Chapter II: Part I: In the Night (2)

'Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey. Everything, in another sense. You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly. I _know how_ it moves me, but I cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.'

Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.

'Oh, do go on,' I entreated him. 'Tell me more about music. Do you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived? You must do, since you always play him.'

He smiled.

'No,' he said, 'I do not. For me there is no supremacy in art. When fifty artists have contrived to be supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. Take a little song by Grieg. It is perfect, it is supreme. No one could be greater than Grieg was great when he wrote that song. The whole last act of _The Twilight of the Gods_ is not greater than a little song of Grieg's.'

'I see,' I murmured humbly. '_The Twilight of the Gods_--that is Wagner, isn't it?'

'Yes. Don't you know your Wagner?'

'No. I--'

'You don't know _Tristan_?'

He jumped up, excited.

'How could I know it?' I expostulated. 'I have never seen any opera. I know the marches from _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_, and "O Star of Eve!"'

'But it is impossible that you don't know _Tristan_!' he exclaimed. 'The second act of _Tristan_ is the greatest piece of love-music--No, it isn't.' He laughed. 'I must not contradict myself. But it is marvellous--marvellous! You know the story?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Play me some of it.'

'I will play the Prelude,' he answered.

I gulped down the remaining drops in my glass and crossed the room to a chair where I could see his face. And he played the Prelude to the most passionately voluptuous opera ever written. It was my first real introduction to Wagner, my first glimpse of that enchanted field. I was ravished, rapt away.

'Wagner was a great artist in spite of himself,' said Diaz, when he had finished. 'He assigned definite and precise ideas to all those melodies. Nothing could be more futile. I shall not label them for you. But perhaps you can guess the love-motive for yourself.'

'Yes, I can,' I said positively. 'It is this.'

I tried to hum the theme, but my voice refused obedience. So I came to the piano, and played the theme high up in the treble, while Diaz was still sitting on the piano-stool. I trembled even to touch the piano in his presence; but I did it.

'You have guessed right,' he said; and then he asked me in a casual tone: 'Do you ever play pianoforte duets?'

'Often,' I replied unsuspectingly, 'with my aunt. We play the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and overtures, and so on.'

'Awfully good fun, isn't it?' he smiled.

'Splendid!' I said.

'I've got _Tristan_ here arranged for pianoforte duet,' he said. 'Tony, my secretary, enjoys playing it. You shall play part of the second act with me.'

'Me! With you!'

'Certainly.'

'Impossible! I should never dare! How do you know I can play at all?'

'You have just proved it to me,' said he. 'Come; you will not refuse me this!'

I wanted to leave the vicinity of the piano. I felt that, once out of the immediate circle of his tremendous physical influence, I might manage to escape the ordeal which he had suggested. But I could not go away. The silken nets of his personality had been cast, and I was enmeshed. And if I was happy, it was with a dreadful happiness.

'But, really, I can't play with you,' I said weakly.

His response was merely to look up at me over his shoulder. His beautiful face was so close to mine, and it expressed such a naïve and strong yearning for my active and intimate sympathy, and such divine frankness, and such perfect kindliness, that I had no more will to resist. I knew I should suffer horribly in spoiling by my coarse amateurishness the miraculous finesse of his performance, but I resigned myself to suffering. I felt towards him as I had felt during the concert: that he must have his way at no matter what cost, that he had already earned the infinite gratitude of the entire world--in short, I raised him in my soul to a god's throne; and I accepted humbly the great, the incredible honour he did me. And I was right--a thousand times right.

And in the same moment he was like a charming child to me: such is always in some wise the relation between the creature born to enjoy and the creature born to suffer.

'I'll try,' I said; 'but it will be appalling.'

I laughed and shook my head.

'We shall see how appalling it will be,' he murmured, as he got the volume of music.

He fetched a chair for me, and we sat down side by side, he on the stool and I on the chair.

'I'm afraid my chair is too low,' I said.

'And I'm sure this stool is too high,' he said. 'Suppose we exchange.'

So we both rose to change the positions of the chair and the stool, and our garments touched and almost our faces, and at that very moment there was a loud rap at the door.

I darted away from him.

'What's that?' I cried, low in a fit of terror.

'Who's there?' he called quietly; but he did not stir.

We gazed at each other.

The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.

'Who's there?' Diaz demanded again.

'Go to the door,' I whispered.

He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor. Diaz went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the corridor, and looked into the darkness.

'Curious!' he commented tranquilly. 'I see no one.'

He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room; one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ball, which caught the light of the candle on the piano.

'You were startled,' he said. 'You must have a little more of our cordial--just a spoonful.'

He poured out for me an infinitesimal quantity, and the same for himself.

I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and that did not leave me.

We sat down a second time to the piano.

'You understand,' he explained, staring absently at the double page of music, 'this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her husband, has just gone off hunting--you will hear the horns dying in the distance--and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch is burning in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the signal by extinguishing it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment when they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that you will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers. Are you ready?'

'Yes.'

We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous. I was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes. The notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was the big black letters at the top, 'Zweiter Aufzug.' And furthermore, on that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the bass of the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and closed my eyes.

'I can't,' I whispered, 'I can't. I would if I could.'

He gently took my hand.

'My dear companion,' he said, 'tell me your name.'

I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason, flashed through my mind.

'Magdalen,' I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere that he believed it.

I could see that he was taken aback.

'It is a holy name and a good name,' he said, after a pause. 'Magda, you are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read it, won't you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.'

And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in conjunction with my air in the bass he was suddenly, magically, drawing out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not disgrace myself.'

'Unless it was Chopin,' whispered Diaz. 'No one could ever see two things at once as well as Wagner.'

We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the page, and then the hunters' horns were heard departing from the garden of love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone, out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away, so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I surrendered utterly and passionately to the spell of the beauty which we were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.

The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm assurance of heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is, there is God also.'

The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy, but I held on, and the climax arrived--a climax which touched the limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in coming together.

'Tristan has come into the garden,' I muttered.

And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.

We plunged forward into the love-scene itself--the scene in which the miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces, what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more fully than I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a supreme experience, and that another such could not be contained in my life.... And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently and persistently against the rhythm.

'Hear the beating of their hearts,' Diaz' whisper floated over the chords.

It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands fell from the keyboard. He looked at me--and with what a glance!

'I can bear no more,' I cried wildly. 'It is too beautiful, too beautiful!'

And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my face in my hands.

He came to me, and bent over me.

'Magda,' he whispered, 'show me your face.' With his hands he delicately persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to look on him. 'How dark and splendid you are, Magda!' he said, still holding my hands. 'How humid and flashing your eyes! And those eyelashes, and that hair--dark, dark! And that bosom, with its rise and fall! And that low, rich voice, that is like dark wine! And that dress--dark, and full of mysterious shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known each other in a previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this moment is the fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You were to be mine. You are mine, Magda!'

There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief instant, to this noble and glorious creature, on whom the gods had showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the resistless tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable, and everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we were together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in contact. He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I ceased to have volition....

IV

When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I was, and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light of dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the brass knob, which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and on another brass knob a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had disconcerting sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle, and as though charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual pain, and an incubus, crushing but intangible, lay heavily, like a physical weight, on my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough--it must be so; but how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I could hear his faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on one elbow and looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in consciousness; his lips were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely flushed, and nothing could disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept with the calmness of the natural innocent man, to whom the assuaging of desires brings only content.

I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him when he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been abashed, timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the egoist's deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it intimately and utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure at once. I could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that. Therefore, I must go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not how; I knew only that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with that; it was not his affair, and I should have resented his interference. Ah! when I was in the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony, how blind! And that morning I was like a Malay running amok.

Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life--at least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the courage of my passion in the night, so I proved the courage of my--not my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret--but of my intellectual honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that, though I am passionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the void, and I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me. Between the autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know me well, but he did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no cord to pull me back.

I passed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains, and there was the score of _Tristan_ open on the piano. Yes; and if I were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.

In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat, and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me; but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and washing the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with you, then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.

'What time is it, please?' I asked her.

'Better than half-past six, ma'am,' said she.

She was young and emaciated.

'Have you got a hat you can lend me? Or I'll buy it from you.'

'A hat, ma'am?'

'Yes, a hat,' I repeated impatiently. And I flushed. 'I must go out at once, and I've--I've no hat And I can't--'

It is extraordinary how in a crisis one's organism surprises one. I had thought I was calm and full of self-control, but I had almost no command over my voice.

'I've got a boat-shaped straw, ma'am, if that's any use to you,' said the girl kindly.

What she surmised or what she knew I could not say. But I have found out since in my travels, that hotel chambermaids lose their illusions early. At any rate her tone was kindly.

'Get it me, there's a good girl,' I entreated her.

And when she brought it, I drew out the imitation pearl pins and put them between my teeth, and jammed the hat on my head and skewered it savagely with the pins.

'Is that right?'

'It suits you better than it does me, ma'am, I do declare,' she said. 'Oh, ma'am, this is too much--I really couldn't!'

I had given her five shillings.

'Nonsense! I am very much obliged to you,' I whispered hurriedly, and ran off.

She was a good girl. I hope she has never suffered. And yet I would not like to think she had died of consumption before she knew what life meant.

I hastened from the hotel. A man in a blue waistcoat with shining black sleeves was moving a large cocoa-nut mat in the hall, and the pattern of the mat was shown in dust on the tiles where the mat had been. He glanced at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure sunshine--such sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm has washed the soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that sunshine; but I had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was not a soul in the square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and mankind with different eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing; to-day I knew everything--so it seemed to me. It seemed to me that I understood all sorts of vague, subtle things that I had not understood before; that I had been blind and now saw; that I had become kinder, more sympathetic, more human. What these things were that I understood, or thought I understood, I could not have explained. All I felt was that a radical change of attitude had occurred in me. 'Poor world!

Poor humanity! My heart melts for you!' Thus spoke my soul, pouring itself out. The very stone facings of the station and the hotel seemed somehow to be humanized and to need my compassion.

I walked with eyes downcast into the station. I had determined to take the train from Knype to Shawport, a distance of three miles, and then to walk up the hill from Shawport through Oldcastle Street to Bursley. I hoped that by such a route at such an hour, I should be unlikely to meet acquaintances, of whom, in any case, I had few. My hopes appeared to be well founded, for the large booking-hall at the station was thronged with a multitude entirely strange to me--workmen and workwomen and workgirls crowded the place. The first-class and second-class booking-windows were shut, and a long tail of muscular men, pale men, stout women, and thin women pushed to take tickets at the other window. I was obliged to join them, and to wait my turn amid the odour of corduroy and shawl, and the strong odour of humanity; my nostrils were peculiarly sensitive that morning. Some of the men had herculean arms and necks, and it was these who wore pieces of string tied round their trousers below the knee, disclosing the lines of their formidable calves. The women were mostly pallid and quiet. All carried cans, or satchels, or baskets; here and there a man swung lightly on his shoulder a huge bag of tools, which I could scarcely have raised from the ground. Everybody was natural, direct, and eager; and no one attempted to be genteel or refined; no one pretended that he did not toil with his hands for dear life. I anticipated that I should excite curiosity, but I did not. The people had a preoccupied, hurried air. Only at the window itself, when the ticket-clerk, having made me repeat my demand, went to a distant part of his lair to get my ticket, did I detect behind me a wave of impatient and inimical interest in this drone who caused delay to busy people.

It was the same on the up-platform, the same in the subway, and the same on the down-platform. I was plunged in a sea of real, raw life; but I could not mingle with it; I was a bit of manufactured lace on that full tide of nature. The porters cried in a different tone from what they employed when the London and Manchester expresses, and the polite trains generally, were alongside. They cried fraternally, rudely; they were at one with the passengers. I alone was a stranger.

'These are the folk! These are the basis of society, and the fountain of _our_ wealth and luxury!' I thought; for I was just beginning, at that period, to be interested in the disquieting aspects of the social organism, and my ideas were hot and crude. I was aware of these people on paper, but now, for the first time, I realized the immense rush and sweep of their existence, their nearness to Nature, their formidable directness. They frightened me with their vivid humanity.

I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a compartment where there were several girls and one young man. The girls were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture. Each had her dinner-basket. Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves. From the young man's soiled white jacket under his black coat, I gathered that he was an engineer. The train moved out of the station and left the platform nearly empty. I pictured the train, a long procession of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people. None of my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance. It was uncanny.

Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn, musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life. 'Ah,' I thought, 'you little know what I know! I may appear a butterfly, but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence. I am above you, beyond you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by the turmoil in my heart!' And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that they probably knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten more than I had ever learnt. I remembered an absorbing correspondence about the manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the _Staffordshire Recorder_--a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to conceal the paper after the second week. I guessed that they might smile at the simplicity of my heart could they see it. Meaning of existence! Why, they were reared in it! The naturalness of natural people and of natural acts struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself. My adventure grew smaller. But I recalled its ecstasies. I dwelt on the romantic perfection of Diaz. It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that Diaz, the glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me--_me_! out of all the ardent, worshipping women that the world contained. I wondered if he had wakened up, and I felt sorry for him. So far, I had not decided how soon, if at all, I should communicate with him. My mind was incapable of reaching past the next few hours--the next hour.

We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless, unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment. The train rumbled on through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild sunshine. Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic productiveness find time for love? Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot, like animals. Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange beasts in the jungle of my poor brain. Then the train arrived at Shawport, and I was obliged to get out. I say 'obliged,' because I violently wished not to get out. I wished to travel on in that train to some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.

The station clock showed only five minutes to seven. I was astounded. It seemed to me that all the real world had been astir and busy for hours. And this extraordinary activity went on every morning while Aunt Constance and I lay in our beds and thought well of ourselves.

I shivered, and walked quickly up the street. I had positively not noticed that I was cold. I had scarcely left the station before Fred Ryley appeared in front of me. I saw that his face was swollen. My heart stopped. Of course, he would tell Ethel.... He passed me sheepishly without stopping, merely raising his hat, and murmuring the singular words:

'We're both very, very sorry.'

What in the name of Heaven could they possibly know, he and Ethel? And what right had he to ...? Did he smile furtively? Fred Ryley had sometimes a strange smile. I reddened, angry and frightened.

The distance between the station and our house proved horribly short. And when I arrived in front of the green gates, and put my hand on the latch, I knew that I had formed no plan whatever. I opened the right-hand gate and entered the garden. The blinds were still down, and the house looked so decorous and innocent in its age. My poor aunt! What a night she must have been through! It was inconceivable that I should tell her what had happened to me. Indeed, under the windows of that house it seemed inconceivable that the thing had happened which had happened. Inconceivable! Grotesque! Monstrous!

But could I lie? Could I rise to the height of some sufficient and kindly lie?

A hand drew slightly aside the blind of the window over the porch. I sighed, and went wearily, in my boat-shaped straw, up the gravelled path to the door.

Rebecca met me at the door. It was so early that she had not yet put on an apron. She looked tired, as if she had not slept.

'Come in, miss,' she said weakly, holding open the door.

It seemed to me that I did not need this invitation from a servant.

'I suppose you've all been fearfully upset, wondering where I was,' I began, entering the hall.

My adventure appeared fantastically unreal to me in the presence of this buxom creature, whom I knew to be incapable of imagining anything one hundredth part so dreadful.

'No, miss; I wasn't upset on account of you. You're always so sensible like. You always know what to do. I knew as you must have stopped the night with friends in Hanbridge on account of the heavy rain, and perhaps that there silly cabman not turning up, and them tramcars all crowded; and, of course, you couldn't telegraph.'

This view that I was specially sagacious and equal to emergencies rather surprised me.

'But auntie?' I demanded, trembling.

'Oh, miss!' cried Rebecca, glancing timidly over her shoulder, 'I want you to come with me into the dining-room before you go upstairs.'

She snuffled.

In the dining-room I went at once to the window to draw up the blinds.

'Not that, not that!' Rebecca appealed, weeping. 'For pity's sake!' And she caught my hand.

I then noticed that Lucy was standing in the doorway, also weeping. Rebecca noticed this too.

'Lucy, you go to your kitchen this minute,' she said sharply, and then turned to me and began to cry again. 'Miss Peel--how can I tell you?'

'Why do you call me Miss Peel?' I asked her.

But I knew why. The thing flashed over me instantly. My dear aunt was dead.

'You've got no aunt,' said Rebecca. 'My poor dear! And you at the concert!'

I dropped my head and my bosom on the bare mahogany table and cried. Never before, and never since, have I spilt such tears--hot, painful drops, distilled plenteously from a heart too crushed and torn.

'There, there!' muttered Rebecca. 'I wish I could have told you different--less cruel; but it wasn't in me to do it.'

'And she's lying upstairs this very moment all cold and stiff,' a wailing voice broke in.

It was Lucy, who could not keep herself away from us.

'Will you go to your kitchen, my girl!'

Rebecca drove her off. 'And the poor thing's not stiff either. Her poor body's as soft as if she was only asleep, and doctor says it will be for a day or two. It's like that when they're took off like that, he says. Oh, Miss Carlotta--'

'Tell me all about it before I go upstairs,' I said.

I had recovered.

'Your poor aunt went to bed just as soon as you were gone, miss,' said Rebecca. 'She would have it she was quite well, only tired. I took her up a cup of cocoa at ten o'clock, and she seemed all right, and then I sends Lucy to bed, and I sits up in the kitchen to wait for you. Not a sound from your poor aunt. I must have dropped asleep, miss, in my chair, and I woke up with a start like, and the kitchen clock was near on one. Thinks I, perhaps Miss Carlotta's been knocking and ringing all this time and me not heard, and I rushes to the front door. But of course you weren't there. The porch was nothing but a pool o' water. I says to myself she's stopping somewhere, I says. And I felt it was my duty to go and tell your aunt, whether she was asleep or whether she wasn't asleep.... Well, and there she was, miss, with her eyes closed, and as soft as a child. I spoke to her, loud, more than once. "Miss Carlotta a'n't come," I says. "Miss Carlotta a'n't come, ma'am," I says. She never stirred. Thinks I, this is queer this is. And I goes up to her and touches her. Chilly! Then I takes the liberty of pushing back your poor aunt's eyelids, and I could but see the whites of her eyes; the eyeballs was gone up, and a bit outwards. Yes; and her poor dear chin was dropped. Thinks I, here's trouble, and Miss Carlotta at the concert. I runs to our bedroom, and I tells Lucy to put a cloak on and fetch Dr. Roycroft. "Who for?" she says. "Never you mind who for!" I says, says I. "You up and quick. But you can tell the doctor it's missis as is took." And in ten minutes he was here, miss. But it's only across the garden, like. "Yes," he said, "she's been dead an hour or more. Failure of the heart's action," he said. "She died in her sleep," he said. "Thank God she died in her sleep if she was to die, the pure angel!" I says. I told the doctor as you were away for the night, miss. And I laid her out, miss, and your poor auntie wasn't my first, either. I've seen trouble--I've--'

And Rebecca's tears overcame her voice.

'I'll go upstairs with you, miss,' she struggled out.

One thought that flew across my mind was that Doctor Roycroft was very intimate with the Ryleys, and had doubtless somehow informed them of my aunt's death. This explained Fred Ryley's strange words and attitude to me on the way from the station. The young man had been too timid to stop me. The matter was a trifle, but another idea that struck me was not a trifle, though I strove to make it so. My aunt had died about midnight, and it was at midnight that Diaz and I had heard the mysterious knock on his sitting-room door. At the time I had remarked how it resembled my aunt's knock. Occasionally, when the servants overslept themselves, Aunt Constance would go to their rooms in her pale-blue dressing-gown and knock on their door exactly like that. Could it be that this was one of those psychical manifestations of which I had read? Had my aunt, in passing from this existence to the next, paused a moment to warn me of my terrible danger? My intellect replied that a disembodied soul could not knock, and that the phenomenon had been due simply to some guest or servant of the hotel who had mistaken the room, and discovered his error in time. Nevertheless, the instinctive part of me--that part of us which refuses to fraternize with reason, and which we call the superstitious because we cannot explain it--would not let go the spiritualistic theory, and during all my life has never quite surrendered it to the attacks of my brain.

There was a long pause.

'No,' I said; 'I will go upstairs alone;' and I went, leaving my cloak and hat with Rebecca.

Already, to my hypersensitive nostrils, there was a slight odour in the darkened bedroom. What lay on the bed, straight and long and thin, resembled almost exactly my aunt as she lived. I forced myself to look on it. Except that the face was paler than usual, and had a curious transparent, waxy appearance, and that the cheeks were a little hollowed, and the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth somewhat deepened, there had been no outward change.... And _this_ once was she! I thought, Where is she, then? Where is the soul? Where is that which loved me without understanding me? Where is that which I loved? The baffling, sad enigma of death confronted me in all its terrifying crudity. The shaft of love and the desolation of death had struck me almost in the same hour, and before these twin mysteries, supremely equal, I recoiled and quailed. I had neither faith nor friend. I was solitary, and my soul also was solitary. The difficulties of Being seemed insoluble. I was not a moral coward, I was not prone to facile repentances; but as I gazed at that calm and unsullied mask I realized, whatever I had gained, how much I had lost. At twenty-one I knew more of the fountains of life than Aunt Constance at over sixty. Poor aged thing that had walked among men for interminable years, and never _known_! It seemed impossible, shockingly against Nature, that my aunt's existence should have been so! I pitied her profoundly. I felt that essentially she was girlish compared to me. And yet--and yet--that which she had kept and which I had given away was precious, too--indefinably and wonderfully precious! The price of knowledge and of ecstasy seemed heavy to me then. The girl that had gone with Diaz into that hotel apartment had come out no more. She had expired there, and her extinction was the price, Oh, innocence! Oh, divine ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered you! And herein is the woman's tragedy.

There in that mausoleum I decided that I must never see Diaz again. He was fast in my heart, a flashing, glorious treasure, but I must never see him again. I must devote myself to memory.

On the dressing-table lay a brown-paper parcel which seemed out of place there. I opened it, and it contained a magnificently-bound copy of _The Imitation of Christ_. Upon the flyleaf was written: 'To dearest Carlotta on attaining her majority. With fondest love. C.P.'

It was too much; it was overwhelming. I wept again. Soul so kind and pure! The sense of my loss, the sense of the simple, proud rectitude of her life, laid me low.

V

Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the air of your own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave the night behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that carry bread and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water; trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and your pathos.

That little journey from Knype to Shawport had implanted itself painfully in my memory, as though during it I had peered too close into the face of life. And now I had undertaken another, and a longer one. Three months had elapsed--three months of growing misery and despair; three months of tedious familiarity with lawyers and distant relatives, and all the exasperating camp-followers of death; three months of secret and strange fear, waxing daily. And at last, amid the expostulations and the shrugs of wisdom and age, I had decided to go to London. I had little energy, and no interest, but I saw that I must go to London; I was driven there by my secret fear; I dared not delay. And not a soul in the wide waste of the Five Towns comprehended me, or could have comprehended me had it been so minded. I might have shut up the house for a time. But no; I would not. Always I have been sudden, violent, and arbitrary; I have never been able to tolerate half-measures, or to wait upon occasion. I sold the house; I sold the furniture. Yes; and I dismissed my faithful Rebecca and the clinging Lucy, and they departed, God knows where; it was as though I had sold them into slavery. Again and again, in the final week, I cut myself to the quick, recklessly, perhaps purposely; I moved in a sort of terrible languor, deaf to every appeal, pretending to be stony, and yet tortured by my secret fear, and by a hemorrhage of the heart that no philosophy could stanch. And I swear that nothing desolated me more than the strapping and the labelling of my trunks that morning after I had slept, dreamfully, in the bed that I should never use again--the bed that, indeed, was even then the property of a furniture dealer. Had I wept at all, I should have wept as I wrote out the labels for my trunks: 'Miss Peel, passenger to Golden Cross Hotel, London. Euston via Rugby,' with two thick lines drawn under the 'Euston.' That writing of labels was the climax. With a desperate effort I tore myself up by the roots, and all bleeding I left the Five Towns. I have never seen them since. Some day, when I shall have attained serenity and peace, when the battle has been fought and lost, I will revisit my youth. I have always loved passionately the disfigured hills and valleys of the Five Towns. And as I think of Oldcastle Street, dropping away sleepily and respectably from the Town Hall of Bursley, with the gold angel holding a gold crown on its spire, I vibrate with an inexplicable emotion. What is there in Oldcastle Street to disturb the dust of the soul?

I must tell you here that Diaz had gone to South America on a triumphal tour of concerts, lest I forget! I read it in the paper.

So I arrived in London on a February day, about one o'clock. And the hall-porter at the Golden Cross Hotel, and the two pale girls in the bureau of the hotel, were sympathetic and sweet to me, because I was young and alone, and in mourning, and because I had great rings round my eyes. It was a fine day, blue and mild. At half-past three I had nothing in the world to do. I had come to London without a plan, without a purpose, with scarcely an introduction; I wished simply to plunge myself into its solitude, and to be alone with my secret fear. I walked out into the street, slowly, like one whom ennui has taught to lose no chance of dissipating time. I neither liked nor disliked London. I had no feelings towards it save one of perplexity. I thought it noisy, dirty, and hurried. Its great name roused no thrill in my bosom. On the morrow, I said, I would seek a lodging, and perhaps write to Ethel Ryley. Meanwhile I strolled up into Trafalgar Square, and so into Charing Cross Road. And in Charing Cross Road--it was the curst accident of fate--I saw the signboard of the celebrated old firm of publishers, Oakley and Dalbiac. It is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in this history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt's death I had already written my first novel, _The Jest_, and sent it to precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance of success, and that they would be prepared to publish it on certain terms, but that I must not expect, etc. By that time I had lost my original sublime faith in the exceeding excellence of my story, and I replied that I preferred to withdraw the book. To this letter I had received no answer. When I saw the famous sign over a doorway the impulse seized me to enter and get the manuscript, with the object of rewriting it. Soon, I reflected, I might not be able to enter; the portals of mankind might be barred to me for a space.... I saw in a flash of insight that my salvation lay in work, and in nothing else. I entered, resolutely. A brougham was waiting at the doors.

After passing along counters furnished with ledgers and clerks, through a long, lofty room lined with great pigeon-holes containing thousands of books each wrapped separately in white paper, I was shown into what the clerk who acted as chamberlain called the office of the principal. This room, too, was spacious, but so sombre that the electric light was already burning. The first thing I noticed was that the window gave on a wall of white tiles. In the middle of the somewhat dingy apartment was a vast, square table, and at this table sat a pale, tall man, whose youth astonished me--for the firm of Oakley and Dalbiac was historic.

He did not look up exactly at the instant of my entering, but when he did look up, when he saw me, he stared for an instant, and then sprang from his chair as though magically startled into activity. His age was about thirty, and he had large, dark eyes, and a slight, dark moustache, and his face generally was interesting; he wore a dark gray suit. I was nervous, but he was even more nervous; yet in the moment of looking up he had not seemed nervous. He could not do enough, apparently, to make me feel at ease, and to show his appreciation of me and my work. He spoke enthusiastically of _The Jest_, begging me neither to suppress it nor to alter it. And, without the least suggestion from me, he offered me a considerable sum of money in advance of royalties. At that time I scarcely knew what royalties were. But although my ignorance of business was complete, I guessed that this man was behaving in a manner highly unusual among publishers. He was also patently contradicting the tenor of his firm's letter to me. I thanked him, and said I should like, at any rate, to glance through the manuscript.

'Don't alter it, Miss Peel, I beg,' he said. 'It is "young," I know; but it ought to be. I remember my wife said--my wife reads many of our manuscripts--by the way--' He went to a door, opened it, and called out, 'Mary!'

A tall and slim woman, extremely elegant, appeared in reply to this appeal. Her hair was gray above the ears, and I judged that she was four or five years older than the man. She had a kind, thin face, with shining gray eyes, and she was wearing a hat.

'Mary, this is Miss Peel, the author of _The Jest_--you remember. Miss Peel, my wife.'

The woman welcomed me with quick, sincere gestures. Her smile was very pleasant, and yet a sad smile. The husband also had an air of quiet, restrained, cheerful sadness.

'My wife is frequently here in the afternoon like this,' said the principal.

'Yes,' she laughed; 'it's quite a family affair, and I'm almost on the staff. I distinctly remember your manuscript, Miss Peel, and how very clever and amusing it was.'

Her praise was spontaneous and cordial, but it was a different thing from the praise of her husband. He obviously noticed the difference.

'I was just saying to Miss Peel--' he began, with increased nervousness.

'Pardon me,' I interrupted. 'But am I speaking to Mr. Oakley or Mr. Dalbiac?'

'To neither,' said he. 'My name is Ispenlove, and I am the nephew of the late Mr. Dalbiac. Mr. Oakley died thirty years ago. I have no partner.'

'You expected to see a very old gentleman, no doubt,' Mrs. Ispenlove remarked.

'Yes,' I smiled.

'People often do. And Frank is so very young. You live in London?'

'No,' I said; 'I have just come up.'

'To stay?'

'To stay.'

'Alone?'

'Yes. My aunt died a few months ago. I am all that is left of my family.'

Mrs. Ispenlove's eyes filled with tears, and she fingered a gold chain that hung from her neck.

'But have you got rooms--a house?'

'I am at a hotel for the moment.'

'But you have friends?'

I shook my head. Mr. Ispenlove was glancing rapidly from one to the other of us.

'My dear young lady!' exclaimed his wife. Then she hesitated, and said: 'Excuse my abruptness, but do let me beg you to come and have tea with us this afternoon. We live quite near--in Bloomsbury Square. The carriage is waiting. Frank, you can come?'

'I can come for an hour,' said Mr. Ispenlove.

I wanted very much to decline, but I could not. I could not disappoint that honest and generous kindliness, with its touch of melancholy. I could not refuse those shining gray eyes. I saw that my situation and my youth had lacerated Mrs. Ispenlove's sensitive heart, and that she wished to give it balm by being humane to me.

We seemed, so rapid was our passage, to be whisked on an Arabian carpet to a spacious drawing-room, richly furnished, with thick rugs and ample cushions and countless knicknacks and photographs and delicately-tinted lampshades. There was a grand piano by Steinway, and on it Mendelssohn's 'Songs without Words.' The fire slumbered in a curious grate that projected several feet into the room--such a contrivance I had never seen before. Near it sat Mrs. Ispenlove, entrenched behind a vast copper disc on a low wicker stand, pouring out tea. Mr. Ispenlove hovered about. He and his wife called each other 'dearest.' 'Ring the bell for me, dearest.' 'Yes, dearest.' I felt sure that they had no children. They were very intimate, very kind, and always gently sad. The atmosphere was charmingly domestic, even cosy, despite the size of the room--a most pleasing contrast to the offices which we had just left. Mrs. Ispenlove told her husband to look after me well, and he devoted himself to me.

'Do you know,' said Mrs. Ispenlove, 'I am gradually recalling the details of your book, and you are not at all the sort of person that I should have expected to see.'

'But that poor little book isn't _me_,' I answered. 'I shall never write another like it. I only--'

'Shall you not?' Mr. Ispenlove interjected. 'I hope you will, though.'

I smiled.

'I only did it to see what I could do. I am going to begin something quite different.'

'It appears to me,' said Mrs. Ispenlove--'and I must again ask you to excuse my freedom, but I feel as if I had known you a long time--it appears to me that what you want immediately is a complete rest.'

'Why do you say that?' I demanded.