THE STREET OF THE EYE
AND NINE OTHER TALES

THE STREET
OF THE
EYE
and nine other tales
by GERALD BULLETT

LONDON
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED

First Published in 1923
Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

To ROSALIND
—THESE FICTIONS

CONTENTS

One of these stories, THE MOLE, appeared in ‘The London Mercury.’ To the editor of this journal I tender thanks.

THE STREET OF THE EYE

THE STREET OF THE EYE

‘STORIES of the supernatural,’ said Saunders, ‘serve at least one useful purpose: they test a man’s intellectual capacity. Not a very sure test, you may say; but for purposes of rough classification it is sure enough. Incertitude, a sense of imminent surprise, is after all the very salt of life. Denounce the habit of classification as bitterly as you like—and I know well the intellectual perils that attend it—it is none the less true that we do, when we meet a man, like to be able to place him, roughly, in this category or that. And most men, by the way, submit to the process very meekly. You subtle folk’—here Saunders bowed to me in genial irony—‘in attributing to the mass of mankind your own mental complexity flatter them grossly. I have heard you yourself discourse on the folly of the old religious psychology which divided mankind, arbitrarily, into sheep and goats. As philosophy, of course, it is nonsense, and the fathers of the church must have known that as well as you and I do; but as a formula for rough-and-ready justice, it serves. If you are pulling your weight in the boat you are a good man; if you are not pulling your weight you are a bad man—that is a definite and verifiable verdict based on rational calculation. The fun begins when having made our calculation, and acted on it, new factors begin to appear which knock all our arithmetic silly. But in our dealings with men how rarely, on the whole, that happens! You do not agree? Well, you are permitted to disagree so long as you believe me to be sincere in my opinion. All modern thought, I know, is moving away from my idea as fast as, according to you, it is moving away from my church; but I fancy that, in practice, the world will continue to adhere to it. If I were to say that all men are types, that would be not so much a falsehood as a wanton exaggeration of a truth. I know all that can be urged, and justly urged, against pigeon-hole classification; but what impresses and startles me is how easily the greater number of one’s fellow-creatures fit into the pigeon-holes. Unique souls, no doubt; but the human soul is a mystery which I don’t profess to understand and which you profess not to believe in. It is the ordinary workaday mentality of a man that can be labelled with some approach to accuracy. And the supernatural story, as I say, is something of a test. Tell a group of new acquaintances some fairly well authenticated ghost-story, and they will fall apart and regroup in their special classes like a company of soldiers forming up into platoons. There will be the credulous fools on the one hand, ready to believe anything without question; there will be the materialist fools on the other hand, snorting in angry contempt. Between the two—truth is generally found midway between extremes—between the two, preserving a delicate balance between scepticism and credulity, doubting the story, perhaps, but admitting the possibility, will be the wise men. I need hardly add, my dear fellow, that it is among these wise philosophers that I myself am to be found. There you have three well-defined types, and it is noteworthy that I am a bright specimen of the exemplary type. If you wish to be saved you have only to look at me and do your best.’

There was a gleam of laughter in Saunders’s kindly and humorous eyes, a gleam that seemed to apologize for having read me something in the nature of a lecture. I had just told my clerical friend that queer story of Bailey’s about James Dearth and the white horse. It had interested him, and he was far more disposed to take it seriously than I was. It started him talking about the Unseen, a hypothesis in which he has a more than professional concern, and so led him to the bundle of generalities I have just recorded. They impressed me less than Saunders’s remarks usually do, but I knew better than to interrupt him. Whatever be the truth about his theory of types, he himself is certainly a distinguished exception to the theory. One never knows where his talk will lead, and I for my part always listen in the hope that it will lead to a story. Saunders, with his penetrating vision and his unique opportunities, has seen many a naked soul, many a human creature stripped bare, by triumph or catastrophe, of the coverings that hide it from the public eye—yes, and from the eyes of intimate friends no less. He is as full of good stories as of bad sermons. And so I waited now, like a timid angler afraid even to cast in his line lest the troubling of the waters should scare the fish away.

‘The surface mind is dull enough,’ continued Saunders presently, ‘dull enough to justify a label. It is the mysterious region below consciousness, the rich, dark, infinitely fertile subsoil, that passes the wit of man to understand. For the most part, one can only reach it by vague conjecture. But sometimes, here and there, some beautiful or terrible flower shoots up from that underworld into the light of our conscious existence. As for your friend’s experiences at the farm, I think, frankly, that there was sheer devilry in it, black magic. But it isn’t always so. You remember what I told you about poor Bellingham.’

In the pause that followed, my hopes flourished exceedingly. Then I hastened to assure Saunders that he had told me precisely nothing at all about poor Bellingham, whose name I heard for the first time. And so, with a little coaxing, I got the tale from him.

1

By one of those fantastic coincidences that make life sometimes seem more artificial than fiction, as well as stranger (said Saunders), it was in a little café in Rue de l’Oeil, Marseilles, that I first noticed Bellingham. Strange that one should have to journey to the south of France to make the acquaintance of a fellow-collegian! For Bellingham, too, was a Jesus man. I had nodded to him a hundred times in the Close, walked with him once or twice for a few hundred yards, and passed him every day in the Chimney going to or from lectures; but I knew next to nothing of him. Once, I remember, we met in the rooms of some other fellow and had coffee. Furnivall was there, who afterwards made something of a hit as an actor; Dodd who got a double first in classics and then, before the results were out, accidentally drowned himself within sight of Trinity Library; Chambers who, under a Greek pseudonym, wrote donnish elderly witticisms for undergraduate journals. Looking back on that inauspicious scene I know that not one of the men I have named possessed half the spiritual force of Bellingham, and yet, had it not been for after-events, I should not now have remembered that he was there at all. He was a tall slackly-built man, rather like a black sackful of uncoordinated bones; he stooped a little, peering out at the world under long bushy eyebrows from behind a large nose. The mouth was large and loose; the cheeks sagged a trifle; the ears stuck out from the head at an angle that, if you looked twice, seemed excessive; and the hands were big and bony with long fingers that moved, sometimes, like a piece of murderous mechanism. It was as if the hands of a strangler had been grafted on to the body of a morose, ungainly saint. I do not describe him as he appeared to me in that college room: that would be impossible, for I simply didn’t observe him. He was no more to me then than an uninteresting ultra-reserved fellow-student drudging at ecclesiastical history and similar stuff. That I failed to single him out is sufficiently amazing to me now. My eyes must have been in my boots. But there it is—he made no impression on my somnolent mind. It was not, as I say, until we met again in that little café in Rue de l’Oeil that I really saw Bellingham. For the thousandth time I looked at him and for the first time I saw him. There was quite a little crowd of us: Hayter of Caius; Mulroyd with his soft voice and Irish cadences; an Oxford man whose name I’ve forgotten; and the Honourable Somebody, a mild-mannered, flaxen-haired boy, a Fabian socialist trying to live down the fact that he was the younger son of a peer. But I’m forgetting myself: these people are merely names to you, and names they must remain. The Oxonian was a chance acquaintance who had encountered our party in Paris and diffidently joined us, a charming fellow who constantly tried—only too successfully, for he remains in my memory as the vaguest phantom—to efface himself. Hayter, whose chief preoccupation, I remember, was the maturing of a new Meerschaum, played the elder brother to the flaxen-haired youngster. Mulroyd was my own particular friend, and it was he who had dragged in Bellingham, the misfit of the party. Bellingham was a curiously solitary man, a ward in Chancery or something of the kind; no one knew anything about his origin or antecedents, and he had no friends. The suspicion that he was lonely, neglected, with nowhere to spend the Long Vacation, made him irresistible to Mulroyd; and that he was conspicuously unsociable Mulroyd regarded as a clarion call of challenge to his own militant kindliness. Well, there’s a rough sketch of the crowd that gathered in that little red-tiled, black-raftered, French hostel. You must imagine us all as sitting or standing about the place, in various negligent attitudes, drinking execrable vin rouge, and talking of routes and train-services and the comparative merits of ales. What turned the conversation towards more ultimate matters I cannot begin to remember, but turn it did. I think it was our Oxonian who interpolated some gloomy observation that set us all thinking of a brooding, inscrutable Destiny which for ever watched, with hard unblinking eyes, our trivial conviviality, listened, with infinite indifference, to our plans of to-day and to-morrow. The remark was succeeded by a pause that was almost a collective shudder, a pause in which, as it seemed to me, we all listened fixedly to our own heart-beats ticking away the handful of moments that divided us from an unknown eternity. You know what it is to be recalled suddenly, wantonly, to a sense of the immensities, to be aware that death, an invisible presence, is in your midst, to feel his lethal breath chilling the warmth of your idle joy. Even Madeleine, the daughter of the house, who had watched us hitherto with laughter in her dark eyes, and innocent invitation on her full lips, was conscious of the abrupt change of temperature. She understood not a word of our speech, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her hand make the sign of the cross and her lips move in prayer. Hayter, shockheaded, long and oval of face, ceased fingering his pipe and seemed lost in contemplation of its mellowing colour. A wistful light shone in Mulroyd’s eyes. The Honourable Somebody—I can’t recall his name—smiled and said ‘Um.’ In that pregnant moment during which we all sat peering over the edge of the unfathomable, questioning the unresponsive darkness, that monosyllable sounded like an incantation, a word mystical and potent. As for me, I looked from one face to the other, trying to read what was written there, and so my glance fell upon Bellingham. Fell and was arrested, for the face of Bellingham was a revelation. What it revealed is difficult to describe in cold prose; a musician could better express it in some moaning, unearthly phrase of music. It was as if there shone from that face not light but darkness, and as if over that head hovered a halo of dark fear, a crown of shuddering doom. The eyes flashed darkness, I say, and yet through them, as through sinister windows, I saw for one instant into the infinite distances of the soul behind them, the unimaginable and secret world in which the real Bellingham, the Bellingham whom none of us in that room had ever seen or approached, lived his isolated life. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees, his chin propped up in those gaunt skeleton hands that were several sizes too big for him. To me, who stood facing him, the effect was incredibly bizarre: it was for all the world as though some monster whose face was hidden from me was crouching at my feet offering the truncated head of Bellingham for my acceptance. The red-knuckled fingers formed a fitting cup for the grotesque sacrifice. I put the horrible fancy behind me and sought to regain a human view of that face. Gaunt and pallid, with high cheekbones and burning eyes, it was a battle-ground of conflicting passions. But the natures and names of the passions I could only surmise. An ascetic and a voluptuary, perhaps, had fought in Bellingham, and his face was the neutral ground that their warfare had violated and laid waste. The merest conjecture, this, and it remained so, until it was proved to be false.

‘It doesn’t bear thinking of,’ remarked Hayter, ‘so it’s best to avoid the thought. The animals are better off than we, by a long chalk.’

‘There’s religion,’ said the flaxen-haired Fabian tentatively.

‘Soothing syrup,’ Hayter murmured. ‘Religion doesn’t face death: it only pretends it isn’t there. Gateway to the larger life, and all that cant.’ Hayter was a very positive young man in his way.

Mulroyd tried to banter us back into a more comfortable humour. ‘Material for a first-rate shindy there. Now then, Saunders, speak up for your cloth, my boy!’

‘I shall, when I’ve got it,’ said I. A theological student does not care to talk shop in mixed company. I was shy of posing as a preacher, and not to be drawn.

‘Well, if Saunders won’t, I will.’

The voice was harsh, and tense with emotion. It seemed to come out of the grave itself. We all stared at Bellingham, whom we had become accustomed to regard as almost incapable of contributing to a conversation. We waited. Hayter even forgot that work of chromatic art, his pipe.

‘Death waits for every man,’ said Bellingham. ‘At any moment it may engulf us.’ The triteness of the sermon was redeemed by the personality that blazed in the speaker. ‘And then....’ His voice trailed off into silence.

‘And then?’ enquired Hayter, with a politeness that I fancied covered a sneer.

‘And then,’ said the man of doom, ‘we shall find ourselves in the terrible presence of God.’

For once even the genial Mulroyd was stung to sarcasm. ‘I must say, judging from your tone, you don’t seem to relish the prospect much.’

‘Never mind what I relish,’ answered Bellingham sternly. ‘In that hour you and I will be judged. We shall be forced to look into the eye that at this moment, and always, is looking upon us.’ There was an uncomfortable silence, as well there might be. We had not reckoned upon such an explosion of evangelical fervour, and it embarrassed us as some flagrant breach of manners would have done. Perhaps, heaven help us, we regarded it as a flagrant breach of manners. Bellingham was committing the cardinal sin: he was taking something too seriously.

‘When I was a child,’ went on Bellingham, without ruth, ‘I was told the story of a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement. To this punishment was added the further horror of perpetual watching. A small hole was drilled in the cell-door through which an eye never ceased to peer at the prisoner. That was an allegory, and I have never forgotten it. Even now, you fellows, we are being watched.’

Some of us, I swear, looked round nervously, half expecting to catch sight of that vigilant eye. I, for my part, was angry. ‘That’s not an allegory, Bellingham,’ I said. ‘It’s a damned travesty. You conceive God to be a kind of Peeping Tom, with omnipotence added. I would rather be an atheist than believe that.’

‘Perhaps you would rather be an atheist,’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Perhaps I would rather be an atheist. But I can’t be. Nor can you. Did any of you notice the name of the street?’

‘Name of the street?’ echoed some one. ‘What street?’

‘This street,’ said Bellingham.

‘We’re not in a street. We’re in a café,’ said Hayter truculently. ‘At least I thought so a moment ago. I begin to fancy we must be in a mission-hall.’

At the moment no one could remember having noticed the name. ‘Well, I did notice it,’ said Bellingham. ‘It is the Street of the Eye.’

Mulroyd shrugged his shoulders, a gesture plainly disdainful of this touch of melodrama.

‘Well,’ said I, ‘what of it?’ For the fellow’s morbidity had spoiled my temper. I expected a night of bad dreams.

‘The Street of the Eye,’ repeated Bellingham. ‘We’re all in that street; every man born is in that street. And we shall never get out of it.’

I believe some of us half-suspected that the wine had gone to his head, though how such stuff could make any man tipsy was beyond understanding. He continued to irradiate gloom upon us from under his shaggy brows. Mulroyd, to create a diversion, held out his hands to Madeleine in mock appeal.

‘Du vin, mademoiselle! Nous sommes bien chagrinés.’

The girl’s eyes brightened again. At the merest hint of a renewal of gaiety she rose, radiantly, as if from the dead.

‘Let’s have some champagne,’ Mulroyd suggested, ‘to take the taste of death out of our mouths.’

‘Carpe diem,’ murmured Hayter. ‘Trite. But the first and last word of wisdom.’

‘You can’t escape that way,’ remarked Bellingham, sourly insistent.

But we could stand no more of Bellingham just then. Flinging courtesy to the winds we laughed and sang and shouted him down. ‘Death be damned!’ cried Mulroyd, as we clinked glasses. Never was a toast drunk with more fervour.

2

You’ll be surprised when I say that after this incident I got to know Bellingham better and to like him more. Strange as it may seem, he was not entirely without humour; and I fancied that he was the least bit ashamed of his outburst. The next day he went about like a dog in disgrace, feeling perhaps that every one disliked him. Back he went into that shell of silence from which he had only once, and with such dramatic effect, emerged. He would never, I know, have gone back on the substance of his discourse; but, as he admitted to me afterwards, he very quickly began to doubt the wisdom of his method. Fellow-undergraduates were not to be frightened into conversion by the kind of revivalist rant he had treated us to. He began to feel woefully out of place in our company. Mulroyd, good fellow though he was, could not bring himself to make any warm overtures to one whom he now regarded as a religious maniac; on the surface he was breezy and friendly enough, but in his heart he knew that Bellingham must be reckoned among his failures, one who had failed to justify his ardent faith in the latent social value of every man. The others ignored him, though not pointedly, much as they had always done. My own attitude was different. I have, as you know, an insatiable curiosity about human nature—especially freaks of human nature, I’m afraid—and Bellingham had piqued that curiosity. I had repudiated his particular version of God as being nothing but an almighty Peeping Tom, and yet a weakness for peeping is my own besetting sin. All my life I have been a kind of amateur detective of the human soul. Moreover—though I don’t stress this—I had more than a sneaking sympathy for the man. After all we had something in common, something that none of the others of our party shared with us. We were both hoping to be ordained. In spite of myself I had to admire the colossal courage of his intervention in that argument, even while I disparaged its tone. In fine, for this reason and for that, I made rather a point of cultivating Bellingham’s acquaintance from that day forth. And I had my reward. I really believe that to me he revealed a more human side of himself than anybody else ever caught sight of. Next term, back at college, he made a habit of strolling into my rooms at five minutes to ten, and very often we talked till the early hours of the morning about this and that. Sometimes he became reminiscent about his childhood. His earliest memories were of a grey suburban villa, with a black square patch in front and a black oblong patch behind, both called gardens. The square one was marked off from the road by hideous iron railings and an iron gate. Bellingham assured me that the pattern of those railings was branded on his retina; and in an unwonted lapse from literalism he declared that it was a pattern designed in hell and executed in Bedlam. ‘Wherever I see it,’ he said passionately, under the influence of nothing more potent than black coffee, ‘wherever I see it—and it is all over southeast London—I recognize the mark of the beast, the signature of an incorrigible stupidity. The very smell of those railings is noisome.’ He was like that: ever ready to see material things as symbols of the unseen, and very prone—like many religionists—to confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. In the sheer exuberance of his passion, whether of joy or disgust, he would make some wild exaggerated statement that no one was expected to take literally; and the next moment he himself would be taking it literally. If, for example, I had suggested to him that to talk of the smell of railings was a trifle fanciful, he would have been genuinely astonished. Whenever he loved or hated, rationality went to the winds. And he seems to have hated the home of his childhood pretty completely. The back garden, where he spent a good deal of his time, figured in his talk as if it were a plague spot, an evil blot upon the earth. If one is to believe his tale, this garden was always, in season and out, full of wet flapping underclothes hanging on a line. They used to lie in wait for him, he said, and smack him in the face: it was like being embraced by a slimy fish. He was glad, however, of the clothes-line posts; he used to climb them and swing from the cross-bars, and once or twice he pulled one of these posts out of its wooden socket in the ground and stared down at the minute wriggling monsters that scuttled about in that little twilit world. Another thing that gave him pleasure was the sight of a neighbouring church, aspiring towards the sky, the throne of God. These memories may well have derived much of their colour from imagination, for both his parents died before he was ten, and he then left the suburban villa to become the ward of his uncle Joseph. Joseph Bellingham appears to have been conspicuously unfitted for the delicate task of bringing up a sensitive, solitary, and already morbid child, although not a word against him would his nephew have admitted. Justly or unjustly I was disposed to believe that this Uncle Joseph had completed the dark work begun in Bellingham by his childish solitude and loveless home. For his parents, I should have told you, were lifeless, disillusioned people. I suspect they had never been happy or passionate lovers, and that they regarded their son’s birth as one more penalty rather than as the desired fruit of their marriage. In some preposterous way (naturally Bellingham was reticent here) the man had sacrificed himself in marrying his wife—some fetish of ‘honour’ perhaps—and of course he spent the rest of his life hating her for it. This may or may not account for the fact that when I first got to know Bellingham he seemed extraordinarily insensitive, for a man of his temperament, to beauty. Not totally deficient—because even his hatred of a certain kind of iron railings implies some standard, however subconscious—but what sense of beauty he possessed had never been wakened: it manifested itself only in a series of dislikes. He had quite a devilish flair for seeing the most repulsive aspect of things. This was all in tune with his miserable theology. To the spiritual loveliness that radiates from the central figure of the New Testament—to that beacon he was as blind as he was deaf to the many golden promises of the religion of Christ. I do not mean that he swerved by a hair’s breadth from orthodoxy; I mean that there was some subtle twist in his temperament that made him accept ‘the love of God’ as a euphemism and ‘the wrath of God’ as a terrible reality. He thought more about hell than about heaven, because he had only seen beauty whereas he had felt ugliness. The one was an intellectual apprehension: the other was a perpetual experience. It was evident to me, from what he did not say, that he had never known love, and I wondered what was in store for him.

But though with me he became more and more unreserved, from all other fellows of his class and education he drew farther away. There was a spiritual uncouthness in him which prevented his taking kindly to the harmless social artificialities of academic life. As I told him—and he admitted it good-humouredly—he would have been more at home as chief medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. In some remote and savage bush his niche awaited him. Even the traditions of politeness he grew to despise. I shocked him by admitting that I myself had more than once got out of accepting an invitation to breakfast or to coffee by feigning to be engaged elsewhere. Bellingham would have said bluntly, ‘No, thanks,’ and have left it at that. Courageous, no doubt, but it did not make for easy social relations. He became more and more dissatisfied, too, with the mild fashionable Anglicanism of our dean. Of his own religion sensationalism was the life-breath; and the worship of good form, the religion of all undergraduates, was in his eyes the most dangerous idolatry. No one was surprised when, having taken his degree with the rest of us, he abruptly left the University. Instead of being ordained he became just what I had chaffingly suggested, a medicine-man to a tribe of barbarians. To be more exact, he set up as a lay-missioner near the Euston Road. He had a meagre but sufficient private income which permitted him to go his own solitary gait. And there he busied himself wrestling with the Devil for the souls of all the miscellaneous street-scum he could lay hands on. God forgive me if I have ever in my heart derided Bellingham! He had the heroism as well as the mania of a one-idea’d man. I find it hard to suppose that his converts were any the happier for having been injected with his particular virus of fear; but, as Bellingham would say, where happiness cannot be reconciled to salvation happiness must go. Go it did, I have no doubt. Fear of the policeman was displaced by a scarcely less ignoble fear of God, conceived to be another policeman on a much larger scale. If I speak bitterly, it is not in spite of my religion but because of it. Before I have finished the story you will understand that I have cause for bitterness.

We exchanged a few letters, he and I; but it was not until eighteen months later that, at his own invitation, I went to see him. ‘Saunders, I need your help,’ he said in his letter, and added something about my being his only real friend and so on. He had dismal little lodgings in a dismal little side-street the name of which I have forgotten. Bellingham himself opened the door to me. I had told him when to expect me and he must have been waiting at the window. He greeted me in a shamefaced eager fashion that touched my heart. I was astonished at the change in him: the more astonished because it was at once subtle and impossible to miss. There was a gentleness in his eyes that I had never seen there before. He was more human. He led me to his own rooms—they were at the top of a four-storied house, and looked out on a prospect of smoking chimneys—and forced me into the only comfortable chair he possessed.

I began smoking, but he denied himself that nerve-soothing indulgence. His eyes, alight with an unwonted shyness that was only half shame, avoided meeting mine. We fenced for a while, talking over our Jesus days; and all the while my mind, involuntarily, was seeking a name for something in that room that I had not expected to find. Presently Bellingham rose from his chair. It was an abrupt and surprising movement. ‘Like to see the rest of my quarters?’ he said, in a tone desperately casual. I followed him into the next room, and there, in one glance, the mystery was made clear. The bedroom was the answer to the problem of the sitting-room. What I had detected while we sat talking was domesticity, a subtle but decided fragrance of home: a certain precision in the arrangement of books and furniture. In the bedroom, with its two spotlessly white-sheeted beds and its vase of flowers standing in the centre of a miniature dressing-table, the same story was told more eloquently; there was, accentuated, aggressive, the same neatness and daintiness of effect which a contented woman instinctively imposes on her surroundings. No bachelor, however fastidious, could have achieved it. ‘Quite a jolly little place,’ I remarked, to hide my own surprise and his embarrassment. ‘Very,’ said Bellingham, and we went back to our seats by the fire.

Bellingham tried to take up the thread of our conversation where we had dropped it five minutes before. But for his own sake I cut off that line of retreat.

‘Look here, my dear fellow! You didn’t ask me over here in order to discuss our esteemed Dr. Morgan. Tell me all about it.’

Bellingham faced me squarely at last. ‘You mean my marriage?’ I nodded. ‘Well, to start with, I’m not married.’

I think he expected me to flinch at that; and perhaps my failure to do so disconcerted as well as encouraged him. I said nothing. I felt that I could do more good by listening than by talking.

‘She has been in these rooms for two months,’ said Bellingham. ‘And what you saw in there—that has existed for ten days, just ten days.’ I divined that this was his way of indicating to me the duration of his married life. ‘You see I didn’t fall at once, or easily. The Devil is always insidious, isn’t he? Saunders, that girl is a magician. Joan, her name is. She transformed this place. It’s not bad now, is it? You should have seen it before she came. And me, too—you should have seen me before she came. It’s a new life to me. I’m translated. And yet....’

‘How and where did you meet her?’

‘In the street, at the beginning of November. Her husband kicked her out. A swine he is; thank God I’ve never set eyes on him. Told her to go and sell herself, and come back with her earnings.’

There was a pause. ‘And she?’ I asked.

‘She was on the streets for five days. Yes, a prostitute for five days.’ I saw Bellingham’s face contract with pain, and I knew that something deeper than pity had been stirred in him. And so the recital went on. Bit by bit I got his story and pieced it together. He did not spare himself; but even his passion for repentance, his ingrained conviction of sin, could not persuade me that he had been guilty of a very heinous crime. He had rescued the girl, at first in sheer compassion, and cherished her as he would have cherished any other fragment of human salvage. And her presence, her pathetic prettiness and her childish need of affection, had been too much for him. In a passion of gratitude, I surmise, she had offered him, with a full heart, what she had so reluctantly sold to casual men during her five days purgatory. The appeal to his manhood was too sudden, too overwhelming, to be resisted. Beauty, seen for the first time in dazzling glory, had invaded his heart and beaten down his defences. For the first time in my experience of him there was inconsistency in Bellingham. He spoke, one minute, of his ‘fall,’ like any sour moralist; and in his very next sentence he would become almost lyrical about this ‘new life,’ this shattering apocalypse of beauty. It was as if the man had been cloven in twain and spoke with two voices. And that, I believe, is the real key to the baffling terror that was to follow.

Later in the afternoon, in time to prepare tea for us, came Joan herself, a big-eyed child in her early ’twenties, with very fair hair, like a little lost angel with a Cockney accent. The sudden fear that leaped into her eyes as she timidly greeted me would have stabbed any man’s heart. She was absurdly fragile, and I saw at once that those five evil days had been no more than a gruesome physical accident which had left her courage shaken but her innocence unimpaired. She guessed, no doubt, that we had been discussing her; and both Bellingham and I felt caddish, I dare say, when we remembered having done so. But I succeeded in winning her confidence by displaying a keen interest in her market-basket, which she carried on her arm, and in a very few moments she became garrulous about her shopping experiences, displaying a pretty pride in her purchases. They included, I remember, three dried herrings and a pound of pig’s-fry. The herrings we had for our tea, and I have never enjoyed a meal more.

In the evening, during a long walk through mean streets, Bellingham came to the point. He had said, you will remember, that he needed my help. What he wanted was no less than that I should play the part of conscience to him. I was to be instated, apparently, as his spiritual pastor. For the sake of that poor child happily darning his socks at home, I could not refuse the embarrassing honour thrust upon me. And when I learned that repentance was actually beginning to gain the upper hand of him I was glad indeed to exert any influence I possessed on the side of humanity. He had had a vile dream, he told me, and it was evident that he regarded it as a warning sent by that vigilant deity of his. In the dream his landlady, who believed him to be a legally married man, came and smiled at him over the bedrail, and wagged her head till it detached itself from the body and multiplied. The air was full of these grinning heads, poised like dragonflies, all their evil eyes on Bellingham. Terror, he told me, took concrete form inside his own head: he could hear it simmering, sizzling, gurgling, boiling, splitting; it drove him out of bed, away from Joan, and across the arid plains of hell under a sky monotonously grey except where the sun, a bloody red, like a huge socket from which the eye had been torn, stared sightlessly at him. Even as he gazed at it it filled and became menacing with the eye of God.

‘It was a vision of hell,’ Bellingham said, wiping the moisture from his brow. ‘And the eye of God was even there. O Lord, how can I escape from Thy presence!’

It did not seem to me a moment propitious for argument, so I held my peace. He talked on about his doubts and his difficulties, his sin and his repentance; and at last I gathered that I was being invited to tell him whether he should stay with Joan or leave her.

‘Oh, fling her into the streets,’ I advised him, with furious irony, ‘as her husband did.’

‘Yes,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘You’re right. Against all my religious convictions I feel you to be right. I have made her my wife, and I must be faithful to my choice, right or wrong.’

‘It’s as plain as day,’ I assured him. ‘Love and duty are pointing in the same direction for once. Why should you doubt it?’

‘You see, Saunders,’ said Bellingham, with sudden fire, ‘it’s all or nothing. She must remain my wife, or we must separate. There’s no third way. I can’t spend the rest of my life in the waters of Tantalus. I’m only a man, God help me!’

For a while we left it at that.

3

Saunders has an exasperating habit of stopping in the middle of a story, and behaving as though it were finished. He did this now. I reminded him that I was still listening.... No, I haven’t done yet, he admitted. I thought that was the end, but it was only the beginning of poor Bellingham’s troubles. You must imagine me now as popping in and out of his home pretty often. Those two remote rooms, like a fantastic nest built among London chimney-pots, attracted me by the romance they symbolized, by their air of being an idyllic peasant cottage, exquisitely clean, stuck away in the heart of the metropolis. Bellingham sent another urgent summons to me. It was the first of a series of alarms. The haunting began. The dreams that, every few nights, made Bellingham’s sleep a thing of terror began now to invade his waking life. The Watching Eye was upon him, the eye of God, he declared it to be, trying to subdue him to submission. He heard a voice that said to him, ‘Put the woman from you.’ In short, he exhibited all the signs of incipient madness. At the time I thought it was indeed madness which threatened him. With one of his frantic telegrams in my hand—‘I have seen God’ or ‘He is come again in judgment’—what else could I think? Yet I still believed that together he and I, with the courageous co-operation of Joan herself, might fend off the danger. She, poor girl, was tearful but invincibly staunch. She would have sacrificed herself utterly for him, whom she loved with an unshakable devotion; but I persuaded her that her going away, as she suggested, would not ease the situation. You will think me fanciful, no doubt, but sometimes I felt that Bellingham was fighting for his soul against some usurping demon, and that anything—death or damnation—was better than base surrender. And Bellingham, though he took a very different view of the nature of the contest, came to agree with my conclusion. He rejected my proposition but embraced the corollary. He conceived himself fighting against impossible odds, with no less than God, the Might and Majesty of the universe, as his implacable antagonist. ‘I tell you, Saunders,’ he said to me, ‘I saw Him plainly. He stood over there by my desk. He has incarnated Himself once more in order to crush my revolt.’ I passed over the almost maniacal egoism of the conception, and asked for a description of the Divine Visitor. ‘His body was all in strong shadow,’ Bellingham answered, shuddering at the recollection. ‘Only His terrible eyes were visible, and His accusing finger that pointed at me.’

I had respected Bellingham ever since I had come to know him; and now, if I respected his intelligence less, I felt something more than admiration for the indomitable spirit of the man. His unshaken belief that he was defying his Creator made fidelity to Joan a piece of titanic courage. Beset by horrors unspeakable, conscious that the citadel of his very reason was being stormed, he yet held doggedly to his determination. Doggedly at first, and afterwards with a sublime pride that I could not witness without an answering pride, a flaming exultation in the splendour of the human soul. Maniac or not, he extorted willing homage from me. You may say what you like about hallucination and the rest of it, but I tell you that to me, an eye-witness, the battle was lifted into the realm of cosmic drama where everything takes on a significance past mortal understanding but not past mortal apprehension. I thought of Job; I thought of Prometheus; and I thought of Bellingham as no mean third, championing life against death, championing youth, beauty, and all frail humanity, against the cruel bogey of the mind that menaced them. It goes without saying that his terrors derived all their power from his belief in their reality. He was blind to the plain facts of real religion, deaf to my rationalizing explanations of the horror that haunted him, obstinate in his conviction that God, and none other, was the author and agent of his persecution. Equally convinced was he that he had but to cast Joan out and he would save his soul alive. Every week saw a change in his physical condition. That brief period of his second blooming, fostered by the sweet presence and the maternal care of Joan, seemed over for ever; it was as if the seven years of spiritual famine were now to follow. He grew more gaunt, more haggard; vitality shrunk into him like a pent prisoner and peered out through those fiery orbs, his eyes, as through the mean windows of a condemned cell. He was locked fast in an impregnable isolation, from which no one could rescue him, it seemed, certainly not I, either by force or guile. He distrusted his food; he distrusted the men and women who passed him in the street. There were only two human souls he did not distrust: Joan herself was one, and I, by the mercy of heaven, was the other. He began to see a vast and sinister significance in all sorts of trivial events, all sorts of minor disasters that did not in the least concern any one of us, seeing in them the beginning of a cosmic disintegration that should engulf him in perdition. He was afraid yet defiant of these fatalities. He was both egomaniacal and illogical in his conviction that God, his implacable adversary, would behave like the veriest villain of melodrama rather than let him escape: tear the universe to tatters in order to compass the death or the dishonour of this one rebellious spirit, like a man who should pull his own house about his ears in the pursuit of a solitary rat. I myself began to scan the papers anxiously for wars and rumours of wars. Different as were our intellectual convictions, there was the stark comradeship between us of those who face death together. He watched for signs of God; Joan and I, with equal vigilance, watched him. And the stronger grew my affection for Bellingham, the shakier my own nerves became. Finally, with a kind of exultation, I threw up all my work—I was a curate at the time—and flung myself body and soul into this holy war. I found lodgings near Bellingham’s, and visited him every day without fail. I felt that this fretting, this piling of horror upon horror, could not go on much longer. Sooner or later there would be a crisis; the increasing tension would snap. Mingled with my fear for Bellingham’s sanity was a fear for the safety of Joan, caged up with a maniac. For a week or more we worried and waited.

4

The end came with a sudden and sickening rush. And yet it was an end worth waiting and working for. In the street just outside his home, Bellingham was knocked down by a passing cab. Joan saw the accident from the window. By the sheerest chance he escaped with nothing worse than bruises and flesh wounds, but his excitement and terror reached their climax as he was helped back, limp and bleeding, to his rooms. The policeman, with a kindly word, handed him over to Joan’s care. She was all for summoning a doctor, but Bellingham would not hear of it. White-faced, hiding his rising tumult behind a mask of steely calm, he told her curtly to fetch me. She obeyed, poor child, in terror of her life and his own. I was with them ten minutes later.

‘Saunders,’ he greeted me, without preamble. ‘God has flung down His last challenge.’

‘You mean this accident!’ said I, scoffing gently.

‘Accident!’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Do you, a priest of God, talk to me of accident! Not a sparrow falls without God. No, it was no accident. It was the last warning. I feel in my bones that this is the end. At any moment now He will strike, and I shall burn in hell for ever more, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ He had the true missioner’s flow of quotations, mostly misapplied; but I knew better than to cross him then. Something of his own passion infected me.

We were standing in the bedroom, where he was at last submitting, with the most complete indifference, to the medical ministrations of Joan. ‘Let’s go into the other room,’ I suggested, ‘and discuss this quietly and in comfort.’ I led the way, and they followed. The living-room, as I fancy they called it, was more cheerful by a long way. There was a fire in the grate, and a lamp like a great harvest moon glowed yellow on the table.

‘Listen to me, Saunders,’ cried Bellingham, refusing to sit down. ‘You are my best friend, my only friend; and Joan is my wife, the finest wife that any man had. The All-Seeing Eye is watching me now, as always; that street-accident, as you call it, was the plain speech of God telling me to desert this woman. I’m a doomed man, Saunders, and I can speak my mind now. I believe in God as firmly as ever I believed in Him, but I have learned something. He is not worth serving. I tell you, Saunders, that the God we have both worshipped is as evil as He is powerful. Almighty Evil sits upon the throne of the universe, and I will curse Him and die.’ Poor fellow, he could not believe me when I told him that it was the God in himself that was speaking those wild words, the God in himself that was fighting a heroic battle against the demon of fear that Joan by her woman’s tenderness had cast out.

There came, suddenly, a crash of something falling in one of the lower rooms of the house. It jarred our tense nerves horribly. And then, for the last time, the terror came to Bellingham, as if in answer to his taunt. He alone saw it, and you will quickly interpose that it was his mind alone that created it. And in a sense I believe you are right, but you’ll find it hard before I finish to maintain that the apparition was a purely subjective thing. Can an hallucination cause windows to rattle and doors to move? I believe for my part that in some unfathomable way the old Bellingham, or rather the riot of evil fancies about God that had victimized the old Bellingham, had woven for itself some external form. Language is crude and clumsy, crushing the truth at which it grasps; but it seems to me that in some sense—and a sense not too metaphorical—the man was, as I said before, cloven in twain, divided against himself. But your face warns me that I’m boring you.

‘There it is,’ shouted Bellingham, pointing towards a corner of the room. Joan, afraid of her lover, rushed to me, and my arms closed round her instinctively. We stared and saw nothing. ‘The same evil eyes,’ said Bellingham, more quietly, ‘the same accusing finger.’ And then began an uncanny one-sided colloquy. Bellingham conversed with his invisible mentor. ‘I will not leave her, God,’ said Bellingham. ‘I despise your dirty counsels. Kill me, damn me, burn me. Send me to hell, where I may see your hateful staring face no more.’

The windows began unaccountably to rattle. Joan clung to me, sobbing, on the verge of hysteria. Bellingham strode towards the table and with one swift gesture put out the light. ‘I am not afraid of your darkness,’ he flung out.

For a moment, silence; and a darkness made ghastly by bright moonlight. Then the windows rattled again, and then, quite without warning, Bellingham collapsed and fell against me. My body had broken his fall, and I now released Joan in order to turn my attention to her lover. The sight of him prostrate restored her to courage. She was always ready when needed. I left Bellingham to her care for a moment and turned again to that haunted corner. I have never known fear such as I knew at that moment, and yet I felt infinitely braced by the dramatic significance of this conflict with an unknown terror. It was as if hell had invaded earth, and that God had left me as His sole witness. At such crises a man with religion turns to it. Your old-fashioned agnosticism will be shocked by my method of exorcising evil.

‘In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, I charge you to leave this man in peace!’ I made the sign of the cross.

And still I stared, and still I saw nothing. Joan was busy with Bellingham, who was beginning to shew signs of returning consciousness. I could not move my eyes away from the corner by the door. And while I stared, something at last happened. Thank Heaven that I alone saw it! The door leading to the bedroom, which had been left half-open, began closing. It closed, pulled to from the other side, and the knob moved and the catch clicked, as though released from the hand of the Unseen. I ran to it, opened it, and looked out. And saw—nothing at all.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

SLEEPING BEAUTY

1

HARRIET leaned across the scullery sink, where dirty plates were soaking, in order to get a better view of the moon. Her sleeves were turned up to the elbow. Her right hand grasped a ball of dishcloth from which slimy water oozed between her red fingers to float, in black spots, upon the surface of the water. Upon that water, through which projected a tureen, like the bows of a wrecked ship, the moonlight fell. The three and elevenpenny alarum clock in the kitchen began striking nine.

All Harriet’s spiritual crises had had for their mise-en-scène this scullery, or so it seemed to Harriet herself. Seven years earlier she had stood where she was now standing and had wrestled with overmastering fear, to the accompaniment of that same ticking clock and to the drip-drip from the plate-rack upon already washed spoons. She had leaned then across the sink, as she was leaning now, and stared in terror at an unearthly glow in the sky that could scarcely fail to mean the end of the world and the coming of God in judgment. She shuddered to picture the dead bodies, putty-coloured, rising in their shrouds to confront—with her and Mamma and Alice and Maud—an implacable Creator. ‘O God, don’t come yet!’ It had been the most spontaneous of all her prayers. She had heard too much of this God to trust herself readily to His mercy; and she, the most wicked of girls, had little enough to hope from mere justice. She had too often deceived her teacher and been unsympathetic with her poor mother; and far too often had she resented having to drudge in the house—sweep and dust, make beds, empty slops, and wash dirty dinner-things—while still at school, and to the neglect of her home-lessons.

Whether in answer to her prayer, or from come other cause, God had stayed His coming on that occasion, and to-night, within a week of her twentieth birthday, she was thinking of quite other things: not of God, but of the moon. There was something placid and sisterly to-night about that celestial presence, and Harriet was deliciously aware of a bond between them, ‘Because Geoff likes us both,’ she said in her heart. What had been his phrase, the phrase that had astonished her first to gladness? ‘Gentle as moonlight, soft and gentle as moonlight.’ The words haunted her memory like singing birds. Geoff’s liking was in itself strange enough: the degree of his liking was scarcely credible. Why had he no eyes for Alice, the acknowledged beauty of the family?—or for Maud, with her brains? ‘Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters,’ Geoff had said. But Cinderella had been a pretty girl, and she, Harriet, was all too plain. It could only have been kindness or perverse obstinacy that had made him deny that. She glanced into the tiny mirror that hung from a nail on the pink distempered wall, and examined with some distaste the oval olive face, the fair hair, and the large brown eyes that looked out at her. Tears began to form in those eyes. ‘Now don’t start that silliness!’ she admonished herself. And she returned to the practical world and to the washing of the things dirtied at supper. ‘I do wish mamma wouldn’t leave all her fat,’ she thought, as with her scullery knife she sped three quivering fragments into the waste-pail.

There remained the undeniable fact that Geoff wanted to marry her: that is, he liked her so much that he wished her to share his home, when he acquired one, and wash his dishes instead of her mother’s. She could cook, too: she could make him nice things; and she would indeed have cheerfully slaved for his comfort in gratitude for that pity which, as she supposed, had made his glance linger in kindness upon her. But that was not to be. Even in that wonderful moment when he praised her gentleness she had realized how impossible it was that she should leave mamma; and her sisters had been not slow to emphasize that impossibility. ‘Boy and girl flirtation,’ said Alice with genial contempt—unaccountably, since Geoff was twenty-six and considered to be rather a clever young man. He was a poet—a bank-clerk in his spare time—and his knack of finding rhymes should alone have earned him some respect. To Geoff himself Alice had always been conspicuously friendly; and as for Maud—he had been her friend in the first place (she had met him in the city), and it had always been assumed that it was Maud whom he came to see. But about Geoff’s intentions now there could be no doubt at all. He had even wanted, the dear silly, to help Harriet wash up, but she had not dared to allow that, and he, making a virtue of necessity, was at this moment closeted with the family, perhaps urging once more his extravagant claim.

The last dish dried, the last fork placed in its proper section of the plate-basket, she returned, rather shamefaced, to the sitting-room. As the door closed behind her an ominous hush fell. A smile upon the proud plump face of Alice froze hard and thawed suddenly. Maud swung round upon the revolving music-stool and began turning the pages of Mendelssohn’s Lieder. Her mother, perched insecurely on the edge of her chair, visibly suffered. She was always visibly suffering.

‘Girls!’ said mamma plaintively.... It was enough. Harriet’s sisters rose without a word and left the room. Mamma looked at the young man, but he made no movement. ‘Geoffrey!’ she said, a world of pathos in her voice. But Geoffrey was deaf to it. ‘This concerns me too,’ he said. ‘May I smoke?’

‘Very well. Stay, if you wish to be cruel....’ But this man, lost to all sense of humanity, only replied: ‘I’m vulgarly persistent, no doubt, but you see I happen to want Harry.’

Harry’s mother turned twin orbs of suffering upon her daughter, and began reciting the speech she had prepared.

‘I’m sorry, Harriet, to disappoint you. I understand your desire to get away from a troublesome invalid mother and your two bread-winning sisters. But you are God’s charge to me and I must protect you.’

‘From me?’ inquired Geoffrey.

She did not heed the interruption.

‘I say nothing against Geoffrey, but I can’t consent to anything in the shape of an engagement between you. For one thing you are as yet a mere girl; you know nothing of life and nothing of marriage. And that isn’t all. Geoffrey has told me something very sad. He has been very open and frank with me: I will say that for him. We all like Geoffrey. But he’s told me that he would wish to be married in an office. He has queer views, my dear. He even tells me that he only goes to church to please his mother and father. I’m afraid he’s let go of the Saviour’s hand altogether. After that, I need hardly say more. I know my little Harriet too well to believe that she can wish to give mother pain. I already have my Cross to bear.’

‘Very well, mamma.’ Harriet’s eyes were luminous with tears.

At that Geoffrey rose. ‘Then I’d better clear off home at once.’

‘My dear Geoffrey,’ protested his hostess, ‘I know you are thinking to spare my feelings after this upset. You’re very good to me always. But you’ll please stay your week-end. We mustn’t part in unfriendliness—and you know how I should hate you to travel on Sunday.’

He could not keep bitterness out of his smile, but he replied cheerfully enough:

‘Well, Mrs. Mason, since Harry is not to be engaged to me there’ll be no harm in my taking her out for half an hour before bed? Would you care to come, Harry?... Thanks awfully.’

2

Harriet went to her room in a trembling ecstasy, struggling against odds to believe that she was indeed beautiful, as he had said. While she moved about, within the pink beflowered walls of her very own room (as in her heart she was wont to call it), his voice still made music in her memory.

‘Why will you submit to be boxed up in that prison? Can’t you understand how I want you? Can’t you understand how lovely you are?’ He had never before been so passionate in his iterations. And she could only shake her head, elated, yet with secret misgiving. He had very queer ideas, mamma had said. Was this obsession by the thought of beauty perhaps one of them? But there was worse to follow.

‘Harry, are you determined to give me up?’

She replied miserably: ‘I can’t go against mamma. You wouldn’t have me go against mamma. Oh, Geoff, I would do anything else for you.’

The words were like a match dropped in dry stubble. ‘Then you do love me? You do! You do!’

His violence frightened and braced her. ‘You know I like you tremendously,’ she said, grappling with the unknown, ‘better than anyone else in the world.’

‘Except your mother,’ he retorted bitterly, and then added in a changed tone: ‘Harry darling, we’ve never kissed. Do you like me enough for that? We may never have another moment alone.’

‘Of course, you funny boy!’

He bent towards her, and she kissed him, in friendly fashion, on the cheek. ‘Happy now?’ she asked, almost merrily, hoping to drive away his tragic air.

He smiled. ‘Not exactly.’ An odd smile it was. And at the bend of the road, under the shadow of Mrs. Lavender’s lime trees, he took her face suddenly between his hands and kissed her mouth. Something stirred in her but did not awake. She could not understand his emotion.

‘Harry, you said you’d do anything for me. Did you mean it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll think me strange. Perhaps you’ll be shocked. It’s this: let me see you. If I’m to go away from you, as I must, let me see you just once, as you really are. Give me a memory to take with me.’

Was he indeed mad? Poor Geoff! ‘But, dear, you can see me now.’

‘Your face, your clothes. Let me see you, all your beauty. Venus Anadyomene....’

She burned with shame as something of his meaning dawned on her ... and now, as she stood in her bedroom re-living the scene, the plan he had unfolded seemed both wild and wicked. Wild and wicked, yes: yet shot through with a flash of poetry. An illuminated ‘Thou God seest me’ gleamed at her from one wall, and a pledge to abstain by God’s help from all intoxicating liquors as beverages, signed in childish caligraphy Harriet Mason, accused her from another. Wild and wicked; but in a passion of gratitude for being loved, and for the spark kindled within her, she had yielded her promise.

‘Thou God seest me.’ Blushing hotly, very conscious of that inquisitive eye, she took down her hair. With a miniature clatter the pins fell from nerveless fingers on to the glass surface of the dressing-table. Slowly she undressed; paused a moment, shyly stroking her slim nude body; and then with a gesture of resolve slipped into her kimono. The eye of God was still upon her, but she had given her word.

Her woolly slippers made no sound on the oilcloth floor. She opened her door and stepped into the passage. Opposite her was Geoff’s door, left purposely ajar. Tremblingly, but swiftly lest fear should make her false, she crossed and entered. Geoff made no sound. She stood, too ashamed to look up, pushing his door to with a nervous backward movement of the hand. It closed, not without noise.

Her lips moved, as in prayer. She lifted her arms high, and her garment, slipping from white shoulders, fell and clustered at her feet, a diaphanous shimmering mass.

‘Lovely, lovely ... O God!’ The scarce-heard whisper made her heart leap in exultation. She raised her head and looked steadfastly at her love. He sat up in bed, still as an image of adoration, the moonlight making visible the worship in his eyes. She stooped, gathered up her gown, and went out into the passage ... into the arms of Alice.

‘I heard a door slam,’ said Alice. ‘What’s the matter? Why, you’ve—— That’s Geoff’s room!’

Alice became pale and for a moment speechless with anger. When she recovered her tongue it was to use a language strange to the ears of Harriet.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ cried Harriet, starry-eyed, ‘and I don’t care. He loves me, Alice, because I am so beautiful, beautiful. Why didn’t you tell me I was beautiful?’

She pushed past Alice and locked herself in her bedroom. Those bitter reproaches had no sting for her. Even had she understood them they would have been less than a feather’s weight against the joy now born in her heart. For her the world was made new, clean and new. With beauty, seen hitherto through a glass darkly, she was now face to face. She fell asleep exhausted with happiness, and when in the morning mamma came to her room and sobbed, and raved, she could understand not a word of it.

‘You’ve brought disgrace and shame upon us all, you wretched child!’ And to this Harriet, in her profound innocence, could only answer: ‘But we love each other, mamma. What harm have we done?’

‘You shall leave my house as soon as that man can be made to marry you, and never come back again.’

‘Am I to marry Geoff after all, then, mamma?’

Yes, it appeared that she was, and that her daring to ask the question was further proof of her shamelessness. It was all very baffling.

THE ENCHANTED MOMENT

THE ENCHANTED MOMENT

MR. JOHN PARDOE was not an imaginative man, but—if the truth must be known—he had once been a child, and though, as Mr. Pardoe aged, the child grew smaller and smaller, it was not yet squeezed out of existence. The secret had been well kept. Plump, rosy, and forty-five years old, encased in patent-toe boots, doeskin spats, sleek morning coat, striped trousering, and silk hat—not to mention certain articles of underwear—Mr. Pardoe oscillated daily between his office in Cannon Street and his pleasant home at Putney, giving no cause to his dearest friend or his bitterest enemy to suspect him of having a secret hoard of youth. His waking mind was occupied exclusively by lighterage, freight duties, marine insurance, bus routes, time tables, foreign exchange rates, and the criminal ineptitude of the Government party; and his dreams, which rose only to the bait of cheese and spring onions for supper, reflected his general staidness of character with a minimum of humorous distortion. For more than a decade he had lived within half a mile of the house that held Swinburne, and he was still unaware of having anything in particular to thank God for.

But in his forty-sixth year, when he had already begun to cherish some of the idiosyncrasies proper to a much older man and to regard with complacency his shining porcelain pate and his fringe of greying hair, something happened to Mr. Pardoe that was the beginning of a spiritual revolution. The something was named Miss Adela Simpson, and it had for many years typed his business letters with an enthusiasm and a generous disregard for pedantry in spelling which would have been hard to match in any other city office. Perhaps it was Mr. Pardoe’s patience with these orthographical freedoms that won Adela’s affection, or perhaps she alone of all his acquaintances had divined the existence of that child in him which I have felt it my duty to mention. Whatever the cause, she married him; and, being herself a fluffy, golden-haired, and sentimental creature, with an unbounded capacity for enjoyment, she persuaded him that he was very happy with her. Had the matter ended there, all might have been well: Mr. Pardoe might have lived and died decorously, a plain man with no nonsense about him. The youth in him might have remained bottled and out of sight for ever, had not Adela tampered with the cork.

But destiny, in the person of Mrs. Pardoe, chose to play tricks on this excellent man. Some eighteen months after that rational registry wedding, the fluffy girl insisted on giving birth to a boy. The local doctor assisted its entry, and the local vicar declared its name to be Timothy. I have already said that Mr. Pardoe was not an imaginative man, and this event was quite outside his calculations. Being both by instinct and training a gentleman of considerable delicacy, he was embarrassed—as who would not be?—and quite unable to assume, at short notice, the rôle of fond parent. But as the weeks passed by and the red squeaking pudding called Timothy began to shew some traces of its humanity, began even to bear a slight resemblance to himself, a change more subtle but no less real occurred in the feelings of the reluctant father. For one thing, the preposterous littleness of the creature attracted his notice and excited his wonder. Sometimes when he looked at Timothy Mr. Pardoe’s face would break into a wholly irrational grin. Once or twice, when no one was near, he presented his index finger to be enfolded in miniature hands of unparalleled clamminess, or played the fool with his watch; and once, once only, he blushed to find himself making ridiculous noises, noises not unlike those emitted habitually by the child’s agreeable but infatuated mother.

The translation of Mr. Pardoe from a serious man with business responsibilities and a taste for party politics into a kind of domestic pet, thinker of thoughts too deep for tears, and lover of children—this translation might have continued apace had not the cook suddenly, wantonly, left to get married. Adela, luxuriating in her new freedom, decided to manage without a cook; but Adela’s cooking was no more precise than her spelling. It played havoc with Mr. Pardoe’s digestive apparatus, and—by that transmutation of matter into spirit which is the most disconcerting fact in life—Mr. Pardoe’s digestive apparatus played havoc with Mr. Pardoe’s temper. He became angry with the world and with the life that crawled upon its surface.

Nevertheless the world continued to revolve, and life was not extinct. Timothy, in particular, was far from extinct. For five years he flourished, and on his fifth birthday, at an hour well past his bedtime, he entered Mr. Pardoe’s study and demanded to be told a story.

Mr. Pardoe, interrupted in the reading of his favourite periodical, The Bondholder’s Register, was annoyed. Birthday or no birthday, this was an outrage: the sanctuary violated, the high priest disturbed at his devotions. Yet, in spite of his dyspepsia, he exhibited an admirable restraint.

‘No, Timothy,’ he said, holding up a cautionary finger. ‘I shall not tell you a story. You know I do not like to be disturbed in the evening. You will go to bed, and at the proper moment I shall come to kiss you good night. But tell you a story I will not. I see your mother’s hand in this—this act of rebellion. If you wanted stories you could go to your toy-cupboard, where you would find several volumes of stories: ridiculous enough, no doubt, but suited to your age. Although you cannot yet read with facility you could easily amuse yourself with the pictures. Really, Timothy, I can’t imagine why you should suppose that I should tell you a story, a thing I have never done in my life.’

As a substitute for an applauding public meeting of the company’s shareholders, Timothy was not a success. He clung to his simple thesis with the brutal tenacity of the very young. ‘Mummy says you are to tell me a story.’

The fluffy girl appeared suddenly in the doorway. ‘Yes, John, you really might, this once. He’s tired of my stories. And it’s his birthday, after all, poor little thing!’

‘Poor little thing!’ sneered Mr. Pardoe. This was sheer domestic tyranny: he wouldn’t suffer it. ‘Let me tell you, Adela,’ he cried, pointing at her accusingly with The Bondholder’s Register, ‘you are spoiling the poor little thing, as you call him. It’s eight o’clock, an hour past his bedtime. The way to bring a child up....’

But here Mr. Pardoe was interrupted, and a valuable homily on the training of children thereby lost to the world. The clock began striking. Now it was one of Mr. Pardoe’s nervous weaknesses, of which there were many, that he could never raise his voice above the sound of a striking clock. He disliked clocks. He resented their unmannerly habit of cutting his sentences in half and making him lose the thread of his discourse. And now he had to wait several seconds until that clock chose to let him proceed with what he was saying. Very well: he resigned himself to the delay. His face was that of a martyr too well-bred even to invoke his God. He mentally counted the strokes: ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven....’

‘Why!’ cried Mr. Pardoe, ‘that clock’s wrong. An hour slow. I’m sure it’s eight o’clock. I set my watch this morning by Greenwich Time....’

2

The words died on his lips, which remained open only because in his bewilderment Mr. Pardoe forgot to close them. He seemed to have stepped into the very heart of Spring. The sounds and colours and the rich earthy smell of the woods made him tingle with delight. Never before had he breathed such air. It was like strong wine in its effect, and that alarmed Mr. Pardoe, who dreaded nothing so much as to lose control of himself. For him the light of reason was the only legitimate light in the universe: moonlight, starlight, sunlight—these were merely decorative. ‘No wonder the fruit is so fine,’ he said to himself; and he plucked one of the golden apples from a laden branch that bowed towards him, and set his teeth in it with a disregard of the rights of property that was quite foreign to his principles. All round him tall grasses waved, and satin-skinned trees stretched out armfuls of treasure, their leaves luminously green, their fruit glowing like multi-coloured glass globes. Mr. Pardoe began to revise his first impression. It could hardly be Spring with all this fruit already ripe for eating, and in such abundance, such astonishing variety! Apple, pear, plum, greengage, lemon, pomegranate, quince—‘Why, with greengages at their present price, there’s a small fortune here!’ He wondered whether there was a market within easy distance. There was no sort of road within sight: there was only a long avenue of arched trees, in the branches of which birds sang with laughter as well as joy in their tumultuous music. At his feet, wherever he stepped, flowers sprang up as if to greet him: lilies lifted their pale faces towards him; roses red and blue rioted in the grass; pansies eyed him amorously. A sound that was like colour made audible, a deep golden sound, a singing dream, filled the forest till it brimmed over with loveliness. In the dim glowing air shot through by shafts of moonlight from the outer world, great dragonflies poised themselves, lost in trance. ‘A trifle theatrical, perhaps,’ said Mr. Pardoe, ‘but undeniably pretty.’

Moving slowly on, he racked his poor brains for a rational explanation of these phenomena. Nature, hitherto so circumspect, was behaving in a most unbridled way. A voice dropped out of the sky, like a bell: ‘Greenwich Time, my dear sir? Good stuff, isn’t it! Come and have some.’

‘Thank you. But I never drink between meals.’ The reply came from Mr. Pardoe’s lips before he could check it. This was absurd—he of all men to have an experience like this! Indignantly he stared in the direction of the voice that had hailed him. A little golden star appeared to be falling through the sky. It lodged in the lower branches of a tree, writhed brilliantly for a moment, and resolved itself into a human being: a creature about the size of a foot-rule with a round red baby-face. It jumped to the ground and shook lumps of starshine from the soles of its wooden boots. ‘Excuse me, won’t you. I’ve been shopping. A fellow gets simply smothered with this stuff in the Milky Way.’

Mr. Pardoe bowed. ‘It is for me to apologize, if you, as I surmise, are the proprietor of this valuable piece of orchard-land. I fear I am trespassing. I must have lost my way. To be perfectly frank with you, I’ve not the slightest idea how I got here; and let me hasten to add that I’m a strictly temperate man. I rather fancy that I’ve been made the victim of some clownish practical joke.’

The midget shed a scintillating tear, which made a circle of green light in the grass where it fell. From his pocket he snatched a notebook. ‘I must make a note of that,’ he said.

‘Of what?’ inquired Mr. Pardoe.

‘That tear. I’ve got only six to last the whole evening. I limit myself to ten a day now. It’s bad to become a slave to pleasure.’

Mr. Pardoe coughed to hide his alarm and embarrassment. ‘Yes, yes. Quite so. Did you read your paper this morning, my dear sir? What a disgraceful Budget again!’

‘Ah,’ cried the midget, turning up his eyes; ‘what is there more enjoyable than a choking sob on a cold Wednesday morning before breakfast? And they ought not to have taken your clothes. I can’t allow that.’

‘My clothes!’ Mr. Pardoe blushed from top to toe, and that blush was the only thing that covered his nakedness. ‘Incredible! It had entirely escaped my notice. I really don’t know how to apologize. I am more ashamed than I can say. This is a disaster that has never happened before. Whatever am I to do?’

‘A happy encounter,’ chuckled the midget, rubbing his hands together. ‘I’m a tailor by trade. Fit you out in no time. Three yards of gossamer spun out of lovers’-dream. The finer the mesh the higher the price. Excuse my speaking commercially, but business is business, you know.’

For the first time Mr. Pardoe’s heart went out to this odd creature. ‘I share your admirable sentiments. Business is business. But I deplore this rather fanciful talk about dreams and gossamer, this—ah—second-rate poetry, if I may call it so. But there, I’m only a plain business man.’

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked the midget surprisingly.

Mr. Pardoe looked revolted. ‘A rather indelicate question, is it not? However, since you have seen fit to ask it, I will confess that I have never found any particular need for believing in the Person to whom you allude.’

The midget put out his tongue, looking inconceivably pert. ‘I’m God,’ said he.

‘Pardon me,’ Mr. Pardoe replied, with immense dignity. ‘I cannot stand here and listen to blasphemy. I am a member of the Church of England.’

‘Don’t know the name,’ said the midget. ‘If it’s an inn, take me to it, like a good fellow.’

‘Before we continue this conversation,’ said Mr. Pardoe, beginning to relish the sound of his own voice, ‘I feel it only fair to say that I entertain the gravest suspicions of you. I suspect you of being a figment of my imagination, perhaps a mere dream. I am not aware of having eaten anything calculated to disagree with me, but that is what has probably happened. It’s a lesson to me, which I shall not easily forget, that one cannot be too careful about one’s diet.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ remarked the midget. He paused to draw three circles in the grass with the point of his foot. ‘But if you want some Greenwich Time you’ve come to the right place. Slip these shoes on.’ In the centre of the middle circle was a pair of loose-fitting shoes, rather like goloshes, made of the skin of a green reptile. It seemed to be covered with eyes. Mr. Pardoe, convinced now that he was dreaming, obediently slipped his feet into these shoes, which immediately began to dance. He found it impossible to control them. That didn’t surprise him so much as did his enjoyment of the dance. ‘Come along,’ said the midget, kicking up his heels, and Mr. Pardoe, following in the wake of that preposterous figment of his imagination, danced down the avenues of Faery with a light heart. Something was released inside him. He felt himself shrink till he was scarcely bigger than his guide, and the loss of that frock coat and that pair of nicely creased striped trousers distressed him no longer. Was it possible that the child he had secreted so long had at last broken out, and that the old John Pardoe, that bond-holding, cheque-endorsing animal, was no more? Was it possible that he had died, and that this was the glorious resurrection promised to the faithful? Mr. Pardoe’s thoughts buzzed in his brain like a hive of bees when he remembered this little tailor-fellow’s blasphemous claim to godhead.

Nothing more unlike Mr. Pardoe’s conception of God can be imagined than the ruddy-faced mischievous creature who stood in the doorway of his house to welcome his guest. The house bore a striking resemblance to a country inn, the best kind of country inn, and Mr. Pardoe fell instantly in love with it. The sight of it induced in him a thirst such as he had never in all his life experienced before.

‘You’d like to see my beard, I expect,’ remarked his host, as they stepped across the threshold. ‘Well, there it is.’ He waved a careless hand towards the centre of the oak-raftered room, where, in a flower-pot that stood in the middle of the table, a grey beard flourished.

Mr. Pardoe scratched his head: sure proof that he was feeling more at home. ‘Now I can’t quite place that,’ he said, reverting to the idea that he was in a dream. ‘The dancing shoes were from Hans Andersen, but this for the moment eludes me.’

‘It’s a good growth,’ said the beard’s owner. ‘Never gives any trouble. Great advantage, not wearing it on the chin. Some of my clients don’t care about a bearded tailor. And to those who do, I say: Step inside. A place for everything and everything in its place, and the place for my beard is the parlour. Very quiet and well-behaved, and drinks far less water than an aspidistra. If it sings too loud I just snip it down a bit with me scissors.’

‘The Singing Beard,’ mused Mr. Pardoe. ‘That must be a public-house sign I’ve come across somewhere.’

‘Now,’ urged the genial tailor, ‘what about a little refreshment. Or would you rather I set about that suit of clothes first?’

The eyes of the abandoned Pardoe sparkled. He visioned a wineglass, the size of a milking-pail, filled with champagne. He felt it against his lips, felt it slip down his dry throat, and sink into his innermost being like a benediction.... He looked at his host with a little shamefaced smile. ‘Well, if it’s all the same to you ... if you’ll excuse my rather unconventional appearance....’

‘Come down to the cellar,’ cried his friend, taking him by the arm, ‘the Cellar of a Thousand Bottles.’ Still gripping Mr. Pardoe, he stamped thirstily on the floor. A trapdoor opened. They shot into the cellar with lightning speed, and before he could remember his manners Mr. Pardoe was knocking the tops off bottles with a skill that in cooler moments would have astounded him.

‘There you are!’ cried the little tailor. ‘Greenwich Time on every label. Look for our trademark and refuse imitations.’ He drank copious draughts. He became confidential, even affectionate. ‘Now that’s the difference between you and me. Your name’s Pardoe. That just shews the difference between you and me. Now my name’s Dionysus,’ he went on, with a radiant smile. ‘It’s a good name. And me father’s name was Dionysus before me. But me grandfather—ah, that’s another story.’

‘And what, my little man, was your grandfather’s name?’ enquired Mr. Pardoe, waving his glass in air.

‘Oh, me grandfather? Were you asking after me grandfather? Ah, his name, don’t you see, was Dionysus. They distinguished us one from the other by our trades. We were tailors, you know, all three of us.’

Mr. Pardoe rose to his feet. The performance was a credit to him. He made a last effort to exorcise the demon of levity that possessed him. ‘My friend, you have had enough. More than enough. You are intoxicated.’

Dionysus paused in his drinking to fix a waggish eye on Mr. Pardoe. ‘Drunk. Drunk as a god. Aren’t you! Why the devil don’t you drink? Imprison you for sobriety.’

He held a brimming glass to the lips of Mr. Pardoe, and, as he drank, the poor bewitched gentleman saw his host swell till the house could no longer contain that vast bulk. Himself a flame of exultation, Mr. Pardoe stared until the eyes of Dionysus became fierce seas, sparkling with unearthly light, towering in storm, and the glory of his sunset-face filled the sky.

3

‘... eight.’ The last stroke of eight o’clock. Mr. Pardoe, rubbing his eyes, saw that his wife’s face still wore the expression of bored patience with which she was accustomed to receive his domestic sermons, and that Timothy, as before, balanced himself on one leg and jerked his body backwards and forwards by way of passing time. They seemed to be waiting for him.

‘What’s this?’ cried Mr. Pardoe, staring at the paper in his hand. He recognized The Bondholder’s Register. An alarming idea visited him. ‘Am I...?’ He looked down at his legs, stroked his arms. Yes, he was. He breathed deeply in his relief. ‘My dear, did you notice anything, anything unusual?’

Blank faces greeted him.

‘Between the seventh and eighth stroke of the hour—did anything happen to me?’

His wife took a step towards him. Her eyes became anxious. ‘No, dear. Are you feeling ill?’

‘No, no. Perfectly well. Just a whim of mine. A mere fancy. Nothing at all. Nothing.’

‘Oh, father!’ said Timothy, for the fourth time, ‘you might tell me a story.’

Mr. Pardoe turned to the boy with enthusiasm. He beamed paternal affection upon him. ‘Yes, old man. Come along. A story before we go to bed, eh?... Once upon a time there was a tailor who lived in the forest and kept a beard, a grey beard, which sang pretty tunes....’

THE MOLE

THE MOLE

CONVERSATION turned inevitably to the local tragedy that was agitating all the village. The little general store, the only shop the place boasted and a poor thing at that, had been burned down in the night, and nothing remained but the heap of ruins from which, not many hours since, two charred corpses had been removed. Our chessmen stood in battle array, ready for action, but unnoticed by either of us. Something in Saunders’s manner held my attention. Sceptic though I am, I have always found him interesting. He pays me the compliment of divesting himself of his rectorship when he visits me, and it has flattered my vanity to believe that I see a side of him that is for ever hidden from those of his parishioners who assemble Sunday by Sunday to receive from him their spiritual ration. And I was the more intrigued because I divined depths in him still to be explored.

Perhaps I am over-fanciful, said Saunders, edging his chair nearer to the fire; but it had always seemed to me that there was more in their marriage than the mere female domination so obvious to every one. And when poor Gubbins came to me last winter, with the story that I’m going to tell you, my guess was confirmed. Mrs. Gubbins wore the breeches—a vulgar phrase for a vulgar thing—but that wasn’t all. I shall never forget my first visit to her shop. You’ve seen the woman scores of times, but I’ll tell you the impression she made on me. Her face was leather; her nose was pinched and pitiless; her eyes—did you ever notice her eyes? You’d expect her to possess the malignant dominating eyes of the shrew. No such thing. Mrs. Gubbins’s eyes resembled those of a mask, or of a corpse: they were fixed, so it seemed to me, in a cold, everlasting, fishy scrutiny of a drab world. If they were the windows of her soul, they were windows made of frosted glass. Looking at them I seemed to see vacuity behind them. Looking again, I surmised a soul indeed, but a damned soul. A professional prejudice, perhaps, that you won’t sympathize with. But it was not her eyes that most disturbed me. I have seen a variety of unpleasant eyes. But I have never seen on any human being so ugly a mole as was on that woman’s chin. It was about the size of a pea, and growing from it were three longish black whiskers. The thing looked positively feline. It became for me, as soon as I caught sight of it, her most significant feature. And that, too, proved a good guess.

I had gone to the shop ostensibly to buy a cake of soap, but really in the hope of catching a glimpse of a human soul, of two human souls. I had heard queer accounts of this couple, and I was curious.

‘A cake of soap, please, Mrs. Gubbins.’ I was then a stranger to her, as to all the village, but my use of her name evoked no sign of life in those glassy eyes of hers. She turned to her husband, that mild little man with dreaming eyes and a trim beard who looked just what he was, a lay preacher with a taste for fantastic prophecy. He was sitting at the back of the shop on a case of sugar, or something of the kind, engrossed in reading his pocket Bible.

‘Run along,’ said Mrs. Gubbins, in her flat expressionless voice. ‘Soap, George! You know where it is!’

The little man looked up with the air of one dragged unwillingly from a dream. In his small rabbit-eyes Christian patience did battle with resentment. I seemed to scent a crisis. Had the woman nagged him for his idleness I couldn’t have blamed her. But what interested me was not the rights and wrongs of the quarrel, but its method.

He blinked at her defiantly. There was a pregnant silence during which they stared at each other. Then the woman, protruding her chin, elongating her thin neck, bent a little towards him. I was dumbfounded with astonishment and a kind of morbid curiosity. For the moment it seemed to me that she must be mutely demanding a kiss in token of his submission; but while I watched, fascinated out of my good manners, she lifted her hand slowly and placed her index finger upon the point of her chin. It flashed on me that she was directing his attention to that mole of hers.

Gubbins averted his eyes and slid off the seat. ‘Yes, dear!’ he muttered, and disappeared into the bowels of the shop.

2

Secrets of the confessional? Yes, in a sense. But Gubbins wouldn’t grudge you the story now. It was during that phenomenally cold spell in November, fifteen months ago, that he came to me. That he came to me at all should tell you something of his anguish of spirit, if you knew the man. Everybody knew him to be a deeply religious person, of the Bible-punching kind, but not everybody guessed how his particular conception of reality had eaten into his mind. He could prove to you by an elaborate system of Scriptural cross-references that the Day of Judgment was due to occur in the summer of 1950; and the geography of heaven was more familiar to him, and more concrete, than the chairs and tables in his own house or the streets of this village. Two-thirds of him lived among these precise humourless dreams of his, dreams that were the fruit not of mystical experience but of a laborious investigation, with rule and compass and a table of logarithms, extended over fifteen years. Two-thirds of him—that means he was more than a little unbalanced. He was a preposterous combination of arrogance and humility: we had many a friendly argument together, though the friendliness, I fancy, was rather on my side. Blandly certain of being the custodian of divine truth, he was yet pitifully dubious about his own chance of salvation and almost crazy in his forlorn pursuit of the love of God. Almost, but not quite: in the medical sense he was undoubtedly as sane as you or I. Me and all my kind he disliked because we receive payment for preaching Christ. That is what makes his appeal to me so remarkable an event.

Well, he came to the Rectory and was admitted by the maid, loyal to her orders to exclude no one, but scared. I found him standing on my study hearthrug, his face ashen, his lean hairy hands clutching a cloth cap as though it were his only hold on safety. The white knuckles gleamed like polished ivory. I saw the fear that flared in his tiny eyes and guessed that he had come as a suppliant, that in some way his faith in himself was broken. And knowing of old the obstinate strength of that faith, I shuddered.

‘In trouble, Mr. Gubbins?’

He appeared not to see my outstretched hand. ‘I’ve had an escape from hell,’ he squeaked. ‘It’s that damned monkey-spot, Mr. Saunders.’

The mild expletive, coming from Gubbins, astonished me no less than his statement. I asked him to sit down and tell me all about it, but he remained standing and his fingers twitched so violently that presently his cap fell to the ground unheeded. ‘It nearly got me, sir, that monkey-spot.’ A local expression, no doubt; but what did it mean? Gubbins saw at last that I didn’t understand him. ‘That monkey-spot on her chin. My wife’s chin. You must have seen it.’

Can you imagine two human beings, tied by marriage, devoting all their emotional energy to hating each other? Perhaps not; but that is, as near as I can tell it to you, the truth about the Gubbinses. Twenty years ago she was an unremarkable woman, and he no doubt a very ordinary youth. Mere propinquity, I imagine, threw them at each other. He, with little or nothing of the genuine affection that might have excused the act, took advantage of her, as the phrase is. Sin number one, the first link in the chain that was to bind him, the first grievance for her to cherish in her ungenerous heart. They were married three months before the birth of the child. It died within an hour. She chose to see in this event the punishment of the sin into which he, as she contended, had betrayed her. From that moment Gubbins was her thrall: not by virtue of love, or the legal tie, but by virtue of the hideous moral ascendancy that the woman had been cunning enough, and pitiless enough, to establish over him. Carefully she kept alive the memory of his offence. It was a whip ready to her hand. And when seeking for distraction from his domestic misery he turned to that intricate game of guesswork which was for him religion, what he learned there of the significance of sin only served to increase his wretchedness.

He was evidently a man weak both in spirit and intelligence, or he would have realized at once that he was no more guilty than she was. But once she had succeeded in imposing her view upon him he could not shake it off. It remained, to poison his self-respect. Side by side with his conviction of unworthiness there grew up a hatred of the woman he was supposed to have wronged. And, being itself sinful, this very hatred provided a further occasion for remorse. It was a race between loathing and repentance, and loathing won. Never a personable woman, Mrs. Gubbins became daily more repellent, until at last the wretched husband found her mere presence a discomfort, like an ill-fitting shoe or a bad smell. In particular, he detested—as well he might—that mole on her chin with its three feline hairs. And she, fiendishly acute, found it all out. She caught his sidelong glances of distaste, and pondered them long; and that distaste became another weapon to her hand. She accused him of harbouring cruel thoughts; taunted him with first robbing her of youth and then despising her for lacking it; flung out wild and baseless charges of infidelity. To propitiate her he made the most fantastic concessions: allowed her to turn him out of the shop, and consented to do all the housework in her stead. It became patent to the world that she was master.

You’ll ask why he was fool enough to put up with this treatment? But, given his weakness, the explanation is credible enough. She attacked him at his most vulnerable point, his conscience. Religion, as he conceived it, taught him to submit to circumstances, not to master them. In his darkest hour he could still kneel at his bedside and say, ‘Thy will, not mine, be done.’ And he really believed for a while that God’s will and Mrs. Gubbins’s were in mystical accord, that she, in fine, was the rod with which, for his own soul’s good, heaven was scourging him. To aid this grotesque delusion there was the spectacle of her formal piety. For she was a prayerful woman, scrupulous in her speech, and of unquestioned honesty in her commercial transactions.

If only he could have cursed her and stood by his words, she might have mended. But he, who believed he had unravelled the ultimate secrets of destiny, dared not pit his moral judgment against hers. He was ever ready to sit on the stool of repentance. A day came when hatred rose to a frenzy in him. He cut short her complaints with an oath, poured out the gall of his heart upon her. She seemed quelled, and in his triumph he added a taunt, banal and indeed puerile: ‘You whiskered old cat!’ It was a fatal mistake. She stared at him mutely for a moment, no doubt in sheer astonishment. Then her eyes narrowed and something like a smile twisted her lips. ‘Cat and mouse,’ she remarked coldly. And—call the man a fool, if you like—that reply terrified Gubbins as nothing else could have done.

He had betrayed himself once more into the hands of the enemy. He had provided her with a new and a bitter grievance. Worst of all, she knew his secret, knew that his loathing centred on that monkey-spot of hers, as he called it. From that moment I imagine her cherishing that mole with the solicitude that Samson, had he been a wiser man, would have lavished upon his hair. It was the source and the instrument of her power. So far as I understood Gubbins, it was as much nausea as hatred that the thing inspired in him. His soul sickened at the sight of it. It became a poison, a torture. All this she knew and exulted in.... Curious that an æsthetic sense, together with a weak stomach, should suffice to work a man’s downfall.

And so I come back to that night of fear the events of which drove Gubbins, twenty hours later but still electric with terror, to the refuge of my study.

3

Saunders paused to relight his pipe. One disconcerting thing about the affair, he resumed after a while, is that in Gubbins’s account of his wife I can discover no human qualities at all. I fancy he himself had begun to regard her as an agent, not of God this time, but of the devil. Characteristic of him to jump from one pole to the other. And that theological fantasia, his imagination, may have coloured everything. That is as it may be. I can only tell you what he told me.

You know how quickly some noxious weed will overrun a flower-bed. Well, something of the kind happened in the ill-disciplined mind of Gubbins. He was pitifully susceptible to suggestion. An idle fancy presented itself to him: ‘Many a woman has been murdered for less than that monkey-spot.’ And the fancy became a fear which walked with him night and day, a fear lest he should be betrayed by sheer force of suggestion into murdering his wife. You realize what that would mean; it would mean damnation for his soul, or so he believed. The gallows had but few terrors for him. I think he would have welcomed death, could he have been sure of his salvation hereafter.

The seed was sown. The idea took root. And the more passionately he struggled against it, the more persistently his imagination envisaged the crime. At last one night, after a hundred sleepless hours, he reached the end of his tether.

He jumped noiselessly out of bed. Moonlight flooded the room, imparting a ghastly pallor to the face of the supine Mrs. Gubbins. In sleep she had something of the chill dignity of a corpse lying in state. The thin lips curled back a little on one side of the mouth, and in the gap gleamed a gold-crowned tooth, a tiny yellow fang. On the point of her chin was that at which the wretched man tried not to look: itself not very offensive, but rendered hideous by the three black jealously-guarded hairs depending from it. Gubbins swears that as he stood staring at his wife’s face those hairs were moving to and fro like the long legs of a spider, or the antennæ of an insect seeking prey.

Having gazed long, he forced his fascinated eyes away, and padded across the room. The door clicked, in spite of him, as he opened it. He experienced all the alarms of a guilty man. Yet his intention was innocent enough: it was even, in its grotesque fashion, comical. He had determined to shear this female Samson of her power by cutting off those three hairs.

But when he returned to the bedside, and stood again by the sleeping body of his wife, he was overcome by nausea. Distaste for the task paralysed his will. He felt as a sensitive man would feel if he were forced to crush a beetle with his naked finger. As an excuse for delay he began examining the instrument in his hand, which was a perfectly ordinary pair of household scissors having, as all scissors have, one sharp end and one blunted. The sharp end interested him most. He scrutinized its point and pressed it against the ball of his thumb; and the thought flashed to him, as though the devil himself had whispered it: ‘This is sharp enough—one thrust under the left ear.’ He shuddered, recoiled from the idea, and burned with shame and fear for having ever had it. And, while still suffocating with the sense of his own guiltiness, there crept into his consciousness the nightmare conviction that he was being watched. He could not see his wife, his gaze being fixed on the scissors, but he knew that she had opened her eyes.

Gubbins couldn’t explain to me the horror of that moment. He merely bowed his head on my mantelpiece and closed his eyes as if to shut out an evil vision. For when, after an age of immobility and silence, he forced himself to look at the face on the bed, he saw the cruel lips curled in a smile of final triumph; and even the opaque eyes seemed for once to shine. And what, for Gubbins, gave the last turn to the screw of terror was that the woman was not looking at him at all. Her gaze, full of evil beatitude, was fixed on the ceiling. For several minutes, minutes that throbbed with his agony, she neither moved nor spoke; and at last, very slowly, she moved a little higher on to the pillow and, still smiling insanely, bared her throat for him to strike. Gubbins was convinced that she ardently desired him to stain his soul with her blood.

Well, as you know, he didn’t murder her: not that time, at any rate. He escaped, as he said, from hell. But I think I would as soon go to hell as have to live through those last fifteen months of his. For now she had completed his enslavement; now she had got his miserable little soul between her finger and thumb. Added to all her old grievances, those daggers with which to stab at his conscience, she had another and a more sensational one: this terrible sin, this attempt upon her life. Spiritual blackmail prolonged for twenty years. No wonder he set fire to the place.

A SENSITIVE MAN

A SENSITIVE MAN

THE sight of Elsie’s drawn face, that pallid mask of desolation, moved Wyvern to a self-pity that savoured exquisitely on the tongue. To watch suffering and to be unable to relieve it was a cruel experience. He hardly dared to conjecture how much she had suffered during the last few days of suspense while he, the only man in the world for her, had been trying to make up his mind on a matter affecting the destinies of three persons. He could not dislike Elsie: she had a certain fragile winsomeness and she was still, though her first bloom was gone, pathetically young. Everything she said to-night did but strengthen his conviction of her intellectual immaturity. Between his mind and hers there was a great gulf fixed. Now Marion—Marion was so different. That did not mean that he had no pity left for Elsie. Not at all. His heart was wrung for the one no less than for the other. That was his tragedy: he had a threefold burden. From that point of view he had to admit himself the most luckless of the three.

‘I know my little wife will understand. Her Jim has been quite frank with her.’

Elsie leaned forward, chin in hands, staring fixedly at distance. Only her extreme pallor showed her to be suffering. For the rest, her brow was knitted as though she concentrated all her power upon some problem that as yet baffled her.

‘Yes, Jim, I understand. I understand that you’re so much more sensitive than other men, and can’t resist beauty. Your gift carries penalties with it, and acute susceptibility is one of them. But....’

He glowed in appreciation of her. She was really unique. ‘Only one woman in a thousand could see that,’ he said warmly. ‘And my little wife is that one. She is the dearest....’

Elsie winced. ‘I was going to say there’s something I can’t understand. I always thought you were the soul of honour, and you were once. Yet you were going away from me without a word of explanation.’

Sorrow looked out at her from his eloquent brown eyes. ‘My dear Elsie, don’t disappoint me. You’ve always been so understanding and helpful. How many men would have confided to their wives all that I have confided to you about my love for Marion?’

‘But, Jim!’ She frowned again, struggling to believe the best of him. ‘Jim, you didn’t tell me anything until other people had begun to make scandal.’ The idea hardened her. ‘I don’t believe you’d ever have told me. You would just have gone on deceiving us both.’

A gesture of impatience, and that was all. He did not give way to anger. ‘My dear, I realize how hard it is for you to listen to the voice of reason in a crisis like this, but you will try, won’t you? It all began in the most innocent, the most human way. I was overwhelmed by my compassion for the poor child—virtually imprisoned, as she is, with a husband she can’t even respect, let alone love. And then the affection ripened. She stimulates me wonderfully. She is an inspiration, just the inspiration that I need. Our minds are so beautifully attuned.’

And still Elsie was not satisfied. ‘You know I don’t grudge you anything, Jim. It’s the deceit that worries me. She ought to know about me. You ought not to take her under false pretences. It’s not like you, Jim, to be content with a vulgar intrigue.’

‘There is nothing vulgar in love.’ He softened the rebuke by taking her hand, which she instantly withdrew. ‘And nothing guilty,’ he added, with a note of sternness.

Her laugh was of a kind that could not but shock him. ‘How clever you are at putting me in the wrong!’ she remarked, when her bitter mirth had subsided. ‘But I’m not wrong.’ Emotion induced in her a vitality that made him almost admire her. ‘I’m not sticking up for Respectability or any of the seven deadly virtues, as you call them. You dethroned these gods for me long ago. But there is something I believe in. I do believe in honour, and I hate a liar.... You’ve deceived her as well as me.’

Wyvern sighed. It was sometimes hard to be patient with women. ‘Elsie, why do you say things which you know to be untrue?’ His tone was still gentle.

‘Well, isn’t it true?’ she retorted. ‘Have you told her about me? Have you explained that a man so many-sided as yourself needs the love of more than one woman? Have you told her that the human heart is capable of almost infinite expansion? You know you haven’t.’

‘I respect you too much,’ he replied, cold with a new dignity, ‘and I respect myself too much ever to discuss you with another woman. I thought you understood me better, Elsie.’

The fire in her seemed to die down. Vitality vanished, leaving her limp and listless. She rose, a frail slip of a girl with colourless skin and a halo of light brown hair like a dim mist—items so negligible compared with the lilies and roses of Marion’s robuster person, the flaming glory of her hair, the seductiveness of her brimming youth. Wyvern could not resist making a mental comparison even in this moment. He hated himself for making it, and he recorded it to his credit that he hated himself. It was so like him to be merciless to his own faults. He watched Elsie narrowly, from behind a curtain of cigarette smoke.

‘Very well, Jim. I shan’t stand in your way; you know that. To-morrow I’ll go away somewhere. Good night.’

He was pained and yet elated. She would go away to-morrow. Fortunately she had plenty of friends and, thank heaven, he had long ago settled an adequate income upon her. He had nothing to reproach himself with. She would go away to-morrow. They would meet again—oh, frequently. They would always be friends. He felt more warmly towards her than he had done for months, and yet he was dissatisfied. The victory he had won didn’t seem so good to him as it had seemed in prospect. He shrank from the suspicion that he had, in some inexplicable way, sunk in her esteem. The idea was unbearable.

‘We’ll discuss that another time. You’re not angry, darling?’ he said. ‘You see how inevitable it all is?’

With her hand on the door knob she turned to say: ‘Yes, Jim. I’m not blaming you.’ And she went out, closing the door softly behind her.

So that was all right. He smoked his cigarette out in something like peace of mind. Not perfect peace, however; the thought of losing something—even something for which he didn’t care—was distasteful. Old associations would cling. It was an insufferable social order that pressed this cruel alternative on a sensitive man, ordaining that he must release one woman before he could take another. ‘It’s all so niggardly, niggardly!’ said Wyvern, as he stepped out into the sweetness of that June evening. He felt the need, as he had never felt it before, of Nature’s soothing touch, her sunset’s balm for his eyes, the caress of her delicate breezes on his brow.

For the sake of the walk he set out in the direction of his studio, a walk that would take him away from suburban houses into little lanes surrounded by open fields. There one could get close to Nature and to Beauty. He had often been grateful to his own foresight for having provided him with a studio not only separate from his residence but distant from it by many miles. Only in solitude, he murmured to himself, can the human spirit grow to its full stature; and he knew that the rather recondite art whereby he supplemented, or failed to supplement, his substantial private income could never have flourished in the vicinity of Elsie, who was, when all was said, ‘a dear little woman, but no artist.’ In his studio he could work undistracted; and once or twice, when the tide of his inspiration had been at the full, he had stayed there for several days, sleeping at nights upon a little canvas folding-bed. There was something Spartan about the practice that appealed to him. Elsie exhibited a suitable distress at these absences, but she encouraged his painting and applauded the results, though without revealing any real critical understanding of them. James Wyvern professed allegiance to no school, and to that fact attributed his failure to obtain recognition. He dealt too exclusively in subtleties to be able to please the multitude, even the multitude of art-critics. It was his declared purpose to demonstrate by his work a familiar French aphorism: La vérité consiste dans les nuances. ‘The Boot Cupboard’ and an unnamed picture representing amethyst-blue houses were perhaps his most successful productions. ‘Representation, no. Symbolism, if you like. Representation is an artistic vice.’ Yet he had his lapses and was deliciously conscious of them. ‘My dear, I am daring. I am taking the gravest risk. What do you think—a ploughed field! Positively a ploughed field! The danger is simply colossal.’ To his artist-friends he was in the habit of saying: ‘Fundamentally, I suppose, I’m a novelist.’ Just as, three years before, during his literary period, he had fended off praise by murmuring: ‘I’m happiest, after all, with my palette and brush.... Oh, that little box of paints!’

Striding along between fragrant hedges, he luxuriated in the joy of the open air and in his new sense of freedom. Everything had been explained to Elsie, and she had taken it, on the whole, beautifully. He was really grateful to Elsie. And now he was a free man. ‘Freedom, the deep breath!’ he quoted in rapture. He was free now to rescue Marion, his imprisoned princess, from her dungeon of despair. He would take her away, far away. Away from censorious England to the magic air and blue skies of Italy, where life should become an exquisite indolent dream. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Como! Como shall be the mise-en-scène.’

Dreaming of Como, he entered the studio.

‘What the devil——!’ There she was, Marion herself, in his wicker-chair. ‘My darling, you!’ He was amazed to find her there, and amazed by the unearthly beauty of her. She rose to meet him, excited fear shining in her large eyes.

‘Hullo, Jimmy! You won’t be glad to see me.’ How the deuce did she know that? ‘John has found out about us. He made a scene. He’s dangerous. I’ve fled the house.’

‘Marion, what a wonderful girl you are! What a study in contrast—your fragrant English girlhood, and your exotic chintz dress!’ He enfolded her in arms of solicitude. ‘My dear, tell me it all.’

‘That’s all. People have been talking to him. He threatened me. So I came here.’

He could see her nostrils dilate and her breasts flutter in the intoxication of the danger. ‘Like netted fish they leap,’ he quoted to himself. Aloud he murmured: ‘Darling, you came here. Yes, of course. But how....’

‘Oh, I found out where it was and just came. There was a woman here——’

He was startled. ‘A woman?... Oh, Mrs. Phillips, perhaps, the woman who cleans up.’

‘Yes. I told her I was a friend of your wife’s, and she let me stay. Cheek, wasn’t it! Invented a wife for you. Just bluff, but it came off.... Do give me a cigarette.’

But this would never do. Here they were alone together, in a most compromising situation, while her husband—positively a dangerous fellow—raged round the countryside looking for her, perhaps with a pistol. At any moment——‘But, my darling girl, is it wise?’

With no sign of having heard the question, she rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Darling Jimmy, what shall I do?’

It was surely the most beautiful moment of his life. He was touched almost to tears by her perfect trust in him. All her dewy freshness, all her passionate beauty, all her vital young womanhood, was his for the taking. He had but to say: ‘Come with me now.... Como!’ and she would come. But was it wise to act so hastily? He plunged into a delirium of pleasurable emotion only to emerge with that question in his mind. With his lips clinging to hers he asked it. Was it wise? They would go away sooner or later: that was inevitable; but to go now, would it not be precipitate? To take a woman from her husband was a serious matter, involving unexampled responsibility. He would be bound to her more surely than by any legal marriage. And the scandal, the hateful publicity, the dragging of one’s name through the divorce courts—it was all so intolerable to a sensitive man. He would incur the enmity of many people, and he would lose Elsie. Elsie would divorce him, would perhaps forget him and re-marry....

He released Marion from that mad embrace.

‘What am I to do, darling?’ she repeated.

‘Let me think, dear,’ he said, stroking his troubled brow. ‘Let me think. Above all we must listen to the voice of reason. So much depends on this. Don’t you think it would be best for you to go back? Only for a while, of course.’

She stared as though he had spoken in an unknown tongue. ‘Go back? Go back to John?’

‘Only for a few weeks, darling, until I can see daylight, and make all arrangements.’

She stepped back from him a few paces, as if to survey him the better. Her eyes had the surprised and stricken look of a child unaccountably hurt.

‘I don’t think I understand. Are you telling me to go back to my husband? You, are you telling me that?’

‘My darling girl, don’t you see....’

‘Do you understand what that means? Go back to my husband who, when I last saw him, was raging like a beast. Go back to him and, if he doesn’t kill me, be his woman.’

‘Dear heart, for a few weeks only.’

She trembled violently for a moment, and then became rigid with scorn. ‘I agree with you perfectly. I had better go.’

The door slammed behind her before Wyvern recovered his wits. He ran forward a few steps as if to pursue her ... and stopped. ‘My God, I shall never see her again!’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Perfect harmony, complete understanding, all lost. That was the moment, the moment of my life, and I let it pass. Como ... I shall never bear to look on Como again.’ Painful as his sensations were, they were undeniably interesting. If ever he wrote a novel he would make that incident the pivot of the plot, the crisis, the turning-point. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.... By Jove there is!’ Why had he not taken it at the flood? It was all too sudden—no arrangements made, and a picture half-finished. Marion—he must forget Marion. Perhaps he had been mistaken in her. Her scorn for him had been so undeserved; he writhed at the recollection of it. He yearned now for some haven of refuge. Bruised and broken by life, his heart cried out for comfort. Ah, Elsie—she did not scorn him. A stab of fear lest the impossible had happened, lest he had alienated his wife’s love, sent him flying out of the studio and on the road for home. Forsaken by both women, he would be homeless indeed, and with no balm for his wounds. What if it were his fate to be misunderstood again? He began rehearsing the speeches he would make to Elsie. He conjured up the scene: Elsie in her night-dress, sitting up in the rumpled bed, just disturbed out of sleep. Perhaps she would be a little cruel at first: women were like that. ‘If my little wife is not kind to me now I shall go mad with the pain of it all.’ At that she would relent, and weep upon his breast. And she would love him more dearly than ever for having been so near to losing him.

MISS LETTICE

MISS LETTICE

NEEDING some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me (without any irony), is the most important of his duties—far more important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased, comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not a garrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that interest me most in his discourse.

As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes. ‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers. For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges: they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm—you know the place? It’s not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’

‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit of using that epithet without cause.

‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of grotesque babyhood.’

I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the dead.

‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a moment by the exactness of his information—it was so characteristic of him that he knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’

‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.

Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’

‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.

Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that has a very old-fashioned name.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a hopeless passion.’

‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’

Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a hurry for ten minutes?’

I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with that air of pensive reminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes going, he told me the story.

1

You are surprised (said Saunders) at being asked to associate Miss Lettice with the idea of passion, requited or unrequited. And, if you recall her small plump figure, and the nun-like pallor of the face that peered placidly from under her black bonnet, you will readily believe that hers was no ordinary passion. But it was passion: let there be no mistake about that; I’m not going to fob off some remote mystical ecstasy upon you under that name. It’s hard enough to credit that the heart of that staid, quaint, curtseying old spinster was aflame with a hunger that ultimately destroyed her, but the evidence is overwhelming. It is twofold, that evidence: there is the evidence of her words and the evidence of my own eyes.

My interest in Miss Lettice was first roused by a disquieting rumour that reached me, by a devious route, from a neighbour’s wife who was employed by Miss Lettice to come in and do the rough housework for her. According to this rumour Miss Lettice was, for no stated reason, afraid of me. This puzzled me, as well it might, because at that time I didn’t even know who she was: if we had met in the street I could not have recognized her. But it was more than puzzling: it was distressing. I knew that if I were to be of any use to the parish at all, fear was the very last emotion I must inspire. I examined the few sermons I had preached, for there, I thought, since they were the only communications I had had with the lady, the solution of my problem must lie. I looked for unsound doctrine, or for traces of hell-fire, or for anything else that could have alarmed a timid soul; and I found nothing. You must remember that I was new to the job, and totally without experience, and altogether too disposed to take trifles seriously. To-day I should soon find a summary method of dealing with such a situation, but at that time it baffled me. I accepted it for a while as a permanent minor discomfort.

I had promised myself to make friends, if I could, with every member of my congregation, and with as many others as I could contrive to visit—no small undertaking in this wilderness of scattered dwellings. Miss Lettice had to wait her turn, of course, but it was a point of honour with me that she should not have to wait beyond it. Nervous, but also curious, I knocked at her front door.

She received me, rather sternly, I thought, but without discomposure. I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and, equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.

For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me my chance.

‘You have been in the parish three months, have you not, Mr. Saunders?’

I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’ I answered, loading my words with all the weight they would carry.

‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted. And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion—I was nearly twenty years her junior—she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken forgiveness.

It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’ I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook her head. ‘Then why did you dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know. Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’