It was very interesting to Gudrun to think of his making the great granite frieze for a great granite factory in Cologne. She got from him some notion of the design. It was a representation of a fair, with peasants and artisans in an orgy of enjoyment, drunk and absurd in their modern dress, whirling ridiculously in roundabouts, gaping at shows, kissing and staggering and rolling in knots, swinging in swing-boats, and firing down shooting galleries, a frenzy of chaotic motion. There was a swift discussion of technicalities. Gudrun was very much impressed. �But how wonderful, to have such a factory!� cried Ursula. �Is the whole building fine?� �Oh yes,� he replied. �The frieze is part of the whole architecture. Yes, it is a colossal thing.� Then he seemed to stiffen, shrugged his shoulders, and went on: �Sculpture and architecture must go together. The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art�our factory-area our Parthenon, _ecco!_� Ursula pondered. �I suppose,� she said, �there is no _need_ for our great works to be so hideous.� Instantly he broke into motion. �There you are!� he cried, �there you are! There is not only _no need_ for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness. In the end it will hurt too much, and they will wither because of it. And this will wither the _work_ as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour. Whereas the machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful. But this will be the end of our civilisation, when people will not work because work has become so intolerable to their senses, it nauseates them too much, they would rather starve. _Then_ we shall see the hammer used only for smashing, then we shall see it. Yet here we are�we have the opportunity to make beautiful factories, beautiful machine-houses�we have the opportunity�� Gudrun could only partly understand. She could have cried with vexation. �What does he say?� she asked Ursula. And Ursula translated, stammering and brief. Loerke watched Gudrun�s face, to see her judgment. �And do you think then,� said Gudrun, �that art should serve industry?� �Art should _interpret_ industry, as art once interpreted religion,� he said. �But does your fair interpret industry?� she asked him. �Certainly. What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is fulfilling the counterpart of labour�the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.� �But is there nothing but work�mechanical work?� said Gudrun. �Nothing but work!� he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, with needle-points of light. �No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine�motion, that is all. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.� Gudrun quivered and flushed. For some reason she was almost in tears. �No, I have not worked for hunger,� she replied, �but I have worked!� �_Travaillé�lavorato?_� he asked. �_E che lavoro�che lavoro? Quel travail est-ce que vous avez fait?_� He broke into a mixture of Italian and French, instinctively using a foreign language when he spoke to her. �You have never worked as the world works,� he said to her, with sarcasm. �Yes,� she said. �I have. And I do�I work now for my daily bread.� He paused, looked at her steadily, then dropped the subject entirely. She seemed to him to be trifling. �But have _you_ ever worked as the world works?� Ursula asked him. He looked at her untrustful. �Yes,� he replied, with a surly bark. �I have known what it was to lie in bed for three days, because I had nothing to eat.� Gudrun was looking at him with large, grave eyes, that seemed to draw the confession from him as the marrow from his bones. All his nature held him back from confessing. And yet her large, grave eyes upon him seemed to open some valve in his veins, and involuntarily he was telling. �My father was a man who did not like work, and we had no mother. We lived in Austria, Polish Austria. How did we live? Ha!�somehow! Mostly in a room with three other families�one set in each corner�and the W.C. in the middle of the room�a pan with a plank on it�ha! I had two brothers and a sister�and there might be a woman with my father. He was a free being, in his way�would fight with any man in the town�a garrison town�and was a little man too. But he wouldn�t work for anybody�set his heart against it, and wouldn�t.� �And how did you live then?� asked Ursula. He looked at her�then, suddenly, at Gudrun. �Do you understand?� he asked. �Enough,� she replied. Their eyes met for a moment. Then he looked away. He would say no more. �And how did you become a sculptor?� asked Ursula. �How did I become a sculptor�� he paused. �_Dunque_�� he resumed, in a changed manner, and beginning to speak French��I became old enough�I used to steal from the market-place. Later I went to work�imprinted the stamp on clay bottles, before they were baked. It was an earthenware-bottle factory. There I began making models. One day, I had had enough. I lay in the sun and did not go to work. Then I walked to Munich�then I walked to Italy�begging, begging everything.� �The Italians were very good to me�they were good and honourable to me. From Bozen to Rome, almost every night I had a meal and a bed, perhaps of straw, with some peasant. I love the Italian people, with all my heart. �_Dunque, adesso�maintenant_�I earn a thousand pounds in a year, or I earn two thousand�� He looked down at the ground, his voice tailing off into silence. Gudrun looked at his fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown from the sun, drawn tight over his full temples; and at his thin hair�and at the thick, coarse, brush-like moustache, cut short about his mobile, rather shapeless mouth. �How old are you?� she asked. He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled. �_Wie alt?_� he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one of his reticencies. �How old are _you?_� he replied, without answering. �I am twenty-six,� she answered. �Twenty-six,� he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he said: �_Und Ihr Herr Gemahl, wie alt ist er?_� �Who?� asked Gudrun. �Your husband,� said Ursula, with a certain irony. �I haven�t got a husband,� said Gudrun in English. In German she answered, �He is thirty-one.� But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like one of the �little people� who have no soul, who has found his mate in a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or a brown seal, had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was unconscious of, his tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending her living motion. He did not know his own power. He did not know how, with his full, submerged, watchful eyes, he could look into her and see her, what she was, see her secrets. He would only want her to be herself�he knew her verily, with a subconscious, sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes. To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock-bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work. It was curious too, how his poverty, the degradation of his earlier life, attracted her. There was something insipid and tasteless to her, in the idea of a gentleman, a man who had gone the usual course through school and university. A certain violent sympathy, however, came up in her for this mud-child. He seemed to be the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him. Ursula too was attracted by Loerke. In both sisters he commanded a certain homage. But there were moments when to Ursula he seemed indescribably inferior, false, a vulgarism. Both Birkin and Gerald disliked him, Gerald ignoring him with some contempt, Birkin exasperated. �What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?� Gerald asked. �God alone knows,� replied Birkin, �unless it�s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.� Gerald looked up in surprise. �_Does_ he make an appeal to them?� he asked. �Oh yes,� replied Birkin. �He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.� �Funny they should rush to that,� said Gerald. �Makes one mad, too,� said Birkin. �But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.� Gerald stood still, suspended in thought. �What _do_ women want, at the bottom?� he asked. Birkin shrugged his shoulders. �God knows,� he said. �Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they�ve come to the end.� Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind today, horribly blind. �And what is the end?� he asked. Birkin shook his head. �I�ve not got there yet, so I don�t know. Ask Loerke, he�s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.� �Yes, but stages further in what?� cried Gerald, irritated. Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger. �Stages further in social hatred,� he said. �He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He�s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He _hates_ the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew�or part Jewish.� �Probably,� said Gerald. �He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.� �But why does anybody care about him?� cried Gerald. �Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he�s the wizard rat that swims ahead.� Still Gerald stood and stared at the blind haze of snow outside. �I don�t understand your terms, really,� he said, in a flat, doomed voice. �But it sounds a rum sort of desire.� �I suppose we want the same,� said Birkin. �Only we want to take a quick jump downwards, in a sort of ecstasy�and he ebbs with the stream, the sewer stream.� Meanwhile Gudrun and Ursula waited for the next opportunity to talk to Loerke. It was no use beginning when the men were there. Then they could get into no touch with the isolated little sculptor. He had to be alone with them. And he preferred Ursula to be there, as a sort of transmitter to Gudrun. �Do you do nothing but architectural sculpture?� Gudrun asked him one evening. �Not now,� he replied. �I have done all sorts�except portraits�I never did portraits. But other things�� �What kind of things?� asked Gudrun. He paused a moment, then rose, and went out of the room. He returned almost immediately with a little roll of paper, which he handed to her. She unrolled it. It was a photogravure reproduction of a statuette, signed F. Loerke. �That is quite an early thing�_not_ mechanical,� he said, �more popular.� The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands. Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse. The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power. Gudrun went pale, and a darkness came over her eyes, like shame, she looked up with a certain supplication, almost slave-like. He glanced at her, and jerked his head a little. �How big is it?� she asked, in a toneless voice, persisting in appearing casual and unaffected. �How big?� he replied, glancing again at her. �Without pedestal�so high�� he measured with his hand��with pedestal, so�� He looked at her steadily. There was a little brusque, turgid contempt for her in his swift gesture, and she seemed to cringe a little. �And what is it done in?� she asked, throwing back her head and looking at him with affected coldness. He still gazed at her steadily, and his dominance was not shaken. �Bronze�green bronze.� �Green bronze!� repeated Gudrun, coldly accepting his challenge. She was thinking of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze. �Yes, beautiful,� she murmured, looking up at him with a certain dark homage. He closed his eyes and looked aside, triumphant. �Why,� said Ursula, �did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.� �Stiff?� he repeated, in arms at once. �Yes. _Look_ how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.� He raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody. �_Wissen Sie_,� he said, with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice, �that horse is a certain _form_, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see�it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.� Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly _de haut en bas_, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face. �But it _is_ a picture of a horse, nevertheless.� He lifted his shoulders in another shrug. �As you like�it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.� Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula�s foolish persistence in giving herself away. �What do you mean by �it is a picture of a horse?�� she cried at her sister. �What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in _your_ head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that _your_ horse isn�t a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.� Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came. �But why does he have this idea of a horse?� she said. �I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really�� Loerke snorted with rage. �A picture of myself!� he repeated, in derision. �_Wissen sie, gnädige Frau_, that is a _Kunstwerk_, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you _must not_ confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you _must not do_.� �That is quite true,� cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. �The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have nothing to do with one another. _I_ and my art, they have _nothing_ to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.� Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured, �_Ja�so ist es, so ist es._� Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both. �It isn�t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,� she replied flatly. �The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.� He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge. Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula _was_ such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But then�fools must be suffered, if not gladly. But Ursula was persistent too. �As for your world of art and your world of reality,� she replied, �you have to separate the two, because you can�t bear to know what you are. You can�t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you _are_ really, so you say �it�s the world of art.� The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that�s all�but you are too far gone to see it.� She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief. The others maintained a dead silence, letting the display of Ursula�s obtrusiveness pass by. Then Gudrun asked, in a voice that was quite cool and casual, as if resuming a casual conversation: �Was the girl a model?� �_Nein, sie war kein Modell. Sie war eine kleine Malschülerin._� �An art-student!� replied Gudrun. And how the situation revealed itself to her! She saw the girl art-student, unformed and of pernicious recklessness, too young, her straight flaxen hair cut short, hanging just into her neck, curving inwards slightly, because it was rather thick; and Loerke, the well-known master-sculptor, and the girl, probably well-brought-up, and of good family, thinking herself so great to be his mistress. Oh how well she knew the common callousness of it all. Dresden, Paris, or London, what did it matter? She knew it. �Where is she now?� Ursula asked. Loerke raised his shoulders, to convey his complete ignorance and indifference. �That is already six years ago,� he said; �she will be twenty-three years old, no more good.� Gerald had picked up the picture and was looking at it. It attracted him also. He saw on the pedestal, that the piece was called �Lady Godiva.� �But this isn�t Lady Godiva,� he said, smiling good-humouredly. �She was the middle-aged wife of some Earl or other, who covered herself with her long hair.� �_� la_ Maud Allan,� said Gudrun with a mocking grimace. �Why Maud Allan?� he replied. �Isn�t it so? I always thought the legend was that.� �Yes, Gerald dear, I�m quite _sure_ you�ve got the legend perfectly.� She was laughing at him, with a little, mock-caressive contempt. �To be sure, I�d rather see the woman than the hair,� he laughed in return. �Wouldn�t you just!� mocked Gudrun. Ursula rose and went away, leaving the three together. Gudrun took the picture again from Gerald, and sat looking at it closely. �Of course,� she said, turning to tease Loerke now, �you _understood_ your little _Malschülerin_.� He raised his eyebrows and his shoulders in a complacent shrug. �The little girl?� asked Gerald, pointing to the figure. Gudrun was sitting with the picture in her lap. She looked up at Gerald, full into his eyes, so that he seemed to be blinded. �_Didn�t_ he understand her!� she said to Gerald, in a slightly mocking, humorous playfulness. �You�ve only to look at the feet�_aren�t_ they darling, so pretty and tender�oh, they�re really wonderful, they are really�� She lifted her eyes slowly, with a hot, flaming look into Loerke�s eyes. His soul was filled with her burning recognition, he seemed to grow more uppish and lordly. Gerald looked at the small, sculptured feet. They were turned together, half covering each other in pathetic shyness and fear. He looked at them a long time, fascinated. Then, in some pain, he put the picture away from him. He felt full of barrenness. �What was her name?� Gudrun asked Loerke. �Annette von Weck,� Loerke replied reminiscent. �_Ja, sie war hübsch._ She was pretty�but she was tiresome. She was a nuisance,�not for a minute would she keep still�not until I�d slapped her hard and made her cry�then she�d sit for five minutes.� He was thinking over the work, his work, the all important to him. �Did you really slap her?� asked Gudrun, coolly. He glanced back at her, reading her challenge. �Yes, I did,� he said, nonchalant, �harder than I have ever beat anything in my life. I had to, I had to. It was the only way I got the work done.� Gudrun watched him with large, dark-filled eyes, for some moments. She seemed to be considering his very soul. Then she looked down, in silence. �Why did you have such a young Godiva then?� asked Gerald. �She is so small, besides, on the horse�not big enough for it�such a child.� A queer spasm went over Loerke�s face. �Yes,� he said. �I don�t like them any bigger, any older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen�after that, they are no use to me.� There was a moment�s pause. �Why not?� asked Gerald. Loerke shrugged his shoulders. �I don�t find them interesting�or beautiful�they are no good to me, for my work.� �Do you mean to say a woman isn�t beautiful after she is twenty?� asked Gerald. �For me, no. Before twenty, she is small and fresh and tender and slight. After that�let her be what she likes, she has nothing for me. The Venus of Milo is a bourgeoise�so are they all.� �And you don�t care for women at all after twenty?� asked Gerald. �They are no good to me, they are of no use in my art,� Loerke repeated impatiently. �I don�t find them beautiful.� �You are an epicure,� said Gerald, with a slight sarcastic laugh. �And what about men?� asked Gudrun suddenly. �Yes, they are good at all ages,� replied Loerke. �A man should be big and powerful�whether he is old or young is of no account, so he has the size, something of massiveness and�and stupid form.� Ursula went out alone into the world of pure, new snow. But the dazzling whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly strangling her soul. Her head felt dazed and numb. Suddenly she wanted to go away. It occurred to her, like a miracle, that she might go away into another world. She had felt so doomed up here in the eternal snow, as if there were no beyond. Now suddenly, as by a miracle she remembered that away beyond, below her, lay the dark fruitful earth, that towards the south there were stretches of land dark with orange trees and cypress, grey with olives, that ilex trees lifted wonderful plumy tufts in shadow against a blue sky. Miracle of miracles!�this utterly silent, frozen world of the mountain-tops was not universal! One might leave it and have done with it. One might go away. She wanted to realise the miracle at once. She wanted at this instant to have done with the snow-world, the terrible, static ice-built mountain tops. She wanted to see the dark earth, to smell its earthy fecundity, to see the patient wintry vegetation, to feel the sunshine touch a response in the buds. She went back gladly to the house, full of hope. Birkin was reading, lying in bed. �Rupert,� she said, bursting in on him. �I want to go away.� He looked up at her slowly. �Do you?� he replied mildly. She sat by him und put her arms round his neck. It surprised her that he was so little surprised. �Don�t _you?_� she asked troubled. �I hadn�t thought about it,� he said. �But I�m sure I do.� She sat up, suddenly erect. �I hate it,� she said. �I hate the snow, and the unnaturalness of it, the unnatural light it throws on everybody, the ghastly glamour, the unnatural feelings it makes everybody have.� He lay still and laughed, meditating. �Well,� he said, �we can go away�we can go tomorrow. We�ll go tomorrow to Verona, and find Romeo and Juliet, and sit in the amphitheatre�shall we?� Suddenly she hid her face against his shoulder with perplexity and shyness. He lay so untrammelled. �Yes,� she said softly, filled with relief. She felt her soul had new wings, now he was so uncaring. �I shall love to be Romeo and Juliet,� she said. �My love!� �Though a fearfully cold wind blows in Verona,� he said, �from out of the Alps. We shall have the smell of the snow in our noses.� She sat up and looked at him. �Are you glad to go?� she asked, troubled. His eyes were inscrutable and laughing. She hid her face against his neck, clinging close to him, pleading: �Don�t laugh at me�don�t laugh at me.� �Why how�s that?� he laughed, putting his arms round her. �Because I don�t want to be laughed at,� she whispered. He laughed more, as he kissed her delicate, finely perfumed hair. �Do you love me?� she whispered, in wild seriousness. �Yes,� he answered, laughing. Suddenly she lifted her mouth to be kissed. Her lips were taut and quivering and strenuous, his were soft, deep and delicate. He waited a few moments in the kiss. Then a shade of sadness went over his soul. �Your mouth is so hard,� he said, in faint reproach. �And yours is so soft and nice,� she said gladly. �But why do you always grip your lips?� he asked, regretful. �Never mind,� she said swiftly. �It is my way.� She knew he loved her; she was sure of him. Yet she could not let go a certain hold over herself, she could not bear him to question her. She gave herself up in delight to being loved by him. She knew that, in spite of his joy when she abandoned herself, he was a little bit saddened too. She could give herself up to his activity. But she could not be herself, she _dared_ not come forth quite nakedly to his nakedness, abandoning all adjustment, lapsing in pure faith with him. She abandoned herself to _him_, or she took hold of him and gathered her joy of him. And she enjoyed him fully. But they were never _quite_ together, at the same moment, one was always a little left out. Nevertheless she was glad in hope, glorious and free, full of life and liberty. And he was still and soft and patient, for the time. They made their preparations to leave the next day. First they went to Gudrun�s room, where she and Gerald were just dressed ready for the evening indoors. �Prune,� said Ursula, �I think we shall go away tomorrow. I can�t stand the snow any more. It hurts my skin and my soul.� �Does it really hurt your soul, Ursula?� asked Gudrun, in some surprise. �I can believe quite it hurts your skin�it is _terrible_. But I thought it was _admirable_ for the soul.� �No, not for mine. It just injures it,� said Ursula. �Really!� cried Gudrun. There was a silence in the room. And Ursula and Birkin could feel that Gudrun and Gerald were relieved by their going. �You will go south?� said Gerald, a little ring of uneasiness in his voice. �Yes,� said Birkin, turning away. There was a queer, indefinable hostility between the two men, lately. Birkin was on the whole dim and indifferent, drifting along in a dim, easy flow, unnoticing and patient, since he came abroad, whilst Gerald on the other hand, was intense and gripped into white light, agonistes. The two men revoked one another. Gerald and Gudrun were very kind to the two who were departing, solicitous for their welfare as if they were two children. Gudrun came to Ursula�s bedroom with three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious, and she threw them on the bed. But these were thick silk stockings, vermilion, cornflower blue, and grey, bought in Paris. The grey ones were knitted, seamless and heavy. Ursula was in raptures. She knew Gudrun must be feeling _very_ loving, to give away such treasures. �I can�t take them from you, Prune,� she cried. �I can�t possibly deprive you of them�the jewels.� �_Aren�t_ they jewels!� cried Gudrun, eyeing her gifts with an envious eye. �_Aren�t_ they real lambs!� �Yes, you _must_ keep them,� said Ursula. �I don�t _want_ them, I�ve got three more pairs. I _want_ you to keep them�I want you to have them. They�re yours, there�� And with trembling, excited hands she put the coveted stockings under Ursula�s pillow. �One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,� said Ursula. �One does,� replied Gudrun; �the greatest joy of all.� And she sat down in the chair. It was evident she had come for a last talk. Ursula, not knowing what she wanted, waited in silence. �Do you _feel_, Ursula,� Gudrun began, rather sceptically, that you are going-away-for-ever, never-to-return, sort of thing?� �Oh, we shall come back,� said Ursula. �It isn�t a question of train-journeys.� �Yes, I know. But spiritually, so to speak, you are going away from us all?� Ursula quivered. �I don�t know a bit what is going to happen,� she said. �I only know we are going somewhere.� Gudrun waited. �And you are glad?� she asked. Ursula meditated for a moment. �I believe I am _very_ glad,� she replied. But Gudrun read the unconscious brightness on her sister�s face, rather than the uncertain tones of her speech. �But don�t you think you�ll _want_ the old connection with the world�father and the rest of us, and all that it means, England and the world of thought�don�t you think you�ll _need_ that, really to make a world?� Ursula was silent, trying to imagine. �I think,� she said at length, involuntarily, �that Rupert is right�one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old.� Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes. �One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree,� she said. �But _I_ think that a new world is a development from this world, and that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn�t to find a new world at all, but only to secure oneself in one�s illusions.� Ursula looked out of the window. In her soul she began to wrestle, and she was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere word-force could always make her believe what she did not believe. �Perhaps,� she said, full of mistrust, of herself and everybody. �But,� she added, �I do think that one can�t have anything new whilst one cares for the old�do you know what I mean?�even fighting the old is belonging to it. I know, one is tempted to stop with the world, just to fight it. But then it isn�t worth it.� Gudrun considered herself. �Yes,� she said. �In a way, one is of the world if one lives in it. But isn�t it really an illusion to think you can get out of it? After all, a cottage in the Abruzzi, or wherever it may be, isn�t a new world. No, the only thing to do with the world, is to see it through.� Ursula looked away. She was so frightened of argument. �But there _can_ be something else, can�t there?� she said. �One can see it through in one�s soul, long enough before it sees itself through in actuality. And then, when one has seen one�s soul, one is something else.� �_Can_ one see it through in one�s soul?� asked Gudrun. �If you mean that you can see to the end of what will happen, I don�t agree. I really can�t agree. And anyhow, you can�t suddenly fly off on to a new planet, because you think you can see to the end of this.� Ursula suddenly straightened herself. �Yes,� she said. �Yes�one knows. One has no more connections here. One has a sort of other self, that belongs to a new planet, not to this. You�ve got to hop off.� Gudrun reflected for a few moments. Then a smile of ridicule, almost of contempt, came over her face. �And what will happen when you find yourself in space?� she cried in derision. �After all, the great ideas of the world are the same there. You above everybody can�t get away from the fact that love, for instance, is the supreme thing, in space as well as on earth.� �No,� said Ursula, �it isn�t. Love is too human and little. I believe in something inhuman, of which love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the unknown to us, and it is something infinitely more than love. It isn�t so merely _human_.� Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! Then, suddenly she averted her face, saying coldly, uglily: �Well, I�ve got no further than love, yet.� Over Ursula�s mind flashed the thought: �Because you never _have_ loved, you can�t get beyond it.� Gudrun rose, came over to Ursula and put her arm round her neck. �Go and find your new world, dear,� she said, her voice clanging with false benignity. �After all, the happiest voyage is the quest of Rupert�s Blessed Isles.� Her arm rested round Ursula�s neck, her fingers on Ursula�s cheek for a few moments. Ursula was supremely uncomfortable meanwhile. There was an insult in Gudrun�s protective patronage that was really too hurting. Feeling her sister�s resistance, Gudrun drew awkwardly away, turned over the pillow, and disclosed the stockings again. �Ha�ha!� she laughed, rather hollowly. �How we do talk indeed�new worlds and old�!� And they passed to the familiar worldly subjects. Gerald and Birkin had walked on ahead, waiting for the sledge to overtake them, conveying the departing guests. �How much longer will you stay here?� asked Birkin, glancing up at Gerald�s very red, almost blank face. �Oh, I can�t say,� Gerald replied. �Till we get tired of it.� �You�re not afraid of the snow melting first?� asked Birkin. Gerald laughed. �Does it melt?� he said. �Things are all right with you then?� said Birkin. Gerald screwed up his eyes a little. �All right?� he said. �I never know what those common words mean. All right and all wrong, don�t they become synonymous, somewhere?� �Yes, I suppose. How about going back?� asked Birkin. �Oh, I don�t know. We may never get back. I don�t look before and after,� said Gerald. �_Nor_ pine for what is not,� said Birkin. Gerald looked into the distance, with the small-pupilled, abstract eyes of a hawk. �No. There�s something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end, to me. I don�t know�but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the pith of my mind.� He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his eyes fixed, looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the barbarians. �It blasts your soul�s eye,� he said, �and leaves you sightless. Yet you _want_ to be sightless, you _want_ to be blasted, you don�t want it any different.� He was speaking as if in a trance, verbal and blank. Then suddenly he braced himself up with a kind of rhapsody, and looked at Birkin with vindictive, cowed eyes, saying: �Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman? She�s so beautiful, so perfect, you find her _so good_, it tears you like a silk, and every stroke and bit cuts hot�ha, that perfection, when you blast yourself, you blast yourself! And then�� he stopped on the snow and suddenly opened his clenched hands��it�s nothing�your brain might have gone charred as rags�and�� he looked round into the air with a queer histrionic movement �it�s blasting�you understand what I mean�it is a great experience, something final�and then�you�re shrivelled as if struck by electricity.� He walked on in silence. It seemed like bragging, but like a man in extremity bragging truthfully. �Of course,� he resumed, �I wouldn�t _not_ have had it! It�s a complete experience. And she�s a wonderful woman. But�how I hate her somewhere! It�s curious�� Birkin looked at him, at his strange, scarcely conscious face. Gerald seemed blank before his own words. �But you�ve had enough now?� said Birkin. �You have had your experience. Why work on an old wound?� �Oh,� said Gerald, �I don�t know. It�s not finished�� And the two walked on. �I�ve loved you, as well as Gudrun, don�t forget,� said Birkin bitterly. Gerald looked at him strangely, abstractedly. �Have you?� he said, with icy scepticism. �Or do you think you have?� He was hardly responsible for what he said. The sledge came. Gudrun dismounted and they all made their farewell. They wanted to go apart, all of them. Birkin took his place, and the sledge drove away leaving Gudrun and Gerald standing on the snow, waving. Something froze Birkin�s heart, seeing them standing there in the isolation of the snow, growing smaller and more isolated. CHAPTER XXX. SNOWED UP When Ursula and Birkin were gone, Gudrun felt herself free in her contest with Gerald. As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to press upon her more and more. At first she could manage him, so that her own will was always left free. But very soon, he began to ignore her female tactics, he dropped his respect for her whims and her privacies, he began to exert his own will blindly, without submitting to hers. Already a vital conflict had set in, which frightened them both. But he was alone, whilst already she had begun to cast round for external resource. When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centred upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality. Presently Gerald opened the door. She knew he would not be long before he came. She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her. �Are you alone in the dark?� he said. And she could tell by his tone he resented it, he resented this isolation she had drawn round herself. Yet, feeling static and inevitable, she was kind towards him. �Would you like to light the candle?� she asked. He did not answer, but came and stood behind her, in the darkness. �Look,� she said, �at that lovely star up there. Do you know its name?� He crouched beside her, to look through the low window. �No,� he said. �It is very fine.� �_Isn�t_ it beautiful! Do you notice how it darts different coloured fires�it flashes really superbly�� They remained in silence. With a mute, heavy gesture she put her hand on his knee, and took his hand. �Are you regretting Ursula?� he asked. �No, not at all,� she said. Then, in a slow mood, she asked: �How much do you love me?� He stiffened himself further against her. �How much do you think I do?� he asked. �I don�t know,� she replied. �But what is your opinion?� he asked. There was a pause. At length, in the darkness, came her voice, hard and indifferent: �Very little indeed,� she said coldly, almost flippant. His heart went icy at the sound of her voice. �Why don�t I love you?� he asked, as if admitting the truth of her accusation, yet hating her for it. �I don�t know why you don�t�I�ve been good to you. You were in a _fearful_ state when you came to me.� Her heart was beating to suffocate her, yet she was strong and unrelenting. �When was I in a fearful state?� he asked. �When you first came to me. I _had_ to take pity on you. But it was never love.� It was that statement �It was never love,� which sounded in his ears with madness. �Why must you repeat it so often, that there is no love?� he said in a voice strangled with rage. �Well you don�t _think_ you love, do you?� she asked. He was silent with cold passion of anger. �You don�t think you _can_ love me, do you?� she repeated almost with a sneer. �No,� he said. �You know you never _have_ loved me, don�t you?� �I don�t know what you mean by the word �love,� he replied. �Yes, you do. You know all right that you have never loved me. Have you, do you think?� �No,� he said, prompted by some barren spirit of truthfulness and obstinacy. �And you never _will_ love me,� she said finally, �will you?� There was a diabolic coldness in her, too much to bear. �No,� he said. �Then,� she replied, �what have you against me!� He was silent in cold, frightened rage and despair. �If only I could kill her,� his heart was whispering repeatedly. �If only I could kill her�I should be free.� It seemed to him that death was the only severing of this Gordian knot. �Why do you torture me?� he said. She flung her arms round his neck. �Ah, I don�t want to torture you,� she said pityingly, as if she were comforting a child. The impertinence made his veins go cold, he was insensible. She held her arms round his neck, in a triumph of pity. And her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil. �Say you love me,� she pleaded. �Say you will love me for ever�won�t you�won�t you?� But it was her voice only that coaxed him. Her senses were entirely apart from him, cold and destructive of him. It was her overbearing _will_ that insisted. �Won�t you say you�ll love me always?� she coaxed. �Say it, even if it isn�t true�say it Gerald, do.� �I will love you always,� he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words out. She gave him a quick kiss. �Fancy your actually having said it,� she said with a touch of raillery. He stood as if he had been beaten. �Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,� she said, in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone. The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded at the very quick, made of no account. �You mean you don�t want me?� he said. �You are so insistent, and there is so little grace in you, so little fineness. You are so crude. You break me�you only waste me�it is horrible to me.� �Horrible to you?� he repeated. �Yes. Don�t you think I might have a room to myself, now Ursula has gone? You can say you want a dressing room.� �You do as you like�you can leave altogether if you like,� he managed to articulate. �Yes, I know that,� she replied. �So can you. You can leave me whenever you like�without notice even.� The great tides of darkness were swinging across his mind, he could hardly stand upright. A terrible weariness overcame him, he felt he must lie on the floor. Dropping off his clothes, he got into bed, and lay like a man suddenly overcome by drunkenness, the darkness lifting and plunging as if he were lying upon a black, giddy sea. He lay still in this strange, horrific reeling for some time, purely unconscious. At length she slipped from her own bed and came over to him. He remained rigid, his back to her. He was all but unconscious. She put her arms round his terrifying, insentient body, and laid her cheek against his hard shoulder. �Gerald,� she whispered. �Gerald.� There was no change in him. She caught him against her. She pressed her breasts against his shoulders, she kissed his shoulder, through the sleeping jacket. Her mind wondered, over his rigid, unliving body. She was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak to her. �Gerald, my dear!� she whispered, bending over him, kissing his ear. Her warm breath playing, flying rhythmically over his ear, seemed to relax the tension. She could feel his body gradually relaxing a little, losing its terrifying, unnatural rigidity. Her hands clutched his limbs, his muscles, going over him spasmodically. The hot blood began to flow again through his veins, his limbs relaxed. �Turn round to me,� she whispered, forlorn with insistence and triumph. So at last he was given again, warm and flexible. He turned and gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her. She was as if crushed, powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him. His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being killed. �My God, my God,� she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying. �Shall I die, shall I die?� she repeated to herself. And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question. And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual �thou shalt,� �thou shalt not.� Sometimes it was he who seemed strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled. �In the end,� she said to herself, �I shall go away from him.� �I can be free of her,� he said to himself in his paroxysms of suffering. And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will. �Where shall I go?� he asked himself. �Can�t you be self-sufficient?� he replied to himself, putting himself upon his pride. �Self-sufficient!� he repeated. It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire. He realised it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to win for himself the same completeness. He knew that it only needed one convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious, self-completed, a thing isolated. This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos. Because, however much he might mentally _will_ to be immune and self-complete, the desire for this state was lacking, and he could not create it. He could see that, to exist at all, he must be perfectly free of Gudrun, leave her if she wanted to be left, demand nothing of her, have no claim upon her. But then, to have no claim upon her, he must stand by himself, in sheer nothingness. And his brain turned to nought at the idea. It was a state of nothingness. On the other hand, he might give in, and fawn to her. Or, finally, he might kill her. Or he might become just indifferent, purposeless, dissipated, momentaneous. But his nature was too serious, not gay enough or subtle enough for mocking licentiousness. A strange rent had been torn in him; like a victim that is torn open and given to the heavens, so he had been torn apart and given to Gudrun. How should he close again? This wound, this strange, infinitely-sensitive opening of his soul, where he was exposed, like an open flower, to all the universe, and in which he was given to his complement, the other, the unknown, this wound, this disclosure, this unfolding of his own covering, leaving him incomplete, limited, unfinished, like an open flower under the sky, this was his cruellest joy. Why then should he forego it? Why should he close up and become impervious, immune, like a partial thing in a sheath, when he had broken forth, like a seed that has germinated, to issue forth in being, embracing the unrealised heavens. He would keep the unfinished bliss of his own yearning even through the torture she inflicted upon him. A strange obstinacy possessed him. He would not go away from her whatever she said or did. A strange, deathly yearning carried him along with her. She was the determinating influence of his very being, though she treated him with contempt, repeated rebuffs, and denials, still he would never be gone, since in being near her, even, he felt the quickening, the going forth in him, the release, the knowledge of his own limitation and the magic of the promise, as well as the mystery of his own destruction and annihilation. She tortured the open heart of him even as he turned to her. And she was tortured herself. It may have been her will was stronger. She felt, with horror, as if he tore at the bud of her heart, tore it open, like an irreverent persistent being. Like a boy who pulls off a fly�s wings, or tears open a bud to see what is in the flower, he tore at her privacy, at her very life, he would destroy her as an immature bud, torn open, is destroyed. She might open towards him, a long while hence, in her dreams, when she was a pure spirit. But now she was not to be violated and ruined. She closed against him fiercely. They climbed together, at evening, up the high slope, to see the sunset. In the finely breathing, keen wind they stood and watched the yellow sun sink in crimson and disappear. Then in the east the peaks and ridges glowed with living rose, incandescent like immortal flowers against a brown-purple sky, a miracle, whilst down below the world was a bluish shadow, and above, like an annunciation, hovered a rosy transport in mid-air. To her it was so beautiful, it was a delirium, she wanted to gather the glowing, eternal peaks to her breast, and die. He saw them, saw they were beautiful. But there arose no clamour in his breast, only a bitterness that was visionary in itself. He wished the peaks were grey and unbeautiful, so that she should not get her support from them. Why did she betray the two of them so terribly, in embracing the glow of the evening? Why did she leave him standing there, with the ice-wind blowing through his heart, like death, to gratify herself among the rosy snow-tips? �What does the twilight matter?� he said. �Why do you grovel before it? Is it so important to you?� She winced in violation and in fury. �Go away,� she cried, �and leave me to it. It is beautiful, beautiful,� she sang in strange, rhapsodic tones. �It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. Don�t try to come between it and me. Take yourself away, you are out of place�� He stood back a little, and left her standing there, statue-like, transported into the mystic glowing east. Already the rose was fading, large white stars were flashing out. He waited. He would forego everything but the yearning. �That was the most perfect thing I have ever seen,� she said in cold, brutal tones, when at last she turned round to him. �It amazes me that you should want to destroy it. If you can�t see it yourself, why try to debar me?� But in reality, he had destroyed it for her, she was straining after a dead effect. �One day,� he said, softly, looking up at her, �I shall destroy _you_, as you stand looking at the sunset; because you are such a liar.� There was a soft, voluptuous promise to himself in the words. She was chilled but arrogant. �Ha!� she said. �I am not afraid of your threats!� She denied herself to him, she kept her room rigidly private to herself. But he waited on, in a curious patience, belonging to his yearning for her. �In the end,� he said to himself with real voluptuous promise, �when it reaches that point, I shall do away with her.� And he trembled delicately in every limb, in anticipation, as he trembled in his most violent accesses of passionate approach to her, trembling with too much desire. She had a curious sort of allegiance with Loerke, all the while, now, something insidious and traitorous. Gerald knew of it. But in the unnatural state of patience, and the unwillingness to harden himself against her, in which he found himself, he took no notice, although her soft kindliness to the other man, whom he hated as a noxious insect, made him shiver again with an access of the strange shuddering that came over him repeatedly. He left her alone only when he went skiing, a sport he loved, and which she did not practise. Then he seemed to sweep out of life, to be a projectile into the beyond. And often, when he went away, she talked to the little German sculptor. They had an invariable topic, in their art. They were almost of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures, the Aztec art, Mexican and Central American. He saw the grotesque, and a curious sort of mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in nature. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun and Loerke, of infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as if they had some esoteric understanding of life, that they alone were initiated into the fearful central secrets, that the world dared not know. Their whole correspondence was in a strange, barely comprehensible suggestivity, they kindled themselves at the subtle lust of the Egyptians or the Mexicans. The whole game was one of subtle inter-suggestivity, and they wanted to keep it on the plane of suggestion. From their verbal and physical nuances they got the highest satisfaction in the nerves, from a queer interchange of half-suggested ideas, looks, expressions and gestures, which were quite intolerable, though incomprehensible, to Gerald. He had no terms in which to think of their commerce, his terms were much too gross. The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality. �Of course,� said Gudrun, �life doesn�t _really_ matter�it is one�s art which is central. What one does in one�s life has _peu de rapport_, it doesn�t signify much.� �Yes, that is so, exactly,� replied the sculptor. �What one does in one�s art, that is the breath of one�s being. What one does in one�s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.� It was curious what a sense of elation and freedom Gudrun found in this communication. She felt established for ever. Of course Gerald was _bagatelle_. Love was one of the temporal things in her life, except in so far as she was an artist. She thought of Cleopatra�Cleopatra must have been an artist; she reaped the essential from a man, she harvested the ultimate sensation, and threw away the husk; and Mary Stuart, and the great Rachel, panting with her lovers after the theatre, these were the exoteric exponents of love. After all, what was the lover but fuel for the transport of this subtle knowledge, for a female art, the art of pure, perfect knowledge in sensuous understanding. One evening Gerald was arguing with Loerke about Italy and Tripoli. The Englishman was in a strange, inflammable state, the German was excited. It was a contest of words, but it meant a conflict of spirit between the two men. And all the while Gudrun could see in Gerald an arrogant English contempt for a foreigner. Although Gerald was quivering, his eyes flashing, his face flushed, in his argument there was a brusqueness, a savage contempt in his manner, that made Gudrun�s blood flare up, and made Loerke keen and mortified. For Gerald came down like a sledge-hammer with his assertions, anything the little German said was merely contemptible rubbish. At last Loerke turned to Gudrun, raising his hands in helpless irony, a shrug of ironical dismissal, something appealing and child-like. �_Sehen sie, gnädige Frau_�� he began. �_Bitte sagen Sie nicht immer, gnädige Frau_,� cried Gudrun, her eyes flashing, her cheeks burning. She looked like a vivid Medusa. Her voice was loud and clamorous, the other people in the room were startled. �Please don�t call me Mrs Crich,� she cried aloud. The name, in Loerke�s mouth particularly, had been an intolerable humiliation and constraint upon her, these many days. The two men looked at her in amazement. Gerald went white at the cheek-bones. �What shall I say, then?� asked Loerke, with soft, mocking insinuation. �_Sagen Sie nur nicht das_,� she muttered, her cheeks flushed crimson. �Not that, at least.� She saw, by the dawning look on Loerke�s face, that he had understood. She was _not_ Mrs Crich! So-o-, that explained a great deal. �_Soll ich Fräulein sagen?_� he asked, malevolently. �I am not married,� she said, with some hauteur. Her heart was fluttering now, beating like a bewildered bird. She knew she had dealt a cruel wound, and she could not bear it. Gerald sat erect, perfectly still, his face pale and calm, like the face of a statue. He was unaware of her, or of Loerke or anybody. He sat perfectly still, in an unalterable calm. Loerke, meanwhile, was crouching and glancing up from under his ducked head. Gudrun was tortured for something to say, to relieve the suspense. She twisted her face in a smile, and glanced knowingly, almost sneering, at Gerald. �Truth is best,� she said to him, with a grimace. But now again she was under his domination; now, because she had dealt him this blow; because she had destroyed him, and she did not know how he had taken it. She watched him. He was interesting to her. She had lost her interest in Loerke. Gerald rose at length, and went over in a leisurely still movement, to the Professor. The two began a conversation on Goethe. She was rather piqued by the simplicity of Gerald�s demeanour this evening. He did not seem angry or disgusted, only he looked curiously innocent and pure, really beautiful. Sometimes it came upon him, this look of clear distance, and it always fascinated her. She waited, troubled, throughout the evening. She thought he would avoid her, or give some sign. But he spoke to her simply and unemotionally, as he would to anyone else in the room. A certain peace, an abstraction possessed his soul. She went to his room, hotly, violently in love with him. He was so beautiful and inaccessible. He kissed her, he was a lover to her. And she had extreme pleasure of him. But he did not come to, he remained remote and candid, unconscious. She wanted to speak to him. But this innocent, beautiful state of unconsciousness that had come upon him prevented her. She felt tormented and dark. In the morning, however, he looked at her with a little aversion, some horror and some hatred darkening into his eyes. She withdrew on to her old ground. But still he would not gather himself together, against her. Loerke was waiting for her now. The little artist, isolated in his own complete envelope, felt that here at last was a woman from whom he could get something. He was uneasy all the while, waiting to talk with her, subtly contriving to be near her. Her presence filled him with keenness and excitement, he gravitated cunningly towards her, as if she had some unseen force of attraction. He was not in the least doubtful of himself, as regards Gerald. Gerald was one of the outsiders. Loerke only hated him for being rich and proud and of fine appearance. All these things, however, riches, pride of social standing, handsome physique, were externals. When it came to the relation with a woman such as Gudrun, he, Loerke, had an approach and a power that Gerald never dreamed of. How should Gerald hope to satisfy a woman of Gudrun�s calibre? Did he think that pride or masterful will or physical strength would help him? Loerke knew a secret beyond these things. The greatest power is the one that is subtle and adjusts itself, not one which blindly attacks. And he, Loerke, had understanding where Gerald was a calf. He, Loerke, could penetrate into depths far out of Gerald�s knowledge. Gerald was left behind like a postulant in the ante-room of this temple of mysteries, this woman. But he Loerke, could he not penetrate into the inner darkness, find the spirit of the woman in its inner recess, and wrestle with it there, the central serpent that is coiled at the core of life. What was it, after all, that a woman wanted? Was it mere social effect, fulfilment of ambition in the social world, in the community of mankind? Was it even a union in love and goodness? Did she want �goodness�? Who but a fool would accept this of Gudrun? This was but the street view of her wants. Cross the threshold, and you found her completely, completely cynical about the social world and its advantages. Once inside the house of her soul and there was a pungent atmosphere of corrosion, an inflamed darkness of sensation, and a vivid, subtle, critical consciousness, that saw the world distorted, horrific. What then, what next? Was it sheer blind force of passion that would satisfy her now? Not this, but the subtle thrills of extreme sensation in reduction. It was an unbroken will reacting against her unbroken will in a myriad subtle thrills of reduction, the last subtle activities of analysis and breaking down, carried out in the darkness of her, whilst the outside form, the individual, was utterly unchanged, even sentimental in its poses. But between two particular people, any two people on earth, the range of pure sensational experience is limited. The climax of sensual reaction, once reached in any direction, is reached finally, there is no going on. There is only repetition possible, or the going apart of the two protagonists, or the subjugating of the one will to the other, or death. Gerald had penetrated all the outer places of Gudrun�s soul. He was to her the most crucial instance of the existing world, the _ne plus ultra_ of the world of man as it existed for her. In him she knew the world, and had done with it. Knowing him finally she was the Alexander seeking new worlds. But there _were_ no new worlds, there were no more _men_, there were only creatures, little, ultimate _creatures_ like Loerke. The world was finished now, for her. There was only the inner, individual darkness, sensation within the ego, the obscene religious mystery of ultimate reduction, the mystic frictional activities of diabolic reducing down, disintegrating the vital organic body of life. All this Gudrun knew in her subconsciousness, not in her mind. She knew her next step�she knew what she should move on to, when she left Gerald. She was afraid of Gerald, that he might kill her. But she did not intend to be killed. A fine thread still united her to him. It should not be _her_ death which broke it. She had further to go, a further, slow exquisite experience to reap, unthinkable subtleties of sensation to know, before she was finished. Of the last series of subtleties, Gerald was not capable. He could not touch the quick of her. But where his ruder blows could not penetrate, the fine, insinuating blade of Loerke�s insect-like comprehension could. At least, it was time for her now to pass over to the other, the creature, the final craftsman. She knew that Loerke, in his innermost soul, was detached from everything, for him there was neither heaven nor earth nor hell. He admitted no allegiance, he gave no adherence anywhere. He was single and, by abstraction from the rest, absolute in himself. Whereas in Gerald�s soul there still lingered some attachment to the rest, to the whole. And this was his limitation. He was limited, _borné_, subject to his necessity, in the last issue, for goodness, for righteousness, for oneness with the ultimate purpose. That the ultimate purpose might be the perfect and subtle experience of the process of death, the will being kept unimpaired, that was not allowed in him. And this was his limitation. There was a hovering triumph in Loerke, since Gudrun had denied her marriage with Gerald. The artist seemed to hover like a creature on the wing, waiting to settle. He did not approach Gudrun violently, he was never ill-timed. But carried on by a sure instinct in the complete darkness of his soul, he corresponded mystically with her, imperceptibly, but palpably. For two days, he talked to her, continued the discussions of art, of life, in which they both found such pleasure. They praised the by-gone things, they took a sentimental, childish delight in the achieved perfections of the past. Particularly they liked the late eighteenth century, the period of Goethe and of Shelley, and Mozart. They played with the past, and with the great figures of the past, a sort of little game of chess, or marionettes, all to please themselves. They had all the great men for their marionettes, and they two were the God of the show, working it all. As for the future, that they never mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction of the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man�s invention: a man invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two, and the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the dismay of the inhabitants: or else the people of the world divided into two halves, and each half decided _it_ was perfect and right, the other half was wrong and must be destroyed; so another end of the world. Or else, Loerke�s dream of fear, the world went cold, and snow fell everywhere, and only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice cruelty. Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future. They delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental delight to reconstruct the world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his quakings, or Voltaire at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own poetry. They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture and painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli, with tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Böcklin. It would take them a life-time, they felt to live again, _in petto_, the lives of the great artists. But they preferred to stay in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. They talked in a mixture of languages. The ground-work was French, in either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in whatever phrase came to her. She took a peculiar delight in this conversation. It was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double meanings, of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of the different-coloured strands of three languages. And all the while they two were hovering, hesitating round the flame of some invisible declaration. He wanted it, but was held back by some inevitable reluctance. She wanted it also, but she wanted to put it off, to put it off indefinitely, she still had some pity for Gerald, some connection with him. And the most fatal of all, she had the reminiscent sentimental compassion for herself in connection with him. Because of what _had_ been, she felt herself held to him by immortal, invisible threads�because of what _had_ been, because of his coming to her that first night, into her own house, in his extremity, because� Gerald was gradually overcome with a revulsion of loathing for Loerke. He did not take the man seriously, he despised him merely, except as he felt in Gudrun�s veins the influence of the little creature. It was this that drove Gerald wild, the feeling in Gudrun�s veins of Loerke�s presence, Loerke�s being, flowing dominant through her. �What makes you so smitten with that little vermin?� he asked, really puzzled. For he, man-like, could not see anything attractive or important _at all_ in Loerke. Gerald expected to find some handsomeness or nobleness, to account for a woman�s subjection. But he saw none here, only an insect-like repulsiveness. Gudrun flushed deeply. It was these attacks she would never forgive. �What do you mean?� she replied. �My God, what a mercy I am _not_ married to you!� Her voice of flouting and contempt scotched him. He was brought up short. But he recovered himself. �Tell me, only tell me,� he reiterated in a dangerous narrowed voice��tell me what it is that fascinates you in him.� �I am not fascinated,� she said, with cold repelling innocence. �Yes, you are. You are fascinated by that little dry snake, like a bird gaping ready to fall down its throat.� She looked at him with black fury. �I don�t choose to be discussed by you,� she said. �It doesn�t matter whether you choose or not,� he replied, �that doesn�t alter the fact that you are ready to fall down and kiss the feet of that little insect. And I don�t want to prevent you�do it, fall down and kiss his feet. But I want to know, what it is that fascinates you�what is it?� She was silent, suffused with black rage. �How _dare_ you come brow-beating me,� she cried, �how dare you, you little squire, you bully. What right have you over me, do you think?� His face was white and gleaming, she knew by the light in his eyes that she was in his power�the wolf. And because she was in his power, she hated him with a power that she wondered did not kill him. In her will she killed him as he stood, effaced him. �It is not a question of right,� said Gerald, sitting down on a chair. She watched the change in his body. She saw his clenched, mechanical body moving there like an obsession. Her hatred of him was tinged with fatal contempt. �It�s not a question of my right over you�though I _have_ some right, remember. I want to know, I only want to know what it is that subjugates you to that little scum of a sculptor downstairs, what it is that brings you down like a humble maggot, in worship of him. I want to know what you creep after.� She stood over against the window, listening. Then she turned round. �Do you?� she said, in her most easy, most cutting voice. �Do you want to know what it is in him? It�s because he has some understanding of a woman, because he is not stupid. That�s why it is.� A queer, sinister, animal-like smile came over Gerald�s face. �But what understanding is it?� he said. �The understanding of a flea, a hopping flea with a proboscis. Why should you crawl abject before the understanding of a flea?� There passed through Gudrun�s mind Blake�s representation of the soul of a flea. She wanted to fit it to Loerke. Blake was a clown too. But it was necessary to answer Gerald. �Don�t you think the understanding of a flea is more interesting than the understanding of a fool?� she asked. �A fool!� he repeated. �A fool, a conceited fool�a _Dummkopf_,� she replied, adding the German word. �Do you call me a fool?� he replied. �Well, wouldn�t I rather be the fool I am, than that flea downstairs?� She looked at him. A certain blunt, blind stupidity in him palled on her soul, limiting her. �You give yourself away by that last,� she said. He sat and wondered. �I shall go away soon,� he said. She turned on him. �Remember,� she said, �I am completely independent of you�completely. You make your arrangements, I make mine.� He pondered this. �You mean we are strangers from this minute?� he asked. She halted and flushed. He was putting her in a trap, forcing her hand. She turned round on him. �Strangers,� she said, �we can never be. But if you _want_ to make any movement apart from me, then I wish you to know you are perfectly free to do so. Do not consider me in the slightest.� Even so slight an implication that she needed him and was depending on him still was sufficient to rouse his passion. As he sat a change came over his body, the hot, molten stream mounted involuntarily through his veins. He groaned inwardly, under its bondage, but he loved it. He looked at her with clear eyes, waiting for her. She knew at once, and was shaken with cold revulsion. _How_ could he look at her with those clear, warm, waiting eyes, waiting for her, even now? What had been said between them, was it not enough to put them worlds asunder, to freeze them forever apart! And yet he was all transfused and roused, waiting for her. It confused her. Turning her head aside, she said: �I shall always _tell_ you, whenever I am going to make any change�� And with this she moved out of the room. He sat suspended in a fine recoil of disappointment, that seemed gradually to be destroying his understanding. But the unconscious state of patience persisted in him. He remained motionless, without thought or knowledge, for a long time. Then he rose, and went downstairs, to play at chess with one of the students. His face was open and clear, with a certain innocent _laisser-aller_ that troubled Gudrun most, made her almost afraid of him, whilst she disliked him deeply for it. It was after this that Loerke, who had never yet spoken to her personally, began to ask her of her state. �You are not married at all, are you?� he asked. She looked full at him. �Not in the least,� she replied, in her measured way. Loerke laughed, wrinkling up his face oddly. There was a thin wisp of his hair straying on his forehead, she noticed that his skin was of a clear brown colour, his hands, his wrists. And his hands seemed closely prehensile. He seemed like topaz, so strangely brownish and pellucid. �Good,� he said. Still it needed some courage for him to go on. �Was Mrs Birkin your sister?� he asked. �Yes.� �And was _she_ married?� �She was married.� �Have you parents, then?� �Yes,� said Gudrun, �we have parents.� And she told him, briefly, laconically, her position. He watched her closely, curiously all the while. �So!� he exclaimed, with some surprise. �And the Herr Crich, is he rich?� �Yes, he is rich, a coal owner.� �How long has your friendship with him lasted?� �Some months.� There was a pause. �Yes, I am surprised,� he said at length. �The English, I thought they were so�cold. And what do you think to do when you leave here?� �What do I think to do?� she repeated. �Yes. You cannot go back to the teaching. No�� he shrugged his shoulders��that is impossible. Leave that to the _canaille_ who can do nothing else. You, for your part�you know, you are a remarkable woman, _eine seltsame Frau_. Why deny it�why make any question of it? You are an extraordinary woman, why should you follow the ordinary course, the ordinary life?� Gudrun sat looking at her hands, flushed. She was pleased that he said, so simply, that she was a remarkable woman. He would not say that to flatter her�he was far too self-opinionated and objective by nature. He said it as he would say a piece of sculpture was remarkable, because he knew it was so. And it gratified her to hear it from him. Other people had such a passion to make everything of one degree, of one pattern. In England it was chic to be perfectly ordinary. And it was a relief to her to be acknowledged extraordinary. Then she need not fret about the common standards. �You see,� she said, �I have no money whatsoever.� �Ach, money!� he cried, lifting his shoulders. �When one is grown up, money is lying about at one�s service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money�that always lies to hand.� �Does it?� she said, laughing. �Always. The Gerald will give you a sum, if you ask him for it�� She flushed deeply. �I will ask anybody else,� she said, with some difficulty��but not him.� Loerke looked closely at her. �Good,� he said. �Then let it be somebody else. Only don�t go back to that England, that school. No, that is stupid.� Again there was a pause. He was afraid to ask her outright to go with him, he was not even quite sure he wanted her; and she was afraid to be asked. He begrudged his own isolation, was _very_ chary of sharing his life, even for a day. �The only other place I know is Paris,� she said, �and I can�t stand that.� She looked with her wide, steady eyes full at Loerke. He lowered his head and averted his face. �Paris, no!� he said. �Between the _réligion d�amour_, and the latest �ism, and the new turning to Jesus, one had better ride on a carrousel all day. But come to Dresden. I have a studio there�I can give you work,�oh, that would be easy enough. I haven�t seen any of your things, but I believe in you. Come to Dresden�that is a fine town to be in, and as good a life as you can expect of a town. You have everything there, without the foolishness of Paris or the beer of Munich.� He sat and looked at her, coldly. What she liked about him was that he spoke to her simple and flat, as to himself. He was a fellow craftsman, a fellow being to her, first. �No�Paris,� he resumed, �it makes me sick. Pah�_l�amour_. I detest it. _L�amour, l�amore, die Liebe_�I detest it in every language. Women and love, there is no greater tedium,� he cried. She was slightly offended. And yet, this was her own basic feeling. Men, and love�there was no greater tedium. �I think the same,� she said. �A bore,� he repeated. �What does it matter whether I wear this hat or another. So love. I needn�t wear a hat at all, only for convenience. Neither need I love except for convenience. I tell you what, _gnädige Frau_�� and he leaned towards her�then he made a quick, odd gesture, as of striking something aside��_gnädige Fräulein_, never mind�I tell you what, I would give everything, everything, all your love, for a little companionship in intelligence�� his eyes flickered darkly, evilly at her. �You understand?� he asked, with a faint smile. �It wouldn�t matter if she were a hundred years old, a thousand�it would be all the same to me, so that she can _understand_.� He shut his eyes with a little snap. Again Gudrun was rather offended. Did he not think her good looking, then? Suddenly she laughed. �I shall have to wait about eighty years to suit you, at that!� she said. �I am ugly enough, aren�t I?� He looked at her with an artist�s sudden, critical, estimating eye. �You are beautiful,� he said, �and I am glad of it. But it isn�t that�it isn�t that,� he cried, with emphasis that flattered her. �It is that you have a certain wit, it is the kind of understanding. For me, I am little, _chétif_, insignificant. Good! Do not ask me to be strong and handsome, then. But it is the _me_�� he put his fingers to his mouth, oddly��it is the _me_ that is looking for a mistress, and my _me_ is waiting for the _thee_ of the mistress, for the match to my particular intelligence. You understand?� �Yes,� she said, �I understand.� �As for the other, this _amour_�� he made a gesture, dashing his hand aside, as if to dash away something troublesome��it is unimportant, unimportant. Does it matter, whether I drink white wine this evening, or whether I drink nothing? It _does not matter_, it does not matter. So this love, this _amour_, this _baiser_. Yes or no, _soit ou soit pas_, today, tomorrow, or never, it is all the same, it does not matter�no more than the white wine.� He ended with an odd dropping of the head in a desperate negation. Gudrun watched him steadily. She had gone pale. Suddenly she stretched over and seized his hand in her own. �That is true,� she said, in rather a high, vehement voice, �that is true for me too. It is the understanding that matters.� He looked up at her almost frightened, furtive. Then he nodded, a little sullenly. She let go his hand: he had made not the lightest response. And they sat in silence. �Do you know,� he said, suddenly looking at her with dark, self-important, prophetic eyes, �your fate and mine, they will run together, till�� and he broke off in a little grimace. �Till when?� she asked, blanched, her lips going white. She was terribly susceptible to these evil prognostications, but he only shook his head. �I don�t know,� he said, �I don�t know.� Gerald did not come in from his skiing until nightfall, he missed the coffee and cake that she took at four o�clock. The snow was in perfect condition, he had travelled a long way, by himself, among the snow ridges, on his skis, he had climbed high, so high that he could see over the top of the pass, five miles distant, could see the Marienhütte, the hostel on the crest of the pass, half buried in snow, and over into the deep valley beyond, to the dusk of the pine trees. One could go that way home; but he shuddered with nausea at the thought of home;�one could travel on skis down there, and come to the old imperial road, below the pass. But why come to any road? He revolted at the thought of finding himself in the world again. He must stay up there in the snow forever. He had been happy by himself, high up there alone, travelling swiftly on skis, taking far flights, and skimming past the dark rocks veined with brilliant snow. But he felt something icy gathering at his heart. This strange mood of patience and innocence which had persisted in him for some days, was passing away, he would be left again a prey to the horrible passions and tortures. So he came down reluctantly, snow-burned, snow-estranged, to the house in the hollow, between the knuckles of the mountain tops. He saw its lights shining yellow, and he held back, wishing he need not go in, to confront those people, to hear the turmoil of voices and to feel the confusion of other presences. He was isolated as if there were a vacuum round his heart, or a sheath of pure ice. The moment he saw Gudrun something jolted in his soul. She was looking rather lofty and superb, smiling slowly and graciously to the Germans. A sudden desire leapt in his heart, to kill her. He thought, what a perfect voluptuous fulfilment it would be, to kill her. His mind was absent all the evening, estranged by the snow and his passion. But he kept the idea constant within him, what a perfect voluptuous consummation it would be to strangle her, to strangle every spark of life out of her, till she lay completely inert, soft, relaxed for ever, a soft heap lying dead between his hands, utterly dead. Then he would have had her finally and for ever; there would be such a perfect voluptuous finality. Gudrun was unaware of what he was feeling, he seemed so quiet and amiable, as usual. His amiability even made her feel brutal towards him. She went into his room when he was partially undressed. She did not notice the curious, glad gleam of pure hatred, with which he looked at her. She stood near the door, with her hand behind her. �I have been thinking, Gerald,� she said, with an insulting nonchalance, �that I shall not go back to England.� �Oh,� he said, �where will you go then?� But she ignored his question. She had her own logical statement to make, and it must be made as she had thought it. �I can�t see the use of going back,� she continued. �It is over between me and you�� She paused for him to speak. But he said nothing. He was only talking to himself, saying �Over, is it? I believe it is over. But it isn�t finished. Remember, it isn�t finished. We must put some sort of a finish on it. There must be a conclusion, there must be finality.� So he talked to himself, but aloud he said nothing whatever. �What has been, has been,� she continued. �There is nothing that I regret. I hope you regret nothing�� She waited for him to speak. �Oh, I regret nothing,� he said, accommodatingly. �Good then,� she answered, �good then. Then neither of us cherishes any regrets, which is as it should be.� �Quite as it should be,� he said aimlessly. She paused to gather up her thread again. �Our attempt has been a failure,� she said. �But we can try again, elsewhere.� A little flicker of rage ran through his blood. It was as if she were rousing him, goading him. Why must she do it? �Attempt at what?� he asked. �At being lovers, I suppose,� she said, a little baffled, yet so trivial she made it all seem. �Our attempt at being lovers has been a failure?� he repeated aloud. To himself he was saying, �I ought to kill her here. There is only this left, for me to kill her.� A heavy, overcharged desire to bring about her death possessed him. She was unaware. �Hasn�t it?� she asked. �Do you think it has been a success?� Again the insult of the flippant question ran through his blood like a current of fire. �It had some of the elements of success, our relationship,� he replied. �It�might have come off.� But he paused before concluding the last phrase. Even as he began the sentence, he did not believe in what he was going to say. He knew it never could have been a success. �No,� she replied. �You cannot love.� �And you?� he asked. Her wide, dark-filled eyes were fixed on him, like two moons of darkness. �I couldn�t love _you_,� she said, with stark cold truth. A blinding flash went over his brain, his body jolted. His heart had burst into flame. His consciousness was gone into his wrists, into his hands. He was one blind, incontinent desire, to kill her. His wrists were bursting, there would be no satisfaction till his hands had closed on her. But even before his body swerved forward on her, a sudden, cunning comprehension was expressed on her face, and in a flash she was out of the door. She ran in one flash to her room and locked herself in. She was afraid, but confident. She knew her life trembled on the edge of an abyss. But she was curiously sure of her footing. She knew her cunning could outwit him. She trembled, as she stood in her room, with excitement and awful exhilaration. She knew she could outwit him. She could depend on her presence of mind, and on her wits. But it was a fight to the death, she knew it now. One slip, and she was lost. She had a strange, tense, exhilarated sickness in her body, as one who is in peril of falling from a great height, but who does not look down, does not admit the fear. �I will go away the day after tomorrow,� she said. She only did not want Gerald to think that she was afraid of him, that she was running away because she was afraid of him. She was not afraid of him, fundamentally. She knew it was her safeguard to avoid his physical violence. But even physically she was not afraid of him. She wanted to prove it to him. When she had proved it, that, whatever he was, she was not afraid of him; when she had proved _that_, she could leave him forever. But meanwhile the fight between them, terrible as she knew it to be, was inconclusive. And she wanted to be confident in herself. However many terrors she might have, she would be unafraid, uncowed by him. He could never cow her, nor dominate her, nor have any right over her; this she would maintain until she had proved it. Once it was proved, she was free of him forever. But she had not proved it yet, neither to him nor to herself. And this was what still bound her to him. She was bound to him, she could not live beyond him. She sat up in bed, closely wrapped up, for many hours, thinking endlessly to herself. It was as if she would never have done weaving the great provision of her thoughts. �It isn�t as if he really loved me,� she said to herself. �He doesn�t. Every woman he comes across he wants to make her in love with him. He doesn�t even know that he is doing it. But there he is, before every woman he unfurls his male attractiveness, displays his great desirability, he tries to make every woman think how wonderful it would be to have him for a lover. His very ignoring of the women is part of the game. He is never _unconscious_ of them. He should have been a cockerel, so he could strut before fifty females, all his subjects. But really, his Don Juan does _not_ interest me. I could play Dona Juanita a million times better than he plays Juan. He bores me, you know. His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited. Really, the fathomless conceit of these men, it is ridiculous�the little strutters. �They are all alike. Look at Birkin. Built out of the limitation of conceit they are, and nothing else. Really, nothing but their ridiculous limitation and intrinsic insignificance could make them so conceited. �As for Loerke, there is a thousand times more in him than in a Gerald. Gerald is so limited, there is a dead end to him. He would grind on at the old mills forever. And really, there is no corn between the millstones any more. They grind on and on, when there is nothing to grind�saying the same things, believing the same things, acting the same things. Oh, my God, it would wear out the patience of a stone. �I don�t worship Loerke, but at any rate, he is a free individual. He is not stiff with conceit of his own maleness. He is not grinding dutifully at the old mills. Oh God, when I think of Gerald, and his work�those offices at Beldover, and the mines�it makes my heart sick. What _have_ I to do with it�and him thinking he can be a lover to a woman! One might as well ask it of a self-satisfied lamp-post. These men, with their eternal jobs�and their eternal mills of God that keep on grinding at nothing! It is too boring, just boring. However did I come to take him seriously at all! �At least in Dresden, one will have one�s back to it all. And there will be amusing things to do. It will be amusing to go to these eurythmic displays, and the German opera, the German theatre. It _will_ be amusing to take part in German Bohemian life. And Loerke is an artist, he is a free individual. One will escape from so much, that is the chief thing, escape so much hideous boring repetition of vulgar actions, vulgar phrases, vulgar postures. I don�t delude myself that I shall find an elixir of life in Dresden. I know I shan�t. But I shall get away from people who have their own homes and their own children and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that. I shall be among people who _don�t_ own things and who _haven�t_ got a home and a domestic servant in the background, who haven�t got a standing and a status and a degree and a circle of friends of the same. Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one�s head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness. How I _hate_ life, how I hate it. How I hate the Geralds, that they can offer one nothing else. �Shortlands!�Heavens! Think of living there, one week, then the next, and _then the third_� �No, I won�t think of it�it is too much�� And she broke off, really terrified, really unable to bear any more. The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day following day, _ad infintum_, was one of the things that made her heart palpitate with a real approach of madness. The terrible bondage of this tick-tack of time, this twitching of the hands of the clock, this eternal repetition of hours and days�oh God, it was too awful to contemplate. And there was no escape from it, no escape. She almost wished Gerald were with her to save her from the terror of her own thoughts. Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack. All life, all life resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching of the clock-fingers. Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his life�it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack. Ha�ha�she laughed to herself, so frightened that she was trying to laugh it off�ha�ha, how maddening it was, to be sure, to be sure! Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her hair had turned white. She had _felt_ it turning white so often, under the intolerable burden of her thoughts, und her sensations. Yet there it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a picture of health. Perhaps she was healthy. Perhaps it was only her unabateable health that left her so exposed to the truth. If she were sickly she would have her illusions, imaginations. As it was, there was no escape. She must always see and know and never escape. She could never escape. There she was, placed before the clock-face of life. And if she turned round as in a railway station, to look at the bookstall, still she could see, with her very spine, she could see the clock, always the great white clock-face. In vain she fluttered the leaves of books, or made statuettes in clay. She knew she was not _really_ reading. She was not _really_ working. She was watching the fingers twitch across the eternal, mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time. She never really lived, she only watched. Indeed, she was like a little, twelve-hour clock, vis-à-vis with the enormous clock of eternity�there she was, like Dignity and Impudence, or Impudence and Dignity. The picture pleased her. Didn�t her face really look like a clock dial�rather roundish and often pale, and impassive. She would have got up to look, in the mirror, but the thought of the sight of her own face, that was like a twelve-hour clock-dial, filled her with such deep terror, that she hastened to think of something else. Oh, why wasn�t somebody kind to her? Why wasn�t there somebody who would take her in their arms, and hold her to their breast, and give her rest, pure, deep, healing rest. Oh, why wasn�t there somebody to take her in their arms and fold her safe and perfect, for sleep. She wanted so much this perfect enfolded sleep. She lay always so unsheathed in sleep. She would lie always unsheathed in sleep, unrelieved, unsaved. Oh, how could she bear it, this endless unrelief, this eternal unrelief. Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha! He needed putting to sleep himself�poor Gerald. That was all he needed. What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there. He was an added weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever unquenched desire for her�that he needed her to put him to sleep, to give him repose. What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don Juan. Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No doubt Hetty Sorrell�s infant cried in the night�no doubt Arthur Donnithorne�s infant would. Ha�the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheelbarrow that goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day�she had seen it. The wheel-barrow�the one humble wheel�the unit of the firm. Then the cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with four; then the donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-engine, with sixteen, and so on, till it came to the miner, with a thousand wheels, and then the electrician, with three thousand, and the underground manager, with twenty thousand, and the general manager with a hundred thousand little wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then Gerald, with a million wheels and cogs and axles. Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch�a beetle�her soul fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and consider and calculate! Enough, enough�there was an end to man�s capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there was no end. Meanwhile Gerald sat in his room, reading. When Gudrun was gone, he was left stupefied with arrested desire. He sat on the side of the bed for an hour, stupefied, little strands of consciousness appearing and reappearing. But he did not move, for a long time he remained inert, his head dropped on his breast. Then he looked up and realised that he was going to bed. He was cold. Soon he was lying down in the dark. But what he could not bear was the darkness. The solid darkness confronting him drove him mad. So he rose, and made a light. He remained seated for a while, staring in front. He did not think of Gudrun, he did not think of anything. Then suddenly he went downstairs for a book. He had all his life been in terror of the nights that should come, when he could not sleep. He knew that this would be too much for him, to have to face nights of sleeplessness and of horrified watching the hours. So he sat for hours in bed, like a statue, reading. His mind, hard and acute, read on rapidly, his body understood nothing. In a state of rigid unconsciousness, he read on through the night, till morning, when, weary and disgusted in spirit, disgusted most of all with himself, he slept for two hours. Then he got up, hard and full of energy. Gudrun scarcely spoke to him, except at coffee when she said: �I shall be leaving tomorrow.� �We will go together as far as Innsbruck, for appearance�s sake?� he asked. �Perhaps,� she said. She said �Perhaps� between the sips of her coffee. And the sound of her taking her breath in the word, was nauseous to him. He rose quickly to be away from her. He went and made arrangements for the departure on the morrow. Then, taking some food, he set out for the day on the skis. Perhaps, he said to the Wirt, he would go up to the Marienhütte, perhaps to the village below. To Gudrun this day was full of a promise like spring. She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her. It gave her pleasure to dawdle through her packing, it gave her pleasure to dip into books, to try on her different garments, to look at herself in the glass. She felt a new lease of life was come upon her, and she was happy like a child, very attractive and beautiful to everybody, with her soft, luxuriant figure, and her happiness. Yet underneath was death itself. In the afternoon she had to go out with Loerke. Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. She might be going to England with Gerald, she might be going to Dresden with Loerke, she might be going to Munich, to a girl-friend she had there. Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And today was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility�that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm,�pure illusion. All possibility�because death was inevitable, and _nothing_ was possible but death. She did not want things to materialise, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion. So that, although she wanted to go out with Loerke for the last time into the snow, she did not want to be serious or businesslike. And Loerke was not a serious figure. In his brown velvet cap, that made his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown-velvet flaps loose and wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf-like, thin black hair blowing above his full, elf-like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small-featured face, he looked an odd little boy-man, a bat. But in his figure, in the greeny loden suit, he looked _chétif_ and puny, still strangely different from the rest. He had taken a little toboggan, for the two of them, and they trudged between the blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their relationship: _such_ a fine game. Loerke did not take the toboganning very seriously. He put no fire and intensity into it, as Gerald did. Which pleased Gudrun. She was weary, oh so weary of Gerald�s gripped intensity of physical motion. Loerke let the sledge go wildly, and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be laughing and pert as a pixie. She knew he would be making ironical, playful remarks as he wandered in hell�if he were in the humour. And that pleased her immensely. It seemed like a rising above the dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies. They played till the sun went down, in pure amusement, careless and timeless. Then, as the little sledge twirled riskily to rest at the bottom of the slope, �Wait!� he said suddenly, and he produced from somewhere a large thermos flask, a packet of Keks, and a bottle of Schnapps. �Oh Loerke,� she cried. �What an inspiration! What a _comble de joie indeed!_ What is the Schnapps?� He looked at it, and laughed. �_Heidelbeer!_� he said. �No! From the bilberries under the snow. Doesn�t it look as if it were distilled from snow. Can you�� she sniffed, and sniffed at the bottle��can you smell bilberries? Isn�t it wonderful? It is exactly as if one could smell them through the snow.� She stamped her foot lightly on the ground. He kneeled down and whistled, and put his ear to the snow. As he did so his black eyes twinkled up. �Ha! Ha!� she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked at her verbal extravagances. He was always teasing her, mocking her ways. But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her extravagances, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated. She could feel their voices, hers and his, ringing silvery like bells in the frozen, motionless air of the first twilight. How perfect it was, how _very_ perfect it was, this silvery isolation and interplay. She sipped the hot coffee, whose fragrance flew around them like bees murmuring around flowers, in the snowy air, she drank tiny sips of the _Heidelbeerwasser_, she ate the cold, sweet, creamy wafers. How good everything was! How perfect everything tasted and smelled and sounded, here in this utter stillness of snow and falling twilight. �You are going away tomorrow?� his voice came at last. �Yes.� There was a pause, when the evening seemed to rise in its silent, ringing pallor infinitely high, to the infinite which was near at hand. �_Wohin?_� That was the question�_wohin?_ Whither? _Wohin?_ What a lovely word! She _never_ wanted it answered. Let it chime for ever. �I don�t know,� she said, smiling at him. He caught the smile from her. �One never does,� he said. �One never does,� she repeated. There was a silence, wherein he ate biscuits rapidly, as a rabbit eats leaves. �But,� he laughed, �where will you take a ticket to?� �Oh heaven!� she cried. �One must take a ticket.� Here was a blow. She saw herself at the wicket, at the railway station. Then a relieving thought came to her. She breathed freely. �But one needn�t go,� she cried. �Certainly not,� he said. �I mean one needn�t go where one�s ticket says.� That struck him. One might take a ticket, so as not to travel to the destination it indicated. One might break off, and avoid the destination. A point located. That was an idea! �Then take a ticket to London,� he said. �One should never go there.� �Right,� she answered. He poured a little coffee into a tin can. �You won�t tell me where you will go?� he asked. �Really and truly,� she said, �I don�t know. It depends which way the wind blows.� He looked at her quizzically, then he pursed up his lips, like Zephyrus, blowing across the snow. �It goes towards Germany,� he said. �I believe so,� she laughed. Suddenly, they were aware of a vague white figure near them. It was Gerald. Gudrun�s heart leapt in sudden terror, profound terror. She rose to her feet. �They told me where you were,� came Gerald�s voice, like a judgment in the whitish air of twilight. �_Maria!_ You come like a ghost,� exclaimed Loerke. Gerald did not answer. His presence was unnatural and ghostly to them. Loerke shook the flask�then he held it inverted over the snow. Only a few brown drops trickled out. �All gone!� he said. To Gerald, the smallish, odd figure of the German was distinct and objective, as if seen through field glasses. And he disliked the small figure exceedingly, he wanted it removed. Then Loerke rattled the box which held the biscuits. �Biscuits there are still,� he said. And reaching from his seated posture in the sledge, he handed them to Gudrun. She fumbled, and took one. He would have held them to Gerald, but Gerald so definitely did not want to be offered a biscuit, that Loerke, rather vaguely, put the box aside. Then he took up the small bottle, and held it to the light. �Also there is some Schnapps,� he said to himself. Then suddenly, he elevated the battle gallantly in the air, a strange, grotesque figure leaning towards Gudrun, and said: �_Gnädiges Fräulein_,� he said, �_wohl_�� There was a crack, the bottle was flying, Loerke had started back, the three stood quivering in violent emotion. Loerke turned to Gerald, a devilish leer on his bright-skinned face. �Well done!� he said, in a satirical demoniac frenzy. �_C�est le sport, sans doute._� The next instant he was sitting ludicrously in the snow, Gerald�s fist having rung against the side of his head. But Loerke pulled himself together, rose, quivering, looking full at Gerald, his body weak and furtive, but his eyes demoniacal with satire. �_Vive le héros, vive_�� But he flinched, as, in a black flash Gerald�s fist came upon him, banged into the other side of his head, and sent him aside like a broken straw. But Gudrun moved forward. She raised her clenched hand high, and brought it down, with a great downward stroke on to the face and on to the breast of Gerald. A great astonishment burst upon him, as if the air had broken. Wide, wide his soul opened, in wonder, feeling the pain. Then it laughed, turning, with strong hands outstretched, at last to take the apple of his desire. At last he could finish his desire. He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully soft, save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come unto her swollen face, watching the eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment, what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a God-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting and struggling. The struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was overborne, her movement became softer, appeased. Loerke roused himself on the snow, too dazed and hurt to get up. Only his eyes were conscious. �_Monsieur!_� he said, in his thin, roused voice: �_Quand vous aurez fini_�� A revulsion of contempt and disgust came over Gerald�s soul. The disgust went to the very bottom of him, a nausea. Ah, what was he doing, to what depths was he letting himself go! As if he cared about her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands! A weakness ran over his body, a terrible relaxing, a thaw, a decay of strength. Without knowing, he had let go his grip, and Gudrun had fallen to her knees. Must he see, must he know? A fearful weakness possessed him, his joints were turned to water. He drifted, as on a wind, veered, and went drifting away. �I didn�t want it, really,� was the last confession of disgust in his soul, as he drifted up the slope, weak, finished, only sheering off unconsciously from any further contact. �I�ve had enough�I want to go to sleep. I�ve had enough.� He was sunk under a sense of nausea. He was weak, but he did not want to rest, he wanted to go on and on, to the end. Never again to stay, till he came to the end, that was all the desire that remained to him. So he drifted on and on, unconscious and weak, not thinking of anything, so long as he could keep in action. The twilight spread a weird, unearthly light overhead, bluish-rose in colour, the cold blue night sank on the snow. In the valley below, behind, in the great bed of snow, were two small figures: Gudrun dropped on her knees, like one executed, and Loerke sitting propped up near her. That was all. Gerald stumbled on up the slope of snow, in the bluish darkness, always climbing, always unconsciously climbing, weary though he was. On his left was a steep slope with black rocks and fallen masses of rock and veins of snow slashing in and about the blackness of rock, veins of snow slashing vaguely in and about the blackness of rock. Yet there was no sound, all this made no noise. To add to his difficulty, a small bright moon shone brilliantly just ahead, on the right, a painful brilliant thing that was always there, unremitting, from which there was no escape. He wanted so to come to the end�he had had enough. Yet he did not sleep. He surged painfully up, sometimes having to cross a slope of black rock, that was blown bare of snow. Here he was afraid of falling, very much afraid of falling. And high up here, on the crest, moved a wind that almost overpowered him with a sleep-heavy iciness. Only it was not here, the end, and he must still go on. His indefinite nausea would not let him stay. Having gained one ridge, he saw the vague shadow of something higher in front. Always higher, always higher. He knew he was following the track towards the summit of the slopes, where was the Marienhütte, and the descent on the other side. But he was not really conscious. He only wanted to go on, to go on whilst he could, to move, to keep going, that was all, to keep going, until it was finished. He had lost all his sense of place. And yet in the remaining instinct of life, his feet sought the track where the skis had gone. He slithered down a sheer snow slope. That frightened him. He had no alpenstock, nothing. But having come safely to rest, he began to walk on, in the illuminated darkness. It was as cold as sleep. He was between two ridges, in a hollow. So he swerved. Should he climb the other ridge, or wander along the hollow? How frail the thread of his being was stretched! He would perhaps climb the ridge. The snow was firm and simple. He went along. There was something standing out of the snow. He approached, with dimmest curiosity. It was a half-buried Crucifix, a little Christ under a little sloping hood, at the top of a pole. He sheered away. Somebody was going to murder him. He had a great dread of being murdered. But it was a dread which stood outside him, like his own ghost. Yet why be afraid? It was bound to happen. To be murdered! He looked round in terror at the snow, the rocking, pale, shadowy slopes of the upper world. He was bound to be murdered, he could see it. This was the moment when the death was uplifted, and there was no escape. Lord Jesus, was it then bound to be�Lord Jesus! He could feel the blow descending, he knew he was murdered. Vaguely wandering forward, his hands lifted as if to feel what would happen, he was waiting for the moment when he would stop, when it would cease. It was not over yet. He had come to the hollow basin of snow, surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep. CHAPTER XXXI. EXEUNT When they brought the body home, the next morning, Gudrun was shut up in her room. From her window she saw men coming along with a burden, over the snow. She sat still and let the minutes go by. There came a tap at her door. She opened. There stood a woman, saying softly, oh, far too reverently: �They have found him, madam!� �_Il est mort?_� �Yes�hours ago.� Gudrun did not know what to say. What should she say? What should she feel? What should she do? What did they expect of her? She was coldly at a loss. �Thank you,� she said, and she shut the door of her room. The woman went away mortified. Not a word, not a tear�ha! Gudrun was cold, a cold woman. Gudrun sat on in her room, her face pale and impassive. What was she to do? She could not weep and make a scene. She could not alter herself. She sat motionless, hiding from people. Her one motive was to avoid actual contact with events. She only wrote out a long telegram to Ursula and Birkin. In the afternoon, however, she rose suddenly to look for Loerke. She glanced with apprehension at the door of the room that had been Gerald�s. Not for worlds would she enter there. She found Loerke sitting alone in the lounge. She went straight up to him. �It isn�t true, is it?� she said. He looked up at her. A small smile of misery twisted his face. He shrugged his shoulders. �True?� he echoed. �We haven�t killed him?� she asked. He disliked her coming to him in such a manner. He raised his shoulders wearily. �It has happened,� he said. She looked at him. He sat crushed and frustrated for the time being, quite as emotionless and barren as herself. My God! this was a barren tragedy, barren, barren. She returned to her room to wait for Ursula and Birkin. She wanted to get away, only to get away. She could not think or feel until she had got away, till she was loosed from this position. The day passed, the next day came. She heard the sledge, saw Ursula and Birkin alight, and she shrank from these also. Ursula came straight up to her. �Gudrun!� she cried, the tears running down her cheeks. And she took her sister in her arms. Gudrun hid her face on Ursula�s shoulder, but still she could not escape the cold devil of irony that froze her soul. �Ha, ha!� she thought, �this is the right behaviour.� But she could not weep, and the sight of her cold, pale, impassive face soon stopped the fountain of Ursula�s tears. In a few moments, the sisters had nothing to say to each other. �Was it very vile to be dragged back here again?� Gudrun asked at length. Ursula looked up in some bewilderment. �I never thought of it,� she said. �I felt a beast, fetching you,� said Gudrun. �But I simply couldn�t see people. That is too much for me.� �Yes,� said Ursula, chilled. Birkin tapped and entered. His face was white and expressionless. She knew he knew. He gave her his hand, saying: �The end of _this_ trip, at any rate.� Gudrun glanced at him, afraid. There was silence between the three of them, nothing to be said. At length Ursula asked in a small voice: �Have you seen him?� He looked back at Ursula with a hard, cold look, and did not trouble to answer. �Have you seen him?� she repeated. �I have,� he said, coldly. Then he looked at Gudrun. �Have you done anything?� he said. �Nothing,� she replied, �nothing.� She shrank in cold disgust from making any statement. �Loerke says that Gerald came to you, when you were sitting on the sledge at the bottom of the Rudelbahn, that you had words, and Gerald walked away. What were the words about? I had better know, so that I can satisfy the authorities, if necessary.� Gudrun looked up at him, white, childlike, mute with trouble. �There weren�t even any words,� she said. �He knocked Loerke down and stunned him, he half strangled me, then he went away.� To herself she was saying: �A pretty little sample of the eternal triangle!� And she turned ironically away, because she knew that the fight had been between Gerald and herself and that the presence of the third party was a mere contingency�an inevitable contingency perhaps, but a contingency none the less. But let them have it as an example of the eternal triangle, the trinity of hate. It would be simpler for them. Birkin went away, his manner cold and abstracted. But she knew he would do things for her, nevertheless, he would see her through. She smiled slightly to herself, with contempt. Let him do the work, since he was so extremely _good_ at looking after other people. Birkin went again to Gerald. He had loved him. And yet he felt chiefly disgust at the inert body lying there. It was so inert, so coldly dead, a carcase, Birkin�s bowels seemed to turn to ice. He had to stand and look at the frozen dead body that had been Gerald. It was the frozen carcase of a dead male. Birkin remembered a rabbit which he had once found frozen like a board on the snow. It had been rigid like a dried board when he picked it up. And now this was Gerald, stiff as a board, curled up as if for sleep, yet with the horrible hardness somehow evident. It filled him with horror. The room must be made warm, the body must be thawed. The limbs would break like glass or like wood if they had to be straightened. He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing too, freezing from the inside. In the short blond moustache the life-breath was frozen into a block of ice, beneath the silent nostrils. And this was Gerald! Again he touched the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen body. It was icy-cold, hair icy-cold, almost venomous. Birkin�s heart began to freeze. He had loved Gerald. Now he looked at the shapely, strange-coloured face, with the small, fine, pinched nose and the manly cheeks, saw it frozen like an ice-pebble�yet he had loved it. What was one to think or feel? His brain was beginning to freeze, his blood was turning to ice-water. So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in his heart and in his bowels. He went over the snow slopes, to see where the death had been. At last he came to the great shallow among the precipices and slopes, near the summit of the pass. It was a grey day, the third day of greyness and stillness. All was white, icy, pallid, save for the scoring of black rocks that jutted like roots sometimes, and sometimes were in naked faces. In the distance a slope sheered down from a peak, with many black rock-slides. It was like a shallow pot lying among the stone and snow of the upper world. In this pot Gerald had gone to sleep. At the far end, the guides had driven iron stakes deep into the snow-wall, so that, by means of the great rope attached, they could haul themselves up the massive snow-front, out on to the jagged summit of the pass, naked to heaven, where the Marienhütte hid among the naked rocks. Round about, spiked, slashed snow-peaks pricked the heaven. Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to the crest. He might have heard the dogs in the Marienhütte, and found shelter. He might have gone on, down the steep, steep fall of the south-side, down into the dark valley with its pines, on to the great Imperial road leading south to Italy. He might! And what then? The Imperial road! The south? Italy? What then? Was it a way out? It was only a way in again. Birkin stood high in the painful air, looking at the peaks, and the way south. Was it any good going south, to Italy? Down the old, old Imperial road? He turned away. Either the heart would break, or cease to care. Best cease to care. Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast, creative, non-human mystery. Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe. �God cannot do without man.� It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal creative mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created being. Just as the horse has taken the place of the mastodon. It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a _cul de sac_ and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one�s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species. Birkin went home again to Gerald. He went into the room, and sat down on the bed. Dead, dead and cold! Imperial Caesar dead, and turned to clay Would stop a hole to keep the wind away. There was no response from that which had been Gerald. Strange, congealed, icy substance�no more. No more! Terribly weary, Birkin went away, about the day�s business. He did it all quietly, without bother. To rant, to rave, to be tragic, to make situations�it was all too late. Best be quiet, and bear one�s soul in patience and in fullness. But when he went in again, at evening, to look at Gerald between the candles, because of his heart�s hunger, suddenly his heart contracted, his own candle all but fell from his hand, as, with a strange whimpering cry, the tears broke out. He sat down in a chair, shaken by a sudden access. Ursula who had followed him, recoiled aghast from him, as he sat with sunken head and body convulsively shaken, making a strange, horrible sound of tears. �I didn�t want it to be like this�I didn�t want it to be like this,� he cried to himself. Ursula could but think of the Kaiser�s: �_Ich habe es nicht gewollt._� She looked almost with horror on Birkin. Suddenly he was silent. But he sat with his head dropped, to hide his face. Then furtively he wiped his face with his fingers. Then suddenly he lifted his head, and looked straight at Ursula, with dark, almost vengeful eyes. �He should have loved me,� he said. �I offered him.� She, afraid, white, with mute lips answered: �What difference would it have made!� �It would!� he said. �It would.� He forgot her, and turned to look at Gerald. With head oddly lifted, like a man who draws his head back from an insult, half haughtily, he watched the cold, mute, material face. It had a bluish cast. It sent a shaft like ice through the heart of the living man. Cold, mute, material! Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand, with a warm, momentaneous grip of final love. For one second�then let go again, let go for ever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered. Those who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved. Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after death. He might have lived with his friend, a further life. But now he was dead, like clay, like bluish, corruptible ice. Birkin looked at the pale fingers, the inert mass. He remembered a dead stallion he had seen: a dead mass of maleness, repugnant. He remembered also the beautiful face of one whom he had loved, and who had died still having the faith to yield to the mystery. That dead face was beautiful, no one could call it cold, mute, material. No one could remember it without gaining faith in the mystery, without the soul�s warming with new, deep life-trust. And Gerald! The denier! He left the heart cold, frozen, hardly able to beat. Gerald�s father had looked wistful, to break the heart: but not this last terrible look of cold, mute Matter. Birkin watched and watched. Ursula stood aside watching the living man stare at the frozen face of the dead man. Both faces were unmoved and unmoving. The candle-flames flickered in the frozen air, in the intense silence. �Haven�t you seen enough?� she said. He got up. �It�s a bitter thing to me,� he said. �What�that he�s dead?� she said. His eyes just met hers. He did not answer. �You�ve got me,� she said. He smiled and kissed her. �If I die,� he said, �you�ll know I haven�t left you.� �And me?� she cried. �And you won�t have left me,� he said. �We shan�t have any need to despair, in death.� She took hold of his hand. �But need you despair over Gerald?� she said. �Yes,� he answered. They went away. Gerald was taken to England, to be buried. Birkin and Ursula accompanied the body, along with one of Gerald�s brothers. It was the Crich brothers and sisters who insisted on the burial in England. Birkin wanted to leave the dead man in the Alps, near the snow. But the family was strident, loudly insistent. Gudrun went to Dresden. She wrote no particulars of herself. Ursula stayed at the Mill with Birkin for a week or two. They were both very quiet. �Did you need Gerald?� she asked one evening. �Yes,� he said. �Aren�t I enough for you?� she asked. �No,� he said. �You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.� �Why aren�t I enough?� she said. �You are enough for me. I don�t want anybody else but you. Why isn�t it the same with you?� �Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,� he said. �I don�t believe it,� she said. �It�s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.� �Well�� he said. �You can�t have two kinds of love. Why should you!� It seems as if I can�t,� he said. �Yet I wanted it.� �You can�t have it, because it�s false, impossible,� she said. �I don�t believe that,� he answered.