She clapped her hands over her ears. "Ah, no. I couldn't bear to listen if you did." They sank into a trembling silence. Her black eyes, fixed on the opposite wall, saw the shape of mountains, against the white evening of a dark sky; the dark red circle of a peat-stained pool lying under the shadow of a rock; the earth of a new-ploughed field over which seagulls ambled white in heavy air, under a cloud-felted sky; and other sombre appearances that moved the heart strangely, as if it discerned in them proofs that the core of life was darkness. There came on her suddenly a memory of that fierce initiatory pain which she had felt when she first drank wine, when she first was kissed by Richard. She remembered it with a singular lack of dismay. There ran through her on the instant a tingling sense of pride and ambition towards all new experience, and she leapt briskly from the bed, crying out in placid annoyance, as if it were the only care she had, because her hair had fallen down about her shoulders. They stood easily together in the light of the great window, she feeling for the strayed hairpins in her head, he looking down on the disordered glory.

"But what's that for?" he asked, pointing at the open trunk in the middle of the floor.

Her eyes filled with tears. "I was packing to go back to Edinburgh."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he said solemnly. "I came near to imperilling a perfect thing." He took her face between his hands and was going to kiss her, but she started away from him.

"Oh, maircy! What cold hands!" she exclaimed.

"I've been out in the shed working at my motor-bicycle. It was freezing. And I made an awful mess of it, too, because I was blind and shaking with rage."

"You poor silly thing!" she cried lovingly. "Give me yon bits of ice!" She took both his hands and pressed them against her warm throat.

For a little time they remained so, until her trembling became too great for him to bear, and he whispered: "This is all it is! This is all it is!"

"What do you mean?" she murmured.

"What you fear ... is just like this. You will comfort my whole body as you are comforting my hands...."

She drooped, she seemed about to fall, but joy was a bright light on her face, and she answered loudly, plangently: "Then I shall not be afraid!" They swayed together, and she told him in earnest ecstasy: "I will marry you any day you like." When he answered, "No, no, I will wait," she jerked at his coat-lapels like an impatient child, and cried: "But I want to be married to you!" Then their lips met in a long kiss, and they travelled far into a new sphere of love.

It amazed her when, in the midst of this happiness, he broke away from her. She felt sick and shaken, as if she had been sitting in an express train and the driver had suddenly put on the brakes, and it angered her that he once more made one of those wordless sounds that she detested. But her anger died when she saw that he was staring over her shoulder out of the window at some sight which had made his face white and pointed with that grave alertness which is the brave man's form of fear. She swung round to see what it was.

A man and a woman were standing in the farmyard looking up at them. Their attitude of surprise and absorbed interest made it evident that the width and depth of the window had enabled them to see clearly what was happening in the room; and for a moment Ellen covered her face with her hands. But she was forced to look at them again by a sense that these people were strange in a way that was at once unpleasant and yet interesting and exciting. They were both clad in uniforms cut unskilfully out of poor cloth, the man in a short coat with brass buttons, braided trousers, and a circular cap like a sailor's, and the woman in an old-fashioned dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a gored skirt; and round his cap and round the crown of her poke-bonnet were ribbons on which was printed: "Hallelujah Army."

The odd unshapeliness of their ill-built bodies in their ill-fitting clothes, the stained and streaky blue of the badly-dyed serge, and the shallow, vibrating magenta of the ribbon made it very fitting that they should stand in the foreground of the mean winter day which had coloured the farmyard and its buildings sour, soiled tones of grey. Their perfect harmony with their surroundings, even though it was only in disagreeableness that they matched them, gave Ellen a kind of pleasure. She felt clever because she had detected it, and she stared down into their faces, partly because she was annoyed by their steady inspection and wanted to stare them out, and partly because she wanted to discover what these people, who were behaving so oddly, were like in themselves. There was nothing very unusual about the woman, save that she united several qualities that one would not have thought could be found together. She was young, certainly still in her middle twenties, yet worn; florid yet haggard; exuberant and upstanding of body, yet bowed at the shoulders as if she were fragile. But the man was odd enough. He was pale and had a very long neck, and wore an expression of extreme foolishness. From the frown with which he was accompanying his gaping stare it was evident that his mind was so vague and wandering that he found it difficult to concentrate it; she was reminded of an inexpert person she had once seen trying to put a white rabbit into a bag. She looked again at the girl, with that contempt she felt, now that she had Richard, for all women who let themselves mate with unworthy men, and found that her dark eyes were fixed sullenly, almost hungrily, on Richard. She laid her hand on Richard's arm and cried: "If it's not impudence, it's the next thing to it, staring like that into a pairson's room! They're collecting, I suppose. Away and give them a penny."

"No," said Richard. "They are not collecting. That is Roger."



CHAPTER IX

Ellen could not understand why Richard whispered explosively as they turned away from the window: "Pin up your hair! Quickly! We must go down at once!" or why he hurried her downstairs without giving her time to use her brush and comb. When they got down into the old parlour Richard went to the side door that opened into the farmyard and flung it open, beginning a sentence of greeting, but there was nothing to be seen but the grey sheds, the wood-pile, and the puddle-pocked ground. He uttered an exasperated exclamation, and drew it to, saying to Ellen: "Open the front door! Please, dear." She did so, but saw nothing save the dark and narrow garden and the black trees against the white north sky. "What in Christ's name are they doing?" Richard burst out, and flung open the side door again. Both put their heads out over the threshold to see if the two visitors were standing about anywhere, and a gust of wind that was making the trees beat their arms darted down on the house and turned the draught between the two open doors into a hurricane. Ellen squealed as her door banged and struck her shoulder before she had time to steer clear of it. "Oh, my poor darling!" said Richard, and he was coming towards her, when they heard the glug-glug-glug of water dripping from the table to the floor, and saw that the draught had overturned a vase filled with silver boughs of honesty. He picked it up and uttered another bark of exasperation, for it had cracked across and he had cut his hand on the sharp edge of the china.

"Oh, damn! oh, damn! oh, damn!" he cried, in a voice that rage made high-pitched and childish, sucking his finger in between the words. "What a filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round till I've found that fool and that woman! This is some new folly—probably I'll have to get him away before mother comes! Come on! Perhaps they're hanging about the garden, though God knows why!" After making a savage movement towards the broken vase, as if he could not bear to leave the disorder as it was, and checking it abruptly, jarringly, he rushed into the dining-room, and Ellen followed him.

The two were there, their faces pressed against the window-panes. Behind them the grey waste of stormy shallow waters, and the salt-dimmed pastures, and the black range of the Kentish hills, hung with grape-purple rainclouds, made it apparent how much greater dignity belongs to the earth and sea than to those who people them. As Richard and Ellen halted at the door the faces receded from the glass. The woman stepped backwards and, looking as if she were being moved on by a policeman, passed suddenly out of sight beyond the window's edge. Richard crossed the room and opened the French window, but by the time he had unlocked it the man in uniform, who had been beckoning to his companion with long bony hands, had gone in search of her. As Richard put his head round the door to bid them enter, the wind, which was now rushing round the house, made itself felt as a chill commotion, an icy anger of the air, in which both he and Ellen shivered. Presently the pair in uniform appeared again, but at some distance across the lawn, and too intensely absorbed in argument to pay any attention to him.

"Oh, damn! oh, damn!" sobbed Richard. The wind was blowing earth-daubed leaves off the flowerbeds through the open door into the prim room. He stepped into the gale and shouted: "Roger! Roger! Come in!"

Roger waved his arms, which were too long for the sleeves of his coat, and from his mouthings it was evident that he was shouting back, but the wind took it all. In anger Richard stepped back into the room and made as if to close the doors, and at that the two on the lawn ran towards the house, with that look which common people have when they run for a train, as if their feet were buckling up under them. Richard held the door wide again, but when the couple reached the path in front of the house they were once more seized with a doubt about entering and came to a standstill.

"Come in," said Richard; "come in."

The man took off his cap and ran his hands through his pale, long hair. "Is mother in?" he demanded in a thin, whistling voice.

"Come in," said Richard; "come in."

The man began: "Well, if mother's not in, I don't know—"

Richard fixed his eyes on the woman's face. "Come in," he said softly, brutally, loathingly. Ellen shivered to hear him speak thus to a woman and to see a woman take it thus, for at once the stranger moved forward to the window and stepped into the room. As she brushed by him she cringingly bowed her shoulders a little, and looked up at him as he stood a head and shoulders higher than herself. He looked back steadily and made no sign of seeing her save by a slight compression of the lips, until she passed on with dragging feet and stood listlessly in the middle of the room. It was evident that they completely understood one another, and yet their understanding sprung from no recollection of any previous encounter, for into the eyes of neither did there come any flash of recognition. There could be no doubt that Richard was feeling nothing but contempt for this woman, and her peaked yet rich-coloured face expressed only sick sullenness; yet Ellen felt a rage like jealousy.

Richard turned again to the garden, and said: "Come in."

"Now don't be high-handed, old man," expostulated the stranger. But then he seemed to remember something, and stretched out both his arms, held them rigid, and opened his mouth wide as if to speak very loudly. But no sound came, and his arms dropped, and his long bony hands pawed the air. Then suddenly his arms shot out again, and he exclaimed very quickly in a high, strained voice: "Pride has always been your besetting sin, Richard. You aren't a bad chap in any way that I know of. But you're proud. And it doesn't become any of us to be proud"—his spirit was shaking the words out of his faltering flesh—"for we're all miserable sinners. You needn't order me"—he spoke more glibly now, the flesh and the spirit seemed in complete agreement—"to come out of the garden like that. I wish Poppy hadn't gone in." He caught his breath with something like a sob; but the woman in uniform made no movement, and turned her eyes to Richard's face as if it were he that must give the order. "I've got a reason for staying out here. I know mother's not got Jesus. If she's ashamed of me now that I'm one of Jesus' soldiers, I won't come in. I'll go and wrestle on my knees for her soul, but I won't hurt her by coming in. So here I stay till she tells me to come in."

"But she's out," said Richard.

The man in uniform was discomfited. The light went out of his face and his mouth remained open. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and muttered: "Ooh-er, is she?"

"Yes," said Richard pleasantly. "She's gone over to Friar's End, but she'll be back any time now. I wish you'd come in. I haven't seen you for years, and I'd like to swap yarns with you about what we've been doing all the time."

"You'd have the most to tell," answered the other wistfully. "You've been here, there, and everywhere in foreign parts. And I haven't been doing nothing at all. Except—" he added, brightening up, "being saved."

"That's your own fault," Richard told him. "I've often wondered why you didn't try your luck abroad. You'd have been sure to hold your own. Well, anyway, come in and have some tea. I don't know what mother would say to me if she came in and found I'd let you stay out in the cold. She'd be awfully upset."

"Do you think she would?" the man in uniform asked, and seemed to ponder. He looked up at the grey sky and shivered. "'Tis getting coldish. And the cloth this uniform is made from isn't the sort that keeps out cold weather. God knows I don't want to grumble at the uniform I wear for Jesus' sake, but me having been in the drapery, I can't help noticing when a thing is cheap." He stared down at his toes for a time, lifting alternately his heels and pressing them down into the wet gravel; then raised his head and said nonchalantly: "Well, old man, I think I will come in after all." But he halted yet again when he got one foot over the threshold. "Mind you, I'm not coming in just because it's cold," he began, but Richard, exclaimed, "Yes, yes! Of course I know you're not!" and gripped him by the arm and pulled him into the room. He did not seem to resent the rough treatment at all, and went over at once to the woman in uniform, and, looking happily about him, cried: "Isn't this a lovely home? I always say there's nobody got such a nice home as my mother."

His voice whistled; and Ellen in her mind's eye saw a vision of some clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise. She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard, meaning to tell him by a smile that she would help him to be kind to Roger. But Richard was still occupying himself with the window, examining with an air of irascibility a stain of blood which his cut finger had left on the white paint near the lock. His eyes travelled from it to the muddy footprints of the two who had come in from the garden and to the spatter of earth-daubed leaves on the polished floor, and his mouth drew down at the corners in a grimace of passion that made Ellen long to run to him and kiss him and bid him not give way to the madness of order so prevalent in this house. But he did not even look at her, so she could do nothing for him.

He went forward to Roger, determinedly sweetening his face, and shook his hand heartily. "It's good that you should have turned up just at this moment, for I'm going to be married before long to Miss Melville, whom I met in Scotland when I was working at Aberfay. Ellen, this is my brother, Roger."

Roger took Ellen's hand and then seemed to remember something. After exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked steadfastly into her face and said sombrely: "I hope all's well with you, sister! I hope all's well with you!"

"Pairfectly," answered Ellen; and after a pause added, shyly: "And I'm pleased to meet you. I hope anyone that's dear to Richard will be friends with me."

He flung his head backwards and cried, in that whistling voice: "Yes, I'll be that! And I'm a friend worth having now I've got Jesus! And He's given me Poppy too! Aha, old man!" With a little difficulty he put both his thumbs inside the corked edge of his armholes and began to stride up and down, taking steps unnaturally long for thin legs. "You aren't the only man who's thought of getting married! Great minds think alike, they say!" With a flourish he stretched out his hand, and it was plain that he thought he would touch the woman in uniform, though he was some feet away. Richard's and Ellen's eyes met; it was repulsive to see a man dizzied by so small a draught of excitement. "Richard, Miss Melville, this is Lieutenant Poppy, who's going to be my wife."

It was difficult to know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted darkness of her eyes.

"We're going to be married as soon as I've served my year of probation. That's a long time ahead, for I've only been at it a fortnight. I expect you'll be getting married much sooner. Things always went easier with you than me," he complained. "But it'll be a happy day when it comes, and I get the two blessings at the same time, becoming a full soldier of Jesus and marrying Poppy. She's nearly a full soldier already. She joined the Army seven months ago."

"Do you preach in the streets?" asked Richard.

Roger's eyes filled with water. Ellen reflected that he must be curiously sensitive for one so dull-witted, for the rage and disgust behind the question had hardly shown their heads. "Yes, I do!" he said pettishly. "And if Jesus doesn't object, I don't see why you should."

"I don't object at all," Richard assured him amiably. "I only wondered what sort of work you did. I suppose you haven't come to work at the Hallelujah Colony here, have you?"

"That's just what I've done!" answered Roger joyfully. "I joined up at Margate and I've laboured there for three weeks. I didn't do so bad. Did I, Poppy? Not for a start? No one could exactly shine at street preaching at first, you know. They will laugh so. But I didn't do worse than other people when they begin, did I, Poppy? However, they've transferred me over here to the Colony, to do clerk work." He added with a touch of defiance: "And, of course, they'll want me to take services too, sometimes. In fact I'm going to take a service this evening."

"How long are you to be here?"

"Maybe always. They may feel I do the best work for Jesus here." He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and took his cap off and threw it on the table with a convulsive gesture. "If mother doesn't turn me away because I've given myself to Jesus," he said with that whistling note, "I'll be able to see her every day."

"She won't turn you away."

There was folly, there was innocence in Roger's failure to notice that Richard was speaking not in reassurance but in grimness, as one might speak who sees a doom, fire or flood travelling down on to the place where he stood. "You ought to know, old chap," he murmured hopefully. "She's always shown her heart to you, like she never has to me.... I don't know.... Oh, I've prayed...."

"Well, you'll know for yourself in a minute," said Richard. "I heard the front door open and close a second ago."

Ellen felt a thrill of pride because he had such keen senses, for the sound had been so soft that she had not heard it, and yet it had reached him in the depth of his horrified absorption of his brother's being. She longed to smile at him and tell him how she loved him for this and all the other things, but again he wouldn't pay attention to her. Indeed, he could not, for, as she saw from his white mask, he was wholly given up to pain and apprehension. Her heart was wrung for him, for she saw the case against Roger. He was sickening like something that has been fried in insufficient fat; and that his loathsomeness proceeded from no moral flaw made it all the more sinister. If there was not vileness in his will to account for the impression he made, then it must be kneaded into his general substance, and meanness be the meaning of his pallor, and treachery the secret of the darkness of his hair. She looked at him accusingly as he stood beside the buxom, sullen woman, who in a slum version of the emotion of embarrassment was sucking and gnawing one of her fingers, and she found shining in his face the light of love; true love that keeps faith and does service even when it is used despitefully. Perplexed, she doubted all judgment.

The doorhandle turned, and Richard stepped in front of Roger. But when Marion slowly came into the room she did not see him or anyone else, because she was looking down on a piece of broken china which she held in her hand.

There was stillness till Richard whispered: "Mother."

She lifted her dark eyes and said, with inordinate melancholy, "Oh, Richard, someone has broken the Lowestoft jug I used for flowers in the parlour."

He answered softly: "No one broke it. The wind blew it down when I opened the door to Roger."

Her eyes did not move from his. Her mouth was a round hole. He put out his hand to take the piece of china from her. They both gazed down on it, as if it were a symbol, and exchanged a long glance. She gave it to him and, bracing herself, looked around for Roger. When she found him she started, and stared at the braid on his coat, the brass buttons, and the brass studs on his high collar. Then she became aware of the woman, and, with a faint, mild smile of distracted courtesy, took stock of her uniform. His cap, lying on the table, caught her eye, and she picked it up and turned it round and round on her hand, reading the black letters on the magenta ribbon.

"So you've joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?" she said, in that muffled, indifferent tone.

"Yes," he murmured.

"Do you preach in the streets?" Her voice shook.

"Yes," he whispered.

She gave the cap another turn on her hand. "Are you happy?" she asked, again indifferently.

"Yes," he whispered.

She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him. "Oh, my boy!" she cried. "Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at last!" Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room, and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all soft, mothering curves to him.

Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor. Roger's sobbing made a queer noise. Ahe ... ahe ... ahe.... It had an unmechanical sound, like the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard's motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an unmechanical situation. It must break down soon. She looked across at Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but not so dejected as she might have feared. It struck her that he was finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the situation which was making her grieve—which must, she realised with a stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with that wrongness. He would rather have things as they were, and see his mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their children do. Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the far view of the river and the marshes.

"Oh, mother!" spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion. "I'm a rich man now! I've got Jesus, and you, and Poppy! Mother, this is Poppy, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can."

The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as if she would have liked to jump through it. One could imagine her alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and abjectly: "I didn't want to come."

Marion answered smoothly: "But now that you are here, how glad I am that you have," and took her two hands and patted them. Looking round benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed: "I'm a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week." She was behaving like an old mother in an advertisement, like the silver-haired old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh's toffee or who reads the Weekly Telegraph in plaques at railway-stations. The rapidity with which she had changed from the brooding thing she generally was, with her heavy eyes and her twitching hands perpetually testifying that the chords of her life had not been resolved and she was on edge to hear their final music, and the perfection with which she had assumed this bland and glossy personality at a moment's notice, struck Ellen with wonder and admiration. She liked the way this family turned and doubled under the attack of fate. She was glad that she was going to become one of them, just as a boy might feel proud on joining a pirate crew. She went over and stood beside Richard and slipped her arm through his. Uneasily she was aware that now she, too, was enjoying the situation, and would not have had it other than it was. She drooped her head against Richard's shoulder, and hoped all might be well with all of them.

"You see, mother, since I saw you I've had trouble—I've had trouble—" Roger was stammering.

Marion turned from him to Richard. "Ring for tea," she said, "and turn on the lights. All the lights. Even the lights we don't generally use."

Roger clung to her. "I don't want to hide anything from you, mother," he began, but she cut him short. "Oh, what cold hands! Oh, what cold hands!" she cried playfully, and rubbed them for him. As the lights went up one by one, behind the cornice, in the candlesticks on the table, in the alabaster vases on the mantelpiece, they disclosed those hands as long and yellowish and covered with warts. The parlourmaid came in and, over her shoulder, Marion said easily: "Tea now, Mabel. There're five of us. And we'll have it down here at the table."

She waved her visitors towards chairs and herself moved over to an armchair at the hearth. All her movements were easy and her face wore a look of blandness as she settled back among the cushions, until it became evident that she was to be disappointed in her natural hope that Roger would see the necessity of stopping his babble while the servant was going in and out of the room. It was true that he did not speak when she was actually present, but he began again on his whistling intimacies the minute she closed the door, and when she returned cut himself short and relapsed into a breathy silence that made it seem as if he had been talking of something to the discredit of them all. Ellen felt disgust in watching him, and more of this perverse pleasure in this situation, which she ought to have whole-heartedly abhorred, when she watched Marion. She was one of those women who wear distress like a rose in their hair. Her eyes, which wandered between the two undesired visitors, were star-bright and aerial-soft; under her golden, age-dusked pallor her blood rose crimson with surprise; her face was abandoned so amazedly to her peril that it lost all its burden of reserve, and was upturned and candid as if she were a girl receiving her first kiss; her body, taut in case she had to keep up and restrain Roger from some folly of attitude or blubbering flight, recovered the animation of youth. It was no wonder that Richard did not look at anybody but his mother.

"You see, mother, it was Poppy who brought me to Jesus," Roger said, a second before the door closed. "I ... I'd had a bit of trouble. I'd been very foolish.... I'll tell you about that later. It isn't because I'm cowardly and unrepentant that I won't tell it now. I've told it once on the Confession Bench in front of lots of people, so I'm not a coward. And I don't believe," he declared, casting a look of dislike at Richard and Ellen, "that the Lord would want me to tell anybody but you about it." The servant returned, and he fell silent; with such an effect that she looked contemptuously at her mistress as she might have if bailiffs had been put into the house. When she had gone he began again: "It was this way Poppy did it. After my trouble I was walking down Margate Broadway—"

The woman in uniform made so emphatic a noise of impatience that they all turned and looked at her. "There isn't a Broadway in Margate!" she nearly snarled. "It's High Street, you mean. The High Street. Broadways they call them some places. But not at Margate, not at Margate."

"Neither it is," said Roger adoringly. "What a memory you're got, Poppy!"

Marion rose from the table, laying her hand on the woman's braided shoulders as she passed. "Let's come to the table and have some tea; and take your hat off, dear. Yes, take it off. That close bonnet can't be very comfortable when one's tired."

Ellen stared like a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls horned under their shawls with Hinde's curlers; yet made her remember also vases and friezes in museums where crimped, panoplied priestesses dispensed archaic rites. Her features were so closely moulded to the bone, her temples so protuberant, and her eyes sunk in such pits of sockets that one had to think of a skull, a skull found in hot sand among ruins. The ruins of some lost Nubian city, the mind ran on, for the fulness of her lips compared with the thinness of her cheeks gave her a negroid look; yet the smallness and poor design of her bones marked her as reared in an English slum. But her rich colour declared that neither that upbringing, nor any of the mean conditions which her bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was, perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking just like this; but it was gone immediately.

"Well," said Roger, "I was telling you how I got Jesus. I was going along Margate High Street, and I saw a crowd, and I heard a band playing. I didn't take any particular notice of it and I was going to pass it by—think of it, mother, I was going to pass it by!—when the band stopped and a most beautiful voice started singing. It was Poppy. Oh, mother, you must hear Poppy sing some day. She has such a wonderful voice. It's a very rich contralto. Before she was saved she sang on a pier. Well, I got into the crowd, and presently I got close and I saw her." A dreadful coyness came on him, and he turned to Poppy and, it was plain to all of them, squeezed her hand under the table. She looked straight in front of her with the dumb malignity of a hobbled mule that is being teased. "Well, I knew at once. I've often envied you and mother for going to Spain and South America, and wondered if the ladies were really like what you see in pictures. All big and dark and handsome, but when Poppy came along I saw I didn't have to go abroad for that! And you know, mother, Poppy is Spanish—half. Her name's Poppy Alicante. Her mother was English, but she married a Spanish gentleman, of very good family he was. In fact, he was a real don, wasn't he, Poppy? But he died when she was a baby, and as he'd been tricked out of his inheritance by a wicked uncle, there wasn't much money about, so Poppy's mother married again, to a gentleman connected with the Navy, who lives just the other side of the river from over here. Funny, isn't it? But it was a very godless home, and they behaved disgracefully to Poppy, when a rich man who saw her on the road when he was riding along in his motor-car wanted to marry her, and she refused because she didn't love him. They were so cruel to her that she had to leave home and earn her living, though she never expected to. But she didn't like mixing with rough people, so as she'd always had Jesus she joined the Army. And that's how we met."

After a pause Marion said, speaking fatuously in order to avoid the appearance of irony: "You're quite a romantic bride, Poppy."

The woman in uniform bit into her toast and swallowed it unchewed.

"Well, I knew at once I'd met the one woman, as they say, and I hung about just to see if I couldn't see more of her. And that's how I got Jesus. She brought me to Him. Mother, mother," he cried, in a sudden pale, febrile passion, "there's few have such a blessed beginning to their marriage! We ought to be very happy, oughtn't we?"

"Yes, Roger," she answered him. "You'll be very happy—a husband that any woman would be proud of."

"Oh, I'm not nearly good enough for Poppy," he said deprecatingly. He seemed used to Poppy's silence, and, indeed, whenever her silent absence from speech was most marked, he bent towards her in a tender attitude which showed a resolution to regard it as maidenly bashfulness. "Well, to get back to my story. I stood there peering through the crowd for another look at her, and an officer began preaching. Captain Harris it was. I didn't take any particular notice of him." He jerked his whitish face about contemptuously. "He's a poor preacher, isn't he, Poppy? He never gets a grip on the crowd, does he? And they can't hear him beyond the first few rows. I don't think I heard more than a few sentences that first evening. If I'd had been in the Army as many years as he has, and I couldn't preach any better than that, I'd find some other way of serving Jesus. I would really.

"But after that"—he stopped, looked at some vision in the air before him which filled his eyes with tears and fire, and sighed deeply—"Captain Sampson preached the gospel. It's Captain Sampson I've been working under since I joined the Army. Oh, mother, mother, I wish you could hear him preach. He would give you Jesus. That first evening I heard him I saw Jesus as plain as I see you. I saw Him then looking fierce like He was when He scourged the moneychangers out of the temple. But when I'm alone, I see the other Jesus, the way he was most times." He put his head back and bleated: "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' The One that loves us when we're weak and when we fall, and loves us all the better for it. Even you"—he looked at Richard with a faint, malign joyfulness—"must feel the want of Him sometimes. Life can't be a path of roses for any of us, however strong and clever we are. So I say it's not good preaching to go on always about fighting for Jesus and being a good soldier, and making it seem as if religion was just another trouble we had to face." His voice broke with petulance. "It's a shame not to show people Gentle Jesus."

He checked himself. Remorse ran red under his pale skin. "What am I saying?" he cried out. "Captain Sampson is a holy man! If he's harsh to those that work under him it's right he should be. God chasteneth whom He loveth, and it's the same way with Captain Sampson I expect. It's really a way of showing that he cares about you and is anxious about you. And anyway, he did give me Jesus that evening. Oh, mother, it was so wonderful!" The words rushed out of him. "He made you feel all tingling like you do when the fire engine goes past. Oh, it's an evening to remember! And it gave me Jesus! Oh, mother, you don't know what it's like to find Jesus! To know"—his voice whistled exultantly over the stricken tea-table—"that there's Somebody who really loves you!"

For one second Marion covered her face with her hands.

Unseeingly he piped on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been born as I wasn't any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel lovely and warm. And I've got earthly happiness as well. I've got Poppy. Oh, I'm a lucky man, lucky man! And I've got a lifework instead of being an odd-come-short. I'll always have something to do now. They've had experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into soldiers for Jesus. Surely they'll be able to find some work for me, even if they don't want me to preach. Look at what I'm going to do now. Even if I don't do anything but clerk work, it's helping the Labour Colony along—helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living under Bible influence when, if they weren't, there they'd be, roaming about the streets hungry and in sin. I'll be doing my bit, won't I, mother?"

She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.

Ellen felt contemptuous. She had read about those Hallelujah Army Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions. The very consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter (which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard talk of revolution. She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that made this world as unsightly as himself. And it was like him to talk about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of things that weren't true. The spectacle of this mean little intelligence refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingratitude to the great and wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society. She leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone: "But you must know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the fringe of the problem. There's no way of settling the question of unemployment until the capitalist system's overturned."

He looked at her with wide eyes and assumed an air of being engaged in desperate conflict. It was evident that his egotism was transforming this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon. "Ah! You're a Socialist. They only think of giving people money. But it isn't money people need. Oh, no. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' It's Jesus they need. Give them the Bible and all their wants will be satisfied," he cried in a shrill peewit cry.

"But the Bible isn't final. There's lots of things we know more about than the people who wrote it. Look at all yon nonsense they put in about Adam and Eve because they didn't know about evolution. That alone shows it's absurd to rely solely on the Bible...."

She looked round for signs of the others' approval. She knew that Richard agreed with her, for among his Christmas presents to her had been Huxley's Essays, and when he had talked to her of science she had seen that research after that truth was to him a shining mystic way which he would have declared led to God had he not been more reverent than Church men are, and feared to use that name lest it were not sacred enough for the ultimate sacredness. But to her amazement he kept his eyes on the crumbs which he was picking up from the tablecloth, and through his parted lips there sounded the faintest click of exasperation. She looked in wonder at Marion, and found her eyes also downcast and her forefinger tapping on her chin as if she were seeking for some expedient to stop this dangerous chatter. Ellen despised them both. They had been terribly exercised at the thought that Roger was going to preach in the streets, but they did not care at all that he was delivered over to error. She looked at him sympathetically over the table, feeling that since these horrid people with whom she had got entangled did not like him, he might be quite nice, and found him exchanging a long, peculiar glance with Poppy, which was followed on both sides by a slow, meaning nod.

He looked in front of him again and his round eyes vacillated between Richard and Ellen, growing rounder at each roll. Presently he swallowed a lump in his throat and addressed himself to her. "Ah, you're an unbeliever," he said. "Well, Captain Sampson says there's always a reason for it if people can't believe." He moistened his lips and panted the words out at her. "If you've been doing anything that's wrong—"

A sob prevented him. "Oh, I can't go and spoil this lovely tea, even if I ought to for Jesus' sake!" he cried. "We're all so happy, I can't bear to break it up by telling you what it's my duty to do! Poppy, doesn't mother have everything nice? I've often thought of this tea-table when I've been eating at places where they did things, roughish. Look at the flowers. Mother always has flowers on the table, even when it's winter. Jesus wouldn't expect me to break this up." His face became transfused with light. "I believe Jesus loves everything that's done nicely, whether it's a good deed or bread-and-butter cut nice and thin. That's why," he mourned, so wistfully that all of them save the impassive woman in uniform made a kind, friendly bending towards him, "I mind not to be able to do anything really well. But Jesus loves me all the same. He loves me whatever I'm like!" His brow clouded. "But because He loves me I owe Him a debt. I ought to preach Him wherever I am, in and out of season. But I can't spoil this. Aren't we all happy, sitting here? I'll tell you what. They've asked me to take the Saturday evening service to-night because the Commandant and the two under him are all down with influenza. If you'll come and hear me I'll tell you what Jesus wants you to hear. Oh, mother, Richard, do, do come!"

"Yes, Roger dear, we'll come."

"You won't ... make fun of it?"

"Oh no! Oh no!" Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy. "We haven't seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought. There are lots of things about me you don't know. For all you know, what you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me...."

"What I said about Richard?..."

"About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help one...."

She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining: "Oh, mother, if I could bring you to Jesus! Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I want!" But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards. "Yes," he cried reproachfully, "Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I reward Him!"

They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the tea-leaves in her cup.

"I told a lie!" he answered their common mute enquiry.

"A silly, vain lie. I told you they'd asked me to take the Saturday evening service to-night. They didn't. I offered to take it. Nobody ever asks me to preach. They say I can't. Mind you, I don't think they're right. I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn't speak so badly. But that's not the point. I told a lie. I distinctly said they'd asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a success of things like Richard always does. Oh, what a thing to do to Jesus!"

"But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry. It wasn't a deliberate lie."

"Oh, mother, you don't understand," he fairly squealed. "You haven't been saved, you see, and you're still lax about these things. It does matter! It was a lie! I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees. Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?"

Marion answered tenderly: "My dear, of course you can," but Poppy clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish, considered exasperation: "You haven't time. We ought to be at the chapel half an hour before the meeting. It's a quarter to six now."

"Oh dear! oh dear! Is it as late as that? I wanted to write on a piece of paper what I'm going to say! Now I won't have time! Oh, and I did want to preach well! Oh, where's my cap?" He began to stumble about the room.

Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal. Richard and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the anticipation of disorder always provoked in them. "Tcha!" exclaimed Poppy contemptuously. "But it's there! On the armchair!" cried Ellen: she could not bear the look on Richard's and Marion's faces. "Where?" asked Poppy. It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen. "There! There! Among the cushions," she answered, and rose and went round the table to pick it up herself. Richard came and helped her.

Roger seemed a little annoyed when Richard and Ellen found the cap for him among the cushions. Having to thank them spoiled, it could be seen, some valedictory effect which he had planned. He stood by while they shook hands with Poppy, who turned her head away as if to hide some scar, and when she had gone across to Marion tried to get in his designed tremendousness. By the working of his face, which made even his ears move a little, they knew they must endure something very characteristic of him. But into his weak eyes there bubbled a spring of joyful tenderness so bright, so clear, so intense that, though it would have seemed more fitting on the face of a child than of a man, it yet was dignified.

"You make a handsome couple, you two!" he said.

"Richard, you're a whole lot taller than me. When I'm away from you I forget what a difference there is between us. And the young lady, she's fine, too."

"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.

He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well, good-bye, mother."

"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out myself, my dears."

Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door: Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger, which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all, the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark. But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body, and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to their own lives.

When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber, fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have known that Ellen had been sitting there too.

Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words. Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."

"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh formula.

"But you must have an eclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be, little, sweet, and moderate.

Marion brought her an eclair on a plate. She took it and stood up, asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."

"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable—this tall man who could assail all things with his outstretched strength, this broad-bodied woman whom nothing could assail because of her crouching strength.

Marion stretched out her hand to the fire. Her insanely polished nails glittered like jewels.

She said in that indifferent tone: "Well, it wasn't so bad."

Some passion shook him. "Mother! Mother! To think of him bringing that woman into this house—to meet you and Ellen!"

"Hush, oh hush! He does not know."

"But, mother! He ought to! Anyone could see—"

"What she was. Yes, poor woman. But remember I made a bad job of Roger. I gave him no brains."

"Mother—it mustn't happen again. She can't come here again."

She grew stern. "Richard, you must say nothing to Roger. Nor to her. She's his love and pride. So far as he's concerned, she's a better woman than I am. I never put my love and pride in his life. If you speak to either of them you will ... add to my already heavy guilt. Besides ... how can she hurt Ellen and me? She's very weak. We're very strong."

"But, mother, you saw what she was."

"More than you did. She's had a child not long since."

"A child?" He stared at her curiously, reverently. "How do you know?"

"Some people get a brown stain on their face when they're having a baby, and afterwards it lingers on. I had it with you. Not with Roger. She has it now." She slowly drew her fingers over her face, her eyes wide in wonder. "It's a queer thing, birth...."

Ellen tingled with shame because such things were spoken of aloud, by someone old. But Richard muttered huskily: "I wonder what the story is...."

"Something horrible. She's come from a good home. Her teeth were well looked after when she was a girl. That hair took some conscientious torturing to make it what it is. She was caught, I suppose, by her love of beauty. Did you ever hear anything more pathetic than her name—Poppy Alicante?"

"I don't see anything more in it than it's an obvious lie."

"It was much more than that. Think of her as a little girl going with her mother into a greengrocer's and hearing about Alicante grapes, and asking what Alicante was, and being told it was in Spain, and making the most lovely pictures of it in her mind and keeping them there ever since. Oh, she's a poor, beauty-loving thing. That's how the handsome sailor picked her up in Chatham High Street on Saturday night."

"No doubt you're right," he said, looking into the fire.

"And she hated giving up the child. That's why she snarls at Roger. Until she gets another she'll be famished. It was taken over, I expect, by a married sister or brother who've got no children of their own. She's not allowed to see it now. Not since she left the nice place that was found for her after she'd got over her trouble. Twenty pounds a year—because of her lost character; and for the same reason rather more work than the rest of the servants, who all found out about it. So she ran away."

He interrupted her: "Supposing all that's true. And I know it is. It's like you, mother, to read from a patch of brown skin on a woman's face things that other people would have found out only by searching registry records and asking the police. It's like the way you always turned your back on the barometer and read the sky for news of the weather. You're an old peasant woman under your skin, mother." His voice was hazed with delight. He had forgotten the moment in the timeless joy of his love for her. Ellen, in the shadows, stirred and coughed. He broke out again: "Well, supposing all that's true! Are you going to be honest and be as clear-sighted about what happened after she ran away? Mother, think of the things that have been done to her, think of the things she's seen!"

The indifferent tone continued now, although she said: "Think of the horrible things that have been done to me, think of the horrible things I've seen! Oh, you're right, of course. Unhappy people are dangerous. They clutch at the happy people round them and drag them down into the vortex of their misery. But if you're going to hate anybody for doing that, hate me. Look how I've dominated you with my misfortunes, look how I've eaten up your life by making you feel it a duty to compensate me for what I've endured. Hate me. But don't hate Poppy. Oh, that poor, simple creature. Even now, after all that's happened, she'd be pleased like a child if you took her to a fair where there were merry-go-rounds. Oh, don't hate her. And don't hate Roger." Wildness flashed through her like lightning through a dense dark cloud. "Don't hate him, Richard! Take your mind off both of us. We're all right. I can manage everything quite well. I'm hard. I haven't got all those fine feelings you think I have. I'm quite hard. I can arrange everything beautifully. Roger's happy in the Hallelujah Army. He's gone to Jesus for the love I ought to have given him. I know they're thinking of turning him out. But I'll see to it that they keep him. I'll pretend to have leanings towards their religion, and I'll give them money from time to time so that they won't dare get rid of him. It will be rather amusing squaring them. I shall enjoy it. We will be all right. Leave us alone. Don't think of us. Think of Ellen. Think of Ellen. How you hold back from your happiness!" she cried gibingly. "I tell you, if I had had your chance of happiness when I was young, neither my mother nor my father would have held me back from it!"

It was as if her soul had leapt, naked and raging, from out of her mouth when she said that. Ellen stirred among the cushions, feeling unformulated shame. She wondered how Richard could endure hearing that hoarse vehemence from the lips of one whom he must wish to be gentle and unpassionate. But he was gazing at his mother trancedly and with slight movements of his hands and feet, as if she were dancing and he desired to join her in her spinning rhythm; and she, mad, changeable woman, shivered and pressed her fingers against her mouth to silence herself, and looked down on her skirt, drawling lazily: "Well, here I am, standing about in my outdoor clothes. If there's anything I hate, it's wearing outdoor clothes in the house. However, it'll save me changing, and I've none too much time if I'm going to be punctual for Roger's meeting."

She moved towards the door. He followed softly, as her shadow, and held it open.

When he made to follow her out of the room she turned sharply. "You needn't come."

"I promised Roger," he said falsely.

"What nonsense!" she blazed. "I'll tell him you had to stay here with Ellen."

She banged the door on him. He stood staring at its panels, which were rosy with firelight, and Ellen closed her eyes for weariness. After some seconds she heard his tread and felt him bend over her. "Ellen," he mumbled, "I must go with mother. That fool will be too awful on the platform. I must see her through."

From the dark fey shape he made against the firelight she knew that he was not thinking of her, that the life she had given him by her love no longer ran in his veins. She scratched one of her wrists. If she could have let the life he had given flow out of her veins she would have done it. "Ay, do," she said. "I like you to be good to your mother. You never know how long you may have her with you," she added piously and not without cheerfulness.

He left her with a kiss that was dry and spurious like a paper flower. She sank back into the chair and closed her eyes again, and listened for the closing of the front door which would leave her free to weep or rage or dance or do whatever would relieve the pressure of the moment on her brain. She filled in the throbbing tune by thinking of the visitors. It gave her a curious thrill, such as she might have felt if she had gratified her ambition to carry a heavy-plumed fan like Sarah Bernhardt's, to reflect that she had sat in the same room with a bad woman. A desire for unspecified adult things ran through her veins, as if she had just heard the strong initial blare of a band. Then she checked all thoughts, for from the hall she heard the sound of argument.

The door was flung open by Marion. She moved towards the hearth with a burly speed which marked this moment a crisis in the house of languid, inhibited movements, and cast herself down on a low stool by the fender. Richard followed and stood over her, the firelight driving over his face like the glow of excited blood, the shadows lying in his eye-sockets like blindness. She cried up at him: "No, I will not go if you come too. How can I go and sit listening to him, with you beside me hating him!" He swayed slowly, but did not answer. She stripped herself of coat and furs and thrust them on him. "There. Take them up to my room. I'm not going. I'll tell some lie. Better than you hating him like this. And while you're up you'll find some papers on my desk about the mortgage on Whitewebbs. Attend to these. And don't come back just now. You drive me mad when you hate Roger so."

When he had softly shut the door she put her hand to her head and said: "Oh, Ellen, what has happened to me? I have lost all my strength."

But her voice was still level, and she was but a squat, crouching mass against the firelight. Ellen did not know whether she was really moved, nor, if she were, whether she could feel comradely with such emotion, since she had seen the woman blench at the thought of her son preaching in the street yet stay complacid at the prospect of him being lost in intellectual error. So she did not answer.

"You must go for a long walk with Richard to-morrow," said Marion presently. "Over to Rochford, perhaps, where Anne Boleyn lived. It's pretty there."

"That would be nice," Ellen answered. She liked it when they talked as if they were merely strangers. "Do you think it will be fine to-morrow? Richard said you were awful clever at telling the weather."

"I can't say. I only looked out for a moment. The clouds are going and the moon's rising. But there's a queer feeling in the air to-night. It's not like the winter or spring or summer or autumn. It's as if we had come into some fifth season of the year." She fell silent and sat tapping the floor with her foot; and asked more loudly but in the same tone: "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over me?"

Ellen was sure she was being mocked; grown-up people never asked one's advice. She muttered sullenly: "I don't know"; but as she spoke she heard from Marion's dark shape a sound of discovery such as a searcher might make when his groping fingers closed on the lost pearl. Its intensity convinced, and she leaned forward, crying in full friendship: "You've thought of something to settle them?"

But Marion answered, with that indifference grown nearly to a sneer: "Oh, no.... Oh, no...."

Ellen leaned back, hating these adults that like to keep their secrets from the young.



CHAPTER X

Ellen was still on her knees fiddling with the lock of the French window in an effort to discover why Marion had found it so difficult to open and shut, when she saw through the lacquer of reflection which the lit room painted on the uncurtained glass that a dark mass had come to a halt just outside. It moved, and she perceived that it was a skirt. She stood up to face the intruder and looked through the glass into Marion's eyes. For a moment she stared back in undisguised anger. Of course, if the woman had had any sense she would never have formed this daft idea of going for a dander on the marshes at this hour of the night, whether her nerves were troubling her or not; but she never ought to have pretended to be so set on it, and let a body feel sure of having the evening alone with Richard as soon as he had finished with those beastly papers, if she was going to turn back in five minutes. Then she remembered that this was Richard's mother, and that for some reason he set great store by her; and she tried to smile, and laid her fingers on the doorknob to open it. But Marion shook her head and put out a prohibitory hand with so urgent a gesture that the unlit lantern which hung by a strap from her wrist bumped against the glass.

Yet she remained for some seconds longer with her face pressed close to the window. She was peering into the room with an expression of wanting to fix its contents and its appearance in her memory, which was odd in the owner of the house. Ellen moved aside in order not to impede her vision, and stood disliking her for her pervasive inexplicability and for her extreme plainness. She had been very ugly all that evening since she came down to dinner, and now the shining glass in front of her face was acting in its uncomeliness like a magnifying lens. Her hair had suddenly become greasy during the last few hours, and it showed in lank loops where her hat had been carelessly jammed down on her head. In the same short space of time her face seemed to have grown fatter, and her skin had taken on the pallor of unhealthy obesity. Against it the dark down on her upper lip looked like dirt. Her eyes were not magnificent to-night. After she had stared round the room she looked again at Ellen, and gave her a forced smile that looked the more unpleasant because the corners of her mouth were joined to her nose by deep creases. It so manifestly did not spring from any joy, that Ellen could not answer it save by just such another false grin. Her honesty hated this woman who had thus negotiated her into insincerity, and she turned away. When she looked back the face had gone.

She went back to the fire and sat thinking bitterly what a daft thing it was for a wife to go wandering round her own house in the night like a thief. But Marion was altogether an upsetting woman. She had kept the dinner waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and when she came down it was revealed that she had caused this delay, which must have inconvenienced the kitchen and was sheer cruelty to Richard, who had made next to nothing of a tea, by dressing herself up in a black and gold brocade affair that it was sheer madness to waste wearing when there was no company, and putting on jewels which made her stricken plainness look the more soiled and leaden. Then, once they sat down to the meal she had done her best to spoil, she had eaten so slowly that it dragged on interminably; and all the while had kept her great eyes fixed on Richard's face, so that though he sometimes turned aside and spoke to Ellen, he was always drawn away from her by his sense of that strong, exigent gaze. The minute they had finished, when there seemed a chance of their settling down in some more easy grouping by the fire, Marion had curtly and disagreeably asked him if he had gone through the papers about the mortgage; and when he answered that he had not been able to keep his mind on them she had told him to go upstairs and finish them just as if he were a child.

Ellen raised her upper lip over her teeth at the thought of Marion's subsequent awkwardness. There had not, when she announced her plan of taking Richard and Ellen up to town the next morning and spending the day shopping and going to a theatre, been the least real party-giving joy in her tone. Her will seemed to be holding her voice in its hands like a concertina and waving it to and fro and squeezing out of it all sorts of notes; but the sound of generous happiness would not come. And when Ellen tried to tell her that it was very kind of her, but for herself she would rather stay quietly in the country and go for a walk with Richard, the woman had simply lifted her voice to a higher pitch and said: "Oh, but it'll be great fun. We must go before Sunday is on us." She was evidently one of those managing bodies who are accustomed to ride rough-shod over the whole world, and often do it under the pretence of kindness. It was most cunning the way she rang for the cook to try and make it seem that there was a pressing domestic reason for her taking this jaunt. But cook had let her down badly, staring in such ingenuous amazement, and blurting out: "Oh Lor', mum, I don't want no aluminium set now. All I said was I thought our copper saucepans would need re-coppering in a year or so, and that, considering the trouble and expense that meant, we might as well restock with aluminium." There had been a hysterical stridency about the way in which Marion had flouted the woman's protests by repeating over and over again: "Yes, you shall have them now. There's not the smallest reason why you should wait for them. I shall go up to Harrod's to-morrow morning."

Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely. Ellen crossed to one of the small leaded windows which were on each side of the French window and looked out of the open pane in its centre. It was as she feared. The light streaming from the room showed her Marion standing half-way across the lawn, looking up at the top storey of the house. As the ray found her she lowered her head and made a jerky, embarrassed movement in the direction of Ellen, who, feeling merciless, continued to hold back the curtain. Marion drew her cloak collar up about her ears and stepped aside into the darkness. Ellen went and sat down by the fire. From something in Marion's bearing, she knew that she would not be back for some time.

It would be beautiful when Richard came down to her. Now that the room was purged of its late occupant she felt herself becoming again the miracle that Richard's love had made her in the days before they left Edinburgh. Her heart beat quicker, she was sustained by a general mirth and needed no particular joke to make her smile. She felt the equal of the tall flame that was driving through the fire. It did not worry her that Richard was not with her, for she knew that at each moment she was recovering more and more of that joy in life which had previously come to her every morning, though those were greyer than here: which had been a real possession, since Richard had often, when he was tired, found such restoration in reading its signs on her as a footsore man might find in throwing himself in long grass: which had been gradually going from her ever since the house had begun to draw her into its affairs. Now she was regaining it; though, indeed, ever to have become conscious of it, as she had during the time of being without it, was to have lost the glad essence of it. She quailed and rejoiced like a convalescent who sets out to put his strength to the test, when she heard the slamming of a door overhead.

He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said: "Where's Marion?"

It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the window, of the dark loiterer in the garden. Murmuring, "Oh, she'll be back in a minute," she opened her arms to him.

He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very close. "Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run across the road!" he whispered in her ear. She knew immediately, from the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself with it. She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he avoided her kiss and said irritably: "I wonder if Roger made an awful ass of himself preaching to-night?"

"I've no doubt," answered Ellen, "that he made Jesus most dislikeable. But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a setback here and there."

"It's not that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had." He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.

Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers; but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer, closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye first saw.

"'Lamport and Holt. Bruyere, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for Rosario. Lalande, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande. Leighton, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. Vestris, left Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to Pernambuco?"

"Once," he said.

"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.

"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."

"Like Venice? Why?"

"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."

She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the silence settle.

After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"

She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out," she said timorously.

"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"

"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."

"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he exclaimed.

"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.

"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me she was doing this?"

Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it? You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces. She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him, slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her head after the day she'd had. And I could never think she was a woman who'd be afraid of walking in the dark. And it seemed natural enough. Because it has been a day for her, hasn't it?"

He agreed grimly: "Yes, it's been a day," and looked over his shoulder at the quiet silvern garden, and shivered. "Tell me," he asked, with a timidity that filled her with fear, since it was the last quality she had ever expected to colour his tone to her, "what was she like, before she went out?"

"Oh, verra bright," said Ellen, with conscious acidity. "She was all for making arrangements for you and me to go up to town with her to-morrow and see a play, and I don't know all what. And she had the cook in to tell her about some aluminium saucepans that we're going to buy to-morrow if we go."

"Oh!" He was manifestly relieved. "Well, I suppose it's all right."

"Yes, it's all right," she told him pettishly; and then tried to make amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion. "I can understand why your mother thought it would do her good to go out. If you've lived all your life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you. No doubt," she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion's more pathetic aspect, "the poor thing's gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young. Richard, Richard, what have I said?"

He looked at her coldly. "Nothing. What could you have said?" But he went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him hasten, and opened it and stepped outside. Against the moonlight he was only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful look of rage which had made her cry aloud. He stepped in again and said: "I'm sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her."

She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with him. "May I come with you?" she asked through tears.

"No, no, it wouldn't be any fun for you," he answered fussily, "scrambling about these fields in the dark."

"Let me come with you!" she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be to him sombre with the day's events, and cried: "I shall feel afraid, waiting here."

"Very well. Go and put your things on. But be quick."

He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged the time spent in waiting for her. Wearily she followed him out of the window. From what her mother had told her about men, she had always known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that she was being tiresome when she was not. But she would never have believed that it could come so soon. And it was spoiling her. She no longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of her own nobility. Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his presence no matter at what price. There was no knowing where all this would end.

But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard, while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and led her up in a slanting course towards the top of the elm-hedge that striped the hill. It was rough walking over the steep frozen hummocks, and she wished he would not walk so fast. But it was lovely going up like this, and with every step widening the wide, whitely-blazing view. The elm trees stood like chased toys made by silversmiths where the light struck them; and in the darkness seemed like harsh twiggy nets hung on tall poles to catch the stars. Scattered over the polished harbour, the black boats squatted on their shadows and the tide licked towards them with an ebony and silver tongue. But far out in the fairway a liner and some lesser steamers carried their spilling cargo of orange brightness, and the further fringe of the night was spoiled by the comprehensive yellow wink of a lighthouse; and these things tainted the black and white immaculacy of the hour. It was not on earth but overhead that the essence of the night displayed itself. Light rushed from the moon into the sky like a strong wind, carrying before it some shining vapours that might have been angels' clouts blown off a heavenly line. It was as if some horseplay was going on among the ethereal forces; for the stars, dimmed by the violent brilliance of the moon, were like tapers seen through glass, and were held, perhaps, by invisible beings who had been drawn to their windows by the sound of carnival. To its zenith the night was packed with gaiety.

"Richard, Richard, is it not beautiful?" she cried.

"Yes, yes," he answered.

They reached the topmost elm in the row, and opened a gate into a field which stretched inland from the hill's brow. Under the shadow of its seaward edge they still walked westerly, the ploughed earth looking like a patch of grey corduroy lying to their right. It struck her that he was moving now like a hunter stalking his quarry, as if the lightness of his feet were a weapon, as if he were looking forward to an exciting kill. At the corner of the field they stopped before a gap in the hedge. Triple barbed wire crossed a vista of close-cropped grass running to trees that lifted dark spires against the pale meridian starlight.

"Wait," said Richard.

He went forward and stamped down the long grasses at one side of the gap, and then bent nearly double and seemed to be pressing against something with his hands and his knee. The barbed wire began to hum, to buzz excitedly; there was the groan of cracking wood, and the grunt of his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the stake which supported it.

"Come on," he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads. It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who was walking on ahead, though there did not seem any reason why they should walk in single file, for the ground was level and the grass short. There was indeed a suavity about this place which was not to be found in fields or commons. The line of trees towards which they were going was only a spur of a dense wood that stretched inland, and light from some moonflooded place beyond outlined their winter-naked bodies and showed them beautiful with a formal afforested grace.

"Is this a park?" she whispered, running forward to his side.

"Yes. My father's park."

"Oh!" she breathed in surprise; then, flaming up in loyalty, cried: "What a shame it isn't yours!"

He made an exclamation of anger and disgust, and said coldly: "Can't you understand that I am glad that nothing which was his is mine?"

Meekly she murmured: "That's natural, that's natural," and fell behind.

They passed the lacy clump of withered bracken, casting a shadow much more substantial than itself, which was the last dwindled outpost of the screen of trees; and Richard hissed over his shoulder, "Hush!" though she had not spoken. But nothing could spoil this. The silver forest waited in a half circle round a clearing that looked marshy with moonbeams; and in the centre of the arc, set forward from the trees, shone a small temple, looking out to sea. It had four white pillars, which were vague with excessive light, columns of gleaming mist; and these upheld a high pediment, covered with deep stone mouldings which cast such shadows and received such brightness that it looked like a rich casket chased by some giant jeweller. That it should last longer than a sigh did not seem possible.

But it endured, it endured; until the urgent advocacy of romance which was somehow inherent in its beauty, and which was not likely to be fulfilled, caused an ache. She caught her breath in a sob.

"You think it beautiful?" asked Richard, close to her ear.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"

"I had a summer-house in that villa of mine at Rio," he said, hotly and defiantly, "which was just like this, but much more beautiful."

He stepped forward and began to move towards the temple with that air of stalking a quarry. She followed him wearily, feeling that it was not right that they should have come here like this. They should have come in some different way. At each step the temple grew higher before them, more candid, more immaculate, but its beauty did not soften his inexorable aspect. When they could see the pale wedges which the moon drove in between the columns he paused and stared, and drew from his pocket something dark which lay easily in his hand. "What's that? What's that?" she asked in panic. "Only an electric torch," he muttered, without surprise at her suspicion, and went with springing, silent, detective gait up the three steps of the temple.

She remained without, drooping. Would he find his mother there? She hoped so, for then they could all go home and leave this place, which she felt despised her. The tall trees of the forest, lifting their bare branches like antlers against the stars, seemed to be holding their heads high in contempt of her defeat. For so to be forgotten was defeat.

No sounds came from the temple, and she timidly went up the steps and passed into the interior, which was cut by the colonnade into narrow chambers of shadows and broader chambers of light. At first she could not see him anywhere, and cried in alarm: "Richard!"

"I'm here," he answered. He was standing beside her, leaning against a pillar, but put out no hand to soothe her fear.

"Have you not found her?" she quavered.

He let the yellow circle of the electric torch travel over the cracked stucco-wall that faced them, the paintless door at its left extremity, the drift of dead leaves on the stone floor.

"What does that door open on to?" asked Ellen, forgetting the reason for their search in the queerness of the place.

"A staircase up to the room above."

"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up there, do you think?"

He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.

"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I stood up there, wouldn't it?"

There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has she told you anything about it?"

"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You take me up too quick."

His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche, though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular soilure.

"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"

"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered, sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to slow thoughts.

She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands, close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands, and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a dancing lantern.