User:SnowyCinema/P/Old Pybus
was secure against disturbance. It was like a celibate's cell in the midst of the growing complexity of modern life, and he could withdraw into it, and be saved from too much subtlety, and from being too damned clever.
For as the Venerable would have it—"There's nothing so damning, my dear, as being too damned clever."
On the Sunday, Lance went up to his room directly after breakfast. His craft had its ritual, its little personal predilections; the window had to be open, but not too much so; a box of matches lay handy; the ink-pot stood just where he could dip his pen into it without being conscious of dipping. He preferred an old-fashioned pen. The deal table provided by the Venerable was an eighth of an inch short in one leg, and had to be underpinned with an old envelope folded four times, and if you moved the table the padding came adrift.
Lance sat down. He allowed himself to look at the landscape while he filled a pipe. The Venerable had gone on duty, and from nine o'clock till twelve the cottage would be a box of blessed silence, and silence was to become more sacred to Lance with each year of his living. He would come in his time to marvel at the world's waste of words, and at the vacuous fool-chatter poured out unceasingly by people who had nothing within them worthy of silence.
At the top of a white page he inked in the heading—Chapter XXXIII. He sat and looked at the castle trees. There were days when his consciousness would seem too tense and alert, and ready to be distracted by trivial happenings, a fly crawling on the window pane, a hair caught up in the nib and smudging the letters. There were mornings when your chair creaked, or your pipe refused to draw. He knew this feeling of tension, this fear of the pen, this over-sensitiveness to the externals. Often it preceded a rush of inspiration. But relaxation was necessary, that clairvoyant calm. He would sit back in his chair, and, looking at the sky and the tops of the trees, say to himself—"Relax—relax. Let things come." That mysterious self which lies beneath the conscious self had to be persuaded to rise to the surface.
He was on the edge of what he described as "Getting off," when he heard the closing of a door, and the sound of two voices, his grandfather's and a woman's. They were in the room below. The sitting-room window was open, and Lance could hear what the two voices said. n -
"I feel—that—it can't go on much longer."
"Poor child."
"I must talk. Sometimes one must talk."
"I'll shut the window, my dear. My grandson's working upstairs. Don't want to disturb him."
The window was closed, and the murmur of the two voices continued for a couple of minutes, and then it ceased. A door opened and shut, while Lance sat stiffly attentive. His personal consciousness had come back to him. The moment of inward illumination had passed.
Usually he would have felt some impatience, or like a man on the edge of sleep jarred into sudden wakefulness, but on this Sunday morning he accepted the two voices. They were not fool-voices, and his self had been appeased. "I must talk. Sometimes one must talk." Of course! Moreover, the girl's voice had had an inevitableness. And that utterance had had for him the appeal of the first few notes of a violin when some human movement opens. He ceased to feel impersonal. He stood up and looked out of the window, and saw the two figures pass along by the fence at the end of the cottage garden. Mary Merris and his grandfather.
He watched them across the castle field. They disappeared behind a grey wall, and he stood holding the curtain aside, very conscious of the memory of a woman surprised in the midst of her weeping. Why had she wept? What was it that could not go on much longer? What had she to say to his grandfather, and he to her?
Lance stood there to interpret, but the interpretation had a sudden, personal significance. It was within himself, and not to be externalised. He sat down in his chair, and smoked his Pipe, and watched. He could picture those two standing in the oriel window and looking out over the Brent valley, or sitting on one of the green benches under the ash trees, but the girl's face was misty to him. In imagination he could not see it clearly, the eyes, the mouth, and suddenly he was conscious of wishing to see it clearly. Her voice was not quite like any other voice. But the Venerable, he could see, that massive white head, and the kind and incorruptible blue eyes.
He sat and waited, and presently he saw his grandfather come back alone, and looking rather as he looked when he fed his pigeons. His eyes and face had an upwardness.
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/sec/
Lance and his grandfather dined together at half past twelve. Old Pybus carried the meal down on a tray from the Saracen kitchen, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, potatoes and kidney beans, and two helpings of cold plum tart. They sat down opposite each other, and the silence between them was sensitive and expectant. For the Venerable had a feeling that Lance was going to ask him a question, and Lance had that question waiting upon his lips.
"Hope we didn't disturb you, my dear?"
Lance, setting to upon that very English dinner, accepted his opportunity.
"No. I was just casting about. Good of you to think about it, grandpater. Besides/b2/"
Old Pybus, knife and fork in hand, cut a potato in half, and waited.
"Some things are importunate."
"Things or people, my dear?"
"Both. I'll confess, that before you shut that window/b2/"
The Venerable gave him a quick look.
"You did."
"I couldn't help it. And I don't know whether I wanted to help it. Some things have a kind of inevitableness. I suppose I could not be allowed to know/b2/?"
"Just what?"
"Yes, just what."
Old Pybus went on with his dinner, but with an air of being less concerned with it than he was with the affairs of his head and heart. Lance had spoken of the importunity of certain things, but the obviousness of them might be equally assertive. Curiosity—as mere curiosity—may be an idle virtue. And yet the Venerable could be influenced by little secret imaginings. He was ending life as a romanticist. A man's outlook and his reactions seem largely a matter of temperament, and dependent upon the heat of his mystical blood. His grandson had that blessed ardour which will persist in discovering beauty where the eyes of the realist can see nothing but dreariness and muck.
"There's an art of living, my dear, as well as an art of writing."
Lance considered the digression. What had beauty of living to do with a woman's tears? n -
"You mean, grandpater, that what I might try to put on paper/b2/?"
"Beauty, my dear. There's such a thing as beautiful living. The fine gesture, the compassionate gesture. When you come to the end of life such gestures seem worth while. But most of our gestures are muddled gestures. That ought to be obvious, but it isn't."
Lance looked hard at his plate.
"So—you can't tell me/b2/?"
"I'm not at liberty to tell you, my dear. I don't gossip about her, no, not even to you."
"Sorry, grandpater, I did not mean/b2/"
"I know. Physical things and spiritual things muddled up together. And the spiritual—striving to be itself. What's the balance, the balance between body and spirit? Oh—that's the art, the balancing of those two."
Lance got up and changed the plates. He had a feeling that his grandfather was talking just to tantalise him, which—of course—was absurd, for all this mystical stuff must have a human core to it. He placed the cold plum tart and a jug of cream on the table.
"You might be setting me a problem, grandpater."
The Venerable handled the cream jug.
"Perhaps. There are live problems, my dear, as well as problems on paper. And the inevitable fly in the cream jug! How to exclude the fly! Or to keep the wasp from gnawing a hole in the fruit! But other people's problems/b2/"
"She's asking you to help her solve it, grandpater."
The Venerable removed the fly with the handle of a spoon.
"Wish I could, my dear, as easily as that. All sorts of ways of solving a problem. Cutting it out—is one of them. Now, if I were a young man! The violence of youth! Violence may be useful/b2/"
He arose to rid himself of a cream-soaked fly.
"Putting certain things and people out of the window. Wish I could do it sometimes. There's an old saying about silk purses and sow's ears. The old people were more downright. We're so subtle, my dear, that sometimes we can't cut an apple in half. Take plenty of cream."
Lance did so. The cream and the plum juice were sensuously pleasing. But why was the Venerable making all this mystery about Mary Merris?
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/sec/
Lance turned from the highroad into the lane which led up past "Marions" to the Woolshot woods. He had come down from Castle Craven to stretch his legs and to do some thinking, for if Old Pybus saw certain things as in a glass darkly, Lance saw them not at all. It may be as difficult to tell just when an apple will fall as to say when curiosity merges into interest.
To begin with, the "Marions" lane might be no more to Lance than a green lane in September, the shaggy hedges closing in a steepish ascent, a green cleft which ended in the blue of the sky and the massive foliage of the beech woods. A robin was singing, and Lance idled. He said to himself that this was the lane in which Mary Merris lived, that mysterious Mary Merris into whose wet eyes he had looked for one short moment. But was any woman mysterious? It was a mere sex illusion. And yet, as he went on up the lane, she seemed to be pressing more deeply into a stillness, a secrecy, a sadness. He was neither a Jefferies nor a Hudson. Green branches were green branches, and might be monotonously so; his attitude to nature was very personal; to youth, nature must have an intimate meaning, some association with a face or a figure or an event.
Lance came to the white gate, and looking over it saw the white porch flanked by the two yew trees, the green door standing open, and someone's brown raincoat hanging on a peg. The little house seemed to him as shut in by silence as it was shut in by green leaves. It had for him a curious melancholy.
He went on. He became possessed by a feeling that an essential something which belonged to that cottage penetrated the hedges like a drifting perfume, and filled the lane with a scented sadness. A melancholy place. And suddenly he paused, becoming aware of a movement on the other side of the "Marions" hedge. There was a rustling. He saw an apple-bough shaken.
Someone began to sing, though the murmuring of the voice was almost inward, suggesting a little moaning, a sound produced almost unconsciously by someone who was solitarily busy, and in a lonely mood. But the words and the melody were recognisable.
"Bend down, bend down to the waters, Melisande." n -
The music was not of his generation nor of hers, and yet it belonged to all time. The prongs of a light ladder appeared in the foliage of the tree. A branch trembled. A dark head appeared, and then a hand reaching out for a red apple.
The hand plucked the apple, but even in the plucking of it seemed to hesitate as though the owner of the hand had been made aware of that other presence. She turned her head, but very slowly. She saw beyond the hedge Lance's upturned face and watching eyes.
Neither of them spoke. He gave her a quick and self-conscious lift of the hat, and went on up the lane, while she remained motionless for a moment, her bosom pressed against one of the rungs of the ladder. s Early in October, No. 7 Blount Street restored to No. 7 Parham Crescent the person of Olive Gadsden. She was able to walk upstairs, and unhelped, though Conrad was there to encourage and assist, and to close the door on a too officious Mrs. Gasson.
"Get me a cushion, Con."
His fat hands stuffed a cushion into her chair. His largeness, swathed in grey, undulated sympathetically, and a roundeyed survey of her apartment left him puzzled but not displeased.
"Can't think why you wanted to come back here."
"Stuffy little place—but the old woman's rather a good sort. Besides—I don't sponge."
He bent down and pressed his full lips to the back of her shingled neck. He was full of nascent uxoriousness.
"Well—that's all right. There won't be much wrong with Chlois Court, Kid. And what about 'Monte' for the honeymoon?"
She allowed him his fondlings, for obviously they were to be part of the business. She was feeling scratchy, and not in the best of tempers, much as a shop-girl may feel at the end of the January sales. She cherished a sense of bitterness against both her lovers, for one had ceased too easily to care, and the other's caring was too inanely amorous. Infernal predicament! She was not afraid of being fastidiously shocked by his fat finality, but she was afraid of being bored by it. n -
Mrs. Gasson entered soon after Conrad had left.
"Well, I do 'ope as you are 'appy, dearie. I must say he's a reel affable gent."
Olive's red mouth seemed to writhe.
"He's a fool, a damned slobbering fool! If there were enough girls like me we'd scream the roof off this blasted world."
Mrs. Gasson made soothing noises.
"There—there, you look at the ring on your finger, and think of the car you come here in."
"Like to look."
She twitched the ring from her finger, and tossed it to Mrs. Gasson, who, with a face of alarm, caught it in a fold of her apron.
"My, it's a marvel! Dimonds and roobies. But you're that reckless, dearie; you always was. Now don't you be for spiting yourself. Marridge is marridge. If you're out for marridge—well—I always says to a gal, do it comfortably."
"I shall. But suppose I didn't?"
"Mirabeau's, dearie!"
"No."
"Sure?"
"I've averaged it out. Don't ask me any more silly questions. I'm feeling a bit raw."
"Not hankering after the young one, are you?"
"Oh, shut up. I'm staying on here for a week or two. He wants to take a furnished flat for me till the orange blossom season begins."
Mrs. Gasson, quite imperturbed, handed back the ring.
"I'll get you a cup o' tea, dearie. A cup o' tea 'elps you to get sophical about things. I got sophical long ago. So'll you, dearie. It's just like moosical comedy, only sometimes you get caught laughin' on the wrong leg."
So, Olive sat at her upper window, and realising life as an affair of bargains, yet felt a grudge against it. She was not fastidious; always—she had been too hard up to allow herself the cult of the fastidious. But she was concious of the vulgarity and the cheapness of her surroundings, and of her involvement in them. Gossipings with that common, cynical, if kind, old woman! Always—the acceptance of the third rate and the tarnished. She had had her dreams of little splendours, and now comfort tempted her, a sort of kindness which was like a large white pillow, money, display, the power to do things,
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to order other people about, to walk into Mirabeau's and buy the dresses off the shoulders of other women. As for the other half of the bargain—there was—as Mrs. Gasson had said—the philosophy of getting used to things. She was quite sure that she could manage Conrad, for when a man who was past fifty got silly about a woman, he could be kept silly. She would have breakfast in bed. She would insist on her own car. The possibilities were varied and intriguing.
And yet she was conscious of resentment, of a feeling of rawness. She would have liked to have combined the properties of youth and the virtues of property. She had her grievance. She might be very old in her sophistications, but she had a youthfulness of appetite.
Hence, this little red blur of resentment which would not cool—but retained its heat. She sat at her window, and looked along the Crescent at that other window where Lance sat at work. She could not see him at work, but she saw his goings out and his comings in. He was the same Lance; he had the same swift and ardent walk, the same carriage of the head, that slimness at the hips and breadth of shoulder. He was everything that Conrad was not. He never looked up at her window. He was obviously and cheerfully active about his own affairs.
The little red blur of anger in her was fanned to a fiercer glow whenever she saw him. She wanted to be even with him, to retaliate, to hurt him as he had hurt her. Her resentment hovered.
She sat and watched. She had books, flowers, chocolates, Conrad's daily homage, the croonings of an assiduous and well-rewarded Mrs. Gasson. She was able to walk out on those slim legs of hers and sit in Regent Park. She sat there in the October sunshine, under the yellowing trees, a sulky-faced young woman with eyes which seemed to be searching for some particular face or figure.
Her inspiration came to her quite suddenly while she was walking back one afternoon to Parham Crescent. She flushed; her eyes gave a gleam. Of course! Why hadn't she thought of it before?
She met Mrs. Gasson on the landing.
"My, dearie, you—do—look better!"
"I feel better!"
"You're the peach blossom—again, I can tell you." n -
Olive sat down in her chair by the window. She was able to recapitulate the movements of No. 17. Lance appeared daily upon the pavement at about half past eleven and returned to No. 17 in time for lunch. He went out again about two, and was not seen again till four. He had his working hours and his walking hours, and they did not appear to vary.
Conrad came to tea with her every day at half past four.
Her inspiration arranged its time-table.
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/ch/
Mrs. Carver opened the door of No. 17. Asked if Mr. Pybus was in, she crinkled up her wizened and perpetually frightened little face as though the persuasive sheen of that other face was too bright for her.
"No, he's out. Went out ten minutes ago, Miss."
"How annoying. How long will he be?"
"I really can't say, Miss. He usually comes back to tea."
Mrs. Carver was one of those women who do not open a door more than nine inches; she had none of Mrs. Gasson's large, free, and welcoming gestures; she looked at Olive with all the suspicion of the plain and put-upon woman for that other sort of woman. Yes, the young person might smile. But Mrs. Carver's caution could be easily coerced; she was no more than a cobweb stretched across the gap.
"How annoying!"
Olive's face had an animated friendliness.
"You see, he has asked me to meet his people to-night. I'll just run up to his room and write a note. Third floor front—I think?"
The assurance of her attack appeared to press Mrs. Carver and the door back against the wall. She gave way even before Olive had made a forward movement, the draught of the other's purpose seemed sufficient.
"I don't know whether I ought to, Miss."
"It's quite all right."
She walked in and past the landlady, reassuring, confident.
"I shan't be three minutes."
Mrs. Carver saw her flying up the stairs like a long-legged girl of fourteen. She was opening Lance's door while the landlady was still prevaricating with herself in the dark little hall. Mouth open and awry, and her breathing tumultuous after that dash up the narrow stairs, she looked about her. Yes, there was a key in the door. She turned it, and with her hand still on the key, she stood with her back to the door, her eyes
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seeming to consume the room. A fire? Yes, there was a fire. And if she was lucky/b2/?
She was lucky. On Lance's table by the window two neat piles of paper lay side by side, the manuscript and the typed copyof "Rust," completed three days ago, and read through for the last time that very morning. She crossed the room with a swift, gliding rush, and, with her two hands resting on the back of Lance's chair, looked at the two piles of paper.
Her nostrils dilated. Yes, she was in luck, and able to command a devastating gesture. Her spite hovered and smiled; her fingers curved themselves over the back of the chair like claws. She had no pity; she was telling herself that all this stuff would not be consumed in three minutes.
Her teeth were uncovered, and almost with a little snarl she fell upon the thing that he had created. She carried both manuscript and typescript to the fire, and kneeling down began to tear and to burn. She read never a word of it. She wrenched away a dozen pages at a time, and piling them on edge, saw the flames curl and ascend.
Someone tried the door. Mrs. Carver's footsteps were as surreptitious and as timid as her soul.
"Are you there, Miss?"
"It's all right."
"You've locked the door."
"It's all right."
She tore and tore with a kind of furious and animal haste, and as though she knew and felt that she was tearing the very man himself. Her face had impressed upon it a curious effect of laughter, but her exultation was silent.
"You oughtn't to have locked the door."
"No need to worry."
"What are you doing?"
"Oh, tearing up a few old things."
Mrs. Carver's voice quavered into consternation.
"Open the door—at once. What will he say?" n -
"Quite a lot, perhaps."
She tore and burnt. The flames were half up the chimney, and the fender full of flaming paper. When the stuff caked she thrust at it with the poker, heaving it up so that air and fire could penetrate. Her face shone in the glare. And all the while she breathed with a shallow quickness, as though she had a hill to climb, and was breathless in her rage to reach the summit.
Mrs. Carver, after listening to that sound of rending paper, went with a fluttering swiftness down the stairs.
"Annie—Annie/b2/"
A girl appeared frowsily from the depths.
"What's wrong?"
"There's a young woman in Mr. Pybus's room. She's locked the door—she's/b2/"
"Lawks/b2/!"
"Call the police. Oh—my poor head! No, I don't want any scandal. What'll we do? She's burning things."
Said the girl: "I'd have the police in—if I was you."
But Mrs. Carver preferred to listen on the stairs, while in Lance's room Olive sat back on her heels and contemplated a grate and fender that were full of black and quaking ash. Her face had a malignant serenity. She supposed that she had done the job pretty completely. But had she? Might there not be another copy? She was up and searching, pulling out drawers, turning them out upon the floor, and exploring his empty suit-case and attaché cases. She found no other copy, for "Rust" was dead, a thing of smouldering ash, an inspiration which had glowed and been extinguished.
Hunting up a pencil and a half-sheet of notepaper, and sitting down in Lance's chair, she allowed herself a last impudence. She drew the profile of a face, and the outline of a hand with its thumb and fingers spread, and scrawled below it: "Quits, my lad. Now go and sneak to somebody."
On her way down the stairs she met Mrs. Carver reascending, and passed by with an urchin's swagger.
"You can tell Mr. Pybus that I called."
Mrs. Carver, mouth open and eyes blinking, remained irresolutely mute. She hurried on and up and into Mr. Pybus's room, and stood regarding the disorder, and that mass of ash and charred paper. Her face was like the face of a whimpering child.
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/sec/
Lance returned at four, and Mrs. Carver, who had been waiting for the sound of his latch-key, dragged herself up the kitchen stairs to meet him. She shook. Her tremulousness discovered a sudden volubility.
"Oh, sir, someone's been in your room, that young woman from No. 7. She said as how you expected a message, and I let her in, not thinking like. She said she'd write a note."
Lance's eyes stared.
"Well/b2/?"
"I'm afraid she's—she's burnt something; all those papers that were lying on your table."
She saw the sudden wincing of Lance's startled face. "Just as though I'd thrown vitrol at him, poor dear," as she said to the girl afterwards. He went from her with silent swiftness; he seemed to climb the stairs like a man swarming up a rope. His door banged, and then there was silence.
Mrs. Carver was terrified, but she found courage—a kind of mother courage—to impel her up the stairs. There was not a sound from the room, and she waited, her body bent towards the door, her hand to her head. After bearing that silence for fully two minutes she knocked.
No one answered, and, feeling still more frightened, she put her hand to the handle and opened the door six inches.
She saw Lance sitting on a chair, holding the poker, and staring at that mass of burnt paper. He appeared to be unaware of the open door or of Mrs. Carver's frightened face. He just sat and stared. And she closed the door very gently, and leaning against the landing hand-rail began to whimper with a kind of surreptitious solemnity.
"O, poor dear! How could she have done it?" s For more than half an hour Mrs. Carver vacillated between the first-floor landing and the kitchen. She got Mr. Pybus's tea ready, and then was afraid to carry up the tray. She sent the girl up with it, and waited at the foot of the stairs.
The girl returned with the tray.
"Says 'e don't want it."
"O, poor young gentleman! What's he doing?" n -
"Packing 'is suit-case."
"Packing! Why didn't I slam the door in that little slut's face? There's bound to be trouble. What'll I do, Annie?"
"What can you do?" said the girl who looked sobered and sorry. But in a little while the two of them heard Lance coming down the stairs. He was carrying his suit-case. His face had a hurt and haggard blankness.
"You're not leaving us, sir?"
"I'm going down to a friend, Mrs. Carver."
"Oh, sir—I can't say how sorry/b2/"
He looked at her with a peculiar gentleness.
"Spilt milk. No fault of yours. I'll let you know."
He went towards the door, and she followed, remorseful, deprecating.
"If I'd only known, sir/b2/"
He glanced back at her as he opened the door.
"Who could have known? Who would have thought? That's about all one can say." s The Venerable had received a parcel of books from London, and, after looking through them by the light of his lamp, he arranged them in that particular corner of his bookshelf where he kept volumes that might be called acquaintances, but were not yet friends. It occurred to him to think that he would keep a very particular niche for Lance's books, and especially for the first-born, "Rust." He stood with his white head slightly on one side, in a mood of abstraction, until the rubbing of the cat against his legs recalled him to other responsibilities.
He bent down to caress Selina and, opening the door, watched the black shape of her flit out into the darkness. The Castle Craven tower clock boomed nine. A faint drizzle was falling, and the October night had a soft and almost expectant sadness. The stars and the moon were washed out, and somewhere a leaky gutter dripped rythmically in the wet silence.
Old Pybus, having breathed in the damp savour of the autumn night, was about to close the door when he heard footsteps crossing the cobbles of the Saracen yard. They came quickly down the broad passage leading to the cottage and the castle field. Old Pybus's white eyebrows expressed a
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surprised alertness. He had been thinking of Lance, and surely these footsteps/b2/!
A figure shaped itself in the drizzling gloom.
"Grandpater."
"My dear!"
And then old Pybus saw his grandson's face, lit by the lamplight through the doorway. It seemed to come out of the night like the face of one suddenly and strangely sick. It was the face of the unexpected, abrupt and disturbing.
The Venerable reached for the suit-case.
"You're ill, my dear."
But Lance retained his hold of the suit-case. He did not look into his grandfather's face. He seemed to flinch from the blue eyes; he kept his head down.
"No, I'm all right. But—I've been knocked out/b2/"
"What's happened, my dear?"
"I'll tell you in a minute. I'm rather done."
There was a strange, intimate, yet awkward silence between them while Old Pybus closed the door with one hand and held Lance's arm with the other. His blue eyes saw things quickly, for Lance was in the light now, looking strangely thin, and pinched about the nostrils.
"Sit down, child."
He saw Lance lower the suit-case to the floor and sit down in one of the Windsor chairs. It was done with a kind of passivity, as though the physical had been over-simulated and exhausted by the mental. Lance had burnt himself out.
His grandfather went straight to the little brown cupboard beside the fire-place.
"Had anything to eat lately?"
"No—not since/b2/"
"Put your head down, my dear. Here—drink this. I'll get you some supper."
The glass went to Lance's lips, and as he raised his head to swallow the brandy his eyes had a smudged and vacant look.
"I walked up the hill rather fast. Be all right in a minute. I had to come to you, grandpater."
Inwardly old Pybus was seething, but he pottered off with outward calmness into the kitchen and, feeling for the box of matches in his right-hand pocket, lit a candle that was on the dresser. What had happened? Why had Lance torn the heart out of himself in walking up Castle Craven hill? The Vener-
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able, with a kind of stoical deliberation, opened the kitchen cupboard, and began to lay his hands on what was available, cheese, butter, a couple of eggs, half a loaf of bread.
Suddenly he heard his grandson's voice.
"Grandpater."
"Hallo."
"The book's gone west—my book."
Old Pybus stood still with the milk jug in his hand. It occurred to him to think how often he and Lance had talked to each other through that doorway.
"Do you mean that Richmond has refused it?"
"No—it's been burnt—type and manuscript—every page."
The Venerable put the milk jug down upon the kitchen table, for his hand was trembling a little.
"Burnt! Good God, my dear/b2/! Who?"
"I'll tell you. I've been in a kind of hell these last few hours, grandpater. A girl burnt it."
"A girl? By mistake?"
"No, on purpose. You see, we had had an affair—and I was the first to see—how futile. I'll try and tell you about it sometime. But she got into my room while I was out and made a bonfire—of my book."
There was anguish in his voice, a protest against the thing that had happened.
"Nine months' work. She might have done anything but that. A book's like a child; you've had birth pangs—and the joy. She couldn't have understood. Just spite, a kind of jealousy. It's as though I had seen/b2/"
His voice sank into nothingness, and old Pybus, with white eyebrows twitching, picked up one of the eggs and with a sort of restrained fierceness cracked the shell and emptied the con tents into a china bowl.
"It's a damnable thing—a very damnable thing. We have got to get through with it—somehow. You sit still, my dear. I'll make you an omelette. I am rather good at omelettes." s The Venerable's white head was wet with the rain. The choice had been Lance's, the wet turf of the castle field at eleven o'clock on an October night, and the smudged darkness
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drawn about them like a curtain. To and fro, to and fro. And in the great stillness of the stagnant night their voices went on and on like the Brent quoting its endless self in the valley below the beeches.
"I can't face it, grandpater."
"You must, my dear."
They had talked for an hour before these particular words were spoken. They would pause and stand still, and Lance, with the rain on his face, would be conscious of his grandfather's white head, and of the wet and gentle darkness. London seemed very far away, and all that monkey world in which you snatched and tore and swallowed at life in a rage of self gratification.
What a night for old Pybus, a night of exultation and of pain, and of dear and exasperating moments when the beloved child who had fled to him behaved like a little wailing boy. And the telling of the tale! It was blurted out with a jerky vividness, the phrases snatched out of the darkness and made to flare for a moment. His description of Olive! "All legs and lip-stick. It was her mouth that—somehow—made me mad—grandpater/b2/" He talked endlessly about the burning of the book; for a time he could speak of nothing else, having been appalled by the ruthless reaction of her spite. "She might have done anything to me but that." And sometimes old Pybus would hold him fast by the arm, or let him walk a little apart, wavering from side to side, and always varying his rhythm. Youth in pain, youth writhing, youth burning its lips with the sacred wine of suffering.
Yet something had to be smashed, that illusion of self-satisfaction, that young and ruthless egotism. For a while old Pybus let him talk, for in listening he breathed the atmosphere of the whole affair, and in the drizzle of that October night the thing became so clear. Lance had played the animal game and had got himself clawed, though that other young animal had dug her claws into the artist. She had answered ruthlessness with ruthlessness. Lance must have hurt her; it was action and not reaction; few bad things are done out of sheer badness of heart.
"She clawed you, my dear. And why?"
He might be Balaam's ass standing in the path of youth's passionate protestings. He too began to talk gently with a kind of naked tenderness. Let life be naked for the moment. Let
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the precious and bloody marks be seen and understood. Things have a horrible way of averaging themselves out.
"You broke with her, my lad. Breaking may be a blow. Perhaps she didn't see it as you did. She struck back. Oh—I'm not saying it wasn't damnable."
He too was ruthless, the old Roman.
"If you get into a cage, my dear, to play the sex game with naked sex—yes—I know. She clawed the soul of you. What could you expect?"
He wrestled with youth. Youth had to be brought down, made to kneel with humility before man's justice—which might be God's justice. All the old rectitudes, the old wholesome chivalries, the simple tendernesses. Sex—as' a mere mouth! Even he could use the whip.
"You've been clawed, my dear—and if I've rubbed in the salt—it's because/b2/"
Something seemed to break in the wet stillness.
"Grandpater."
"My child."
Old Pybus somehow felt the weight of him, the wetness of him.
"Stand up to it. When a flying-lad crashed in the war, they sent him up again next day—to conquer the sense of crash. To-morrow, yes—there's always a to-morrow."
"You can't repeat a thing."
"Oh, yes you can; you've got to. Meanwhile—old lad—it's nearly twelve o'clock, and your coat's wet through, and I've got to put you to bed. No sheets aired. You'll have to manage between blankets."
"I shan't sleep."
He held Lance firmly.
"You'll try to—anyway. Come along."
Watching the kettle on the fire, before which he had hung Lance's wet coat, and listening to Lance moving in the room above, old Pybus realised how mixed are life's emotions. "God forgive me, but I'm glad." Yes, it was possible to curse and to bless, and to see beyond the tangle of such an affair. He had a stone bottle ready on a chair, and as he poured the hot water into it from the kettle's mouth, he smiled and repeated one of his own apothegms—"There's nothing so damning as being just damned clever." Didn't he know? Oh—surely! He screwed in the stopper, and, after wrapping the bottle in a
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piece of flannel, poured the rest of the hot water into a glass containing three ounces of good whisky and a lump of sugar. He ascended the stairs, first with the hot bottle, and then with the good toddy.
"Hallo, my dear, in bed?"
"Yes."
"Nothing like a night-cap. I'm coming in."
The hot bottle wrapped in flannel was slipped into Lance's bed.
"Good for too much blood to the head. You drink this down, child."
Lance lay and looked up at his grandfather almost as a child looks at its nurse. The man-child in him needed comforting.
"You're too good to me, grandpater. I don't know why."
Old Pybus's face had a mischievous tenderness.
"Oh, you are going to find that out." s The Venerable sat down in front of the fire. The hour was half past twelve, but he did not feel like going to bed. Not he, when the most human and wonderful thing that an old fellow could have wished for had happened.
After all what was a burnt book at five and twenty? Better a burnt book at that age than a charred cleverness at five and forty. For if Lance was destined to write the great stuff that touches the heart of the world—then he—Lance—must have the heart to do it. No use being just damned clever. "Rust" had been a little too damned clever.
Old Pybus filled a pipe.
"Too good to him, am I? Being good to someone other than yourself! How very old and simple. Oh, my child, you needed this wound."
He smiled, and, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, gently poked the fire. His old, wise, fearless face warmed to it. His philosophy of life spread its hands. For old Pybus believed that no great and good thing can come out of life without suffering. Youth must have its blow over the heart. It is good and necessary for youth to be floored, and to get up sick and dizzy, and perhaps with a little whimper of shame.
"Too much for self—too much for self."
He smiled. n -
Would it happen as he wished? He trusted and believed so. Lance would pick himself up, and, with a shake of the head and with that slow smile of his, look life squarely in the eyes. "I have learnt something, grandpater, because I have felt something."
Well, it was time for an old fellow to go to bed, and old Pybus pulled off his slippers, and went softly up the stairs. He paused on the landing to listen.
"Poor old Probyn. The boy came to me. I shall have to see about it—yes—see about it. Full up to the brim—what? Poor old Probyn must be thirsty." s Lance was out somewhere in the country, walking—walking, and seeing the world and life as an autumnal scene, for when youth feels old, nothing can be more solemnly decrepit, and Lance was feeling very old. He was sore and stiff with the shedding of a skin. Life seemed a sad and shabby affair. But he was awake to the burning beauty of the beech woods, and in passing down the "Marions" lane he could remember Mary's brother in his blindness, and say within himself—'Poor devil."
Meanwhile, the Venerable was active and abroad in Castle Craven. He called at the stationer's shop next the bank and made various purchases. He returned to the cottage with a brown paper parcel and a bunch of bronze and white chrysanthemums. He ascended the narrow stairs.
Lance, returning about twelve o'clock, and mounting to his little room under the tiles, found his table set by the window with ink and a pile of unruled foolscap, and in one corner a vase of flowers. He crossed the room and stood by the table; he picked up the pen that was laid ready and saw that the particular nib he used had been provided.
And suddenly his eyes grew hot. He found himself at the top of the narrow stairs, and listening to his grandfather's footsteps in the room below. He was conscious of turbulent and swift emotion, a rush of something that was creative and generous and splendid.
"Grandpater/b2/"
"Hallo."
"I—I've found—that table. I'll start work—to-morrow." n -
Old Pybus came to the foot of the stairs.
"No need to worry, my dear. You'll do it again and you' do it better. Oh, yes—you will. I have got enough for both of us."
He saw Lance's face looking down.
"You mean—I can stay here, till/b2/?"
"Of course. It's an idea—isn't is? Write and tell Richmond what's happened, and that you'll have a new "Rust" to show him in six months."
"Grandpater/b2/"
Old Pybus's cup of life was brimming over.
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/ch/
Thus, so far as Lance was concerned, Parham Crescent ceased to be Parham Crescent, but the problem of Windover remained. Lance could take from the Venerable that which he could not take from his own father. Mrs. Carver was paid, and Lance's belongings were packed and sent down to Castle Craven, and Mrs. Carver, deprecating and scared as ever, had wanted to know what Lance's address would be.
"In case of letters, sir."
"Forward them to Windover."
"I'd like to say again, sir—that I shall never forgive myself—somehow—for letting that young wretch. She's left the Crescent, sir."
"It wasn't your fault, Mrs. Carver. One doesn't expect such things to happen."
"Aren't you going to do anything about it—sir, prosecute her?"
"No, nothing."
But the problem of Windover remained, in spite of a fortnight's furious and triumphant work upon the new "Rust," and comings and goings up those narrow stairs, and the applauding blue eyes of his grandfather and a letter from John Richmond that was like the stretching of a big and generous hand.
"If you can rewrite that book and make a better book of it—you will be a great man, my lad. Go to it."
Yes, what of Windover, and this long concealed and singular comradeship? Lance did sit down and write a brief and rather casual letter to his father, in which he said that he had gone down into the country to stay with a friend, and he had contrived to get the letter posted in London so that the Castle Craven post-mark should not appear.
Sir Probyn was posed. Why this secrecy? And nothing was said about the book and of Richmond's yea or nay. Probyn,
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with spectacles on nose—the monocle was less in evidence—sat long over that letter and was reproached by it. His son's silences were becoming more and more a matter of reproach; that they had never understood each other was no reason for the continuation of a misunderstanding which disturbed the elder man more and more. Probyn had mellowed. He was beginning to regard things as things and not as mere possessions.
He sneaked up to town and called at No. 17 Parham Crescent. Mrs. Carver had on her scared and wincing face. Oh, yes, Mr. Pybus had left; she had had orders to send letters to Windover; and didn't Sir Probyn know?
Probyn squinted. He was feeling just a little humiliated even in the presence of this deprecating little person.
"He told me he had gone into the country, but he gave me no address."
Mrs. Carver blinked.
"Must be only temporary, sir. But didn't Mr. Pybus tell you about his book?"
"No. What about the book?"
"Then—I don't think it's any business of mine, sir. I expect you'll hear."
More mystery, more equivocations! Probyn could not bring himself to cross-question the lady; but to be cut off in this way, to be left in the dark feeling rather like a superfluous old dotard! He went back to Windover, and as his car carried him up the avenue of beeches under the flaming foliage, he felt towards Windover as he had never felt before, as to a house that was pitying and gracious and protective. He was conscious of its beauty. Also he was conscious of a sense of emptiness and of smarting bewilderment. How much had he carried in his head all these years, too much in his head, perhaps, and too little in his heart?
But there was Doll to be considered. Should he tell his wife anything, and, if so, how much? After all, was he not exaggerating the significance of Lance's silence? The boy had given Windover as his address, but as yet no letters for Lance had come to Windover. Probyn decided to say nothing. He was worried about poor old Doll; in his good-nature he refrained from passing on other worries to her.
But in front of old Pybus's fire, while smoking their pipes after supper, Windover was approached, for the approach to
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Windover was inevitable. The Venerable could consider the magnanimous gesture, for he was watching his beloved child picking himself up after being given a pair of blooded knees; and perhaps those late October days were the happiest days of old Pybus's life. Somehow he had felt himself sharing in Lance's act of courage. He understood it as few men would have understood it. The rewriting of "Rust" was an act of courage, the going up to recover and to repeat that which had been written and lost; to make the second leap, for the creative spirit is impatient of repetition.
"Read that, grandpater."
And he had been able to say to Lance—"Great stuff, my dear. There's something in this second edition that wasn't in the other."
"You're not humbugging?"
"I'm not."
For with strange suddenness a something had come into Lance's work which had not been there before, a sympathy, the beginnings of a more complete tenderness, a little tremor that was half-tears, half-laughter. It had—perhaps—less veneer, less of the polished alabaster. It was more raw and more human.
As to Windover, it was the Venerable who made the first approach.
"They ought to know, my dear. Now—that life has become a rather serious business. I'm feeling/b2/"
Lance looked at his grandfather across the light of the fire.
"How?"
"Just a little guilty."
"You?"
"Well—yes. Now who's to tell them, you or I?"
Lance, with his pipe between folded hands, and his elbows on his knees, looked steadily at the flames.
"Just when I'm right on the top of the wave. And a pensioner, grandpater! I was so damned touchy."
"No need to feel touchy, my dear. But somehow I think the responsibility's mine."
"Why should it be?"
"The beau geste, my dear."
"Yes—that."
"And something more."
Their eyes met, their eyes that were so alike. n -
"I've been rather a selfish young devil."
"Words of wisdom, child; but a selfish old devil is worse than a young one." s It was with Lance's knowledge that the Venerable packed a bag and, assuming to himself a two days' holiday, set out on that great adventure. For a great adventure it was, and as singular as any in which Sancho Panza shared. Old Pybus left the train at Cheam station. A Ford taxi, with windows rattling and mudguards flapping like broken wings, carried him to Windover, and up that soaring and splendid avenue. Old Pybus, sitting well forward on his seat, saw most things that were to be seen, the afternoon sunlight aslant through the autumn trees, the rolling grassland of Probyn's park, the ornamental water and the swans, the soft red stateliness of the old house. So this was Probyn's house, the home of the city father, the sonless fellow who had made a fortune in wool!
The Venerable got out of the taxi, leaving his bag inside it. He proposed to spend the night at the Golden Harp at Cheam.
"Better wait a minute."
The man-servant who came to the door, and who had instructions to discourage the too many penurious persons who came to tout for subscriptions or to sell books, eyed old Pybus and not knowing him from Adam, waited for the usual question.
"Is Sir Probyn Pybus in?"
All of them asked that question and, if the knight was not at home, they inquired for his lady.
"Any appointment?"
The Venerable had a letter ready.
"No. Take that in to your master. I'll wait here."
The letter was taken in, and old Pybus stood with his back to the door, and looked across the terrace and the gardens to the burning beech woods, and thought of Lance at work in that little upper room. The pomp of life! Certainly Probyn had provided himself with beauty, purchased it, in fact, at that happy moment when the previous possessors of it had been eliminated by the revenue officials. And how would Probyn receive that letter, and the little old fellow who had come to tilt at Windover instead of at Windmills? The Venerable could picture Probyn screwing that monocle into his eye,
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and squinting at that letter, that very simple letter. Poor old Probyn! He had a very fine property here, and a son who at the moment asked for nothing but to be shabby and quiet while the urge of creation was upon him. For your artist is the eternal child; he will—if he is healthy—prefer to play with the toys of his own creation to having all Gamage's unloaded at his feet.
The servant returned, to find the Venerable surveying the landscape as though it was his for the looking at, and the taximan smoking a cigarette.
"Sir Probyn will see you, sir."
Old Pybus faced about with a curious smile.
When the man-servant opened the door of the library, old Pybus saw his elder son standing at the French window with his back to the room, a long black silhouette against the gold of an old catalpa which grew on the lower lawn. The door was open, and Probyn must have known that it was open—but he began his confrontation of that awkward occasion with a flat and secret back. It had come upon him very suddenly. Two minutes ago he had been sitting at his desk reading the short and uncompromising letter that had made him remember the blue stare of his father's eyes.
"The gentleman, sir."
Old Pybus walked in, and the man closed the door, and Probyn, as though his shoes were glued to the parquet and the movement cost him no inconsiderable effort, resolved to face his father. He bent slightly, and stiffly at the hips. Old Pybus was a formidable deputation.
"Very surprising. But—I'm glad."
The Venerable, standing very still in the middle of the room and observing his son's face, replied with a movement of the ead.
"Astonishing to both of us—no doubt. I came from Cheam. I'm staying the night there. My taxi's waiting."
Probyn responded with a wooden movement of the right arm.
"Sit down—won't you?"
"Thanks."
"Care for a cigar?"
"Not in the middle of the afternoon, and not at my age. Fine place—this—of yours, Probyn."
"Yes; nice old place. Still at Castle Craven?" n -
"Yes; still at Castle Craven."
And Probyn looked at his father, and went to pick up the letter that lay on the desk. His movements were slow and heavy, as though the workings of his consciousness were weighted and delayed—and most uncomfortably so—by that other preserice. What was its significance? What the devil did the old boy want? And yet Probyn was aware of a curious sort of throb.
"You said—here—that you had something to tell me."
Almost he had said "Father," and old Pybus, sitting erect in one of the deep chairs and looking rather like a waiting eagle, blinked his eyes momentarily.
"Yes—that's so. About Lance."
Probyn's head seemed to give a jerk.
"Lance? But/b2/"
"Exactly. Keeping a secret too long, Probyn, may sometimes come to smell like a secret sin. Perhaps you won't understand that, perhaps you will. Do you know where Lance is?"
Probyn seemed to draw his breath and hold it.
"No. In the country somewhere. But—what/b2/?"
"Well, I'm here to tell you that he is with me."
"At Cheam?"
"No; Castle Craven—living with me. The boy found me out nearly five years ago," and then he added in a very gentle voice: "He's rather a fine lad, Probyn, finer—perhaps—in his way—than either you or I. You have got to take it—as it is."
Probyn appeared to compel himself to walk to the fire and to stand there with a pretence of warming his hands.
"Don't quite take you. Do you mean that you and the boy/b2/?"
"Four or five years ago, Probyn—if you remember."
Probyn did remember. His face looked hot.
"And after that?"
"Lance turned up one day. He used to drive over; he had found out who I was. I did not know him for my grandson, and he kept his secret for a while. Since—then/b2/"
"I see."
"No—you don't see—yet, Probyn. It's not quite so easy. You and I have something to forgive each other—if we have any sense left in us. You see—in a way—I understood the lad." n -
Probyn's face seemed to be growing redder. When he spoke his voice had a thickness as though he had developed a sudden cold in the head. The stoop of his shoulders was awkward.
"Are you the friend in the country?"
"I suppose so."
"For years he has been going down to see you?"
"About once a month."
"Suppose you thought—that—you were getting back at me—through the boy."
Old Pybus stood up.
"No; as a matter of fact I didn't. It just happened that way. The boy came to me; he wanted to come. Somehow we talked the same language."
"You backed him against me."
"No. If you see it—as I see it, Probyn, it is history repeating itself; fathers and sons, fathers and sons. I made rather a mess of being a father."
Watching his son's back the Venerable was moved to feel that Probyn had sore shoulders.
"I think—on the whole—you did much better than I did, my lad. Life's a queer business. Youth has to blaze its trail. I want to say that I wasn't glad. If it had been Conrad
"You say you have got him with you now?"
"He came to me. I'll tell you why, and just why he is going to be with me for six months."
Old Pybus had refused a cigar, but he did bring out one of his old pipes and fill and smoke it. He stood by the window puffing steadily, and looking out over the garden and the park, while Probyn remained by the fire, leaning one elbow on the oak shelf. He had a very tired look; his eyes watched the fire. For he was listening to the very human story of his son and his son's book and a woman, and seeing the message beneath, a palimpsest, the mystic inwardness and meaning of it all. For Lance, when life had dealt him that first wound, had gone to the old man—his grandfather, had fled to him to be comforted and healed and to have his feet planted once more upon the upward and creative path. The father was aware of a dull sense of humiliation and of failure. The thing twinged in him.
"Supposing you were in my place?"
Old Pybus appeared to consider that question. n -
"Suppose I was, Probyn, if a litle differendy. Neither you nor I appear to have understood our sons. Isn't that common ground? Can't we meet on it? If Lance has children, I don't suppose I shall see them, but you will. Meanwhile/b2/"
His pipe had gone out and he relit it.
"Let Lance alone. Let him alone—and he'll come back. I can see him on the way to it. If only people would not clutch. He's as proud as hell. He wants to fight his own fight. So did you. Let him alone, Probyn. He's learning—learning fast."
And suddenly he crossed over and stood near his son.
"I'm only a finger-post, or an old fellow who is keeping a quiet corner for him while he fights it out with himself. He's the most loveable creature. Be wiser than I was. Don't meddle. He'll come over to see you/b2/"
He laid a hand on his son's arm.
"I'm a very old man, and you are not so young as you were. We can afford to be a little big. That's all I have to say." On the night when the Venerable was sleeping at Cheam, Lance had drawn the curtains across the window of his upper room, and lit the lamp. He was in the mood for work; he had been working well all day, and the urge was still on him. He could not say why or how. All that he could say was that he was seeing things very clearly, and seeing life with more depth to it, as though the particular pool into which he gazed wis clearer than it had been. The new "Rust" was coming to him differently, it had more volume; and already he was realising that in the earlier edition he had missed his opportunities. Previously the characters had been scored in like clever caricatures in carbon, flat figures; but now they seemed to separate themselves from the surface of the paper. He felt himself all round them. They were more understandable, more human, lic had been working for twenty minutes when something occurred to disturb him. There was an impatient lifting of the head. The hand that held the pen rested tentatively on the edge of the table.
"Let them knock."
The stillness of the cottage seemed to resent the interruption
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as much as he did. It closed over the sound and smoothed itself out like water. The pen poised itself over the paper.
The knocking was repeated.
"Damn!"
He pushed his chair back. The picture that had been spread before his inward eyes had furled itself up, and he knew by experience that it might not unfurl itself again that night. Balked in your leap you had to crouch and steady yourself for the second effort. And then it occurred to him that he had locked the cottage door, and that the Venerable might have returned unexpectedly from Windover.
He got up and opened the bedroom door. The stairs and the lower part of the cottage were in darkness, but at the foot of the stairs a candlestick was always kept on a little bracket, and Lance lit this candle. It was a still and windless night, and when he unlocked and opened the cottage door, the flame of the candle swayed slightly, but gave out its full light.
He saw the whiteness of a face, and the dark outline of a figure, and the unexpectedness of both made him mute for the moment. He just stood there holding the candle.
It was she who spoke.
"I wanted to see—Mr. Pybus."
Her voice and its quality were as unexpected as her presence. There was something about it that moved him to feel the presence of her as something mysterious and strange and emotional. He thought of her most curiously as a bird blown against a window, and crouching close to it. That was to say—it was the spirit of her, the personal—intimate—feminine essence of her.
"on sorry. My grandfather's away—to-night."
-
He raised the candle. The movement was unconscious, prompted no doubt by the desire that was in him, the desire to see her face more clearly. He saw her eyes. They appeared to be gazing straight at the flame; the pupils were dilated—which should not have been so. The light seemed to blur itself on the dark and swimming circles. And those widely open eyes of hers affected him most curiously. He felt that never before had he looked into such eyes, nor in the same way, nor seen in any human eyes such a strangeness of an inarticulate and stricken something.
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"I'm sorry. Can I/b2/?"
He lowered the candle. She stood very still, but he had a sudden fear that she was going away, that she would melt abruptly into the darkness, and there was that in him which did not want her to go. At least—not yet. He moved back slightly into the room.
"Will you come in a moment? I'll light the lamp."
Still looking towards the candle flame and not at his face, she answered him with the same dull and inward voice.
"Please don't bother. It's not worth while. But if I might sit down for a minute."
He made way. He half-closed the door after her, and placing the candlestick on the table, glanced at the fire.
"I'm afraid—it's nearly out."
Having entered the room, she remained standing by the table, giving him a sort of impression that she was incapable of further movement. It was not that she was embarrassed. He would have said that she was almost unconcious of his presence, and that he was without any significance for her, and yet he did not resent her attitude. In some curious way he felt that he understood it as he understood the people in his book; but she was alive and capable of making him feel naïvely shy and full of an exquisite and sudden muteness. He wanted her to come out of that strange, staring stupor and speak to him—to tell him
"Won't you try this chair? My grandfather will be back to-morrow if I can take any message."
She looked at the Venerable's arm-chair as though it was the first thing of its kind she had seen, and then sank into it with a kind of gliding movement.
"Thank you. I'm sorry he's not here. No—perhaps to-morrow."
She sat there, straight and unrelaxed, staring at the remnants of a fire—and suddenly she shivered. He had left the door half-open and yet that little shiver of hers was more spiritual than physical.
"Sorry. Silly of me."
He went and closed the door and, turning to look at her, was confronted by the unknown woman in her, the mystery of her. She was sitting there perfectly motionless, and the very stillness of her had mystery. That she was feeling sick and dumb with some inward torture he was sure. Though
"Google ne ee ps ee st/b2/"
the room was so still he could feel a kind of stifled flutter of wings. "Nothing that I can do?"
He watched her intently, almost appealingly.
"Nothing. I wanted to ask your grandfather/b2/"
"Yes, I see. Would you care to write a letter?"
She put a hand to her forehead.
"A letter. I might. No. Perhaps you will tell him."
"Yes."
"That I should like to see him—soon."
"I'll tell him directly he comes back."
"Thank you."
He did not sit down in her presence, but lit the lamp, stand~ing on one side of the fire-place and leaning against the mantelshelf, watched her stealthily. Her face had the charm of irregularity, as though each feature had its own individual motive, a dark irregularity, with the eyes set wide, and the nose short and broad, and the mouth sensuous and expressive. Ordinarily he would have called it a mischievous face, full of the mystery of elusive moods. But now/b2/She had made him forget his work; he was more conscious of her than he was of himself. He stood there wondering.
"Wonderful old man—my grandfather."
She raised her head quickly; for the first time she appeared to look at him as though she saw him as Lance the man.
"Yes. There are some people—very rare/b2/"
"A kind of sage."
She reflected.
"He has a strange effect. Like some books. Do you every find/b2/?"
"I have done."
"There are some books, Hudson—when he writes about birds—and moors, and woods, or Tagore's prose, which makes one feel—a kind of infinite calmness—something beautifully impersonal, the wind in the trees, or bees among the flowers. What is it?"
He was smiling down at her, but he was not conscious of his smile or of its significance.
"The awareness of mystery. The Venerable is a mystic."
"You call him the Venerable?"
"Yes."
"He is. He's/b2/"
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And suddenly she rose with one quick movement, and glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece, allowed herself to look at him momentarily with a quiet fulness of the eyes.
"I must be going. You'll tell him."
He did not answer her for a moment. Something had happened. He closed his eyes for a second, and looked at her again, and then went to open the door.
"I'll tell him. I wish I could have been of use."
She went out like a woman passing up towards the altar of a church.
"Good night."
"Good night."
He stood at the door, and the darkness seemed to close about her like a cloak. But for him that was not the end of the night; he was thinking suddenly of beginnings, not of endings. Deliberately he watched the hand of the clock mark out five minutes. He turned out the lamp, and locking the cottage door behind him, went after her.
But not to overtake her, only to shadow. He had had that instant impression of her as of a woman who was not to be followed with a light curiosity, and as he passed down through Castle Craven and out into the dark country she made the night mysterious for him. Amazing reality, but he did not question it. He had had a glimpse of her crossing the Brent bridge, under the lamp on the bridge's crown, and after that he went with a swift carefulness, ears and eyes alert.
But just why was he following her? Because he wanted to? Yes, in a way, for he belonged to a generation which follows the light of its own torch—but his wanting was different from what it would have been six months ago, for she was different. Surely! She did not belong to the leg and the lipstick brigade. Good God, no! And in him there was almost the exultation of silent laughter, but not the laughter that the unmystical understand. It was part of a sudden tremor—lyrical, tender.
How the clouds smoked over the thin moon! Had he indeed damned her—the unknown—for knocking on the Venerable's door? But what was her tragedy? Yes, he called it a tragedy to himself as he followed between the dim hedges.
-
Old Pybus gor keeping to the grass or the edge of the path. Those eyes of hers, and their look of desperate emptiness when he had told her. He could hear her footsteps now and again, and realised that she was walking in the road, and he wondered why, for every little act of hers had become significant and absorbing.
The lane up to "Marions" showed as a grey gap in the southern hedge, and he paused here a moment, and then went on in time to hear the soft jarring of the gate as she closed it. He found himself standing outside the gate looking at a lighted window whose brown blind was criss-crossed by the branches of a young fruit tree—and suddenly the light went out, and everything was dark.
How undramatic, and how quiet! That was his feeling for the moment, though he would come to know that the poignant breaths of life are drawn very quietly. A hand pulls down a blind, or turns out a light, and there is silence.
He stood there for a while, very conscious of the little house's silence, and of a sense of stillness within himself, and presently he saw an upper window lit up, and the momentary flicker of a shadow upon the blind. Her window. And what was she thinking and feeling, and what was the expression of her eyes? And what was it that troubled her so desperately—that poor blind devil of a brother?
He was still there when that other window grew dark, and with a little feeling of wonder at himself he turned back towards Castle Craven.
-
/ch/
Tue Venerable, wearing a serenity that was like the laurel wreath of an emperor, climbed Castle Craven hill, carrying his bag and the "Pax Romana."
"It is peace, my child."
He sat down in his own arm-chair and in front of his own fire, and Lance listened to him with his mind full of other matters, while hiding his impatience, for Windover seemed far away, and "Marions" so very near. Lance's consciousness was full of Mary Merris and her message, though his father held the stage.
"We shook hands. Things are to go as they are. I'm very glad, my dear."
Looking up into Lance's face he was a little puzzled by its waiting seriousness, as though its attention was focused upon a point beyond the rendezvous of sires and grandsires.
"I made a promise for you."
"Yes."
"That you would go and see them regularly."
"Of course."
His glance was fixed on the crown of his grandfather's white head.
"I think someone wants you even more than I do. Mary was here last night."
Old Pybus's blue eyes cocked themselves momentarily under their white eyebrows. Mary indeed! It was not Lance's calling of her "Mary," but the manner of Lance's doing of it, that something in the voice which made the Venerable take one long leap from Windover to "Marions." He said: "Give me a spill, my dear, I'll smoke," and spent the next thirty seconds in filling a pipe and lighting it. Youth and its problems! His two young things! And Lance was calling her Mary.
"Last night, was it?"
He felt rather than saw Lance go to the window, and stand there.
-
"I was working. Someone knocked. I thought it might be you. She wanted you."
"Did she say/b2/?"
The little room seemed tense with Lance's self-consciousness.
"No. I asked her in. She sat in your chair for five minutes. Grandfather, I want you to tell me—if you can tell me."
Old Pybus bit hard on the stem of his pipe.
"In trouble—was she?"
There was a pause, and a pause between these two could be eloquent.
"She looked as though/b2/"
"Just how, my dear?"
"Difficult to describe. At the end of herself. At first she didn't seem to see me. It made me feel/b2/. So, you don't think you can tell me?"
Old Pybus bent forward towards the fire.
"If you saw her—like that—I might."
"I saw her—like something I have never seen before. She wants you, grandpater—now."
"I'll go. They'll have to do without me till to-morrow. Care to walk with me?"
"As far as her gate."
"No farther?"
He was aware of Lance as a figure that moved.
"No right to go farther—have I? All right; I'll ask no more questions. It's not mere damned curiosity."
"It couldn't be, my dear."
They went down by way of the Brent under the flutter of falling beech leaves, and across the valley the Woolshot woods were domes of gold and of bronze. The valley was a great, green trough between these autumn splendours, and on the crown of the bridge the Venerable paused to gaze and to remember. For in remembering we realise both the past and the present, and with Lance beside him leaning against the grey parapet he was conscious of the immanence of youth and its urgencies. What may seem an insoluble problem to the old may appear as a destined adventure to the young, for some problems give way to an inspired violence and to passion. And the Venerable was thinking: "Most of my river has run under the bridge—but his is in full flood. What will be—will be."
Perhaps he was a little tired; he walked more slowly than
-
usual, and Lance noticed it. To him the Venerable would never be a troublesome old fellow.
"We ought to have had tea, grandpater."
"Not a bit of it, dear. She'll give me tea. But you?"
"I can wait in the lane. She'll want to talk to you."
"It will be tea for all of us—before we go."
They turned into the Woolshot lane, and here too the leaves were falling, trickling down through the hedgerows. The bracken, turning gold, laced itself amid the stems and the shaggy branches of thorn and oak and maple. The brambles were loops of scarlet and maroon. Here and there a furze bush or a holly were darkly green for contrast.
Lance opened the white gate for old Pybus.
"I'll hang about here."
And watching the Venerable passing up the brick path to the porch, he felt rather like a dog left leashed to the gatepost. He was outside the affair, and wanting to be in the midst of it, and yet he was nearer to his crisis than he knew. Having nothing else to do Lance walked up and down the lane, but when he heard their two voices in the orchard he went farther up towards Woolshot so that he could not accuse himself of eavesdropping. But what were they saying to each other—these two/b2/? He turned where the lane flung a curve, and, standing on a bank where two or three yards of chestnut fencing guarded a weak place in the hedge, he found that he could look down into Mary's secret orchard. The leaves had thinned, and between two rows of apple trees he could see Mary and the Venerable walking. They went to and fro together over the rough grass, the little dark, solid figure of his grandfather, and the slighter and taller figure of the girl. She was wearing a tawny-coloured woollen coat which seemed to match the yellow in the apple trees. And it occurred to him to think that the Venerable's best black boots were rather too thin for stodging about in that rank, wet
"ass. But presently they disappeared from view.
"Do you mind if I sit, my dear?"
"There, you see how horribly self-absorbed one becomes." They had diverged to an old, green bench under the hedge,
-
and were screened by an apple tree, and the Venerable bent down to turn up the bottoms of his wet trousers.
"Something has got to be done about this."
She gave a little tragic laugh.
"Oh, yes, I'll put you in front of the fire and find you a pair of slippers."
His smile had a gentle drollness.
"I wasn't referring to—these. You will have to break this vicious circle. The thing's killing you—the real essential you."
"But what can I do?"
"Come down off your cross."
Sitting there she let her shoulders droop, and her eyes had the look of not focusing any definite object.
"I'm so tired. And sometimes when one is tired one gets so horribly impatient. I have thought of all sorts of things. Of course—there is always the obvious solution. One can give in."
He looked startled.
"My dear," he said, "my dear!"
"You're shocked."
"Not shocked. Only—for you—the thing's impossible somehow, that sort of giving in, a throwing of yourself to the beasts. Let's think."
She let her hands lie on her knees, and her thinking became a kind of toneless monologue.
"It's the consciousness of failure—that—somehow—drives me on. Day after day. I tried everything. I've tried to think myself into his place, and to understand what the eternal blackness means, the utter boredom of it. But when people—are—poisoned—you know, and nothing that you can do. He—poisoned poor Gil. It seemed to him nothing but a sort of huge—animal jest—the retort physical—because! But would you believe such beastliness possible, and the way he still gloats at me over it. I've felt like a creature in a cage; one gets bewildered, mesmerised by the way things happen. There seems to be a kind of horrible inevitableness about them all. You can't cry out or make an effort. You find yourself just standing and staring and trembling. When he comes down here now I feel as though some big, strong animal were looking at me gloatingly, knowing that I was becoming paralysed/b2/"
She ceased, and old Pybus's white brows twitched.
-
"He still comes?"
"Nearly every day. It seems so absurd and monstrous, doesn't it? As though I couldn't put an end/b2/"
"You are too tired."
"Yes, too tired—somehow—to make any effort. Of course one could appeal to people, but would they believe?"
"The doctor and the lawyers? Rather useless people—sometimes—my dear. Throw up your lease—and get out. Pack the boy into some—'Home.' Isn't that obvious?"
Obvious it was, but somehow not to her. She was in that queer, overstrung state when there are a dozen emotional protests against the obvious. It was as though she clung blindly to her cross, as some women will. She was still possessed by an overmastering and elemental pity. She fought against failure.
"But this can't go on, Mary."
"Some things do."
"But this thing can't and mustn't. It's a little hell in an age of reason, though reason doesn't carry us very far sometimes. I've got to think—if you're past thinking."
She stood up suddenly.
"Your poor wet feet! Let's go in. A good fire—and some tea. And—your grandson?"
"I'll call him in," said old Pybus. So Lance was called in and, entering that house for the first time, found the Venerable sitting in front of Mary's fire and taking off his wet boots. "Orders, my dear. She has gone to get us tea."
It was a long, low room with two windows, and a larger room than you would have expected to find in so small a house, its floorboards stained and covered with rugs, and drawn up in front of the fire a large, old sofa upholstered in faded red damask. The Venerable was sitting on the sofa, but Lance went across to one of the windows, and looking out into the garden, was aware of its sad untidiness, though someone had made an attempt to tie up a row of chrysanthemums.
There were chrysanthemums, too, in a big brown jar on the table, and mingling with the scent of them was a perfume of herbs. A big bundle of lavender hung from a beam, and the
-
scent of it became associated in Lance's mind with the girl who was away there in the kitchen. He turned and looked at his grandfather who was toasting a pair of grey socks in front of the fire. The Venerable had an air of preoccupation.
There were footsteps, and the man in Lance grew tense and vibrant. She came in carrying a tray, and he looked at her and she at him. It seemed just a look—and no more.
"Can I do anything?"
He made a movement as though to take the tray from her.
"Oh—I can manage, thank you. We shall have to boil the kettle in here."
"Can I get the kettle?"
"The kitchen's down the passage on the right. The black kettle, not the enamelled one. It's full."
He had reached the door, when there came a sound of knocking on the floor of the room above as though someone was rapping with the heel of a boot or with a stick; and an impulse made him pause and glance back. He saw a hand poised holding a white tea-cup; it seemed to hesitate for a second, and then the cup was placed quietly upon its destined saucer. Also he had observed a movement of the Venerable's head, but a moment later old Pybus had resumed his meditations over the fire.
Lance went down the passage and into the kitchen, and as he went he heard these two speaking to each other, but he could not catch what was said.
"He's awake now."
"Better leave him alone—Mary."
"But he may/b2/You would understand—but Lance? Sometimes he's so violent."
"Let Lance hear it—if it has to be."
She stood erect, with an air of breathlessness.
"Have you told him?"
"No."
"I'd rather/b2/"
"Just as you please."
"I'd rather he knew."
When Lance returned with the kettle Mary took it from him, and placing it on the fire, she seated herself on an old velvet tuffet at one end of the brass curb, leaving the sofa to the men. But Lance was still on his feet, with a 'Let me sit on that thing," while she—stretching out her hands to the
-
fire—was not to be shifted. "No, it's my favourite perch, except when I have my feet up, which isn't often." So Lance had to join the Venerable, with his grandfather's grey socked feet to be looked at as well as a woman's profile, and feeling himself suspended between the intimate and brooding silence of the other two. The three of them watched the kettle until a little cloud of vapour showed at the spout and the lid began to chatter.
Mary bent forward, but Lance was before her.
"All right. Let me/b2/"
The handle was hot and he had to use his handkerchief, and while Mary was holding the teapot for him to fill it, the knocking in the room above was repeated with more urgency. The hand holding the teapot made a slight movement, and the pipe of boiling water from the kettle's spout striking momentarily upon the glazed surface of the pot splashed a few hot drops upon her hand.
Lance winced.
"I say—I've scalded you. I'm/b2/"
But she did not flinch.
"Only a drop or two. It was my fault."
"But I have. You ought to/b2/Let me take the thing."
"No, fill it; it's nearly full."
He did as she wished, but when she had placed the teapot on the tray he wanted to see her hand, and when he would not be denied, she showed it to him though there was nothing to be seen. Both their heads were bent and rather close together, and the Venerable on his sofa watched them over a motionless shoulder.
"You ought to put something on it—some cream."
But she wouldn't, though a kind of softness had touched her face. She drew up a chair and sat down, and began to put sugar into the three cups, and then remembered that she did not know whether Lance took sugar. He was hovering; his glance seemed to envelope without touching. Yes, he took sugar. But where was she going to sit? Not on that chair away from the fire while he and the Venerable occupied the sofa. No, it could not be allowed. And she looked up at him for a moment, and eyes held eyes, he bending to her, she with upturned face vaguely questioning and gently grave.
"No, but I/b2/"
She was aware of the sudden smile in his eyes.
-
"Let's appeal to Cesar. Grandfather—who's to sit with you on the sofa."
"Mary," said a voice.
And she rose, and, without looking at him, went to sit on the sofa, but not before she had filled the three cups.
"I'm outvoted."
The Venerable, drawing in his grey socks and tucking them away as though gently repressing two furry little creatures which had presumed too freely upon the rights of the hearthrug, looked up at Lance who had come to the sofa with a cup in either hand.
"Are we counting heads or cups, my dear? And like those altruists—the socialists—are we with noble gestures—voting to ourselves—other people's money?"
Lance just smiled at him.
"I am offering Mary—her rights as a woman, to sit and be served."
"Ah, just so," said old Pybus, "when she has done most of the serving. That's our nice male gesture, but it is better than nothing. And what does Mary say?"
Neither of them looked at her. There are moments when a woman is felt—and not looked at.
"Isn't it the drop of sugar in the cup?"
"Ah," said the Venerable again, "that little piece of sugar, the celestial—something! Without it! My dear, pass me the bread and butter, I'm getting too much like a pontiff." But out in the lane, with the dusk coming down, and the sere foliage of the hedgerows dimly yellow above the grey blue gloom, both Lance and his grandfather fell into a conscious silence, a silence that would be broken deliberately by one of them. And probably it was old Pybus's wish that Lance should break it, which he did, and before they had reached the Castle Craven highroad.
"Was that the brother—upstairs?"
The Venerable, walking with a kind of solid straightness down the middle of the lane, and looking neither to the right hand nor the left, nodded his big head.
"It was."
"Laid up?"
-
"In a manner of speaking."
Lance had no more questions to ask for the moment. His impressions were eating into a black surface like sparks into tinder. That fellow upstairs knocking on the floor, and Mary's flinching, and her remaining below with them in spite of the summons? The various impressions merged, and he was ready with another question.
"What's the matter with him?"
The Venerable answered with one word, and Lance's head seemed to swing up and round.
"That! Good God!—I felt/b2/"
They were on the highroad now, old Pybus on the path, and Lance on the crown of the road, head up, eyes at gaze.
"I'm glad you have told me, grandpater."
His voice had a quick resonance.
"Anything more?"
"Oh, much more, my dear."
"Is there! I should have thought that that was enough. How did it start with him?"
"Boredom, poor lad. But someone else set it alight. It's an extraordinary piece of—sex psychology."
"How?"
"Another man."
"I see. Some stupid sot."
"Not at all. Wilfully."
"Wilfully? But—why?"
Old Pybus stopped dead for a moment, stared at the path, and then walked on.
"So damnable—that you would say—incredible. Yes, almost incredible. Sheer, filthy, sexual spite. And pressure, a kind of brutal, chuckling persuasion."
He was aware of Lance swinging nearer to him across the road.
"What the devil do you mean, grandpater? Not >"
"Just a kind of lust, my dear, which being repulsed—turned to this filthy retort."
"What, with Mary?"
"Yes, with Mary."
Lance stopped as his grandfather had stopped a moment ago.
"Do you mean to tell me, grandpater, that some—some—deliberately set out to turn that poor blind devil into a drunkard—because—Mary/b2/"
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Old Pybus it a do."
"But it's unthinkable, it's too damnable to credit."
"My dear," said the Venerable, "did nothing ever happen to you? A month ago, didn't sex scorch you? Doesn't the beast sometimes breathe in the faces of all of us?"
But for a while Lance was unable to believe it. The thing seemed too monstrous and too ugly to be real. It sounded like the worst sort of melodrama; it was a horrible smudge across the surface of the night. Yet he had only to look at his grandfather's face and the set of those blue eyes to know that the thing was a reality. And when he did realise it, it was with a silence, a feeling of mute, tense fierceness that was like the setting of ice.
"Who is the fellow?"
He was told, and his disgust deepened. He had nothing to say. The Venerable lit the lamp. Lance had left him at the door of the cottage, and he had turned back into the darkness, and old Pybus, after rubbing his chin with the back of his hand, observed that the fire was in extremis. He went for some wood and, kneeling down, busied himself in resuscitating the blaze, poking in pieces of firewood and piling small coal about the young, crackling flames. His face had a silent and deliberate gravity, for the rekindling of the fire was to him mystical and significant, an act which had been sacred and symbolical ever since man had ceased to be a raw-fleshed beast. For a fire suggested the immortality of effort, an eternal cleansing, a warmth in the bosom of life, youth, age renewing itself. He could understand the guarding and renewing of fire upon the altars of old time, and see in it an upward act, the burning flower of mystery. Yes, even this cottage fire had its mystery, and when it was well ablaze, he drew his chair close, and warmed his hands at it. The clock ticked on. And he sat and wondered whether he had lit a blaze in the heart of youth, and if so—whether it would burn with that fine, mystical meaning. He believed that it would; he hoped that it would.
And presently he heard the door open and close. He did not look round or change his attitude, but remained very still in front of the fire. Lance drew up a chair and sat down beside him. They shared the fire and the silence.
-
/ch/
In some of the little London coteries Lance had heard books and the makers of books discussed. "So and so was so subtle," or perhaps the word was "intimate," or some other precious adjective which suited the highbrow pose of the moment. Women seemed to love the word "subtlety," and Lance had known a phase when consciously and cleverly he had tried to be very subtle until the Venerable had let off one of his squibs. "What is this subtlety they talk about?" Nor had Lance been able to convince his grandfather that some forms of subtlety were anything but the self-conscious cultivation of the obscure. "You want people to say, my dear—'Oh, that Pybus fellow—is a deep young devil—damned clever.' "They had argued, and the Venerable had produced W. H. Hudson's "Far Away and Long Ago" and had made Lance read pages 34 to 38, and then had asked him to say whether the picture of death and the child was not completely convincing and wonderful. "Where's your so-called subtlety there? I see nothing but a beautiful naturalness, interpretation—or recording—without affectation." Lance had replied that the child's mind was not the man's, and that the weavings of consciousness became much more intricate; and the Venerable had agreed. "But still there is a naturalness, my dear, a simplicity, more notes—no doubt—in the sound pattern. If you—get—all the notes and in the right order. Things may only seem obscure when we fail to see them clearly. Obviously. Don't be a fog-master."
Old Pybus may have been verging on the prosy, and his preaching of naturalness not wholly in accord with his mysticism, but when the strange, romantic occasion came to Lance he found it compounded of naturalism and mysticism. It had the eternal duality, body of matter and body of soul, physiology or any sort of ology you please and that mystical essential which still eludes all the ologies. Also, it was all so absurdly simple. You felt the urge and you behaved with a
-
kind of inevitableness, but not quite as the behaviourists allow. From the moment of his sitting before the Venerable's fire he seemed to become a most unsubtle and yet sensitive creature, and all that happened to him and in him appeared as natural as the reaction of Hudson the child to the presence and the prospect of death.
When Mary drove her decrepit old two-seater into the Saracen yard the car's decrepitude touched him. That Lance was not there by accident but by design was obvious to both of them, yet without any suggestion of flagrancy. He just happened to be there. He made it appear natural that he should be there. He did not offer to help her in any way, but his challenge was direct.
"May I wander over—some afternoon?"
And she, with a box of eggs in her hands, was supremely wise as to his appeal, though she did not visualise all that lay behind it. She looked at him for a moment with one of those upward and discerning glances, and if she divined a kind of young ruthlessness in him she may have felt that towards some people and things it would be tempered always with the artist's tenderness. He would not be ruthless to a dog or a tree or to one particular woman. His ruthlessness had discernment.
She accepted his naturalness and returned it.
"If you happen to find me rather busy/b2/"
"That's understood. I want to meet your brother."
Again she gave him that upward look. Was he quite sure? Or did he assume that she would understand?
"Yes, come and see him."
She went away upon her affairs, conscious of having divined behind his quiet and unsmiling seriousness a romantic fierceness, nor did she quarrel with the impression. It might be a kind of fierceness that appeals to a woman. It would have the quality of a flash of light. It would cleave the obscure and the ugly. And somehow there came to her in Castle Craven High Street a memory of the young man on the white horse with his thundering troopers behind him. And she consented. She accepted that vision of youth in its panoply and in all its martial passion. It had a primitive rightness.
But when, with an air of serene casualness, youth told age that it was going to "Marions," age foresaw things, or felt very sure that it foresaw them. For it seemed to old Pybus that certain happenings would become inevitable, and he.
-
too, consented. Youth must cut with the sword. In its shining harness there must be at such a season no crack or crevice of humour. It must have the stark, white face that would be laughed at in the pages of Punch; a smile for the gently effete people who have finished, and have little left in them but a clown's half amiable and half-acid chuckle.
"Can I borrow a stick, grandpater?"
The Venerable, who was smoking an after dinner pipe, looked up from the book he happened to be reading.
"I should think so. You'll find 'em behind the kitchen door, such as they are."
Certainly, old Pybus's sticks were without pretensions. There was the old malacca cane without a ferrule, and the cherrywood that had a kink in it, and the plain ash that was still very much ash, and unusually heavy. Lance chose the ash stick, and the Venerable made a note of it.
"You like 'em heavy, my dear."
Lance had nothing to add to the simple act of choosing.
"May have tea over there."
"All right."
He went out and across the castle field, and old Pybus got up to watch him. Lance prodded the grass with the ash stick, and to old Pybus it was not a stick, but a cavalryman's thrusting sword, and for a moment his grandfather felt both anxious and exultant. Age is apt to shrink from violence and to avoid it, for with the falling of the leaf and the passing of the year—the old wise consciousness asks for gentler happenings. But the Venerable was still the old Roman who, in the force of his youth, had sometimes stabbed at life with the sword. He watched his grandson disappear round the angle of the castle's wall, and then resumed his book and his chair by the fire. But he did not read his book. He fell into a stare of thought, and so long did it last with him that he was ten minutes late in posting himself in his usual place in front of the brass gong. Lance opened and closed the gateof "Marions," and, walking up to the porch, stood for half a minute before ringing the bell. The door was open and in the passage hall he saw an old blue cloak and a brown mackintosh of Mary's hanging on the pegs, and a couple of sticks, an umbrella and three
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old golf clubs thrust into a brown drain-pipe. He was very much aware of these things as her things, the properties of her stage. That strip of brown linoleum was trodden by her feet, and no doubt she sometimes polished the round brass card tray on that little oak table.
He was conscious of a stillness that belonged not only to the heavy, grey November day, but to his own self-consciousness. He turned about to look at the garden, seeing the two little lawns grey with moisture and stippled with worm casts and fallen leaves. The brick path needed weeding. A bed of snapdragons still bloomed spasmodically. Beyond the hedges the Brent valley showed as a dim and bluish void, all vague as to detail.
His feeling was that the house must be empty. Looking along the passage he could see the door of the sitting-room ajar, and when he put his hand to the brass bell handle and pulled it, he expected to hear no more than a little clangour somewhere in the distance, a summons that would be unanswered. He heard the straining of the bell wire and the distant tinkling of the bell, and then a voice—sudden and a little querulous.
"Who's that?"
The voice came from the sitting-room, and before Lance had begun to explain himself, it was heard again.
"Is it you! Bob, old man? She's—out somewhere."
Lance stepped into the passage. He felt that he had to make an immediate reply to that unexpected challenge.
"Is Miss Merris in? I've walked over from Castle Craven."
Then followed a little silence as of surprise, but Lance fancied that he could hear a chair pushed back.
"My sister's out somewhere. Who is it?":
"Lance Pybus. Is that Mr. Merris?"
The initiative was his and he took it. He walked up the passage and pushed open the door, to see a man in bagged and creased grey flannel trousers and a blue coat with brass buttons looking towards him and the open door. Merris was sitting in front of the fire, his chair half turned away from it, and in the attitude of a man surprised and about to rise to his feet. His blind face with its drooping eyelids and little black beard had a curious and slumbering uneasiness.
"Forgive me for coming in. You know my grandfather—I think."
-
The man in the chair remained silent and unsure. His thin face was half in the shadow, and it had the sinister elusiveness of a face that is unfriendly and not clearly seen. His attitude was a little furtive, and unwelcoming.
"Old Pybus, the porter at the Saracen?"
"Yes," said Lance quite gently, "Old Pybus the porter. Do you think I shall find your sister—out there?"
Merris's blind eyelids seemed to stare like shuttered windows. He put up a hand and fingered his beard, a strange and half senile gesture, hesitant, almost surreptitious. And Lance 'was conscious both of repulsion and pity. He noticed that the thin hand had a slight tremor.
"Afraid I'm worrying you. I'll go out and try and find your sister."
The lips made a movement in the midst of the black hair, but no sound came, and feeling like a man oppressed by the faint and stuffy smell of a sick room, Lance turned about and escaped into the garden. But no sooner was he out in the open air, and in quest of Mary, than that feeling of disrelish vanished. He did not understand why or how. His impression of the brother as a poor frowsy thing from which his own clean aliveness shrank a little as from an unpleasant and decadent sottishness, did not pass over in any way to the sister. He might and did exclaim—"Poor devil!" but he did not think of the sister as 'Poor Mary. "And somehow his reaction to the brother's tragedy—for tragedy it was—quickened that other impulse until it ceased to be a mere impulse and became a seeing and a feeling and an understanding. He saw the woman in Mary as he had not seen her before. He saw her in a way that he would never forget, so that his seeing of her became one of those associated memories which would never fail to produce in after years a tremor of tenderness.
She was not in the garden, and he tried the orchard with its rank, green grass and alleyways of old trees. Nor was she in the orchard, but through the thinning lacework of one of the hedges he saw her in the little sloping field below the beech woods. And he stood still for a moment, watching her with a quick and sensitive curiosity, and a feeling of strange inevitableness.
But he did not see her merely as a bare-headed girl in a tawny yellow jumper moving about among the chicken
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houses, and shutting up the birds for the night. Already—and almost insensibly—he had come to visualise her with more fullness, much as an older man sees a woman when looking for that which is woman in her and not mere sex. She had courage; she was fastidious; she could loathe a job and yet stick to it, and yet at the same time she possessed that rare flexibility which makes for understanding. And Lance, standing there among the old trees, felt that he knew quite a lot about Mary, and yet that she retained her mystery, an exquisite unexpectedness which never becomes familiar. She was one of those immortals who would retain their wonder at life, just as the Venerable had retained it. You would go on loving that wonder in her, those eyes behind the eyes. You would not regard her as a mere body, and so—in time—cease to regard her—because mere bodies become nothing more than bodies.
Going to the gate in the hedge he passed through it. He wanted to call to her as he felt towards her.
"Mary."
"The naturalness of it slipped out of him. She was about twenty yards away, fastening the gate of one of the wire runs. She turned and faced him, and his claiming of her as Mary. His impression was that she smiled.
He moved forward a few steps and paused.
"I have seen your brother. He told me I might find you out here."
She slipped the key of a padlock into a pocket of her jumper. And from her manner of looking at him he got the impression that she knew that he knew. He was conscious of a feeling of expectancy.
"I have just finished. We'll go in and have tea."
Her voice had a quietness, and as she came down the grass slope towards him, he felt that the Mary in her consented. It was not a self-conscious mechanism that joined him, but the intimate, live, mysterious creature who was flower and fruit and perfume. He stood still, waiting.
The strange thing was that he had nothing to say to her, nor did she look as though she expected him to say anything. They drifted down through the gate and into the orchard, each conscious of the other's consciousness, and mutely and gently accepting it.
But in the porch she paused, and her glance touched his
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face, and he divined in her a little tremor of something, distress or apprehension.
"Do you mind locking the door. I'll go and see to the kettle."
He was startled, but in a moment he understood, and he lingered behind her with a deep look in his eyes. He closed and locked the door, and hanging his hat on a peg, and slipping the ash stick into the brown drain-pipe, he entered the sitting-room.
"I found Mary. She was shutting up the chickens."
The brother's blind eyelids flickered. He moved uneasily in his chair.
"Better put something on the fire, hadn't we?"
"I'll do it. Mary has gone to get tea."
And Lance established himself on the hearthrug close to her blind brother. Lance talked. He realised during the first half minute that it was one of those occasions when you had to talk, for the blind face at the other end of the hearthrug had neither the will nor the wish to help him. It was both vacant and mistrustful. It suggested the face of an eavesdropper. It had a curious and embarrassing stillness.
When Mary came into the room with the tray she looked at both men a little anxiously. She was struck by the contrast of those two profiles as seen against the light of the fire; the one was alive; the other had a sulky deadness. She knew her brother so well by now, his dissemblings, his suspiciousness, his air of listening like a man outside a door. For months they had been playing this horrible and surreptitious game, and if she had not grown to hate him it was because he was so helpless even in his cravings.
Lance turned to her, smiling.
"You've a piano here."
She looked at her brother.
"Gil's."
And then her eyes met Lance's and he understood.
"I say, Merris, do play to us—afterwards."
The eyelids quivered.
"I'm not in the mood. Sorry."
Lance did not look at Mary, but he leaned forward and
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took the kettle from the fire, and held out his other hand for the teapot.
"Let me do it."
She surrendered it silently, and went to the window that looked towards the orchard. The vista of grass and old trees had a dimness, though twilight was not yet. She pulled down the blind, and Lance noticed that act of hers, and seeing her turn towards the other window he was struck by a something in her eyes, a look of apprehension.
"Tea by firelight—is that the idea?"
She answered that she disliked the November twilight, and pulled down the other blind, and he wondered whether she was shutting things out, other possibilities, incursions. He felt sure that it was so and in him that inevitable tenderness towards her seemed to leap and glow. He put the kettle down in the fender, and went to place the brown teapot on the tray. She was standing there now with the tip of her fingers resting on the edge of the table, her face very grave and thoughtful.
"I'll do the waiting, Mary."
Her eyes looked quickly up at him, and then glanced aside at her brother.
"Gil has that little table."
"Right. I'll get it."
During tea Lance tried to draw Merris out by talking to him about music and the tendencies of modern music, for he had a young man's prejudices and enthusiasms, and was ready to confess that Beethoven was to him no more than Czerny's Hundred and One Exercises pompously elaborated. He abominated the eighteenth century school. It was like Pope's poetry, sententious, artificial, insincere. But Merris was still unaccountably suspicious, and seemed to hang those swollen white eyelids of his superciliously in front of the fire. And did Lance include Bach in his condemnations?—and Lance had to allow Bach a rolling solemnity. He tried the moderns, and asked Merris what he thought of Albeniz and such pieces as Cordova, Seguidillas and Cadiz, and Merris was rude.
"Never heard of the chap. Some new pose—I gather."
Lance said that Albeniz had extraordinary colour, a flamboyant and gaillard sumptuousness, but Merris was not interested, and Lance gave it up. He stayed on for half an hour, smoking a pipe with Mary's permission. He had offered Merris
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his pouch, and the fellow had refused it. "Thanks, I'll smoke some of my own stuff presently, if you don't mind." He appeared to make a point of not smoking with Lance, sitting there with an air of sulky patience, and waiting for this chatterer to go.
When his pipe was finished Lance pulled out his watch, and said that he had work to do. He stood over Merris for a moment as though waiting for a hand.
"Good night."
"Good night," and the blind man began to feel for his pipe.
Mary went with him to the porch door, and, closing it after them, wandered down with him to the gate.
"I'm glad you came. You mustn't mind/b2/"
"I'm afraid I bored him."
She was looking into the distance, her hands resting on the "Everything bores him—poor Gil, everything and nothing."
"Doesn't he touch that piano—now?
"No."
"We must get him back to it."
She swung the gate gently to her as he passed out, and turned to linger.
"If one could/b2/"
"May I try, Mary?"
"If you will. He used to extemporise. He had real genius—of a kind."
"I'll try.
And though she did not thank him, he knew somehow that he had more than her thanks.
For a few seconds she listened to his footsteps in the lane, and then went back and locked the door, and with a feeling of self-compulsion re-entered the room. Her brother was leaning forward, holding a piece of flaring paper to the bow] of his pipe, and the glare of it lit up the black and white sullenness of his face. He turned sharply, throwing the burning spill into the fender.
"What's that chap want?"
She stood by the fire, looking down at it and at him.
"To be friends."
"I don't like him. He puts on airs. Talking to me about music. An old hotel porter's grandson."
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Her stillness was the stillness of self-control.
"You must have noticed his voice, Gil. Don't you know the voice—of a man—when you hear it?"
He flared up. Why hadn't she used the word gentleman? Yes, he could recognise the amateur gentleman all right, the half-educated fellow who could talk with vulgar niceness. And who was the chap, anyway? And what did he do? Sponge on his old grandfather?
She turned aside, and began to clear away the tea-things. She stifled a hot resentment. His poor, sottish selfishness hurt her, but she would not allow herself to be hurt. She answered him quietly, and with an air of finality.
"You are quite wrong, Gil. Why shouldn't we have a friend? I have asked Lance to come again."
He muttered something, something that was crassly offensive, but though she looked with sudden hurt contempt at him, she let it pass.
"Very well."
"If he comes here again—I shall go up to my room."
"As you please." The Venerable happened to be in when Lance came back from "Marions" and he saw his grandson return the ash stick to its place behind the kitchen door. Nor was Lance particularly communicative. He sat down in front of the fire for five minutes, but his silence was neither self-conscious nor deliberate; it concealed nothing; it was just a part of his mood. And old Pybus went on reading his book until Lance had found something that had to be said.
"Pretty stiff problem—that brother of hers."
Old Pybus laid his book down on his knees, and for fully half a minute nothing more was said. They sat and watched the fire. Had cross-word puzzles been popular in the cottage you might have concluded that they were hunting some particularly elusive word. But Lance was thinking how words changed their temper, and that the crude application of a word to a situation or a person became inadequate when your vision ceased to be a cocksure stare. Not so very long ago he would have applied the word "swine" to Mary's brother, but when your crude impatience was checked you saw in all creatures of Gadara the presence of a devil, not the old-fashioned.
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anthropomorphic devil, but obsession, an hypertrophied appetite, some pitiful disharmony.
"I tried to talk music to him. Supposing, grandpater, one—got such a chap back to his piano?
The Venerable reflected.
"Yes, and the keeping him there, my dear, with such a gap in the consciousness? I don't know. But it ought to be tried."
Lance's head went up.
"I am going to try, that and other things."
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/ch/
For some days old Pybus was just a little sad. Possibly he felt himself to be a spectator, the old fellow in the chair at his cottage door watching the lusty young things at play. For the moment he had no tale to tell to his children, and one of them went in and out with a face of fierce dreaminess; and yet the Venerable's philosophy was capable of quietism; you sat and watched and waited for your bird to perch, and because of your stillness the thing would happen.
Perhaps, in the Venerable's case it was bound to happen, for the Lance who went to "Marions" and the Lance who came back from it were not one and the same creature, and the Venerable would wonder how matters were between Mary and his grandson, and what they said to each other, and how they looked when they said it. Probably the brother was making things more than difficult, but then a love affair should not be too easy. For in the falling of the leaf and before the last leaf should have fallen, old Pybus felt moved to preach a sermon upon matrimony, though it would begin with "My Children," and end with a blessing. O, old-fashioned fellow, damning marriage as an adventure, and hailing it as a sacrament, the growth of an exquisite comradeship; and seeing in "progress" nothing but a return to a point on the opposite curve of the circle!
Did the Venerable wish to see Lance and Mary consummate that comradeship? Undoubtedly he did, yes, and in spite of the world's tendencies towards adventurous singleness, and that top-heaviness that used to be called the artistic temperament. Artistic fudge! Old Pybus would argue that your creative artist is not a juggler behind the footlights, but a quietist, and the greater the craftsman—the greater the quietist, a man who looks through a window, a housed creature, a thing to be protected and planned for, and encompassed with serenity. Of all men the artist needs a mate, but a very particular mate, and the Venerable—having pondered upon life.
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wanted Lance to marry. He wanted him to marry Mary, for he divined in Mary that particular woman. So, during those November days he went about with an air of sage attentiveness. He had left the core of the problem to youth, for the very passion of youth is a solvent of problems, and though it was November old Pybus felt thunder in the air, emotional thunder, and some time the clap of it would be heard. It would break over the muddled head of that poor blind devil, and over the head of Mary, and over the head of someone else. Were ash sticks carried without a purpose? But if Lance got hurt/b2/?
While Lance, prodding the turf of Mary's field with that self-same stick, and devotedly probing the problem, and finding himself prodding the air as well as the more solid turf, would fall back upon the seemingly obvious protest.
"You can't go on like this—Mary. You can't chuck your life away."
And looking over his head she would reply that—somehow or other—you couldn't drop certain burdens. They were fastened to your shoulders—and you would not be happy if you let the cords be cut, and then sneaked off into the future.
She perplexed him. So quickly had their intimacy ripened that he felt that he could say anything to her—and she to him, but the saying of things can be like throwing a stone into still water. She was still water. She gave him the impression of the inexpressible, of the subtlety of feeling that cannot be rendered into words. He felt resistances that were not calculable. And sometimes when she spoke—and gave him back words after he had pressed words upon her, he was made to think of little drops of blood escaping. She tantalised his increasing tenderness, all that strove for her—and with her.
He would try to fasten her to a promise.
"Look here—if we can't get Gil back to the piano—away from that other thing—will you agree/b2/?"
But she would not agree to anything. She would look both frightened and obstinate. She was being assailed on three sides, and she had her moods of bewilderment. The whole emotional scheme was a little blurred. She had endured for so long that any movement of revolt seemed difficult. She was female, and he male.
Obviously the first and urgent move was his, but when he hinted at it and its necessity, she seemed to flinch.
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"No, not that way. I'd prefer/b2/"
Always he felt himself growing reticent when she flinched, not because he was surrendering his inspiration, but because he hated to see her eyes grow big and troubled. With all her endurance and her courage she was amazingly gentle; she seemed to have a horror of the violently physical.
And he would prevaricate.
"Oh—all right. But that is what ought to be done. You are too gentle—Mary."
"You'd like to call me cowardly."
"Heavens, no. I'm not such a crude beast. But I have my view."
So, for a week or more the affair fluctuated, though Lance's efforts to break down the brother's blind hostility, and to push, lead, or flatter him back to his piano, had little result. It was as though Merris resented Lance's aliveness, his power to see, the very patronage of his coming and going. Caged up in his perpetual darkness Merris's psychic perceptions were unpleasantly acute. He felt in Lance a rival, a male personality impinging upon his own orbit; he was jealous of him, furiously and sullenly jealous. Of course the fellow came to see Mary; he wanted Mary, and all this pretence about pianos and persuasion was humbug, and offensive humbug.
"The chap thinks I'm a fool."
Such was the reaction of the romance upon Merris. He glowered sightlessly upon fortunate, masterful youth; he behaved as though Lance bored him; he would blunder out and grope his way up to his room. And his mental and emotional reactions were as awkward and recalcitrant as his movements. He was conscious of being preached at—though the harangues were disguised in the language of friendliness.
He would sit up there and brood. He would show these two! They were preaching a sort of decency to him, while amusing themselves, and giving expression to their romantic energy by combining against him and shutting him up. He was not to be allowed. Damn them—both! His crave, and the ironic malevolence of that crave had an inevitableness. Idiots!
Mary might keep the doors locked and the windows fastened after dusk, but that good friend, that fellow with a sly yet robust sense of humour, was not to be discouraged.
"Gil—old lad."
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"That you, Bob."
"Have a drink?"
A piece of string was let down from an upper window, and, incredible though it may seem, that was how it happened. Snow had fallen. It lay on the hills, and on the hedgerows, and crusted the branches of the trees; it had covered the fallen leaves, but the clouds that had spread this whiteness had passed, and the blue of the sky was cold and serene and still.
Lance, from the hollow of the "Marions" lane, saw the great, red, winter sun hanging in the black branches of the Woolshot beeches. It was like the blaze of a beacon, and the branches of the trees were trails of smoke, and behind him Castle Craven—faintly blue upon its white hill—glimmered its windows at the sunset. He was conscious of a great stillness, but it was a stillness as of suspense. In staring at that great red circle he too seemed to reflect its redness. The cold, still air felt strained.
There were tracks in the snow, footprints, the arrowheads of birds' feet, the marks of a rabbit. He noticed them, and the red berries on the thorns and briars, and the way the snow hung pocketed in the hedges. Coming to the white gate he paused there with old Pybus's ash stick sloped like a sword over his shoulder. It was both less and more than a sword. The very face of him had a kind of fierce alertness, a young pallor. He looked at the window, at her window. He went in and through the orchard, and in and out among the old, gnarled trees which seemed to make quaint gestures as he passed under them, his head cocked, his eyes frosty, as though looking to meet his enemy there. Youth under arms! In the upland field he saw the patterning of Mary's footprints linking the wire doors of the runs and the brown houses, and he noticed that there were no footmarks but hers.
He went back through the orchard towards the cottage, and at the window looking towards the orchard he saw her face, a white oval behind the glass. She was standing there watching him, with glints of firelight in the room behind her. He raised that stick of his.
"Mary."
Her lips moved. She disappeared. She had gone to meet
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him, to unlock the door and let him in. He stood in the porch kicking the snow from his boots.
"Anything happened?"
"No."
"I'll come in. May I?"
"Gil's upstairs."
"Still?"
"Yes."
They did not look directly at each other, and with apparent casualness he moved past her, and she closed the door. But he seemed to be aware of her eyes and their expression, and of the elusive shadowiness of her face. She was not flesh, but a complex of emotions, a mysterious creature reminding him of a woman in one of those old pre-Raphælite pictures, largeeyed, full-throated, strange. She seemed to shrink and draw back into the dark passage as though eluding the instant issue. His masterful, young passion was so much less subtle than her reaction to it and its possibilities.
"I'm sorry about Gil. It's damnable."
She made a movement with her hands.
"Yes. Go in. I'll see to the fire."
He gave her a quick and searching look as he turned to the door.
"No need—Mary. I mean—the other thing. I know."
Almost she was the victim of a dramatic indecision. She was agonised with hesitations. She let him go into the sitting-room, and, while pretending to be busy in the kitchen, she stood motionless by the fire, staring at it. She had a horror of violence. She had so schooled herself to surrender and to the patient suffering of things, that she trembled a little when this young, dramatic chivalry of his came striding and clanging. She shrank from the wrench, while divining its necessity and its romantic ruthlessness. So this was romance! Of course/b2/And to steady herself she began collecting the tea-things, cup by cup, and saucer by saucer, and with the sugar-bowl in her hand she seemed to be counting the number of white cubes in it. Was there no other way? And supposing? But how absurd, these tremors and tendernesses and vacillations, these primitive qualms! She would go in and tell him, reason with him.
The kettle was steaming, and the tray ready, and she had no excuse for further loiterings. She picked up the tray and
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carried it out into the passage. The door of the sitting-room was half closed, and she pushed it open with her foot, to see Lance at the orchard window. His figure had a dark and poised intentness; it looked very black against the afterglow and the snow.
He turned sharply, and with a jerk of the arm pulled down the blind, but not before she had seen something moving in the distance between the trunks of the fruit trees.
"All right—Mary. Don't worry."
The tea-cups jiggled on the tray as she placed it on the table. She was aware of Lance moving towards the door.
"It's all right. Tea in five minutes."
She made a swift glide as though to intercept him.
"Oh, please. Not that way/b2/"
He stood holding the door. His face had a masterful but quiet fierceness, and on this most dramatic moment in their lives she realised him and his maleness, and all that they would mean now and in the future. She seemed to see as in a dream, with time effaced, and a life's happenings crowded into one swift picture. She stood mute, motionless, staring at him, and her face became like a child's, plaintive and consenting. She felt a kind of inevitableness and accepted it. She found herself supposing that things of the heart happened in this way, like a high tower falling, and that afterwards you had to sort out and replace the pieces. Yes, the afterwards, and so often the afterwards was the woman's!
She had the feeling of clasping something to her, something that scorched and hurt, and yet had a quiver of exultation.
"Oh, my dear
She saw his eyes as he closed the door.
"Stay there—Mary. Don't look."
She heard him go quickly down the passage and out into the snow. She heard voices, voices which had the sharp crack of branches snapping under the weight of snow. She could not hear what was said, which was well, for such words were like fierce blows, and not for her.
"Keep off—you young/b2/"
"You—swine."
There were other sounds, like a stirring of nature, a vague
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movement as of wind and chafing branches, and she stood with her hands to her bosom, fearfully attentive, trembling. She knew—she could imagine. She was conscious of a kind of age-old primeval fear, the fear of the woman shut up, crouching, hidden, while men tore at each other. And she—she the civilised—soft-thinking woman—was involved in it, and so furiously involved that she felt her fingers curving to clutch. Her lover was fighting; he was being hurt. How would things go? That great tawny beast of a man/b2/! Oh, horrible, the horror of humiliation, of his being thrashed, of his coming back to her beaten, ashamed, her young rider on the white horse. She could not bear to think of him being smashed and mauled. She must look.
Stooping she raised a corner of the blind. The sky was a suffused redness, and against it the fruit trees were sharp and black; the snow appeared tinged with the sky's redness. She saw the two figures half-way up one of the orchard aisles, knotted together, striking, twisting, jerking from side to side. She closed her eyes and dropped the blind.
But a moment later she had to look again, and it seemed to her that in the passing of those few seconds the sky had grown pale, and that the orchard was full of the dusk. The two figures had broken apart, one lying prone on the snow, the other standing, and with a little catching of the breath she realised that the standing figure was Lance's. Oh, thank God! The figure on the snow moved; it rose on its hands and knees; it made an effort to crawl. She saw Lance
Again she dropped the blind. She became aware of her heart beating, and its contractions were so strong and rapid that she felt shaken by them; she seemed to quiver like a piano when powerful chords were struck. She sat down on a chair behind the door. She felt strangely stifled, but strangely exultant. Oh, romance, violence, the old rage of chivalry, the beast trampled upon, the white knight triumphant! So, things sometimes did happen that way. But how dark it was! The room was growing dim. She must have lights, lights for him, not the lamp, but candles, firelight. There were candles on the mantelpiece, and she hurried to light them, only to find her hand so shaky that the match flame and the wick seemed to be playing hide and seek. She had to steady that right hand, holding the wrist with her left hand. But how absurd, how dearly and splendidly absurd! She felt herself
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swept by a gust of tenderness. The candle flames seemed to waver. She knelt down and stirred the fire to a blaze.
A moment later she heard the porch door open. She rose with one swift movement. The light was dim in the passage, but she could see his face.
"Oh, my dear, you're bleeding."
He laughed, or she had the impression that he laughed.
"Oh, probably. It's nothing."
His voice had the hard breathlessness of a man who had run a race. He was all torn about, collarless, shirt ripped open. There were red blurs on chin and forehead.
"He'll never come here again. I could have killed him."
"Oh, my dear."
She caught his right arm, pressing it between her hands. Her face winced for him.
"You're bleeding. I'll get water. Come, come and sit down, by the fire here/b2/"
His red mouth seemed to smile at her.
"Am I a very horrible object, Mary? Well—he was worse. I'll go into the kitchen—and clean up."
"Oh, my dear, no. You're—you're/b2/No one but me—will ever have seen you like this it's my part."
She compelled him towards the chair by the fire, and he looked down at her with an amused, devoted fierceness. So, it was her part, and all this violence and blood/b2/
"Mary."
He let himself relax into the chair. A cushion was under his head. "He watched her go out of the room, and the very air seemed stirred by her solicitous, sweet haste. He lay back and smiled; his bloody face lost its grimness. The Venerable had forewarnings. Was it because the white breasts of his pigeons appeared to have a redness when he fed them, or because that flaming winter sun went down in a whorl of fire behind the ash trees and the castle? But he remained off duty—he was remaining off duty more and more these days, and his world humoured him; he sat by the fire; he let his thoughts go back to the days of his own romance. Oh, yes, there had been a romance, a girl in a white muslin frock sitting under the old thorns on Hampstead Heath, a!:|
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pale, fragile, fey-eyed thing, but old Pybus's romance had never gone beyond the May flower. He had wondered often what he and Miss White Muslin would have made of marriage, and now he was wondering what these two children of a later generation would make of it, were they to marry.
He was knocking his pipe out on the bars of the grate when Lance came in. The lamp was lit, and when old Pybus saw his grandson's face, he turned again to the fire and waited.
"It's all right, grandpater."
"All right. Good lad. You/b2/"
Lance came to lean on the back of the Venerable's chair.
"Oh,—I got him. He had the best of it for the first half minute. He must weigh two stone more than I do. But it was just rough and tumble. By God, he hurt me, and though he hurt me I felt I had him. He couldn't last. Fat and too sodden. Besides—I was raging."
Old Pybus, with his empty pipe stuck between his teeth, nodded a big white head.
"You got him."
"He could just about crawl when I'd done with him. I made him crawl into the lane. Oh, he's finished—all right. He got the knock from me. He'll never go near the place again."
His grandfather sat and smiled.
"How's Mary? Was she much/b2/?"
"Oh—a little. But she was splendid. She washed my face for me. It needed it. But, grandpater, I have never felt so good before, knocking that beast into grovelling pulp."
"You beloved savage! But that's just what was wanted. You can kiss the top of my head, my dear."
It was kissed.
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/ch/
Tus thunderclap had other reverberations. It had both closed and opened doors, and to a blind man it uncovered a vision of a young Zeus holding the lightning.
To Mary it was an opening of windows, deep breaths of clean, free air, the death of an evil thing, the beginnings of that most difficult and delightful experiment in self-expression, a duet between two young moderns.
To Lance this romantic storm ushered in blue water and a curious awareness of a something in himself which was both sacred and immortal, though a man cannot judge of that which is immortal in himself until he has come to the season when he faces his own mortality. He loved, but he was at the very beginnings of the great sacrament. All that he knew was that the image of woman had two lamps burning before it, wonder and compassion. Nor could the Venerable help him here. There was no one to tell him that Mary would gather to herself memories of poignant and beautiful appeal—that she would be the one creature to whom he would turn always with an uprising of infinite tenderness. That she would be—just Mary. That she would be something more than mother, wife, or child. That—always—she would have a little veil of dear and exquisite mystery. Youth does not foresee or fore-feel these things; it cannot do so. Life grows. Nor could Lance tell that before the face of Mary—seen or conjured up—the violences and ruthlessness and angers of a forceful maleness would pause and stand still. He would feel that tremor of tenderness and compassion, a going out to her of all that was strong and fine and gentle. Because she was gentle, because her eyes and hands drew him when, like a hurt or angry child, he was ready to stamp and to rage. Because she was just Mary, a creature immortally wise and gentle and courageous, exquisitely imperfect, and therefore sensitive to her beloved's imperfections.
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For—in the beginning of things he saw her both vividly and vaguely. She was May to his April, a little older, a little more mature, in the fullness of the setting of the fruit of suffering. She could look at him attentively; she could show a brave frankness.
"Don't be so infallible, dear man. We are still—groping."
She could tease him gently, and when the Venerable listened to her teasing he would have the air of smothering a sly and exquisite chuckle.
"Good girl. Don't let him grow a solemn face. Make him forget that he is too damned clever."
But at the moment the White Knight appeared dominant, and rode his horse magnanimously, and saw the issue before him as clear as a white shield. Woolshot had been tumbled out of the saddle. It had been trodden on and mired. It had effaced itself, gone upon a holiday, caught the Orient Express, and rumour had it that the Tawny Beast was hunting other tawny beasts somewhere in Africa.
Meanwhile the other half of the problem remained, and to the young handler of lightning it could not appear insoluble. Merris had to be got back to his piano. Obviously. Also, a little ruthlessness might be necessary, splashes of cold water interspersed with little bursts of applause.
Lance used a quite modern frankness.
"Look here, sit down and play that thing of Ravels' to me."
He had Merris out of his chair and by both elbows.
"Gome along—there's a good chap. I want that piece of music."
That Mary's brother had surrounded himself with a fog of hostility was but the mere skin of the problem. Lance thought that he could unravel the business, or peel off that sullen husk. Merris needed stimulating. He needed lifting out of that sordid self-absorption in which he sat like a flabby and spoilt child stubbornly glowering in its pram. It was not that Lance was unimaginative towards the other's blindness and his cravings, but he looked at them so to speak over Mary's shoulder.
He had talked to the Venerable.
"It's a case for a cold tub at six in the morning."
"Frightfulness, my dear?"
"One quarter of frightfulness to three quarters of persuasion. I want to get him to realise/b2/"
"You do."
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Mary.
The Venerable was moved to suggest that if Merris had not realised Mary and her fundamentalism—it was rather late in the day to attempt it. Self-expression was the only thing. His music.
Lance said: "Exactly," but the word was inadequate. Merris had to be put back to his piano, and to be persuaded that there was nothing in heaven or earth more potent and precious than his piano. He would have to improvise himself back into a world of clean sounds and feelings.
"Don't you see it in that way, grandpater?"
"And the appreciation, my dear?"
"We can give him it—but not too much of it. Can't he be made to realise that the world is still full of ears?"
"Beginning with his own."
Lance walked over from Castle Craven each afternoon. He was working in the morning and at night, and in spite or these distractions his work had moved forward. Or perhaps it was because of them. All that he could say was that the working of his inner consciousness was changing; it seemed to be losing a dreadfully facile cleverness; it cost him more effort; it was as though the well of his inspiration had deepened and the bucket had to go deeper. But he was getting that deeper water. The thing on paper had a rightness, an inevitableness. It astonished him; it seemed to come up out of the dark, and from mere vapoury nothingness change to light.
Usually, during those December days, he would open the gateof "Marions" about dusk. He would see the various December twilights, a sky that was grey or opalescent or steel blue, and the winter blackness of the beeches, and the wet bronze of the leaf carpet and the rusty bracken. On the hillside, Mary would be putting those unromantic fowls to bed, but the wire runs and the brown houses had an air of impermanence. If there still was work to do he would help her.
"How is the piano to-day?"
"Two hours this morning."
"Splendid."
Her face looked smoothed out. Going down through the orchard they would loiter and hold hands, and pretend to look at the sky or the stars or the old trees. Some things were so very near, other things still very remote and problematical. There was a tacit understanding between them, an open
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mindedness. He had said to her—"I'm just nothing yet; what the world calls: 'A fellow who writes,' but I am going to be something. So—you see." And she had answered: 'Not quite clearly—yet. "Which was understandable, and he understood it, and bore with it because of the gentleness that was his for her sake. You could not rush and overwhelm her loyalties. Possibly he had begun to suspect that some things are worth waiting for.
"Next year—you'll get out your colours and brushes."
"No time."
With his arm over her shoulders he looked down at her serious, sweet head.
"There must be—yes—later on. It isn't as though we both scribbled. I'm not going to be a little Jack Horner. I'm learning about the duality of things."
"What's that?"
He smiled, and digressed.
"Just the way the hair grows on your forehead."
"I can't help it."
"Thank God. There are such lots of things you can't help, Mary, and so I can't help them either. You make me just stand and stare."
Yes, Merris was the problem; his as well as Mary's, though Lance could never quite overcome his feeling of distaste, of physical shrinking, his dislike of that blind, flaccid and sallow ce with its beard and its air of nervous, sneering boredom. The fellow was both tragic and unwholesome, and Lance had a wish to put him out in the rain to be rained upon, or to let the north wind blow through him. Heavens, how it blew and rained that winter! Even when there was some blueness in the sky the north wind seemed to be trying to push Castle Craven over the edge of the hill into the Brent valley. Lance had to sit with his oil-stove close to his chair, and to rub his hands over it, and the Venerable was paying for the oil. But between them, with some assistance from old Pybus, they did contrive to persuade Merris back to his piano. On Sundays the three of them plotted a little musical causerie, nor was it all artifice, for Merris had hands and a temperament, and he could smother the sound of the wind in the trees.
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He had a preference for northern music, that of the Scandinavians and the Poles. He liked to play by firelight, for he had that peculiar appreciation of atmosphere which survives the loss of vision, and may be exaggerated by it. Also, he had a dislike of being watched, and an uncanny instinct for knowing when backs were not turned. Mary and the Venerable on the sofa, and Lance on a couple of old cushions, watched the fire, and listened.
It was sufficient to say—"Play this" or "Play that," and to remain silent. He knew better than any of them the how and the why of it, and like all interpreters of sound and colour, was apt to resent polite chatter. He was more approachable when nothing was said about his music, and it was listened to and appreciated in silence. He would just go on playing, and if the darkness had the silence of sympathy, he was satisfied.
Lance came quickly to understand this passion for silence, and its sensitive significance. It was as though Merris resented any sort of interference. He had snapped Lance up on one occasion.
"That thing makes you hear the Vistula running, and the wind in the poplars."
Merris had turned on his stool.
"The wind in the rain-pipes—if you like. Music isn't pictorial. Damn all Village Blacksmiths."
So Lance learned to be silent, and it was this delicate silence of his that began—as it were—to surround the darkness between them and to create a nascent intimacy. Lance explained it to the Venerable by saying—"The chap likes to be listened to. Naturally. It's his method of self-expression. We'll get him by listening." But, as a matter of fact, the reactions were much more subtle and obscure, and not so easily rationalised. For Lance had a peculiar effect upon Mary's brother; he was both a stimulus and a provocation. He had appeared as an interloper, a vigorous young male thing setting the darkness vibrating. He might sit there silently, but Merris seemed to see his silence as a self-assured, attentive, critical face. There were many moments when he hated Lance. He seemed to divine in Lance a compassionate arrogance, a tolerance that referred to him as a "Poor devil." His very playing was an attack or a retort, a passionate and bitter challenge to that silent, unseen youth. The very intimacy that began to grow up between them had a curiously acid sparkle.
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Also, he was jealous of Lance. His very helplessness had made him very dependent upon his sister. He was possessive. His blindness had cramped and narrowed his nature. He would suddenly behave like a peevish and spiteful child.
"It isn't my music, Pybus—I'm not quite such a fool."
Mary had left them alone together by the fire. She was busy in the kitchen and Gil—moodily aggressive—had refused to play.
"Not wholly your music, I agree."
"Well—don't forget it."
Lance smiled, and was astonished to find that Merris seemed to divine the fact that he was smiling.
"Don't grin."
Lance looked hard at the blind face. He had begun to discover that an impartial frankness was the best counter to Merris when he was in one of his irritable moods.
"Well—do you grudge Mary a friend?"
He thought that he detected a sneer quivering under the curves of those thin nostrils.
"You are an exacting beggar—you know. Mary has a life of her own. She's not your slave."
And then—of course—the brother looked plaintive.
"Yes, rub it in. I'm a parasite, a damned nuisance. You'd like me out of it."
Lance picked up the poker and prodded the fire.
"Shut up, Merris. Don't talk like that—about her."
Nevertheless, Merris did respond to the stimulus. Here was this fellow who was writing a book and bringing over chapters for Mary to read. In the evenings Merris could hear her turning over the pages.
"What's that you're reading?"
"Lance's novel."
He did not ask her to read it aloud. He was just a little afraid of Lance's novel, just as he was more than a little afraid of Lance. And like a child he was moved to insist upon his own particular trick. His pride sat itself down at the piano. Moreover, there were other indications of a quickened self-regard. He became less of a sloven. He was driven into Castle Craven to have his hair cut and his beard trimmed. He indulged in two new suits. He would sit in front of the fire, cleaning and polishing his nails as though those hands of his were master-hands and worthy of deference.
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The Venerable, observing the three of them, and loving the two of them, while pitying the third, felt himself fumbling with a Chinese puzzle that fooled his old fingers.
He wanted Mary for Lance, but would Mary be obtainable without her brother? And did either Mary or Lance understand the ruthlessness of marriage, its sacred exclusiveness, its intolerance?
But he was soon made to realise that Lance understood it. They were walking back to Castle Craven in the wet darkness, with a north-west wind making a bluster in the hedges. Old Pybus, in black oilskins and sou'-wester, looked like a largesized boy of fourteen bobbing along beside his grandson. Lance was head-in-air, in spite of the wind and the rain.
"What do you think of Merris, grandpater?"
There had been times when the Venerable had thought of Merris as better dead, but he did not say so to Lance; some solutions are too obvious and too easy.
"More grip, my dear."
"Yes, he's cleaner. But you can't assimilate him. What I mean is/b2/"
He took off his hat and shook the rain out of the brim, and the gesture was prophetic.
"I'm sorry for the poor beggar—but, you see—he's hostile. I suppose it's natural. He has had Mary all these ears," y. The Venerable trudged along the path with his hands stuffed into his pockets.
"Just so.—If you want Mary/b2/"
Lance's silence implied that" he wanted Mary, and meant to have her, not only for his own sake, but for hers. Also she had to be persuaded that one husband was more precious than twenty blind brothers. It was nature. But, then, Mary's trouble was the very fact that she was Mary.
"I can't see her—leaving him in a corner of his own. But that is what must happen, grandpater. I won't have anything else. Of course I accept responsibility. It's up to me to help put him in a comfortable corner. That's the situation."
Old Pybus grunted.
"It is."
They arrived at the high bridge over the Brent, and the
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light from the bridge lamp glistened upon the Venerable's black and polished figure. The Brent was in flood, adding its moist roar to the sound of the wind in the beeches, and on the crown of the bridge it occurred to old Pybus that life and youth were like the river. Flood water, not to be denied, tearing to the sea. Life solves its own problems either with a gentle gliding or with violent haste. Some things—or perhaps all things—are inevitable.
"Have you said anything to Mary?"
"Not yet."
Old Pybus appeared to shake the rain out of his eyes.
"Try to be gentle. But it's inevitable—of course. You two together."
The Venerable hated meddlesome people, but he did feel curious as to Mary's inward tendencies. She belonged to a world that was still dominated by the idea of sacrifice, by the vision of a figure hanging upon a cross, and old Pybus had come to doubt the soundness of the sacrament of sacrifice. It had began with a bloody offering to a god, and had become the mystery of god sacrificed. But how often was the sacrifice nothing more than a pathetic surrender to some other creature's egotism. It was a sacrament which had appealed to women, or perhaps it had been forced upon them by the maleness of all orthodox creeds. Or perhaps it was a natural, emotional urge in woman, the bearer of children, the nurturer of children? That Mary had this sacrificial passion in her was fairly obvious, and old Pybus wanted it for Lance and not for the other fellow; and here was another problem. Mary might obstinately refuse to come down from her cross.
Going over to "Marions" one Sunday, with Lance left at home in the throes of a "situation," old Pybus stumbled innocently upon a scene. It was frosty and clear and very cold, and getting no response from the cottage, the Venerable was setting out upon an exploration, when he heard the two voices. And there, in the orchard, was Merris sitting on the green seat, and looking as though he was glued to it. He was without an overcoat. He had the air of a thoroughly sulky and rebellious child, clutching its perch, and refusing to be carried indoors.
But the very absurdity of the scene was suggestive, the defiance of that blind figure, its air of stubborn and rebellious malignity.
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"I'm going to stay here. I shan't be wanted in there. I'm superfluous."
The Venerable's eyebrows bristled. His inclination was towards a good leather slipper well and truly applied to that incorrigible man-child's spiritual posterior. But he went softly back to the porch, and waited. Poor, jealous, cunning child! Were two or perhaps three lives to be denied completeness because of a blindness that lacked grace?
A robin, shrilling in the cold sunlight, fixed a black eye upon old Pybus, and the Venerable, whistling a response to the bird on the bough, found other eyes upon him.
"Oh—Venerable!"
He smiled upon her, perhaps because she was not smiling. She had the air of a patient nurse pushed beyond her forbearance.
"Lance is in the throes. My opportunity/b2/"
She looked through and beyond him.
"And my child's rebellious."
He stood aside to let her pass, while he absorbed the significance of that word "child." A child was so final. And was that her feeling?
"Tantrums? Supposing/b2/"
She went past him, and turning in the passage, looked at the sky through the bare branches of the apple trees.
"You see—he's jealous. What would you say?"
"I'm prejudiced, my dear."
"How?"
"In your favour—and in Lance's."
It was as though he had stripped the problem of its veil of sacrificial sentiment, and had done it wilfully. He saw her face stiffen. She understood.
"You men are greedy. What could you say?"
"Not greedy—always. Not in that way. Besides—one has a right."
"Lance?"
Old Pybus nodded.
"Surely? But only—if/b2/Well, I'm meddling, my dear. But only you can tell."
She stood very still, and her eyes had a like stillness.
"How could I do it? He has no one. He's so pathetic, even when he's—impossible. And yet—you must know. He's in the orchard."
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Said old Pybus—"I'll go and fetch him in. You'll catch cold there. Go in."
But though he had spoken softly to her he felt less gentle towards the brother. Blind, petulant, grudging whimperer! Insane egotist! He walked on into the orchard in a Roman rage, and paused to observe that figure on the seat. He was shocked, for the fellow was weeping, exuding tears from under those drooping eyelids, sitting there gripping the edge of the seat, his blind face wet and plaintive and futile.
Old Pybus gave a toss of the head. Damn the fellow! Damn his weakness, his egotism! Prometheus set on a garden seat, and tearing his own vitals! But was not this sort of weakness the most exasperating and frustrating of vices?
He walked across the grass, feeling it brittle and frozen under his feet, and laid a square white hand on the brother's shoulder.
"We're waiting for you. Come in."
The blind face winced.
"But I don't want to come in."
The Venerable's hand transferred itself to the coat collar.
"Get up. You're no better than a baby. You want slapping and putting to bed." That is where a man may differ from a child. A child may forgive and forget, and a man may not, especially if he is vain, and a weakling. Merris was led by the Venerable through the orchard and into the house, with a back and a neck that were as stiff as a steel rod, and a face that was frozen. He moved his feet with a kind of careful shuffle. He guided himself to his chair and sat down in it, his hands on his knees, the whole of him expressing a rigid sulkiness.
Mary was in the kitchen, and old Pybus, after a glance or two at that sullen face, and gauging the depth of the room's silence, felt moved to apply the slipper once again.
"Does it ever occur to you to think of your sister?"
Merris's hands gripped his knees. He seemed to stiffen himself.
"Is it any business of yours?"
Old Pybus's white eyebrows bristled.
"It's what I choose to make it. The trouble is—that you are too sorry for yourself. We're sorry, but you are sorrier.
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"It ought to be the other way about. Supposing you reflect on the fact that your sister has some right to a life of her own."
After that there was silence, a congealed stillness, until Mary came into the room with the tea-tray and was met by that chilly atmosphere. She looked at the fire and at the two figures. She put down the tray, and kneeling between old Pybus and her brother, reached for the coal tongs.
"You are letting the fire down."
The Venerable bent forward to take the tongs from her.
"Apologies, my dear. Let me."
Trudging homewards later under a frosty sky, with the stars ashiver, he still felt a little inward warmth over the using of the slipper. Life should be nine-tenths persuasion, and one-tenth frightfulness. Certainly. And Mary had not exercised frightfulness. Merris had the temperament of a child, of a little, strutting, sulky boy, and if the devotion of ministering hands could not move him, well—a cut with a cane might cause him to take notice and reflect. The Venerable held canings to be inevitable. You chose the rare and particular occasion. You switched a forgetful pride. You found the raw place, and when you had stimulated it you applied unguent of a wise sympathy.
So, old Pybus thought, and prophesied a possible reaction; but the effect of those few simple and curt words was to be other than he imagined. The quality of a reaction is a question of blood, breed, texture, temperament. He had switched Lance on occasions, and the quick blood had answered generously. But Gilbert Merris was not Lance.
"May do him good," thought the Venerable. "Whom the Lord loveth/b2/"
The stars blinked above the Venerable's head. He had mixed mysticism and pedagogy. "May do him good." But our psychology is still apt to be unexpected. We are like boys playing with chemicals, mixing things in a test tube. There may be a boiling over, or a F a Surprising colour change.
"May do the beggar good
Later, the Venerable evould be caught wondering whether he would have done the thing—had he known or foreseen.
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/ch/
Arr Christmas Lance went to Windover. One of Probyn's cars came for him, and with it a letter to the father of all the Pybi, who read it with an air of benignity, and then put it away in his pocket.
"Good of Probyn. No, I'm not coming. You two ought to be together."
So Lance dispossessed the chauffeur and drove the big blue car over the winter roads, and knew that he had never felt so comradely towards his father as on this day of winter sunlight and blue-black distances. They had exchanged simple and gracious gestures, and were to come together not as father and son, but as two men of the world, ready to respect each other's reticences. For Lance had been to the wars and could boast of trophies. Also, he went to Windover as a lover and son, and as a young man who had set himself to do this difficult thing and was accomplishing it. Above all, he carried in his breast pocket that glorious letter from John Richmond, a letter such as a man either writes or receives perhaps twice in a life time. It was epic. It referred to the first half of the recreated "Rust"; also it pinned upon Lance's coat the red badge of courage.
"Your book—and your pluck balance each other. I'll publish you in the autumn. Go ahead."
When they were within five miles of Windover, Lance pulled up and resigned the wheel to the chauffeur. "I want to look at the country. Don't make a smudge of it." And leaning back in a corner he recalled a phrase of his own in the second chapterof "Rust."
"The speed-smudge of modern life," and as the big car glided graciously along the undulations of the road it gave him a sense of restrained power. He watched the country, the grey-green hills burnished by the sinking sun, and the black woods, and the ploughed fields
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which showed a tinge of purple. The landscape had a beautiful strangeness while remaining gently familiar. Or was it that he saw things differently, because he himself was both the same and different? He watched for the old house. In the avenue of beeches a red sun flashed and vanished behind the rhythmical grey trunks of the trees, and when he saw the house it seemed to stand in a blur of gold mist. It satisfied him.
His father, hatless, and wearing a rough tweed overcoat, came along the terrace from the library window. They shook hands with an inarticulate but smiling shyness. The chauffeur dealt with Lance's suit-case, while father and son walked back towards the library window.
"I thought—the Venerable—might be with you."
His father's voice had a note of diffidence.
"Yes. He was pleased, pater—but he thought/b2/"
"I see. You and I."
"Yes."
As they turned to enter the French window, Probyn's hand rested lightly on his son's shoulder. His face had a shy radiance.
"Well, here we are. Have tea in here. Go in."
But Lance stood back and, with a little courteous hesitancy, waited for his father to enter.
"How's the mater?"
"Not so well—as I should like. Had to rest in the afternoon."
"Oh," said Lance, with a twinge of conscious self-reproach. "I hadn't heard. I'm sorry."
"She will be down in five minutes."
Probyn closed the window, and Lance stood on the hearthrug, staring at the fire. He had become suddenly aware of his father and of his father's room, and of his father as a man who felt and could be hurt, a very human creature. There had been a something in his father's voice when he had spoken of his wife. And Lance felt the warmth of the fire on his face.
"Pater/b2/"
"Yes, old chap."
"I want to say something. I think I have learned a good deal—lately."
Probyn stood stiffly by his desk.
"Never too old. Same with me, Lance."
"I've been a bit of a prig to you—sometimes. I'm sorry."
Probyn was having trouble with his eyeglass. He cleared
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his throat, and then appeared to remember that he was still wearing his overcoat.
"That's all right. Suppose I may have been something of a city father. Think I'll take this thing off."
"I'll put it in the hall for you."
"No, don't you trouble. That's all right, old chap. Hallo, here's your mother."
They were both holding the coat and looking at each other with a kind of affectionate shyness when Lance's mother came into the room. He went to her quickly and kissed her. And in that moment, and with inward catching of his consciousness, he had realised her difference. It was his mother and yet not his mother. She was thinner, less vivid, more spiritualised. There were little lines as of pain between her eyebrows and at the angles of the eyes, and the eyes themselves had a look as of apprehension.
"Oh—Lance/b2/"
He kissed her again on the forehead.
"I'm glad to be here, mater. I'm sorry—such a long time. Oughtn't you to sit down?"
She seemed to cling to his hand, and hers was moist and hot.
"I'm getting an old woman—my dear."
He pushed one of the big brown arm-chairs towards the fire, and Probyn placed a cushion in it.
"There you are, old girl."
Lance, with a queer, glowing, and infinitely grave face, stood looking down at his mother.
"Anything else I can get you?"
She looked up at him with those apprehensive, asking eyes.
"No—just sit down, Lance. Take a cushion on the floor—like you used to. Remember the old nursery? And making toffee?"
Lance sat down on a cushion, and then turned to glance up at his father.
"Where are you coming, pater?"
"Oh, here—just here," said Probyn clearing his throat.
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The most remarkable thing about that Christmas reunion was the fact that money was not mentioned. The Golden Fleece appeared to have been put away in a cupboard, and its effulgence ceased to cast a glare. Though, on Christmas morning, while lighting their pipes and discussing a walk through the woods, Probyn produced an envelope, and with an air of casualness while squinting at the bowl of his pipe, placed the envelope on a corner of the desk.
"Might be useful. Token of good will."
He was a little flushed, and a little apologetic, and Lance, taking the envelope and examining the contents, unfolded a cheque for five hundred pounds.
"Pater/b2/!"
"Just a sign of good will, old chap. Hope you'll accept it—in the spirit in which it is given. Not a bribe, you know."
Lance put the cheque in his pocket, and struck a match.
"It's very good of you, very generous. I didn't come here—pater, you know/b2/"
"That's just it," said his father, "that's just it."
No more was said, but Lance produced John Richmond's letter, and handed it to his father, and pretended to read the Times while Probyn shared his son's "panache." Because Lance supposed that his father would be pleased, and perhaps he watched Probyn screwing the monocle into his eye, and taking the letter to one of the French windows where the light was better. Nor was there any strutting of Lance's self-love, no ty notion of rubbing the thing in. He wanted his father el pleased.
"Rather a decent letter, pater?"
Probyn removed his eye-glass.
"Yes—by Jove—yes. Congratulations. Splendid."
He glowed. He looked at the winter landscape and thought: "Well, if this fellow Richmond wants to do the big thing—I'm in with him. Supposing I put down a thousand for advertising? Have to do it—gracefully—of course. Nothing blatant."
He stood fingering his tie, and then turned to scrutinise his son with a mingling of curiosity and secret satisfaction. So this was the kid to whom he used to bowl a shilling composition cricket-ball, with a gravel path for a pitch, and the wicket chalked on a very new brick wall. Extraordinary!
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Hadn't everything been rather extraordinary, the Golden Fleece, knighthood, Windover, the resurrection of the Venerable? But Lance and Lance's book were more extraordinary than anything else. Life seemed to be both amazing and simple. Amazing because suddenly a fog seemed to lift just as the mist cleared on an autumn morning, and you saw the world serene and sunlit and somehow—strangely clarified.
"One of the most—gratifying letters—I have read. I'm delighted."
Unconsciously he made one of his little, stiff, civic bows.
"May I keep it and show it to your mother?"
"Of course."
They went out and walked. It was clear and frosty, and the beech leaves were crisp under their feet, and beyond the fretwork of black boughs were great gouts of blue. The very air had a quiet candour. And treading among the dead bracken, or following the grass tracks between the green furze banks, with the sun aslant upon the heave of the hillside, they seemed to walk into a new awareness of each other. It was not expressed. Largely it was inexpressible. Lance did not arrive at the conclusion that his father had come by a philosophy of life, but he was aware of his father looking at gs, a tree, or a piece of greensward, or at a cushion of bronze brown leaves caught between two old massive roots, as though he took a pleasure in j-looking. That is to say he was beginning to look at beauty with eyes that discerned and loved.
"I always like that bit of blue hill over there/b2/"
Lance followed his father's pointing stick, thought of a craftsman's phrase, but did not exploit it.
"Yes—very good."
"I'm rather worried about your mother—Lance."
There were questions and answers. They talked almost casually, as Englishmen will, but it was the casualness of concealed feeling. Diabetes, insulin. Oh—yes, the doctor men were quite encouraging—but then—of course—one did worry. And the man in Lance was old enough to understand that at his father's age—there were worries—suspenses—deep-rooted associations which felt the tremor. And he conceived towards his father a gentleness, a feeling that was almost protective. He had not quite understood his father. He began to see something of the Venerable in Probyn.
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Happening, after tea, to pick up a book from his father's desk he found it to be an anthology of old flowers and gardens—"The Old World Pleasance." His father had inserted several slips of paper to mark particular passages, and had scribbled pencil notes upon the slips. Lance read:
"Bring hether the Pinke and Purple Cullambine With gelliflowers, Bring Corronations, and Sops in wine, Worne of Paramoures; Strow me the ground with Daffadowndillies And Cowslips and Kingcups and loved Lillies. The pretty Pawnce And the Chevisaunce Shall match with the fayre flowre Delice."
Lance read his father's notes. "Thought the gelliflower was a wallflower. What are Sops in Wine? Also, the Pawnce and the Chevisaunce Memo, make inquiries for an old herbal. "N. B. Thomas Hyll says that the marigold follows the sun, turning its face. Observe—some time—if this is so.'"
"Ranunculus. This flower is one of a very unsociable Nature, and will not thrive mixed with or standing near any other sort. John Lawrence, 1726. Mem. Try them by themselves in a pot or stone vase."
Lance smiled. From this little book of his father's drifted a faint perfume; a smell as of old herbs and of happy associations. How very simple and pleasant and childlike to watch a marigold flower turning with the sun, or to attempt to persuade that very unsociable plant—the ranunculus—to be socialistic and tolerant of crowds. Better than sticking postagestamps into an album, and squinting at them through a magnifying glass! Probyn in his "Old World Pleasance" had become a humanist. Old Pybus, feeding his pigeons on Christmas Eve, saw Mary and her grey car arrive in the Saracen yard. He had a bird perched on the crown of his hard felt hat, and one on either shoulder, and Mary was reminded of a mystical figure of the Trinity.
"What, shopping?"
"Yes, Christmas."
-
"Have tea with me. I can give you a better tea than they do at the cake shop."
"I know. Well, may I? In half an hour?"
The pigeons were round his feet, and above the roofs the winter sky glowed red. Her face had a faint flush. She appeared happier, as though some of her confidence in life had been restored. The Venerable, looking at her as she looked at the sky, was made to think of the shepherd's jingle upon red sunsets and red dawns.
Yes, undoubtedly things were better at "Marions." There appeared to have been a definite reaction, and that application of the slipper had stimulated a blind pride.
"How's the brother?"
She smiled.
"I left him improvising a carol, a kind of 'Good King Wenceslas' as one of the moderns might have rendered it."
"Splendid," said old Pybus. "You might have brought him with you."
"He was quite happy. The girl is getting his tea. I have a few things to buy."
The Venerable nodded his head, and the white pigeon rose from his hat.
"Hallo, there goes my panache! I'll have the kettle boiling in half an hour."
The kettle was old Pybus's affair. He watched it taking its time to boil on the sitting-room fire, but he was in no hurry, and he was thinking of Merris and the seeming finality of Merris's blindness. To feel the fire and not to see it, to smell a rose and to know that the darkness conceals a flower! But was it not possible for a man to create or collect about himself a world of sound, and to make of himself so sensitive an instrument that the sense of sound might satisfy him? Could Merris do it, or was he better dead?—for there was no other alternative worth choosing. But take a man's natural vanity; you might feed it and clip it as you fed a young yew hedge and then use the shears. But who was going to handle the shears? And if your green stuff grew rank and pulpy, and no one troubled to clip it, the result might prove unlovely.
"That's it,' thought old Pybus, "one would like to be a sort of little, peripatetic deity. But you might take yourself too damned seriously."
He glanced at the clock.
-
Merris also was sitting in front of the fire, and with an air of unusual sleekness, a well-brushed head and a trimmed beard. From somewhere he had routed out a black velvet coat, and his tie was a little profuse and the colour of amber. A lamp stood on the table, throwing the shadow of his head and shoulders upon the strip of wall beside the fireplace. He was leaning forward slightly, listening, and now and again he would rub the palms of his hands together like a man rolling tobacco. He was not conscious of the gesture. It was expressive, part of his anticipatory mood, or as though he were stroking a pleasant thought.
Sounds of activity came from the kitchen, a girl's going to and fro over the tiled floor, the clink of a cup, the clatter of a knife dropped upon a wooden table, and to Merris these sounds had the quality of music. They were part of his sensuous aliveness. When the girl broke into an indifferent whistling of the winter's most popular dance tune, his lips mimicked the notes.
She came down the passage.
"Shall I make you some buttered toast, Mr. Gilbert?"
He turned head and shoulders towards the door.
"Please, Nelly. What's that you're whistling?"
She looked at him round the edge of the door. She was a plain young woman with a broad face, and coarse black hair, but her voice was not unpleasant. She was smiling, and the smile was both sensual and sentimental. She had a very large mouth.
"Pansy Eyes'—Everybody's playing it. It's rather nice."
"Fox-trot?"
"We Charleston to it, Mr. Gilbert, up at the Rec."
"The Rec! What's that?"
"The Recreation room—up at Castle Craven."
"Oh—I see."
They laughed, but the girl's laughter was more like a titter.
"Wonder if I could play it on the piano?"
"You do play—so lovely, Mr. Gilbert/b2/"
"Look here, Nelly, you shall whistle it after tea, and I'll try and vamp it on the piano/b2/I used to dance."
"Did you, Mr. Gilbert?"
-
"Believe I could dance now. There's the old gramophone and one or two jazz records.
"Oh, Mr. Gilbert/b2/"
"We'll push back the furniture and try. Hurry up with the tea, Nell."
He might have added: "Before Miss Mary comes back," but the conspiracy was suggested and understood. The girl gave a little wriggle of the shoulders and hurried off to the kitchen. She had no lover; no'lover had come her fway, and she wanted a lover. Merris, blind though he was, and perhaps because of his blindness, had for her a strong enticement.
Merris stretched out his hands to the fire. He felt the warmth of it, and that other warmth—the nearness and the consent of a woman. He divined it, felt the little snuggling, secret thrill of it in the warm darkness. He moistened his lips. There is a sort of physical pride in man that exults and swells itself out in the presence of such an adventure, and Merris's pride had been wandering alone like a streetwalker. Mary had cut him off from that other crave, and his very blindness was a crave, a dark void asking to be filled.
The girl brought in his tea and placed the tray on an oak stool beside his chair.
"I haven't made you any toast, Mr. Gilbert. I thought
"Take too much time. Had your tea, Nelly?"
"No, sir."
"Have some with me. Get another cup."
His voice caressed her. He could not see her face, but he imagined it as smiling and confused and flushing with consent. He heard her slip out of the room, and when she returned he was aware of her moving about in the darkness. The curtain rings jingled. He understood. She was making sure that the curtains covered the windows.
"Got your cup?"
"Yes, Mr. Gilbert."
"You had better pour out for both of us. You can sit on the tuffet, can't you?"
He felt her close to him, her arm almost touching his knee.
"That's lovely. We shall have to keep our ears open."
Said the girl:
"Miss Merris has the car. It's a noisy old car—too—isn't it?"
-
Mary locked the blue doors of the little old coach-house, and crossed the brick-paved yard to the rustic gate which opened into the garden. The sky was powdered with stars, and a little, brittle breeze moved the apple branches across those points of silver. A shutter creaked, but the unrest of the winter night was to her a quiet breathing, and in front of the porch she lowered her heavy basket to the ground, and stood at gaze. She could see Castle Craven as a crown of lights upon its hill, and each light was like a little friendly eye. She could say to herself that she was happy, if to feel smooth and cared for is to be happy. She could say: "I have endured. I have striven to help, and help has come to me. And here is music."
She could hear her brother playing. He had struck a few tentative notes, and then three full sonorous chords, just when she had paused to look at the lights of Castle Craven. In putting down her basket she had felt herself discarding a burden.
Poor old Gil! He had seemed so much more of a man during the last three weeks. And what a relief it was to be able to come home without having to hold your breath—and to wonder! Was anything more sordid and soul-rotting than suspicion, that almost surreptitious stealing in upon his blindness? And she had Lance.
She stooped for the basket. In it—among other things—she had Gil's Christmas present, a new pipe and half a pound of his favourite tobacco. Blessed stars—blessed simplicity.
She turned and tried the door, and found it locked. She had raised her hand to the brass knocker when she heard the girl's footsteps.
"That you, Miss?"
"Yes, Nelly."
"I thought I'd lock the door, Miss."
"Quite right."
"Shall I take the basket, Miss?"
"Thanks, Nelly. You can be getting home now—if you want to. I have a little present for you here. It's Christmas Eve."
-
/ch/
Prosyn's car turned into the Saracen yard and came to rest with its long blue bonnet within six feet of the inn's side door. This door was painted white, and Lance and his father were in the act of putting the fur rug from their knees when the white door opened and showed them the Venerable carrying a little black tray. On it were two plates surmounted by two tin covers, the Venerable's dinner, or his two silver caps of maintenance.
It was a singular occasion. The chauffeur got down to open the near door, and Probyn, being next to that door, was the first to leave the car. Both Lance and the chauffeur saw that particular act, Probyn's simple and quaint beaw geste. It embodied a ritual. Probyn, in his long coffee-coloured overcoat, stood at the bottom of the two steps, and holding out his hands, claimed the privilege of carrying his father's dinner tray.
And the Venerable consented. He recognised and surrendered to an act of grace. Probyn, carrying the tray with something of the air of a knight bearing his lord's sword and spurs on a black cushion, walked down and across the Saracen yard with his father. It was the most silent of ceremonies. Neither of them had uttered a word, and Lance, who had remained in the car, knew that he had witnessed a notable act.
He got out, folded up the rug, and placed it on the seat. The chauffeur, a pleasant person with very English eyes in a rosy face, stood solemnly staring.
"You had better get some dinner, Payne."
"Yes, sir. What about your suit-case, sir?"
"You might carry it down to my grandfather's, the cottage at the bottom of the passage."
"Yes, sir. The way the gentlemen have gone, sir?"
"That's it."
-
But Lance had seen more than an old fellow in a black coat and striped trousers standing in a doorway, holding a tray. He had been absent at Windover less than a week, and he had returned to see the Venerable as he had not seen him before, as a very old man. Just those few days, an insignificant lapse of time, and yet the thing had happened. Or he had returned with eyes that could be startled by the change, though the change must have been there. The little sturdy figure had appeared to him indefinably old and shrunken. The white head had seemed less massive and vigorous.
He walked slowly down to the cottage. His heart was open to both those other men. He was aware of a little spasm of sadness, a beautiful, wise sadness. He saw his father stretching out his hands for that tray.
"Salve—pater/b2/"
Pausing outside the door to glance up at the Venerable's white pigeons on the red and grey roofs, he was moved to a gentle wondering. Mystery of wings, and mystery of blue sky, and mystery of spirit! O, most splendid of mysteries, redescending upon the earth with the sound of wings invisible! Was man mere clay, man—the mystic, man the magnanimous and compassionate? A little, old, black dinner-tray, and his father's hands!
He heard voices.
"Your dinner will be getting cold."
"You are going to join me, Probyn."
"Of course."
"Then—I'll go up and order/b2/"
"No, no, on no account. I'll go myself. We'll have what you are having."
Probyn came out of the cottage and met his son. They looked at each other. They were son and father. They smiled. It began to rain after Probyn's car had left. Old Pybus had gone on duty, and Lance, after unpacking his suit-case and looking at the landscape through a wet window, felt most strangely like a small boy in need of comfort. The little room struck raw, and his mood was penetrated by a like
-
feeling of rawness. He and his father had talked for a while before the fire, and Lance had raised the question of money. "Do you mind how I use that cheque, pater?"
"Just as you please, old chap. It's just a bit of paper." And Lance had said: "Did you notice how old he looks? I hadn't realised it before. It shocked me." Probyn, leaning forward to warm his hands, had answered very slowly. "He is a very old man. Of course—both of us—would rather/b2/But he's the sort that likes to die in harness."
Looking at the wet landscape Lance felt strangely sore. He was thinking of that little old man standing where the brass gong hung like a halo. And for three months this little old man had given him bed, bread, and meat, and how much more than these, the courage to endure, an inward vision. The old Roman at his post! But in Lance there had arisen a sudden passion to succour, to protect, to cherish. He felt it towards four people, Mary, his mother, Probyn, the Venerable, but at the moment its strongest urge was towards the Venerable.
"He's the sort that likes to die in harness."
The ardour of youth in arms confronted the shadow of the inevitable. A very old man! And suddenly he realised death and its physical finality as a blotting out of beauty, even as that rain was blotting out sky and hill. He had never seen death. He was as a child, and he stood there remembering those poignant pages of Hudson's book which the Venerable had put into his hands. The thing touched him now as it touches all of us—though our lips may remain sealed, and we stand inarticulate, incredulous, questioning. Absurd emotion! How crassly obvious. Had he, then, been so full of his own affairs that he had not realised the obvious, or suffered himself to see that figure of Old Mortality? And what did it mean to him?
Lance put on a raincoat and an old cap and went out into the rain. He knew quite well where he was going. He was going to Mary. He was running to her in this moment of almost childish bewilderment and pain as he would run to her through life, to his beloved, his mother-woman, the one creature from whom he would unthinkingly exact tenderness, soft touches, understanding. There was that in him which seemed to know without knowing, as a child knows. He
-
wanted this sense of elemental soreness touched and soothed. He wanted to express something. He wanted her and self-expression.
He noticed neither the mud nor the rain. He sought her cottage like a scared small boy making for home. His problem was hers; she had no riddles of her own, or he had forgotten them. He found himself at her door, knocking.
It opened. She was there in the dim, wet, winter light. He saw her eyes, and did not translate their expression into any selfless language.
"Mai/b2/"
She looked at him, and somehow her hands went out. She had for him that strange, indefinable something. His tremblings were hers, his angers, his bewilderments. There were things that she set aside.
"Oh, my dear/b2/"
He put his head down on her shoulder.
"Oh, what a kid I am! I want to tell you." She had taken him into the kitchen and there they had sat side by side on a couple of wooden chairs with the kitchen range showing its black teeth at them like an idol with a head full of live coals. She had listened. She was sufficiently unpractical to understand him and his moods. She knew that she would never ask him to be Young Logic, and that she would love him the better for his sensitive outbursts, for there was a part of her that was made of moonlight. Common sense, with her fat arms in the washtub, cheerfully bids the man-child not to be a fool. Oh, those stupidly cheerful people! With one hand pressing his head against her cheek, she suffered him to express his self-realisations.
"But don't you think that his last few years will have been rather happy years?"
"But one takes so much for granted. One gets so absorbed."
She smiled over him, one of those half-whimsical—half-tender smiles which are to a woman's face what the genius of the artist is to the portrait. Of course he took things for granted. He was taking her for granted. He was absorbed at that very moment in intimate and personal emotion. She was his one and complete Mary, a mirror, a voice, his own
-
individual conception of her as Mary. But she could say of him: "You dear, funny, lovable old child." She could forgive him for failing to feel that she had a particular and poignant problem of her own.
"I expect we look at things rather differently."
"But do we?"
"When you are old. I think old people feel the chill of the unknown. They want to feel warm and human and sociable, and near to those they love. They ask for kindness. Wouldn't one?"
"I suppose so. But then—the Venerable has done all the giving."
"Oh, no, my dear. Besides—I'll tell you how I came to understand. Gil had to go to one of the leading oculists, and when the doctor found out that we were rather poor he would not take any fees from me. He was an old man. And I was rather young, and uncomfortable, and I tried to persuade him to let me pay. I remember a look—almost of pain and of appeal on his face. He said: 'Young lady, I am an old man. May I not be allowed to do something for the love of the thing? What is money to me?'"
"Yes, that's rather fine. It touches one."
"Besides, it's so natural'.
But she had Gil in the other room, and her thoughts passed from lover to brother. She was troubled about Gil, without being able to decide what it was that troubled her. Her eyes were fixed upon the black bars of the range and the red glow behind them, and she was made to think of faces in the fire, monstrous faces, fantastic masks. Gil puzzled her. He had the air of being much better friends with himself, and she should have been glad, but her gladness was clouded. She had divined a something in the house, as though she were meeting drifts of elusive perfume, or as though a face smiled at her, and then smiled differently when her back was turned. She had caught glimpses of her brother in a mirror.
She made a moveinent.
"Are you coming to see Gil?"
"Of course. How's the music?"
She rose and stood looking at the black bars and the live fire behind them.
"He seems much more cheerful."
A sprawling figure in an arm-chair; that was Lance's first
-
impression of Merris. He was struck by the length of the fellow's legs, and the feet in light blue socks cocked on a footstool. Mary was saying: "Here's Lance," and Lance saw a head turned on a cushion, and that blind face looking curiously sleek and complacent.
"Full of plum pudding?"
Yes, a kind of sleek smirk, a languor which somehow suggested arrogance, a stillness that condescended. It was a complex of impressions. And that facetiously—"Full of plum pudding?"
Lance moved to the fire. His responses were casual.
"I prefer mince pies."
"Find 'em inspiring? Mary tells me you always write on a full stomach."
"I suppose that's so."
"How do you manage the blood to the brain?"
Mary had left them alone together, and Lance sat down with an air of deliberation. He looked attentively for a moment at the velvet jacket and the amber tie, and the little clipped beard, and those blue socks complacently solacing themselves. And then he turned his eyes to the fire. He was embarrassed by a sudden quickening of the dislike he had always felt for Merris. He did not want to look at him. He did not want to be very near to him. Physically—the reaction might be described as a distaste for a man who did not wash. But why this facetiousness, this almost smug lounging in front of the fire, a suspicion of something swollen? Mary had used the word "cheerful," but it struck Lance as being inadequate, perhaps consciously so. A one-word atmosphere is like a picture that is all blue or all red, and Merris might be the colour of raw flesh, but he was clothed. Lance wondered.
Was it Merris's music? Was this velvet coat a pose? Had the fellow conceived a "soul child," and was he swaggering like a young mother? If so—he Lance supposed that it was all to the good, and the beard could not be helped, and the amber tie was a coloured gesture. He said: "How's the piano, Merris?" and saw Merris's long fingers go up to caress his beard.
"The piano is very well, "Pybus, thank you. And how is the pen? Does it fountain as it should?"
"I use a steel nib, Lady's—medium point."
-
From Merris came a kind of chuckle, a dry sound, like leaves blown about.
"Symbolical of sex—I suppose."
There was silence. Lance had travelled beyond the "Damn the fellow" mood, the Englishman's natural reaction. Irony implies a subtle self-conceit. To condescend is to provoke an echo. And Lance, frowning at the fire, did suppose that he had condescended to Merris, and that the fellow was sufficiently sensitive to feel and to resent it. But that did not explain Merris's transfiguration, the suggestion of a sleek chuckle.
"You ought to do something with your music."
"Think so?"
"I do," e
"Then—there cannot be any doubt about it."
When a man attempts irony he challenges you to rag him, but Lance heard Mary enter the room, and with her she seemed to bring the muteness of a smothered question. Lance felt self-conscious. It would be little help to her to find them like a couple of pert and squabbling children. He stood up, and, looking at his watch by the light of the fire, remembered his grandfather.
"Going?"
"Yes. I'm expected—there."
His eyes said more, and, turning in the doorway, he looked back at her brother.
"Good night, Gil. I meant what I said about your music. I know you think me a confounded prig."
He saw Merris's profile against the fire.
"Same to you, Pybus. Good luck to the steel nib."
Mary followed Lance out into the passage, and, taking from a peg the old raincoat she wore when at work in bad weather, she held it up to him. Saying nothing—he helped her on with the coat. It was she who opened the door, and let in the raw wet night.
"England/b2/"
His hand touched hers. He felt the droop of her, a sudden tiredness, a questioning of life. She looked into the wet, dark drizzle with wide eyes.
"I'm coming a little way."
"No hat?"
"Does it matter?"
-
He slipped an arm round her. She had comforted him, and he in his turn felt that she asked for comfort; that she was discouraged, and troubled. They went through the gate into the lane, and his sense of her nearness was poignant and very precious. Never had she seemed so near, or so ready to lean.
"What did you think of Gil?"
He was aware of her looking up into his face.
"Seems more pleased with life, doesn't he? I suppose it is the piano, and self-expression."
"I wish I knew."
The note of distress and of doubt in her voice shocked him.
"Don't you know?"
"No."
"He isn't getting that stuff/b2/?"
"I've wondered. But how/b2/? Oh, my dear, it makes me feel so sordid. This eternal watching and suspecting."
He held her closer.
"Look here, Mary—this can't go on. I want you to let me do something about it. You have given too much of yourself. It is time someone else did the giving."
"But what can one do?"
"Be intelligently selfish. There are places where Gil could be cared for. I could arrange it. I know someone who would help."
He felt her stiffen.
"One of those anonymous places! I couldn't. You see—I promised myself/b2/"
He paused, and, standing still, he felt the rain on his face. He was conscious of a sense of struggle, of the wilful lover in him urging a claim. He was conscious, also, of her leaning against him with a kind of pathetic rigidity, and it seemed to him that two men in him held her. His mouth touched her hair. It was all wet with the rain. And there ran through him an instant, infinite tenderness.
"Mary, I'll do just what you wish. But, my dear, I want you to be happy."
She pressed her wet head against his face.
"It's so hard. Be patient with me, oh—be patient. There's a something that pulls me. I can't help it, Lance. I'm made that way."
He said: "I know. It's just because you are Mary."
-
When man has become civilised he is a gentle opener and closer of doors, and Lance found the Venerable asleep in his arm-chair in front of the fire.
Lance did not wake his grandfather, and stepping softly to look at him he seemed to see a little, old, tired child curled up in the chair. His sleep was very soundless and still, and his breathing so shallow that for a moment Lance wondered which sleep it was—the sleep of to-day or that of the great to-morrow.
Slipping out of his wet mackintosh, and, kneeling first on one knee and then on the other to take off his shoes, he sat down on an old green plush footstool close to his grandfather's feet. The Venerable's head, reposing on a red cushion, had a mystical whiteness. His hands were crossed over the lower button of his black alpaca coat. And Lance looked at his grandfather's hands; always meticulously clean, and with a skin that had none of the branny harshness of old age; they had—or seemed to have—on this last night of the old year—a tenuous pallor. They were typical, the hands of a very clean and proud old man; but to Lance they were much more than that. They were the hands of a worker, hands which had bestowed upon him a worker's benediction, and the blessing of human understanding. "Great old man—even in his sleep," thought Lance, and felt in his pocket for that cheque of his father's. He unfolded it, and, holding it with both hands, seemed to consider it, as though the words and figures were mystic symbols. His father's signature, too, "Probyn Pybus"—with a flourish of the two Y's and a looped line drawn beneath it—was a sign in the heavens. Lance smiled; he was smiling at the Lance of yesterday, and looking with a ruthless self-knowledge at the Lance of to-morrow. "Till he took me in hand," he reflected, "I was just damned clever, a precious young highbrow. I suppose he taught me to feel."
And then the Venerable woke up without Lance being aware of the opening of those very blue eyes. Old Pybus looked at his grandson, and at the piece of paper held 'y his grandson's fingers. He too smiled.
"I think I have been asleep, my dear."
Lance did not move, nor did he attempt to conceal his father's cheque.
-
"So you have, grandpater. And now you have mentioned it—I want you to do more sleeping. Getting up at six on a winter morning isn't n
Old Pybus drew up his feet and sat erect in his chair.
"Probyn gave you that, my dear?"
"Yes, he's a Pybus, grandpater. And I took it."
"Because?"
"Yes—in a way. And because—I think I had a glimpse of what was at the back of his mind. I suppose one learns to take things—though I seem to have been doing nothing but taking. Marygave me a hint."
"On—
"Partly. Bate grandpater—don't you think you could retire? What I mean is—I feel—that it's my turn—our turn. You see/b2/"
Old Pybus laid a hand on his grandson's shoulder.
"My dear—I understand you. But I like doing things. Old people do, you know. They treat me very gently here. I'd like to go on doing things. Is shall like it all the better for knowing/b2/"
Lance slowly and softly folded up his father's cheque.
"You're an old war-horse, grandpater. But—I wish/b2/"
"Well, my dear, the wish is the thing that matters."
-
/ch/
Wuen a north-east wind blew over Castle Craven it blew bitterly, and the old town would turn up a grey collar and huddle itself under the hurrying sky. The halliards of the flagstaff on the church tower kept up a monotonous clapping. The roar of the wind joined the roar of the river. The Venerable's pigeons sought out sheltered corners, the warm side of chimney stacks, the angles of dormer windows. In the Brent valley and on the hills landscape and sky gave the impression of movement, the trees blown all one way and looking as though they were trying to run from that bitter blast, but were rooted to the ground by terror. Lance, at work in his upper room, kept the oil-stove very near; paper and pen were cold, and now and again he had to hold his hands over the stove.
As usual, old Pybus got out of bed at six. He had an alarum clock on the table beside him, and Lance would hear the clock's reverberations, and tumble out into the raw gloom to light a candle, and hurry downstairs in trousers and shirt to forestall his grandfather and put a match to the fire. The Venerable felt the cold. On these mornings his face had a grey, pinched look, and he would rub his hands to get the blood moving in his fingers.
"I wish you would stay in bed, grandpater, until the room is warm."
But the Venerable was obstinate. For ten years or so he had gone on duty at half past seven, and the Saracen Inn was his ship. He had to see what that lubber of a lad was doing, whether the doorstep was as white as it should be, and the hall and lounge clean and tidy. He examined every ash-tray, sorted out the letters and tucked them under the tapes on the green board, gave the brass gong a polish, and kept an eye on the fires. As he had confessed to Lance, he liked doing these simple things, and though he had no fear
-
of death, he loved the day's rhythm, the realities of its routine. His mysticism did not lack hands.
At half past seven he would walk off up the yard, wrapped up in a black overcoat. Lance insisted upon the overcoat, for the yard had a draughtiness on these winter mornings, and as likely as not the Venerable would loiter to whistle to the pigeons. He began the day by throwing out the crusts and two handfuls of seed to them. And at night Lance would carry the oil-stove into his grandfather's bedroom half an hour before the Venerable went up to bed. Until this winter old Pybus had scorned a hot bottle, but he had been persuaded to allow that it warmed your feet and helped you to fall asleep. That north-easter was not blowing on the night when Mary came up to Castle Craven to share a little fiesta with Lance and the Venerable. It was the Venerable's birthday. Probyn had been over in the morning with his conception of what a birthday present should be, Probyn the practical, the wool merchant, whose fleece was turning to goblin gold. He had brought a fur-lined overcoat, six flannel shirts, the same number of thick pants and vests, and a precious copy of Gerard's Herbal. He had swallowed a glass of sherry and some emotion, Even in the late nineteen-twenties England and a Pybus could be old England and old Pybus. Cars might blow their trumpets, but there were some walls that had not fallen.
Lance had ordered the dinner, and had tipped the Saracen cook. Also, he had managed to procure flowers, a posy for the Venerable, and violets for Mary. Also propped against old Pybus's glass was the dedicationof "Rust," lettered in old-English type by Mary—"To the Venerable."
Old Pybus was wearing his famous made-to-measure suit, and the tortoiseshell glass with the black silk ribbon.
"In honour of you, my dear. This is how we did things at Trinity when Lance and I were up. Hallo—what's this?"
He had been man/oe/uvred into his own chair and kept there with his back to the table until George, the head-waiter, appeared in person with the soup-tureen bl "It's a little previous, grandpater. Mary worked it in ivory ack."
Lance was referring to the dedication and not to the soup,
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but his grandfather took the half sheet of vellum-paper into his hand, and the paper trembled just a little.
"Thank you, my Near. The more one wants to say—the less there is to be said. But it's a great gesture."
He looked across at Mary.
"So your colour-box is out at last. Ivory black instead of rose-madder or vermillion. You must keep the rose-madder for Lance."
He laughed.
"Moods and a colour-box. But at my age! Now—just how old am I? Ought I to tell?"
"Does it matter, Venerable?"
"Unless I want to boast about it, my dear. But I think not. Supposing we wish" Rust "as many editions as I have had birthdays."
"How the highbrows would hate me. Seventy shameful editions!"
"Offer them the chance, my dear, and see them jump."
He was in great spirits, for here were these two young things sitting down with an old fellow on his seventy somethingth birthday, and looking at him lovingly. They were gentle to him, not with the patronage of youth, but with a fine and delicate courtesy, because that old body of his was growing frail. And he had nothing but a few hundreds to leave to either of them. His amber had no such fly in it. He was the Venerable, the head of the house, their ancient of days.
And certainly he was not dull. He shared and enjoyed their glances. He sat there like a benedictino, with a little twinkle of tender teasing in his blue eyes. Here was romance, the romance of reality, the quintessence of human mysticism, a marriage of mind and emotion.
They drank red wine. George had warmed it, and it was bland and mellow, and the Venerable felt that red wine was sacramental. When Lance poured him out a second glass, old Pybus appeared to reflect for a moment before raising the glass. He made a little bow to Mary, and a little bow to Lance.
"Your health, my dears."
They touched glasses.
"Sanctus simplicitas. I wish you both something better than happiness."
He did not wish them the absence of any shadow, for
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shadows have their uses, nor was he thinking of their particular shadow. The man with the blind eyes had been left at home with his piano, though Lance had suggested his joining the party. There need be no ungraciousness in a refusal, but Merris had been ungracious. "No, thanks. I'm not part of the celebration," He had refused with a little smirk of irony, but without spleen. But there may have been some significance in their forgetting of Merris on that particular evening. He was less than a shadow. If they thought of him at all they thought of him at his piano, absorbed in the sounds of his own creating, a human disharmony which would have clashed with the leitmotif of this particular occasion.
Lance had left his chair to pour out the Venerable a glass of port when there came a knocking at the door. He stood with the decanter poised, and with a downward smile at his grandfather.
"I can guess what that is."
"George in a hurry?"
"I divine a deputation. The staff of the Saracen presents its compliments and congratulations to Mr. Pybus."
The Venerable made a movement as of sitting erect and ready in his chair.
"Better see, my dear."
Lance passed the decanter to Mary, and went to the door. He had a smile ready, but the smile was not needed. He saw a girl standing there, and on her face was something indescribable, a kind of sullen, wet horror.
"I want to see Miss Mary."
Lance held the door open.
"You had better come in."
The girl's eyes were fixed in a stare upon his collar.
"No—I won't. I want to see her out here. Something's happened." Lance had brought the little aluminum saucepan from the kitchen and placed it on the hob of the sitting-room fire. It contained their coffee, but they were not to drink that coffee. He turned to look at the Venerable, who was sitting very erect in his chair with an air of almost grim attentiveness. They could hear the two voices out there in the darkness. Mary had closed the door.
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Old Pybus's eyes met his grandson's.
"Something?"
Lance nodded. He felt that there was nothing to be said while those moments of tension lasted. Something—yes—something! It was the girl who was doing most of the talking; her voice, hysterical and slightly shrill, seemed to hammer at the room's silence with a couple of emotional fists. Her words came in snatches between sharp spasms of breathing.
"He just wanted to enjoy himself—that's all. Don't look at me like that.—Yes—I can feel you looking. How was I to think of such a thing happening? You shut him up—you did. He never had any fun. Oh—dear—oh—dear. I just wanted him to have a little fun. Oh, my God, he's lying down there. No—they didn't stop—blast them. When I saw—I just ran. Yes—up here. I'm about done."
Old Pybus, as though some blind instinct was groping in him, felt in his pocket for his pipe. He looked up as Lance made a sudden movement towards the door. He held up a hand.
"No—my dear."
"Grandpater, did you hear? She said/b2/"
"Yes—I heard. We snap like dogs when we are in pain. Be still."
The wailing voice began again.
"He was just merry—he was. "Nelly, I'll race you," he said, just like that. How was I to know that he was going to do such a thing? I saw the lights of the car coming—and I shouted to him and ran after him down the road. He didn't seem to hear the car."
Said that other voice, Mary's voice—"You say he didn't seem to hear. Yet he could run. You must tell me—how bad he was. It's everything."
"Oh, Miss, it's cruel."
"No, no,—don't you see? Did he know that car was coming?"
"I don't think he knowed—Miss. He wouldn't have done it, would he—on purpose?"
The door opened and Mary came in. She did not look at either of them, but at the chair on which she had left her hat and coat. Her eyes were like two dark hollows in her white face. She stood there as though bewildered.
Lance went to her.
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"We heard. We couldn't help it. I'll go, dear." She pointed to het coat. "No—I must go. Could you send people—a doctor?" Old Pybus got out of his chair. "Lance—you/b2/'." Of course/b2/"
"I'll see to the other things." Lance held Mary's coat. "I'm coming—dear. I must. Where did the girl say?" She seemed to set and stiffen her throat and shoulders. "Between the bridge and our lane. On the main road." They went out together past the dim, half-defiant, half-cringing figure of the girl. "Nelly, you must come."
"Oh—I couldn't. Miss. It's too horrible—him lying there—on the grass."
"You must. You must show us. Hold my hand." They took the path by the castle field and down through the hanging beech woods, Lance first going to the Saracen yard to borrow a hurricane lamp which was used in windy weather. Returning, he met his grandfather, buttoning up his coat, and ready with the matches that Lance had forgotten.
"What a night, grandpater."
Old Pybus's face was strangely impassive.
"Some things—are better—as they are. Have they goneon?"
"Yes."
"I'll send the other people to you."
Lance found the two women waiting for him where the path turned by the old sally-port of the castle and a windblown ash spread its branches like a sheltering hand. The lamp threw a pool of light, and Lance held it so that their faces were in the shadow. The girl, huddled against the wall beside Mary's erect and waiting figure, was crying into a crumpled handkerchief.
"I'll go first—and light the path for you."
He was aware of the stillness of the trees. There was a smell of moist and rotting leaves, and here and there a root writhed like a snake across the path. The branches of the beeches lost
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themselves in the blackness above, and he had a curious feeling of being closed up in a little shell of darkness with those two following figures. He had things to say to Mary, tender, reassuring things, and he could not utter them because of that snivelling girl. She had not the virtue of silence. The river below them was full of the winter's hurry, and superimposed upon its chant were the blurtings of tragedy.
"He only had two glasses. I'll swear it, Miss. We just turned in—so to speak."
Lance winced. He heard Mary's sharply agonised: "Oh, be quiet." Yes, why couldn't the fool be quiet; or did tragedy demand a pitiful, blubbering clown? But what a culmination! The girl's blurtings had painted the crude picture, those two going off together in the darkness, the common pub below the bridge, Merris's red mouth and blind eyes, the fever in him, the hurried—greedy gulpings. He had come out from the place, playful, inflamed, like any hobbledehoy, to stagger about the dark road, to dare the girl to an absurd race. What a picture! The very word "pub," public-house, smelling of that vulgarity that is so English or Nordic, beer, sweat, a steamy—stuffy room, mouths adhering to cheap glasses, gin, sawdust, silly laughter, silly voices!
He heard Mary say: "I don't blame you, Nelly. Try to be quiet." And suddenly the situation was saved, and snatched away from that smell of beer and of beastliness. He understood that in Mary there was pity, some strange and compassionate mercy shown to this other woman. Something quivered in his throat. Oh, thank God! And again he heard the river running, and smelt the fragrance of those autumn leaves, and somehow the night was clean. Ah, Mary! He wanted to face about and touch her, gather something that was hers and put his lips to it. She was greatness; she was woman.
They came down to the bridge over the river, and the bracket lamp on the parapet showed an empty curve. Lance paused. He had the calmness of pity. He was inspired.
"Nelly—how far down the road—was it?"
Her voice came back to him with a dull gentleness. She too was absorbing Mary.
"About a quarter of a mile, sir, I should say. Just where there's an oak tree in the hedge."
"I'll go on ahead."
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He looked at Mary, and Mary was silent, but her silence thanked him. He went on.
Holding the lamp shoulder high he came to the place where Merris lay where the car had flung him. The road was empty. There were the hedgerows and the dim shape of the oak tree, and a curve of green grass. Merris lay on his back with his arms spread. His face was untouched; it expressed sleep, a strange tranquillity.
Lance put the lamp on the grass and knelt down. It was the first time that he had seen death, but even in his innocence he seemed to know that death was here. He put out the lamp, and Mary, marking from a little distance the sudden vanishing of the light, divined it to be a signal. She stood still; she closed her eyes for a moment so that the inward darkness of realisation matched the outer darkness. She spoke to the girl.
"Nelly, you can go home."
The girl stood and shivered.
"Did you see the light go out, Miss?"
"Yes. You can go home. You need not come with me any farther."
She went on alone, and Lance, hearing her footsteps, stood wondering whether she had seen and understood. His impulse was to go and mect her, and yet he remained motionless, holding the lamp. She was very near.
She was just a dim shape in the darkness, and he was surprised at the stillness of everything, at the strange and almost secret way things happened.
"MM.
"You put out the light?"
"Yes, you saw."
"Oh, my dear, how I have failed!"
Her cry of distress went through him. He put the lamp down on the grass. She did not resist his arms; she let herself be taken and held; she gave herself up.
"Beloved, what are you saying? You gave everything."
"He's dead. Did you hear what she said to me? That I shut him up, that he was dull, that he'wanted to enjoy things."
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"Oh, my dear, and you were gentle to her. It wasn't so. You're not to think of it in that way."
"Oh, poor Gil!"
He took her face between his hands.
"Mary, my Mary, it's not true. You were perfectly wonderful to him. You're wonderful to me now. You always will be. What more could you have given? Oh, don't tremble like this."
Her eyes were closed.
"Hold me, Lance, hold me; don't let me go. It's all dark."
"I'll hold you, Mary, always. Put your head down, dear."
She did not weep; she made a kind of broken murmuring and all the while his lips were pressed against her hair. He just held her and loved her. In a little while she grew calm. She looked up into his face, and stood off, but with her hands upon his shoulders.
"I'd like him taken home."
"I'll bring him home. They'll be here—very soon. But ou? >
"I'm going home."
"But, Mary, can you—alone? I can't let you/b2/"
"I can," she said, "I wish to."
"Dear, you're brave."
She made a little movement of the head.
"Oh, one has to be. It's all rather dim and strange at present. I feel as though something had hit me, and dulled me. I'd rather go."
He was loath to let her go.
"But—Mary/b2/"
"I want to do things. It helps to do things. Stay here—for me—Lance—my dearest, and bring him back."
"It's as you wish. I'll run on after you when they come."
Holding his hand, she turned and looked at something that was like a shadow on the dim grass.
"Poor Gil. I'm going now, dear. You'll wait." Later, Lance was glad that Mary had gone, for hard upon the heels of Law and Medicine came a little rabble from the river alleys of Castle Craven intrigued by the rumour that
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someone had been smashed up. A grey-headed sergeant of police, pushing two women aside whose heads strained forward into the little circle of light with looks of greedy curiosity, joined the doctor and a constable. "Stand back, will you." There were three or four children poking about among the legs of their elders. Headlights glared. The driver of the ambulance, who had left his engine running, remarked to someone, and that someone happened to be Lance: "They do like the smell of blood."
Lance looked fierce. He saw these pushing, peering fi as cattle round a feeding-pen. He went and stood beside old Pybus, who had come down with the doctor. The Venerable was as muffled up in silence as he was in his big, black coat.
"I'm glad she didn't stay. I'm going on, Venerable."
His grandfather nodded.
"What does she wish?"
"She asked to have him there."
"Better tell them."
The doctor was drawing aside, and Lance took his place, and spoke to the sergeant. He said what he had to say, and the sergeant, looking up over a big shoulder, observed that there would be an inquest, and that the Castle Craven mortuary was more useful than a private house. Lance did not argue. "It's Miss Merris's wish, sergeant. I promised," and the sergeant—with an air of philosophic and official tolerance—replied with an "All right, sir." Lance was feeling restive. He shouldered somebody aside, and stood by his grandfather.
"I'm going on. Will you see that they—do what she wishes, grandpater."
Old Pybus touched his grandson's shoulder.
"I will, my dear."
Lance ran. He was glad of the darkness and of the raw night air in his face, and glad to lose those glaring headlights and the little swarm of surreptitious, craning figures. The smell of blood! A thrill! Someone smashed up! Just like Brooklands, with a rushing and a jostling round the circus rails. Did a crowd ever think? And yet people could be so extraordinarily decent. But when he came to the"Marions" lane he dropped to a walk, feeling somehow that he must tread softly up this little path of many memories. His consciousness was Mary's. His restiveness, his resentments and his scorns
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died away in his consciousness of her tragedy. "Oh, my dear, how I have failed!" He would never forget that cry of hers and the way it had moved him. As if she could fail a man! Why, she was as unique as the Venerable.
He came to the gate, and paused. He saw the winter hedges, hazel and thorn and holly, the bare fruit trees, the two old yews, and set behind and among them four lighted windows. She had lit her lamps and her candles, and he was made to think of torches, a pyre, the whimsies of her tragic tenderness. No house dark and dubious and secretive. She asked for light. She had willed light, and the sensitive man-child in him applauded her. He went through the white gate with a swelling of the throat.
The door under the porch was open. He went in. He seemed to know instinctively where he would find her. She was sitting in front of the fire, elbows on knees, her face between her hands. She looked round and up at him with a dark silence of the eyes.
"They are coming."
Her eyes went back to the fire, and kneeling beside her he too looked into the heart of the fire. All was over. The lane was empty, and old Pybus stood in the porch, buttoning up his coat.
"I shall stay here to-night, grandpater."
"Quite right, my dear. She ought not to be left alone."
"She says that she is going to sit by him all night. She thinks she's failed. As if she could fail! If she can keep a wake, so can I."
Old Pybus realised that he had forgotten his hat. His big head was so very full of other matters.
"My hat, my dear. Left it in the sitting-room. Yes, you keep your vigil. I think I'll be getting back now."
Lance went for his grandfather's hat. Their voices had been hushed, and so were his footsteps, for death was lying under a white sheet, but Mary had ears.
"Grandpater—I forgot; you'll have to walk. You ought to have gone back with the ambulance."
"Walking won't kill me, my dear."
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"I wish I'd thought. I'll come with you as far as the end of the lane."
And at the end of the lane they parted, Lance turning back to his vigil. Old Pybus loitered for a moment, looking at the lights of Castle Craven and seeing the old hill town as a fantastic birthday cake upon which life had stuck some seventy candles. And life and death had conspired to give him a present.
"I'm not sorry. No—I'm damned if I'm sorry."
Suddenly, he heard his grandson's voice coming to him from the darkness of the lane.
"Grandpater."
"Hallo."
"I'm sorry your day ended like this. But many happy returns of other days."
Old Pybus raised his hat.
"The same to you, my dear; the same to both of you."
He went upon his way with great content.
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/ch/
Lixe the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, Lance Pybus slept, though he had watched with his invisible Mary through the first watches of the night. The fire was grey ash, and the lamp had burnt itself out when he woke in his chair to find Mary standing beside him. A little light was sifting through the curtains, and her figure was wraithlike.
"Mary! I'm sorry. I've been asleep."
She touched his cheek with her hand, and her fingers were very cold.
"Why not? You were here, and I felt you here. And now we begin the day."
He took and held her hand as he rose.
"Dear—you're very cold, and I have let the fires out. I'm quite an expert at fires. Where shall I find things?"
"I'll show you."
She pulled back the curtains from the window looking on the orchard, and they saw the trees like ghost trees between a dim grey sky and the frosted grass. The day was coming up, a beginning of things and an ending of things, and they stood to watch the orchard coming to life, and the trees ceasing to be ghosts. And in the chill of the winter dawn they drew together with a calm and quiet consciousness of new horizons.
She was the first to move.
"Come.—We'll light the fires, and I'll get you some breakfast."
He kissed her softly on the forehead, a salute of honour.
"Always—and for ever, Mary." When Lance went out into the lane a winter sun was shining upon glistening hedgerows and frosted grass. A thin blue sky covered the zenith. The earth felt firm and clean and ringing under his feet.
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He lit a pipe and looked across at Castle Craven. What a day! It was one of those live and vivid mornings in the midst of winter, and he walked fast, full of himself and of those other selves. The day was both to-day and to-morrow; it envisaged many morrows; it had sunlight and blue sky.
He took the path up through the beeches to the castle field. The clock in the church tower struck nine. He saw the Venerable's pigeons flashing white wings, and lining the roof tops. Dear old Venerable! He entered the cottage and saw the fire alight and cheerful, and his grandfather's breakfast things still on the table. Old Pybus had gone on duty, and Lance, with a glance at the fire, closed the door on that familiar and quiet room, and walked up through the Saracen yard to the white door in the red wall.
He opened it; he walked half-way along the passage, and stood still. He saw a figure lying on the floor below the big brass gong. A woman was kneeling; a waiter and a boy were bending forward.
The kneeling woman looked up into Lance's face. He was gazing at his grandfather and not at her—though he was aware of a sound of weeping.
"He'd just been upstairs to carry down a bag. He came and stood here—just as he always did. I heard something fall."
Lance was staring.
"He must have struck the gong as he fell. It was flashing and swinging when I rushed out. But doesn't he look grand and peaceful."
Lance knelt down. He saw nothing but the Venerable's face, tranquil, vaguely smilingL.
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OLD PYBUS
Old Pybus is the third book which Warwick Deeping has written since Sorrell and Son made him famous wherever books are read. It contains perhaps in an even greater degree than do Doomsday and Kitty those elements of understanding and sympathy which, in a day whose fiction is not notable for either characteristic, are its author's strength. It is a quality of Warwick Deeping, one perhaps responsible in no small degree for the appeal he makes to all conditions of men and women, that he has this understanding and sympathy for age as well as for youth. Many a modern author can write delightSully of the young people he sees about him. But an author who can link the generations, who can look forward into the future and grasp the vision of youth and back into the past and understand the longings of age, is a landmark in the novel-writing of whatever language he uses. THIS BOOK HAS BEEN SET ON THE MONOTYPE IN BASKERVILLE, ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NOR= WOOD, MASSACHUSETTS. BOUND IN SUNPROOF CLOTH BY H. WOLFF ESTATE, NEW YORK. THE PAPER WAS MADE BY W. CG. HAMILTON & SONS, MIQUON, PA. THE BINDING IS
AFTER DRAWINGS BY MR. PERCY SMITH.
—cov