Chapter III: Part 3

She shook her head. It was getting dark and they walked on past his home further into the country. The eve was late, but it had come suddenly without the deliberation of sunset or the tenuity of dusk. Each tree was a hatful of the arriving blackness. They stood by a white gate under an elm, but they had little to say to each other.

"Come to my house," he urged again and again. She shook her head. He was indignant at her distrust of him. Perhaps she was right, but he would never forgive her. The sky was now darker than the road; the sighing air was warm, with drifting spots of rain.

"Tell me," she suddenly said, taking his arm, "has anybody else ever loved you like that."

He prevaricated: "Like what?" He waited a long time for her answer. She gave it steadily. "Like you want me to love you."

He, too, hesitated. He kissed her. He wanted to tell her it was not wise to pry.

"Tell me," she urged, "tell me."

"Yes," he replied. He could not see her plainly in the darkness, but he knew of the tears that fell from her eyes.

"How unreasonable!" he thought, "how stupid!" He began to tell the truth to her, about his feelings towards her, and towards those others, and about themselves--the truth as he conceived it.

She was almost alarmed, certainly shocked.

"But you don't believe such things," she almost shivered, "I'm sure you don't, it isn't right, it is not true."

"It may not be true," he declared implacably, "but I believe it. The real warrant for holding a belief is not that it is true but that it satisfies you."

She did not seem to understand that; she only answered irrelevantly, "I'll make it up to you some day. I shall not change, David, towards you. We have got all our lives before us. I shan't alter, will you?"

"Not alter!" he began angrily, but then subduedly added, with a grim irony that she did not gather in; "No, I shall not alter." She leaned upon his breast murmuring: "I'll make it all up to you, some day."

He felt like a sick-minded man and was glad when they parted. He went back to his cottage grumbling audibly to himself. Why could he not take this woman with the loving and constant heart and wed her? He did not know why, but he knew he never would do that. She was fine to look upon, but she had ideas (if you could call them ideas) which he disliked. Her instincts and propensities were all wrong, they were antagonistic to him, just as, he felt, his were antagonistic to her. What was true, though, was her sorrow at what she called their misunderstandings; and what was profound, what was almost convincing, was her assumption (which but measured her own love for him) that he could not cease to love _her_. How vain that was. He had not loved any woman in the form she thought all love must take. These were not misunderstandings, they were just simply at opposite ends of a tilted beam; he the sophisticated, and she the innocent beyond the reach of his sophistries. But Good Lord! what did it all matter? what did anything matter? He would not see her again. He undressed, and got into bed. He thought of Julia, of Ianthe, of Kate.... He had a dream in which he lay in a shroud upon a white board and was interrogated by a saint who carried a reporter's notebook and a fountain pen.

"What is your desire, sick-minded man?" the saint interrogated him, "what consummation would exalt your languid eyes?"

"I want the present not to be. It is neither grave nor noble."

"Then that _is_ your sickness. That mere negation is at once your hope and end."

"I do not know."

"If the present so derides the dignified past surely your desire lies in a future incarnating beautiful old historic dreams?"

"I do not know."

"Ideals are not in the past. They do not exist in any future. They rush on, and away, beyond your immediate activities, beyond the horizons that are for ever fixed, forever charging down upon us."

"I do not know."

"What is it you do know?" asked the exasperated Saint, jerking his fountain pen to loosen its flow, and Masterman replied like a lunatic:

"I know that sealing wax is a pure and beautiful material, and you get such a lot of it for a penny."

He woke and could not sleep again. He cursed Kate, he jeered at Julia, he anathematised Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild once more their broken images.

4

For a time the breach between them could not be healed, and during its interregnum he began to meet Ianthe again. But her eager devotion had lost its savour now, and he was conscious of his own mere amorous predacity, of treason to the dumb but benignant Kate, the sad-visaged woman whose chilly regard had riveted him, whose reproach unspoken and indeed unseen hovered almost annoyingly in his imagination.

Ianthe behaved evilly to Kate when she discovered that mutual infatuation for their one lover. Echoes of the sisters' feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him, touched him and moved him on Kate's behalf; all his loyalty belonged to her. What did it matter that he could not fathom his desire for her, or that Ianthe was his for a word, or that Kate's implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?

Kate was devout in the perfunctory way that denotes no apprehension of the mystery of sublime recognitions but is yet an effectual moral breakwater, she could be neither saint nor sinner. But her mind held fast to its promise: she would make it up, she would make it all up some day: and she did not feel or know that this was as much a promise to herself as to the man she loved.

They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremours of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of her. But all her qualms were lulled, he did not appear in any of the half-anticipated _negligé_, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.

"My dear!" he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: "Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously irresistibly lovely. How do you do it--or how do I fail so?"

She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large rusty nails projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to be lowered for sleeping; huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a corner beside a bureau; there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It was warm in there, but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window; the April air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and shivered.

"It is very nice," she said to him once, "but it's strange, and I feel that I ought not to be here."

"O, never mind where you ought to be," he cried, pouring out the coffee, "that's where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and adorn it, it's your native setting, Kate. No--I know exactly what is running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here. Well, I don't. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour. Come and look at things."

He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many-folding valleys, and so on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown, in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. Airs of wandering winds came in, odours of herbs, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy was firing some heaps of scutch grass and the smoke wore across the land in dense deliberate wreaths. Sportsmen's guns were sounding from the hollow park.

Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.

"Breakfast will be cold."

How queerly he looked at her before he said: "Yes, of course, breakfast will be getting cold," and then added, inconsequently: "Flowers are like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend humbly before it: but even the most modest desire the sun."

When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full of curious, not to say absurd, superstitions about herself and about him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding; her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn't any doubts must have many illusions.

He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit twenty yards away sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. "Hoi!" cried Kate, and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem much afraid.

"Is it wounded?" she asked.

"No, I think it is a tame one, escaped from a farm or a cottage near us, I expect."

Kate crept after it on hands and knees and it let her approach. She offered it the core of an apple she had just eaten. The rabbit took it and bit her finger. Then Kate caught it by the ears. It squealed but Kate held it to her bosom with delight, and the rabbit soon rested there, if not with delight at least with ease. It was warm against her breast. It was delicious to feel it there, to pull its ears and caress its fat flank, but as she was doing this she suddenly saw that its coat was infested with fleas. She dropped the rabbit with a scream of disgust and it rushed into the thicket.

"Come here," said Masterman to her, "let me search you, this is distressing."

She knelt down before him and in spite of her wriggling he reassured her. "It's rather a nice blouse," he said.

"I don't care for it. I shall not wear it again. I shall sell it to some one or give it to them."

"I would love to take it from you...."

"You! Take it from me?"

"Yes, stitch by stitch."

With an awkward movement of her arm she thrust at his face, crying loudly "No, how dare you speak to me like that!"

"Is it very daring?" For a moment he saw her clenched hands, detestably bloodless, a symbol of roused virtue; but at once her anger was gone, Kate was contrite and tender. She touched his face with her white fingers softly as the settling of a moth. "O, why did we come here?"

He did not respond to her caresses, he was sullen, they left the spinney; but as they walked she took his arm murmuring:

"Forgive me, I'll make it all up to you, some day."

Coyness and cunning, passion and pride, were so much at odds that later on they quarrelled again. Kate knew that he would neither marry her nor let her go; she could neither let him go nor keep him. This figure of her distress amused him, he was callously provoking, and her resentment flared out at the touch of his scorn. With Kate there seemed to be no intermediate stages between docility and fury, or even between love and hatred.

"Why are you like this?" she cried, beating her pallid hands together, "I have known you for so long."

"Ah, we have known each other for so long, but as for really knowing you--no! I'm not a tame rabbit to be fondled any more."

She stared for a moment, as if in recollection; then burst into ironical laughter. He caught her roughly in his arms but she beat him away.

"O, go to ... go to...."

"Hell?" he suggested.

"Yes," she burst out tempestuously, "and stop there."

He was stunned by her unexpected violence. She was coarse, like Ianthe, after all. But he said steadily:

"I'm willing to go there, if you will only keep out of my way when I arrive."

Then he left her standing in a lane: he hurried and ran, clambering over stiles and brushing through hedges, anything to get away from the detestable creature. She did not follow him and they were soon out of sight of each other. Anger and commination swarmed to his lips, he branded her with frenzied opprobrium and all the beastliness that was in him. Nothing under heaven should ever persuade him to approach the filthy beast again, the damned intolerable drab, never, never again, never.

But he came to a bridge. On it he rested. And in that bright air, that sylvan peace, his rancour fell away from him, like sand from a glass, leaving him dumb and blank at the meanness of his deed. He went back to the lane as fast as he could go. She was not there. "Kate, Kate, my dove!" But he could not find her.

He was lost in the fields until he came at last upon a road and a lonely tavern thereby. It had a painted sign; a very smudgy fox, in an inexplicable attitude, destroying a fowl that looked like a plum-pudding but was intended to depict a snipe. At the stable door the tiniest black kitten in the world was shaping with timid belligerency at a young and fluffy goose who, ignoring it, went on sipping ecstatically from a pan of water. On the door were nailed, in two semi-circles of decoration, sixteen foxpads in various stages of decay, an entire spiral shaving from the hoof of a horse, and some chalk jottings:

_2 pads._
_3 cruppers._
_1 bellyband._
_2 set britchin._

The tavern was long and low and clean, its garden was bare but trim. There was comfort; he rested, had tea, and then in the bar his musings were broken upon by a ragged importunate old pedlar from Huddersfield.

"Born and bred in Slatterwick, it's no lie ah'm speaking, ah were born and bred Slatterwick, close to Arthur Brinkley's farm, his sister's in Canady, John Orkroyd took farm, Arthur's dead."

"Humph!"

"And buried. That iron bridge at Jackamon's belong to Daniel Cranmer. He's dead."

"Humph!"

"And buried. From the iron bridge it's two miles and a quarter to Herbert Oddy's, that's the _Bay Horse_, am ah right, at Shelmersdyke. Three miles and three-quarters from Dyke to the _Cock & Goat_ at Shapley Fell, am ah right?"

Masterman, never having been within a hundred miles of Yorkshire, puffed at his cigarette, and nodded moodily, "I suppose so" or "Yes, yes."

"From Arthur Brinkley's to th' iron bridge is one mile and a half and a bit, and from Arthur Brinkley's to Jury Cartright's is just four mile. He's dead, sir."

"Yes."

"And buried. Is that wrong? Am ah speaking wrong? No. It's a long step from yon, rough tramp for an old man."

Masterman--after giving sixpence to the pedlar who, uttering a benediction, pressed upon him a card of shirt buttons--said "Good evening," and walked out to be alone upon the road with his once angry but now penitent mind. "Kate, poor dear Kate!"

The sun was low down lolling near the horizon but there was an astonishing light upon the land. Cottage windows were blocks of solid gold in this lateral brilliance, shafts of shapely shade lay across leagues of fields, he could have counted every leaf among the rumpled boskage of the sycamores. A vast fan of indurated cloud, shell-like and pearly, was wavering over the western sky, but in the east were snowy rounded masses like fabulous balloons. At a cross road he stood by an old sign post, its pillar plastered with the faded bill of a long ago circus. He could read every word of it but when he turned away he found everything had become dimmer. The wind arose, the forest began to roar like a heaving beast. All verdurous things leaned one way. A flock of starlings flew over him with one movement and settled on a rolling elm. How lonely it was. He took off his hat. His skull was fearfully tender--he had dabbed it too hard with his hairbrush that morning. His hair was growing thin, like his youth and his desires.

What had become of Kate, where had she hidden? What _would_ be the end of it all? He would never see her again. He disliked everything about her, except herself. Her clothes, her speech, her walk, the way she carried her umbrella, her reticence that was nothing if not conspicuous, her melancholy, her angular concrete piety, her hands--in particular he disliked her pale hands. She had a mind that was cultivated as perfunctorily as a kitchen garden, with ideas like roots or beans, hostilities like briars, and a fence of prudery as tough as hoops of galvanised iron. And yet he loved her--or almost. He was ready to love her, he wanted to, he wanted her; her deep but guarded devotion--it was limited but it was devotion--compelled that return from him. It was a passionate return. He had tried to mould that devotion into a form that could delight him--he had failed. He knew her now, he could peer into her craven soul as one peers into an empty bottle, with one eye. For her the opportunities afforded by freedom were but the preludes to misadventure. What a fool she was!

When he reached home Kate stood in darkness at the doorway of his house. He exclaimed with delight, her surprising presence was the very centre of his desire; he wanted to embrace her, loving her deeply inexplicably again, just in a moment.

"I want my bike," the girl said sulkily. "I left it inside this morning."

"Ah, your bicycle! Yes, you did." He unlocked the door, "Wait, there should be a candle, there should be."

She stood in the doorway until he had lit it.

"Come in, Kate," he said, "let me give you something. I think there is some milk, certainly I have some cake, come in, Kate, or do you drink beer, I have beer, come in, I'll make you something hot."

But Kate only took her bicycle. "I ought to have been home hours ago," she said darkly, wheeling it outside and lighting the lantern. He watched her silently as she dabbed the wick; the pallor of her hands had never appeared so marked.

"Let's be kind to each other," he said, detaining her, "don't go, dear Kate."

She pushed her bicycle out into the road.

"Won't you see me again?" he asked as she mounted it.

"I am always seeing you," she called back, but her meaning was dark to him.

"Faugh! The devil! The fool!" He gurgled anathemas as he returned to his cottage. "And me, too! What am I?"

But no mortal man could ever love a woman of that kind. She did not love him at all, had never loved him. Then what was it she did love? Not her virtue--you might as well be proud of the sole of your foot; it was some sort of pride, perhaps the test of her virtue that the conflict between them provoked, the contest itself alone alluring her, not its aim and end. She was never happier than when, having led him on, she thwarted him. But she would find that his metal was as tough as her own.

Before going to bed he spent an hour in writing very slowly a letter to Kate, telling her that he felt they would not meet again, that their notions of love were so unrelated, their standards so different. "My morals are at least as high as yours, though likely you regard me as a rip. Let us recognise then," he wrote concludingly, "that we have come to the end of the tether without once having put an ounce of strain upon its delightful but very tense cord. But the effort to keep the affair down to the level at which you seem satisfied has wearied me. The task of living down to that assures me that for you the effort of living up to mine would be consuming. I congratulate you, my dear, on coming through scatheless, and that the only appropriate condolences are my own--for myself."

It was rather pompous, he thought, but then she wouldn't notice that, let alone understand it. She suffered not so much from an impediment of speech--how could she when she spoke so little?--as from an impediment of intellect, which was worse, much worse, but not so noticeable, being so common a failing. She was, when all was said and done, just a fool. It was a pity, for bodily she must indeed be a treasure. What a pity! But she had never had any love for him at all, only compassion and pity for his bad thoughts about her; he had neither pity for her nor compunction--only love. Dear, dear, dear. Blow out the candle. Lock the door. Good-night!

5

He did not see her again for a long time. He would have liked to have seen her, yes, just once more, but of course he was glad, quite glad, that she did not risk it and drag from dim depths the old passion to break again in those idiotic bubbles of propriety. She did not answer his letter--he was amused. Then her long silence vexed him, until vexation was merged in alarm. She had gone away from Tutsan--of course--gone away on family affairs--oh, naturally!--she might be gone away for ever. But a real grief came upon him. He had long mocked the girl, not only the girl but his own vision of her; now she was gone his mind elaborated her melancholy immobile figure into an image of beauty. Her absence, her silence, left him wretched. He heard of her from Ianthe, who renewed her blandishments; he was not unwilling to receive them now--he hoped their intercourse might be reported to Kate.

After many months he did receive a letter from her. It was a tender letter though ill-expressed, not very wise or informative, but he could feel that the old affection for him was still there, and he wrote her a long reply in which penitence and passion and appeal were mingled.

"I know now, yes, I see it all now; solutions are so easy when the proof of them is passed. We were cold to each other, it was stupid, I should have _made_ you love me and it would have been well. I see it now. How stupid, how unlucky; it turned me to anger and you to sorrow. Now I can think only of you."

She made no further sign, not immediately, and he grew dull again. His old disbelief in her returned. Bah! She loved him no more than a suicide loved the pond it dies in; she had used him for her senseless egoism, tempting him and fooling him, wantonly yes, wantonly, he had not begun it, and she took a chaste pride in saving herself from him. What was it the old writer had said? "Chastity, by nature the gentlest of all affections--give it but its head--'tis like a ramping and roaring lion." Saving herself! Yes, she would save herself for marriage.

He even began to contemplate that outcome.

Her delayed letter, when it came, announced that she was coming home at once; he was to meet her train on the morning after the morrow.

It was a dull autumnal morning when he met her. Her appearance was not less charming than he had imagined it, though the charm was almost inarticulate and there were one or two crude touches that momentarily distressed him. But he met with a flush of emotion all her glances of gaiety and love that were somehow, vaguely, different--perhaps there was a shade less reserve. They went to lunch in the city and at the end of the meal he asked her:

"Well, why have you come back again?"

She looked at him intently: "Guess!"

"I--well, no--perhaps--tell me, Kate, yourself."

"You are different, now, you look different, David."

"Am I changed! Better or worse?"

She did not reply and he continued:

"You, too, are changed, I can't tell how it is, or where, but you are."

"O, I am changed, much changed," murmured Kate.

"Have you been well?"

"Yes."

"And happy?"

"Yes."

"Then how unwise of you to come back."

"I have come back," said Kate, "to be happier. But somehow you are different."

"You are different, too. Shall we ever be happy again?"

"Why--why not?" said Kate.

"Come on!" he cried hilariously, "let us make a day of it, come along!"

Out in the streets they wandered until rain began to fall. "Come in here for a while." They were passing a roomy dull building, the museum, and they went in together. It was a vast hollow-sounding flagstone place that had a central brightness fading into dim recesses and galleries of gloom. They examined a monster skeleton of something like an elephant, three stuffed apes and a picture of the dodo. Kate stood before them without interest or amusement, she just contemplated them. What did she want with an elephant, an ape, or a dodo! The glass exhibit cases were leaned upon by them, the pieces of coal neatly arranged and labelled were stared at, besides the pieces of granite or coloured rock with long names ending in _orite_, _dorite_ and _sorite_ and so on to the precious gems including an imitation, as big as a bun, of a noted diamond. They leaned over them, repeating the names on the labels with the quintessence of vacuity. They hated it. There were beetles and worms of horror, butterflies of beauty, and birds that had been stuffed for so long that they seemed to be intoxicated; their beaks fitted them as loosely as a drunkard's hat, their glassy eyes were pathetically vague. After ascending a flight of stone steps David and Kate stooped for a long time over a case of sea-anemones that had been reproduced in gelatine by a German with a fancy for such things. From the railed balcony they could peer down into the well of the fusty-smelling museum. No one else was visiting it, they were alone with all things dead, things that had died millions of years ago and were yet simulating life. A footfall sounded so harsh in the corridors, boomed with such clangour, that they took slow diffident steps, almost tiptoeing, while Kate scarcely spoke at all and he conversed in murmurs. Whenever he coughed the whole place seemed to shudder. In the recess, hidden from prying eyes, David clasped her willing body in his arms. For once she was unshrinking and returned his fervour. The vastness, the emptiness, the deadness, worked upon their feelings with intense magic.

"Love me, David," she murmured, and when they moved away from the gelatinous sea-urchins she kept both her arms clasped around him as they walked the length of the empty corridor. He could not perceive her intimations, their meaning was dark to him. She was so altered, this was another Kate.

"I have come home to make it all up to you," she repeated, and he scarcely dared to understand her.

They approached a lecture room; the door was open, the room was empty, they went in and stood near the platform. The place was arranged like a tiny theatre, tiers of desks rising in half circles on three sides high up towards the ceiling. A small platform with a lecturer's desk confronted the rising tiers; on the wall behind it a large white sheet; a magic lantern on a pedestal was near and a blackboard on an easel. A pencil of white chalk lay broken on the floor. Behind the easel was a piano, with a duster on its lid. The room smelled of spilled acids. The lover's steps upon the wooden floor echoed louder than ever after their peregrination upon the flagstones; they were timid of the sound and stood still, close together, silent. He touched her bosom and pressed her to his heart, but all her surrender seemed strange and nerveless. She was almost violently different; he had liked her old rejections, they were fiery and passionate. He scarce knew what to do, he understood her less than ever now. Dressed as she was in thick winter clothes it was like embracing a tree, it tired him. She lay in his arms waiting, waiting, until he felt almost stifled. Something like the smell of the acids came from her fur necklet. He was glad when she stood up, but she was looking at him intently. To cover his uneasiness he went to the blackboard and picking up a piece of chalk he wrote the first inconsequent words that came into his mind. Kate stood where he had left her, staring at the board as he traced the words upon it: _We are but little children weak_.

Laughing softly she strolled towards him.

"What do you write that for? I know what it is."

"What it is!--well, what is it?"

She took the chalk from his fingers.

"It's a hymn," she went on "it goes...."

"A hymn!" he cried, "I did not know that."

Underneath the one he had written she was now writing another line on the board: _Nor born to any high estate_.

"Of course," he whispered, "I remember it now, I sang it as a child--at school--go on, go on."

But she had thereupon suddenly turned away, silent, dropping her hands to her side. One of her old black moods had seized her. He let her go and picking up another fragment of chalk completed the verse:

_What can we do for Jesu's sake
Who is so high and good and great?_

She turned when he had finished and without a word walked loudly to the piano, fetched the duster and rubbed out the words they had written on the blackboard. She was glaring at him.

"How absurd you are"--he was annoyed--"let us go out and get some tea." He wandered off to the door, but she did not follow. He stood just outside gazing vacantly at a stuffed jay that had an indigo eye. He looked into the room again. She was there still just as he had left her; her head bent, her hands hanging clasped before her, the dimness covering and caressing her--a figure full of sad thoughts. He ran to her and crushed her in his arms again:

"Kate, my lovely."

She was saying brokenly: "You know what I said. I've come to make it all up to you. I promised, didn't I?"

Something shuddered in his very soul--too late, too late, this was no love for him. The magic lantern looked a stupid childish toy, the smell of the acid was repulsive. Of all they had written upon the blackboard one word dimly remained: _Jesu_.

She stirred in his arms. "You are changed, David."

"Changed, yes, everything is changed."

"This is just like a theatre, like a play, as if we were acting."

"Yes, as if we were acting. But we are not acting. Let us go up and sit in the gallery."

They ascended the steps to the top ring of desks and looked down to the tiny platform and the white curtain. She sat fondling his hands, leaning against him.

"Have you ever acted--you would do it so well?"

"Why do you say that? Am I at all histrionic?"

"Does that mean insincere? O no. But you are the person one expects to be able to do anything."

"Nonsense! I've never acted. I suppose I could. It isn't difficult, you haven't to be clever, only courageous. I should think it very easy to be only an ordinary actor, but I'm wrong, no doubt. I thought it was easy to write--to write a play--until I tried. I once engaged myself to write a little play for some students to act. I had never done such a thing before and like other idiots I thought I hadn't ever done it simply because I hadn't ever wanted to. Heavens, how harassed I was and how ashamed! I could not do it. I got no further than the author's speech."

"Well that was something. Tell me it."

"It's nothing to do with the play. It's what the author says to the audience when the play is finished."

She insisted on hearing it whatever it was. "O well," he said at last. "Let's do that properly, at least. I'll go down there and deliver it from the stage. You must pretend that you are the enthusiastic audience. Come and sit in the stalls."

They went down together.

"Now imagine that this curtain goes up and I suddenly appear."

Kate faintly clapped her hands. He stood upon the platform facing her and taking off his hat, began:

"Ladies and Gentlemen.

"I am so deeply touched by the warmth of this reception, this utterly undeserved appreciation, that--forgive me--I have forgotten the speech I had carefully prepared in anticipation of it. Let me meet my obligation by telling you a story; I think it is true, I made it up myself. Once upon a time there was a poor playwright--something like me--who wrote a play--something like this--and at the end of the performance the audience, a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience--something like this--called him before the curtain and demanded a speech. He protested that he was unprepared and asked them to allow him to tell them a story--something like this. Well, that, too, was a remarkably handsome well-fed intellectual audience, so they didn't mind and he began again, Once upon a time a poor playwright,--and was just about to repeat the story I have already twice told you when suddenly, without a word of warning, without a sound, without a compunction, the curtain swooped down and chopped him clean in half."

Masterman made an elaborate obeisance and stepped off the platform.

"Is that all?" asked Kate.

"That's all."

At that moment a loud bell clanged throughout the building signifying that the museum was about to close.

"Come along!" he cried, but Kate did not move, she still sat in the stalls.

"Don't leave me, David, I want to hear the play," she said archly.

"There _was_ no play and there _is_ no play. Come, or we shall be locked in for the night."

Still she sat on. He went to her and seized her hands.

"What does it matter!" she whispered, embracing him. "I want to make it all up to you."

He was astoundingly moved. She was marvellously changed. If she hadn't the beauty of perfection she had some of the perfection of beauty. He adored her.

"But no," he said, "it won't do, it really won't. Come, I have got to buy you something at once, a ring with a diamond in it, as big as a bun, an engagement ring, quickly, or the shops will be shut."

He dragged the stammering bewildered girl away, down the stairs and into the street. The rain had ceased, the sunset sky was bright and Masterman was intensely happy.

A BROADSHEET BALLAD

A BROADSHEET BALLAD

At noon the tiler and the mason stepped down from the roof of the village church which they were repairing and crossed over the road to the tavern to eat their dinner. It had been a nice little morning but there were clouds massing in the south; Sam, the tiler, remarked that it looked like thunder. The two men sat in the dim little taproom eating, Bob, the mason, at the same time reading from a newspaper an account of a trial for murder.

"I dunno what thunder looks like," Bob said, "but I reckon this chap is going to be hung, though I can't rightly say for why. To my thinking he didn't do it at all: but murder's a bloody thing and someone ought to suffer for it."

"I don't think," spluttered Sam, as he impaled a flat piece of beetroot on the point of a pocket-knife and prepared to contemplate it with patience until his stuffed mouth was ready to receive it, "he ought to be hung."

"There can be no other end for him though, with a mob of lawyers like that, and a jury too ... why the rope's half round his neck this minute; he'll be in glory within a month; they only have three Sundays, you know, between the sentence and the execution. Well, hark at that rain then!"

A shower that began as a playful sprinkle grew to a powerful steady summer downpour. It splashed in the open window and the dim room grew more dim, and cool.

"Hanging's a dreadful thing," continued Sam, "and 'tis often unjust I've no doubt, I've no doubt at all."

"Unjust! I tell you ... at majority of trials those who give their evidence mostly knows nothing at all about the matter; them as knows a lot--they stays at home and don't budge, not likely!"

"No? But why?"

"Why? They has their reasons. I know that, I knows it for truth ... hark at that rain, it's made the room feel cold."

They watched the downfall in complete silence for some moments.

"Hanging's a dreadful thing," Sam at length repeated, with almost a sigh.

"I can tell you a tale about that, Sam, in a minute," said the other. He began to fill his pipe from Sam's brass box, which was labelled cough lozenges and smelled of paregoric.

"Just about ten years ago I was working over in Cotswold country. I remember I'd been into Gloucester one Saturday afternoon and it rained. I was jogging along home in a carrier's van; I never seen it rain like that afore, no, nor never afterwards, not like that. Br..r..r..r! it came down ... bashing! And we came to a cross-roads where there's a public house called _The Wheel of Fortune_, very lonely and onsheltered it is just there. I seed a young woman standing in the porch awaiting us, but the carrier was wet and tired and angry or something and wouldn't stop. 'No room'--he bawled out to her--'full up, can't take you!' and he drove on. 'For the love o' God, mate,'--I says--pull up and take that young creature! She's ... she's ... can't you see!' 'But I'm all behind as 'tis', he shouts to me, 'you knows your gospel, don't you: time and tide wait for no man?' 'Ah, but dammit all, they always call for a feller,' I says. With that he turned round and we drove back for the girl. She clumb in and sat on my knees; I squat on a tub of vinegar, there was nowhere else and I was right and all, she was going on for a birth. Well, the old van rattled away for six or seven miles; whenever it stopped you could hear the rain clattering on the tarpolin, or sounding outside on the grass as if it was breathing hard, and the old horse steamed and shivered with it. I had knowed the girl once in a friendly way, a pretty young creature, but now she was white and sorrowful and wouldn't say much. By and bye we came to another cross-roads near a village, and she got out there. 'Good day, my gal,' I says, affable like, and; 'Thank you, sir,' says she, and off she popped in the rain with her umbrella up. A rare pretty girl, quite young, I'd met her before, a girl you could get uncommon fond of, you know, but I didn't meet her afterwards: she was mixed up in a bad business. It all happened in the next six months while I was working round those parts. Everybody knew of it. This girl's name was Edith and she had a younger sister Agnes. Their father was old Harry Mallerton, kept _The British Oak_ at North Quainy; he stuttered. Well this Edith had a love affair with a young chap William, and having a very loving nature she behaved foolish. Then she couldn't bring the chap up to the scratch nohow by herself, and of course she was afraid to tell her mother or father: you know how girls are after being so pesky natural, they fear, O they do fear! But soon it couldn't be hidden any longer as she was living at home with them all, so she wrote a letter to her mother. 'Dear Mother,' she wrote, and told her all about her trouble.

"By all accounts the mother was angry as an old lion, but Harry took it calm like and sent for young William, who'd not come at first. He lived close by in the village, so they went down at last and fetched him.

"'All right, yes,' he said, 'I'll do what's lawful to be done. There you are, I can't say no fairer, that I can't.'

"'No,' they said, 'you can't.'

"So he kissed the girl and off he went, promising to call in and settle affairs in a day or two. The next day Agnes, which was the younger girl, she also wrote a note to her mother telling her some more strange news.

"'God above!' the mother cried out, 'can it be true, both of you girls, my own daughters, and by the same man! O, whatever were you thinking on, both of ye! Whatever can be done now!'"

"What!" ejaculated Sam, "both on 'em, both on 'em!"

"As true as God's my mercy--both on 'em--same chap. Ah! Mrs. Mallerton was afraid to tell her husband at first, for old Harry was the devil born again when he were roused up, so she sent for young William herself, who'd not come again, of course, not likely. But they made him come, O yes, when they told the girls' father.

"'Well, may I go to my d..d..d..damnation at once!' roared old Harry--he stuttered you know--'at once, if that ain't a good one!' So he took off his coat, he took up a stick, he walked down street to William and cut him off his legs. Then he beat him till he howled for his mercy, but you couldn't stop old Harry once he were roused up--he was the devil born again. They do say as he beat him for a solid hour; I can't say as to that, but then old Harry picked him up and carried him off to _The British Oak_ on his own back, and threw him down in his own kitchen between his own two girls like a dead dog. They do say that the little one Agnes flew at her father like a raging cat until he knocked her senseless with a clout over head; rough man he was."

"Well, a' called for it sure," commented Sam.

"Her did;" agreed Bob, "but she was the quietest known girl for miles round those parts, very shy and quiet."

"A shady lane breeds mud," said Sam.

"What do you say?--O ah!--mud, yes. But pretty girls both, girls you could get very fond of, skin like apple bloom, and as like as two pinks they were. They had to decide which of them William was to marry."

"Of course, ah!"

"'I'll marry Agnes,' says he."

"'You'll not,' says the old man, 'you'll marry Edie.'"

"'No I won't,' William says, 'it's Agnes I love and I'll be married to her or I won't be married to e'er of 'em.' All the time Edith sat quiet, dumb as a shovel, never a word, crying a bit; but they do say the young one went on like a ... a young ... Jew."

"The Jezebel!" commented Sam.

"You may say it; but wait, my man, just wait. Another cup of beer? We can't go back to church until this humbugging rain have stopped."

"No, that we can't."

"It's my belief the 'bugging rain won't stop this side of four o'clock."

"And if the roof don't hold it off it 'ull spoil they Lord's Commandments that's just done up on the chancel front."

"O, they be dry by now." Bob spoke re-assuringly and then continued his tale. "'I'll marry Agnes or I won't marry nobody,' William says, and they couldn't budge him. No, old Harry cracked on but he wouldn't have it, and at last Harry says: 'It's like this.' He pulls a half-crown out of his pocket and, 'heads it's Agnes,' he says, 'or tails it's Edith,' he says."

"Never! Ha! ha!" cried Sam.

"Heads it's Agnes, tails it's Edie, so help me God. And it come down Agnes, yes, heads it was--Agnes--and so there they were."

"And they lived happy ever after?"

"Happy! You don't know your human nature, Sam; wherever was you brought up? 'Heads it's Agnes,' said old Harry, and at that Agnes flung her arms round William's neck and was for going off with him then and there; ha! But this is how it happened about that. William hadn't any kindred, he was a lodger in the village, and his landlady wouldn't have him in her house one mortal hour when she heard all of it; give him the rightabout there and then. He couldn't get lodgings anywhere else, nobody would have anything to do with him. So of course, for safety's sake, old Harry had to take him, and there they all lived together at _The British Oak_--all in one happy family. But they girls couldn't bide the sight of each other, so their father cleaned up an old outhouse in his yard that was used for carts and hens and put William and his Agnes out in it. And there they had to bide. They had a couple of chairs, a sofa, and a bed and that kind of thing, and the young one made it quite snug."

"'Twas a hard thing for that other, that Edie, Bob."

"It was hard, Sam, in a way, and all this was happening just afore I met her in the carrier's van. She was very sad and solemn then; a pretty girl, one you could like. Ah, you may choke me, but there they lived together. Edie never opened her lips to either of them again, and her father sided with her, too. What was worse, it came out after the marriage that Agnes was quite free of trouble--it was only a trumped-up game between her and this William because he fancied her better than the other one. And they never had no child, them two, though when poor Edie's mischance come along I be damned if Agnes weren't fonder of it than its own mother, a jolly sight more fonder, and William--he fair worshipped it."

"You don't say!"

"I do. 'Twas a rum go, that, and Agnes worshipped it, a fact, can prove it by scores of people to this day, scores, in them parts. William and Agnes worshipped it, and Edie--she just looked on, long of it all, in the same house with them, though she never opened her lips again to her young sister to the day of her death."

"Ah, she died? Well, it's the only way out of such a tangle, poor woman."

"You're sympathising with the wrong party." Bob filled his pipe again from the brass box; he ignited it with deliberation; going to the open window he spat into a puddle in the road. "The wrong party, Sam; 'twas Agnes that died. She was found on the sofa one morning stone dead, dead as a adder."

"God bless me," murmured Sam.

"Poisoned," added Bob, puffing serenely.

"Poisoned!"

Bob repeated the word 'poisoned.' "This was the way of it," he continued; "one morning the mother went out in the yard to collect her eggs, and she began calling out; 'Edie, Edie, here a minute, come and look where that hen have laid her egg; I would never have believed it,' she says. And when Edie went out her mother led her round the back of the outhouse, and there on the top of a wall this hen had laid an egg. 'I would never have believed it, Edie,' she says, 'scooped out a nest there beautiful, ain't she; I wondered where her was laying. T'other morning the dog brought an egg round in his mouth and laid it on the doormat. There now, Aggie, Aggie, here a minute, come and look where the hen have laid that egg.' And as Aggie didn't answer the mother went in and found her on the sofa in the outhouse, stone dead."

"How'd they account for it?" asked Sam, after a brief interval.

"That's what brings me to the point about this young feller that's going to be hung," said Bob, tapping the newspaper that lay upon the bench. "I don't know what would lie between two young women in a wrangle of that sort; some would get over it quick, but some would never sleep soundly any more not for a minute of their mortal lives. Edie must have been one of that sort. There's people living there now as could tell a lot if they'd a mind to it. Some knowed all about it; could tell you the very shop where Edith managed to get hold of the poison, and could describe to me or to you just how she administrated it in a glass of barley water. Old Harry knew all about it, he knew all about everything, but he favoured Edith and he never budged a word. Clever old chap was Harry, and nothing came out against Edie at the inquest--nor the trial neither."

"Was there a trial then?"

"There was a kind of a trial. Naturally. A beautiful trial. The police came and fetched poor William, they took him away and in due course he was hanged."

"William! But what had he got to do with it?"

"Nothing. It was rough on him, but he hadn't played straight, and so nobody struck up for him. They made out a case against him--there was some unlucky bit of evidence which I'll take my oath old Harry knew something about--and William was done for. Ah, when things take a turn against you it's as certain as twelve o'clock, when they take a turn; you get no more chance than a rabbit from a weasel. It's like dropping your matches into a stream, you needn't waste the bending of your back to pick them out--they're no good on, they'll never strike again. And Edith, she sat in court through it all, very white and trembling and sorrowful, but when the judge put his black cap on they do say she blushed and looked across at William and gave a bit of a smile. Well, she had to suffer for his doings, so why shouldn't he suffer for hers. That's how I look at it...."

"But God-a-mighty...!"

"Yes, God-a-mighty knows. Pretty girls they were, both, and as like as two pinks."

There was quiet for some moments while the tiler and the mason emptied their cups of beer. "I think," said Sam then, "the rain's give over now."

"Ah, that it has," cried Bob. "Let's go and do a bit more on this 'bugging church or she won't be done afore Christmas."

COTTON

COTTON