The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Counterplot, by Hope Mirrlees

THE COUNTERPLOT

Miss Hope Mirrlees, when she wrote Madeleine, several years ago, was recognised to be one of the most promising of the younger school of women novelists.

The Counterplot is a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane, watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing inter-relations of her family, is teased by the complexity of the spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till, by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent essential factors. So, from the texture of the words, the emotions, the interactions of the life going on around her she weaves a play, the setting of which is a Spanish convent in the fourteenth century, and this play performs for her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams, for by it she is enabled to express subconscious desires, to vent repressed irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to have said in any other way. This brief summary can give but little idea of the charm of style, the subtlety of characterisation, and the powerful intelligence which Miss Hope Mirrlees reveals. The play itself is a most brilliant, imaginative tour de force!

THE
COUNTERPLOT

by
HOPE MIRRLEES
Author of “Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists”

“Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much the better.”

Miguel de Unamuno.

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright

Manufactured in Great Britain

TO
JANE HARRISON

Μάλιστα δέ τ’ ἔκλυον αὐτοί

CHAPTER I

1

Plasencia was a square, medium-sized house of red brick, built some sixty years ago, in those days when architects knew a great deal about comfort, but cared so little about line that every house they designed, however spacious, was uncompromisingly a “villa.” Viewed from the front, it was substantial and home-like, and suggested, even in the height of summer, a “merry Christmas” and fire-light glinting off the leaves of holly; from the back, however, it had a look of instability, of somehow being not firmly rooted in the earth—a cumbersome Ark, awkwardly perched for a moment on Ararat, before plunging with its painted wooden crew into the flood, and sailing off to some fantastic port.

It is possible that this effect was not wholly due to the indifferent draughtsmanship of the Victorian architect, for there is a hint of the sea in a delicate and boundless view, and the back of Plasencia lay open to the Eastern counties.

Even the shadowy reticulation of a West-country valley, the spring bloom upon fields and woods, and red-brick villas that glorifies the tameness of Kent, are but poor things in comparison with the Eastern counties in September: yellow stripes of mustard, jade stripes of cabbage, stripes of old rose which is the earth, a suggestion of pattern given by the heaps of manure, and the innumerable shocks of corn, an ardent gravity given by the red-brown of wheat stubble, such as the red-brown sails of a fishing boat give to the milky-blue of a summer sea; here and there a patch of green tarpaulin, and groups of thatched corn-ricks—shadowy, abstract, golden, and yet, withal, homely edifices, like the cottages of those villages of Paradise whose smoke Herrick used to see in the distance. An agricultural country has this advantage over heaths and commons and pastoral land that the seasons walk across it visibly.

On a particular afternoon in September, about three years ago, Teresa Lane sat in a deck-chair gazing at this view. She was a pallid, long-limbed young woman of twenty-eight, and her dark, closely-cropped hair emphasised her resemblance to that lad who, whether he be unfurling a map of Toledo, or assisting at the mysterious obsequies of the Conde de Orgas, is continually appearing in the pictures of El Greco.

As she gazed, she thought of the Spanish adjective pintado, painted, which the Spaniards use for anything that is bright and lovely—flowers, views; and certainly this view was pintado, even in the English sense, in that it looked like a fresco painted on a vast white wall, motionless and enchanted against the restless, vibrating foreground. Winds from the Ural mountains, winds from the Atlantic celebrated Walpurgis-night on the lawn of Plasencia; and, on such occasions, to look through the riven garden, the swaying flowers and grasses, the tossing birch saplings, at the tranced fields of the view was to experience the same æsthetic emotion as when one looks at the picture of a great painter.

But the back of Plasencia had another glory—its superb herbaceous border, which, waving banners of the same hues, only brighter, marched boldly into the view, and became one with it. Now in September it was stiffened by annuals: dahlias, astors, snapdragon, sunflowers; Californian poppies whose whiteness—at any rate in the red poppyland of East Anglia—always seems exotic, miraculous, suggesting the paradoxical chemical action of the Blood of the Lamb. There were also great clumps of violas, with petals of so faint a shade of blue or yellow that every line of their black tracery stood out clear and distinct, and which might have been the handiwork of some delicate-minded and deft-fingered old maid, expressing her dreams and heart’s ease in a Cathedral city a hundred years ago. As to herbaceous things proper, there was St. John’s wort, catmint, borrage, sage; their stalks grown so long and thick, their blossoms so big and brave, that old Gerard would have been hard put to see in them his familiars—the herbs that, like guardian angels, drew down from the stars the virtue for the homely offices of easing the plough-boy’s toothache, the beldame’s ague.

A great lawn spread between the border and the house; it was still very threadbare owing to the patriotic pasturage that, during the last years of the War, it had afforded to half a dozen sheep, but it was darned in so many places by the rich, dark silk of clover leaves as almost to be turned into a new fabric.

Well, then, the view and border lay simmering in the late sunshine. A horse was dragging a plough against the sky-line, and here and there thin streams of smoke were rising from heaps of smouldering weeds. In the nearer fields, Teresa could discern small, moving objects of a dazzling whiteness—white leghorns gleaning the stubble; and from time to time there reached her the noise of a distant shot, heralding a supper of roast hare or partridge in some secluded farm-house. Then, like a Danish vessel bound for pillage in Mercia, white, swift, compact, a flock of wood pigeons would flash through the air to alight in a far away field and rifle the corn.

But so pintado was the view, so under the notion of art, that these movements across its surface gave one an æsthetic shock such as one would experience before a mechanical device introduced into a painting, and, at the same time, thrilled the imagination, as if the door in a picture should suddenly open, or silver strains proceed from the painted shepherd’s pipe.

Teresa could hardly be said to take a pleasure in the view and its flowery foreground—indeed, like all lovely and complicated things, they teased her exceedingly; because the infinite variety which made up their whole defied expression. Until the invention of some machine, she was thinking, shows to literature what are its natural limits (as the camera and cinema have shown to painting) by expressing, in some unknown medium, say a spring wood in toto—appearance, smells, noises, associations—which will far outstrip in exact representation the combined qualities of Mozart, Spencer, Corot, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and yet remain dead and flat and vulgar,—so long shall we be teased by the importunities of detail and forget that such things as spring woods are best expressed lightly, delicately, in a little song, thus:

The grove are all a pale, frail mist,

The new year sucks the sun;

Of all the kisses that we kissed

Now which shall be the one?

As she murmured the lines below her breath, two children came running down the grass path that divided the herbaceous border—Anna and Jasper Sinclair, the grandchildren of the house.

Teresa watched their progress, critically, through half-closed lids. Yes, children are the right fauna for a garden—they turn it at once into a world that is miniature and Japanese. But perhaps a kitten prowling among flower-beds is better still—it is so amusing to watch man’s decorous arrangement of nature turning, under the gambols of the sinister little creature, into something primitive and tropical—bush, or jungle, or whatever they call it in Brazil and places; but Anna was getting too big.

Human beings too! Worse than the view, because more restless and more complicated, yet insisting on being dealt with; even Shelley could not keep out of his garden his somewhat Della Cruscan Lady.

The children came running up to her.

“You don’t know what we’ve found, what we’ve found, what we’ve found!” “Let me say! a dead hare, and we’ve buried him and....” “And I’ve found a new fern; I’ve got ten and a half kinds now and I ought to get a Girl Guide’s badge for them, and the Doña promised me some more blotting-paper, but....”

Teresa stroked Jasper’s sticky little hand and listened indulgently to their chatter. Then they caught sight of Mrs. Lane coming out of the house, and rushed at her, shouting, “Doña! Doña!”

The Spaniards deal in a cavalier way with symbolism; for instance, they put together from the markets, and streets, and balconies of Andalusia a very human type of female loveliness; next, they express this type with uncompromising realism in painted wooden figures which they set up in churches, saying, “This is not Pepa, or Ana, or Carmen. Oh, no! It isn’t a woman at all: it’s a mysterious abstract doctrine of the Church called the Immaculate Conception.” They then proceed to fall physically in love with this abstract doctrine—serenading it with lyrics, organising pageants in its honour, running their swords through those who deny its truth, storming the Vatican for its acceptance.

Hence, for those who are acquainted with Spain, it is hard to look on Spanish concrete things with a perfectly steady eye—they are apt to become transparent without losing their solidity.

However this may be, Mrs. Lane (the Doña, as her friends and family called her), standing there smiling and monumental, with the children clinging to her skirts, seemed to Teresa a symbol—of what she was not quite sure. Maternity? No, not exactly; but it was something connected with maternity.

The children, having said their say, made for the harbour of their own little town—to wit, the nursery—where, over buns, and honey, and chocolate cake, they would tell their traveller’s tales; and the Doña bore down slowly upon Teresa and sank heavily into a basket chair. She raised her lorgnette and gazed at her daughter critically.

“Teresa,” she said, in her slow, rather guttural voice, “why do you so love that old skirt? But I warn you, it is going to the very next jumble sale of Mrs. Moore.”

Teresa smiled quite amicably.

“Why can’t you let Concha’s elegance do for us both?” she asked.

So toneless and muted was Teresa’s voice that it was generally impossible to deduce from it, as also from her rather weary impassive face, of what emotion her remarks were the expression.

“Rubbish! There is no reason why I shouldn’t have two elegant daughters,” retorted the Doña, wondering the while why exactly Teresa was jealous of Concha. “It must be a man; but who?” she asked herself. Aloud she said, “I wonder why tea is so late. By the way, I told you, didn’t I, that Arnold is coming for the week-end and bringing Guy? And some young cousin of Guy’s—I think he said his name was Dundas.”

“I know—Rory Dundas. Guy often talks about him. He’s a soldier, so he’ll probably be even more tiresome than Guy.”

Oho! How, exactly, was this to be interpreted?

“Why, Teresa, a nice young officer, with beautiful blue eyes like Guy perhaps, only not slouching like Cambridge men, and you think that he will be tiresome!”

Again Teresa smiled amicably, and wished for the thousandth time that her mother would sometimes stop being ironical—or, at any rate, that her irony had a different flavour.

“And so Guy is tiresome too, is he?”

Teresa laughed. “No one shows more that they think so than you, Doña.”

“Oh! but I think all Englishmen tiresome.”

Then the butler and parlour-maid appeared with tea; and a few minutes later Concha, the other daughter, strolled up, her arm round the waist of a small, elderly lady.

Concha was a very beautiful girl of twenty-two. She was tall, and built delicately on a generous scale; her hair was that variety of auburn which, when found among women of the Latin races, never fails to give a thrill of unexpectedness, and a whiff of romance—hinting at old old rapes by Normans and Danes. As one looked at her one realised what a beautiful creature the Doña must once have been.

The elderly lady was governess emerita of the Lanes. They had grown so attached to her that she had stayed on as “odd woman”—arranging the flowers, superintending the servants, going up to London at the sales to shop for the family. They called her “Jollypot,” because “jolly” was the adjective with which she qualified anything beautiful, kindly, picturesque, or quaint; “pot” was added as the essence of the æsthetic aspect of “jolliness,” typified in the activities of Arts and Crafts and Artificers’ Guilds—indeed she always, and never more than to-day, looked as if she had been dressed by one of these institutions; on her head was a hat of purple and green straw with a Paisley scarf twisted round the crown, round her shoulders was another scarf—handwoven, gray and purple—on her torso was an orange jumper into which were inserted squares of canvas wool-work done by a Belgian refugee with leanings to Cubism; and beads,—enormous, painted wooden ones. Once Harry Sinclair (the father of Anna and Jasper) had exploded a silence with the question, “Why is Jollypot like the Old Lady of Leeds? Because she’s ... er ... er ... INFESTED WITH BEADS!!!”

While on this subject let me add that it was characteristic of her relationship with her former pupils that they called her Jollypot to her face, and that she had never taken the trouble to find out why; that the great adventure of her life had been her conversion to Catholicism—a Catholicism, however, which retained a tinge of Anglicanism: to wit, a great deal of vague enthusiasm for “dear, lovely St. Francis of Assisi,” combined with a neglect of the crude and truly Catholic cult of that most potent of “medicine-men”—St. Anthony of Padua; and that taste for Dante studies so characteristic of middle-aged Anglican spinsters. Indeed, she was remarkably indiscriminating in her tastes, and loved equally Shakespeare, Dante, Mrs. Browning, the Psalms, Anne Thackeray, and W. J. Locke; but from time to time she surprised one by the poetry and truth of her observations.

The Doña, holding in mid-air a finger biscuit soaked in chocolate, smiled and blinked a welcome; but her eyes flashed to her brain the irritated message, “If only the jumper were purple, or even green! And those beads—does she sleep in them?”

Partly from a Latin woman’s exaggerated sense of the ridiculous possibilities in raiment, partly from an Andalusian Schaden-freude, ever since she had known Jollypot she had tried to persuade her that a devout Catholic should dress mainly in black; but Jollypot would flush with indignation and cry, “Oh! Mrs. Lane, how can you? When God has given us all these jolly colours! Just look at your own garden! I remember a dear old lady when I was a girl who used to say she didn’t see why we should say grace for food because that was a necessity and God was bound to give it to us, but that we should say it for the luxuries—flowers and colours—that it was so good and fatherly of Him to think of.” Which silly, fanciful Protestantism would put the Doña into a frenzy of irritation.

But Jollypot—secure in her knowledge of her own consideration of the Sesame and Lilies of the field—had, as usual, a pleasant sense of being prettily dressed, and, quite unaware that she offended, she sat down to her tea with a little sigh of innocent pleasure. Concha, after having hugged the unresponsive Doña, and affectionately inquired after Teresa’s headache, wearily examined the contents of the tea-table, and having taken a small piece of bread and butter, muttered that she wished Rendall would cut it thinner.

“And what have you been doing this afternoon?” asked the Doña.

“At the Moore’s,” answered Concha, a little sulkily.

“But how very kind of you! That poor Mrs. Moore must have been quite touched ... did I hear that Eben was home on leave?” and the Doña scrutinised her with lazy amusement; Teresa, also, looked at her.

“Oh, yes, he’s back,” said Concha, lightly, but blushing crimson all the same. She loathed being teased. “How incredibly Victorian and Spanish it all is!” she thought.

She yawned, then poured some tea and cream into a saucer, added two lumps of sugar, and put it down on the lawn for the refreshment of ’Snice, the dachshund.

“And how was Eben?” asked the Doña.

“Oh, he was in great form—really extraordinarily funny about getting drunk at Gibraltar,” drawled Concha; she always drawled when she was angry, embarrassed, or “feeling grand.”

“Oh! the English always get drunk at Gibraltar—it wasn’t at all original of Eben.”

“I suppose not,” and again Concha yawned.

“And I suppose Mrs. Moore said, ‘Ebenebeneben! Prenny guard!’ which meant that one of the Sunday school children was coming up the path and he must be careful what he said.”

Concha gurgled with laughter—pleasantly, like a child being tickled—at the Doña’s mimicry; and the atmosphere cleared.

Teresa remembered Guy Cust’s once saying that conversation among members of one family was a most uncomfortable thing. When one asks questions it is not for information (one knows the answers already) but to annoy. It is, he had said, as if four or five men, stranded for years on a desert island with a pack of cards, had got into the habit of playing poker all day long, and that, though the game has lost all savour and all possibilities of surprise; for each knowing so well the “play” of the other, no bluff ever succeeds, and however impassive their opponent’s features, they can each immediately, by the sixth sense of intimacy, distinguish the smell of a “full house,” or a “straight,” from that of a “pair.”

For instance, the Doña and Teresa knew quite well where Concha had been that afternoon; and Concha had known that they would know and pretend that they did not, so she had arrived irritated in advance, and the Doña and Teresa had watched her approach, maliciously amused in advance.

“Well, and was Mrs. Moore hinting again that she would like to have her Women’s Institute in my garden?” asked the Doña.

“Oh, yes, and she wants Teresa to go down to the Institute one night and talk to them about Seville, but I was quite firm and said I was sure nothing would induce her.”

“You were wrong,” said Teresa, in an even voice, “I should like to talk to them about Seville.”

“Good Lord!” muttered Concha.

“Give them a description of a bull-fight, Teresa. It would amuse me to watch the face of Mrs. Moore and the Vicar,” said the Doña.

Teresa and Concha laughed, and Jollypot shuddered, muttering, “Those poor horses!”

The Doña looked at her severely. “Well, Jollypot and what about the poor foxes and hares in England?”

This amœbæan dirge was one often chanted by the Doña and Jollypot.

“Oh! look at the birds’ orchard ... all red with haws. Poor little fellows! They’ll have a good harvest,” cried Jollypot, pointing to the double hedge of hawthorn that led to the garage, and evidently glad to turn from man’s massacring of beasts to God’s catering for birds.

“Seville!” said Concha meditatively; and a silence fell upon them while the word went rummaging among the memories of the mother and her daughters.

Tittering with one’s friends behind one’s reja, while Mr. Lane down below (though then only twenty-three, already stout and intensely prosaic), self-consciously sang a Spanish serenade with an execrable English accent; gipsy girls hawking lottery tickets in the Sierpes; eating ices in the Pasaje del Oriente; the ladies in mantillas laughing shrilly at the queer English hats and clumsy shoes; the wall of the Alcazar patined with jessamine; long noisy evenings (rather like poems by Campoamor), of cards and acrostics and flirtation; roses growing round orange trees; exquisite horsemanship; snub-nosed, ill-shaven men looking with laughing eyes under one’s hat, and crying, Viva tu madre! Dark, winding, high-walled streets, called after Pedro the Cruel’s Jewish concubines; one’s milk and vegetables brought by donkeys, stepping as delicately as Queen Guinevere’s mule. One by one the candles of the Tenebrario extinguished to the moan of the miserere, till only the waxen thirteenth remains burning; goats, dozens of wooden Virgins in stiff brocade, every one of them sin pecado concebida, city of goats and Virgins ... yes, that’s it—city of goats and Virgins.

“By the way,” said Concha nonchalantly, “I’ve asked Eben to lunch on Sunday.”

The Doña bowed ironically and Concha blushed, and calling ’Snice got up and moved majestically towards the house.

“Arnold’s coming on Saturday, Jollypot,” said the Doña, triumphantly.

“The dear fellow! That is jolly,” said Jollypot; then sharply drew in her breath, as if suddenly remembering something, and, with a worried expression, hurried away.

The thing she had suddenly remembered was that the billiard-table was at that moment strewn with rose petals drying upon blotting-paper, and that Arnold would be furious if they were not removed before his arrival.

The Doña, by means of a quizzical look at Teresa, commented upon the last quarter of an hour, but Teresa’s expression was not responsive.

“Well,” said the Doña, regretfully hoisting her bulk from her basket-chair, “I must go and catch Rudge before he goes home and tell him to keep the sweet corn for Saturday—Arnold’s so fond of it. And there’s the border to be—oh, your father and his golf!”

The irritated tone of this exclamation ended on the last word in a note of scorn.

Teresa sat on alone by the deserted tea-table, idly watching the Doña standing by the border, in earnest talk with the gardener.

How comely and distinguished, and how beautifully modelled the Doña looked in the westering light! No one could model like late sunshine—she had seen it filtering through the leaves of a little wood and turning the smooth, gray trunk of a beech into an exquisite clay torso, not yet quite dry, fresh from the plastic thumb, faithfully maintaining the delusion that, though itself a pliable substance, the frame over which it was stretched was rigid and bony. The Doña and beech trees, however, were beautiful, even without the evening light; but she had also seen the portion of a rain-pipe that juts out at right angles from the wall before taking its long and graceless descent—she had seen the evening light turn its dirty yellow into creamy flesh-tints, its contour into the bent knee of a young Diana.

Forces that made things look beautiful were certainly part of a “Merciful Dispensation.” Memory was one of these forces. How exquisite, probably, life at Plasencia would look some day!

It would take a lot of mellowing, she thought, with a little smile. Again it was a question of the swarm of tiny details: beauty, evidently, requiring their elimination.

But, for instance, the interplay of emotions at tea that afternoon—was it woven from the tiny brittle threads of unimportant details, or was it made of a more resisting stuff?

Why was the Doña equally irritated that she, Teresa, ignored young men, and that Concha ran after them—like a tabby-cat in perpetual season? No—that was disgusting, coarse, unkind. There was nothing ugly about Concha’s abundant youth: she was merely normal—following the laws of life, no more disgusting than a ripe apple ready to drop.

There came into Teresa’s head the beginning of one of Cervantes’s Novelas Exemplares, which tells of the impulse that drives young men, although they may love their parents dearly, to break away from their home and wander across the world, “... nor can meagre fare and poor lodging cause them to miss the abundance of their father’s house; nor does travelling on foot weary them, nor cold torment them, nor heat exhaust them.”

And, added Teresa, rich in the wisdom of a myriad songs and stories, they are probably fully aware, ere they shut behind them the door of their home, that some day they, too, will discover that freedom is nought but a lonely wind, howling for the past.

Il n’y a pour l’homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir ... yes, but to realise that, personally, emotionally—to feel as one the three events—three simultaneous things making one thing that is perpetually repeated, three notes in a chord—and the chord Life itself ... an agonising sense of speed ... yes, the old simile of the rushing river that carries one—where? But every life, or group of lives, is deaf to the chord, stands safe on the bank of the river, till a definite significant moment, which, looked back upon, seems to have announced its arrival with an actual noise—a knocking, or a rumbling. To Teresa, it seemed that that moment for them all at Plasencia had been Pepa’s death, two years ago—that had been what had plunged them into the river. Before, all of them (the Doña too) had lived in Eternity. Now, when Teresa awoke in the night, the minutes dripped, one by one, on to the same nerve, till the agony became almost unbearable; and it was the agony of listening to a tale which the narrator cannot gabble fast enough, because you know the end beforehand—yes, something which is at once a ball all tightly rolled up that you hold in your hand and a ball which you are slowly unwinding.

She looked towards the house—the old ark that had so long stood high and dry; now, it seemed to her, the water had reached the windows of the lowest story—soon it would be afloat, carrying them all ... no, not her father. He, she was sure, was still—would always be—outside of Time.

But Concha—Concha was there as much as she herself.

Why did she mind in Concha the same intellectual insincerities and pretensions, the same airs and graces, that she had loved in Pepa?

She smiled tenderly as she remembered how once at school she had opened Pepa’s Oxford Book of English Verse at the fly-leaf and found on it, in a “leggy,” unfledged hand, the following inscription: “To Josepha Lane, from her father,” and underneath, an extract from Cicero’s famous period in praise of letters—et haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, and so on. (That term Pepa’s form had been reading the Pro Archia.)

Teresa had gone to her and asked her what it meant.

“Dad would never have written that—besides, it’s in your writing.”

Pepa had blushed, and then laughed, and said, “Well, you see I wanted Ursula Noble” (Ursula Noble’s father was a celebrated Hellenist) “to think that we had a brainy father too!”

Then, how bustling and important she had been when, shorty after her début, she had become engaged to Harry Sinclair—a brilliant Trinity Don, much older than herself, and already an eminent Mendelian—how quickly and superficially she had taken over all his views—liberalism, atheism, eugenics!

Oh, yes, there had been much that had been irritating in Pepa; but, though Teresa had recognised it mentally, she had never felt it in her nerves.

She was suddenly seized with a craving for Pepa’s presence—dear, innocent, complacent Pepa, so lovely, so loving, with her fantastic, yet, somehow or other, cheering plans for one’s pleasure or well-being—plans that she galvanised with her own generous vitality.

Yes, Pepa had certainly been very happy during her six or seven years of married life at Cambridge: cultured undergraduates pouring into tea on Sundays, and Pepa taking them as seriously as they took themselves, laughing delightedly at the latest epigram that was going the round of Trinity and Kings’—“Dogs are sentimental,” or “Shaw is so Edwardian”—trolling Spanish Ladies or the Morning Dew in chorus round the piano; footing it on the lawn—undergraduates, Newnham students, Cambridge matrons, young dons, eyeglasses and prominent teeth glittering in the sun, either a slightly patronising smile glued on the face, or an expression of strenuous endeavour—to the favourite melodies of Charles II.; suffrage meetings without end, lectures on English literature, practising glees in the Choral Society; busy making cardboard armour for the Greek play, or bicycling off to Grantchester, or taking Anna to her dancing class, or off to Boots to change her novels—a Galsworthy for herself, a Phillips Oppenheim for Harry.

It had always seemed to Teresa that this life, in spite of its suffrage and girl’s clubs and “culture,” was both callous and frivolous in comparison with the tremendous adventures that were going on, all round, in laboratories and studies and College rooms: at any moment Professor —— might be able to resolve an atom, and blow up the whole of Cambridge in the process; and, in little plots of ground, flowers whose habitat was Peru or the Himalayas, were springing up with—say, purple pollen instead of golden, and that meant that a new species had been born; or else, Mr. —— of Christ’s, or John’s, or Caius, would suddenly feel the blood rush to his head as a blinding light was thrown on the verbal nouns of classical Arabic by a French article he had just been reading on the use of diminutives in the harems of Morocco.

Anyhow, whether callous or frivolous or both, it had given Pepa seven happy years.

What Harry Sinclair’s contribution—apart from the necessary background—had been to that happiness it would, perhaps, be difficult to determine. There could be no one in the world less sympathetic to the small emotional things—so important in married life—than Harry: homesickness, imagined slights when one was tired, fears that one’s son aged three summers might some twenty years ahead fall in love with little Angela Webb, and there was consumption in the family—he viewed them with the impatience of a young lady before the furniture of a drawing-room that she wants to clear for a dance, the dance, in his case, being the sweeps, pirouettes, glides, of endless clever and abstract talk through the clear, wide spaces of an intellectual universe.

However, emotionally, Pepa had never quite grown up, so perhaps she had missed nothing.

All the same, when he had broken down at her death, there had been something touching and magnificent in his fine pity—not for himself, but for Pepa, so ruthlessly, foolishly, struck down in the hey-day of her splendid vigour. “It’s devilish! devilish!” he had sobbed.

During the last days of her life, Pepa had talked to Teresa a good deal about Anna and Jasper. “Make them want to be nice people,” she had said; and Teresa remembered that, even through her misery, she had wondered that Pepa had not used a favourite Cambridge cliché and said, “Make them want to be splendid people”; perhaps it was she, Teresa, who was undeveloped emotionally.

She had tried hard to do what Pepa had asked her; but in these latter days, when the outlines of the virtues have lost their firmness, it is difficult to give children that concrete sense of Goodness that had made the Victorian mothers’ simple homilies, in after years, glow in the memory of their children with the radiance of a Platonic Myth.

Well, anyhow, she must go up to the nursery now.

She walked into the house. In the hall, as if in illustration of her views on memory, the light was falling on, and beautifying a medley of objects, incongruous as the contents of one’s dreams: the engraving of Frith’s Margate that had hung in Mr. Lane’s nursery in the old Kensington house where he had been born; a large red and blue india-rubber ball dropt by Anna or Jasper; the old Triana pottery, running in a frieze round the walls, among which an occasional Hispano-Mauresque plate yielded up to the touch of the sun the store of fire hidden in its lustre; a heap of dusty calling-cards in a flat dish on the table; Arnold’s old Rugby blazer, hanging, a brave patch of colour, among the sombre greatcoats.... Through the half-opened door of the drawing-room came a scent of roses; and through the green baize door that led to the kitchen the strange, lewd sounds of servants making merry over their tea. Probably Gladys, the under-housemaid, was reading cups.

Teresa mounted the wide, easy stairs, and, passing through another green baize door, entered the children’s quarters, and then the nursery itself. There, tea finished and cleared away, a feeling of vague dissatisfaction had fallen on the two children. Every minute bed-time was drawing nearer, and anxious eyes kept turning towards the door; would any one come before it was too late, and Jasper was already plunging and “being silly” in the bath, while Anna, clad in a pink flannel dressing-gown, her hair in two tight little plaits, was putting tidy her books and toys, and—so as to perform the daily good deed enjoined by the Girl Guides—Jasper’s too?

Their craving for the society of “grown-ups” was as touching and inexplicable, it seemed to Teresa, as that of dogs. She had noticed that they longed for it most between tea and bed-time—it was as if they needed, then, a viaticum against the tedium of going to bed and the terrors of the night. Nor, she had noticed, was Nanny, dearly though they loved her, capable of giving this viaticum, nor could any man provide it: it had to be given by a grandmother, or mother, or aunt.

So Teresa’s advent was very warmly welcomed; and sitting down in the rocking-chair she tried to perform the difficult task of amusing Anna and Jasper at the same time. For between Anna of nine and Jasper of six there was very little in common.

Jasper, like the boy Froissart, “never yet had tired of children’s games as they are played before the age of twelve”: these meaningless hidings, and springings, and booings, and bouncings of balls. His mind, too, was all little leaps, and springs, and squeals, and queer little instincts running riot, with a tendency to baby cabotinage. “Don’t be silly, Jasper!” “Don’t show off!” were continually being said to him.

Anna’s mind, on the other hand, was completely occupied with solid problems and sensible interests, namely, “I hope that silly Meg will marry Mr. Brook (she was reading Louisa Alcott’s Little Women). I expect the balls were damp to-day, as they wouldn’t bounce ... it would be nice if I could get a badge for tennis next year. Ut with the subjunctive ... no, no, the accusative and infinitive ... wait a minute ... I’m not quite sure. Every square with a stamp in it—every single square. I wonder why grown-ups don’t spend all their money on stamps. I wonder if Daddy remembered to keep those Argentine ones for me ... little pictures of a man that looks like George—George—George IV., I think—anyhow, the one that didn’t wear a wig ... the Argentine ones are always like that ... that’ll make six Argentine stamps. Brazil ones are pretty, too ... what’s the capital of Brazil again?”

Teresa had found that a story—one that combined realism with the marvellous—was the best focus for these divergent interests; so she started a story.

The sun was setting; and the border and view, painted on the glass of the nursery windows, grew dim. Some one in the garden whistled the air of:

You made me love you:

I didn’t want to do it,

I didn’t want to do it.

Nanny sat with her sewing, listening too, a pleased smile on her face, the expression of a vague and complex feeling of satisfaction: for one thing, it was all so suitable and what she had been used to in her other places—kind auntie telling the children a story after tea; then there was a sense of “moral uplift” as, doubtless, the story was allegorical; poor Mrs. Sinclair in heaven, too—she would be glad if she could see what a good aunt they had—then there was also a genuine interest in the actual story; for no nurse without a sense of narrative and the marvellous is fit for her post.

“Bed-time, I’m afraid. Kiss kind Auntie and say, ‘Thank you, Auntie, for the nice story.’”

Outside, the cowman was leading the cows home to the byre across the lawn. It was a good thing that Rudge, the head gardener, was safe in his cottage, eating his tea. Far away an express flashed across the view, whistling like a nightjar, giving a sudden whiff of London that evaporated as swiftly as its smoke.

“But we don’t call her ‘Auntie’; we call her ‘Teresa,’” said Anna for the thousandth time.

“Now, Anna dear, don’t be rude. Up you get, Jasper. I’m afraid, miss, it really is bed-time ... and they were late last night too.”

2

Teresa dressed and went down to the drawing-room, to find her father and Jollypot already there and chatting amicably.

“The place was full of salmon at four and sixpence a pound, and he said, ‘You’ll never get rid of that!’ and the fishmonger said, ‘Won’t I? It’ll go like winking,’ and the other chap said, ‘Who’ll buy it these hard times?’ and he said, ‘The miners, of course.’”

Dick Lane was a stockily-built man of middle height, with a round, rubicund face. A Frenchman had once described him as, Le type accompli du farmer-gentleman.

He was, however, a Londoner, born and bred, as his fathers had been before him for many a generation; but, as they had always had enough and to spare for beef and mutton and bacon, the heather of Wales and the pannage of the New Forest had helped to build their bones; besides, it was not so very long ago that cits could go a-maying without being late for ’Change; and then, there is the Cockney’s dream of catching, one day before he dies, the piscis rarus—a Thames trout—a dream which, though it never be realised, maketh him to lie down in green pastures and leadeth him beside the still waters.

As to Dick, he liked cricket, and the smell of manure and of freshly-cut hay, he liked pigs, and he liked wide, quiet vistas; but he liked them as a background to his prosaic and quietly regulated activities—much as a golfer, though mainly occupied with the progress of the game, subconsciously is not indifferent to the springy turf aromatic with thyme and scabious, nor to the pungent breezes from the sea, nor to the sweep of the downs.

He and Teresa exchanged friendly nods, and she, sinking into a chair, began to contemplate him—much as Blake may have contemplated the tiger, when he wondered:

What mysterious hand and eye

Framed its awful symmetry.

There he sat, pink from his bath, pleasantly tired after his two rounds of golf, expounding to Jollypot his views on the threatened strike—the heir to all the ages.

For his body and soul were knit from strange old fragments: sack; fear of the plague; terror of the stars; a vision of the Virgin Queen borne, like a relic in a casket, on the shoulders of fantastically-dressed gentlemen; Walsingham; sailor’s tales of Spanish ladies; a very English association between the august word of Liberty and the homely monosyllable Wilkes; dynasties tottering to the tune of “Lillybolero”; Faith, Hope, and Charity, stimulated by cries of, “No Popery,” “Lavender, Sweet Lavender,” “Pity the poor prisoners of the Fleet”; Dr. Donne thundering Redemption at Paul’s Cross, the lawn at his wrist curiously edged with a bracelet of burnished hair; Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Pride, Lechery, Robin Hood, throbbing in ballads, or else, alive and kicking and bravely dressed beyond one’s dreams, floating in barges down the Thames; Death—grinning in stone from crevices of the churches, dancing in churchyards with bishops and kings and courtesans, forming the burden of a hundred songs, and at last, one day, catching one oneself; Death—but every death cancelled by a birth.

Without all this he would not have been sitting there, saying, “The English working man is at bottom a sensible chap, and if they would only appeal to his common sense it would be all right.”

Then the gong sounded. Dick looked at his watch and remarked, quite good-humouredly, “I wonder how many times your mother has been in time for dinner during the thirty years we have been married.”

At last the door opened, and the Doña came in with Concha.

“I have just been saying I wonder how many times you have been in time for dinner since we were married.”

The Doña ignored this remark, and busied herself in straightening Teresa’s fichu.

Then they went in to dinner.

“By the way, Anna,” said Dick, looking across at the Doña and sucking the soup off his moustache, “I was playing golf with Crofts, and he says there’s going to be a wonderful new rose at the show this year—terra cotta coloured. It’s a Lyons one; he says it’s been got by a new way of hybridising. We must ask Harry about it.”

“Harry wouldn’t know—he knows nothing about gardening,” said the Doña scornfully.

“Not know? Why, he’ll know all about it. That fellow Worthington—you know who I mean, the chap that went on that commission to India—well, he’s a knowledgeable sort of chap, and he asked me the other day at the Club if Dr. Sinclair of Cambridge wasn’t a son-in-law of mine, and he said that he’d been making the most wonderful discoveries lately.”

“What’s the use of discoveries—of Harry’s, at any rate? They do no one any good,” said the Doña sullenly.

“Oh, I don’t know; there’s no knowing what these things mayn’t lead to—they may teach us to improve the human stock and all sorts of things”; and then Dick applied himself to the more interesting subject of his fried sole, oblivious, in spite of years of experience, that his remark had horrified his wife by its impious heresy.

However, her only comment was an ironical smile.

“To learn to know people through flowers—what a lovely idea,” mused Jollypot, who was too absent-minded to be tactful. “I think it is his work among flowers that makes Dr. Sinclair so—so——”

“So like a flower himself, eh?” grinned Dick, with a sudden vision of his large, massive, overbearing son-in-law.

“I’m sure flowers really irritate Harry horribly,” said Concha. “They’ve probably got the Oxford manner, or are not Old Liberals, or something.”

“You are quite right, Concha. Both flowers and children irritate him,” said the Doña bitterly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dick, with indifferent good humour. “By the way,” he added, “I’ve asked a young fellow called Munroe down for the week-end. He’s representing a South African sugar firm we have to do with ... it’ll be all right, won’t it?”

“Well, Arnold’s written to say he’s coming, and he doesn’t like strangers, you know,” said the Doña.

“Well, I’m blessed ... has it come to this ...” he spluttered, roused completely out of his habitual good humour.

“No, it hasn’t,” said Concha soothingly, and laid a hand on his.

“Well, all the same, it’s ...” he growled; and then subsided, slightly appeased.

The Doña, quite unmoved, continued placidly eating her sole. Then she remarked, “And where is your friend to sleep, may I ask? Arnold is bringing down Guy and a cousin of his. When the children are here you know how little room we have.”

“I suppose one of them—Arnold, as far as that goes—can sleep at Rudge’s,” said Dick sulkily.

“Oh, I can sleep in Dad’s dressing-room, if it comes to that,” said Teresa.

“Or I can,” said Concha.

“Oh, no, you’re so much more dependent on your own dressing-table and your own things,” said Teresa; and Concha blushed. Innocent remarks of Teresa’s had a way of making her blush; but she was a fighter.

“What’s the good Colonial like?” she asked, her voice not quite natural—and thinking the while, “I will ask if I choose! It’s absolutely unbearable how self-conscious they’re making me—it’s like servants.”

“The Colonial—what Colonial? Oh, Monroe! He’s a Scot really, but he’s been out there some years; done jolly well, too. He’s a gallant fellow, too—V.C. in the war.”

“Oh, no-o-o!” drawled Concha, “how amusing! V.C.’s are so exotic—it’s like seeing a fox suddenly in a wood——” and then she blushed again, for she realised that this remark was not original, but Guy Cust’s, and that Teresa was looking at her.

“What’s he like?” she went on hurriedly.

“Oh, I don’t know ... he’s a great big chap,” and then he added cryptically, “pretty Scotch, I should say.”

When dinner was over, the Doña went up to the nursery to apologise, in case the children were still awake, for not having been up before to say good-night. She found they were asleep, however, but Nanny was sitting in the day-nursery darning a jersey of Jasper’s; so, partly to avoid having had the trouble of climbing the stairs for nothing, partly because she had been seeking for some time the occasion for a private chat, she sank into the rocking-chair—looking extremely distinguished in her black lace mantilla and velvet gown.

Her brown eyes, with the quizzical droop of the lids that Teresa had inherited, fixed Nanny in a disconcerting Spanish stare.

How thankful she was that she did not have to wear a gown of black serge fastening down her chest with buttons, and a starched white cap.

“I think the children have had a happy summer,” she said.

“Oh, yes, madam. There’s nowhere like Plasencia—and no one like Granny and Auntie!”

There was a definite matter upon which the Doña wanted information; but it required delicate handling. She was on the point of approaching it by asking if the children were not very lonely at Cambridge, but realising that this would be a reflection upon Nanny she immediately abandoned it—no one could deal more cavalierly, when she chose, with the feelings of others than the Doña; but she never inadvertently hurt a fly.

So what she said was, “I suppose Dr. Sinclair is always very busy?”

“Oh, yes—always working away at his stocks and his chickens,” said Nanny placidly, holding a small hole up to the light. “He’s managed to get that bit of ground behind the garden, and he’s planted it with nothing but stocks. He lets Anna help him with the chickens. She’s becoming quite a little companion to her Daddy.”

“That is delightful,” purred the Doña; then, after a pause, “He must be terribly lonely, poor man.”

“Oh, yes, he frets a lot, I’m sure; but, of course, gentlemen don’t show it so much.”

“Ah?” and there was a note of suppressed eagerness in the interjection.

Nanny began to feel uncomfortable.

As dogs who live much with human beings develop an agonising sensitiveness, so servants are apt to develop from an intimacy with their masters a delicacy and refinement of feeling often much greater than that of the masters.

At the bottom of her heart, she resented Dr. Sinclair’s indifference to his children—at any rate, his indifference to Jasper—for Anna, who was a remarkably intelligent little girl, he rather liked. But with regard to Jasper, he had once remarked to a crony at dinner that, with the exception of the late Lord —— (naming a famous man of science), his son was the greatest bore he had ever met; which remark had been repeated by the parlour-maid in a garbled version to the indignant Nanny.

Then, in decent mourning, a broken heart as well as a crape band must be worn on the sleeve; Dr. Sinclair’s sleeve was innocent of either, and it could not be denied that within eight months of his wife’s death his voice was as loud and cheerful, his eyes as bright, as ever before.

Yes; but it was quite another matter to be pumped, even by “Granny,” or to admit to any one but her own most secret heart that “Daddy” could, under any circumstances, behave otherwise than as the model of all the nursery virtues.

There was a short silence; then the Doña said, “Yes, poor man! It must be very dull for him. But I suppose he is beginning to see his friends?”

“Oh, yes, madam, the College gentlemen sometimes come to talk over his work with him,” and Nanny pursed up her lips, and accelerated the speed with which she was threading her needle through her warp. “It’s a blessing, I’m sure,” she added, “that he has his work to take off his thoughts sometimes.”

“Yes, indeed!”; then, after a slight pause, “What about that Miss—what was her name—the lady professor—Miss Fyles-Smith? Is she still working with Dr. Sinclair?”

“I couldn’t say, madam, I’m sure. She was very kind, taking the children on the river, and that—when Dr. Sinclair was away.”

The slight emphasis on the temporal clause did more credit to Nanny’s heart than her head—considering that the rapier she was parrying was wielded by the Doña; for it caused the Doña to say to herself, “Aha! she knows what I mean, does she? There must be something in it then.”

However, this was loyal, faithful service, and the Doña had an innate respect for the first-rate; but, though honouring Nanny, she did not feel in the least ashamed of herself.

She changed the subject, and sat on, for a while, chatting on safe, innocent topics.

3

The Doña considered that no sand-dune, Turkish divan, bank whereon the wild thyme blows, or Patriarch’s bosom, could rival her own fragrant-sheeted, box-spring-mattressed, eiderdowned bed; therefore she went there early and lay there late. So on leaving the nursery, although it was barely half-past nine, she went straight to bed, and there she was soon established, her face smeared with Crême Simon, with a Spanish novel lying open on the quilt. But the comfort of beds, as of all other things—even though they be ponderable and made of wood and iron—is subject to the capricious tyranny of dreams; and for some time, in spite of the skill of Mr. Heal, the Doña’s bed had not been entirely compact of roses.

When, an hour or so later, Dick climbed into his bed, she said, “I suppose you realise that Harry has forgotten all about my Pepa?”

“Oh, nonsense, Anna! Poor chap, you don’t expect him to be always whimpering, do you? I tell you, the English aren’t demonstrative.”

“Nor are the Spaniards, but they have a great deal of heart all the same; and Harry has absolutely none—I don’t believe he has any soul either.”

“So much the better then; he can’t be damned.”

This was an unusually acute and spiteful remark—for Dick. The Doña had never confided to him her vicarious terrors touching the apostasy of Pepa, who had not had her children baptised, and, during her last illness, had refused to the end the ministrations of Holy Church; but one cannot pass many years in close physical intimacy with another person without getting an inkling, though it be only subconsciously, of that person’s secret thoughts; and though Dick had never consciously registered his knowledge of the Doña’s, the above remark had been made with intention to wound.

His irritation at her criticism of Harry was caused by a sense of personal guilt: twice, perhaps, during the last year had his own thoughts dwelt spontaneously upon Pepa—certainly not oftener.

With a sigh of relief he put out the light, shook himself into a comfortable position, and then got into the shadowy yacht in which every night he sailed towards his dreams. With that tenderness of males (which deserves the attention of the Freudians) towards any vehicle—be it horse, camel, motor-car, or ship—he knew and loved every detail of her equipment; and in the improvements which, from time to time, he made in her he observed a rigid realism—never, for instance, making them unless they were justified by the actual state of his bank-book. The only concession that he made to pure fancy was that there was no wife and children to be considered in making his budget. On the strength of an unexpected dividend, he had recently had her fitted out with a wireless installation. The only guests were his life-long friend, Hugh Mallam, and a pretty, though shadowy and somewhat Protean, young woman.

As to the Doña, she lay for hours staring with wide eyes at the darkness. Why, oh why, had she married a Protestant? Just to annoy her too vigilant aunts, for the sake of novelty and excitement she had, in spite of her confessor, run off with a round-faced, unromantic young Englishman—really unromantic, but for her with the glamour that always hangs round hereditary enemies. Perhaps she deserved to be punished: but when they had been little she had been so sure of her children—how could they ever be anything but her own creatures, pliable to her touch? Even Arnold, brought up a Protestant (he had been born before the Bull exacting that all children of a mixed marriage should be Catholics), she had been certain that, once his own master, he would come over. She smiled as she remembered how he used to say when he was at school—as a joke—“Oh, yes, I’m going to be the Pope, and I’ll have a special issue of stamps to be used in the Vatican, then after a few days suppress ’em; so I’ll have a corner in them!” And though he had not come over to Rome, there was a certain relaxing of tension as she thought of him; somehow or other, it made it different his having been born before the Bull. But Pepa—that was another thing: a member of the Catholic fold from her infancy ... where could she be now but in that portion of Purgatory which is outside the sphere of influence of prayers and masses, and which will one day be known as Hell? Before her passed a series of realistic pictures of those torments, imprinted on her imagination during las semanas de los ejerjicios espirituales of her girlhood.

Could it be?... No, it was impossible.... Impossible? Pepa had died in mortal sin ... she was there.

CHAPTER II

1

Arnold Lane and Guy Cust had been great friends at Cambridge, in spite of having been at different colleges, and having cultivated different poses.

Guy, who was an Etonian, had gone in for intellectual and sartorial foppishness, for despising feminine society, for quoting “Mr. Pope” and “Mr. Gibbon,” and for frequenting unmarried dons.

Arnold had been less exclusive—had painted the town a “greenery-yellow” with discalceated Fabians, read papers on Masefield to the “Society of Pagans,” and frequently played tennis at the women’s colleges; he had also, rather shamefacedly, played a good deal of cricket and football.

Then, at the end of their last year, came the War, and they had both gone to the front.

The trenches had turned Arnold into an ordinary and rather Philistine young man.

As to Guy—he had undergone what he called a conversion to the “amazing beauty of modern life,” and, abandoning his idea of becoming a King’s don and leading that peculiar existence which, like Balzac’s novel, is a recherche de l’Absolu in a Dutch interior, when the War was over he had settled in London, where he tried to express in poetry what he called “the modern mysticism”—that sense, made possible by wireless and cables, of all the different doings of the world happening simultaneously: London, music-halls, Broad Street, Proust writing, people picking oranges in California, mysterious processes of growth or decay taking place in the million trees of the myriad forests of the world, a Javanese wife creeping in and stabbing her Dutch rival. One gets the sense a little when at the end of The Garden of Cyrus Sir Thomas Browne says: “The huntsmen are up in America and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.” Its finest expression, he said, was to be found in the Daily Mirror.

But early training and tastes are tenacious. We used to be taught that, while we ought not to wish for the palm without the dust, we should, nevertheless, keep Apollo’s bays immaculate; and, in spite of their slang, anacoluthons, and lack of metre, Guy’s poems struck some people (Teresa, for instance) as being not the bays but the aspidistras of Apollo—dusted by the housemaid every morning.

Towards five o’clock, the next day, their arrival was announced by ’Snice excitably barking at the front door, and by Concha—well, the inarticulate and loud noises of welcome with which Concha always greeted the return of her father, brother, or friends, is also best described by the word “barking.”

“It’s a friendly gift; I’m sure no ‘true woman’ is without it,” thought Teresa.

Arnold had his father’s short, sturdy body and his mother’s handsome head; Guy was small and slight, with large, widely-opened, china-blue eyes and yellow hair; he was always exquisitely dressed; he talked in a shrill voice, always at a tremendous rate. They were both twenty-seven years old.

As usual, they had tea out on the lawn; the Doña plying Arnold with wistful questions, in the hopes of getting fresh material for that exact picture of his life in London that she longed to possess, that, by its help, she might, in imagination, dog his every step, hear each word he uttered.

Up in the morning, say at eight (she hoped his landlady saw that his coffee was hot), then at his father’s office by nine, then ... but she never would be able to grasp the sort of things men did in offices, then luncheon—she hoped it was a good one (no one else had ever had any fears of Arnold’s not always doing himself well), then ... hazy outlines and details which she knew were all wrong, and, in spite of the many years she had spent in England, ridiculously like the life of a young Spaniard in her youth ... no, no, he would never begin his letters to young ladies ojos de mi corazon (eyes of my heart)—they would be more like this: Dear ——? Fed up. Have you read? Cheerio! Amazing performance! Quite. Allow me to remind you.... And then, perhaps, a Latin quotation to end up. No, it was no use, she would never be able to understand it all.

“A Scotch protégé of Dad’s is coming to-night,” said Concha; “he’ll probably travel down with Rory Dundas—I wonder if they’ll get on ... oh, Guy, I hadn’t noticed them before; what divine spats!”

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Arnold, “it’s that chap Munroe, I suppose. Look here, I don’t come down here so often, I think I might be left alone when I do, Mother,” and he turned angrily to the Doña. It was only in moments of irritation that he called her “mother.”

“And I think so, too. I told your father that you would not be pleased.”

“Well, of course, it’s come to this, that I’ll give up coming home at all,” and he savagely hacked himself a large slice of cake.

A look of terror crept into the Doña’s eyes—her children vanishing slowly, steadily, over the brow of a hill, while she stood rooted to the ground, was one of her nightmares.

Trying to keep the anger out of her voice, Teresa said, “The last time you were here there were no visitors at all, and the time before it was all your own friends.”

“Quite. But that is no reason....”

“Poor angel!” cried Concha, plumping down on his knee, “you’re like Harry, who used to say that he’d call his house Yarrow that it might be ‘unvisited.’”

Arnold grinned—the Boswellian possessive grin, automatically produced in every Trinity man when a sally of Dr. Sinclair’s was quoted.

“How I love family quarrels! By the way, where’s Mr. Lane?” said Guy.

“Playing golf,” answered the Doña curtly.

“The glorious life he leads! ‘The apples fall about his head!’ He does lead an amazingly beautiful life.”

“‘Beautiful,’ Guy?” and the Doña turned on him the look of pitying wonder his remarks were apt to arouse in her.

“Yes, successful, middle-aged business men,” cried Guy excitedly, beginning to wave his hands up and down, “they’re the only happy people ... they’re like Keats’ Nightingale, ‘no hungry generations tread them down, singing of....’”

“I’m not so sure of that,” laughed Arnold. “We’re certainly hungry, and we often trample on him—if that’s what it means,” and, getting up, he yawned, stretched himself, and, seizing the Doña’s hand, said, “Come and show me the garden.”

The Doña flushed with pleasure, and they strolled off towards the border, whither they were shortly followed by Concha.

Teresa and Guy sat on by the tea-table.

“I quite agree with you,” she said presently. “Dad’s life is pleasant to contemplate. Somehow, he belongs to this planet—he manages to be happy.”

“Yes, you see he doesn’t try to pretend that he belongs to a different scheme of evolution from beasts and trees and things, and he doesn’t dream. Do you think he ever thinks of his latter end?” and he gave a little squeak of laughter.

Teresa smiled absently, and for some seconds gazed in silence at the view. Then she said, “Think of all the things happening everywhere ... but there are such gaps that we can’t feel the process—even in ourselves; we can only register results and that isn’t living, and it’s frightfully unæsthetic.”

“But, my dear Teresa, that’s what I’m always preaching!” cried Guy indignantly. “It’s exactly this registering of results instead of living through processes that is so frightful. In a poem you shouldn’t say, ‘Hullo! There’s a lesser celandine!’ all ready-made, you know; and then start moralising about it: ‘In its unostentatious performance of its duty it reminds me of a Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman that I once knew’—you know the sort of thing. In your poem the lesser celandine should go through the whole process of growth—and then it should wither and die.”

“No, Guy; it can’t be done ... in music, perhaps, but that’s so vague.”

Guy felt a sudden sinking in his stomach: had he not himself invented a technique to do this very thing? He must find out at all costs what Teresa thought of his poetry.

“Don’t you think ...” he began nervously, “that modern poetry is getting much nearer to—to—er—processes?”

Teresa gave a little smile. So that was what it was all leading up to? Was there no one with whom she could discuss things simply and honestly for their own sake?

“Did you—er—ever by any chance read my poem on King’s Cross?”

“Yes. It was very good.”

She felt tempted to add, “It reminded me a little bit of Frith,” but she refrained. It would be very unkind and really not true.

Her praise, faint though it was, made Guy tingle all over with pleasure, and he tumbled out, in one breath, “Well, you see, it’s really a sort of trick (everything is). Grammar and logic must be thrown overboard, and it’s not that it’s easier to write without them, it’s much more difficult; Monsieur Jourdain was quite wrong in calling logic rébarbative; as a matter of fact, it’s damnably easy and seductive—so’s grammar; the Song of the Sirens was probably sung in faultless grammar ... and anyhow, it spoils everything. Now, just think of the most ridiculous line in the Prelude:

... and negro ladies in white muslin gowns.

Don’t you see it’s entirely the fault of the conjunction ‘and’? Try it this way. Oranges, churches, cabriolets, negro ladies in white muslin gowns.... It immediately becomes as significant and decorative as Manet’s negro lady is a white muslin gown in the Louvre—the one offering a bouquet to Olympia.”

He paused, and looked at her a little sheepishly, a smile lurking in the corner of his eyes.

“You’re too ridiculous,” laughed Teresa, “and theories about literature, you know, are rather dangerous, and allow me to point out that all the things that ... well, that one perhaps regrets in poor Wordsworth, whom you despise so much, that all these things are the result of his main theory, namely, that everything is equally interesting and equally poetic. While the other things—the incomparable things—happened in spite of his theories.”

“Oh, yes ... trudging over the moors through the rain, and he’s sniffing because he’s lost his handkerchief, and he’s thinking of tea—sent him by that chap in India or China, what was his name? You know ... the friend of Lamb’s—and of hot tea cakes.”

Teresa gave her cool, superior smile. “Poor Guy! You’ve got a complex about Wordsworth.”

After a little pause, she went on, “Literature, I think, ought to transpose life ... turn it into a new thing. It has to come pushing up through all the endless labyrinths of one’s mind—like catechumens in the ancient Mysteries wandering through cave after cave of strange visions, and coming out at the other end new men. I mean ... oh, it’s so difficult to say what I mean ... but one looks at—say, that view, and the result is that one writes—well, the love story of King Alfred, or ... a sonnet on a sun-dial. I remember I once read a description by a psychologist of the process that went on in the mind of a certain Italian dramatist: he would be teased for months by some abstract philosophical idea and gradually it would turn itself into, and be completely lost in an action—living men and women doing things. It seems to me an extraordinarily beautiful process—really creative.... Transubstantiation, that’s what it is really; but the bad writers are like priests who haven’t proper Orders—they can scream hoc est corpus till they are hoarse, but nothing happens.”

Guy had wriggled impatiently during this monologue; and now he said, in a very small voice, “You ... you do like my poetry, don’t you, Teresa?”

She looked at him; of course, he deserved to be slapped for his egotism and vanity, but his eager, babyish face was so ridiculous—like Jasper’s—and when Jasper climbed on to the chest of drawers and shouted, “Look at me, Teresa! Teresa! Look at me!” as if he had achieved the ascent of Mount Everest, she always feigned surprise and admiration.

So, getting up, she said with a smile, “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature, Guy—I do really. Now I must go.”

He felt literally intoxicated with gratification. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature; an amazingly brilliant creature”—he sucked each word as if it were a lollipop.

Then, the way she affectionately humoured him—that was the way women always treated geniuses: geniuses were apt to seem a trifle ridiculous; probably the impression he made on people was somewhat similar to Swinburne’s.

He got up and tripped across the lawn to a clump of fuchsias.

Yes; he had certainly been very brilliant with Teresa: the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the sirens was, I am sure, in faultless grammar; the song of the ... and how witty he had been about the negro ladies!

He really must read a paper on his own views on poetry—to an audience mainly composed of women: The cultivated have, without knowing it, become the Philistines, and, scorning the rude yet lovely Saturnalia of modern life, have refused an angel the hospitality of their fig-tree; Tartuffe, his long, red nose pecksniffing—the day of the Puritans is over; but for the sake of the Lady of Christ’s, let them enjoy undisturbed their domestic paradise regained; then all these subjects locked up so long and now let loose by modern poetry ... yes, it would go like this: The harems have been thrown open, and, though as good reactionaries we may deplore the fact, yet common humanity demands that we should lend a helping hand to the pretty lost creatures in their embroidered shoes; then, about anacoluthons and so on; surely one’s sentences need not hold water if they hold the milk of Paradise; oh, yes ... of course ... and he would end up by reading them a translation of Pindar’s first Olympian Ode, ... Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ ..., and now, ladies and gentlemen, which of you will dare to subscribe to Malherbe’s ‘ce galimatias de Pindare’?

Loud applause; rows of indulgent, admiring, cultured smiles—like the Cambridge ladies when the giver of the Clark lectures makes a joke.

“Guy! I have told you before, I will not have you cracking the fuchsia buds.”

It was the Doña, calling out from the border where, deserted by Arnold but joined by Dick, she was examining and commenting upon each blossom separately, in the manner of La Bruyère’s amateur of tulips.

“All right,” he called back in a small, weak voice, and went up to say, “How d’ye do” to Dick.

“Hullo, Guy! Been writing any more poetry?”

This was Dick’s invariable greeting of him.

Then he wandered off towards the house—a trifle crestfallen. “I think you’re an amazingly brilliant creature.” Yes; but wasn’t that begging the question, the direct question he had asked whether she liked his poetry? And one could be “an amazingly brilliant creature,” and, at the same time, but an indifferent writer. Marie Bashkirsteff, for instance, whose journal he had come upon in an attic at home, mouldering away between a yellow-backed John Strange Winter and a Who’s Who of the nineties; no one could deny that socially she must have been extremely brilliant, but, to him, it had seemed incredible that the world should have failed to perceive that her “self-revelations” were to a large extent faked, and her imagination a tenth-rate one. And now, both as painter and writer, Time had shown her up, together with the other pompiers whose work had made such a brave show in the Salons of the eighties, or had received such panegyrics in the Mercure de France.

He felt sick as he thought of time, in fifteen years ... ten years ... having corroded the brilliant flakes of contemporary paint, faded the arabesque of strange words and unexpected thoughts, and revealed underneath the grains of pounce.

Brilliant ... there was Oscar Wilde, of course ... but then, Oscar Wilde!

He must find out what value exactly she attached to brilliancy.

2

It was past seven o’clock when Captain Roderick Dundas and Mr. David Munroe drove up side by side to Plasencia.

If they did not find much to say to each other, the fault was not Rory’s; for he was a friendly creature, ready, as he put it, “to babble to any one at his grandmother’s funeral.”

In appearance he was rather like Guy, only much taller. They had both inherited considerable prettiness from their respective mothers—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” whose beauty and high spirits had made a great stir at their début in the eighties.