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Ðîçàìóííä Ëåõìàí(3 February 1901–12 March 1990) was an English novelis)
Dusty answer
*«Àõ, êàêîé ïûëüíûé îòâåò ïîëó÷àåò äóøà
              Êîãäà æàæäåøü óâåðåííîñòè â ýòîé íàøåé æèçíè!»
                _Äæîðäæ Ìåðåäèò._      ÍÜÞ-ÉÎÐÊ
                Ãåíðè Õîëò è êîìïàíèÿ   1927 ãîä
***
1

When Judith was eighteen, she saw that the house next door, empty for
years, was getting ready again. Gardeners mowed and mowed, and rolled
and rolled the tennis-court; and planted tulips and forget-me-nots in
the stone urns that bordered the lawn at the river’s edge. The ivy’s
long fingers were torn away from the windows, and the solid grey stone
front made prim and trim. When the blinds went up and the familiar oval
mirror-backs once more stared from the bedroom windows it seemed as if
the long time of emptiness had never been, and that the next-door
children must still be there with their grandmother,--mysterious and
thrilling children who came and went, and were all cousins except two
who were brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who
dropped over the peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations
to tea and hide-and-seek.

But in truth all was different now. The grandmother had died soon after
she heard Charlie was killed. He had been her favourite, her darling
one. He had, astoundingly, married the girl Mariella when they were both
nineteen, and he just going to the front. He had been killed directly,
and some months afterwards Mariella had had a baby.

Mariella was twenty-two years old now, Charlie’s widow with a child
Charlie had begotten. It seemed fantastic when you looked back and
remembered them both. The grandmother had left the house to Mariella,
and she was coming back to live there and have a gay time now that the
war was well over and Charlie (so you supposed) forgotten.

Would Mariella remember Judith next door, and how they used to share a
governess and do the same lessons in spite of Mariella’s four years’
seniority? Miss Pim wrote: ‘Judith is an exceptionally clever child,
especially about essays and botany. She laps up knowledge as a kitten
laps milk’. The letter had been left on Mamma’s desk: unforgettable,
shameful, triumphant day.

Mariella on the other hand--how she used to sit with her clear light
eyes blank, and her polite cool little treble saying: ‘Yes, Miss Pim,’
‘No, Miss Pim,’--and never be interested and never understand! She wrote
like a child of six. She would not progress. And yet, as Miss Pim said,
Mariella was by no means what you’d call a stupid girl.... By no means a
stupid girl: thrilling to Judith. Apart from the thrill which her own
queerness gave, she had upon her the reflected glory of the four
boy-cousins who came for the holidays,--Julian, Charlie, Martin and
Roddy.

Now they were all grown up. Would they come back when Mariella came? And
would they remember Judith at all, and be glad to see her again? She
knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly
as herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered
them,--their faces especially. In earliest childhood it was plain that
nobody else realized the wonder, the portentous mystery of faces. Some
patterns were so pure, so clear and lovely you could go on looking at
them for ever. Charlie’s and Marietta’s were like that. It was odd that
the same bits of face shaped and arranged a little differently gave such
deplorable results. Julian was the ugly one. And sometimes the ugliest
faces did things that were suddenly lovely. Julian’s did. You dared not
take eyes off a stranger’s face for fear of missing a change in it.

‘My dear! How your funny little girl stares. She makes me quite
uncomfortable.’

‘Don’t worry, my dear. She doesn’t even see you. Always in the clouds.’

The stupids went on stupidly chattering. They little knew about faces.
They little knew what a fearful thing could happen to a familiar
face--Miss Pim’s for instance--surprised off its guard and broken up
utterly into grossness, withered into hatred or cunning; or what a
mystery it was to see a face day after day and find it always strange
and surprising. Roddy’s was that sort, though at first it had seemed
quite dull and flat. It had some secret in it.

At night in bed she invented faces, putting the pieces together till
suddenly there they were!--quite clear. They had names and vague sorts
of bodies and lived independent lives inside her head. Often they turned
out to have a likeness to Roddy. The truth was, Judith thought now,
Roddy’s was a dream rather than a real face. She felt she had never seen
it as it actually was, but always with that overstressed significance,
that haunting quality of curiousness which a face in a dream bears.

Queer Roddy must be twenty-one now; and Martin twenty; and Julian
twenty-four at least; and beautiful Charlie would have been Mariella’s
age if such an incredible thing had not happened to him. They would not
want anything to do with her. They would be grown up and smart, with
friends from London; and she still had her hair down and wore black
cotton stockings, and blushed wildly, hopelessly, eternally, when
addressed in public. It would be appalling to meet them again,
remembering so much they had certainly forgotten. She would be
tongue-tied.

In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer
intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly,
explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining
enchanted shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they had become
well-nigh fantastic creatures. Presumably they had realised long ago
that Charlie was dead. When they came back again, without him, she would
have to believe it too. To see them again would be a deep wrenching sort
of hurt. If only it could be supposed it would hurt them too!... But
Charlie had of course been dead for years; and of course they did not
know what it was to want to know and understand and absorb people to
such a degree that it was a fever. Or if they did, it was not upon her,
trifling female creature, that they applied their endeavours. Even
Martin, the stupid and ever-devoted, had felt, for a certainty, no
mysterious excitement about her.

When she looked backwards and thought about each of them separately,
there were only a few odd poignant trivialities of actual fact to
remember.

Mariella’s hair was cut short like a boy’s. It came over her forehead in
a fringe, and beneath it her lucid mermaid’s eyes looked out in a blind
transparent stare, as if she were dazzled. Her skin was milk-white, her
lips a small pink bow, her neck very long on sloping shoulders, her body
tall and graceful with thin snakey long limbs. Her face was without
expression, composed and cool-looking. The only change it ever suffered
was the perfect upward lift of the lips when they smiled their limited
smile. Her voice was a small high flute, with few inflections,
monotonous but soft and sweet-tempered. She spoke little. She was remote
and unruffled, coolly friendly. She never told you things.

She had a great Dane and she went about alone with him for choice, her
arm round his neck. One day he was sick and started groaning, and his
stomach swelled and he went into the thickest part of the laurel bushes
and died of poison in half an hour. Mariella came from a French lesson
in time to receive his dying look. She thought he reproached her, and
her head, fainting in anguish, fell over his, and she said to him: ‘It
wasn’t my fault.’ She lay beside him and would not move. The gardener
buried him in the evening and she lay on the grave, pale, extinguished
and silent. When Judith went home to supper she was still lying there.
Nobody saw her cry, and no one ever heard her speak of him again.

She was the one who always picked up naked baby-birds, and worms and
frogs and caterpillars. She had a toad which she loved, and she wanted
to keep a pet snake. One day she brought one home from the long-grass
meadow; but Miss Pim had a faint turn and the grandmother instructed
Julian to kill it in the back yard.

Charlie dared her to go three times running through the field with the
bull in it, and she did. Charlie wouldn’t. She could walk without a
tremor on the bit of the roof that made everyone else feel watery
inside; and she delighted in thunderstorms. Her hair crackled with
electricity, and if she put her fingers on you you felt a tiny tingling
of shock. She was elated and terrifying, standing at the window and
smiling among all the flashes and thunder-cracks.

Julian was the one she seemed to like best; but you never knew. She
moved among them all with detached undemanding good-humour. Sometimes
Judith thought Mariella despised her.

But she was kind too: she made funny jokes to cheer you up after tears.
Once Judith heard them whisper: ‘Let’s all run away from Judy’--and they
all did. They climbed up the poplar tree at the bottom of the garden and
made noises out of it at her, when she came by, pretending not to be
looking for them.

She went away and cried under the nursery sofa, hoping to die there
before discovery. The darkness had a thick dusty acrid smell, and
breathing was difficult. After hours, there were steps in the room; and
then Mariella lifted the sofa frill and looked in.

‘Judy, come out. There’s chocolate biscuits for tea.’

With a fresh burst of tears, Judith came.

‘Oo! You do look cry-ey.’ She was dismayed. ‘Shall I try to make you
laugh?’

Mariella unbuttoned her frock, stepped out of it and danced grotesquely
in her holland knickers. Judith began to giggle and sob at the same
time.

‘I’m the fat man,’ said Mariella.

She blew out her cheeks, stuffed a cushion in her knickers and strutted
coarsely. That was irresistible. You had to squeal with laughter. After
that the others came in rather quietly and were very polite, not looking
till her face had stopped being blotched and covering her hiccups with
cheerful conversation. And after tea they asked her to choose the game.
So everything was all right.

It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All
the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up
into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the
silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky
and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the
troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay.

When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp
and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and
drops of wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them.
They were beautiful and mysterious like the evening.

The happiness was a swelling pressure in the head and chest, too
exciting to bear. Going home under the willows in the little connecting
pathway between the two gardens Judith suddenly made up some poetry.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stupid funny serious Martin had red cheeks and brown eyes and dirty
knees. His legs were very hairy for his age. He had an extremely kind
nature. He was the one they always teased and scored off. Charlie used
to say: ‘Let’s think of a sell for Martin,’ and when he had been sold,
as he always was, they danced in front of him shouting: ‘Sold again!
Sold again!’ He never minded. Sometimes it was Judith who thought of the
best sells, which made her proud. She was very cruel to him, but he
remained faithful and loving, and occasionally sent her chaotic sheets
of dirt and ink from school, signing them: ‘Yrs truly, M. Fyfe.’

He loved Roddy too,--patiently, maternally. Sometimes they went about
each with an arm round the other’s neck; and they always chose each
other first in picking sides. Judith always prayed Charlie would pick
her first, and sometimes he did, but not always.

Martin had coagulated toffee in one pocket and hairy acid drops in the
other. He was always eating something. When there was nothing else he
ate raw onions and stank to Heaven.

He was the best of them all at running and chucking, and his muscle was
his fondest care and pride. What he liked best was to take Roddy or
Judith in the canoe and go bird’s nesting up the creek. Roddy did not
tease him about Judith--Roddy never cared what other people did enough
to tease them about it--but the others were apt to, so he was rather
ashamed, and spoke roughly and pushed her in public; and only showed he
loved her when they were alone together.

Once there was hide-and-seek and Charlie was he. Martin asked Judith to
hide with him. They lay in the orchard, under the hay-stack, with their
cheeks pressed into the warm sweet-smelling turf. Judith watched the
insects labouring over blades of grass; and Martin watched her.

‘Charlie’s a long time coming,’ said Judith.

‘I don’t think so. Lie still.’

Judith dropped back, rolled over and surveyed him out of the corner of
an eye. His face seen so near looked funny and rough and enormous; and
she laughed. He said:

‘The grass is wet. Sit on my chest.’

She sat on his hard chest and moved up and down as he breathed. He said:

‘I say, which do you like best of us all?’

‘Oh, Charlie.... But I like you too.’

‘But not as much as Charlie?’

‘Oh no, not as much as Charlie.’

‘Couldn’t you like me as much?’

‘I don’t think so. I like him better than anyone.’

He sighed. She felt a little sorry for him and said:

‘But I like you next best,’ adding to herself, ‘I don’t think’--a sop to
God, who was always listening. For it was an untruth. Roddy came next,
then Julian, and then Martin. He was so boring and faithful, always
following her round and smelling slightly of perspiration and dirt, and
so entirely under her thumb that he almost had no part in the mysterious
thrillingness of the children next door. She had to think of him in his
detached aspects, running faster than anyone else, or diving for things
at the bottom of the river before he became part of it: or else she had
to remember him with Roddy’s arm flung over his shoulder. That gave him
a glamour. It was thrilling to think of being friends with a
person--especially with Roddy--to that extent. It was no use praying
that Charlie would be willing to walk about like that with her. He would
never dream of it.

Charlie was beautiful as a prince. He was fair and tall with long bright
golden hair that he tossed back from his forehead, and a pale clear
skin. He had a lovely straight white nose, and a girl’s mouth with full
lips slightly apart, and a jutting cleft chin. He kept his shirt collar
unbuttoned, and the base of his throat showed white as a snowdrop. His
knees were very white too. Judith thought of him night and day. At night
she pretended he was in bed beside her; she told him stories and sang
him to sleep: and he said he liked her better than anyone else and would
marry her when they grew up. He went to sleep with a moonbeam across his
brow and she watched over him till morning. He fell into awful dangers
and she rescued him; he had accidents and she carried him for miles
soothing his groans. He was ill and she nursed him, holding his hand
through the worst of the delirium.

He called out: ‘Judith! Judith! Why don’t you come?’ and she answered:
‘I am here, darling,’ and he opened his eyes and recognised her and
whispered, ‘Stay with me,’ and fell into a peaceful refreshing sleep.
And the doctor said, ‘We had all given him up; but your love has pulled
him through.’

Then she fell ill herself, worn out with watching and anxiety. Charlie
came to her and with tears implored her to live that he might show his
gratitude. Sometimes she did; but sometimes she died; and Charlie
dedicated his ruined life to her, tending her grave and weeping daily.
From the bottom of the grave she looked up and saw him pale and
grief-stricken, planting violets.

Nothing in the least like that ever really happened in spite of prayers.
He was quite indifferent.

Once she spent the night next door because Mamma and Papa were away and
Nurse’s mother was going at last. It seemed too exciting to be true, but
it happened. The grandmother said she was Mariella’s little guest, so
Mariella showed her the visitors’ lavatory. Charlie met her coming out
of it, and passed by politely, pretending not to notice. It was a great
pity. She had hoped to appear noble in all her works to him. There was
no chance now. It nearly made the visit a failure.

They had a midnight feast of caramels and banana mess which Julian knew
how to make because he was at Eton; and next morning Charlie did not
come to breakfast and Julian said he had been sick in the night and gone
to Grannie. He was always the one to be sick after things. They went up
to see him, and he was in bed with a basin beside him, flushed and very
cross. He turned to the wall and told them to get out. He spoke to the
grandmother in a whining baby voice and would not let her leave him.
Julian muttered that he was a spoilt sugar-baby and they all went away
again. So the visit was quite a failure. Judith went home pondering.

But next time she saw him he was so beautiful and lordly she had to go
on worshipping. Secretly she recognised his faults, but it was no use:
she had to worship him.

Once they turned out all the lights and played hide and seek. The
darkness in the hall was like crouching enormous black velvet animals.
Suddenly Charlie whispered: ‘Come on, let’s look together;’ and his damp
hand sought hers and clutched it, and she knew he was afraid of the
dark. He pretended he was brave and she the frightened one, but he
trembled and would not let go her hand. It was wonderful, touching and
protecting him in the dark: it made the blackness lose its terrors. When
the lights went on again he was inclined to swagger. But Julian looked
at him with his sharp jeering look. He knew.

Julian and Charlie had terrible quarrels. Julian was always quite quiet:
only his eyes and tongue snapped and bit. He was dreadfully sarcastic.
The quiet things he said lashed and tortured Charlie to screaming
frenzies; and he would give a little dry bit of laugh now and then as
he observed the boiling up of his brother. Once they fought with croquet
mallets on the lawn, and even Mariella was alarmed. And once Charlie
picked up an open penknife and flung it. Julian held his hand up. The
knife was stuck in the palm. He looked at it heavily, and a haggard sick
horror crept over his face and he fainted with a bang on the floor.
Everybody thought he was dead. But the grandmother said ‘Nonsense’ when
Martin went to her and announced the fatality; and she was right. After
she had revived and bandaged him, poor trembling Charlie was sent in to
apologise. Later all the others went in, full of awe and reverence, and
everybody was rather embarrassed. Charlie was a trifle hysterical and
turned somersaults and threw himself about, making noises in his throat.
Everybody giggled a lot with the relief, and Julian was very gentle and
modest on the sofa. After that Julian and Charlie were better friends
and sometimes called each other ‘Old chap.’

Once at a children’s gymkhana that somebody had, Charlie fell down; and
when he saw a trickle of blood on his knee he went white and began to
whimper. He never could bear blood. Some of the gymkhana children looked
mocking and whispered, and Julian came along and told them to shut up,
very fiercely. Then he patted Charlie on the back and said: ‘Buck up,
old chap,’ and put an arm round him and took him up to the house to be
bandaged. Judith watched them going away, pressed close to each other,
the backs of their heads and their thin childish shoulders looking
lonely and pathetic. She thought suddenly: ‘They’ve no Mother and
Father;’ and her throat ached.

Charlie sometimes told you things. Once, after one of the quarrels,
chucking pebbles into the river, he said:

‘It’s pretty rotten Julian and me always quarreling.’

‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’

‘Oh, I dare say it’s just as much mine.’

Magnanimous Charlie.

‘Oh no, he’s so beastly to you. I think he’s a horrid boy.’

‘Rot! What do you know about it?’ he said indignantly. ‘He’s ripping
and he’s jolly clever too. Much cleverer than me. He thinks I’m an awful
ass.’

‘Oh, you’re not.’

‘Well he thinks so,’ he said gloomily. ‘I expect I am.’

It was terrible to see him so depressed.

‘_I_ don’t think so, Charlie.’ Then fearfully plunging: ‘I wish you were
_my_ brother.’

He hurled a pebble, watched it strike the water, got up to go and said
charmingly:

‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’

And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He
was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but
always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart.
She cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it!...’ Yet at the same time
there was the melting glow because he had after all said it.

Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said:

‘D’you see what this is?’

‘A pin.’

‘Guess where I found it.’

‘In the seat of your chair.’

The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively:

‘In my pudding at school.’

‘Oh!’

‘I nearly swallowed it.’

‘_Oh!_’

‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’

He stared at her.

‘Oh, _Charlie_!...’

‘You can keep it if you like.’

He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed....

She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it. “The pin that
nearly killed C.F.” with the date; and laid it away in the washstand
drawer with her will and a bit of uncut turquoise, and some shells, and
a piece of bark from the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After
that she was a good deal encouraged to hope he might marry her.

Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike--clear, bloodlessly cool;
and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But
Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed
quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him,
and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle
likeness.

Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian remembered
tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they had only
heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the other
could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them. They
were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas
carols his voice was heart-breakingly sweet and he looked like the
little choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live,--which made Judith
anxious. The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to
Judith, just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his
dear father.

The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes in
the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on
the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his
eyes tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute,
then jerk away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other
people. He never shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you
thought he was just beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well
and knew why she said: ‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection.
Later still you varied hating him with almost loving him.

Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He did
not always take notice of her, of course, being at Eton, and she much
younger; but when he did, he was always kindly--even interested; so that
it seemed unjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.

He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was a
relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind
too angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and
poking restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same,
insistently holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his
company was quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more
intelligent, more interesting than they were, and he would not let them
alone till he had discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.

But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person withdrew.
He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good, repelling
where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He loved
instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so anxious
to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was very
tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot of
instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make
her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing
but that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself
had a great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had
contemptuous ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and
he said ‘God’ in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice.
Sometimes she understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the
explanation, and sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so
pleased and enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony
searching for the right, the perfect words in which to express himself,
and if he was satisfied at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved
words passionately: he invented very good ones. Also he made the most
screamingly funny monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt
cheerful. Generally however, he was morose when they were all together,
and went away alone, looking as if he despised and distrusted them.
Judith discovered he did not really prefer to be alone: he liked one
other person, a listener. It made him light up impetuously and talk and
talk. The others thought him conceited, and he was; yet all the time he
was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive, less overbearing
than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at others; and he
never forgave a person who laughed at him.

He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many
herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely
shocked. Once the grandmother said:

‘Who broke the punt pole?’

And they all said:

‘I didn’t.’

Then she said patiently:

‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with his
desire to conceal nothing cried joyfully: ‘I did.’--adding almost with
disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was
quite painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.

Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.

Sometimes he invented dreams, pretending he had really dreamt them.
Judith always guessed when the dreams were untruths, though often they
were very clever and absurd, just like real dreams. She made up dreams
too, so he could not deceive her. She knew the recipe for the game; and
that, try as you would, some betraying touch was bound to creep in.

In the same way he could not deceive her about the adventures he had
had, the queer people he had met, plausible as they were. Made-up people
were real enough, but only in their own worlds, which were each as
different from the world your body lived in as the people who made them
were different from each other. The others always believed him when they
bothered to listen; they had not the imagination to find him out. Judith
as a fellow artist was forced to judge his lies intellectually, in spite
of moral indignation.

He was rather mean about sweets. Often he bought a bagful of acid drops,
and after handing them round once went away and finished them by
himself. Sometimes when Judith was with him he sucked away and never
once said: ‘Have one.’ But another time he bought her eightpence worth
all to herself and took her for a beetle walk. He adored beetles. He
knew their names in Latin, and exactly how many thousand eggs a minute
they laid and what they ate, and where and how long they lived. Coming
back he put his arm round her and she was proud, though she wished he
were Charlie.

He read a lot and sometimes he was secretive about it. He stayed in the
bath room whole afternoons reading dictionaries or the Arabian Nights.

He was the only one who was said to know for certain how babies were
born. When the others aired their theories he laughed in a superior way.
Then one day after they had all been persuading him he said, surly and
brief: ‘Well, haven’t you noticed animals, idiots?’ And after they had
consulted amongst themselves a bit they all thought they understood,
except Martin, and Marietta had to explain to him.

Julian played the piano better than Charlie; he played so that it was
impossible not to listen. But he was not, as Charlie was, a pure vessel
for receiving music and pouring it forth again. Judith thought Charlie
undoubtedly lapped up music as a kitten lapped milk.

Julian said privately that he intended to write an opera. It was too
thrilling for words. He had already composed a lovely thing called
‘Spring’ with trills, and an imitation of a cuckoo recurring in it. It
was wonderful,--exactly like a real cuckoo. Another composition was
called ‘The Dance of the Stag-Beetles.’ That was very funny. You simply
saw the stag-beetles lumping solemnly round. It made everybody
laugh--even the grandmother. Then Roddy invented a dance for it which
was as funny as the music; and it became a regular thing to be done on
rainy days. Julian himself preferred ‘Spring.’ He said it was a bigger
thing altogether.

       *       *       *       *       *

Roddy was the queerest little boy. He was the most unreal and thrilling
of all because he was there so rarely. His parents were not dead like
Julian’s and Charlie’s, or abroad like Martin’s or divorced and
disgraced like Mariella’s. (Mariella’s mother had run away with a
Russian Pole, whatever that was, when Mariella was a baby; and after
that her father ... there Nurse had broken off impressively and tilted
an imaginary bottle to her lips when she was whispering about it to the
housemaid.)

Roddy’s parents lived in London and allowed him to come on a week’s
visit once every holiday. Roddy scarcely ever spoke. He had a pale, flat
secret face and yellow-brown eyes with a twinkling light remote at the
back of them. He had a ruffled dark shining head and a queer smile that
you watched for because it was not like anyone else’s. His lip lifted
suddenly off his white teeth and then turned down at the corners in a
bitter-sweet way. When you saw it you said ‘Ah!’ to yourself, with a
little pang, and stared,--it was so queer. He had a trick of spreading
out his hands and looking at them,--brown broad hands with long crooked
fingers that were magical when they held a pencil and could draw
anything. He had another trick of rubbing his eyes with his fist like a
baby, and that made you say ‘Ah!’ too, with a melting, quick sort of
pang, wanting to touch him. His eyes fluttered in a strong light: they
were weak and set so far apart that, with their upward sweep, they
seemed to go round the corners and, seen in profile, to be set in his
head like a funny bird’s. He reminded you of something fabulous--a
Chinese fairy-story. He was thin and odd and graceful; and there was a
suggestion about him of secret animals that go about by night.

Once Judith saw a hawthorn hedge in winter, shining darkly with recent
rain. Deep in the heart of its strong maze of twigs moved a shadowy
bird pecking, darting silently about in its small mysterious confined
loneliness after a glowing berry or two. Suddenly Judith thought of
Roddy. It was ridiculous of course, but there it was: the suggestion
came of itself with the same queer pull of surprise and tenderness. A
noiseless, intent creature moving alone among small brilliancies in a
profound maze: there was--oh, what was there that was all of Roddy in
that?

He was so elastic, so mercurial in his movements, when he chose, that he
did not seem true. He had a way of swinging down from the topmost branch
of a tree, dropping lightly, hand below hand, as if he were floating
down, and then, long before he reached the usual jumping-place, giving
himself easily to the air and landing in a soft relaxed cat-like crouch.

Once they set out to attempt the huge old fir-tree at the edge of the
garden. The thing was to get to the top before someone below counted
fifty. Julian, Mariella, Martin tried, and failed. Then Roddy. He swung
himself up and soon after leapt out from a branch and came down again,
pronouncing it too uncomfortable and filthy to be bothered about. Judith
looked up and saw the wild swirl of twigs so thick all the way up that
no sky showed through. She said to herself: ‘I will! I will!’ and the
Spirit entered in to her and she climbed to the top and threw a
handkerchief out of it just as Martin said fifty-seven. After that she
came down again, and received congratulations. Martin gave her his lucky
thripenny as a prize, and she was swollen with pride because she, the
youngest, had beaten them all; and in her exaltation she thought: ‘I can
do anything if I say I can,’ and tried again that evening to fly through
the power of faith but failed.

Afterwards when she was resavouring in secret the sweet applause they
had given her she remembered that Roddy had said nothing,--just looked
at her with twinkling eyes and a bit of his downward smile; and she
thought he had probably been laughing at her for her enthusiasm and her
pride. She felt disillusioned, and all at once remembered her bruises
and her ruined bloomers.

Roddy had no ambition. He did not feel at all humiliated if he failed to
meet a challenge. If he did not want to try he did not try: not because
he was afraid of failing, for he knew his power and so did everyone
else; and not because he was physically cautious, for fear was unknown
to him: it was because of the fundamental apathy in him. He lived in
bursts of energy followed by the most lethargic indifference.

When he chose to lead they all followed; but he did not care. He did not
care whether he was liked or not. He never sought out Martin, though he
accepted his devotion kindly and did not join in the sells arranged for
him. But then he never joined in anything: he was not interested in
personal relationships.

They were all a little afraid of him, and none of them--except Martin to
whom he was as a son--liked him very much.

The things he drew were extremely odd: long dream-like figures with thin
legs trailing after them, giants and pigmies and people having their
heads cut off, and ghosts and skeletons rising from graves and flapping
after children; and people doing wild dances, their limbs flying about;
and amusing monsters and hideous terrifying old women. His caricatures
were the best. The grandmother said they were very promising. Julian was
always the most successful subject, and he minded dreadfully.

Sometimes Judith sat beside him and watched his quick pencil. It was
like magic. But always he soon gave up. He had scarcely any interest in
his drawings once they were finished. She collected them in sheaves and
took them home to gloat over. That he could execute such things and that
she should be privileged to observe and to gather up after him!... His
drawings were more thrilling even than the music of Julian and Charlie.
She could play the piano herself quite nicely, but as for
drawing,--there was another clear case of the unreliability of the
Bible. However much you cried: ‘I can, I can!’ and rushed, full of
faith, to pencil and paper, nothing whatever happened.

Once she was suddenly emboldened and said out loud the words rehearsed
silently for many weeks,

‘Now draw something for _me_, Roddy.’

Oh, something designed from its conception for your very own,--something
which could be labelled (by yourself, since Roddy would certainly
refuse) ‘From the artist to Judith Earle,’ with the date: a token, a
perpetual memorial of his friendship!...

‘Oh no,’ said Roddy, ‘I can’t.’ He threw down his pencil, instantly
bored at the suggestion, smiled and presently wandered off.

The smile took the edge off the sting, but there was an old feeling, an
oppression, as she watched him going away. It was no use trying to bring
Roddy out of his labyrinthine seclusion with personal advances and
pretensions to favouritism. Roddy had a power to wound far beyond his
years; he seemed grown up sometimes in his crushingness.

Now and again he was very funny and invented dances on the lawn to make
them laugh. His imitation of a Russian ballet-dancer was wonderful. Also
he could walk on his hands or do backward somersaults into the water.
This was very thrilling and made him highly respected.

Once he and Judith were the two hares in a paper chase. Roddy spied an
old umbrella in the hedge and picked it up. It was tattered and gaunt
and huge; and there was something friendly about it,--a disreputable
reckless jollity. He carried it for a long time, swinging it round and
round, and sometimes balancing it on his chin or spearing things with
it. At the top of the hill they came to the pond covered with green
stuff and a white starry froth of flowers. All around grew flags and
forget-me-nots, and the hundred other rare enchanting trivialities of
watery places.

‘Well, I don’t want this old umbrella,’ said Roddy. He considered the
water. ‘Do you?’

‘No. Throw it away.’

He flung it. It alighted in the middle of the pond. It stuck--oh,
horror!--upright, caught in something, and refused to sink.

‘Oh, Roddy!’

It stared at them across the waste of waters, stark, forlorn,
reproachful. It said: ‘Why did you pick me up, encourage and befriend me
when this is what you meant to do?’

‘Well, come on,’ said Roddy.

They fled from it.

They fled from it, but ah!--it pursued them. From miles away it wailed
to Judith in a high thin squeak: ‘Save me! Save me!’ They made excuses
to each other for spoiling the paper chase, and going back the same way.
Their feet were compelled, driven.

The pond lay fair and flawless in the evening light. The umbrella was
drowned.

Roddy stood at the edge and bit his lip. He said:

‘Well, I almost wish I hadn’t thrown the poor old chap away.’

She nodded. She could not speak.

The place was haunted for ever.

But what remained more deeply in her memory was the bond with Roddy, the
sharing of an emotion, the secret sympathy. Avidly she seized upon it,
and with it nourished her immoderate ambitions. One day they would all
like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her every thing.
Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious would revolve
intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.

       *       *       *       *       *

From that far off unsubstantial time Roddy’s face was the last, the
clearest, the strangest to float up.

There was a field with chalky pits in it and ripening blackberries and
wastes of gorse and bracken. The curious smell of the bracken rose
faint but penetrating, earthy and yet unreal, disturbing.

stretched on its side with its tiny frail-boned paws laid out quiet, and
the tender secret white fur of its underneath half revealed. One of
them--which?--she could never remember--said:

‘Well, I never thought I’d touch it.’

It was like hearing a person speak in a bad dream.

‘How did you do it?’ said Roddy’s voice.

‘Well, it was sitting, and I crept up and chucked a stone to startle it
up, not meaning to hurt it. But I must have hit it plumb behind the
ear,--I killed it outright anyway. It was an absolute fluke. I couldn’t
do it again if I tried all my life.’

‘Hum,’ said Roddy. ‘Funny thing.’

He stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at the corpse,
making his face a mask. The sun wavered and darkened. The surface of the
bracken shone with a metallic light, the grass was lurid, the trees
hissed. Judith struggled in a nightmare.

‘Well, what shall I do with it?’ said someone.

‘I’ll see to it,’ said Roddy.

Then he and she were alone. She bent down and touched the fur. It was
dead, it was dead. She fell on her knees beside it and wept.

‘I say, _don’t_,’ said Roddy after a bit. He could not bear tears.

She wept all the more, awful sobs from the pit of the stomach.

‘He didn’t mean it, it can’t be helped,’ said Roddy. Then after another
interval:

‘You know, it didn’t feel it. It died at once.’

It died at once. Oh, how pathetic, how unbearable.... Then again, after
a long time:

‘Look, we’ll take it home and give it a funeral.’

He gathered huge fern-leaves and gently wrapped the rabbit in them. She
picked it up: she would carry it, though she almost fainted with anguish
at the feel of its tender thin body. She thought: ‘I am holding
something that’s dead. It was alive a few minutes ago and now it’s--what
is it?’--and she felt choked, drowning.

They set off. Weeping, weeping she carried the rabbit down the hill into
the garden; and Roddy walked silently beside her. He went away and dug a
hole under a laurel bush in the thickest part of the shrubbery. But when
it came to the final act, the burying, she could not bear it at all. She
was beyond all coherence now, a welter of sobs and tears.

‘I say, _don’t_,’ said Roddy again in a shaking voice.

She was suddenly quiet with shock; for he sounded on the verge of
breaking down. He could not endure her grief. Out of the corner of a
sodden eye she saw his face start to break up. Quickly she yielded the
body, and he took it away.

He was gone a long time. When he came back he took her arm and said:

‘Come and look.’

Under the laurel bush, at the head of the little mound he had set up a
beautiful tablet. It was the top of a cake tin, smooth and clean and
shining; and on it he had hammered out with a nail the words: ‘In memory
of a Rabbit.’

Peace and comfort flowed in upon her....

The rabbit was under all that quiet and green gloom, under the chill
stiff polished moulding of the great laurel leaves, no longer terrible
and pathetic, but dignified with its memorial tablet, lapped in the kind
protecting earth, out of reach of flies and boys and the mocking stare
of the sun. It was all right. There was not any sorrow.

‘Oh, Roddy!’

He had done it to please her. Charlie would not have done it, Martin
could not have. It was a purely Roddy gesture, so unlike him, you would
have supposed, and yet, when it was done, so recognisably his gesture
and only his. Incalculable Roddy! She remembered how when Martin had
sprained his ankle and moaned, he had hovered round him in distress,
with a puckered face. He could not stand the unhappiness and pain of
people.

She wanted to kiss him, and did not dare. She looked at him, the whole
of herself flowing towards him in a warm tumult of gratitude, and
quickly touched his arm; and he looked back, withdrawing himself for
fear of thanks, smiling his obscure downward smile. She thought: ‘Shall
I never, never understand him?’

She saw the sky beginning to blossom with evening. The sun came out
below flushed clouds and all the treetops were lit up, sombrely floating
and rocking in a dark gold wash of light. Across the river the fields
looked rich and wistful, brimming with sun, cut with long violet
shadows. The river ran a little wildly, scattered over with fierce,
fire-opal flakes. But all was softening, flattering. The clouds were
drifting away, the wind was quiet now; there would be an evening as
still, as carved as death.

She saw it all with the quivering overclear senses of exhaustion. It was
too much. Roddy’s pale face was all at once significant, and all the
others, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved
him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he
seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to
be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark
poignant intimacy and merging,--a lifting flood, all come and gone in a
timeless moment.

       *       *       *       *       *

But afterwards it did not seem true. She only remembered that next time
she saw him he had been quite ordinary and indifferent, and she herself,
still looking for signs and wonders, chilled with disappointment. Roddy
as a child grew dim after that; and the rabbit’s grave that she had
meant to tend and keep sweet with flowers through the changing seasons,
grew dim too. After a while she could not even remember exactly where it
was in all that shrubbery. The rabbit lay forgotten.

The others faded too. She could recapture nothing more of them. They
were cut off sharp in a final group on the hillside, as if horror had in
that instant made a night and blotted them out for good.

Then the grandmother let the house and went away to seek a less damp air
for her rheumatism. Being alone came again as the natural stuff of life,
and the children next door were gone and lost, as if they had never
been.


2

Then they came again--straying so suddenly, strangely, briefly across
the timeless confusions of adolescence, that they left behind them an
even more disturbing sense of their unreality,--an estrangement
profounder than before.

It was winter--the time of the long frost and the ten days’
skating,--the time when crossing the river to get to the skating pool
was dangerous because of the great blocks of ice coming down with the
stream. Those ten days flashed out for ever in life,--a sparkling pure
breathless intoxication of movement and light and air that seemed each
evening too delightful to be allowed to last; and yet each succeeding
morning--she first listening to the day then fearfully peeping at
it--had miraculous prolongation. She prayed: _Oh God, let the skating
last. Let me skate. Take not my happiness from me and I will love Thee
as I ought._ And for ten days He hearkened unto her.

Each day she abandoned lessons and, crossing the river, ran across the
crunching frost-bound marsh to the edge of the pond. Over and over it
the people slipped, glided, swirled with shouts of laughter in the sun.
Their lips were parted, their eyes shone, they were beautified.

She wore a white sweater and a crimson muffler. At first people looked
at her and then they began smiling at her; and soon she was greeting all
those who came regularly and smiling at fresh strangers every day.

There was a girl who came each morning from the London train. She was
slender and fair, and she skated with the flying grace of a dream. Her
pleated skirt swung out as she moved, her feet in their trim boots were
narrow and small, and when she twirled her long slim legs showed to the
knee. She appeared like a goddess in the midst of the cheerful sociable
incompetent herd. Judith skated to and fro in front of her every day,
hoping in vain for a look; for she was proud and absorbed and ardent,
holding herself aloof and noticing no one, skating and skating till it
got dark. One day she brought a handsome young man with her, and to him
was not at all proud and indifferent.

They waltzed, they spun, they cut figures, they ran hand in hand, they
laughed at each other; and when they rested they sat side by side
talking and smoking cigarettes. Unlike his companion, the young man
looked at Judith not once but many times: and then he smiled at her;
then he whispered something to the goddess, and Judith’s heart beat
wildly. But the cold scornful creature merely glanced once in a bored
way, nodding and went on skating. When evening fell and they were
preparing to go he looked up from taking off his boots as Judith passed,
and radiantly smiling with white teeth and blue eyes, said ‘Good night.’
That was, to her regret, the only time she saw this handsome and
friendly young man, whose wife she would have been pleased to be.

There was an old gentleman with glasses and a grey moustache who skated
very sedately and who took a great deal of trouble to teach her the
outside edge. He called her ‘my dear’, and his eyes gazed at her from
behind his glasses with a hungry watery wistfulness. He had little if
any conversation, but he would clear his throat and open his mouth as he
looked at her as if for ever on the verge of some tremendous confidence.
There was also a common but polite boy with pimples who could skate very
fast indeed and who for several afternoons raced panting up and down the
ice, while she hung on to the belt of his Norfolk jacket, and shrieked.

The tenth morning was Saturday. The London train brought several
parties. The goddess had a little girl with her. There were many vulgar
shouting groups of incompetents, and one or two quiet and moderately
proficient ones. Judith noticed a curious trio of tall slender refined
looking people--two boys and a girl. They sat on the bank and slowly ate
sandwiches. When they had finished they got up and stood grouped
together, making no movement to adjust the skates they carried. As soon
as they stood up, Judith recognized them: Mariella, Julian and Charlie.

It had happened.

They had not changed much, but they had grown most alarmingly. Mariella
must be close on six foot. Her body had merely been stretched out
without much alteration of the long vague curves of childhood. She
hardly dared look at the boys: they were enormous.

That was Charlie, really Charlie, that yellow-headed one, a little
wild-looking, more beautiful than ever.... She felt choked.

At that moment Mariella’s eyes fell on her. A fearful blush and
heart-beating went all through her, and she turned hastily away. But she
could feel them observing, questioning, conferring about her. She
executed a perfect half-circle on the outside edge, and felt that now,
if they did recognise her, she could just bear it.

Somebody was calling from the edge.

‘Hey! Hey! Hi!’

She looked round cautiously. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was
calling her, and they were all nodding and beckoning. They could, it
seemed, easily bear to recognize her, and the sight of her skating
towards them caused them no apparent faintness or anguish.

Charlie said rather peevishly:

‘I say, how do you _do_ it? That turn thing. Who taught you?’

Judith was dumb.

‘She doesn’t recognize us,’ said Mariella with a little giggle. ‘You
_are_ Judith Earle, aren’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Oh, I _do_. Only you’ve grown so.’ She tried to look at them
and to her horror felt the tears smart under her eyelids. ‘I didn’t
expect----’ Her mouth was trembling, and she stopped in despair,
hanging her head.

It was such a shock, such a deep pang of joy and misery.... They would
not understand.... After all these years of thinking about them, seeing
them so passionately, nursing in her imagination their unreal and
dream-like existence, that they should all at once quite casually be
there! It was almost as if dead people were to come to life. She prayed
to be swallowed up in the ice.

‘Well, you’re no pigmy,’ said Julian.

And they all laughed. Then it was all right. They ceased to swell and
waver before her eyes, settled down, began to grow real.

‘Well, I don’t know how it’s done,’ said Charlie, still rather angrily
looking at the ice. ‘Mariella, what on earth did you drag us here for?
You don’t know any more than I do how it’s done. What a stupid waste of
a day!’ The stress of his petulance made his voice, which was breaking,
squeak suddenly now and then, in the funniest way, so that nobody could
have taken him seriously.

‘Well, you needn’t have come.’ Mariella’s voice was still cool and
childish. With her little smile, she turned away from him to watch the
skaters.

‘And my feet are so cold I can’t feel them,’ went on Charlie. ‘Three
great gawps, that’s what we are, three great gawps.’ He looked at
Mariella’s back. ‘And Mariella’s _easily_ the gawpest.’

That seemed to unburden him, for he suddenly threw off his bad temper
and laughed.

‘Put on your skates, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’ll do our damndest.’

He began to whistle and sat down, struggling with his boots.

‘Judith shall show us how it’s done. She is so _extremely_ able.’ He
looked at her, giving her his attention for the first time, and
charmingly smiled. His eyes were amazing when they looked full at
you--brilliant, icy-blue, a little too wide open. His long red girlish
lips still parted a trifle in repose; and the whole head had a
breath-taking extravagance of beauty.

‘How are you, Judith?’ he said. ‘Do you remember the dear old days?’

‘Yes, I do.’

What self-possession he had! She was not up to him. He lost interest in
her, and went on with his boots, fiercely whistling.

‘Do you really still live here, Judith?’ said Mariella.

‘Yes, really. Where do you live?’

‘Well, we’re in London now. Grannie moved there to be near my school.
Where do you go to school?’

‘I don’t. I have classes by myself with a man who coaches boys for
Oxford and Cambridge. He’s a vicar. And then I have music lessons from a
person who comes from London, and Daddy teaches me Greek and Latin. My
Mother and Father don’t believe in girl’s schools.’ That sounded rude
and priggish. She blushed and added. ‘But I do. It’s awfully dull by
myself.’

‘Why don’t you get your Mother to send you to my school?’ said Mariella.
‘It’s ripping fun. You could come up to London every day.’

‘Mariella _loves_ her school,’ said Julian. ‘It’s _topping_. She doesn’t
learn _anything_ and plays hockey _all_ day. Judith’s parents want her
to be _educated_, Mariella. You don’t understand. Isn’t that so,
Judith?’

Judith blushed again and was afraid it was so.

‘I believe in female education,’ muttered Julian to his boots.

They had become extremely queer creatures as they grew up, thought
Judith. The boys especially were very peculiar, with their height and
pallor and their trick of over-emphatic speech. Julian was immensely
tall and cadaverous, with a stormy, untidy, hideous face, and eloquent
eyes that seemed always to be changing colour in their deep sockets. He
actually had lines in his cheeks, and his nose was becoming hooked, with
dilated, back-sweeping nostrils.

‘Well, I wish you’d come,’ said Mariella unruffled, after a silence.
‘It’s ripping. You’d love it.’

It was nice of Mariella to be so friendly and pressing. Perhaps she had
always been very fond of you, had missed you.... Judith’s heart warmed.

‘I wish _you’d_ come back and live here, Mariella. It was so lovely when
you did.’

‘I’d like to,’ said Mariella complacently. ‘P’raps we will some day. If
Grannie’s rheumatism would only get better we might come every summer.’

‘But it never will get better,’ said Julian. ‘Not at her age.’

The boots were all on at last, the skates fastened. They got up and
wobbled out a few inches on to the ice. There was a chorus of ‘Hell!’
‘Wow!’ ‘Goodness!’

Charlie slipped up with a crash, Mariella followed him.

‘It’s beastly,’ he said furiously. ‘You can’t keep your skates still. I
think I’ve broken my wrist. I shall go home.’ The others took no notice.
They wobbled further and further out, giggling. They were too tall and
thin to balance properly, and their ankles kept on betraying them.

‘Come and help us, Judith,’ screamed Julian. ‘We’ve never skated before
in our _lives_. We can’t _stop_. We’re too thin to be allowed to fall
down.’

They were dragging each other on helplessly.

‘Come _here_,’ wailed Charlie. ‘Judith, come and help me to stand.
Shan’t we fall in? Are you sure it’s safe? My feet are _frozen_.’

Judith giggled as she went from one to the other encouraging,
admonishing, supporting. The three ridiculous sillies! They enjoyed
their silliness, they enjoyed making her laugh, they were not a bit
frightening after all. Never, never since she had bidden them good-bye
years ago had been such warm and bubbling happiness. Everything
delightful was really starting at last.

As they began to improve they became ambitious. They declared their
desire to learn fancy skating, and Charlie swore he would cut a figure
of eight before the day was out; and all the time they were simply no
good at all. Out of the corner of an eye Judith saw the old gentleman
and the boy in the Norfolk jacket wistfully looking on, and she ignored
them.

‘Now, come along Mariella,’ said Charlie. ‘Take hands like this,
crossed, and we’ll go for a glide.’ They sailed rather haltingly away.

Under Mariella’s blue wool cap the dark short hair curled softly upwards
now, longer than the boyish crop of yore. Her face had preserved its
pure and innocent mask. She was laughing, not as other people laughed,
unreservedly in the enjoyment of physical pleasures, but rather as if
she were making a concession to Charlie’s mood, and found the
abandonment of laughter alien to her. There was still the curious
likeness between the two clear bloodless faces, though Charlie’s was
forever changing with quick emotions and Mariella’s was still, empty
almost. They would understand each other, thought Judith. In spite of
the friction that used to go on between them, they had always been more
obviously, more oppressively blood-relations than any other members of
the circle. With years the bond had become even more subtly defined.

Julian was left out. He had never taken any notice of Mariella, yet he
had always been the one upon whom her light gaze had dwelt with a faint
difference, as if it meant to dwell. In the old days it had sometimes
seemed as if she would have been pleased--really pleased, not just
indifferently agreeable as she generally was--if Julian had offered to
take her for a beetle-walk. She appeared to have a slight respectful
interest in him, and a manner which suggested, though only to a
remorseless watcher, that she would have valued his good opinion. It
still seemed so. When he was teasing her about her school, her eyes,
uncertain yet dwelling, had fallen on him a moment; but now, as
formerly, you could detect no affection between them.

‘We wondered if we should meet you,’ said Julian shyly. ‘I’m so glad we
did.’

Then they had not completely forgotten. She blessed him for the
assurance, which only he would have given.

‘I couldn’t believe it was you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see
you again. I did miss you after you went. I thought perhaps Martin might
write to me, but he didn’t. How is Martin?’

‘He’s all right. We don’t see him so much now. His people are back from
Africa and he spends most of the holidays with them.’ He smiled and
added: ‘I remember Martin was terribly devoted to you. I must tell him
I’ve seen you.’

‘And where’s Roddy?’

‘Oh, Roddy.... He’s all right. He’s in London. Roddy’s very grown up:
he’s having dancing lessons.’ Julian snorted.

‘Does he still draw?’

‘I don’t know. Should think he’s too lazy.’

Julian had never liked Roddy.

‘Do you still compose, Julian?’

‘Oh, do you remember that?’ He smiled with pleasure.

‘Of course. The “Stag-Beetles” Dance. And “Spring with the Cuckoo in
it.”’

‘Oh, that rot. Fancy your remembering!’ He looked at her in just the old
way, amused but interested, thinking well of her.

‘I thought it was beautiful. Have you written anything lately?’

‘No. No time. I’ve given it all up. I’ve been working like mad for a
scholarship. P’raps I’ll take to it again a bit at Oxford.’

He seemed to have become enthusiastic about it all at once, encouraged
by her interest. He had not changed much.

‘And did you get your scholarship?’

‘Yes. Balliol. I go up next year.’ He was being brief and modest,
actually blushing. But Balliol meant nothing to her: she was thinking of
his great age.

‘You must be eighteen.’

‘Yes.’

‘D’you know, I remember all your birthdays.’

As she said it she almost cried again, it seemed such a confession of
long-cherished vain hope and love. He stared at her, ready to be amused,
and then, seeing her face, looked away suddenly, as if he
half-understood and were astonished, embarrassed, touched.

‘Oh, look at those two,’ he said quickly.

Charlie had taken off his coat, and they were holding it up as a sail.
With a pang of dismay Judith realized for the first time the ominous
strength of the wind. It filled the coat full, and Mariella and Charlie,
bearing it high in front of them, went sailing straight across the pond.
They could not stop. They shrieked in laughter and agony and went ever
faster. They were borne to the pond’s edge, stubbed their skates and
fell violently in a heap on the grass.

Charlie lay on his back and moaned.

‘I’ve got a pain. I’ve got a pain. Oh, Mariella! Oh, God! Oh,
all you people! The anguish, the _sensation_!--like the Scenic
Railway--transports of horror and bliss. I thought: Never, _never_ shall
we stop. We went faster, and fas.... Oh, Mariella, your _face_.... I
shall _die_....’

He writhed with laughter, the tears poured down his face. ‘I t-_tried_
to say: _drop_ the c---- I hadn’t any _voice_--Oh, what a _feeling_!...
those skimming dreams.... O God!’

He shut his eyes exhausted.

Then soon he had to try again. Then they all tried, and were a nuisance
to the other skaters. Every one looked at Charlie, and nobody was
annoyed because of his beauty and radiant spirits, and his charming
apologies when he got in the way.

Judith ached with giggling; even Mariella and Julian were wiping their
eyes. Charlie was so excited that he looked quite feverish. In his
enthusiasm he threw his arms wide and cried:

‘Oh, darlings!’--and Judith was thrilled because she felt herself
included in the endearment.

‘You know,’ said Julian, ‘you’ll be sick to-night, Charlie, if you go on
like this.’

So he was still the one to be sick.

A small cold mongrel dog came shivering, wriggling across the ice and
rolled over before him, waving limp deprecatory paws. Charlie picked it
up and wrapped it in his coat, crooning to it and kissing it.

‘Oh, what sweet paws you have, my chap. Mariella, his paws are
particularly heart-breaking. Do look,--all blunt and tufted and
uncontrolled. Don’t they melt you? Poor chap,--darling chap. You come
along with me for a skate.’

He skated away with the dog in his arms, talking his special foolish
language to it, and colliding with people at every other step.

Oh, he was strange, thought Judith, looking after him. She had no key to
him: she could only dissect him and make notes, learn him by heart and
marvel at him,--never hope to meet him some day suddenly, at a chance
look, a trifling word, with that secret “Ah!”--that shock of inmost
mysterious recognition, as she had once met Roddy.

She thought of Roddy dancing in London, urban and alarming. She saw him
distinctly, his dark head, his yellowish pallor, his smile; and wished
wildly that he had come instead of Charlie: Charlie who troubled her,
made her heavy-hearted with the burden of his lavish indifferent
brilliance.

The sharp, blue and white afternoon was paling to sunset. The pond
flashed and glittered with empty light. In the middle rose the clump of
withered flags, dry starved grasses and marsh plants, berried bushes and
little willows,--the whole a blur of pastel shades, purplish-brown,
fading green, yellow and russet, with here and there a burning shred of
isolated colour,--a splash of crimson, a streak of gold. The whirr and
scratch of skates murmured on the air, and the skaters wove without
pause, swiftly, lightly, like flies on a ceiling. Beneath the ice the
needling grass-blades and the little water-weeds were still, spellbound;
outspread stiffly, delicately in multitudinous and infinitesimal
loveliness.

As she stood alone gazing down at them Julian came back to her side and
said:

‘Do you ever come to London?’

‘Hardly ever. If Daddy’s at home he generally takes me to a theatre at
Christmas; and now and then I go with Mamma for clothes.’

‘Well, you’d better come up some time soon and we’ll go to a play. Fix
it with Mariella.’

‘Oh!’

It couldn’t be true,--it could never happen. There was a scratch and
stumble of skates, and the other two came to a wavering halt in front of
them.

‘We must go,’ said Mariella.

‘Judith’s coming to go to a play with us,’ said Julian.

‘Oh, good,’ said Mariella, not interested.

‘When?’ snapped Julian. ‘Fix it.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, with a quick glance at him. ‘We must ask
Grannie. I’ll ask Grannie, Judith, and let you know to-morrow.’

‘Because we’re coming back to-morrow,’ broke in Charlie. ‘Julian, we
must, mustn’t we? Will you be here, Judith?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘That’s good, because I shall need you. I need thee every hour. I shall
have forgotten my breast-stroke by to-morrow. I do believe if we hadn’t
found you, Judith, we should never have stepped on to the ice at all. We
should just have looked at it and faded gracefully back to London. We
are so _very_ silly.’

He sat down to take off his boots, and began whistling--then burst out
singing:

    ‘There were three sillies
     Who stood like lilies----’

A pause--

    ‘Refusing to spin----’

Another pause--

    ‘Crying, Hey, Lackaday!
     The ice will give way,
     And we shall fall in----’

He pulled off his boots; and finished:

    ‘If Miss Earle they’d not met
     They’d be standing there yet.’

‘Pretty poor,’ cried Julian.

‘Oh, I think it’s awfully good,’ said Judith.

Charlie bowed, and said:

‘I can do more like that.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Not now. Pouf! I’m tired.’

He looked it. Save for the bright flush on each cheek his pallor was
startling. His eyes looked dark in their shadowy rings, and he leaned
back against Mariella while she gravely fastened his shoes and buttoned
up his coat. When she put on his muffler he dragged it off again,
crying:

‘Oh, Mariella. _No!_ I’m so hot.’

‘You’re to wear it,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ll catch cold,’ and she
wound it round his neck again, while he submitted and made faces at her,
his eyes laughing into hers, like a child coaxing an elder to smiles.

Watching him, Judith thought:

‘Are you conceited and spoilt?’

All that gaiety and proud indifference, all that unconscious-seeming
charm, that confident chatter--all might be the product of a complete
self-consciousness. Surely he must look in the glass and adore his own
reflection. She remembered her old dream of marrying him, and thought
with a vast sorrowful prophetic sense of the many people who would yearn
to him silently for love, while he went on his way, wanting none of
them.

Against the dusk, his head, his face shone as if palely lit.

Narrowly she watched him; but there was no sign for her: all that
brilliance of expression glancing and pausing around him, and nothing
for her beyond a light smile or two, a casual appreciation of her
temporary uses. He and Mariella had scarcely once said: ‘Do you
remember?’ If they still cherished any of the past she was not in it. It
was strange to think of such indifference, when they, with the other
three, were all the pattern, all the colour and richness that had ever
come into life.

In the dying light their mystery fell over them again, and they were as
unattainable as ever. If only with the rare quality of their physical
appearance they must always enslave her; and she felt worn out with the
stress of them.

‘To-morrow,’ said Charlie, ‘we’ll bring Roddy.’

‘Yes. Come on,’ said Mariella. ‘We must hurry for our train.’

They tramped in silence across the cold solitude of the marsh, and the
wind came after them, keen and menacing. When they arrived at the
river’s edge, Charlie stood still, and looked across, saying dreamily:

‘There’s a light in the old house. I suppose that’s the caretaker
person. We might look in to-morrow and surprise her. Doesn’t it look
lonely?... I wish we would live there again. Where’s your house, Judith?
I thought it was next door.’

‘So it is, but the trees hide it.’

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’

Then she ferried them across the river in the punt, and parted from them
on the other side, where the lane to the station branched off.

‘Well, see you to-morrow.’

Julian looked up at the sky.

‘I believe it’s thawing,’ he said. ‘I believe it’ll rain in the night.’

‘Rot!’ said Charlie. ‘Why--feel the ground.’

‘Yes, but the air’s milder. And look at the sky.’

To the east and north the frosty stars pointed their darts; but in the
smoky, tumultuous west, black clouds devoured the last of the sun.

Panic seized Judith, and she hated Julian, wanted to strike him.

‘Rot! that doesn’t mean anything,’ said Charlie uneasily.

‘And listen to the wind.’

The wind was in the treetops, full and relentless, and driving the
clouds.

‘Oh, shut up!’ said Charlie. ‘Can’t there be a wind without a thaw? And
come on, can’t you, or we’ll miss our train.’

‘Good-night then.’

‘G’night, Judith. We’ll look out for you.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Goo’night.’

‘Good-night.’

Judith ran home, shutting eyes to the clouds, ears to the wind, and with
the slam of the front door behind her striving to ignore the God of
envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness whose portents were abroad
in the sky.

‘To-morrow they are coming again and bringing Roddy. To-morrow I shall
see Roddy. O God, be merciful!’

       *       *       *       *       *

Towards dawn she woke and heard the blind, drearily sighing, futile
hurry and hiss of the rain,--and said aloud in the darkness: ‘How can I
bear it?’

Yet lured by sick fantastic hope she crossed the river that morning and
made her way to the pond.

There was nobody there, save one small boy, sliding upon the ice through
several inches of water and throwing up before him in his swift career
two separate and divided fountains.

Then that was the end. They were lost again. They would not come back,
they would not write, she would never go to London to see them. Even
Julian would forget about her. They did not care, the rain was glad,
there was nothing in the wide world to give her comfort. She turned from
the rain-blurred place where their unreal lost images mocked at and
confused her,--dreams within the far-off dream of happy yesterday.


3

It was some time in the middle of the war that she knew for certain that
Julian was at the front. She heard it from the old next door gardener,
who had given her apples and pears long ago, and it was from the
grandmother herself that he knew it. She had written to tell him to
plant fresh rose-buds and to keep the tennis lawn in perfect order, for
very soon, directly the war was over, the grandchildren were to have the
house for their own, as a place for week-ends and holidays.

Mr. Julian was at the front, safe so far, God be thanked, and Mr.
Charlie had just been called up; but the fighting, so the grandmother
said, would be over before ever he went to France.

Then, nourished afresh on new hopes, desires, and terrors, the children
next door came back night after night in dreams.

Julian in uniform came suddenly into the library. He said:

‘I’ve come to say good-bye.’

‘Good-bye? Are you going back to the front?’

‘Yes. In a minute. Can’t you hear my train?’

She listened and heard the train-whistle.

‘Charlie’s going too--He’ll be here in a minute. Good-bye, Judith.’

She put out her hand and he took it and then bent down with a sort of
grin and kissed her. He said:

‘That’s what men do when they’re going to the front.’

She thought with pleasure: ‘Then Charlie will want to kiss me too;’ and
she looked out of the window, hoping to see him.

It was impenetrably dark, and she thought anxiously: ‘He won’t be able
to find his way. He always hated the dark.’

‘Come on,’ said Julian. ‘You must come and wave good-bye to me.’

But still she delayed and peered out, looking with growing panic for
Charlie.

All at once she saw him in the darkness outside. He was not in uniform,
but in grey flannel shorts and a white shirt open at the neck,--the
clothes of his childhood. He trailed himself haltingly, as if his feet
hurt him.

‘Sh!’ said Julian in her ear. ‘He’s disguised himself.’

‘Ah, then he won’t get killed....’

‘No.’

She caught sight of his face. It was a terrible disguise,--the
shrivelled, yellow mask of an ancient cretin. He looked at her vacantly,
and she thought with a pang: ‘Ah! I must pretend I don’t know him.’

He passed out of sight with his queer clothes and his limp and his
changed face,--all the careful paraphernalia of his travesty. Looking at
him, she was seized with sudden horror. There was something wrong: they
would see through it.

She tried to reach him, to warn him; but she was voiceless and he had
disappeared.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was Charlie himself, so the old gardener said, who wrote to tell him
that he and Mariella were to be married. Master Charles had always been
the beloved one,--the one to be ready with a smile and a pleasant word,
and never a bit of haughtiness for all his Grannie made such a little
prince of him.

‘And when this old war’s over, Lacey,’ he says, ‘we’ll be coming back to
live in the dear old house. Grannie wants us to,’ he says, ‘and you may
be sure we want to. We were never ones to like London. So look out for
us before long.’ But ah! he had to come through the fighting first. They
were to get married at once, for he was off to the front. Speaking for
himself, said the old gardener, he’d have had enough of life if anything
happened to Master Charlie.

The next day, the announcement of their marriage at a registry office
appeared in the “Times.”

‘Why, they can’t be more than nineteen,’ said Mamma, ‘and first cousins,
too. A dreadful mistake. However, I suppose the chances are----’ and
she sighed, settling her V.A.D. cap before the mirror. ‘I must write to
the old lady. They were good-looking children--one of them especially.
Why don’t you send a nice little note to the girl, Judith? You used to
play together such a lot.’

‘Oh, she wouldn’t remember me,’ said Judith, and went quickly away, sick
with shock.

Married, those two. Mariella a wife: Mrs. Charles Fyfe.

‘I am _young_ Mrs. Fyfe. This is Charlie, my husband.’

How had it happened?

‘Mariella, you must marry me, you must, you _must_. Oh, Mariella, I _do_
want to marry you, and I’m going to the front so I _do_ think I might be
allowed to have what I want. I may be killed and I shan’t have had
anything out of life. Oh, Mariella, please! You know you’re happiest
with us, Mariella. You couldn’t marry anyone outside and leave us all,
could you? Nor could I. I couldn’t bear to be _touched_ by any other
woman. You and I understand each other so well we _couldn’t_ be unhappy.
We are different from other people, you know. Marry me and I’ll come
back from the war. But if you say no I’ll just go out and let myself be
killed at once....’

And Mariella, pale and childish and not understanding, went away. She
went--yes--to Julian, and looking at him full with her dazed look said:
‘Charlie has asked me to marry him.’ He said not a word, but looked dark
and shrugged his shoulders and turned away as who should reply: ‘What is
that to me?’ So Mariella went straight back to Charlie and said:

‘All right.’

Her mouth quivered and she nearly cried then, but not quite: neither
then nor afterwards. And the grandmother wept bitterly, till in the end
Charlie comforted her; and after that, implacably she would give and
sacrifice all to Charlie.

No, no, that was too stupid, too abnormal. People only behaved like that
in your unbalanced imagination.

Mariella would never have wept, never have gone to Julian, never dreamed
of being in love with him,--him or Charlie or any one else you would
have thought, childless, sexless creature that she had always seemed,
years behind you in development. How she must have changed to be now
liable to passion! All at once she had to be thought of as a woman, the
gulf of marriage fixed between you and her.

Had she consented then in her usual placidly agreeable way, just to
oblige Charlie, without a notion of what it meant to be in love and
marry? Had she gradually fallen in love with him during all the years
they were growing up together, or had it been suddenly, with a shock of
realization, when he told her he was going to France? Or had he come
home one day excited, full of emotion at the thought of what lay ahead
for him, and found her looking beautiful, strange, and thrilling to his
troubled eyes, and taken her suddenly in his arms, charming her into his
own illusion of love?

Or had it been gentle and certain all the time,--an idyll?

‘My dear, you know I shall never love anyone but you.’

‘Nor I anyone but you.’

‘Then let’s marry before I go.’

‘Oh yes,--at once.’

So they married, with all the others gentle and certain, and acquiescent
as a matter of course, saying, whatever their secret thoughts: ‘Ah well,
it had to be.’

They would spend their few days contentedly together, saying quietly:
‘If anything should happen we shall have had this happiness at least:’
their few nights....

When people married they slept in the same room, perhaps in the same
bed: they wanted to. Mariella and Charlie would sleep together: that
would be the only change for them who had lived in the same house since
childhood and knew all about each other. Why had they wanted to make
that change--what had impelled them to seek from each other another
intimacy? Charlie’s beauty belonged to someone now: Mariella of all
people had claims upon it. She might have a baby, and Charlie would be
its father....

It was all so queer and unhappy, so like the dreams from whose
improbabilities she woke in heaviness of spirit, that it was impossible
to realize. This thing had happened and she was further than ever from
them, perplexed in the outer darkness, unremembered, unwanted, nothing
at all. She might hold on all her life but they would never be drawn
back to her.

She was certain now that Charlie was going to be killed. There was that
in the fact of his marriage, of his leaping to fulfil the instincts of
normal man for life which proclaimed more ominously by contrast the
something,--the fatal excess--that foredoomed him; which made darker the
shadow falling ever upon the bright thing coming to confusion.

There seemed nothing now in life but a waiting for his death.

       *       *       *       *       *

They came and came in her dreams--some that caused her to wake with the
happiness of a bird, thinking for a moment: ‘Then he’s safe ...;’ others
that made her start into bleak consciousness, heavy with the thought
that he was even now dead.

There were dreams of Mariella with a child in her arms; of Mariella and
Charlie walking silently up and down, up and down the lawn next door,
like lovers, their arms about each other, and kissing as they walked.
Then Mariella would turn into Judith, and very soon the whole thing
would go wrong: Charlie would cease to walk up and down like a lover,
and falter and disappear.

She dreamed of standing in the doorway of the old next door schoolroom
looking out into the hall. Between the inner glass doors and the outer
white-painted wooden ones, in the little passage where tubs of
hydrangeas and red and white lilies stood upon a mosaic floor, Mariella
was talking to one of the boys. She must be saying good-bye to Charlie.
The back of her neck was visible, the short curls tilting back as she
lifted her head to him. Tall and shadowy, faceless, almost formless, he
bent over her, and mysteriously, silently they conferred; and she
watched, hidden in the doorway. Suddenly Mariella broke away and ran
past through the hall. Her face was white and wild, streaming with
tears; she bowed it right forward in her hands and fled up the stairs.

‘Oh, look! Mariella is crying for the first time in her life....’

In the doorway the dark figure still stood. It turned and all at once
had a face; and was not Charlie but Julian. She sprang back thinking:
‘He mustn’t see me here, spying;’ and in the agitation of trying to slip
away unobserved, the dream broke.

There was a dream of playing some game among them all in the next door
garden, and of Charlie stopping suddenly, and crawling away with a weak
fumbling step, his hand on his heart.

‘He’s got a weak heart.’

‘Ah, then he won’t go to the front.’

‘No, he’s quite safe.’

She woke up happy.

But sometimes Charlie had been to the front and had come back with that
feebleness and sickness upon him. He was going to die of it. He came
all pale into the schoolroom and stopped, leaning against the big oak
cupboard. He put his hand on his heart, sighing and moaning, looking
about him in appalling distress. He said:

‘I feel ill. I don’t know what it is.... I’d like to consult my
brother.’

He had the face of a stranger, an emaciated and elderly man,--nobody in
the least like Charlie; but it was he. He shuffled out again, almost too
weak to move, looking for Julian, who would not come. In horror-struck
groups the others watched him. He was dying beyond a doubt. She woke,
aghast.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was at the close of a day in February. Outside, where the gentle dusk
glimmered on rain-wet branches, the bird-calls were like sudden pale
jets of light, coming achingly to the mind; and all at once the sun,
like a bell, struck out a poignant richness, a long dark-golden evening
note with tears in it, searching all the land with its fullness and
dying slowly into an obscurer twilight. The tree-tops were quiet against
the sky. There was no leaf upon them: yet, in that liquid mauve air they
stirred in her a sudden soft pang, a beating of the heart, and were, for
a moment, the whole of the still hidden spring.

She stood staring through the window; and wars and rumours of wars
receded, dwindling into a little shadow beyond the edge of the enchanted
world.

She went out into the garden, towards the river. Ah, these shapely
boughs, this smell of buds, that tenderly-trailing blue smoke from the
rubbish heap, this air like clear greenish water, washing in luminous
tides, those few stars cast up and glowing upon translucent strands
between the riven pale deeps of clouds!... Bearing her ecstasy
delicately, she came to the bottom of the garden, where the connecting
pathway ran towards the house next door. She heard a heavy trailing step
she knew, and she waited to bid good-night to the old gardener coming
home from work.

‘Good-night, Lacey.’

His mumbling voice said from the shadows:

‘Good-night, Missie.’

‘_Lovely_ evening, Lacey.’

‘Ah, grand.’

‘How does your garden look next door?’

‘Ah, a bit forward. There’ll be frosts later, you may be bound.’

He sounded tired to-night; he was getting very old. Now for the
customary last question.

‘When are they coming back, Lacey? It’s high time, isn’t it?’

He paused; then said:

‘You maybe won’t have heard, Miss....’

‘What?’

‘Master Charlie’s been killed.... Yes, Miss. We ‘ad word from London
this afternoon. Ah, it’s cruel. It’ll about kill his Grannie, that’s wot
I sez first thing--about kill her it will. He was the apple of her eye.
That’s what we all said--the apple of her eye. She says to me once she
says: “Lacey,” she says, “Master Charlie’ll live ‘ere when I’m gorn. I’m
keepin’ the place on for ’im,” she says. “It shall never be let nor
nothing. It’s ‘is, for ’im to bring ‘is wife to. Ah, pore little Miss
Mariella, pore soul....” He broke into feeble weeping. “Ah, it’ll about
be the death of ‘is Grannie. Pore Master Charlie--pore little chap ...
everybody’s favourite, I remember ’im when ‘e was.... Yes, Missie, yes,
Miss Judith....’

His voice failed; and with a hand touching his hat over and over again
in mechanical apology, confused distress and appeal, he went shuffling
away into the shadows.

       *       *       *       *       *

But of course, of course he was dead; she had expected it all the time.
Now it had happened she could turn to other things. She thought: ‘It’s
not bad now; it’ll be worse later: then some time it will stop. I must
bear it--bear it--bear it!’

That wheezing voice echoed in the solitude and complained: ‘Pore Master
Charlie, pore little chap,’ over and over again through the dark lane
among the poplars, above the wall of the garden where the poor little
boy had lived long ago.

Had he really lived? Forget him, forget him. He was only a shadow any
way, a romantic illusion, a beautiful plaything of the imagination:
nothing of importance. Put him away, be sensible, be indifferent, gather
round you once again the imperturbable mysteries of nature, be blinded
and made deaf with them for ever. He was much better dead. He was weak
and spoilt, selfish; he wouldn’t have been any good.... He never could
bear blood: he must be thankful to be dead.

Where was he? He seemed to be near, listening to what you had to say of
his death.

‘Charlie, my darling, if only you’d known how I loved you!’

‘I know now. I shall always be watching you.’

Then there is no cause for weeping: he is alive, he is in God’s keeping.
“Lord, into thy hands I commend his spirit.” What did that mean?
Pretend, pretend to believe it, cover the blankness with confident
assertions.

What had become of that shining head? How did he look now?

At this very moment they were all weeping for Charlie shot dead in
France. It was really true: he was dead and in the earth, he had
vanished for ever. Her mind wavered and fainted under the burden of
their grief: her own she could endure, but theirs was intolerable.

She went back, out of the unregarding night, to the Greek verbs which
must be learnt by to-morrow.

       *       *       *       *       *

A long time after, came the last terrible dream.

They were all bathing together from the next door raft, in a sort of dim
luminous twilight. She saw her own white legs reaching out to touch the
water; and she stepped in and swam about. Roddy was there, a dark head
bobbing vaguely near her. Sometimes he touches her hand or her shoulder,
smiling at her in a friendly way. The others made a dim group on the
bank. They were all very happy: she felt ecstasy swelling within her,
and passing from her among them all.

Charlie suddenly came into the group. Oh, there was Charlie safe and
well and alive after all, and nobody need be unhappy any more!

He did not speak. He emerged swiftly from among them, and they all
watched him in silence while he stooped to the dim river and slipped in.
He turned his face, his hidden face, downstream, and went floating and
swimming gently along. He too was happy.

A dark misty solitude of night and water was ahead of him, and he went
into it without pause or backward look, and it folded around him. Horror
crept in: for he was disappearing.

A voice broke ringingly, in anguish:

‘Come back!’

It shattered itself, aghast, upon emptiness.

Softly he vanished.

She cried aloud and woke into a night streaming, blind with the rain’s
enormous weeping.

He never came again.

His son was born and his grandmother died; but he was too far, too spent
a ghost to raise his head at that.




PART TWO


1

They were coming back. When she knew this she dared not venture beyond
the garden for fear of encountering them unexpectedly. Only the dark was
safe; and night after sleepless night she jumped out of the kitchen
window into the garden, and crossed the lawn’s pattern of long
tree-shadows, sharp-cut upon the blank moon-blanched level of the grass.
All the colours were drained away; only the white spring flowers in the
border shone up with a glimmer as of phosphorus, and the budding
tree-tops were picked out, line by cold line, in a thin and silvery wash
of light.

She went dancingly down the garden, feeling moon-changed, powerful and
elated; and paused at the river’s edge. The water shone mildly as it
flowed. She scanned it up and down; it was deserted utterly, it was hers
alone. She took off her few clothes and stepped in, dipping rapidly; and
the water slipped over her breasts, round her shoulders, covering all
her body. The chill water wounded her; her breath came shudderingly, in
great gasps; but after a moment she started to swim vigorously
downstream. It was exquisite joy to be naked in the water’s sharp clasp.
In comparison, the happiness of swimming in a bathing suit was vulgar
and contemptible. To swim by moonlight alone was a sacred and passionate
mystery. The water was in love with her body. She gave herself to it
with reluctance and it embraced her bitterly. She endured it, soon she
desired it; she was in love with it. Gradually its harshness was
appeased, and it held her and caressed her gently in her motion.

Soon next door loomed lightless among its trees. If they were there,
they were all sleeping. No eyes would be staring in the darkness, gazing
at the enchanted water, wondering at the dark object moving upon its
surface.

But no, they had not come yet: the moon came from behind a cloud and
illumined the face of the great house; and it was grief-stricken as
ever, bowed down with the burden of its emptiness. She turned back and
swam home.

The night of full moon came, warm and starry. As she swam towards the
willows at the far edge of the next-door garden,--her usual goal--she
saw lights in the windows. The long house spread itself peacefully under
the moon, throwing out its muffled warmth of lamplight like a quiet
smile.

So they had come.

Somebody might be in the garden,--on the river even. She clung close
under the bank, by a willow stump, not daring to move, feeling her
strength ebb from her.

Then all at once their forms, their voices were near her. Somebody
started to play a nocturne of Faur;: Julian. Before her she saw someone
tall, in a pale frock, walking along the lawn: Mariella. A moment after
a man’s figure came from the shadows and joined hers. Which was he? The
twin glow of their cigarettes went ahead of them as they paced slowly,
arm in arm, across the lawn, just as Charlie and Mariella had often
paced in the dreams.

They were so near they must in a moment look down and see her; but they
passed on a few steps and then paused, looking out over the river, and
up at the resplendent moon. The piano stopped, and soon another figure
came and joined them. They were three tall shadows: their faces were
indistinguishable.

‘Hullo!’ said the small clear unchanged voice of Mariella, ‘I can’t
understand your music, Julian. Nor can Martin, can you, Martin?’

‘Well it’s so damned dull. No tune in it.’

Julian’s brief laugh came for answer.

It was like all the dreams to listen to these voices dropping, muted but
distinct, from invisible lips close to you in the dark, saying trivial
things that seemed important because of the strangeness and surprise of
the meeting.

‘Why don’t you,’ said Martin, ‘play nice simple wholesome things that we
can have on the brain and hum and whistle all day?’

‘I’m not simple and wholesome enough to do them justice. I leave them to
your masterly right index, Martin.’

‘Martin’s the world’s finest one-finger man, aren’t you?’ from Mariella,
teasing, affectionate.

‘Where’s Roddy?’

‘He went off alone in the canoe.’

‘How romantic,’ said Mariella.

There was a groan.

‘Mariella, why will you----’

‘What?’

‘Quack,’ said Julian. ‘You _must think_ before you speak.’

She laughed.

‘Good-night,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed. When you come upstairs mind
and be quiet past the nursery. Remember it’s not _your_ nursery but
Peter’s now. Nannie’ll warm your jacket if you wake him again, Martin.’

Her cigarette end hit the water a few inches from Judith. Her whitish
form grew dim and was gone.

‘What a night!’ said Julian, after a silence. ‘The moon is a most
theatrical designer.’

The two strolled on,--none too soon, for the water was glacial to her
cramped body, her fingers were rigid upon the willow-roots, and her
teeth were rattling in her head.

She heard from Martin:

‘When I was in Paris with Roddy----’

And then after a long pause, Julian’s voice suddenly raised: ‘But what
if you bored _yourself_ ... day after day ... to myself: _Christ!_ You
_bloody_ bore....’

The voices sank into confusion and ceased; but in the ensuing silence
they seemed to follow her and repeat themselves, charged with the
portentous significance of all overheard fragments of speech; so that
she felt herself guiltily possessed of the secrets of their hearts.

The moon shone full on the garden bank when she lifted herself out,
exhausted, and lay down on the grass.

Around her the shadows stood still. Her body in the moonlight was
transfigured into lines of such mysterious purity that it seemed
composed less of flesh than of light. She thought: “Even if they had
seen me they wouldn’t have thought me real.”... Martin would have been
astonished if not shocked; he would have turned politely away, but
Julian would have appraised her curves, critically and with interest.
And Roddy,--Roddy was so long ago he was incalculable. But if that
someone dark and curious, with Roddy’s face, cherished for years in the
part of you which perceived without eyes and knew without reason,--if he
had seen, he would have watched closely, and then withdrawn himself from
the seduction, from the inconvenience of his own pang; and watched from
afar, in silence.

“Oh, Roddy, when will you come and reveal yourself?”

The swim home had warmed her, but now, in spite of excited pulses, she
felt the cold beginning to strike deeply. She got up and stood still a
moment: soon she must hide her silver-white body in the cloak, and then
it would cease to be a miracle.

As she stooped for the garment, she heard the long soft ripple and plash
of a paddle; a canoe stole into view, floating down full in the middle
of the stream. She gathered her dark cape round her and stepped back
into the shadows; and as she watched the solitary figure in the stern
she forgot to breathe.

‘Oh, turn! Oh, turn!’ she sent after him silently.

But if he did she would dissolve, be swallowed up....

He did not turn his head; and she watched him go on, past the next-door
garden and still onward;--going on all night perhaps....

If only he had seen her he would have beckoned to her.

‘Judith, come with me.’

‘I will.’

And all night they would have floated on together.

Some day it would happen: it must. She had always known that the play of
Roddy must be written and that she must act in it to the end--the happy
end.

‘Oh, Roddy, I am going to love you.’

The diminishing, unresponsive blot which was he passed out of sight.

       *       *       *       *       *

Half way back to the house she stopped suddenly, overcome with
bewilderment; for that had been Roddy’s self, not his shadow made by the
imagination. The solitudes of the darkness now held their very forms,
were mysterious with their voices where for so long only imagined shapes
had hovered in the emptiness.... They had slipped back in that lucid,
credulous life between waking and sleep out of which you start to ponder
whether the dream was after all reality--or whether reality be nothing
but a dream.


2

Next day, with unreal ease, she met Mariella in the village. She came
out of the chemist’s shop, and they were face to face. There she was,
tall and erect, with her dazed green-blue crystal eyes looking without
shadow or stain up-upon the world from between dark lashes; her eyes,
that knew neither good nor evil,--the icy eyes of an angel or a devil.
Under her black hat her short hair curled outwards, her pale smooth face
preserved its childish oval, her lips just closed in their soft
faint-coloured bow. The mask was still there, more exquisite than of
old; yet when she smiled in greeting, something strange looked out for a
moment, as if her face in one of its rare breakings-up had been a little
wounded, and still retained the slightest, disturbed expression.

She seemed pleased.

‘Judith!... isn’t it?’

‘Mariella!’

‘Then you _are_ still here. We wondered.’

‘Yes. Still here.’

She seemed at a loss for what to say, and looked away, shy and ill at
ease, her eyes glancing about, trying to hide.

‘We--we were wondering about you and we thought you must be away. We
remembered you were brainy and Julian said you told him you were going
to college or somewhere, so we thought p’raps that’s where you were. We
thought you must be dreadfully frightening and learned by now. Aren’t
you?’

‘Oh no!’

What reply was possible to such silliness?

‘You were always doing lessons,’ she said in a puzzled voice. Then with
a smile: ‘Do you remember Miss Pim?’

‘Yes. Her false teeth.’

‘Her _smell_.’ She wrinkled her small nose. ‘I used to sit and get
whiffs of her, and think of tortures for her. No wonder I was backward.’
She gave her little giggle and added nervously again: ‘Look here, when
will you come and see us? We’d like it. This afternoon?’

‘Oh, Mariella, I’d love to.’

‘They’re all there. D’you remember everyone? Julian was demobilized a
little while ago. He’s going back to Oxford in the autumn.’

‘And Martin and Roddy?’

‘Yes, they’re both there. Roddy’s just back from Paris. He’s supposed to
be studying drawing there. Martin ought to be at Cambridge, but he’s had
appendicitis rather badly so he’s missing the term.’

‘Are you glad to be back here?’

‘Oh yes, we all like it awfully. And it seems to suit the infant.’

‘That’s good.’

There was a pause. She had thrown off her last remark with careless
haste, defying you not to know about the infant; and her eyes had
escaped again, as if in dread. In the pause the gulf of things never to
be said yawned for a moment beneath their feet; and it was clear that
Mariella at least would never breathe her husband’s name.

‘I--I was just buying some things for him,’ she said. ‘Some things Nanny
wanted. But you can’t get much here....’ Her voice trailed off
nervously. Then:

‘This afternoon,’ she said. ‘Good-bye till then. Don’t come too early
because the boys are always dreadfully lazy after lunch.’

She smiled and went on.


3

At five o’clock Judith surprised the parlourmaid by taking off her hat
in the hall, wiped her perspiring hands and announced herself.

At the threshold of the sitting room she paused and gasped. The room,
magnified by fear, seemed full of giants in grey flannels. Mariella
detached herself from a vast crowd and floated towards her.

‘Hullo!’ she said. ‘Do you want tea? I forgot about it. We never have
tea. I needn’t introduce, need I? You know every one.’ She put a light
hand for a moment on Judith’s arm, and the room began to sink and
settle; but the faces of the boys-next-door were nothing but a blur
before her eyes as she shook hands.

‘D’you remember which is which?’ said Mariella.

Now she would have to look up and answer, control this trembling, arrest
this devouring blush.

‘Of course I do.’

She lifted her eyes, and saw them standing before her, smiling a trifle
self-consciously. That gave her courage to smile back.

‘You’re Martin--you’re Roddy--you’re----’ she hesitated. Julian stood
aloof, looking unyouthful and haughty. She finished lamely--‘Mr.
F-Fyfe.’

There was a roar of laughter, a chorus of teasing voices to which,
plunged once more in a welter of blushes and confusion, she could pay no
heed.

‘I thought you mightn’t like--might think me--I didn’t know if--you
looked as if you----’ she stammered.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sure, that you should feel the need of any such
formality,’ said Julian stiffly. He too was blushing.

‘It was only his shyness,’ mocked a voice.

Judith thought: ‘After all, he was always the friendly one.’ That he too
should be shy restored her self-confidence, and she said looking full at
him and smiling:

‘I’m sorry. Julian then.’

‘That’s better,’ he said, still stiffly; but he smiled.

Their faces had become clear to her now; but there was still a point of
trouble and strangeness in the room,--the queer-looking sallow young man
Roddy. Her eyes fluttered over him and went on to Martin. He smiled at
her, and she took a step nearer to him.

‘Are you at Cambridge?’ she said.

‘I am.’

‘That’s where I’m going.’

‘Are you really?’

‘For what purpose?’ said Roddy softly.

‘Oh, to learn. I want to learn everything about literature--English
literature anyway, from the very beginning,’ she said earnestly.

‘That’s precisely what Martin’s aiming at. Isn’t it, Martin, you
bookworm?’

‘I don’t get on much,’ said Martin with a swift confiding smile. ‘I’m
such an idle devil. And so slow.’

She pondered.

‘I don’t think I’m particularly clever,’ she said. ‘Do you suppose most
girls who go to College are?’

‘Martin and I think they must be,’ said Roddy, twinkling. ‘They look it,
I will say.’

‘I saw some when I went for my examination. They were very plain.’ There
was laughter; and she added in strict fairness: ‘There were two pretty
ones,--two or three.’

‘Then you intend to become a young woman with _really_ intellectual
interests?’ said Roddy.

‘Oh yes. I think so.’

‘That’s rather serious.’

She became suddenly aware that they were all laughing at her and
stopped, overcome with shame and dismay.

‘Never mind.’ Roddy was twinkling at her with irresistible gaiety, and
his voice was full of caressing inflections. ‘Martin will be delighted
to see you. But don’t go to Newnham or Girton. Awful places--Martin is
terrified of them. Go to Trinity. He’ll chaperone you.’

‘Oh, give over, Roddy,’ said Martin indulgently smiling. ‘You’re too
funny.’

‘I hope your appendicitis is better?’ asked Judith politely.

‘Much better, thank you.’ He made a little bow.

Nobody had anything more to say. They were not very good hosts. They
stood around, making no effort, idly fingering and dropping the tags of
conversation she offered them, as if she were the hostess and they most
difficult guests. As in the old days, they formed their oppressive
self-sufficient circle of blood-intimacy with its core of indifference
if not hostility to the stranger. Charlie was dead, but now when they
were all gathered together she felt him weighing, drawing them further
aloof; and she wished miserably that she had not come.

They were all casually engaged by themselves. Roddy was cleaning his
pipe, Martin and Mariella playing with a spaniel puppy. It floundered on
to Martin’s lap, and a moment after:

‘Oh, again!’ came Mariella’s clear little pipe. ‘What an uncontrolled
chap he is! I’m sorry, Martin.’

‘It’ll dry,’ said Martin equably surveying his trousers. ‘It’s nothing.’

Julian had sat down at the piano and was strumming _pianissimo_. Roddy
took up the tune and whistled it.

‘What shall we do?’ said Mariella. She went on rolling the puppy.

Julian turned round in his playing and looked at Judith. Gratefully she
went over and stood beside him. By the piano, watching Julian’s hands,
she was isolated with him and need not be afraid.

‘Go on playing. Something of your own.’

He shook his head and said:

‘Oh, that’s all gone.’

What lines, what harshness the war had given his always furrowed face!

‘But it’ll come back.’

‘No. It was a feeble spark; and the God of battles has seen fit to snuff
it. The war made some chaps poets--of sorts; but I never heard of it
making anyone a musician.’

‘Well, you can still play.’

‘Oh, I strum. I strum.’ He sounded weary and disgusted. Was he saying to
himself: ‘_Christ!_ You _bloody_ bore?’

‘I’d always feel--’ she struggled, ‘--compensated if I could strum as
you do. Ever since I was little I’ve envied you to distraction.’

He cheered up a little and smiled, looking interested in the old way.

‘Play what you were playing last night.’

‘How do you know what I was playing last night?’

‘I was on the river and I heard you.’

‘Did you?’ He was flattered. It touched his imagination to think of
himself playing out into the night to invisible listeners.

‘All alone, were you?’ He looked her over with alert interest.

‘Oh yes. I said to myself: that must be Mr. Fyfe playing.’

He laughed.

‘You know, you were monstrous.’

‘Not at all. It was you. You defied me to pretend I’d ever known you.’

‘Nonsense. I was looking forward to you. Last time was--When? Centuries
ago.’

‘Yes. That skating time.’

‘Lord, yes. Another world.’

Abruptly he stopped his soft playing; and Charlie came pressing upon
them, making himself remembered above all else on that day.

‘Why stuff indoors?’ said Mariella. ‘Come out, Judith.’

She followed Mariella almost light-heartedly. After all, she was the
sort of girl who could talk to people, even amuse them. She had proved
it with Julian; and success with the others might reasonably be expected
to follow.

       *       *       *       *       *

A child was playing on a rug under the cedar tree, and his nurse sat
sewing beside him. Judith recognized her as a figure out of the old
days, a dragon called Pinkie, Mariella’s nurse who had become her maid.
Wrinkled, stern, with the fresh cheeks and clear innocent expression of
an old nurse, she sat guarding Mariella’s son.

‘May I please take him, Pinkie?’ said Mariella. ‘Pinkie won’t let me
touch him as a rule.’

‘You’re so careless,’ she said severely; then recognised Judith and
beamed.

Mariella lifted the child easily and carried him under one arm to where
the group of young men had formed by the river’s edge.

Judith watched him with a painful interest and wonder. Here in front of
her was Charlie’s child: she must believe it.

He was a tall child of slight build and oddly mature looks for his two
years. He had frail looking temples and a neck far too slender, it
seemed, to support the large head covered with a shock of fine straight
brown hair. He had Mariella’s dark lashes framing brilliant deep-set
eyes, and nothing else of his parents save his pallor and a certain
fine-boned distinction which no Fyfe could lack.

The circle was a barren thing; it could not stretch to enclose new life.
Mariella’s child was outside and irrelevant. Sometimes a cousin put out
a large hand to steady him, or whistled to him or made a grimace,
squeaked his teddy-bear or shouted at him encouragingly when he fell
down. They looked at him with tolerant amused faces like big dogs,
mildly gratified when he paused, steadying himself for a moment with a
hand on their knees; but they soon forgot about him. Julian alone
appeared to have an interest in him: he watched him; and Mariella
herself now and then for a moment watched Julian watching him.

It was absurd, incongruous, incredible that this should belong to
Mariella, should have been begotten by Charlie, carried in her body for
nine months, as any woman carries her child, born of her in the ordinary
way with agony and joy, growing up to love and be loved by her, and to
call her mother.

But anybody could have a child; even mysterious childish widows like
Mariella, tragic dead young husbands like Charlie; the simple proof was
there before her eyes. Yet Mariella was such a childless person by
nature. It was as if her body had played a trick on her and conceived;
but to the creature it had brought forth her unmaternal spirit bore no
relationship. So it seemed; but you could never tell with Mariella.

‘Come here,’ said Judith, and held out her hand.

He stared, then edged away nervously.

‘Do you like children?’ asked Mariella politely.

‘I love them,’ said Judith, and then blushed, detecting a fatuous
fervour in her voice. But, thank heaven, Roddy had strolled away with
Martin and was out of hearing.

‘Do you?’ Mariella glanced at her and seemed to find nothing more to
say. She pulled the puppy to her.

‘Good chap, go and play with Peter. Go on.’

‘Then Peter is his name.’

‘_Michael_ Peter,’ emphasized Julian mockingly. ‘Mariella had the
highest motives; but I fear she has done for him. Michael alone or Peter
alone he _might_ have stood up against--but the combination! I tremble
for his adolescence. However he ought to have a spurious charm, at any
rate until he leaves the university. The only hope is that he himself
may find the double burden excessive, and cancel himself out to a
healthy James or Henry. We could do with a Henry or so in our family.
Perhaps after all we should commend your far-sightedness, Mariella?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said in her little
cheerful voice. ‘I think Michael Peter is a very nice name. And he’s
quite a nice boy, isn’t he?’

He was running up and down the lawn with the puppy in pursuit, pawing at
him, nipping his calves, tripping him up. At first he bore it equably,
but after a while stopped in distress, pushing at the dog with impotent
delicate hands, nervously exclaiming and as if expostulating with him in
a language of his own, but not once looking towards any of them for
assistance. The puppy crouched before him, and all at once let out a
sharp yelp of excitement. He put his hands up to his ears. His lip
shook.

‘Damn that puppy!’ said Julian furiously. He strode over to his nephew
and lifted him in his arms.

‘The boy’s tired, Mariella, and you know it, and there you sit, calmly,
_calmly_,--and let that damn fool noisy puppy bully him and pester him
and smash his nerves....’

He was white. He stared with naked antagonism at Mariella, and the air
seemed to quiver and grow taut between them. She got up swiftly to catch
the puppy and touched her son’s head in passing.

‘Poor Peter-boy,’ she said quietly. ‘Silly boy! It’s all right.’

‘I must go,’ murmured Judith.

It was unbearable. She must slip away and hide from the shame and shock
of her own perception of the suppressed hysteria.

‘Must you go?’ Mariella smiled at her with a sort of sweet blankness.
‘Well--you must come again soon. Come often.’

‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said Julian. ‘I’m taking the boy in.’

Without another word or look Mariella went away; and he marched off into
the house, carrying the child; and Judith followed him, sick at heart.

Everything had gone wrong. Martin and Roddy had not returned and she
dared not seek them to say good-night. Alas, they would not care whether
she did so or not since they had not been sufficiently interested in her
to stay beside her. Even Martin did not want her, preferred Roddy. She
had hoped to gain assurance enough to look at Roddy, once, calmly, and
see him as he was; but in the few glances they had exchanged she had
seen nothing but an unreality so poignant, so burning that it blurred
her whole mind and forced her eyes to escape, helpless. To-night when
she was in bed they would all come before her, haunting and tormenting,
trebly indifferent and unpossessed now that this longed-for meeting was
accomplished, a bitter and fruitless fact. Imagination at least had been
fecund, it had fed itself:--but the reality was as sterile as stone.
What might she have done, she wondered, that she had not done, how
should she have looked in order to please them? Was it her clothes or
her looks or her idiotic seriousness about college that had condemned
her to them? Bleakly pondering, she followed Julian into the sitting
room.

He sat down at the piano with the boy on his knee, and began softly
playing. Judith stood beside him.

After a little the child flung his head back against Julian’s shoulder,
raptly listening. When he did this Julian’s face smoothed itself out and
all but smiled. He continued to play, then stopped and said:

‘Sit down. You needn’t go yet,’--and continued his quiet music.

To free his arms she gently took the child from him and set him on her
own lap, where he sat motionless and as if unconscious of the change.

Gradually as she watched the crooked fingers sliding along the keys
from chord to chord, and saw around her the familiar room, the past
stole over her. He was the boy Julian and she the half-dreaming
privileged listener; and as if there had been no gap in their knowledge
of each other they sat side by side in unselfconscious intimacy. What
had there been to fear? She saw now that she would always be able to
pick him up just where she had left him, and find him unchanged to her;
she could say anything to him without danger of mockery or rebuff. But
he had always been the easiest: the sense of blood-relationship was
tempered in him by his critical intelligence; and he was always prepared
at least to sharpen his wits against the stranger, if not to befriend
him.

He paused and she said:

‘Nothing has changed here. I remember every single thing in the room and
it’s all the same,--even to the inkstains on those boards. It’s like a
dream to be back here talking to you--one of those dreams of remembered
places where everything is so familiar it seems ominous. I’ve often had
a dream like this----’

She stopped, wishing her last words unsaid; but he took her remark to be
general and nodded, and leaned forward to look at Peter, lying wan and
sleepy in her lap. He was very tired; but not fretful: only silent and
languid. Julian touched his cheek.

‘And is Peter part of the dream too?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes. Isn’t he?’

He was the passive, waiting core of the ominousness, the unexpected
thing you shrank from yet knew you had to come back to find. In the
dream, it was quite natural to sit there with Julian, holding Charlie’s
child.

‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said musingly, ‘that this is the only proof--the
_only_ proof that Charlie ever lived? A child! Not another whisper from
him.... I haven’t even a letter. I suppose _she_ has.’ An utter misery
showed for a moment in his face, and he paused before adding: ‘And no
portrait. Do you remember him?’

‘Of course.’ Her throat ached with tears. ‘He was the most beautiful
person----’

‘Yes he was. A _spring_ of beauty. He didn’t care about that, you know,
in spite of what people said. His physical brilliance somehow obscured
his character, I think, made it difficult to judge. But he had a very
simple heart.’

Was it true? Who had ever known Charlie’s heart? Was not Julian speaking
as it were in epitaphs, as if his brother had become unreal to him,--a
symbol for grief,--the individual ghost forgotten? Perhaps Mariella
alone of all people had known his heart--strange thought!--and still had
him quick within her; but she would never tell.

‘It’s not often I speak of him to anyone,’ said Julian; and his usually
narrow swift-glancing eyes suddenly opened wide and held hers as if he
had some unendurable thought. They were pits of misery. What was he
remembering?

After a long silence he took the boy on his lap again and said softly:

‘Peter shall play.’

Peter put out both his hands, and carefully, delicately dropped them on
the keys, listening and smiling.

‘Is he musical?’

Julian nodded.

‘Oh yes. He’s that--more or less. I seem to detect all the symptoms.’

He looked down at the leaning head on his shoulder with a sort of harsh
tenderness; and after a while he spoke again as if out of a deep musing.

‘What, one asks oneself, is she going to do about him?’

‘Mariella?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well--it’s more or less mechanical, with a boy, isn’t it? School and
university,--and in his case, musical instruments?’

‘How _wretched_ he’s going to be,’ he said fiercely, ‘Can’t you _see_?’

‘She wouldn’t let him be wretched,’ she said, startled.

‘She?--she won’t know it! And if she did, she’d be helpless.’

‘Well, he’s got you.’

‘Me!’ He gave his bark of laughter.

‘I mean--you like him,’ she ventured timidly.

‘I can’t stand brats. And they can’t stand me.’

‘I’m not talking about brats. I’m talking about Peter. I thought you
liked him.’

He laughed.

‘You look so shocked. Do _you_ like brats then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm--Well, I dare say Mariella says the same. In fact, I’ve heard her.
She’s very correct, poor darling, in all her little contributions.’ He
looked at the clock. ‘It’s time I took him up. Wait for me.’

When he came back he laughed again.

‘You still look shocked. I’m not a nice man, am I?’

‘I’m not thinking about you.’

After a pause he said:

‘It’s all right, Judy. You’re right. I do like him. But because I’m
bound to feel, must I refuse to think?’

‘Think what?’

‘That he ought never to have been born.’

‘Oh!’ she blushed, horrified.

He flung at her:

‘What do you wish for the people you love? Life?’

‘Of course. Don’t you?’ She was confused, out of her depth.

‘No--God, no!’

‘Then what?’

‘Unconsciousness. Heavenly, _heavenly_ annihilation.’

‘Then why don’t you kill him?’ She was shocked at the sound of her own
words.

‘Because I don’t love him enough.’ He laughed. ‘Luckily I don’t love
anyone enough--never shall. Not even myself.’ He turned to the window
and said, speaking low, with strained composure: ‘Sometimes--in moments
of clear vision--I see it all, the whole futile sickening farce. But it
gets obscured. So my friends are safe. Besides, I’m so damned emotional:
if they implored me to save them I shouldn’t have the heart to argue how
much wiser they’d be to die.’

She wondered with alarm if he were mad and sat silent, waiting in vain
for an intelligent counter-argument to present itself. Finally she
stammered:

‘But it’s not a futile sickening farce to normal people.’

‘Oh, normal people! they’re the whole trouble. They don’t _think_. They
don’t see that you can’t miss anything of which you’ve never been
conscious. All the things for which they value life--their food, their
loves and lusts and little schemes and athletic exercises, all the
little excitements--what are they but a desperate questioning: ‘What
shall I do to be happy, to fill up the emptiness, leaven the dreariness?
How can I best cheat myself and God?’ And, strange to say, they don’t
think what a lot of trouble would have been saved if they’d never
been--never had to go hunting for their pleasures or flying from their
pains. A trivial agitation that should never have begun; and back into
nothing again. How silly!... As you may have guessed, I am not
altogether convinced of the One Increasing Purpose. I have the
misfortune to be doubtful of the objective value of life, and especially
of its pains. Neither do my own griefs either interest or purify me. So
you see----’

He turned from the window and smiled at her.

‘Yet even I have my compensations: music, food, beautiful people,
conversation--or should I say monologue?--especially this sort of bogus
philosophy to which you have been so patiently listening. Do you agree
with me, by the way?’

‘No. Do you?’

He laughed and shrugged.

‘Still,’ she added, ‘it’s a point of view. I’ll think about it. I can’t
think quickly. But oh!----’ She stopped.

‘What?’

‘I’m so thankful I’ve been born.’ She blushed. ‘Even if I _knew_ you
were right I wouldn’t feel it.’

‘Ah, you’ve never bored yourself. Perhaps you never will. I hope and
believe it’s unlikely.’

She looked at him with distress. Poor Julian! He had to be theatrical,
but his unhappiness was sincere enough. His jesting was so humourless,
so affected that it crushed the spirit; and all his talking seemed less
a normal exercise than a forced hysterical activity assumed to ease
sharp wretchedness. It was not fair to judge and dislike him: he was a
sick man.

He sat down again at the piano, and she rose on an impulse and went and
stood beside him.

‘Some chaps dance,’ he said. ‘They haven’t stopped dancing since they’ve
been back. I play----’ He plunged into a medley of ragtime--‘and
play--and play--and play. Syncopation--gets you--right on the
nerves--like cocaine--No wonder it’s popular.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Intellectually,’ he said, ‘I adore it. It’s _so_ clever.’

He played on loudly, rapidly, with pyrotechnical brilliance, then
stopped. ‘My passions, however, are too debile to be stirred.’

He flung round on the piano stool and dropped his face into his hands,
rubbing his eyes wearily.

‘Julian--I wish you weren’t--I wish you could----’

He looked up, startled, saw her expression, looked quickly away again
and gave an embarrassed laugh like a boy.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘You needn’t take any notice of me. I’m being
a bore. I’m sorry.’ The last words were faintly husky.

‘Oh, you’re _not_ a bore, you’re not! Only--_don’t_ be so miserable.’

In the awkward silence that followed she said:

‘I must go.’

‘No, you’re not to go,’ he said gently. ‘Stay and talk to me.’ He
paused. ‘The trouble is, I can’t sleep, you know, and it makes me a bit
jumpy. I don’t like my thoughts, and they _will_, they _will_ be thought
about. But I shall get better in time.’

‘Poor Julian!’

He allowed his face to relax, and his manner was suddenly quiet and
simple, almost happy: the unexpected sympathy had made him cheerful.

‘You mustn’t go, Judith, you must stay to supper.’

‘I can’t. What will Mariella say?’

‘Mariella doesn’t say. Whether she _thinks_ is the problem,--or even
_feels_. Is she a _very_ remarkable person? Or is it _simply_ arrested
development?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Not?’

She smiled to herself, struck with a fancy.

‘Perhaps she’s a fairy, Julian.’

As she said it she grew suddenly thoughtful; for it had flashed upon her
that perhaps that was the explanation of Roddy; perhaps he was a fairy,
and in that case it was no use--he would never....

‘A fairy. I never thought of that.’ He mused, pleased with the idea.
‘You know it must mean something, that nobody’s _ever_ suggested giving
her a _petit nom_, or curtailing the mouthful; she’s always been
Mariella.’

He began humming a little tune in his contentment. Quickly she said:

‘Just to go back to Peter. You don’t mean it, do you? Why should he be
wretched? Think of the things you can teach him. You know you’ll love
that.’

He looked a trifle dashed; but after a moment his face cleared again,
and his eyes smiled kindly at her.

‘Don’t worry. At all events, I’ll see he’s not ill-treated--except in my
own way. That is, if she’ll let me. She will. She’s very good-tempered,
I must say. She’s never allowed me to quarrel with her. She well might
have.’

He looked like brooding again; but seeing her gazing at him anxiously,
added:

‘It’s odd how natural it seems to be talking to you alone like this. You
haven’t changed a bit. I always remember you listening so solemnly and
staring at me. I’m so glad I’ve found you again. I could always talk to
you.’

‘At me,’ she corrected.

He made a face at her, but looked cheerful. She had always known how
near the edge to venture without upsetting him. He hummed his little
tune again, then played it on the piano.

‘I think I made that up.... It’s rather a nice little tune. Perhaps I’ll
take up my music seriously again.’

‘Oh, you must, Julian. It is so well worth it: such a special talent.’

He looked at her with sudden attention.

‘How old are you, Judith?’

‘Seventeen. Nearly eighteen.’

He studied her.

‘You must put your hair up.’

‘Must I?’

‘Yes, because then you’ll be beautiful.’

She was still speechless when Mariella, Martin, two Great Danes and the
puppy came in.

       *       *       *       *       *

‘Hullo!’ said Mariella. ‘Still here?’

‘I’m afraid so. But I’m just going.’

‘She’s not. She’s staying to supper,’ said Julian.

‘Oh, good,’ said Martin surprisingly; and his shy red face smiled at
her.

‘Of course you must,’ said Mariella cheerfully. ‘We’re just going to eat
now. Where’s Roddy?’

‘He stayed down at the boathouse. He said he’d come soon.’

‘He’d better,’ said Julian, and turning to Judith explained politely:
‘What with poor Martin having to build himself up so, experience has
proved it’s wiser to be punctual.’

‘I’ll go and fetch him,’ said Judith, to her own surprise.

She left them amicably wrestling, and escaped light-heartedly into the
garden. The cool air refreshed her brain, shaken and excited from its
contact with Julian; and she walked slowly to the boathouse by the
shrubbery path, sniffing as she went at wild cherry, japonica, almond
and plum. It was joy to look for and recognize afresh the beauties of
the garden; its unforgotten corners,--places of childish enchantment.
Somewhere near, under the laurel, was the rabbit’s grave. She remembered
that evening, how she had been shaken with revelation. This was just
such another mysterious and poignant fall of the light: anything might
happen. Her senses were so overstrung that the slightest physical
impression hit her sharply, with a shock.

There on the raft was the curious young man Roddy. He raised his head
from the examination of an old red-painted canoe, and smiled when he saw
her.

‘I’m sent to say supper’s ready.’

‘Thank you very much. I’ll come.’

‘I’m staying to supper.’ She smiled radiantly at him, sure of herself
and full of an immense amusement.

‘I’m delighted.’

His golden-brown eyes sent her their clear and shallow light.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Seeing if this old canoe is sea-worthy. You see, there’s a leak, but I
don’t _think_ it’s anything much. I’ll leave her in the water
over-night. I want to rig her up with a sail.’ He stroked the canoe
lovingly.

‘You like going in boats, don’t you?’

‘I suppose I do rather.’

‘I like it too. Especially at night.’

But he would not give himself away. She saw him slipping down the
stream, alone in his canoe, the night before, but she was not to know
it, she could not say: ‘I saw you.’

He bent over his canoe, fingering the wood, then straightened himself
and stood looking down the long willow-bordered stretch of water. The
sun had gone out of it and it was a quiet grey limpid solitude. A white
owl flew over, swooping suddenly low.

‘There he goes,’ said Roddy softly. ‘He goes every evening.’

‘Yes, I know.’

She smiled still in her immense mysterious amusement. She saw him look
up at the poplar from whence the owl had come, and as he did so his
whole image was flung imperishably on her mind. She saw the portrait of
a young man, with features a trifle blurred and indeterminate, as if he
had just waked up; the dark hair faintly ruffled and shining, the
expression secret-looking, with something proud and sensual and cynical,
far older than his years, in the short full curve of his lips and the
heaviness of his under-lids. She saw all the strange blend of likeness
and unlikeness to the boy Roddy which he presented without a clue.

He caught her smile and smiled back, all his queer face breaking up in
intimate twinklings, and the mouth parting and going downward in its
bitter-sweet way. They smiled into each other’s eyes; and all at once
the light in his seemed to gather to a point and become fixed, dwelling
on her for a moment.

‘Well?’ he said at last; for they still lingered uncertainly, as if
aware of something between them that kept them hesitating, watching,
listening subconsciously, each waiting on the other for a decisive
action.

He spread out his hands and looked down at them; a nervous gesture and
look she remembered with a pang.

‘Yes, we must go,’ she said softly.

At supper he sat opposite to her, and twinkled at her incessantly, as if
encouraging her to continue to share with him a secret joke. But,
confused amongst them all, she had lost her sense of vast amusement and
assurance; she was unhappy because he was a stranger laughing at her and
she could not laugh back.

Beside him was the face of Martin, staring solemnly, with absorption,
watching her mouth when she spoke, her eyes when she glanced at him.

Thank God the meal was soon over.

       *       *       *       *       *

A gay clipped exhilarating dance tune sounded from the drawing-room.
Roddy had turned on the gramophone. He came and took Mariella without a
word and they glided off together. Judith stayed with Julian and Martin
in the verandah, looking in at them. She was frightened; she could not
dance, so she would be no use to Roddy.

‘Do you dance, Julian?’

‘No. At least only with two people.’

Alas,--wounding reminder of his elegant unknown world where she had no
place!... She blushed in the dusk.

‘Julian’s very lordly about his dancing;’ said Martin. ‘I expect he’s
rotten really.’

‘It may be,’ said Julian, stung and irritable. ‘It may be that I
therefore bestow the burden of my gyrations on the only two creatures of
my acquaintance whose rottenness equals mine. It may be that I derive
more satisfaction from the idea of this artistic whole of rottenness
than from the physical delights of promiscuous contact.’

‘It may be,’ said Martin pleasantly, unperturbed.

Julian hunched his shoulders and went away, clouded by a dreadful mood.

‘Poor old Ju,’ said Martin softly.

‘Yes, poor thing.’ Her voice implied how well she understood, and he
looked grateful.

In the drawing-room, Roddy and Mariella moved like a dream, smoothly
turning, pausing and swaying, quite silent.

‘Well, shall we?’ Martin smiled down at her.

Now she must confess.

‘I can’t, Martin, I don’t know how. I’ve never learnt. I haven’t
ever----’ Shame and despair flooded her.

‘Oh, you’ll soon learn,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Come and try.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

She glanced at the competent interweaving feet of Mariella and Roddy, at
Marietta’s slender back pivoting gracefully from the hips, at Roddy’s
composed dancing-face and shoulders. She could not let them see her
stumbling and struggling.

‘Well, come and practise in the hall. Here now. Can you hear the music?
Follow me. This is a fox-trot. Look, your feet between my feet. Now just
go backwards, following my movements. Don’t think about it. If you step
on my feet it’s my fault and _vice versa_. Now--short, _long_, short,
two short. Don’t keep your back so stiff,--quite free and supple but
quite upright.’

‘Do it by yourself,’ said Judith perspiring with anxiety. ‘Then I can
see.’

He chass;d solemnly round the hall, pausing now and then to show her how
he brought his feet together; then, with a firm hand on her
shoulder-blades he made her follow him.

‘That’s good. It’s coming. Oh, good! Sorry, that was my fault. You’ve
got the trick now.’

All at once the music had got into her limbs; it seemed impossible not
to move to it.

‘But you can!’ said Martin, letting her go and beaming at her in joyful
surprise.

‘Come back into the drawing-room,’ said Judith, exalted. They went.

‘Now,’ she said trembling.

Martin put his arm round her and they glided off. It was easier than
walking, it was more delicious than swimming or climbing; her body had
always known how it was done. Martin looked down at her with eloquent
eyes and said:

‘You know, you’re marvellous. I didn’t know anyone could learn so
quickly.’

‘It’s because I’ve had such a good teacher,’ she said sweetly.

They went on dancing, and every now and then she looked up and smiled at
him and his eyes shone and smiled in answer, happy because of her
pleasure. He really was a dear. In his looks he had improved beyond
expectation. He was still a little red, a little coltish and untidy, but
his figure was impressive, with powerful heavy shoulders and narrow
hips; and the muscles of his thigh and calf bulged beneath his trousers.
His head with the brown wings of hair brushed flat and straight on it,
was finely set, his eyes were dark and warm, kindly rather than
intelligent; his nose was biggish and thick, his mouth long, thin and
rather ineffectual, with a faint twitch at one corner,--the corner that
lifted first, swiftly, when he smiled his frequent shy smile. His teeth
were magnificent; and he smelt a little of Virginian cigarettes.

‘You must dance with Roddy,’ said Martin. ‘He’s ever so much better than
I am.’

Roddy and Mariella were dancing in the porch now, not speaking or
looking about them. The record came to an end, but they went on whirling
while Martin sought a new tune and set it going; then they glided
forward again.

Roddy had forgotten her: she was not up to his dancing.

At last Mariella stopped and disengaged herself.

‘I want to dance with Martin now,’ she said.

Roddy left her and strolled over to Judith.

‘Been giving Martin a dancing-lesson?’ he said.

‘Goodness, no! He’s been teaching me. I didn’t know how.’

‘Oh?--How did you get on?’

‘Quite well, thank you. It’s easy. I _think_ I can dance now.’

‘Good!’

It was plain he was not interested; or else was incredulous. He thought
she was just a stumbling novice; he was not going to dance with her or
even offer to go on teaching her. Roddy would never have bothered to
give her hints or be patient while she was awkward. He was so good
himself that he could not condescend to incompetence. But Judith,
still, though more doubtfully, exalted, said:

‘Shall we dance?’

He looked surprised.

‘All right. Certainly. Just let me cool down a bit.’

He was not in any hurry. He sat on the table and watched Marietta’s
neatly moving feet.

‘She’s good at her stuff,’ he said.

‘Do you adore dancing?’

‘Well, I don’t know that I adore it. It’s fun once in a way.’

‘It seems funny not to be mad about a thing if you can do it so
beautifully.’

He looked at her with amusement.

She must remember not to ask Roddy if he adored things. His secret life
went on in a place where such states of feeling were unknown.

‘Shall we?’ he said at last.

She was not going to be able to do it; the rhythm had gone out of her
limbs. He was going to be too good for her and she would stumble and he
would get disgusted and not dance with her any more....

After a few moments of anguish, suddenly she could, after all. Long
light movements flowed from her body.

Roddy looked down.

‘But you can dance,’ he said.

‘I told you I could. You didn’t believe me.’

He laughed.

‘You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never danced before?’

‘Never.’

‘Swear?’

‘Cross my heart.’

‘But of course,’ said Roddy, ‘you couldn’t help dancing, such a
beautiful mover as you.’

He had really said that! She lifted her face and glowed at him: life was
too, too rich.

The music came to an end. Roddy stood still with his arm round her waist
and called imperiously to Martin for another tune.

‘Come on,’ he said, and tightened his arm round her. You might almost
dare to suppose he was a little, a very little exalted too.

‘But you do love it, Roddy!’

He looked down at her and smiled.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Roddy!’

She was silenced by happiness.

They were alone now. Martin and Mariella were on the verandah, and she
heard Mariella say:

‘Darlin’ Martin, fetch me my coat.’

‘Mariella’s very fond of Martin, isn’t she?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose she is. What makes you think so?’

‘I just heard her call him darling just now.’

He laughed.

‘Oh yes. She does that now and again.’

‘She doesn’t call you darling,’ said Judith twinkling.

‘No. Nobody ever does.’

‘Not anybody,--ever?’

‘Not _any_body--_ever_.’

‘What a pity! And it _is_ so enjoyable to be called darling.’

‘I’ve no doubt it is. I tell you I’ve no experience.’ He peered into her
face, and repeated piteously: ‘Nobody _ever_ does.’

Judith laughed aloud.

‘I will,’ she heard her own voice saying.

‘You really will?’

She waited.

‘Go on,’ he urged.

The word would not come.

‘Go on, go on!’ he shouted triumphantly.

‘Oh, be quiet!’

‘Please!...’

‘No....’

She hid her face away from him and blushed. Laughing silently he
gathered her up and started whirling, whirling. A deeper dream started.
The room was a blur, flying, sinking away; only Roddy’s dark red tie and
the line of his cheek and chin above it were real.

She laughed and gasped, clinging to him.

‘Giddy?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

He stopped and looked at her amusedly.

‘Oh, I _am_.’

She threw out an arm blindly and he caught it and supported her.

‘Come out on the verandah and get sober,’ he said.

The spring night greeted them with a chill fragrance. Roddy’s eyes were
so bright that she could see them shining, brimming with amusement in
the dim light.

‘What are you looking at, Roddy?’

‘You.’

‘I can see your eyes. Can you see mine?’ He bent his head over hers.

‘Yes, of course. They’re like stars. Lovely dark eyes.’

‘_Are_ they?... Roddy paying compliments,--how funny! Roddy, I remember
you. Do you remember yourself when we were children?’

‘Not much. I never remember the past. I suppose I’m not interested
enough--or interesting enough.’

She felt checked, and dared not ask the ‘What do you remember about me?’
which should have opened the warm little paths of childish reminiscence.
Roddy had no desire to recall the uninteresting figures of himself and
the little girl Judith: that trifling relationship had been brushed away
as soon as it had ceased. She must realize that, for him, no long
threads came dragging from the web of the past, tangling the present.

She stared into the dark garden, wondering what safe topic to propose.

‘When do you go back to Paris, Roddy?’

‘Oh,--soon, I suppose.’

‘Do you work very hard there?’

‘Terribly hard.’

‘Drawing or painting?’

‘Some of both. Nothing of either.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t show me some of your things?’

‘Couldn’t. I’ve nothing here. I’m having a rest.’ He twinkled at her.

‘What a pity! I should so have loved.... Which are you best at, drawing
or painting?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Drawing, I think. But I’m not any good. I just waste
time.’

‘Why do you?’

‘Why indeed?’

‘How funny! If I could draw I’d draw all day. I’d be so excited at being
able to, I’d go on and on. I’d be so horrid and enthusiastic. I wouldn’t
have any sense of humour about it. You’d think me _nauseating_, wouldn’t
you?’

He nodded, smiling.

‘But I’d _draw_. I’d be the best drawer in the world. Oh, you are lucky!
I do envy people with a specialty, and I do love them. Isn’t it funny
how fingers take naturally to one form of activity and not to another?
Mine--mine--’ she spread them out and looked at them--‘mine wouldn’t
draw if I spent all my life trying to make them; but--they know how to
touch a piano--only a little of course; but they _understand_ that
without having it explained. And some fingers can make lovely things
with a needle and thread and a bit of stuff. There’s another mystery!
Then there are the machine makers, and the ones that can use knives like
artists to take away bits of people or put bits in,--and the ones that
can remove pain just by touching.... Some people _are_ their hands,
aren’t they? They understand with them. But most people have idiot
hands,--destroyers. Roddy, why are some of our senses always idiots? All
my senses are semi-imbecile, and I’m better off than lots of people, I
suppose. Seems to me, what they call the norm is practically idiot, and
any departure is just a little more or less so. Yet one has this _idea_
of perfection----’

She stopped abruptly. He was not interested, and his face in the wan
light was a blank which might be hiding mockery or distrust of a girl
who affected vaporous philosophizings, trying, no doubt, to appear
clever. She flushed. Such stuff had been her food for years, chewed over
secretly, or confided to the one friend, the Roddy of her imagination;
and here she was in the foolishness of her elation pouring it out to
this unmoved young man who thought--she _must_ remember this--that he
was meeting her for the first time. It was plain, it must be plain to
him, that she was a person with no notion of the rules of behaviour.

‘Come back and dance,’ suggested Roddy at last.

It was curious how much easier it was to get on with Roddy if he had an
arm round you. His mind, the whole of him, came freely to meet you then;
there was entire happiness, entire peace and harmony. It was far more
difficult to find him on the plane where only minds, not senses, had
contact,--the plane on which a Julian, one whose physical touch could
never be desirable, was reached without any groping. Roddy put something
in the way. He guarded himself almost as if he suspected you of trying
to catch him out; or of taking an impertinent interest in him. His mind
would be thrilling if you could dig it out: all hidden and withheld
things were.

‘I don’t want ever to stop,’ she said suddenly.

‘We won’t,’ he promised and held her closer, as if he were as much
caught away and dazed as she.

He bent his head and whispered laughingly:

‘Just say it.’

‘Say what?’

‘That word you like--in your delicious voice--just as a kindness.’

‘No, I won’t--now.’

‘When will you?’

‘You are naughty, Roddy.... Perhaps when I know you better.’

‘You’ll never know me better than you do now.’

‘Don’t say that. Why do you?’

‘There’s nothing more to know.’

‘Oh, if there’s nothing more to know, then you are----’

‘What?’

‘More or less--as far as I can tell----’

‘What?’

She whispered.

‘A darling.’

‘Ah, thank you.’ He added rapidly, in the full soft voice of laughter:
‘Thank you, darling.’

‘Now we’ve both said it. Roddy, aren’t we absurd?’

‘No, very sensible.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I adored it.’

‘Roddy, are we flirting?’

‘Are we?’

‘If we are, it’s your fault. You make me feel sort of stimulated. I
didn’t flirt with Martin.’

‘I’m very glad to hear it. Martin wouldn’t have liked it at all.’

They laughed and danced on. He held her very close, the cold rim of his
ear touching her forehead.

‘To think I’ve never danced before!’

‘Why haven’t you?’

‘Nobody to dance with.’

‘Nobody?’

‘Nobody at all.’

‘Have you been living on your little lone since I went away?’

‘Ever since then.’

‘Well, now I’ve come back we’ll dance a lot, won’t we?’

‘Oh yes. But you’ll disappear again, I know you will.’

‘Not yet. And not for long.’

She could have cried, he was so comforting.

He spun, holding her tightly, stopped, held her a moment more, and let
her go as the record came to an end. She watched him as he went, with
that secret of idle grace in his movements, to switch off the
gramophone. He looked pale and composed as ever, while she was flushed,
throbbing and exhausted with excitement. She stood at the open French
windows and leaned towards the cool night air; and he found her silent
when he came back.

‘A penny for them, Judith.’

‘I was thinking--what extraordinary things one says. I suppose it’s the
dancing. It seems so incredibly easy to behave as one naturally
wouldn’t----’

‘I find that myself,’ he said solemnly.

‘The--the unsuitable things that generally stay inside one’s head,--they
spring to one’s lips, don’t they?’

‘They do.’

‘Values are quite changed. Don’t you think so?’

She must make him realize that she was not really a cheap flirtatious
creature: re-establish her dignity in his eyes. She had behaved so
lightly he might be led to think of her and treat her without respect,
and laugh at her behind her back after she had ceased to divert him. It
was very worrying.

‘Quite, quite changed,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it queer? I suppose--it doesn’t do much harm? One oughtn’t to
think worse of a person for----’

He threw back his head to laugh at his ease, silently, as always, as if
his joke were too deep down and individual for audible laughter.

‘Are you laughing at me, Roddy?’

‘I can’t help it. You’re so terribly funny. You’re the funniest person
I’ve ever met.’

‘Why am I?’

‘You’re so incredibly serious.’

‘I’m not--not always.’

‘I’m afraid you are. I’m afraid you’re terribly introspective.’

‘Am I? Is that wrong? Roddy, please don’t laugh at me. It leaves me out
if you laugh by yourself like that. I could laugh _with_ you at any
thing, if you’d let me----’ she pleaded.

‘Anything--even yourself?’

She pondered.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps not. That’s a weakness, isn’t it?’

‘There you go again! Never mind about your weaknesses. I was only
teasing you. Let me see you smile.’

To obey him her lips went upwards sorrowfully; but when she saw his
laughing, coaxing face, her heart had to lift too.

‘Well you’re very nice anyway,’ he said, ‘serious or no. Have you
forgiven me?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, Roddy.’

As she said it she realised with a passing prophetic sense of
helplessness and joy and fear that whatever he did she would always
inevitably forgive him. But she must not tell him that, yet.

Martin and Mariella came strolling back from the garden, the spark of
their cigarettes going before them. She heard Mariella’s little laugh
bubbling out contentedly, her childish voice answering his in an easy
chatter. Yes, Mariella was happy with Martin. He was polite and kind to
her, and she was equal to him without effort. As she came into the light
Judith was struck afresh by the lack of all emphasis, the careful
absence of any one memorable feature in the memorable whole of her
beauty. Her lovely athletic body effaced itself in simple clothes of no
particular fashion or cut; subdued in colour, moderately long,
moderately low in their necks and short in their sleeves,--negative
clothes that nevertheless were distinguished, and said “Mariella” and
nothing else in the world.

It was time to go.

‘Oh, must you?’ said Mariella.

Roddy said not a word. He had detached himself as soon as the others
came in, and was idly busy in a corner, tuning a guitar. Either he had
not heard or was not interested. It seemed impossible that his face had
been off its guard a few minutes ago, warming and lighting in swift
response.

Julian lounged in again silently, a book in his hand. He looked tired
and fierce, as if daring her to remember his recent lapse into
friendliness. The strange disheartening people....

She stammered: ‘Well, good-night everybody. Thank you so much.’

‘One of the boys will see you home,’ said Mariella dubiously.

‘Oh no. It isn’t necessary. I’ll just climb over the wall if the gate’s
locked. I shall be quite all right, honestly....’

There was no need to protest. They dismissed the matter in silence.

‘Well, come in any time,’ said Mariella.

But any time was no good. She had dreaded just such a non-committal
invitation. Any time probably meant never. Despondently she looked back
to smile her thanks; and as her eyes took in the group of them standing
there looking at her, she felt suddenly startled.

But they were all alike!

So strange, so diverse in feature and colour, they yet had grown up with
this overpowering likeness; as if one mind had thought them all out and
set upon them, in spite of variations, the unmistakable stamp of itself.
Alone among all the tall distinguished creatures Roddy made sharp
departure, and preserved, though not wholly intact, the profounder
individuality of his unimportant features.


4

It was some weeks later. The day had been long and fruitless. She had
idled through the hours, playing the piano, reading ‘_Pecheurs
d’Islande_’ with voluptuous sorrow, doing nothing. A letter from her
mother in Paris had arrived in the afternoon. They were not coming home
just yet. Father had caught another of his colds and seemed so exhausted
by it. He was in bed and she was nursing him, and it had meant
cancelling his party, that party. Why should not Judith come out and
join them, now that her examinations were over? It would amuse her; and
Father would be glad to have her. They would expect her in a few days;
she was old enough now to make the journey by herself.

Her heart was heavy. She could not leave the house, the spring garden,
this delicious solitude, these torturing and exquisite hopes. How could
she drag herself to Paris when she dared not even venture beyond the
garden for fear of missing them if they came for her? If she went now,
the great opportunity would be gone irrevocably; they would slip from
her again just as life was beginning to tremble on the verge of
revelation. She must devise an excuse; but it was difficult. She
swallowed a few mouthfuls of supper and wandered back into the library.

The last of the sun lay in the great room like blond water, lightly
clouded, still, mysterious. The brown and gold and red ranks of the dear
books shone mellow through it, all round the room from the floor three
quarters way to the ceiling; the Persian rugs, the Greek bronzes on the
mantlepiece, the bronze lamps with their red shades, the tapestry
curtains, the heavy oak chairs and tables, all the dim richnesses, were
lit and caressed by it into a single harmony. The portrait of her father
as a dark-eyed, dark-browed young man of romantic beauty was above the
level of the sun, staring sombrely down at his possessions. She could
sit in this room, especially now with hair brushed smooth and coiled low
across the nape, defining the lines of head and neck and the clear
curve of the jaw,--she could sit alone here in her wine-red frock and
feel part of the room in darkness and richness and simplicity of line;
decorating it so naturally that, if he saw, his uncommunicating eyes
would surely dwell and approve.

She and the young man of the portrait recognised each other as of the
same blood, springing with kindred thoughts and dreams from a common
root of being, and with the same physical likeness at the source of
their unlikeness which she had noticed in the cousins next-door. She was
knit by a heart-pulling bond to the portrait; through it, she knew she
loved the elderly man whose silent, occasional presence embarrassed her.

There was sadness in everything,--in the room, in the ringing bird-calls
from the garden, in the lit, golden lawn beyond the window, with its
single miraculous cherry-tree breaking in immaculate blossom and tossing
long foamy sprays against the sky. She was sad to the verge of tears,
and yet the sorrow was rich,--a suffocating joy.

The evening held Roddy clasped within its beauty and mystery: he was
identified with its secret.

‘Oh, Roddy, I love you! I’ve always loved you.’

Oh, the torment of loving!

But soon the way would open without check and lead to the happy ending.
Surely it had started to open already.

The pictures came before her.

Roddy playing tennis,--playing a characteristic twisty game that
irritated his opponents, and made him laugh to himself as he ran and
leapt. His eyes forgot to guard themselves and be secret: they were
clear yellow-brown jewels. She was his partner, and with solemn fervour
she had tried to play as she had never played before, for his sake, to
win his admiration. But he was not the sort of partner who said: “Well
played!” or “Hard lines.” He watched her strokes and looked amused, but
was silent even when she earned him victory after victory.

Afterwards she said:

‘Oh, Roddy, I love tennis. Don’t you?’

He answered indifferently:

‘Sometimes,--when they let me do as I like; when I’m not expected to
play what they call properly. One of my lady opponents once told me I
played a most unsporting game. “My intelligence, however corrupt, is
worth all your muscle”--was what I did not just then think of saying to
her. She was in a temper, that lady.’

She smiled at him, thinking how she loved the feel of her own body
moving obediently, the satisfaction of achieving a perfect stroke, the
look of young bodies in play and in repose,--especially his; and she
hazarded:

‘I love it just for the movement. I love movement,--the look of people
in motion and the thought and feel of my own movements. I suppose I am
too solemn over it. I want so much to do it as well as I can. I’m solemn
because I’m excited. I sometimes think I would like above all things to
be the best dancer in the world,--or the best acrobat; or failing that,
to watch dancers and acrobats for ever.’

Looking back on their few but significant conversations, she decided
that there was something about him which invited confidences while
seeming to repel them. Though his response--if it came at all or came
save in silent laughter--was uncoloured by enthusiasm and unsweetened by
sympathy, he made her feel that he understood and even pondered in
secret over her remarks.

‘There are some things I tell you, Roddy, that I tell no one else. They
make themselves be told. Often I haven’t known they were inside me.’ She
rehearsed this silently. One day she would say it aloud to him.

Then she had added:

‘Do you still caricature, Roddy?’

‘Now and then,--when I feel like it.’

‘It is funny how a caricature impresses a likeness on you far quicker
and more lastingly than a good portrait. Do you remember you once did
one of me when we were little and I cried?’

‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘Do you see everybody with their imperfections exaggerated--always?’

‘Only with one eye. That’s my defence. The other has so frequently to be
shut--or wounded. But there’s a great deal of ;sthetic pleasure to be
had from the contemplation of monsters.’

‘I suppose the temptation is to shut the normal one more and more until
finally it ceases to work; especially if the other one has a greater
facility. And it has, hasn’t it, Roddy?’

‘Perhaps. You must stay by me and counteract it.’

‘Which is it?’ she looked at him laughing.

He shut one eye.

‘I shut it entirely to look at you,’ he said.

Afterwards when she played again, a single with Martin, he lay on the
bank, indolent after his burst of energy, watching her long after the
others had lost interest and gone indoors. Passing him once, she had
closed one eye and looked at him inquiringly; and all his face had
broken up in warm delighted twinklings. He did welcome the most trivial
jokes from her; and they were always trivial, and not nearly frequent
enough.

Next time had been the time of Julian’s extremely bad temper. He had
played tennis with malice and vicious cuts and nasty exclamations of
triumph. Over Roddy’s face slid down the mask of deadly obstinacy which
was his anger.

He came from the game and flung himself on the bank without a word,
while Julian remained on the court, peevishly patting balls about.

‘He annoys me,’ said Roddy after a bit, watching him under heavy lids.
Presently he took a piece of paper from his pocket and worked in
silence.

‘Roddy, may I see it?’

He made no reply; but after a few more minutes he flung it over to her.

It was a terrible success (Julian had always been the most successful
subject); and it was devilish as well as funny.

‘Oh, Roddy!’ She began to giggle.

‘Sh! Lookout! He’s coming back.’

He snatched the paper from her and crushed it up.

‘Oh, let me keep it.’

‘Well, don’t let him see it. He hates it.’

He flung it hurriedly into her lap as Julian came up; and as she stuffed
it into her pocket with studied carelessness, his lips suddenly
relinquished the last of his obstinacy, and he flashed her a look
suffused with laughter and the sense of shared guilt. Surely he had
never looked at anyone before with such irresistible intimacy and
appeal. The less assured face of the child Roddy peered for a moment in
that look; but the dark and laughing fascination was new and belonged to
the young man; and she melted inwardly at the remembrance of it.

Then there had been the time Martin and Roddy had come to tea--so
exciting a little time that she still dwelt on it with beating heart.

She felt again her delighted astonishment at sight of the pair of them
coming up the garden. She had washed her hair and was drying it in the
sun when they appeared; it was spread in a mass round her shoulders and
down to her waist, and she was brushing the last of the damp out of it.

‘Hullo!’ said Martin.

‘Hullo!’

They came smiling up to her.

‘Are you busy?’ said Martin.

‘No, only washing my hair. Please excuse it.’

‘We like it,’ said Roddy. He watched her brushing, combing it and
shaking it back over her shoulders as if fascinated.

‘Are you doing anything this afternoon?’ said Martin.

‘Oh no!’--eagerly.

‘Shall we be in the way?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then may we come to tea?’

‘Oh! Will you really?’

‘Julian has got some tiresome people we don’t like, so we escaped, and
Roddy suggested coming to find you.’

Roddy raised his eyebrows, smiling faintly.

‘Well, we both suggested it,’ continued Martin with a blush. ‘May we
really stay?’

Which, oh, which of them had suggested it?...

‘Will you wait here while I go and put my hair right?’

‘It’s not dry yet,’ said Roddy. ‘Let me brush it at the back for you.’

She stood still in embarrassed pleasure while he brushed and combed her
hair.

‘You do it beautifully. You don’t pull a bit.’

‘I’m a good hairdresser. I brush my mother’s when her maid’s out.’

‘Has she got lovely hair?’

‘Goodish. Very long. Not such lumps of it as this though.’ He took up a
handful and weighed it. ‘Extraordinary stuff.’

It was the first time that she had ever heard him mention his mother.
Why, Roddy must have a home life, a whole background of influences and
associations of which she knew nothing.... She felt startled and
anxious; and the old ache at being left out, failing to possess, stirred
in her.

She saw him brushing his mother’s hair with careful hands. His mother
had long dark hair perfumed deliciously. She had a pale society face,
and she sat before her brilliantly lit dressing table wearing a rich
wrap and pearls, and put red on her lips, and made Roddy fetch and carry
for her about the bedroom. They talked and laughed together. She had
never heard of Judith.

Judith dismissed the picture.

Roddy went on brushing, while Martin stared and smiled at her. They made
a most intimate-looking little group. She thought of herself for a
moment as their sister. Roddy would often brush her hair for her if she
was his sister, or if....

‘There!’ said Roddy. ‘_Je vous f;licite, Mademoiselle._’ He adjusted
her tortoiseshell slide and bowed to her with the hairbrush over his
heart.

‘I love your garden,’ said Martin.

She showed them the garden and then the house. They asked questions and
admired the furniture and the rare books she picked out for them in the
library.

‘When Daddy comes back you must meet him,’ she said. ‘He’d love to show
you his books.’

She was sure he would like such appreciative young men.

‘I’d like to meet him awfully,’ said Martin. ‘I’ve often heard about
him.’

She glowed.

‘No wonder you’re a bookworm, Judy,’ said Roddy, searching the shelves
with absorbed eyes. ‘I’d be myself if I had this always round me.’

He could hardly tear himself away from browsing and gazing.

In the hall hung a water-color portrait of Judith at the age of six.

‘Ah!’ said Roddy. ‘I remember you like this.’

He looked from her to the portrait, and then at her again, as if
remembering and comparing, and dwelling on the face she smilingly lifted
to him until she had to drop her eyes.

They had tea in the drawing-room,--exquisite China tea in the precious
Nankin cups which always appeared for visitors. Everything in the house
was precious and exquisite: she had never realized it before; and she
thought:

‘Now that they have seen me in my beautiful home, against my own
background, the only daughter of such richness, they will think more of
me.’

It certainly seemed so. Conversation flowed happily about nothing. She
was, for the first time, completely at her ease; and they listened with
interest,--even with a sort of deference, as if they thought her rather
a special person.

After tea they went down to the river. The westering sun spread on the
water as far as eye could see in a full embrace of shining light.

‘Let’s bathe,’ said Martin.

They ran next door for their bathing suits while she undressed in the
boathouse. Then they returned and undressed behind the boathouse; and
they all plunged into the water together.

Judith and Roddy stood on the raft, watching Martin diving sideways, and
backwards and forwards, always perfectly, his magnificent muscle
swelling and rippling as he moved. He swam and dived with a faultless
ease of technique, as if he could never tire.

But Roddy would not exert himself. After two swift arrow-like dives he
stood on the raft looking funny and boyish, with his hair plastered
close over his head and his too-slender body shivering slightly. She
noticed how delicately he was made in spite of his height. He had the
look of a cat, graceful, narrow and lazy; and his skin was almost as
smooth as her own.

When she dived he watched her body and all her movements closely; and
she wondered whether his artist’s eye were detecting the faults and
virtues of her form and if she compared at all favorably with his models
in Paris.

She swam a little and talked to Martin, and came back to the raft.

‘Have you had enough, Roddy?’

‘Soon.’

‘Do you prefer watching?’

‘I always prefer watching.’

It was true. He would watch with deep concentration while others moved
and took exercise, as if he were drawing them in his mind or getting
them by heart; but his own impulses towards physical activity were rare
and of brief duration.

‘I like swimming,’ said Judith; careful not to say she adored it.

‘You do it very nicely.’

‘But this is dull compared with swimming at night.’

‘Ah!’

‘Have you ever done that?’

‘No, never.’

‘You don’t need to wear a bathing-suit then. It’s far more delicious
with nothing on.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘I do it quite often.’

Now she was going to tell him something she had never meant to tell him.
She could not stop herself. As if he were expecting it, he turned his
face to hers, and waited.

‘I saw you once when I was bathing. It was before we met again. You were
in a canoe, alone, and I knew it was you. I watched you go past.’

‘I know you did.’

‘You----?’

‘I saw you,’ he said.

She was paralysed; and of the questions which flooded her mind not one
could be spoken.

She lifted her eyes and saw his weighing on her, making her answer him,
with something heavy and fixed, dazed almost, at the back of their clear
shining. She gazed back; and in a moment was lost, sinking in timeless
soundless darkness and clinging to his eyes while she drowned.

It was all over in the duration of two or three heavy heart beats: and
then they were standing together aimlessly, shivering in wet
bathing-suits and Martin came all streaming and fresh from the water and
broke in upon them with cheerful upbraidings.

They parted from her with happy thanks and friendly looks, and Roddy
said that some day he would come and spend a whole afternoon in the
library if he might; and then instead of the casual: ‘See you again
soon’ which she dreaded, they gave her a specific invitation to a picnic
in two days’ time.

That had been the last time.

It was a day without sun. The muffled light fell all day across the
countryside as if through faintly shining bluish glass; and beneath it
the spring held itself withdrawn and still, as unchanging as a picture.
Around the gentle green of the picnic meadow was the wild and ardent
green of the little hedge; and here and there across the hedge, the
blackthorn flung great scatters of frail-spun snow. Beyond the meadow
the larch copse was lit all over with plumes of green fire; and upon its
fringes, pure against the dim purple-brown of its tangled trunks, a
stripling tree or so sprinkled its fresh leaves out upon the darkness
like a swarm of green moths arrested in flight. Everywhere was the
lavish, pouring green, smouldering and weighed-down with the ache of
life, and quiet, quiet, turned inward upon itself and consuming its own
heart. Everywhere the white blossom, as it rose, freed itself lightly
from its roots in earth’s pangs of passion and contemplation, and,
floating upon the air, kept but one secret, which was beauty, paid no
heed, gave no sign.

Roddy lay with his head in the moss, sniffing at primroses, nibbling
grasses, teasing Martin under his breath, watching them all with
half-closed eyes.

Everyone was quiet and happy; all the peevishness was gone, all the
tension smoothed out. The cigarette smoke curled in patterns into the
still air; and now and again the Spring stirred, shook out a long breath
of blossom and leaf and wet earth; and then was tranced again.

They made a wood fire and watched it sink to crumbling feathery ash
round a glowing core; and they ate oranges and tomatoes and very young
small lettuces stolen from the garden by Martin who was still, so Roddy
said, a tiger for raw vegetables. But there were no onions: he declared
he had given them up.

Nothing memorable was said or done, yet all seemed significant, and her
happiness grew to such a poignant ecstasy that her lips trembled. She
rolled over and hid her face in her hands for fear it should betray her
by indecent radiance; but nobody noticed. Their eyes looked calm and
dreaming: even Mariella’s had a less blind stare, a depth of meditation.

If only the moment could stay fixed, if their strange and thoughtful
faces could enclose her safely for ever in their trance of contentment,
if she could be able to want nothing from them beyond a share of their
unimpassioned peace: if only these things could be, they would be best.
For a moment they seemed possible; for a moment she achieved a summit
and clung briefly to it, tasting the cool taste of no desire. But it
would not do: it was the taste of being old and past wanting
people,--past wanting Roddy who already tasted so sharply and sweetly
that she must have more of him and more of him; and whose presence in
the circle made collective indifference a pretence too bleak to strive
for.

The sun flooded the meadow all at once in a tide of pallid light; and
the earth ceased to struggle and brood in the dark coil of itself, and
spread itself smiling and released. The spell within the clouded crystal
of the afternoon broke; they stretched and stirred. Judith looked up at
the big elm.

‘Who can climb this?’ she said.

‘Up with you,’ said Martin.

She climbed as she had not climbed since childhood, lifting herself
lightly, unhesitatingly from branch to branch. At the top she looked
down and saw them all small beneath her, looking up. Boldly from her
eminence she called to the little creatures to come up; but not one of
them would.

She descended again, feeling young and silly in the face of their lack
of physical ambition. But they were all smiling upwards to receive her.
Martin held his hands up to her and she took them and jumped from the
bottom bough.

‘You haven’t forgotten your stuff,’ he said, and his eyes dwelt on her
with their faithful brown look.

‘I wish I could do that,’ said Mariella. ‘I never could.’

‘And now,’ said Julian, ‘divert us with a hand spring or so,’--and his
harsh face looked half-amused, half-clouded with an odd look,--almost
like jealousy.

He had never been really pleased with the spectacle of other people’s
successes: He found it too bitter not to be himself the one to excel.
But he could not trouble her to-day or make her doubtful.

Roddy said nothing,--only looked at her out of glinting, twinkling eyes.

It was time to go home.

She parted from them gaily, taking her immense happiness with her
unbroken, for once stepping clear out of the day into sleep with it
wrapped round her.

But now, when she looked back for that day, it was a million miles
behind her, floating unsubstantially like a wisp of shining mist: and
all that returned to her out of it, clear and whole, were two detached
impressions which, at the time, had barely brushed her consciousness:
the look of young lilac-leaves with the sun on them, glittering above
the garden-gate where she had bidden them good-bye; and the expression
she had surprised on Mariella’s face some time in that day,--but when,
she had forgotten.

Whatever had disturbed Mariella’s face then, it had not been happiness.
The other faces, even Roddy’s, had unaccountably become blurred in the
mist; but Mariella’s came back again and again, as if to stress the
significance of its momentary defencelessness; as if, could it only be
solved, there, in a flash, would be the whole clue to Mariella.

       *       *       *       *       *

She got up and studied her hair in the mirror above the mantelpiece.
While she stared there came a tap on the window behind her. She turned
and there was Roddy peering through the pane and laughing at her. She
ran to the window and opened it.

‘Roddy!’

It did not seem possible that he should have come when she wanted him so
badly.

‘I’ve knocked twice. You were too busy to hear me.’

‘I’ve put my hair up.’

‘It’s ravishing. Will you please come in it to a fireworks party which
Martin is giving in about an hour’s time?’

‘Fireworks! of all heavenly things! Hurrah for Martin!’

‘He only thought of it this afternoon, and he dashed into the town and
bought up the whole stock. He sent me to fetch you. He says he must
have you. Julian’s terrified of the big rocket and he wants you to
persuade him to light it. And you’re to stay to supper afterwards.
Mariella’s away for the night. Can you face it?’

‘Oh, how glorious!’

He gave her a hand and she jumped out of the window.

Roddy was in his best mood. He was friendly and talkative; his face was
almost wide awake; his very hair looked alert, ruffled about his
forehead; and he was sunburnt and clear-eyed, at his ease in grey
flannels and yellow shirt and an ancient navy-blue coat.

The river had an enchanted beauty and stillness in the half-light. It
was moon-coloured, with a dying flush in it; faint opal flickers lit the
ripples that broke away on either side of the canoe.

‘It won’t be dark enough for a while, yet,’ said Roddy.

‘They’ll wonder where I am.’

‘Why? Didn’t you tell them?’

‘They didn’t know I’d slip off so soon.’

She blushed. It really looked as if Roddy had come early in order to
have a little time alone with her. He would not say so; but he twinkled
and smiled so gaily that she smiled back at him, as if giving him secret
for delightful secret.

‘They’ll tease me,’ he declared.

‘No. Will they?’

‘Yes, I assure you----’

‘How silly!’

‘Isn’t it? Do you know, they’ll suspect us of the most desperate
flirtation on this exquisite secluded river.’

‘_Will_ they?’ She was troubled.

‘What common minds! As if a man couldn’t be alone with a girl without
making love to her.’

‘Oh, I do agree, Roddy.’

He threw back his head and laughed silently: he had been laughing all
the time. And it had seemed for a moment that Roddy was prepared for the
first time in her memory to have a little serious conversation.

‘Oh, Roddy, how you do laugh at me!’

‘I can’t help it, Judy. You are so incredibly solemn. You don’t mind, do
you? Please don’t mind. I adore people who make me laugh.’

It was that his laughter left her out, making her feel heavy and
unhumorous. If only he would teach her to play with him, how quick and
apt he would find her!

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Only I do wish I could be ready for you.’

Being himself, was Roddy more likely or less likely to fall in love with
a person he never took seriously?

‘You’d forgive anybody, however badly they treated you, wouldn’t you,
Judy?’

‘Forgiving or not forgiving doesn’t mean much to me. I never could feel
wronged. I might not be able to help feeling hurt, but _forgiveness_
wouldn’t come into it.’

‘Hmm!’ said Roddy. ‘Are you sure you’re so civilized? Personally I never
forgive anybody anything. I’m like God. I love my grievances, and want
people to feel them.’

‘I know you’re laughing really. I know it isn’t true, what you say.’

He said quickly, quite seriously:

‘I never would forgive a person who made a fool of me.’

‘I wouldn’t _like_ it; but if it only affected myself, it wouldn’t be
important. A thing that happens to yourself alone doesn’t _matter_.’ She
stopped and blushed painfully, thinking: ‘How he’ll mock.’ But instead
he looked at her gravely and nodded, saying:

‘I dare say you’re right.’

It was beginning to get dark.

He steered the canoe under the willows into narrow shadinesses, lit a
cigarette and lay back watching her.

‘And what will they teach you at college, Judy?’

No one but he knew how to say ‘Judy.’

‘I don’t know, Roddy. I’m rather frightened,--not about the
reading,--about the girls, all the people. I don’t understand a bit how
to live with lots of people. I never have. I shall make such mistakes.
It oppresses me, such a weight of lives crammed together in one
building, such a terrifying press of faces. I prefer living alone.’

‘Don’t get standardized, or I shan’t come and visit you.’

‘Will you come and visit me?’

‘If I ever find myself not too desperately busy,’ he said twinkling.

‘I shall look forward to that. Perhaps I’ll see Martin sometimes too.
Perhaps it won’t be so bad.... Roddy, do you realize I’ve never known
anyone of my own age except the gardener’s little girl and one or two
local children--and all of you? After you left, when we were little, I
was so lonely I.... You don’t know. Daddy would never let me be sent to
school. Now you’re back, I expect every day to wake up and find you all
vanished again.’

‘We shan’t vanish again.’

‘If only I were sure!’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Oh, you! You’re the most vanishing of all. You slip through my
fingers.’

‘Not I. It’s you who do that.’

‘I?’

‘Yes. You elude....’ He made a gesture with his hand. ‘I don’t
understand how you work. You’re an enigma. You intrigue me.’

‘I’m very glad.’

‘And I’m afraid of you.’

‘You’re not. You’re only amused at me.’

‘No. You’re wrong.’

He fell silent, smoking and watching her; all his attention fixed in his
eyes. It was as if he could not look away. Her head swam, and she
stammered:

‘What are you thinking?’

‘That it’s a good thing we--agree so--completely about the standards of
conduct proper between the sexes; otherwise it might be a good thing
you’re so exceptionally forgiving.’ His voice had an edge of question.

‘Roddy, what are you talking about?’

‘Nothing. A slight emotional conflict,--now resolved.’

He sat up suddenly, brushing some mood all in a minute from his mind and
his eyes and his voice. He lit another cigarette and started paddling.

Supposing Roddy had been going to say: ‘Kiss me?’ ... Better not to
think about it.

The stars were bright now: it must be dark enough for Martin’s
fireworks. Things were happening next-door: Martin was preparing to
celebrate in earnest. He had hung a row of fairy lanterns all along the
eaves of the verandah, and the lights glowed rose, blue, green and white
among the leaves of the vine. His shadowy figure was moving on the lawn,
and another moved beside it: that was Tony Baring, Roddy explained, his
friend and Martin’s, staying for the night. Julian was playing the
piano; he was visible in profile against the window.

‘What a party, Roddy! And I the only lady. Please protect me.’

‘Oh yes, we all will. We’ll each protect you against all the others, so
you’re fairly safe.’

A sudden light flared up in the garden.

‘Hey!’ said Martin’s voice. ‘Hi! Here everybody! My fireworks have
started. Where the hell has Roddy got to? I wanted----’

‘Here we are!’ shouted Judith. ‘Hullo, Martin! Martin! We’re here, we’re
watching. Hurrah for you, Martin!’

‘Oh good! Is that you, Judy? I’ve got some pretty hot stuff here.
Watch!’

He spoke in the anxious excited voice of a small boy displaying the
charms of his hobby to some indulgently attentive adult.

‘Oh, Martin, that’s splendid. Oooh, what a beauty! How I adore
fireworks!’

It was essential that dear Martin should be made to feel his fireworks a
success. They had behind them so eager a purpose of giving amusement to
others that they deserved tremendous encouragement. You felt he had
spent every penny of his pocket-money on them.

There was a shout of laughter and screams from Julian. He had left the
piano and was joining the others on the lawn; and the Catherine wheel
had broken loose and was after him, snapping and leaping at his heels.

A shower of golden sparks went up in a fountain and poured down over the
tulips and wall-flowers. Another followed; but this time the shower was
rainbow-coloured. The deep talk and laughter of Martin, Julian and Tony
was a strange not quite human chorus in the moonless dark.

‘Oh, Roddy, isn’t it exciting?’

‘It is indeed.’

The fireworks became more and more splendid. Long crystal-white cascades
broke and streamed down to the grass. Things went off in the air with a
soft delicious explosion and blossomed in great blazing coloured drops
that lingered downwards like a drift of slow petals.

‘Oh, Roddy, if only----! They’re so brief. I wish they were never
quenched but went on falling and falling, so lovely for ever. Would you
be content to burst into life and be a ten seconds’ marvel and then
vanish?’

But Roddy only smiled. On his face was the mask behind which he guarded
his personal pleasures and savoured them in secret.

Suddenly the willow-trees were revealed cloudily in a crude red
light,--then an aching green one,--then one like the concentrated
essence of a hundred moonlights. The three men on the lawn were outlined
in its glare, motionless, with their heads up. She heard Martin cursing.
Something was a complete failure: it spat twice, threw a thin spark or
so and went out. Then the big rocket took wings with a swift warning
hiss, left in its wake a thick firefly trail and broke at a great height
with a velvety choke of fulfilment and relief, bloomed rapidly in
perfect symmetry, a huge inverted gold lily,--then started dropping
slowly, flower unfurling wide from the heart of coloured flower all the
way down.

‘Roddy, look at that! Honestly, you feel anything so lovely must be made
by enchantment and thrown into the air with no cause behind it except
the--the stress of its own beauty. I can’t connect it with Bryant and
May, can you?’

Then all was gone. There was a splash. A swan drifting near the canoe
shook itself and swirled sharply, with puffed wings, into the shadows.
Roddy picked a charred stick out of the water and held it up.

‘Signs and wonders!’ he said. ‘The swan had a revelation too. Here’s a
remedy against fancy, Judy. Wouldn’t you like to keep it?’

‘Throw it away at once.’

He flipped it over his shoulder laughing.

The fireworks were over, and the three men were coming down towards the
water’s edge.

Roddy whispered:

‘Shall we escape?’

‘Oh....’

It was too late.

‘Hullo! Hullo!’ called the cheerful voice of Martin. ‘Did you enjoy my
fireworks?’

All at once there was much laughter and talk and greeting, and she was
drawn out of their exquisite aloofness into the voluble every-day
circle. Martin stretched an eager hand and out she stepped from the
canoe among them all. Half-dazed, she saw shadows of men standing round,
appearing and fading as in a dream, felt dream-like touches of men’s
hands; heard unreal voices bidding good-evening to Judith; was conscious
of dim confusion of movement towards the house. Did her own face rise so
wanly against the darkness, deep-shadowed under the features, a firm-cut
austere mask? Beneath the masks the hidden eyes held now and then a
straying gleam from the fairy-lanterns. It was all so nearly a sleeper’s
dream that to speak audibly seemed a vast effort.

Roddy strolled up from the river’s edge, having made fast the boat. He
came close and stood behind her shoulder, just touching it; and at once
the dream broke and every pulse was alert.

They went into the house for supper.

Tomato-sandwiches and cake, fruit-salad and bananas and cream, lemonade
and cider-cup loaded the table. Martin had prepared the whole thing
himself with a passion of judicious greed.

Tony Baring sat opposite and stared with liquid expressive blue eyes. He
had a sensitive face, changing all the time, a wide mouth with beautiful
sensuous lips, thick black hair and a broad white forehead with the
eyebrows meeting above the nose, strongly marked and mobile. When he
spoke he moved them, singly or together. His voice was soft and
precious, and he had a slight lisp. He looked like a young poet.
Suddenly she noticed his hands,--thin unmasculine hands,--queer
hands--making nervous appealing ineffectual gestures that contradicted
the nobility of his head. She heard him call Roddy ‘my dear’; and once
‘darling’; and had a passing shock.

There was a submerged excitement in the room. Mariella’s absence had
noticeable effect: there was a lightness of wit, an ebullience of talk
and laughter; gay quick voices answering each other.

The polished table was blotted over with pools of red candleshade, and
pale pools from the white tulips picked in honour of the guest. The
great mirror opposite reflected the table with all its muted colours;
reflected too the back of Tony’s broad head and a bit of Roddy in
curious profile, and her own face, lustrous-eyed, dark-lipped, long of
neck and mysterious. When she looked at it she thought it was
transfigured; and she knew who made the electric feeling.

It was time to go home.

But Roddy got up and started the gramophone; then caught her by the hand
and led her out on the verandah.

‘One dance,’ he said.

‘And then I must go.’

‘You dance better than ever to-night.’

‘It’s because I’m so enjoying myself.’

He laughed and tightened his arm round her.

‘Judy----’

‘Yes? Oh, Roddy, I do love it when you say “Judy.” Nobody else says it
like you.’

He bent his face to look into her lifted one with a soft hidden smile.

‘What were you going to say?’ she asked.

‘I forget. When you look at me with your enormous eyes I forget
everything I mean to say.’

The gramophone stopped abruptly, with a hideous snarl; and the form of
Julian darted forth like a serpent upon them.

‘You’ve waked the boy with that damned noise,’ he said. ‘I knew you
would.’

He was gone; and in the succeeding shock of quiet the wail of Peter
floated down to them. Quick footsteps sounded in the room above; and
suddenly there was silence.

‘Oh, Roddy, he was cross.’

‘Yes,’ said Roddy indifferently. ‘He’s fussier than twenty old Nannies.
The brat’s nurse has gone to see her sister buried, so he’s looking
after him.’

‘It’s funny how Julian seems to take charge of him, rather than
Mariella.’

‘Oh, Julian’s always got to know best. I expect he told her she couldn’t
be trusted with him. I believe they had words,--I don’t know. Anyway she
went off to London this afternoon to a dog show or something, and left
Julian triumphant.’ Roddy chuckled. ‘God, he’s a peculiar man.’

‘I never can believe that baby belongs to Mariella--and Charlie.’

But he gave her no response to that; although, as she spoke the name,
with stars, lights, voices, music, his shadowed face, all that was
lovely life around her, the pathos of that death struck her so wildly it
seemed he must feel it too and draw closer to her.

How he watched her!

‘Roddy, what are you thinking about?’

She pleaded silently, suffocated with strange excitement: ‘Let us be
frank. There’ll never be another night like this and soon we’ll be dead
too. On such a night let us not miss one delight, let us speak the truth
and not be afraid. Tell me you love me and I will tell you. You know
it’s true to-night. Never mind to-morrow.’

But he shook his head slowly, smiling.

‘I never tell.’

She turned to go into the house.

‘Nor I. But I think one day I will,--tell somebody, one person,
something--the truth, just once,--just to see how it feels.’

He followed her in silence into the house.

       *       *       *       *       *

Martin and Tony were lying in arm-chairs, looking sleepy.

‘Poor things--longing to go to bed. It’s all right, I’m going now. I
want to say good-night to Julian.’

On such a night Julian must not be left angry, alone. There must be no
failure on her part at least.

‘He’s with Peter.’

‘In his old room?’

‘Yes.’

‘I know. I’ll be back in a minute.’

She ran up the stairs. Dimmed light streamed through a door ajar in
front of her. It was the room where Julian and Charlie had slept years
ago. Softly she pushed the door open.

Julian sat by the window with the child on his knees. He had thrown a
shawl over his head and out of its folds the pale face peeped, owl-like
and still. In his little night-suit he looked absurd and touching.

Julian raised a face so haggard and suffering that she paused,
half-ashamed, uncertain what to say or do.

‘Come in, Judith,’ he said.

‘Only for a minute.... Won’t he sleep?’

‘No. I think he’s feverish. He got a fright, waking up alone. He’s very
nervous.’

He bent over the child, rocking him, patting his shoulder.

‘I expect he’s just playing up. You ought to put him back in his cot.’

‘No. He’d cry. I couldn’t _endure_ it if he cried any more. I’ll keep
him till he’s asleep.’

Solemn in his shawl, Peter bent his too-brilliant gaze upon her as she
stooped to touch his cheek. He never smiled for her; but then neither
did he greet her as he greeted most people with a clear: “Go ‘way.” He
accepted her with grave politeness.

‘Do you like holding him?’

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

He was holding the child to comfort himself.

‘He’s very nice,’ she said. ‘What a different sort of childhood he’ll
have from yours, with the others always round you! He’s likely to be the
eldest of the next generation by a good deal, isn’t he?’

‘I should say so,’ he said bitterly. ‘I don’t mind betting not one of us
provides a little cousin for him. I don’t see us breeding somehow.
Unless possibly Martin....’

Not Roddy. No....

‘Well, you mustn’t let him be lonely.’

‘That’s her affair.’

‘Is it? She seems to let you take charge. Julian, does she love him?’

He was silent for a moment before answering: ‘I think she does.’ He put
his hand to his head and said suddenly, very low: ‘O God, it’s awful!
You know I quarreled with him--Charlie--over that marriage. I never saw
him after it--we were never reconciled. But after the child was born,
she wrote and told me he had said in his last letter to her that if
anything happened to him he would like me to be the child’s guardian....
So I suppose he forgave me.’

‘Of course, of course, Julian,’ she said, half-weeping at the look of
his bowed head.

Was this the canker that gnawed Julian,--interminable thought of Charlie
dead like that, without a reconciling word?

‘I blame only myself,’ he said, still in the low voice. ‘_She_ has been
very good. Never a word of--anything. Always that sweet empty
unresentful way,--like a child. Sometimes I think she never knew--or
never understood, anyway. I think she can’t understand that sort of
thing. It’s a sort of insensitiveness. She might hate me over Peter, but
she doesn’t seem to. Why doesn’t she?’

The expression she had surprised on Mariella’s face came back to her,
still undecipherable.

‘I almost wish she would,’ he went on. ‘I wish I was certain she was
jealous or even critical of me. I haven’t the least idea where I am.’ He
rubbed his eyes and forehead wearily. ‘It’s odd how her presence affects
me. She gets on my nerves to a degree! Nothing but this sweet blank
passivity.... You know I like people with spikes and facets, people who
thrust back when I thrust, brilliant, quick glittering people. And I
like people who are slow and deep and warm; and I think you’re one of
that sort, Judy. But what is she? Sometimes I think she’s watching me
intently but I don’t know where from, and it makes me irritable. She’s
got quality, you know,--incredible physical and moral courage. I think
that must have been what Charlie loved in her. But cold, cold and
flat--to me.’

He sighed and shivered.

‘Oh, Julian, you’re very tired, aren’t you? There’s nothing to worry
about. You’ve got things on your mind because you’re so tired. Does your
head ache?’

‘Yes. No.... I’m in a bad mood, Judith. You’d better leave me.’ But he
spoke gently and raised his face to smile at her. It was then she saw
that he had been crying.

‘I will leave you, Julian. I only came to say good-night. And to say I
was sorry I made you angry. I wouldn’t have waked him for the world.’

‘It’s all right. I’m sorry I was angry. Don’t worry.’

‘Good-night, Julian.’

‘Good-night Judith.... You look so lovely----’

She thought: ‘I shall never see him like this again. I must
remember....’

They looked at each other deeply, and when she turned silently away she
had in imagination stooped and kissed his cheek.

As she opened the door, laughter and talk came suddenly to her from
below,--a faint roar of male voices that struck her with strange alarm,
and seemed to threaten her. She took a step back into the room again,
listened and whispered:

‘Julian, who is that Tony?’

He shrugged.

‘I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me. He writes verse I believe. He’s
just bringing out a book. I gather from his conversation he is _quite_
the thing at Cambridge--in certain circles.’

‘Is Roddy very fond of him?’

‘Oh, Roddy! _Fond_ of him! I don’t know.’

‘He seems to be very fond of Roddy.’

‘Yes, it looks like it.’ He glanced at her sharply.

She knew then she had dreaded that he would answer in that way, give her
just such a look. She remembered that Tony had been suddenly hostile;
his eyes stony and watchful, had fastened on her when she came in from
the verandah with Roddy.

The voices came up to her again, like a reiterated warning. ‘Keep away.
You are not wanted here. We are all friends, men content together. We
want no female to trouble us.’

Better not to go down among them all, safer to stay here in the quiet
with Julian. She lingered, looking back in doubt and loneliness; but
this time he did not tell her to stay. The muffled shining of the lamp
filled the room, flowed over his form, his forehead bowed, drowsy and
meditative, one great shoulder curving forward to support the white
bundle lying against it. His pose suggested the something in him which
it was hard to name,--a kind of beauty and nobility a little twisted.
Close beside his narrow bed stood Peter’s cot, and Peter’s two plush
animals lay upon the pillow.

Softly she closed the door upon that strange pair. If Mariella had seen
them, would her face have changed?

Downstairs again.

It would not be Roddy who would offer to take her home. She saw in one
glance that he had finished with her for to-night: he leaned against the
mantelpiece, and Tony, beside him, had an arm about his shoulders; and
Tony’s eyes, coldly upon her, said he was not for her. Something licked
sickeningly at her heart: it was necessary to be jealous of the young
poet Tony; for he was jealous of her. To her good-night Roddy replied
with chilling mock-formal politeness, bowing his head, laughing at her.
Martin put her cloak about her shoulders with reverent hands, and they
went out.

The night was dark. All the blossoming things of earth were hidden, and
the fragrances abroad seemed shaken from the stars that flowered and
clustered profusely in the arching bows of the sky. They were back at
her garden-gate. Above it rose a faint broken shadow where, by day,
lilac and laburnum poured over in a wild maze to the lane. But when they
came to the cherry-tree they found it still glimmering faintly,--a
cloud, a ghost.

Judith stretched up a hand and picked a scrap of cherry and held it out
to Martin.

‘That’s the secret of it all, I do think. Cherry blossom grows from the
seeds of enchantment. Keep it and wish and you’ll have your heart’s
desire. Wish, Martin.’

He snatched it and her hand with it. They waited. He held the spray and
clutched her hand, sighed and said nothing. Their forms were shadows
just outlined against the luminous tree.

‘What were you going to say?’ she whispered.

‘I--don’t know.’

‘No wishes?’

‘Too many.’

He was lost,--caught away, spell-bound, lost.

‘What a night! Isn’t it, Martin?’

‘It’s the very devil.’

‘I don’t feel a bit like myself, do you? There’s some sort of queerness
about,--magic. Or is it just being young, do you think?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Don’t let’s ever be old. Could you bear it?’

‘I shouldn’t like it.’

‘Well wish that. Wish never to be old.’

Silence.

‘No,’ he said at last. He held her hand still and bent his head,
twisting his bit of cherry. His voice came huskily: ‘I’ve wished
something else.’

Gently she drew her hand away. She must run away quickly from whatever
was happening: no emotional conflict with Martin must thrust across and
confuse the path where all was prepared for one alone.

‘Don’t go in,’ implored Martin. ‘Can’t we walk?’

‘Oh, I must--I must go in.’

‘Oh, Judith!’

‘I must, Martin. Thank you for bringing me home, I must fly now. It’s so
late----’ she said in panic.

‘When shall I see you again?’

‘Soon--soon.’

He was speechless. She called a soft good-night and left him and the
darkness swallowed him up.

As she went towards the solitary light burning for her in the hall she
thought with a sudden fear that he had implored her for assurance just
as she mutely implored Roddy every time he left her; and she had
answered--oh, not, surely not, as Roddy would have answered?

‘Oh, Roddy, come out of your dark maze and make me certain!’

She must warm herself with the remembrance of the first part of the
evening, ignore the little chill of those few last minutes. What were
his eyes telling her when he bade her good-night? Surely they were
whispering: ‘Take no notice. We know what has passed between us, we know
what must come. Though we must keep our secret before others, we do not
deceive each other.’

Yes, that was it.

She started running; and wondered why; and ran as hard as she could.

As she opened the front door, she stopped, aghast. The telephone bell
was screaming, screaming, screaming.

Telegram for Judith Earle. From Paris.

‘Father died this evening. Come to-morrow. Mother.’

As she hung up the receiver silence in a vast tide flowed in and drowned
the house, his house, as if for ever.

He had been deep in the business of dying while she, his daughter----
No. She must not think that way; she must just think of him dead. What
an extraordinary thing.... Last time she had seen him had he looked as
if he were going to die? There came a doubtful indistinct picture of
him--yes--going upstairs to bed, early, not later than ten o’clock. She
had looked up the staircase and seen him near the top, mounting with a
hand on the bannister: going to bed so early, looking--yes--a little
feeble; the bowed back and slow yielding step, the slightly laborious
stair-mounting of a man getting old--yes--a delicate elderly man, a
little frightening, a little pathetic to see unexpectedly: for could
youth then really depart? He had been young and he had come upon old
age. Some day she too--she too ... yes, for a moment she had thought
that. And now he was dead.

She crept to the library and switched on all the lights and stared at
the portrait of a young man. That beautiful youth had lived, grown old
and died. He had begotten a daughter who was looking at him and thinking
these things. But the cold portraits of people held them bound for ever
in unreality; they could not die: they had not lived.

She sank into a chair, burying her face in her hands, seeking for a
memory that would make her know that he had lived and died.

She was very small and he, very kind and noble, was taking her to hear
the child-genius play. Her excitement was too great to bear: she too
would be a child-genius; and when the violin came it wrought on her so
violently that she was sick where she sat. He had been deeply
disappointed in her, his kindness and nobility turned to disgust.

At night, every night for a long time, with the night light burning, he
had sat on her bed and sung softly to her. He sang ‘Uncle Tom Cobley.’

    “_All along out along down along lea_....”

Oh, the haunting echo, the loneliness of that! Over and over he sang the
names of the mysterious company of men, but so softly that the slipping
syllables wove round her hazily and fled before she caught them.

Then he sang of a golden apple.

    “_Evoe, evoe, wonderful way
     For subduing--subduing the hearts of men_....”

_Evoe, evoe_.... The sound started a pang, a question, a stir of rich
sadness that went aching on, through the twice-sung whisper of the
sibilants, right on after the fall, the lingering soft pause and fall of
the last words.

At the end he sang “Good-night ladies.” When he had finished she said
“Again”; and he sang it again and yet again, always more low, till
finally it was nothing but a plaintive sigh. She lay listening with eyes
shut, weeping with sorrow and delight.

    “_Good-night, ladies, we’re going to leave you now_--”

That was so sad, so sad!

    “_Merrily we’ll roll along, roll along, roll along,
     Merrily we’ll roll along on the deep--blue--sea._”

She saw a dim swaying far-stretching line of lovely ladies all in white,
waving good-bye upon a dark sea-shore. The great ship faded away over
the waves, bearing further and further the deep-throated chorus of
singers. The long line swayed, reached vainly forward. Their white hands
glimmered. She saw them fade, alas! fade, vanish out of sight.

Oh, he had known how to stir mystery in a child. He had turned sound
inside out for her, making undreamed-of music,--and pictures besides,
and light and colour. He had seemed to forget her for weeks at a time,
but when he had remembered, what a more than compensating richness had
come into life! She had planned to grow so beautiful and accomplished
that he would be proud of her and want her with him always. They were to
have travelled together, famous father and not unworthy daughter, and
they were to have discussed very intellectual topics and she was to have
looked after him when the steps, going upstairs, started, really
started, to have that feebleness.... He was to have lived to be very old
and go upstairs on her arm, cherished by her.

No more lessons in Greek: no more hearing him softly open his door to
listen to her playing,--(though he never praised her, what praise that
had been!) No more talk--now and then, when he remembered her, when his
eyes dwelt on her with interest--of books and pictures and music and
famous people he knew. No second proud visit to Cambridge with him, no
seeing him sigh, smile, dream from an old don’s window over Trinity
Great Court in the sun, after the lunch-party. The three elderly
bachelors had smiled at her, embarrassed by her presence, doubtful as
regards the attentions due to a young lady. They had been shy with her,
courteous, careful and elegant of speech, a little dusty altogether, but
gentle like their rooms, like the old gold light falling outside on
ancient buildings. She had listened to them all savouring and playing
with words, quoting Greek, saying “Do you remember?” He had seemed so
distinguished, so brilliant, a man ripe and calm with knowledge. And
afterwards he had shown her the colleges and the Backs and promised to
come often to see her when she came up. He had talked of his youth and
for a moment they had trembled on the verge of shared emotions: no more
of that, no hope of future rich Cambridge occasions.

No more watching his intent and noble profile in the lamplight, stooped
hour after hour over his writing, opposite the bust of Homer. Once or
twice he had looked up and smiled at her as though vaguely content to
have her with him. His desk was empty for ever. That was pathetic; it
would bring tears if dwelt on; it made him so human.

Did it hurt to die?

Now in a flash she remembered the question:

‘Daddy, does it hurt to die?’

Years ago. Grandmamma had just died. When he came to say good-night to
her in bed, she had asked him that.

He had remained silent and brooding. His silence filled her with terror:
her heart beat and, red and panic-stricken, she stared at him. He was
going to tell her something dreadful, he knew something so terrible
about Grandmamma, about death and the way it hurt that he could not
speak.... He was going to die.... _She_ was.... O God! O Jesus!

At last he had sighed and said:

‘No, no. It doesn’t hurt at all to die.’

She had flung herself weeping into his arms, and he had clasped her in
silence; and from his quiet, pressing shoulder, comfort had poured in
and in upon her.

It did not hurt at all to die, it was quite all right, he had said. He
had just died.

She looked about her, at the brooding room. Nothing but loneliness,
helplessness, appalling silence. She was cold too, shivering.

A little while ago she had been next door. Now the house would all be
dark, shut to her. Supposing she were to run back to them with her
tidings, surely they would help, advise, console: for they were her
friends.

‘Roddy, Roddy, Daddy’s dead.’

He was standing with Tony’s arm around his shoulders, remote,
indifferently smiling. He did not like grief, and Tony kept him from
her. Her time was far away and long ago.

‘Julian, Daddy’s dead.’

He was bowed over the child; and he raised his head to listen, but made
no answer. He had plenty of his own sorrows; and he feared she would
wake the child.

But Martin might be told, Martin would listen and comfort with large and
inarticulate tenderness. He would be standing under the cherry-tree,
waiting, just as she had left him. She ran to the window.

There was nobody in the garden. A faint light was abroad,--it might be
the small rising moon or the dawn--making the cherry-tree pale and
clear. It seemed to float towards her, to swell and tower into the sky,
a shining vision.

Then death, lovely death, lay at the heart of enchantment. It was the
core of the mystery and beauty. To-morrow she would not know it, but
to-night no knowledge was surer. And he whom they were to mourn was--in
one minute she would know where he was,--one minute.

She leaned out of the window.

Now! Now!

But the cherry-tree was nothing but a small flowering cherry-tree.
Before her straining eyes it had veiled itself and withheld the sign.
***
PART THREE PART THREE