DUSTY ANSWER

DUSTY ANSWER

By

Rosamond Lehmann
‘Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!’
George Meredith.
NEW YORK
Henry Holt and Company
1927
To
George Rylands
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
FIRST PRINTED IN AMERICA
SEPTEMBER, 1927.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.

[Part One], [Part Two], [Part Three], [Part Four], [Part Five].

PART ONE

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a fresh burst of tears, Judith came.

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

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

‘I’m the fat man,’ said Mariella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t think so. Lie still.’

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

‘The grass is wet. Sit on my chest.’

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

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

‘Oh, Charlie.... But I like you too.’

‘But not as much as Charlie?’

‘Oh no, not as much as Charlie.’

‘Couldn’t you like me as much?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’

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

Magnanimous Charlie.

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

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

‘Oh, you’re not.’

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

It was terrible to see him so depressed.

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

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

‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’

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

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

‘D’you see what this is?’

‘A pin.’

‘Guess where I found it.’

‘In the seat of your chair.’

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

‘In my pudding at school.’

‘Oh!’

‘I nearly swallowed it.’

‘Oh!’

‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’

He stared at her.

‘Oh, Charlie!...’

‘You can keep it if you like.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who broke the punt pole?’

And they all said:

‘I didn’t.’

Then she said patiently:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Now draw something for me, Roddy.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No. Throw it away.’

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

‘Oh, Roddy!’

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

‘Well, come on,’ said Roddy.

They fled from it.

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

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

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

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

She nodded. She could not speak.

The place was haunted for ever.

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

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

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

She was staring in horror at a dead rabbit lying in the path. It was stretched on its side with its tiny frail-boned paws laid out quiet, and the tender secret white fur of its underneath half revealed. One of them—which?—she could never remember—said:

‘Well, I never thought I’d touch it.’

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

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

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

‘Hum,’ said Roddy. ‘Funny thing.’

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

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

‘I’ll see to it,’ said Roddy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I say, don’t,’ said Roddy again in a shaking voice.

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

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

‘Come and look.’

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

Peace and comfort flowed in upon her....

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

‘Oh, Roddy!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It had happened.

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

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

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

Somebody was calling from the edge.

‘Hey! Hey! Hi!’

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

Charlie said rather peevishly:

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

Judith was dumb.

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

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

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

‘Well, you’re no pigmy,’ said Julian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, I do.’

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

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

‘Yes, really. Where do you live?’

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

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

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

‘Mariella loves her school,’ said Julian. ‘It’s topping. She doesn’t learn anything and plays hockey all day. Judith’s parents want her to be educated, Mariella. You don’t understand. Isn’t that so, Judith?’

Judith blushed again and was afraid it was so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie slipped up with a crash, Mariella followed him.

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

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

They were dragging each other on helplessly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And where’s Roddy?’

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

‘Does he still draw?’

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

Julian had never liked Roddy.

‘Do you still compose, Julian?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And did you get your scholarship?’

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

‘You must be eighteen.’

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

Charlie lay on his back and moaned.

‘I’ve got a pain. I’ve got a pain. Oh, Mariella! Oh, God! Oh, all you people! The anguish, the sensation!—like the Scenic Railway—transports of horror and bliss. I thought: Never, never shall we stop. We went faster, and fas.... Oh, Mariella, your face.... I shall die....’

He writhed with laughter, the tears poured down his face. ‘I t-tried to say: drop the c—— I hadn’t any voice—Oh, what a feeling!... those skimming dreams.... O God!’

He shut his eyes exhausted.

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

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

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

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

So he was still the one to be sick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you ever come to London?’

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

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

‘Oh!’

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

‘We must go,’ said Mariella.

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

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

‘When?’ snapped Julian. ‘Fix it.’

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

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

‘Oh yes.’

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

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

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

A pause—

‘Refusing to spin——’

Another pause—

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

He pulled off his boots; and finished:

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

‘Pretty poor,’ cried Julian.

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

Charlie bowed, and said:

‘I can do more like that.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Not now. Pouf! I’m tired.’

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

‘Oh, Mariella. No! I’m so hot.’

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

Watching him, Judith thought:

‘Are you conceited and spoilt?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So it is, but the trees hide it.’

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’

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

‘Well, see you to-morrow.’

Julian looked up at the sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And listen to the wind.’

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

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

‘Good-night then.’

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

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Goo’night.’

‘Good-night.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve come to say good-bye.’

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

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

She listened and heard the train-whistle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah, then he won’t get killed....’

‘No.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How had it happened?

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

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

‘All right.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Nor I anyone but you.’

‘Then let’s marry before I go.’

‘Oh yes,—at once.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘He’s got a weak heart.’

‘Ah, then he won’t go to the front.’

‘No, he’s quite safe.’

She woke up happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good-night, Lacey.’

His mumbling voice said from the shadows:

‘Good-night, Missie.’

‘Lovely evening, Lacey.’

‘Ah, grand.’

‘How does your garden look next door?’

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

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

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

He paused; then said:

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

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A long time after, came the last terrible dream.

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

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

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

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

A voice broke ringingly, in anguish:

‘Come back!’

It shattered itself, aghast, upon emptiness.

Softly he vanished.

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

He never came again.

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

PART TWO

1

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

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

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

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

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

So they had come.

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

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

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

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

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

Julian’s brief laugh came for answer.

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

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

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

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

‘Where’s Roddy?’

‘He went off alone in the canoe.’

‘How romantic,’ said Mariella.

There was a groan.

‘Mariella, why will you——’

‘What?’

‘Quack,’ said Julian. ‘You must think before you speak.’

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She heard from Martin:

‘When I was in Paris with Roddy——’

And then after a long pause, Julian’s voice suddenly raised: ‘But what if you bored yourself ... day after day ... to myself: Christ! You bloody bore....’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Judith, come with me.’

‘I will.’

And all night they would have floated on together.

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

‘Oh, Roddy, I am going to love you.’

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

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

2

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

She seemed pleased.

‘Judith!... isn’t it?’

‘Mariella!’

‘Then you are still here. We wondered.’

‘Yes. Still here.’

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

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

‘Oh no!’

What reply was possible to such silliness?

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

‘Yes. Her false teeth.’

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

‘Oh, Mariella, I’d love to.’

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

‘And Martin and Roddy?’

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

‘Are you glad to be back here?’

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

‘That’s good.’

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

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

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

She smiled and went on.

3

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course I do.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry. Julian then.’

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

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

‘Are you at Cambridge?’ she said.

‘I am.’

‘That’s where I’m going.’

‘Are you really?’

‘For what purpose?’ said Roddy softly.

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

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

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

She pondered.

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

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

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

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

‘Oh yes. I think so.’

‘That’s rather serious.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Go on playing. Something of your own.’

He shook his head and said:

‘Oh, that’s all gone.’

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

‘But it’ll come back.’

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

‘Well, you can still play.’

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

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

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

‘Play what you were playing last night.’

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

‘I was on the river and I heard you.’

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

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

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

He laughed.

‘You know, you were monstrous.’

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

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

‘Yes. That skating time.’

‘Lord, yes. Another world.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stared, then edged away nervously.

‘Do you like children?’ asked Mariella politely.

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

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

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

‘Then Peter is his name.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I must go,’ murmured Judith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused and she said:

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

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

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

‘Yes. Isn’t he?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Peter shall play.’

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

‘Is he musical?’

Julian nodded.

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

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

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

‘Mariella?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘How wretched he’s going to be,’ he said fiercely, ‘Can’t you see?’

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

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

‘Well, he’s got you.’

‘Me!’ He gave his bark of laughter.

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

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

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

He laughed.

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

‘Yes.’

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

When he came back he laughed again.

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

‘I’m not thinking about you.’

After a pause he said:

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

‘Think what?’

‘That he ought never to have been born.’

‘Oh!’ she blushed, horrified.

He flung at her:

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

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

‘No—God, no!’

‘Then what?’

‘Unconsciousness. Heavenly, heavenly annihilation.’

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

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

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

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

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

He turned from the window and smiled at her.

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

‘No. Do you?’

He laughed and shrugged.

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

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you like it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, you’re not a bore, you’re not! Only—don’t be so miserable.’

In the awkward silence that followed she said:

‘I must go.’

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

‘Poor Julian!’

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

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

‘I can’t. What will Mariella say?’

‘Mariella doesn’t say. Whether she thinks is the problem,—or even feels. Is she a very remarkable person? Or is it simply arrested development?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Not?’

She smiled to herself, struck with a fancy.

‘Perhaps she’s a fairy, Julian.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘At me,’ she corrected.

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

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

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

He looked at her with sudden attention.

‘How old are you, Judith?’

‘Seventeen. Nearly eighteen.’

He studied her.

‘You must put your hair up.’

‘Must I?’

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

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

‘Hullo!’ said Mariella. ‘Still here?’

‘I’m afraid so. But I’m just going.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m sent to say supper’s ready.’

‘Thank you very much. I’ll come.’

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

‘I’m delighted.’

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

‘What are you doing?’

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

‘You like going in boats, don’t you?’

‘I suppose I do rather.’

‘I like it too. Especially at night.’

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

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

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

‘Yes, I know.’

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, we must go,’ she said softly.

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

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

Thank God the meal was soon over.

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

‘Do you dance, Julian?’

‘No. At least only with two people.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Poor old Ju,’ said Martin softly.

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

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

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

Now she must confess.

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

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

‘Oh, I couldn’t.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Now,’ she said trembling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At last Mariella stopped and disengaged herself.

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

Roddy left her and strolled over to Judith.

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

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

‘Oh?—How did you get on?’

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

‘Good!’

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

‘Shall we dance?’

He looked surprised.

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

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

‘She’s good at her stuff,’ he said.

‘Do you adore dancing?’

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

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

He looked at her with amusement.

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

‘Shall we?’ he said at last.

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

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

Roddy looked down.

‘But you can dance,’ he said.

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

He laughed.

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

‘Never.’

‘Swear?’

‘Cross my heart.’

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

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

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

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

‘But you do love it, Roddy!’

He looked down at her and smiled.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Roddy!’

She was silenced by happiness.

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

‘Darlin’ Martin, fetch me my coat.’

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

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

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

He laughed.

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

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

‘No. Nobody ever does.’

‘Not anybody,—ever?’

‘Not anybody—ever.’

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

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

Judith laughed aloud.

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

‘You really will?’

She waited.

‘Go on,’ he urged.

The word would not come.

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

‘Oh, be quiet!’

‘Please!...’

‘No....’

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

She laughed and gasped, clinging to him.

‘Giddy?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

He stopped and looked at her amusedly.

‘Oh, I am.’

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

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

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

‘What are you looking at, Roddy?’

‘You.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh,—soon, I suppose.’

‘Do you work very hard there?’

‘Terribly hard.’

‘Drawing or painting?’

‘Some of both. Nothing of either.’

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

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

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

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

‘Why do you?’

‘Why indeed?’

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

He nodded, smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He bent his head and whispered laughingly:

‘Just say it.’

‘Say what?’

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

‘No, I won’t—now.’

‘When will you?’

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

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

‘Don’t say that. Why do you?’

‘There’s nothing more to know.’

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

‘What?’

‘More or less—as far as I can tell——’

‘What?’

She whispered.

‘A darling.’

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

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

‘No, very sensible.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I adored it.’

‘Roddy, are we flirting?’

‘Are we?’

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

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

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

‘To think I’ve never danced before!’

‘Why haven’t you?’

‘Nobody to dance with.’

‘Nobody?’

‘Nobody at all.’

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

‘Ever since then.’

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

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

‘Not yet. And not for long.’

She could have cried, he was so comforting.

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

‘A penny for them, Judith.’

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

‘I find that myself,’ he said solemnly.

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

‘They do.’

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

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

‘Quite, quite changed,’ he said.

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

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

‘Are you laughing at me, Roddy?’

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

‘Why am I?’

‘You’re so incredibly serious.’

‘I’m not—not always.’

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

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

‘Anything—even yourself?’

She pondered.

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

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

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

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

‘Oh yes. Yes, Roddy.’

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

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

It was time to go.

‘Oh, must you?’ said Mariella.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they were all alike!

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, the torment of loving!

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

The pictures came before her.

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

Afterwards she said:

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

He answered indifferently:

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

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

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

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

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

Then she had added:

‘Do you still caricature, Roddy?’

‘Now and then,—when I feel like it.’

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

‘I’d forgotten that.’

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