"You shan't have to. I swear I won't say another word."

"Sometimes I think it would be easier for you if I went."

"It wouldn't. It would be simply damnable. You can't go, Anne. That would make Maisie think."

iii

After weeks of rest Maisie passed into a period of painless tranquillity. She had no longer any fear of her illness because she had no longer any fear of Jerrold's knowing about it. He did know, and yet her world stood firm round her, firmer than when he had not known. For she had now in Jerrold's ceaseless devotion what seemed to her the absolute proof that he cared for her, if she had ever doubted it. And if he had doubted her, hadn't he the absolute proof that she cared, desperately? Would she have so hidden the truth from him, would she have borne her pain and the fear of it, in that awful lonely secrecy, if she had not cared for him more than for anything on earth? She had been more afraid to sleep alone than poor Colin who had waked them with his screaming. Jerrold knew that she was not a brave woman like Anne or Colin's wife, Queenie; it was out of her love for him that she had drawn the courage that made her face, night after night, the horror of her torment alone. If he had wanted proof, what better proof could he have than that?

So Maisie remained tranquil, secure in her love for Jerrold, and in his love for her, while Anne and Jerrold were tortured by their love for each other. They were no longer sustained in their renunciation by the sight of Maisie's illness and the fear of it which more than anything had held back their passion. Without that warning fear they were exposed at every turn. It might be there, waiting for them in the background, but, with Maisie going about as if nothing had happened, even remorse had lost its protective poignancy. They suffered the strain of perpetual frustration. They were never alone together now. They had passed from each other, beyond all contact of spirit with spirit and flesh with flesh, beyond all words and looks of longing; they had nothing of each other but sight, sight that had all the violence of touch without its satisfaction, that served only to excite them, to torture them with desire. They might be held at arm's length, at a room's length, at a field's length apart, but their eyes drew them together, set their hearts beating; in one moment of seeing they were joined and put asunder.

And, day after day, their minds desired each other with a subtle, incessant, intensely conscious longing, and were utterly cut off from all communion. They met now at longer and longer intervals, for their work separated them. Colin had come home in October, perfectly recovered, and he and Jerrold managed the Manor estate together while Anne looked after her own farm. Jerrold never saw her, he never tried to see her unless Colin or Maisie or some of the farm people were present; he was afraid and Anne knew that he was afraid. Her sense of his danger made her feel herself fragile and unstable. She, too, avoided every occasion of seeing him alone.

And this separation, so far from saving them, defeated its own end. Every day it brought them nearer to the breaking point. It was against all nature and all nature was against it. They had always before them that vision of the point at which they would give in. Always there was one thought that drew them to the edge of surrender: "I can bear it for myself, but I can't bear it for him," "I can bear it for myself, but I can't bear it for her."

And to both of them had come another fear, greater than their dread of Maisie's pain, the fear of each other's illness. Their splendid physical health was beginning to break down. They worked harder than ever on the land; but hard work exhausted them at the end of the day. They went on from a sense of duty, dull and implacable, but they had no more pleasure in it. Anne became every night more restless, every day more tired and anaemic. Jerrold ate less and slept less. They grew thin, and their faces took on the same look of fatigue and anxiety and wonder, as if, more than anything, they were amazed at a world whose being connived at and tolerated their pain.

Maisie saw it and felt the first vague disturbance of her peace. Her illness had worried everybody while it lasted, but she couldn't think why, when she was well again, Anne and Jerrold should go on looking like that. Maisie thought it was physical; the poor dears worked too hard.

The change had been so gradual that she saw it without consternation, but when Eliot came down in November he couldn't hide his distress. To Eliot the significant thing was not Anne's illness or Jerrold's illness but the likeness in their illnesses, the likeness in their faces. It was clear that they suffered together, with the same suffering, from the same cause. And when on his last evening Jerrold took him into the library to consult him about Maisie's case, Eliot had a hard, straight talk with him about his own.

"My dear Jerrold," he said, "there's nothing seriously wrong with Maisie. I've examined her heart. It isn't a particularly strong heart, but there's no disease in it. If you took her to all the specialists in Europe they'd tell you the same thing."

"I know, but I keep on worrying."

"That, my dear chap, is because you're ill yourself. I don't like it. I'm not bothered about Maisie, but I am bothered about you and Anne."

"Anne? Do you think Anne's ill?"

"I think she will be, and so will you if... What have you been doing?"

"We've been doing nothing."

"That's it. You've got to do something and do it pretty quick if it's to be any good."

Jerrold started and looked up. He wondered whether Eliot knew. He had a way of getting at things, you couldn't tell how.

"What d'you mean? What are you talking about?" His words came with a sudden sharp rapidity.

"You know what I mean."

"I don't know how you know anything. And, as a matter of fact, you don't."

"I don't know much. But I know enough to see that you two can't go on like this."

"Maisie and me?"

"No. You and Anne. It's Anne I'm talking about. I suppose you can make a mess of your own life if you like. You've no business to make a mess of hers."

"My God! as if I didn't know it. What the devil am I to do?"

"Leave her alone, Jerrold, if you can't have her."

"Leave her alone? I am leaving her alone. I've got to leave her alone, if we both die of it."

"She ought to go away," Eliot said.

"She shan't go away unless I go with her. And I can't."'

"Well, then, it's an impossible situation."

"It's a damnable situation, but it's the only decent one. You forget there's Maisie."

"No, I don't. Maisie doesn't know?"

"Oh Lord, no. And she never will."

"You ought to tell her."

Jerrold was silent.

"My dear Jerrold, it's the only sensible thing. Tell her straight and get her to divorce you."

"I was going to. Then she got ill and I couldn't."

"She isn't ill now."

"She will be if I tell her. It'll simply kill her."

"It won't. It may—even—cure her."

"It'll make her frightfully unhappy. And it'll bring back that infernal pain. If you'd seen her, Eliot, you'd know how impossible it is. We simply can't be swine. And if I could, Anne couldn't.... No. We've got to stick it somehow, Anne and I."

"It's all wrong, Jerrold."

"I know it's all wrong. But it's the best we can do. You don't suppose Anne would be happy if we did Maisie down."

"No. No. She wouldn't. You're right there. But it's a damnable business."

"Oh, damnable, yes."

Jerrold laughed in his agony. Yet he saw, as if he had never seen it before, Eliot's goodness and the sadness and beauty of his love for Anne. He had borne for years what Jerrold was bearing now, and Anne had not loved him. He had never known for one moment the bliss of love or any joy. He had had nothing. And Jerrold remembered with a pang of contrition that he had never cared enough for Eliot. It had always been Colin, the young, breakable Colin, who had clung to him and followed him. Eliot had always gone his own queer way, keeping himself apart.

And now Eliot was nearer to him than anything in the world, except Anne.

"I'm sorry, Jerrold."

"You're pretty decent, Eliot, to be sorry—I believe you honestly want me to have Anne."

"I wouldn't go so far as that, old man. But I believe I honestly want Anne to have you.... I say, she hasn't gone yet, has she?"

"No. Maisie's keeping her for dinner in your honour. You'll probably find her in the drawing-room now."

"Where's Maisie?"

"She won't worry you. She's gone to lie down."

Eliot went into the drawing-room and found Anne there.

She looked at him. "You've been talking to Jerrold," she said.

"Yes, Anne. I'm worried about him."

"So am I."

"And I'm worried about you."

"And he's worried about Maisie."

"Yes. I suppose he began by not seeing she was ill, and now he does see it he thinks she's going to die. I've been trying to explain to him that she isn't."

"Can you explain why she's got into this state? It's not as if she wasn't happy. She is happy."

"She wasn't always happy. Jerrold must have made her suffer damnably."

"When?"

"Oh, long before he married her."

"But how did he make her suffer?"

"Oh, by just not marrying her. She found out he didn't care for her. Her people took her out to India, I believe, with the idea that he would marry her. And when they saw that Jerry wasn't on in that act they sent her back again. Poor Maisie got it well rammed into her then that he didn't care for her, and the idea's stuck. It's left a sort of wound in her memory."

"But she must have thought he cared for her when he did marry her. She thinks he cares now."

"Of course she thinks it. I don't suppose he's ever let her see."

"I know he hasn't."

"But the wound's there, all the same. She's never got over it, though she isn't conscious of it now. The fact remains that Maisie's marriage is incomplete because Jerry doesn't care for her. Part of Maisie, the adorable part we know, isn't aware of any incompleteness; it lives in a perpetual illusion. But the part we don't know, the hidden, secret part of her, is aware of nothing else.... Well, her illness is simply camouflage for that. Maisie's mind couldn't bear the reality, so it escaped into a neurosis. Maisie's behaving as though she wasn't married, so that her mind can say to itself that her marriage is incomplete because she's ill, not because Jerry doesn't care for her. It's substituted a bearable situation for an unbearable one."

"Then, you don't think she knows?"

"That Jerrold doesn't care for her? No. Only in that unconscious way. Her mind remembers and she doesn't."

"I mean, she doesn't know about Jerrold and me?"

"I'm sure she doesn't. If she did she'd do something."

"That's what Jerrold said. What would she do?"

"Oh something beautiful, or it wouldn't be Maisie. She'd let Jerrold go."

"Yes. She'd let him go. And she'd die of it."

"Oh no, she wouldn't. I told Jerrold just now it might cure her."

"How could it cure her?"

"By making her face reality. By making her see that her illness simply means that she hasn't faced it. All our neuroses come because we daren't live with the truth."

"It's no good making Maisie well if we make her unhappy. Besides, I don't believe it. If Maisie's unhappy she'll be worse, not better."

"There is just that risk," he said. "But it's you I'm thinking about, not Maisie. You see, I don't know what's happened."

"Jerrold didn't tell you?"

"He only told me what I know already."

"After all, what do you know?"

"I know you were all right, you and he, when I saw you together here in the spring. So I suppose you were happy then. Jerrold looked wretchedly ill all the time he was at Taormina. So I suppose he was unhappy then because he was away from you. He looks wretchedly ill now. So do you. So I suppose you're both unhappy."

"Yes, we're both unhappy."

"Do you want to tell me about it, Anne?"

"No. I don't want to tell you about it. Only, if I thought you still wanted to marry me——"

"I do want to marry you. I shall always want to marry you. I told you long ago nothing would ever make any difference.

"Even if——?"

"Even if—Whatever you did or didn't do I'd still want you. But I told you—don't you remember?—that you could never do anything dishonourable or cruel."

"And I told you I wasn't sure."

"And I am sure. That's enough for me. I don't want to know anything more. I don't want to know anything you'd rather I didn't know."

"Oh, Eliot, you are so good. You're good like Maisie. Don't worry about Jerry and me. We'll see it through somehow."

"And if you can't stand the strain of it?"

"But I can."

"And if he can't? If you want to be safe——"

"I told you I should never want to be safe."

"If you want him to be safe, then, would you marry me?"

"That's different. I don't know, Eliot, but I don't think so."

He went away with a faint hope. She had said it would be different; what she would never do for him she might do for Jerrold.

She might, after all, marry him to keep Jerrold safe.

Nothing made any difference. Whatever Anne did she would still be Anne. And it was Anne he loved. And, after all, what did he know about her and Jerrold? Only that if they had been lovers that would account for their strange happiness seven months ago; if they had given each other up this would account for their unhappiness now. He thought: How they must have struggled.

Perhaps, some day, when the whole story was told and Anne was tired of struggling, she would come to him and he would marry her.

Even if——



XVIII

JERROLD AND ANNE

i

The Barrow Farm house, long, low and grey, stood back behind the tall elms and turned its blank north gable end to the road and the Manor Farm. Its nine mullioned windows looked down the field to the river. And the great barns were piled behind it, long roof-trees, steep, mouse-coloured slopes and peaks above grey walls.

Anne didn't move into the Barrow Farm house all at once. She had to wait while Jerrold had the place made beautiful for her.

This was the only thing that roused him to any interest. Through all his misery he could still find pleasure in the work of throwing small rooms into one to make more space for Anne, and putting windows into the south gable to give her the sun.

Anne's garden absorbed him more than his own seven hundred acres. Maisie and he planned it together, walking round the rank flower-beds, and bald wastes scratched up by the hens.

There was to be a flagged court on one side and a grass plot on the other, with a flower garden between. Here, Maisie said, there should be great clumps of larkspurs and there a lavender hedge. They said how nice it would be for Anne to watch the garden grow.

"He's going to make it so beautiful that you'll want to stay in it forever," she said.

And Anne went with them and listened to them, and told them they were angels, and pretended to be excited about her house and garden, while all the time her heart ached and she was too tired to care.

The house was finished by the end of November and Jerrold and Maisie helped her to furnish it. Maisie sent to London for patterns and brought them to Anne to choose. Maisie thought perhaps the chintz with the cream and pink roses, or the one with the green leaves and red tulips and blue and purple clematis was the prettiest. Anne tried to behave as if all her happiness depended on a pattern, and ended by choosing the one that Maisie liked best. And the furniture went where Maisie thought it should go, because Anne was too tired to care. Besides, she was busy on her farm. Old Sutton in his decadence had let most of his arable land run to waste, and Anne's job was to make good soil again out of bad.

Maisie was pleased like a child and excited with her planning. Her idea was that Anne should come in from her work on the land and find the house all ready for her, everything in its place, chairs and sofas dressed in their gay suits of chintz, the books on their shelves, the blue-and-white china in rows on the oak dresser.

Tea was set out on the gate-legged table before the wide hearth-place. The lamps were lit. A big fire burned. Colin and Jerrold and Maisie were there waiting for her. And Anne came in out of the fields, tired and white and thin, her black hair drooping. Her rough land dress hung slack on her slender body.

Jerrold looked at her. Anne's tired face, trying to smile, wrung his heart. So did the happiness in Maisie's eyes. And Anne's voice trying to sound as if she were happy.

"You darlings! How nice you've made it."

"Do you like it?"

Maisie was breathless with joy.

"I love it. I adore it! But—aren't there lots of things that weren't here before? Where did that table come from?"

"From the Manor Farm. Don't you remember it? That's Eliot."

"And the bureau, and the dresser, and those heavenly rugs?"

"That's Jerrold."

And the china was Colin, and the chintz was Maisie. The long couch for Anne to lie down on was Maisie. Everything that was not Anne's they had given her.

"You shouldn't have done it," she said.

"We did it for ourselves. To keep you with us," said Maisie.

"Did you think it would take all that?"

She wondered whether they saw how hard she was trying to look happy, not to be too tired to care.

Then Maisie took her upstairs to show her her bedroom and the white bathroom. Colin carried the lamp. He left them together in Anne's room. Maisie turned to her there.

"Darling, how tired you look. Are you too tired to be happy?"

"I'd be a brute if I weren't happy," Anne said.

But she wasn't happy. The minute they were gone her sadness came upon her, crushing her down. She could hear Colin and Maisie, the two innocent ones, laughing out into the darkness. She saw again Jerrold's hard, unhappy face trying to smile; his mouth jerking in the tight, difficult smile that was like an agony. And it used to be Jerrold who was always happy, who went laughing.

She turned up and down the beautiful lighted room; she looked again and again at the things they had given her, Colin and Jerrold and Maisie.

Maisie. She would have to live with the cruelty of Maisie's gifts, with Maisie's wounding kindness and her innocence. Maisie's curtains, Maisie's couch, covered with flowers that smiled at her, gay on the white ground. She thought of the other house, of the curtains that had shut out the light from her and Jerrold, of the couch where she had lain in his arms. Each object had a dumb but poignant life that reminded and reproached her.

This was the scene where her life was to be cast. Henceforth these things would know her in her desolation. Jerrold would never come to her here as he had come to the Manor Farm house; they would never sit together talking by this fireside; those curtains would never be drawn on their passion; he would never go up to that lamp and put it out; she would never lie here waiting, thrilling, as he came to her through the darkness.

She had wanted the Barrow Farm and she had got what she had wanted, and she had got it too late. She loved it. Yet how was it possible to love the place that she was to be so unhappy in? She ought to hate it with its enclosing walls, its bright-eyed, watching furniture, its air of quiet complicity in her pain.

She drew back the curtains. The lamp and its yellow flame hung out there on the darkness of the fields. The fields dropped away through the darkness to the river, and there were the black masses of the trees.

There the earth waited for her. Out there was the only life left for her to live. The life of struggling with the earth, forcing the earth to yield to her more than it had yielded to the men who had tilled it before her, making the bad land good. Ploughing time would come and seed time, and hay harvest and corn harvest. Feeding time and milking time would come. She would go on seeing the same things done at the same hour, at the same season, day after day and year after year. There would have been joy in that if it had been Jerrold's land, if she could have gone on working for Jerrold and with Jerrold. And if she had not been so tired.

She was only twenty-nine and Jerrold was only thirty-two. She wondered how many more ploughing times they would have to go through, how many seed times and harvests. And how would they go through them? Would they go on getting more and more tired, or would something happen?

No. Nothing would happen. Nothing that they could bear to think of. They would just go on.

In the stillness of the house she could feel her heart beating, measuring out time, measuring out her pain.

ii

That winter Adeline and John Severn came down to Wyck Manor for Christmas and the New Year.

Adeline was sitting in the drawing-room with Maisie in the heavy hour before tea time. All afternoon she had been trying to talk to Maisie, and she was now bored. Jerrold's wife had always bored her. She couldn't imagine why Jerrold had married her when it was so clear that he was not in love with her.

"It's funny," she said at last, "staying in your own house when it isn't your own any more."

Maisie hoped that Adeline would treat the house as if it were her own.

"I probably shall. Don't be surprised if you hear me giving orders to the servants. I really cannot consider that Wilkins belongs to anybody but me."

Maisie hoped that Adeline wouldn't consider that he didn't.

And there was a pause. Adeline looked at the clock and saw that there was still another half-hour till tea time. How could they possibly fill it in? Then, suddenly, from a thought of Jerrold so incredibly married to Maisie, Adeline's mind wandered to Anne.

"Is Anne dining here tonight?" she said.

And Maisie said yes, she thought Adeline and Mr. Severn would like to see as much as possible of Anne. And Adeline said that was very kind of Maisie, and was bored again.

She saw nothing before her but more and more boredom; and the subject of Anne alone held out the prospect of relief. She flew to it as she would have fled from any danger.

"By the way, Maisie, if I were you I wouldn't let Anne see too much of Jerrold."

"Why not?"

"Because, my dear, it isn't good for her."

"I should have thought," Maisie said, "it was very good for both of them, as they like each other. I should never dream of interfering with their friendship. That's the way people get themselves thoroughly disliked. I don't want Jerry to dislike me, or Anne, either. I like them to feel that if he is married they can go on being friends just the same."

"Oh, of course, if you like it——"

"I do like it," said Maisie, firmly.

Firm opposition was a thing that Adeline's wilfulness could never stand. It always made her either change the subject or revert to her original statement. This time she reverted.

"My point was that it isn't fair to Anne."

"Why isn't it?"

"Because she's in love with him."

"That," said Maisie, with increasing decision, "I do not believe. I've never seen any signs of it."

"You're the only person who hasn't then. It sticks out of her. If it was a secret I shouldn't have told you."

"It is a secret to me," said Maisie, "so I think you might let it alone."

"You ought to know it if nobody else does. We've all of us known about Anne for ages. She was always quite mad about Jerrold. It was funny when she was a little thing; but it's rather more serious now she's thirty."

"She isn't thirty," said Maisie, contradictiously.

"Almost thirty. It's a dangerous age, Maisie. And Anne's a dangerous person. She's absolutely reckless. She always was."

"I thought you thought she was in love with Colin."

"I never thought it."

Maisie hated people who lied to her.

"Why did you tell Jerrold they were lovers, then?" she said.

"Did I tell Jerrold they were lovers?"

"He thinks you did."

"He must have misunderstood what I said. Colin gave me his word of honour that there was nothing between them."

But Maisie had no mercy.

"Why should he do that if you didn't think there was? If you were mistaken then you may be mistaken now."

"I'm not mistaken now. Ask Colin, ask Eliot, ask Anne's father."

"I shouldn't dream of asking them. You forget, if Jerrold's my husband, Anne's my friend."

"Then for goodness sake keep her out of mischief. Keep her out of Jerrold's way. Anne's a darling and I'm devoted to her, but she always did love playing with fire. If she's bent on burning her pretty wings it isn't kind to bring her where the lamp is."

"I'd trust Anne's wings to keep her out of danger."

"How about Jerrold's danger? You might think of him."

"I do think of him. And I trust him. Absolutely."

"I don't. I don't trust anybody absolutely."

"One thing's clear," said Maisie, "that it's time we had tea."

She got up, with an annihilating dignity, and rang the bell. Adeline's smile intimated that she was unbeaten and unconvinced.

That evening John Severn came into his wife's room as she was dressing for dinner.

"I wish to goodness Anne hadn't this craze for farming," he said. "She's simply working herself to death. I never saw her look so seedy. I'm sorry Jerrold let her have that farm."

"So am I," said Adeline. "I never saw Jerry look so seedy, either. Maisie's been behaving like a perfect idiot. If she wanted them to go off together she couldn't have done better."

"You don't imagine," John said, "that's what they're after?"

"How do I know what they're after? You never can tell with people like Jerrold and Anne. They're both utterly reckless. They don't care who suffers so long as they get what they want. If Anne had the morals of a—of a mouse, she'd clear out."

"I think," John said, "you're mistaken. Anne isn't like that.... I hope you haven't said anything to Maisie?"

Adeline made a face at him, as much as to say, "What do you take me for?" She lifted up her charming, wilful face and powdered it carefully.

iii

The earth smelt of the coming rain. All night the trees had whispered of rain coming to-morrow. Now they waited.

At noon the wind dropped. Thick clouds, the colour of dirty sheep's wool, packed tight by their own movement, roofed the sky and walled it round, hanging close to the horizon. A slight heaving and swelling in the grey mass packed it tighter. It was pregnant with rain. Here and there a steaming vapour broke from it as if puffed out by some immense interior commotion. Thin tissues detached themselves and hung like a frayed hem, lengthening, streaming to the hilltops in the west.

Anne was going up the fields towards the Manor and Jerrold was coming down towards the Manor Farm. They met at the plantation as the first big drops fell.

He called out to her, "I say, you oughtn't to be out a day like this."

Anne had been ill all January with a slight touch of pleurisy after a cold that she had taken no care of.

"I'm going to see Maisie."

"You're not," he said. "It's going to rain like fury."

"Maisie knows I don't mind rain," Anne said, and laughed.

"Maisie'd have a fit if she knew you were out in it. Look, how it's coming down over there."

Westwards and northwards the round roof and walls of cloud were shaken and the black rain hung sheeted between sky and earth. Overhead the dark tissues thinned out and lengthened. The fir trees quivered; they gave out slight creaking, crackling noises as the rain came down. It poured off each of the sloping fir branches like a jet from a tap.

"We must make a dash for it," Jerrold said. And they ran together, laughing, down the field to Anne's shelter at the bottom. He pushed back the sliding door.

The rain drummed on the roof and went hissing along the soaked ground; it sprayed out as the grass bent and parted under it; every hollow tuft was a water spout. The fields were dim behind the shining, glassy bead curtain of the rain.

The wind rose again and shook the rain curtain and blew it into the shelter. Rain scudded across the floor, wetting them where they stood. Jerrold slid the door to. They were safe now from the downpour.

Anne's bed stood in the corner tucked up in its grey blankets. They sat down on it side by side.

For a moment they were silent, held by their memory. They were shut in there with their past. It came up to them, close and living, out of the bright, alien mystery of the rain.

He put his hand on the shoulder of Anne's coat to feel if it was wet. At his touch she trembled.

"It hasn't gone through, has it?"

"No," she said and coughed again.

"Anne, I hate that cough of yours. You never had a cough before."

"I've never had pleurisy before."

"You wouldn't have had it if you hadn't been frightfully run down."

"It's all over now," she said.

"It isn't. You may get it again. I don't feel as if you were safe for one minute. Are you warm?"

"Quite."

"Are your feet wet?"

"No. No. No. Don't worry, Jerry dear; I'm all right."

"I wouldn't worry if I was with you all the time. It's not seeing you. Not knowing."

"Don't," she said. "I can't bear it."

And they were silent again.

Their silence was more real to them than the sounding storm. There was danger in it. It drew them back and back. It was poignant and reminiscent. It came to them like the long stillness before their passion. They had waited here before, like this, through moments tense and increasing, for the supreme, toppling instant of their joy.

Their minds went round and round, looking for words to break the silence and finding none. They were held there by their danger.

At last Anne spoke.

"Do you think it's over?"

"No. It's only just begun."

The rain hurled itself against the window, as if it would pluck them out into the storm. It brimmed over from the roof like water poured out from a bucket.

"We'll have to sit tight till it stops," he said.

Silence again, long, inveterate, dangerous. Every now and then Anne coughed, the short, hard cough that hurt and frightened him. He knew he ought to leave her; every minute increased their danger. But he couldn't go. He felt that, after all they might have done and hadn't done, heaven had some scheme of compensation in which it owed them this moment.

She turned from him coughing, and that sign of her weakness, the sight of her thin shoulders shaking filled him with pity that was passion itself. He thought of the injustice life had heaped on Anne's innocence; of the cruelty that had tracked her and hunted her down; of his own complicity with her suffering. He thought of his pity for Maisie as treachery to Anne, of his honour as cowardice. Instead of piling up wall after wall, he ought never to have let anything come between him and Anne. Not even Maisie. Not even his honour. His honour belonged to Anne far more than to Maisie. The rest had been his own blundering folly, and he had no right to let Anne be punished for it.

An hour ago the walls had stood solid between them. Now a furious impulse seized him to tear them down and get through to her. This time he would hold her and never let her go.

His thoughts went the way his passion went. Then suddenly she turned and they looked at each other and he thought no more. All his thoughts went down in the hot rushing darkness of his blood.

"Anne," he said, "Anne"—His voice sounded like a cry.

They stood up suddenly and were swept together; he held her tight, shut in his arms, his body straining to her. They clung to each other as if only by clinging they could stand against the hot darkness that drowned them; and the more they clung the more it came over them, wave after wave.

Then in the darkness he heard her crying to him to let her go.

"Don't make me, Jerrold, don't make me."

"Yes. Yes."

"No. Oh, why did we ever come here?"

He pressed her closer and she tried to push him off with weak hands that had once been strong. He felt her breakable in his arms, and utterly defenceless.

"I can't," she cried. "I should feel as if Maisie were there and looking at us.... Don't make me."

Suddenly he let her go.

He was beaten by the sheer weakness of her struggle. He couldn't fight for his flesh, like a brute, against that helplessness.

"If I go, you'll stay here till the rain stops?"

"Yes. I'm sorry, Jerry. You'll get so wet."

That made him laugh. And, laughing, he left her. Then tears came, cutting through his eyelids like blood from a dry wound. They mixed with the rain and blinded him.

And Anne sat on the little grey bed in her shelter and stared out at the rain and cried.



XIX

ANNE AND ELIOT

i

She knew what she would do now.

She would go away and never see Jerrold again, never while their youth lasted, while they could still feel. She would go out of England, so far away that they couldn't meet. She would go to Canada and farm.

All night she lay awake with her mind fixed on the one thought of going away. There was nothing else to be done, no room for worry or hesitation. They couldn't hold out any longer, she and Jerrold, strained to the breaking-point, tortured with the sight of each other.

As she lay awake there came to her the peace that comes with all immense and clear decisions. Her mind would never be torn and divided any more. And towards morning she fell asleep.

She woke dulled and bewildered. Her mind struggled with a sense of appalling yet undefined disaster. Something had happened overnight, she couldn't remember what. Something had happened. No. Something was going to happen. She tried to fall back into sleep, fighting against the return of consciousness; it came on, wave after wave, beating her down.

Now she remembered. She was going away. She would never see Jerrold again. She was going to Canada.

The sharp, clear name made the whole thing real and irrevocable. It was something that would actually happen soon. To her. She was going. And when she had gone she would not come back.

She got up and looked out of the window. She saw the green field sloping down to the river and the road, and beyond the road, to the right, the rise of the Manor fields and the belt of firs. And in her mind, more real than they, the Manor house, the garden, and the many-coloured hills beyond, rolling, curve after curve, to the straight, dark-blue horizon. The scene that held her childhood, all her youth, all her happiness; that had drawn her back, again and again, in memory and in dreams, making her heart ache. How could she leave it? How could she live with that pain?

If she was going to be a coward, if she was going to be afraid of pain—How was she to escape it, how was Jerrold to escape? If she stayed on they would break down together and give in; they would be lovers again, and again Maisie's sweet, wounding face would come between them; they could never get away from it; and in the end their remorse would be as unbearable as their separation. She couldn't drag Jerrold through that agony again.

No. Life wasn't worth living if you were a coward and afraid. And under all her misery Anne had still the sense that life was somehow worth living even if it made you miserable. Life was either your friend or your enemy. If it was your friend you served it; if it was your enemy you stood up to it and refused to let it beat you, and your enemy became your servant. Whatever happened, your work remained. Still there would be ploughing and sowing, and reaping and ploughing again. Still the earth waited. She thought of the unknown Canadian earth that waited for her tilling.

Jerrold was not a coward. He was not afraid—well, only afraid of the people he loved getting ill and dying; and she was not going to get ill and die.

She would have to tell him. She would go to him in the fields and tell him.

But before she did that she must make the thing irrevocable. So Anne wrote to the steamship company, booking her passage in two weeks' time; she wrote to Eliot, asking him to call at the company's office and see if he could get her a decent cabin. She went to Wyck and posted her letters, and then to the Far Acres field where Jerrold was watching the ploughing.

They met at the "headland." They would be safe there on the ploughed land, in the open air.

"What is it, Anne?" he said.

"Nothing. I want to talk to you."

"All right."

Her set face, her hard voice gave him a premonition of disaster.

"It's simply this," she said. "What happened yesterday mustn't happen again."

"It shan't. I swear it shan't. I was a beast. I lost my head."

"Yes, but it may happen again. We can't go on like this, Jerry. The strain's too awful."

"You mean you can't trust me."

"I can't trust myself. And it isn't fair to you."

"Oh, me. That doesn't matter."

"Well, then, say I matter. It's the same for me. I'm never going to let that happen again. I'm going away."

"Going away—"

"Yes. And I'm not coming back this time."

His voice struggled in his throat. Something choked him. He couldn't speak.

"I'm going to Canada in a fortnight."

"Good God! You can't go to Canada."

"I can. I've booked my passage."

His face was suddenly sallow white, ghastly. His heart heaved and he felt sick.

"Nothing on earth will stop me."

"Won't Maisie stop you? If you do this she'll know. Can't you see how it gives us away?"

"No. It'll only give me away. If Maisie asks me why I'm going I shall tell her I'm in love with you, and that I can't stand it; that I'm too unhappy. I'd rather she thought I cared for you than that she should think you cared for me."

"She'll think it all the same."

"Then I shall have to lie. I must risk it.... Oh Jerry, don't look so awful! I've got to go. We've settled it that we can't go on deceiving her, and we aren't going to make her unhappy. There's nothing else to be done."

"Except to bear it."

"And how long do you suppose that'll last? We can't bear it. Look at it straight. It's all so horribly simple. If we were beasts and only thought of ourselves and didn't think of Maisie it wouldn't matter to us what we did. But we can't be beasts. We can't lie to Maisie, and we can't tell her the truth. We can't go on seeing each other without wanting each other—unbearably—and we can't go on wanting each other without—some day—giving in. It comes back the first minute we're alone. And we don't mean to give in. So we mustn't see each other, that's all. Can you tell me one other thing I can do?"

"But why should it be you? Why should you get the worst of it?"

"Because one of us has got to clear out. It can't be you, so it's got to be me. And going away isn't the worst of it. It'll be worse for you sticking on here where everything reminds you—At least I shall have new things to keep my mind off it."

"Nothing will keep your mind off it. You'll fret yourself to death."

"No, I shan't. I shall have too much to do. You're not to be sorry for me, Jerrold."

"But you're giving up everything. The Barrow Farm. The place you wanted. You won't have a thing."

"I don't want 'things.' It's easier to chuck them than to hang on to them when they'll remind me.... Really, if I could see any other way I'd take it."

"But you can't go. You're not fit to go. You're ill."

"I shall be all right when I get there."

"But what do you think you're going to do in Canada? It's not as if you'd got anything to go for."

"I shall find something. I shall work on somebody's ranch first and learn Canadian farming. Then I shall look out for land and buy it. I've got stacks of money. All Grandpapa Everitt's, and the money for the farm. Stacks. I shall get on all right."

"When did you think of all this?"

"Last night."

"I see. I made you."

"No. I made myself. After all, it's the easiest way."

"For you, or me?"

"For both of us. Honestly, it's the only straight thing. I ought to have done it long ago."

"It means never seeing each other again. You'll never come back."

"Never while we're young. When we're both old, too old to feel any more, then I'll come back some day, and we'll be friends."

And still his will beat against hers in vain, till at last he stopped; sick and exhausted.

They went together down the ploughed land into the pastures, and through the pastures to the mill water. In the opposite field they could see the brown roof and walls of the shelter.

"What are you going to plant in the Seven Acres field?"

"Barley," he said.

"You can't. It was barley last year."

"Was it?"

They were silent then. Jerrold struggled with his feeling of deadly sickness. Anne couldn't trust herself to speak. At the Barrow Farm gate they parted.

ii

Maisie's eyes looked at him across the table, wondering. Her little drooping mouth was half open with anxiety, as if any minute she was going to say something. The looking-glass had shown him his haggard and discoloured face, a face to frighten her. He tried to eat, but the sight and smell of hot roast mutton sickened him.

"Oh, Jerrold, can't you eat it?"

"No, I can't. I'm sorry."

"There's some cold chicken. Will you have that?"

"No, thanks."

"Try and eat something."

"I can't. I feel sick."

"Don't sit up, then. Go and lie down."

"I will if you don't mind."

He went to his room and was sick. He lay down on his bed and tried to sleep. His head ached violently and every movement made him heave; he couldn't sleep; he couldn't lie still; and presently he got up and went out again, up to the Far Acres field to the ploughing. He couldn't overcome the physical sickness of his misery, but he could force himself to move, to tramp up and down the stiff furrows, watching the tractor; he kept himself going by the sheer strength of his will. The rattle and clank of the tractor ground into his head, making it ache again. He was stunned with great blows of noise and pain, so that he couldn't think. He didn't want to think; he was glad of the abominable sensations that stopped him. He went from field to field, avoiding the boundaries of the Barrow Farm lest he should see Anne.

When the sun set and the land darkened he went home.

At dinner he tried to eat, sickened again, and leaned back in his chair; he forced himself to sit through the meal, talking to Maisie. When it was over he went to bed and lay awake till the morning.

The next day passed in the same way, and the next night; and always he was aware of Maisie's sweet face watching him with frightened eyes and an unuttered question. He was afraid to tell her that Anne was going lest she should put down his illness to its true cause.

And on the third day, when he heard her say she was going to see Anne, he told her.

"Oh, Jerrold, she can't really mean it."

"She does mean it. I said everything I could to stop her, but it wasn't any good. She's taken her passage."

"But why—why should she want to go?"

"I can't tell you why. You'd better ask her."

"Has anything happened to upset her?"

"What on earth should happen?"

"Oh, I don't know. When did she tell you this?"

He hesitated. It was dangerous to lie when Maisie might get the truth from Anne.

"The day before yesterday."

Maisie's eyes were fixed on him, considering it. He knew she was saying to herself, "That was the day you came home so sick and queer."

"Jerry—did you say anything to upset her?"

"No."

"I can't think how she could want to go."

"Nor I. But she's going."

"I shall go down and see if I can't make her stay."

"Do. But you won't if I can't," he said.

iii

Maisie went down early in the afternoon to see Anne.

She couldn't think how Anne could want to leave the Barrow Farm house when she had just got into it, when they had all made it so nice for her; she couldn't think how she could leave them when she cared for them, when she knew how they cared for her.

"You do care for us, Anne?"

"Oh yes, I care."

"And you wanted the farm. I can't understand your going just when you've got it, when you've settled, in and when Jerrold took all that trouble to make it nice for you. It isn't like you, Anne."

"I know. It must seem awful of me; but I can't help it, Maisie darling. I've got to go. You mustn't try and stop me. It only makes it harder."

"Then it is hard? You don't really want to go?"

"Of course I don't. But I must."

Maisie meditated, trying to make it out.

"Is it—is it because you're unhappy?"

Anne didn't answer.

"You are unhappy. You've been unhappy ever so long. Can't we do anything?"

"No. Nobody can do anything."

"It isn't," said Maisie at last, "anything to do with Jerrold?"

"You wouldn't ask me that, Maisie, if you didn't know it was."

"Perhaps I do know. Do you care for him very much, Anne?"

"Yes, I care for him, very much. And I can't stand it."

"It's so bad that you've got to go away?"

"It's so bad that I've got to go away."

"That's very brave of you."

"Or very cowardly."

"No. You couldn't be a coward.... Oh, Anne darling, I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It's my own fault. I'd no business to get into this state. Don't let's talk about it, Maisie."

"All right, I won't. But I'm sorry.... Only one thing. It—it hasn't made you hate me, has it?"

"You know it hasn't."

"Oh, Anne, you are beautiful."

"I'm anything but, if you only knew."

She had got beyond the pain of Maisie's goodness, Maisie's trust. No possible blow from Maisie's mind could hurt her now. Nothing mattered. Maisie's trust and goodness didn't matter, since she had done all she knew; since she was going away; since she would never see Jerrold again, never till their youth was gone and they had ceased to feel.

iv

That afternoon Eliot arrived at Wyck Manor. His coming was his answer to Anne's letter.

He went over to the Barrow Farm about five o'clock when Anne's work would be done. Anne was still out, and he waited till she should come back.

As he waited he looked round her room. This, he thought, was the place that Anne had set her heart on having for her own; it was the home they had made for her. Something terrible must have happened before she could bring herself to leave it. She must have been driven to the breaking-point. She was broken. Jerrold must have driven and broken her.

He heard her feet on the flagged path, on the threshold of the house; she stood in the doorway of the room, looking at him, startled.

"Eliot, what are you doing there?"

"Waiting for you. You must have known I'd come."

"To say good-bye? That was nice of you."

"No, not to say good-bye. I should come to see you off if you were going."

"But I am going. You've seen about my berth, haven't you?"

"No, I haven't. We've got to talk about it first."

He looked dead tired. She remembered that she was his hostess.

"Have you had tea?"

"No. You're going to give me some. Then we'll talk about it."

"Talking won't be a bit of good."

"I think it may be," he said.

She rang the bell and they waited. She gave him his tea, and while they ate and drank he talked to her about the weather and the land, and about his work and the book he had just finished on Amoebic Dysentery, and about Colin and how well he was now. Neither of them spoke of Jerrold or of Maisie.

When the tea things were cleared away he leaned back and looked at her with his kind, deep-set, attentive eyes. She loved Eliot's eyes, and his queer, clever face that was so like and so unlike his father's, so utterly unlike Jerrold's.

"You needn't tell me why you're going," he said at last. "I've seen Jerrold."

"Did he tell you?"

"No. You've only got to look at him to see."

"Do you think Maisie sees?"

"I can't tell you. She isn't stupid. She must wonder why you're going like this."

"I told her. I told her I was in love with Jerrold."

"What did she say?"

"Nothing. Only that she was sorry. I told her so that she mightn't think he cared for me. She needn't know that."

"She isn't stupid," he said again.

"No. But she's good. She trusts him so. She trusted me.... Eliot, that was the worst of it, the way she trusted us. That broke us down."

"Of course she trusted you."

"Did you?"

"You know I did."

"And yet," she said, "I believe you knew. You knew all the time."

"If I didn't, I know now."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

"How? Because of my going away? Is that it?"

"Not altogether. I've seen you happy and I've seen you unhappy. I've seen you with Jerrold. I've seen you with Maisie. Nobody else would have seen it, but I did, because I knew you so well. And because I was afraid of it. Besides, you almost told me."

"Yes, and you said it wouldn't make any difference. Does it?"

"No. None. I know, whatever you did, you wouldn't do it only for yourself. You did this for Jerrold. And you were unhappy because of it."

"No. No. I was happy. We were only unhappy afterwards because of Maisie. It was so awful going on deceiving her, hiding it and lying. I feel as if everything I said and did then was a lie. That was how I was punished. Not being able to tell the truth. And I could have borne even that if it wasn't for Jerrold. But he hated it, too. It made him wretched."

"I know it did. If you hadn't been so fine it wouldn't have punished you."

"The horrible thing was knowing what I'd done to Jerrold, making him hide and lie."

"Oh, what you've done to Jerrold—You've done him nothing but good. You've made him finer than he could possibly have been without you."

"I've made him frightfully unhappy."

"Not unhappier than he's made you. And it's what he had to be. I told you long ago Jerrold wouldn't be any good till he'd suffered damnably. Well—he has suffered damnably. And he's got a soul because of it. He hadn't much of one before he loved you."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean he used to think of nothing but his own happiness. Now he's thinking of nothing but Maisie's and yours. He loves you better than himself. He even loves Maisie better—I mean he thinks more of her—than he did before he loved you. There are two people that he cares for more than himself. He cares more for his own honour than he did. And for yours. And that's your doing. Just think how you'd have wrecked him if you'd been a different sort of woman."

"No. Because then he wouldn't have cared for me."

"No, I believe he wouldn't. He chose well."

"You were always much too good to me."

"No, Anne. I want you to see this thing straight, and to see yourself as you really are. Not to go back on yourself."

"I don't go back on myself. That would be going back on Jerrold. I'm sorry because of Maisie, that's all. If I'd had an ounce of sense I'd never have known her. I'd have gone off to some place not too far away where Jerrold could have come to me and where I should never have seen Maisie. That's what I should have done. We should both have been happy then."

"Yes, Jerrold would have been happy. And he wouldn't have saved his soul. And he'd have been deceiving Maisie all the time. You don't really wish you'd done that, Anne."

"No. Not now. And I'm not unhappy about Maisie now. I'm going away. I'm giving Jerrold up. I can't do more than that."

"You wouldn't have to go away, Anne, if you'd do what I want and marry me. You said perhaps you might if you had to save Jerrold."

"Did I? I don't think I did."

"You've forgotten and I haven't. You don't know what an appalling thing you're doing. You're leaving everything and everybody you ever cared for. You'll die of sheer unhappiness."

"Nonsense, Eliot. You know perfectly well that people don't die of unhappiness. They die of accidents and diseases and old age. I shall die of old age. And I'll be back in twenty years' time if I've seen it through."

"Twenty years. The best years of your life. You'll be desperately lonely. You don't know what it'll be like."

"Oh yes, I do. I've been lonely before now. And I've saved myself by working."

"Yes, in England, where you could see some of us sometimes. But out there, with people you never saw before—people who may be brutes—"

"They needn't be."

He went on relentlessly. "People you don't care for and never will care for. You've never really cared for anybody but us."

"I haven't. I'm going because I care. I can't let Jerry go on like that. I've got to end it."

"You're going simply to save Jerrold. So that you can never go back to him. Don't you see that if you married me you'd both be safe? You couldn't go back. If you were married to me Jerrold wouldn't take you from me. If you were married to me you wouldn't break faith with me. If you had children you wouldn't break faith with them. Nothing could keep you safer."

"I can't, Eliot. Nothing's changed. I belong to Jerrold. I always have belonged to him. It isn't anything physical. Even if I'm separated from him, thousands of miles, I shall belong to him still. My mind, or soul, or whatever the thing is, can't get away from him.... You say if I belonged to you I couldn't give myself to Jerrold. If I belong to Jerrold, how can I give myself to you?"

"I see. It's like that, is it?"

"It's like that."

Eliot said no more. He knew when he was beaten.

v

Maisie sat alone in her own room, thinking it over. She didn't know yet that Eliot had come. He had arrived while she was with Anne and she had missed him on the way to Barrow Farm, driving up by the hill road while he walked down through the fields.

She didn't think of Jerrold all at once. Her mind was taken up with Anne and Anne's unhappiness. She could see nothing else. She remembered how Adeline had told her that Anne was in love with Jerrold. She had said, "It was funny when she was a little thing." Anne had loved him all her life, then. All her life she had had to do without him.

Maisie thought: Perhaps he would have loved her and married her if it hadn't been for me. And yet Anne had loved her.

That was Anne's beauty.

She wondered next: If Anne had been in love with Jerrold all that time, and if they had all seen it, all the Fieldings and John Severn, how was it that she had never seen it? She had seen nothing but a perfect friendship, and she had tried to keep it for them in all its perfection, so that neither of them should miss anything because Jerrold had married her. She remembered how happy Anne had been when she first knew her, and she thought: If she was happy then, why is she unhappy now? If she loved Jerrold all her life, if she had done without him all her life, why go away now?

Unless something had happened.

It was then that Maisie thought of Jerrold, and his sad, drawn face and his sudden sickness the other day. That was the day he had been with Anne, when she had told him that she was going away. He had never been the same since. He had neither slept nor eaten.

Maisie had all the pieces of the puzzle loose before her, and at first sight not one of them looked as if it would fit. But this piece under her hand fitted. Jerrold's illness joined on to Anne's going. With a terrible dread in her heart Maisie put the two things together and saw the third thing. Jerrold was ill because Anne was going away. He wouldn't be ill unless he cared for her. And another thing. Anne was going away, not because she cared, but because Jerrold cared. Therefore she knew that he cared for her. Therefore he had told her. That was what had happened.

When she had put all the pieces into their places she would have the whole story.

But Maisie didn't want to know any more. She had enough to make her heart break. She still clung to her belief in their goodness. They were unhappy because they had given each other up. And under all her thinking, like a quick-running pain, there went her premonition of its end. She remembered that they had been happy once when she first knew them. If they were unhappy now because they had given each other up, had they been happy then because they hadn't? For a moment she asked herself, "Were they—?" and was afraid to finish and answer her own question. It was enough that they were all unhappy now and that none of them would ever be happy again. Not Anne. Not Jerrold. Their unhappiness didn't bear thinking of, and in thinking of it Maisie forgot her own.

Her heart shook her breast with its beating, and for a moment she wondered whether her pain were beginning again. Then the thought of Anne and Jerrold and herself and of their threefold undivided misery came upon her, annihilating every other thought. As if all that was physical in Maisie were subdued by the intensity of her suffering, with the coming of the supreme emotion her body had no pain.



XX

MAISIE, JERROLD, AND ANNE

i

She got up and dressed for dinner as if nothing had happened, or, rather, as if everything were about to happen and she were going through with it magnificently, with no sign that she was beaten. She didn't know yet what she would do; she didn't see clearly what there was to be done. She might not have to do anything; and yet again, vaguely, half-fascinated, half-frightened, she foresaw that she might be called on to do something, something that was hard and terrible and at the same time beautiful and supreme.

And downstairs in the hall, she found Eliot.

He told her that he had come down to see Anne and that he had done his best to keep her from going away and that it was all no good.

"We can't stop her. She's got an unbreakable will."

"Unbreakable," she said. "And yet she's broken."

"I know," he said.

In her nervous exaltation she felt that Eliot had been sent, that Eliot knew. Eliot was wise. He would help her.

"Eliot——" she said. "Will you see me in the library after dinner? I want to ask you something."

"If it's about Anne, I don't know that there's anything I can say."

"It's about Jerrold," she said.

After dinner he came to her in the library.

"Where's Jerrold?"

"In the drawing-room with Colin. He won't come in."

"Eliot, there's something awfully wrong with him. He can't sleep. He can't eat. He's sick if he tries."

"He looks pretty ghastly."

"Do you know what's the matter with him?"

"How can I know? He doesn't tell me anything."

"It's ever since he heard that Anne's going." "He's worried about her. So am I. So are you."

"He isn't worrying. He's fretting.... Eliot—do you think he cares for her?"

Eliot didn't answer her. He looked at her gravely, searchingly, as if he were measuring her strength before he answered.

"Don't be afraid to tell me. I'm not a coward."

"I haven't anything to tell you. It isn't altogether this affair of Anne's. Jerrold hasn't been fit for a long time."

"It's been going on for a long time."

"What makes you think so?"

"Oh," said Maisie, "everything."

"Then why don't you ask him?"

"But—if it is so—would he tell me?"

"I don't know. Perhaps he wants to tell you, only he's afraid. Anyhow, if it isn't so he'll tell you and you'll be happy."

"Somehow I don't think I'm going to be happy."

"Then," he said, "you're going to be brave."

She thought: He knows. He's known all the time, only he won't give them away.

"Yes," she said, "I'll ask him."

"Maisie—if it is so what will you do?"

"Do? There's only one thing I can do."

She turned to him, and her milk-white face was grey-white, ashen; the skin had a slack, pitted look, suddenly old. The soft flesh trembled. But her mouth and eyes were still. In this moment of her agony no base emotion defaced their sweetness, so that she seemed to him utterly composed. She had seen what she could do. Something hard and terrible.

"I can set him free."

ii

That was the end she had seen before her, vaguely, as something not only hard and terrible, but beautiful and supreme. To leave off clinging to the illusion of her happiness. To let go. And with that letting go she was aware that an obscure horror had been hanging over her for three days and three nights and was now gone. She stood free of herself, in a great light and peace, so that presently when Jerrold came to her she met him with an incomparable tranquillity.

"Jerrold—"

The slight throbbing of her voice startled him coming out of her stillness.

They stood up, facing each other, in attitudes that had no permanence, as if what must pass between them now would be sudden and soon over.

"Do you care for Anne?"

The words dropped clear through her stillness, vibrating. His eyes went from her, evading the issue. Her voice came with a sharper stress.

"I must know. Do you care for her?"

"Yes."

"And that's why she's going?"

"Yes. That's why she's going. Did Eliot say anything?"

"No. He only told me to ask you. He said you'd tell me the truth."

"I have told you the truth. I'm sorry, Maisie."

"I know you're sorry. So am I."

"But, you see, it isn't as if I'd begun after I married you. I've cared for her all my life."

"Then why didn't you marry her?"

"Because, first of all, I didn't know I cared. And afterwards I thought she cared for Colin."

"You never asked her?"

"No. I thought—I thought they were lovers."

"You thought that of her?"

"Well, yes. I thought it would be just like her to give everything. I knew if she cared enough she'd stick at nothing. She wouldn't do it for herself."

"That was—when?"

"The time I came home on leave three years ago."

"The time you married me. Why did you marry me, if you didn't care for me?"

"I would have cared for you if I hadn't cared for her."

"But, when you cared for her——?"

"I thought we should find something in it. I wanted you to be happy. More than anything I wanted you to be happy. I thought I'd be killed in my next action and that nothing would matter."

"That you wouldn't have to keep it up?"

"Oh, I'd have kept it up all right if Anne hadn't been there. I cared enough for you to want you to be happy. I wanted you to have a child. You'd have liked that. That would have made you happy."

"Poor Jerrold——"

"I'd have been all right if I hadn't seen Anne again."

"When did you see her again?"

"Last spring."

"Only last spring?"

"Yes, only."

"When I was away."

She remembered. She remembered how she had first come to Wyck and found Jerrold happy and superbly well.

"But," she said, "you were happy then."

He sighed, a long, tearing sigh that hurt her.

"Yes. We were happy then."

And in a flash of terrific clarity she remembered her home-coming and the night that followed it and Jerrold's acquiescence in their separation.

"Then," she said, "if you were happy——"

"Do you want to know how far it went?"

"I want to know everything. I want the truth. I think you owe me the truth."

"It went just as far as it could go."

"Do you mean——"

He stood silent and she found his words for him.

"You were Anne's lover?"

"Yes."

Her face changed before him, as it had changed an hour ago before Eliot, ashen-white and slack, quivering, suddenly old.

Tears came into his eyes, tears of remorse and pity. She saw them and her heart ached for him.

"It didn't last long," he said.

"How long?"

"From March till—till September."

"I remember."

"Maisie—I can't ask you to forgive me. But you must forgive Anne. It wasn't her fault. I made her do it. And she's been awfully unhappy about it, because of you."

"Ah—that was why——"

"Won't you forgive her?"

"I forgive you both. I don't know how I should have felt if you'd been happy. I can't see anything but your unhappiness."

"We gave it up because of you. That was Anne. She couldn't bear going on after she knew you, when you were such an angel. It was your goodness and sweetness broke us down."

"But if I'd been the most disagreeable person it would have been just as wrong."

"It wouldn't, for in that case we shouldn't have deceived you. I should have told you straight and left you."

"Why didn't you tell me, Jerrold? Why didn't you tell me in the beginning?"

"We were afraid. We didn't want to hurt you."

"As if that mattered."

"It did matter. We were going to tell you. Then you were ill and we couldn't. We thought you'd die of it, with your poor little heart in that state."

"Oh, my dear, did you suppose I'd hurt you that way?"

"That was what we couldn't bear. Not being straight about it. That was why we gave each other up. It never happened again. Anne's going away so that it mayn't happen.... Maisie—you do believe me?"

"Yes, I believe you. I believe you did all you knew."

"We did. But it's my fault that Anne's going. I lost my head, and she was afraid."

"If only you'd told me. I shouldn't have been hard on you, Jerry. You knew that, didn't you?"

"Yes. I knew."

"And you went through all that agony rather than hurt me."

"Yes."

"The least I can do, then, is to let you go."

"Would you, Maisie?"

"Of course. I married you to make you happy. I must make you happy this way, that's all. But if I do you mustn't think I don't care for you. I care for you so much that nothing matters but your happiness."

"Maisie, I'm not fit to live in the same world with you."

"You mustn't say that. You're fit to live in the same world with Anne. I suppose I could have made this all ugly and shameful for you. But I want to keep it beautiful. I want to give you all beautiful to Anne, so that you'll never go back on it, and never feel ashamed."

"You made me ashamed every time we thought of you."

"Don't think of me. Think of each other."

"Oh—you're adorable."

"No, I'm doing this because I love you both. But if I didn't love you I should do it for myself. I should hate myself if I didn't. I can't think of anything more disgusting and dishonourable than to keep a man tied to you when he cares for somebody else. I should feel as if I were living in sin."

"Maisie—will you be awfully unhappy?"

"Yes, Jerrold. But not so unhappy as if I'd kept you."

"We'll go away somewhere where you won't have to see us."

"No. It's I who'll go away."

"But I want you to have the Manor and—and everything. Colin'll look after the estate for me."

"Do you think I could stay here after you'd gone?... No, Jerry, I can't do that for you. You can't make it up that way."

"I wasn't dreaming of making it up. I simply owe you everything, everlastingly, and there's nothing I can do. I only remembered that you liked the garden."

"I couldn't bear it. I should hate the garden. I should hate the whole place."

"I've done that to you?"

"Yes, you've done that to me. It can't be helped."

"But, what will you do, Maisie?"

"I shall go back to my own people. They happen to care for me."

That was her one reproach.

"Do you think I don't?"

"Oh no. I've done the only thing that would make you care. Perhaps that's what I did it for."

He took the hand she gave him and bowed his head over it and kissed it.

iii

Maisie had a long talk with Eliot after Jerrold had left her.

She was still tranquil and composed, but Jerrold was worried. He was afraid lest the emotion roused by his confession should bring on her pain. That night Eliot slept in his father's room, so that he could go to her if the attack came.

But it did not come.

Late in the afternoon Jerrold went down to the Barrow Farm and saw Anne. He came back with a message from her. Anne wanted to see Maisie, if Maisie would let her.

"But she thinks you won't," he said.

"Why should I?"

"She's desperately unhappy."

She turned from him as if she would have left him, and then stayed.

"You want me to see her?"

"If you wouldn't hate it too much."

"I shall hate it. But I'll see her. Go and bring her."

She dreaded more than anything the sight of Anne. Her new knowledge of her made Anne strange and terrible. She felt that she would be somehow different. She would see something in her that she had never seen before, that she couldn't bear to see. Anne's face would show her that Jerrold was her lover.

Yet, if she had never seen that look, if she had never seen anything in Anne's face that was not beautiful, what did that mean but that Anne's love for him was beautiful? Before it had touched her body it had lived a long time in her soul. Either Anne's soul was beautiful because of it, or it was beautiful because of Anne's soul; and Maisie knew that if she too was to be beautiful she must keep safe the beauty of their passion as she had kept safe the beauty of their friendship. It was clear and hard, unbreakable as crystal. She had been the one flaw in it, the thing that had damaged its perfection. Now that she had let Jerrold go it would be perfect.

Anne stood in the doorway of the library, looking at her and not speaking. She was the same that she had been yesterday, and before that, and before that; dressed in the farm clothes that were the queer rough setting of her charm. The same, except that she was still more broken, still more beaten, and still more beautiful in her defeat.

"Anne—"

Maisie got up and waited, as Anne shut the door and stood there with her back to it.

"Maisie—I don't know why I've come. There were things I wanted to say to you, but I can't say them."

"You want to say you're sorry you took Jerrold from me."

"I'm bitterly sorry."

She came forward with a slender, awkward grace. Her eyes were fixed on Maisie, thrown open, expecting pain; but she didn't shrink or cower.

Maisie's voice came with its old sweetness.

"You didn't take him from me. You couldn't take what I haven't got."

"I gave him up, Maisie. I couldn't bear it."

"And I've given him up. I couldn't bear it, either. But," she said, "it was harder for you. You had him. I'm only giving up what I've never really had. Don't be too unhappy about it."

"I shall always be unhappy when I think of you. You've been such an angel to me. If we could only have told you."

"Yes. If only you'd told me. That was where you went wrong, Anne."

"I couldn't tell you. You were so ill. I thought it would kill you."

"Well, what if it had? You shouldn't have thought of me, you should have thought of Jerrold."

"I did think of him. I didn't want him to have agonies of remorse. It's been bad enough as it is."

"I know what it's been, Anne."

"That's what I really came for now. To see if you'd had that pain again."

"You needn't be afraid. I shall never have that pain again. Eliot told me all about it last night."

"What did he say?"

"He showed me how it all happened. I was ill because I couldn't face the truth. The truth was that Jerrold didn't care for me. It seems my mind knew it all the time when I didn't. I did know it once, and part of me went on feeling the shock of it, while the other part was living like a fool in an illusion, thinking he cared. And now I've been dragged out of it into reality. I'm facing it. This is real. And whatever I may be I shan't be ill again, not with that illness. I couldn't help it, but in a way it was as false as if I'd made it up on purpose to hide the truth. And the truth's cured me."

"Eliot told me it might. And I wouldn't believe him."

"You can believe him now. He said you and Jerrold were all right because you'd faced the truth about yourselves and each other. You held on to reality."

"Eliot said that?"

"Yes. He said it was the test of everybody, how they took reality, and that Jerrold had had to learn how, but that you had always known. You were so true that your worst punishment was not being able to tell me the truth. I was to think of you like that."

"How can you bear to think of me at all?"

"How can I bear to live? But I shall live."

Maisie's voice dropped, note by note, like clear, rounded tears, pressed out and shaped by pain.

Anne's voice came thick and quivering out of her dark secret anguish, like a voice from behind shut doors.

"Jerrold said you'd forgiven me. Have you?"

"It would be easier for you if I didn't. But I can't help forgiving you when you're so unhappy. I wouldn't have forgiven you if you hadn't told me the truth, if I'd had to find it out that time when you were happy. Then I'd have hated you."

"You don't now?"

"No. I don't want to see you again, or Jerrold, either, for a long time. But that's because I love you."

"Me?"

"Yes, you too, Anne."

"How can you love me?"

"Because I'm like you, Anne; I'm faithful."

"I wasn't faithful to you, Maisie."

"You were to Jerrold."

Anne still stood there, silent, taking in silence the pain of Maisie's goodness, Maisie's love.

Then Maisie ended it.

"He's waiting for you," she said, "to take you home."

Anne went to him where he stood by the terrace steps, illuminated by the light from the windows. In there she could hear Colin playing, a loud, tempestuous music. Jerrold waited.

She went past him down the steps without a word, and he followed her through the garden.

"Anne—" he said.

Under the blackness of the yew hedge she turned to him, and their hands met.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "Next week I'll take you away somewhere till it's over."

"Where?"

"Oh, somewhere a long way off, where you'll be happy."

Somewhere a long way off, beyond this pain, beyond this day and this night, their joy waited.

"And Maisie?" she said.

"Maisie wants you to be happy."

He held her by the hand as he used to hold her when they were children, to keep her safe. And hand in hand, like children, they went down through the twilight of the fields, together.

THE END