Chapter II: Part 2

“I’m telling you what she said. She insisted on it. She used a queer phrase. She said—‘I longed for home till my lips ached.’”

The lady with Mr. Flood stirred in her shadows.

“She didn’t imagine that. That happens. That is how one longs——” She broke off.

“For home?” he said, with that smile of his that ended at his mouth and left his eyes like chips of quartz.

She answered him slowly, him only—

“I suppose, with some women, it could be for home. If she says so——That is what confounds one in her. She knows—she proves that she knows, in a phrase like that, things that (when one thinks of her personality) she _can’t_ know—couldn’t know. It’s inexplicable. ‘Till one’s lips ache’——Oh, Lord!” She laughed harshly.

Anita looked at them uncertainly.

“Well, that’s what she said. And to judge from her description Westering was something to be homesick for. I expected a paradise.”

“Westering? That’s quite a town.”

“Yes, I know. There’s a summer colony. Madala mourned over it. She was absurd. She raced me out of the station and up the hill, and would scarcely let me look about me till we were at the top, because the lower end of the village had been built over. It might have been the sack of Rome to hear her—‘Asphalt paths! Disgraceful! The grocer used to have _blue_ blinds. They’ve spoiled the village green.’ And so it went on until we reached Upper Westering.”

“Oh, where they live now?”

“Yes. And then she turned to me and beamed—‘_This is_ my _country_.’ It certainly is a pretty place. There’s a fine view over the downs; but too hilly for me. We climbed up and down lanes and picked ridiculous bits of twig and green stuff till I protested. Then she took me into the churchyard. We wandered about: very pleasant it was: such a hot spring day, and pretty pinkish flowers—what did she call the stuff?—cuckoo-pint, springing from the graves—and daffodils. Then we sat down in the shadow of the church to eat our lunch. We began to discuss architecture and I was growing interested, really beginning to enjoy myself—some of it was pre-Norman—when a man climbed over the stile from the field behind the church, and came down the path towards us. As he passed, Madala looked up and he looked down, and up she jumped in a moment. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I do believe—I _do_ believe—’ You know that little chuckly rise in her voice when she’s pleased—‘I do believe it’s you!’ ‘Oh, Madala,’ I said, ‘the sandwiches!’ They were in a paper on her lap, you know. She had scattered them right and left. But I might have talked to the wind. I must say he had perfectly respectable manners. He turned back at once, and smiled at her, and hesitated, and began to pick up the sandwiches, though he evidently didn’t know her. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember? Aren’t you Dr. Carey? You mended my camel when I was little. I’m Madala!’ She was literally brimming over with pleasure. But, you know, such a silly way to put it! If she had said ‘Madala Grey’ he would have known in a moment. There were a couple of _Eden Walls_ on the bookstall as we went through. I saw them. However, he remembered her then. He certainly seemed pleased to see her, in his awkward way. He stood looking down at her, amused and interested. People always got so interested in Madala. Haven’t you noticed it? Even people in trams. Though I thought to myself at the time—‘How absurd Madala is! What can they have in common?’ Yes, I thought it even then.”

“Well, what had they in common?”

“Heaven knew! She was ten and he was twenty-five when they last met. He knew her grand-people: he had mended her dolls for her: he lived in her old home: that, according to her, was all that mattered. She said to me afterwards, I remember, ‘Just imagine seeing him! I _was_ pleased to see him. He belongs in, you know.’ ‘No, Madala,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Such a fuss about a man you haven’t seen since you were a child! I call it affectation. It’s a slight on your real friends.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but he belongs in.’ She looked quite chastened. She said—‘Nita, it wasn’t affectation. I believe he was pleased too—honestly!’ He was. Who wouldn’t be? You know the effect she used to make.”

“What did he say?” asked the Baxter girl.

“Oh, he looked down at her as if he were shy. Then he said—‘You’ve a long memory, Madala!’ Yes, he called her Madala from the first. It annoyed me. She said—‘Oh, do you remember when Mother was so ill once? You were very kind to me then.’ Then she said something which amazed me. I’d known her for two years before she told me anything about that _Sylvania_ tragedy, but to him she spoke at once. ‘They’re dead,’ she said, ‘Mother and Father. They’re drowned. There isn’t anyone.’ But her voice! It made me quite nervous. I thought she was going to break down. He said, with a stiff sort of effort—‘Yes. I heard.’ That was all. Nothing sympathetic. He just stood and looked at her.”

“Well?” said Miss Howe impatiently.

“Oh—nothing else. I finished picking up the sandwiches. She introduced me, but I don’t think he realized who I was. It annoyed me very much that she insisted on his eating lunch with us. As I said to her afterwards, it wasn’t suitable. Buns in a bag! But there he sat on a damp stone (he gave Madala his overcoat to sit upon) perfectly contented. I confess I wasn’t cordial. But he noticed nothing. Obtuse! That was how I summed him up from the first—obtuse! And no conversation whatever. Madala did the talking. I believe she asked after every cat and dog for twenty miles round. And her lack of reticence to a comparative stranger was amazing. She told him more about herself in half an hour than she had told me in four years. But she was an unaccountable creature.”

“Yes, that’s just it. One never knew what Madala would do next, and yet when she’d done it, one said—‘Of course! Just what Madala _would_ do!’ But it wasn’t like her to neglect you, Nita!”

“Oh, she noticed after a time. She began to be uncomfortable. I—withdrew myself, as it were. You know my way. She didn’t like that. She tried—I will say that for her—she did try to direct the conversation towards my subjects. Useless, of course. He was, not illiterate—no, you can’t say illiterate—but curiously unintellectual. Socialism now—somehow we got on to socialism. That roused him. I must say, though he expressed himself clumsily, that he had ideas. But so limited. He had never heard of Marx. Bernard Shaw was barely a name to him. Socialism—his socialism—when we disentangled it, was only another word for the proper feeding of the local infants—drains—measles—the village schools. Beyond that he was mute. But Madala chimed in with details of American slum life, and roused him at once. They grew quite eloquent. But not one word, if you please, of her own work. Anything and everything but her work. He did ask her what she was doing. ‘Oh,’ said she in an offhand way, ‘I scribble. Stories.’ And then—‘It earns money, and it kills time.’ Yes, that’s exactly how she put it. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘that’s not the spirit—’ I’d never heard her use such a tone before. She had such high ideals of art. It jarred me. I thought that she ought to have known better. But she looked at me in such a curious way—defiant almost. She said—‘It’s my own spirit, Nita. Oh, let me have a holiday!’ And at that up she jumped and left us sitting there, and wandered off to the stile and was over it in a second. We sat still. The hedge hid her. Then we heard her call—‘Cowslips! Oh, cowslips!’ I thought he would go when she called, but he sat where he was, listening. It was one of those hot, still days, you know. There was a sort of spell on things. There were bees about. We heard a cart roll up the road. I wanted to get up and talk, make some kind of diversion, and yet I couldn’t. We heard her call again—‘Hundreds of cowslips! I’m going to make a cowslip ball.’ Her voice sounded far away, but very clear. And there was a scent of may in the air, and dust—an intoxicating smell. It made me quite sleepy. It was just as if time stood still. Three o’clock’s a drowsy time, I suppose. And he never stirred—just sat there stupidly. But I was too sleepy to be bored with him. Presently back she came. She had picked up her skirt and her petticoat showed—it was that lavender silk you gave her, Lila. So unsuitable, you know, on those dirty roads. And her skirt was full of cowslips. She was just a dark figure against the sky until she was close to us; but then, I thought that she looked pretty, extremely pretty. Bright cheeks, you know, and her eyes so blue——”

“Grey—” said Mr. Flood, “the grey eyes of a goddess.”

“They looked blue, and she didn’t look like a goddess. She looked like a little girl. Well, there she stood, with her grey skirt and her lavender silk, and her cowslips—you know they have a sweet smell, cowslips, a very sweet smell—and tumbled them all down on the tombstone. Then she wanted string. Carey seemed to wake up at that. He’d been looking at her as if he had dreamed her. He produced string. He was that sort of man. Then she made her cowslip ball. I held one end of the string and he held the other, and she nipped the stalks off the flowers and strung them athwart it. That is the way to make a cowslip ball.”

“Nita, I love you!” cried Miss Howe for the second time, and the others laughed.

She stopped. She stiffened.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ne’ mind! Go on!”

She said offendedly—

“There’s nothing more to tell. We got up and came away.”

But as we sat silently by, still waiting, the storyteller crept back into her face.

“Oh, yes—” up went her forefinger. “It was then that it happened. We went stumbling over the graves, round to the east end, to see the lepers’ window, a particularly interesting one. Ruskin mentions it. Yes, Carey came with us. There’s a little bit of bare lawn under the window before the stones begin again, and as we crossed it Madala gave a kind of shuddering start. He said—‘Cold?’ smiling at her. She shivered again, in spite of herself as it were, for she’d been joking and laughing, and said—‘Someone must be walking over my grave.’ And at that he gave her such a look, and said loudly in a great rough voice—‘Rubbish! don’t talk such rubbish!’ Really, you know, the tone! And I thought to myself then as I’ve thought many times since—‘At heart the man’s a bully—that’s what the man is.’ But Madala laughed. We didn’t stay long after that. The window was a disappointment—restored. There was nothing further to see and Madala was quite right—it was chilly. The sky had clouded over and there was a wind. I thought it time to go. Madala made no objection. She had grown curiously quiet. She tired easily, you know. And he didn’t say another word. Quite time to go. I thought we might try for the earlier train, so we went off at last in a hurry. No, he didn’t come with us: we shook hands at the gate. And when I looked back a minute later he had turned away. We caught our train.”

There was a little pause that Miss Howe ended.

“Queer!” she said.

Anita stared at them. Her hands twitched.

“Oh, I’m a practical person, but—‘You’re walking on my grave,’ she said. And there or thereabouts, I suppose, she’ll lie.”

“Coincidence,” said Mr. Flood quickly.

“Of course. I never thought of it again. Nor did Madala for that matter, though she was quiet enough in the train. There she sat, looking out of the window and smiling to herself. But then she was always like that after any little excitement, very quiet for an hour, re-living it—literally. I think, you know,” she hesitated, “that that was the secret of her genius. Her genius was her memory. _She liked whate’er she looked on_——”

“And her looks were certainly everywhere,” said the blonde lady in her drawling voice.

“Just so. But it didn’t end there. She remembered. She remembered uncannily. She was like a child picking up pebbles from the beach every holiday, and spending all the rest of its year polishing. She turned them into jewels. The process used to fascinate me—professionally, you know. You could see her mind at work on some trifling incident, fidgeting with it, twisting it, dropping it, picking it up again, till one wearied. And then a year later, or two years, or three years, or ten years maybe, you’ll pick up a novel or a story, and there you’ll find it, cut, graved, polished, set in diamonds, but—the same pebble, if one has the wit to see.”

“Well, what did she say?” Miss Howe cut through the theory impatiently.

Anita frowned. She disliked being hurried.

“Oh, that day? Very little. I was surprised. She usually enjoyed pouring herself out to me. But no, she just sat and smiled. It irritated me. ‘What is it, Madala?’ I said at last. She stared at me as if she had never seen me before. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in her vague way. And then—‘Wasn’t it a lovely day?’ I waited. I knew she would go on sooner or later. Presently she said—‘That stone we sat on _was_ damp. He was quite right.’ Then she said, thinking aloud as it were—‘You know, if a man has a really pleasant voice, I like it better than women’s voices. It’s so steady.’ And then—‘What did you think of him, Anita?’”

Miss Howe chuckled.

“And you said?”

“Oh, I said what I could. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. It was so obvious that the place and everyone in it was beglamoured for her. I said that he seemed a worthy, harmless person, or something to that effect. I forget exactly how I phrased it—I was tactful, of course. Oh, I remember, I said that she ought to put him into a book—that the old country doctors were disappearing, like the farmers and the parsons. I’m sure I appeared interested. But all she said was—‘Old? He’s not old. Would you call him old?’ ‘That was a figure of speech,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of the type. But all the same you can’t describe him as young, Madala.’ ‘Oh, he’s not a boy,’ she said. ‘No one ever said he was a _boy_.’ She didn’t say any more. But just as we were getting out at Victoria she cried—‘My cowslips! Anita, my cowslips! I’ve forgotten my cowslip ball.’ I told her that it wouldn’t have lasted anyway, with the stalks nipped off so short. But she looked as if she had lost a kingdom.”

“I believe I know that cowslip ball.” Miss Howe looked amused. “_A_ cowslip ball, anyway. She had one sent to her once when I was there. I thought it was from her slum children.”

“Yes, he sent it on.” My cousin went on quickly with her own story. “How he knew the address puzzled me. Her publishers wouldn’t have given it and I know she didn’t.”

“Telephone book,” said the Baxter girl, as one experienced.

“Ah, possibly. I went round to her that morning, and—yes, you were there, Lila,” she conceded, “for I remember I wondered how Madala could compose herself to work with anyone else in the room. I always left her to herself when she stayed with me.”

“She didn’t mind me,” said Miss Howe firmly.

“She always said that she didn’t, I know. And of course I know that it is possible to withdraw oneself as it were, but I confess I disapproved. Her room was a regular clearing-house in those days. Oh, not you particularly, Lila, but——”

“You came in yourself that morning, didn’t you?” said Miss Howe very softly and sweetly.

“I was telling you so. And what did I find? Her desk littered over with string and paper and moss and damp cardboard, and that story Hooper published (it had been freshly typed only the day before) watering into purple under my eyes, while she sat and gloated over those wretched flowers. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘your manuscript! Really, Madala!’”

“And Madala—” Miss Howe began to laugh—“Oh, I remember now.”

“What did Madala say?” demanded the Baxter girl.

“It wasn’t like her.” Anita fidgeted. “She knew how I disliked the modern manner.”

“But she said,” Miss Howe caught it up—

“I don’t know what possessed her,” said my cousin with a rush. “She actually stamped her foot at me. Yes, she did, and then held out her wretched posy and said—‘Oh, damn the manuscript, Nita! Smell!’”

“What did Nita do?” enquired the blonde lady softly of Miss Howe.

“Sniffed,” Mr. Flood struck in. “Obviously! Satisfied Madala and relieved her own feelings. That is called tact.”

“And just then, you know,” Miss Howe glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice, “_he_ came in.”

“Kent?” The lady with Mr. Flood did not lower her voice. I believe she wanted him to hear. She was like a curious child poking at a hurt beastie. Her smile was infantine as she looked across at him. But the man at the window never stirred.

“Sh!” Miss Howe frowned at her. And then, still whispering—“Yes, don’t you remember? he had his studio in the same block all that year. He always came across to Madala when he wanted a sardine tin opened, or change for his gas, or someone to sit to him.”

“Someone was saying that he couldn’t keep a model.” Mr. Flood glanced at them in turn.

Miss Howe flushed surprisingly.

“It’s not that. You ought to know better, Jasper. It’s only that he’s exigeant—never knows how the time goes, and” (she lowered her voice still more), “and Madala spoilt him. She could sit by the hour looking like a Madonna, and getting all her own head-work done, and never stirring a hair. Of course he doesn’t like the shilling an hour type after her.”

“I know, I know! The explanation is quite unnecessary.” He smiled and waved his hand.

“Then why——?” She was still flushed and annoyed.

“One gets at other people’s views. I merely wondered how the—er—partnership appeared to your—er—intelligence. Now I know.”

“She did spoil him.” Anita disregarded them. “The time she wasted on him! In he came, you know, that day, and she went to meet him with the cowslips still in her hand, and shielding her eyes from the sun. That room of hers got all the morning sun.”

“What did she wear—the blue dress?” The Baxter girl was like a child being told a story.

“I forget. Anyway he stood looking her up and down till she reddened and began to laugh at him. And then he said—‘And cowslips too! What luck! Come along! Come _along_!’ ‘Oh, my good man!’ I said, ‘she’s in the middle of her writing!’ But it was useless to expostulate. He wanted her and so she went. I heard him as he dragged her off. ‘Madala, I’ve got such a notion!’ No, it was the great fault of her character, I consider, that she could never deny anyone, not even for her work’s sake. Still, I suppose one had to forgive it in that case, for that was the beginning, you know, of _The Spring Song_. She is painted just as she stood there that morning, literally gilded over with sunshine, and the flowers in her hands.”

“It’s the best thing he’s ever done, isn’t it?” said the Baxter girl.

“Best thing? It’s a master-piece. It’s Madala Grey.”

“When is he going to show it?” asked Mr. Flood.

Anita shrugged.

“Heaven knows! He insists that it isn’t finished. I believe he sits and prays over it. He was annoyed that Madala took me there one day. You know how touchy he is.”

“He won’t show it now,” said the blonde lady.

“Why not? Why not?” Anita hovered, on the pounce, like a cat over a bowl of goldfish, and like a fish the blonde lady glided out of reach.

“And _she_ asks!” she appealed to the others.

Anita frowned.

“You’re cryptic.”

“Well, wasn’t there a certain—rivalry? You should have a fellow-feeling.”

“Oh—” she resented quickly, “Kent always wanted to keep her to himself, if you mean that.”

The blonde lady smiled.

“And now he keeps her to himself. I mean just that. I go by your account, of course. _I_ haven’t glimpsed _The Spring Song_.”

“So that started it.” The Baxter girl mused aloud. “I think that’s romantic now—to make a famous picture and to pick up one’s husband, all in twenty-four hours.”

“‘Pick up!’”

“You know what I mean—fall in love.”

“‘Fall in love!’”

“Nita, don’t trample.” Miss Howe threw the Baxter girl a cigarette.

“I only mean—it was romantic, meeting like that so long ago and nobody knowing a word until just before they were married, except you, Miss Serle. And I don’t believe you guessed?” She questioned her with defiant eyebrows.

“How could I guess what never happened? ‘In love!’ I suppose it deceived some good folks.”

“It wasn’t so long ago,” Miss Howe soothered them. She had a funny little way of slipping people into another subject if she thought that they sounded quarrelsome. ‘Let’s be comfortable!’ was written all over her. And yet she could scratch. I think that a great many women are like Miss Howe.

“Long ago? Of course not!” Anita picked it up at once. “How long is it? A year? Eighteen months? April, wasn’t it? She wrote _The Resting-place_ in the next three months. Scamped. I shall always say so. She was three years over _Ploughed Fields_. Yes, April began it. _The Resting-place_ was out for the Christmas sales. She married him at Easter. And now it’s November. The year’s not gone. But Madala Grey is gone.”

“Where?” said the Baxter girl intensely.

“Don’t!” said Miss Howe.

But the Baxter girl looked as if she couldn’t stop herself.

“We—we put her into the past tense—d’you notice how easily we’re doing it already?—but—is she less alive to you, less lovable, less Madala Grey to you, because of a telegram and a funeral service? is she?”

“No,” said Miss Howe. “If you put it like that—no.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Flood. “When you put it like that—yes.”

“She must be somewhere,” argued the Baxter girl. “She can’t just stop.”

“Why not?” said Mr. Flood, with his bored smile.

“She can’t. I feel it,” she said with her hand at her heart and her large eyes on him.

“I don’t,” he said to her, and he lost his smile. “‘Dust to dust——’”

The woman behind him moved restlessly.

“Jasper, _dear_! How trite!”

“But the spirit?” said the Baxter girl, “the spirit?”

Nobody answered. The little blue flames on the hearth capered and said ‘Chik-chik!’ Anita shivered.

“The room’s getting cold,” she said sharply. And then—“Jenny, is that door open? There’s such a draught.”

I got up and went to see. But the door was shut. When I came back they were talking again. Anita was answering the Baxter girl.

“Yes, I stayed there once. A pretty place. The sort of place she would choose. All roses. No conveniences. And what with the surgery and the socialism, the poor seemed to be always with us. Only one servant——”

“She _ought_ to have made money,” said Miss Howe.

“Oh, the first two books were a _succès d’estime_, I wept over her contract. She did make a considerable amount of money on _The Resting-place_. But it was all put by for the child. She told me so. He, you know, a poor man’s doctor! She told me that too—flung it at me. She had an extravagant way of talking, manner more than anything, of course, but to hear her you would almost think she was proud of the life they led. She was always unpractical.”

“I’d like to have gone down there once,” said Miss Howe. “If I’d known—heigh-ho!”

“I—I wished I hadn’t gone,” said Anita slowly. “It wasn’t a success.”

“The husband, I suppose,” the Baxter girl hinted delicately.

“No, I hardly saw him. It was Madala herself. Changed. Affectionate—she was always that to me but——I remember sitting with her once. We had been talking, about Aphra Behn I believe, and she had grown flushed and had begun to stammer a little. You know her way?”

“I know.” The Baxter girl leaned forward eagerly.

“And she was tracing a parallel between the development of the novel and the growth of the woman’s movement—her old vein. Brilliant, she was. And all at once she stopped and began staring in front of her. You know that trick she had of frowning out her thoughts. I was careful not to interrupt. I knew something big was coming. She could be—prophetic, sometimes. At last she said in a worried sort of way—‘I’ve a dreadful feeling that we’re out of coffee and it’s early closing.’ No, I’m not exaggerating—her very words. And then some long rigmarole about Carey’s appetite, and that if she made the coffee black strong she could persuade him to take more milk with it. Oh—pitiful! And in a moment she’d dashed off on a three mile walk to the next village where there was a grocer that did open on Wednesdays. Oh, it was most pathetic. It made me realize the effect that he was having on her—stultifying! I always did dislike him.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe.

“Just so—you don’t know. Naturally, you were not so intimate with Madala. Well, that very afternoon, I remember, he came in at tea-time. That was unusual: he was generally late for seven-thirty dinner, and then he didn’t change. I used to wonder how Madala allowed it. Well, as I was telling you, he came in, stamping through the hall, calling to her, and when he opened the drawing-room door and found that she was out, you should have seen his look! Sour! No other word! And off he went at once to meet her, on his bicycle, though I was prepared to give him tea. They didn’t come back for hours. In fact I had gone up to change. I saw them from the window, coming up the drive. And there was Madala Grey, perched on _his_ bicycle, with a great bunch of that white parsley that grows in the hedges, and a string bag dangling down, while he steadied her, and both of them _talking_! and as he helped her off, she kissed him—in front of the kitchen windows. And, if you please, not a word of apology to me. All she said was—why hadn’t I seen that he had some tea before he went after her? I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Madala annoyed. No, you can’t say the marriage improved her.” She paused. “It was so unlike her,” she meditated, “as if I could help it! You know, I’d always thought her so considerate. Carey’s influence, of course. Oh,” she cried out suddenly and angrily, “I’ve got nothing against Carey. I’m not prejudiced. But if he’d been the sort of man one could approve—someone——” Her eye wandered from Kent Rehan to Mr. Flood—“but he was dragging her down——”

Miss Howe shook her head.

“Anita, you’re wrong. I’ve only met him a couple of times but I liked what I saw of him. An honest, straightforward sort of person. Oh, not clever, of course. He’d have bored me in a week——”

“Ah?” said the woman behind Mr. Flood.

“Oh, yes, dull—distinctly. But I had the impression that if I’d been one of his patients I should have done everything he told me to do.”

Anita shrugged.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt he had every virtue, but it’s idle to pretend that he made any attempt to appreciate Madala Grey.”

“You don’t suggest that the man didn’t love his wife, do you?” said Miss Howe in her downright way.

“I suggest nothing. But the fact remains—I give it for what it is worth—but the fact does remain that John Carey has never read one of her books—not one!”

“What?” The Baxter girl’s mouth opened and stayed so.

“You don’t intend to say——” began Mr. Flood.

“I don’t believe it,” said Miss Howe contemptuously.

“Why not? I’ve known a man jealous of his wife before now. I suppose he knew enough to know that she had the brains.” The blonde lady was smiling.

Anita shook her head reluctantly.

“Jealousy? H’m—it might have been, of course. But I didn’t get that impression. I believe that it was a perfectly genuine lack of interest.”

“Yes, but I don’t believe it. How d’you know he didn’t? It’s not a thing he’d own to. Who told you?”

“Madala. Madala herself. She used to make a joke of it.”

“She never showed when she was hurt,” said the Baxter girl emotionally.

“Yes, but it almost seemed as if she were not hurt, as if her—her sensitiveness, her better feelings, had been blunted. I’ve known her use it as a _weapon_ almost,” said Anita conscientiously recollecting. “He—that annoyed me so—he was very peremptory with her sometimes, most rude in his manner. Of course, you know, she _was_ dreamy. Not that that excused him for a moment. I remember a regular scene——”

“Before you?” Miss Howe cast instant doubt upon it.

“My room was next to theirs. I could hear them through the wall. I can assure you that he stormed at her in a most ungentlemanly way——”

“What about?” said the Baxter girl breathlessly.

“Something about his razors. A parcel had come by the early post, and just because she had cut the string—but I couldn’t follow it all. He was a man who was easily irritated by trifles. Well, as I say, after he had raged at her for five minutes or more, till I could have gone in and spoken to him myself, all that that patient woman said, was—‘Darling, have you begun _Eden Walls_ yet?’ I tell you the man never said another word.”

“He didn’t prevent her writing, did he?” said Miss Howe.

“There’s no doubt that he discouraged her. He was selfish. It was his wretched doctoring all day long—and you know how sensitive Madala was. I did persuade her to do some work while I was staying with them, but I soon saw that it was labour thrown away. Her heart wasn’t in it. When it wasn’t Carey it was the baby clothes. For the sake of her reputation,” her voice hardened, “it’s as well that she has died when she has.”

“Anita!”

“I mean it.” She was quick and fierce. “Do you think it was a little thing for me to see that pearl of great price—oh, not Madala Grey! I grew to hate her almost, that new Madala Grey—but the gift within her, her great, blazing genius—flung away, trampled on——”

Miss Howe turned her head in slow denial.

“No, Anita! Not genius. Charm, if you like. Talent, as much as you please. But Madala Grey wasn’t a genius, and she knew it.”

Anita flung up her head.

“She will be when I’ve done with her. She will be when I’ve written the _Life_.”

“Ah, the poor child!” said Great-aunt startlingly.

Anita never heeded. She was wrapt away in some cold passion of her own, a passion that amazed me. I had always thought of her as what she looked, an ordered, steely woman, all brain and will; yet now of a sudden she revealed herself, a creature convulsed, writhing in flames. But they were cold flames. Cold fire, is there such a thing? Ice burns. There is phosphorus. There is the light of stars. I know what I mean if only I had the words. Star-fire—that’s it. She was like a dead star. She warmed no one, she only burned herself up.

It was the impression of a moment. When I looked again it was as if I had been withdrawn from a telescope. She was herself once more. The volcano had shrunk to a diamond twinkle, to a tiny, gesticulating creature with a needle tongue. It was bewildering: while I listened to her I was still thinking—‘Yes, but which is Anita? Diamond or star? What makes the glitter? Frost or flame?’

But that blonde woman in the shadows went off into noiseless laughter that woke the dragons and stirred Mr. Flood to an upward glance. Then he hunched himself closer against her knees, his chin low on his chest, so that his tiny beard and mouth and eyes were like triangles standing on their points. The pose gave him a glinting air of mockery and yet, somehow, you did not feel that he was amused. You only felt—‘Oh, he’s practised that at a looking-glass.’

He drawled out—

“The _Life_, dear lady? Enlighten our darkness.”

“That,” came the murmur behind him, “is precisely what she is going to do. How dense you are, Jasper!”

And at the same moment from Miss Howe—

“Be quiet, you two! Tell us, Anita! A life of her? Is that it? Ah, well, I always suspected your note-book. Did she know you Boswellized?”

“She?” There was the strangest mixture of scorn and admiration in the voice. “As if one could let her know! That was the difficulty with Madala Grey: she wouldn’t take herself seriously. She had—” a pause and a search for the correct word—“what I can only call a _perverted_ sense of humour. If she’d known that I—noted things, she’d have been quite capable of falsifying all her opinions, misrepresenting herself completely, just to—throw me out, as it were. Not maliciously, I don’t mean that. But she teases,” finished Anita petulantly. “She will do it. She laughs at the wrong things. Of course she’s young still.”

“Yes, she’s young—now. She stays young now. She gains that at least,” said the woman in the shadows.

Anita made a quick little sound, half titter and half gasp.

“Oh!” she cried—and her voice was as grey as her face—“I forgot. Do you know—I forgot! It’s going to be ghastly. I believe I shall always be forgetting.”

I glanced up at Kent Rehan. It made me realize that I had been listening with anxiety, that I was afraid of their expressive sentences. They had words, those writing people. They knew what they thought: they could say what they thought: and what they thought could hurt. I didn’t want him to be hurt. I said, under my breath—

“Oh, why do you stay here? They aren’t your sort.”

But he had heard nothing. He was poring over the long tassel of the blind, weaving it into a six-strand plait. I couldn’t help watching his fingers. He had the most beautiful hands that I’ve ever seen on a man. They looked like two alive and independent creatures. They looked as if they could do anything they chose, whether he were there to superintend or not. And he was miles away. I was glad. Anita’s voice was rising like a dreary wind.

“Just that is so strange. All the time I’ve known her I’ve thought of her in the past tense. Her moods, her ways, her actions, were finished things to me—chapters of the _Life_. I _wrote_ her all the time. But now, when she _is_ mine, as it were, now that she exists only in my notes and papers and remembrance of her, now it comes that I’m shaken. I can’t think of her as a subject any more. I shall be wanting her—herself. I can’t think clearly. It’s frightening me, the work there is ahead of me. Because I’ve got to do it without her. She’s lying dead down there in Surrey—now—at this minute. And there’s that man—and a child. One’s overwhelmed. It’s so cruel. The only creature who ever cared for me. Think of Madala, quite still, not answering, not lighting up when you speak to her, staring at the ceiling, staring at her own coffin-lid. In two days she’ll be under the ground. Do you ever think what that means—burial—the corruption—the——”

“Stop it, Nita!” Miss Howe’s movement blotted out my cousin’s face. “Do you hear? I can’t stand it. Here—drink some coffee. Jasper! Say something!” I heard the coffee-cup dance in its saucer.

There came Aunt Serle’s anxious quaver—

“Anita! Nita! What’s the matter, my dear? What’s the matter with my daughter?”

Nobody answered. She was like a tortoise as she poked her head from the hood of her chair.

“Jenny!” she called cautiously. “Jenny!”

I slipped across the room to her.

“What’s it about, Jenny? Eh? Speak up, my dear! Not crying, is she? Temper, that’s it. Don’t say I said so.”

“It’s all right, Auntie. She—they—it’s the bad news. It’s upset them all.”

“Bad news? Fiddlesticks! Temper, I call it. Why shouldn’t the girl get married? Not much money, but a pleasant fellow. Time for her to settle. I said to her—‘My dear, you follow your heart.’ But Nita tried to stop it. Nita couldn’t get over it. Cried. Temper. That’s it. Look at her now. ’Sh! Don’t let her see you.”

But Anita wasn’t looking at me and she wasn’t crying. I suppose Great-aunt must have known what she was talking about; but it wasn’t easy to imagine my cousin soft and red-eyed like that great, good-natured Miss Howe. Her little sharp face looked as controlled as if it were carved. Yet, as she said herself, she was shaken. That showed in the jerkiness of her movements, the sharpening of her voice, in the break-up of her accustomed flow of words into staccato, like a river that has come to some rocks: and her hands had a clock-work, incessant movement, clutch-clutch, fingers on palm, that her eyes repeated. They were everywhere at once, resting, flitting, settling again, yet seeing nothing, I think, while she listened to Mr. Flood and grew more irritated with every word.

“Why bad news?” said Great-aunt in my ear. “It’s a son, isn’t it?”

I hesitated.

“Oh, Auntie, didn’t you hear?” (She had heard, you know. I had seen her shrinking back when Anita screamed at her, with that dreadful shrinking that you see in an animal threatened by a head-blow. She had been leaning forward, and eager. She must have heard.)

“Hear? They all talk,” she quavered. “‘Be quiet,’ says Anita. Ah, I’ve spoilt her. Now Madala——What’s the time, my dear? Why don’t she come?”

“Auntie—Auntie——”

“Eh?” she said. “Why don’t Madala come?”

“Auntie—you’ve forgotten. She’s been ill.”

“Ah—and she’ll be worse before she’s better,” said Great-aunt briskly. “’Sh! Listen to my daughter.”

We listened: at least, I listened. Great-aunt cocked her head on one side, still as a bird, for a minute; then, like a bird, she was re-assured and fell to her knitting again.

Anita and Mr. Flood were quarrelling.

“Why shouldn’t I? Tell me that! Is anyone better fitted? Who knows as much about her as I do? Didn’t I discover her, hacking on two pounds a week? Didn’t I recognize what she was? Who sent her to Mitchell and Bent? Who introduced her everywhere? Who bullied her into writing _Ploughed Fields_? Who was the best friend she ever had—even if I didn’t make the parade of being fond of her that——Oh, I’ve no patience! What would the world know of Madala Grey if it weren’t for me?”

“But—oh, of course we all know how good you were to her, Miss Serle, indeed I can guess by what you’ve done for me——” began the Baxter girl.

Mr. Flood’s tongue tip showed between his red lips. I think he would have made some comment but for the hand pressing on his shoulder.

“But——?” said the woman behind the hand.

“I only mean—‘genius will out,’ won’t it?”

“Genius? Big word!” said Miss Howe.

“Not too big.” The Baxter girl reddened enthusiastically.

“‘Genius will out?’ Not Madala Grey’s. She didn’t know she had any. I don’t believe she ever fully realized——Why, it was the merest chance that _Eden Walls_ didn’t go into the fire. If it hadn’t been for me—if it hadn’t been for me——”

“Ah—_you_!” Miss Howe squared up to her. “Now just what (among friends) have you stood to gain? Fond of her? Oh yes, you were, Anita! Don’t tell me! But in spite of yourself, eh? But that wasn’t what you were after. You didn’t get the pleasure out of her that—I did, for instance. You used to exhaust Madala. I’ve seen you do it. You—you drained her.”

“Yes, I did. I meant to,” said Anita with her laugh. “Pleasure!”

“And she thought you were fond of her. She used to flare if anyone attacked you. Poor Madala!”

“Poor? Why? I shall give it all back.” Anita gave her a long cool look. “I—I hate debts,” said Anita.

Miss Howe flushed brightly.

“If you were cursed with the artistic temperament——” She broke off and began again. “If I were a poor devil of a Bohemian in a hole, it’s not to you I’d go——”

“—twice!” said Anita.

Again they eyed each other. Miss Howe, still flushing, chose her words.

“Madala never lent. That wasn’t in her. She gave. Time, money, love—she gave. You took, it was understood, rather than hurt her feelings by refusing. But it was always free gift.”

“Not to me.” Anita held her head high. “I shall pay. And interest too.”

“Oh, the _Life_! Are you really going to attempt a _Life_?” Miss Howe recovered herself with a laugh, while Mr. Flood repeated curiously—

“Yes, but then what were you after, Anita? What do you stand to gain?”

“Reflected glory,” came from behind him.

She turned as if she had been stung.

“Reflected? Let her keep it! Reflected? Am I never to have anything of my own? Oh, wait!”

“You can’t get much of yourself into a life of Madala Grey though. You’ve too much sense of style for that,” Mr. Flood insisted. “We both hate a biographer who ‘I says, says I.’”

“Oh, it shall be all Madala Grey. I promise you that,” she said with her thin smile.

“Humph! It’s a notion.” Miss Howe was really interested, I could see—yet with a flush on her cheek still. “It’s your sort of work too, Anita! You’re—happier—in critical work.”

“Oh, don’t hedge. Don’t be delicate with me. I can’t create, that’s what you mean. Do you think that’s news to me? Is there a critic who has failed to make it clear to me? I can record—but I can’t create. Good! I can’t create. I can’t do what she did—what you do, Jasper—what even Beryl here does. But——” she paused an instant, “you should be afraid of me for all that. I can pry. Little, nasty, mean word, isn’t it? It’s me!”

The Baxter girl laughed uncertainly and then stopped because Anita’s eyes were on her.

“I’ve eyes. I”—she opened and shut her tiny hands before them—“I’ve claws. I can pry you open, any of you—if I choose. I haven’t chosen. You’ve not been worth while. But—Madala!” and here she released the uneasy Baxter girl—“Madala’s my chance—my chance—my chance! Madala Grey—look at her—coming into her kingdom at twenty—that babe! And me! Look at me! Do you know what my life has been, any of you? Oh, you come to my house to meet my lionets, and we’re very good friends, and you’re afraid of my reviews, and so I have my position, I suppose. But what do you know about me? When I was fifteen—and it’s thirty years ago—I said to myself, ‘Now what shall I do with my life?’ Mother—” she shot her a glance: she didn’t even trouble to lower her voice, “she’d have drudged me and dressed me and married me, I suppose, to three hundred a year and the city—oh, with the best of motives. I fought. I fought. That’s why I’m an ungrateful daughter. I’m supposed to be, I think. My people were so sorry for my mother. My people thought me a fool. I saw through them. Yes, and I saw through myself. That’s the kind of a fool I was. Didn’t I reckon it out? I hadn’t a charm. I hadn’t a talent. I had my _will_. That’s all I had. I taught myself. Work? You don’t know what work means, you ten and five-talented. There’s not a book worth reading that I haven’t read. There’s not the style of a master that I haven’t studied, that I couldn’t reproduce at a pinch. There’s not a man or a woman in London today, worth knowing—from my point of view—that I haven’t contrived to know. The people who’ve arrived—how I’ve studied them, the ways of them, the methods of them. And what’s the end of it all? That” —she jerked her head to the row of her own books on the shelf behind her—“and my column in the _Matins_, and some comforting hundreds a year, and—my knowledge of myself. Oh, I’ve turned out good work. I know that. I have judgment. That’s why I judge myself. I’ve always been rigid with myself. And so I know when I look at my books—though I can say that they are sounder, better work, in better English, that they have more knowledge behind them, than the books of a dozen of you people who arrive—yet I know that they have failed. People don’t read me. People don’t want me. Why? I have my name. I’ve the name of a well-known critic, but—I’m only a name. I’m not alive. The public doesn’t touch hands with me. Now why? Oh, how I’ve tormented myself. Nearly thirty years I’ve given, of unremitting labour, to my art, to my career. There’s not a thought or a wish that I haven’t sacrificed to it. And then that child of twenty comes along, without knowledge, without training, without experience, and gets at one leap, mark you all, at one leap, more than I’ve achieved in thirty years. Some people, I suppose, would submit. Well, I won’t. I wouldn’t. Does my will go for nothing? I _will_ have my share. ‘Reflected glory,’ yes, I’ve stooped to that. I’ve exploited her, if you like to call it that. When I think of the day I discovered her——” She paused an instant, dragging her hand wearily over her eyes—“I was at my zero that day. The _Famous Women_ had been out a week. The reviews—oh, the reviews! Respectful, courteous, lukewarm. If they’d attacked me, if they’d slated, I’d have rejoiced. But they respect me and they’re bored. They know it’s sound work and they’re bored. I bore people. I bore you—all of you. Do you think I’m blind? That night I read the manuscript of _Eden Walls_. (Wasn’t it kind of me—it wasn’t even typed!) And then I saw my chance. I saw how far she’d got at twenty, and I thought—‘I’ll take my chance. I’ll take this genius. I’ll make her fond of me. I’ll help her. I’ll worm myself into her. I’ll abase myself. I’ll toady. I’ll do anything. But I will find out how she does it. I will find out the secret. I’ll find it and I’ll make it my own. I’ll serve for her as Jacob served for Rachel; but she shall serve me in the end.’ I have watched. I have studied. I have puzzled. I believe I’ve grasped it at last. I know myself and I know her. If genius is life—the power to give life—is it that?—then I’m barren. I can’t make life as Madala can. But—listen to me! Listen to me, all of you! I can take a living thing—I can cut it open alive. That’s what I shall do with this life-maker—this easy genius. I’ve taken her to pieces, flesh and blood, bone and ligament and muscle, every secret of her mind and her heart and her soul. The life, the _real_ life of Madala Grey, the rise and fall of a genius, that’s what I’m going to make plain. She’s been a puzzle to you all, with her gifts and her ways and her crazy marriage—she’s not a mystery to me. I tell you I’ve got her, naked, pinned down, and now I shall make her again. Isn’t it fair? She ought to thank me. ‘Dead,’ he says. Who’s to blame? She chose to kill herself. What right had she to take risks? I—I’ve refrained. She couldn’t. She threw away her lamp. But I—I take it. I light it again. Finding’s keeping. It’s mine.”

Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail, and she checked, panting. Her hand went up to her throat as the fumy air rasped it.

“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as she challenged them.

The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in answer, a laugh rippled out.

I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective soul.

“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she, too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.

“One talks,” she said, “among friends.”

Miss Howe made a wry face.

“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”

“You’ve all of you been awfully good to me,” said the Baxter girl. But her gratitude was too general to be acceptable. Even I could have told her that.

“Oh, we do our best for you,” said Mr. Flood.

She looked at him from under her lashes.

“Yes, and she’s thinking this minute what a nice little scene this would make for her new book—touched up, of course,” said the woman behind him.

“Art—selection—Jimmy Whistler——” Mr. Flood was one indistinct murmur.

“With herself her own heroine again, eh?” Miss Howe baited her.

“I didn’t. I wasn’t.”

“Better folk than you do it, child! Anita says so. Don’t they, Anita?”

“Oh,” said Anita heavily, “I wish Madala Grey were here. I wish she hadn’t died. If she were here she wouldn’t—you’d never—she wouldn’t let you laugh at me.”

Miss Howe looked at her intently. There was a quick little run of expression across her large handsome face, like a hand playing a scale. It showed, that easily moved, easily read face, surprise, interest, concern, and, in the end, the sentimental impulse of your kind fur-clad woman to the beggar on the curb. ‘Why! I believe she’s cold! I don’t like it! Give her tuppence, quick!’ She was out of her chair, overwhelming Anita, in one impetuous heave of drapery.

“You’re right, Nita! We’re pigs! Something’s wrong with us. ’Pologize. You know we don’t mean it.”

Anita endured her right-and-left kisses.

“You do mean it,” was all she said.

She was shrunk to such a small grey creature again. I thought to myself—‘Fire? It’s not even diamond-sparkle. She’s as dull as stone.’

Miss Howe was eagerly remorseful.

“We don’t. I don’t know what’s got into us tonight. It’s the fog. There’s something evil about a fog. Distorting. It yellows over one’s soul.”

“It isn’t only tonight,” said the Baxter girl, with her sidelong, ‘can-I-risk-it?’ look at them. “The fog’s been coming on for months.”

“And you mean——?” The blonde lady never snubbed the Baxter girl. It struck me suddenly, as their eyes met, that there was the beginning of a likeness between them. The Baxter girl at fifty—with dyed hair——? But it was only an idea of mine. I’m always seeing imaginary likenesses. I remember that those Academy pictures of Kent Rehan’s always set me to work wondering—‘That woman with the face turned away—I’ve seen her somewhere—of whom does she remind me?—where have I seen her?’ And yet, of course, in those days I knew nothing of Madala Grey.

But the Baxter girl was answering—

“It—it’s cheek, I know, but it’s true. When I first came—” then, with a swift propitiatory glance at Anita—“when you first let me come—the Nights weren’t like this. You weren’t like this, any of you——”

“Upon—my—word!” said Miss Howe with her benevolent chuckle. “Nita! Listen to the infant!”

“Like what?” Mr. Flood moved uneasily.

The Baxter girl turned to him enthusiastically.

“Oh, I used to think you such wonderful people——”

“Did you now?” Miss Howe teased her.

“Let be! let be!” said Mr. Flood impatiently. “Well, dear lady?”

“Oh, I did! I’d read all your stuff. I believe I could write out _The Orchid House_ from memory still.”

His eyes lit up as he challenged her—

“‘Sour!’ said the fox at her feet,
‘How can she ripen windy-high?
Sour!’ said the fox with his nose to the sky—”

He was as pleased as a child with a toy when she capped it—

“Then a grape dropped off. It was rotten sweet.