Chapter II

For three weeks Janet stayed with her, sleeping with her, arms tight-locked about her yielding body as they had often slept together in the days at Kew. With her own hands, she fed her; in the warmth of her big, generous heart, she nursed her back to life, as you revive some little bird, starved and cold, in the heat of your two hands.

During the first fortnight, she asked no questions. What had happened was obvious. She learnt from the people on the second floor in the office of the railway company that Traill had left his rooms; but under what circumstances and why, she made no inquiries. Brought face to face with the exigencies in the lives of others, there is a fund of common sense to be found in the character of the revolutionary woman. That Janet Hallard was an artist, now with a studio of sorts of her own, says nothing for her temperament and less for her art. She had no conception of the higher life, and to her mind the inner mysticism was a jumble of confused nonsense--the blind leading the blind, for whom the ultimate ditch was a bastard theosophy. As a matter of fact, Janet had no mean ideas of design; but they were vigorous and, for her living, she had to struggle against the overwhelming sentimentalism of the _nouveau_ art.

In dealing with Sally then, a subject needing tact, common sense and an unyielding strength of purpose, she was more than eminently fitted to save her from the edge of the precipice towards which she had found her so blindly stumbling. It was just such a moment as when one sees one's dearest friend walking blindly to the verge of an abyss and knows that too sudden a cry, too swift a movement to save them, may plunge their reckless body for ever into eternity. In this moment, Janet kept her wits. With infinite care, with infinite tenderness, never weakening to the importunate demands that were made of her, giving up her work, giving up every other interest that she had, she slowly drew Sally back into the steady current of existence; saw day by day the life come tardily again into the bloodless cheeks, and watched the smearing shadows beneath the hollow eyes as they disappeared.

Then, at the end of a fortnight, she learnt in quavering sentences from Sally's lips, trembling as they told it, the story of her desertion.

"You shouldn't have followed him, Sally," she whispered gently at its conclusion.

"I know I shouldn't--I know I shouldn't. And so I know of course he isn't to blame. It's that woman--his sister. I always knew she hated me--knew it! She used to look at me like you look at soiled things in a shop! She pointed me out to him in the theatre. I can guess the things she said. She brought the other--the other one to see him. Oh, wasn't it cunning of her? Mustn't she be a brute! Think what she's done to me! Look how wretched she's made my life! And she's got every single thing she can want. Oh, I don't wonder that people have their doubts about this marvellous mercy of God! I don't see any mercy in what's happened to me. I never saw any mercy in what happened to father; and yet he only did what he ought to have done."

The excitement was rising within her--a steady torrent lifting to the flood. Janet watched its progress steadily in her eyes. When it reached this point, she adroitly changed the current of her thoughts.

"What did your father do?" she asked with interest.

Sally looked up and the expression in her eyes changed.

"Have I never told you?"

"No."

"He consecrated too much wine one Easter Sunday where he was taking a _locum tenens_--and afterwards, when he had to drink it--it went to his head."

She told it so seriously that Janet was driven to choke the rush of laughter rising within her.

"Why did he have to drink it?" she asked.

"They have to. Consecrated wine mustn't be kept."

"But why not? Does it go bad?"

"Janet! No--but, don't you see?--they do keep it in the Roman Catholic Church--on the altar--that's why the little red lamp is always burning in front. That's why the people bow when they first come into the church. And don't you see they're afraid in the Anglican Church, that if the Bread and Wine were kept, people might venerate it as the real Presence, which of course it isn't."

"Isn't it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"Then he had to drink it all himself?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't he get somebody to help him?"

"He did try. He asked the warden--but the warden was a total abstainer."

Janet looked sternly out of the window.

"Then he asked a man he saw outside the church--but he was apparently an atheist. At any rate, he didn't believe in that."

"P'raps he thought the wine wasn't good?" Janet suggested.

"Oh no--he offered to drink it; but of course as he didn't believe--"

"Didn't believe in what? He believed it was wine, didn't he?"

"Oh yes--but he didn't believe in the Communion. So father had to drink it himself. And then, the Bishop came into the vestry and found him."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing then--but a few months later, he was appointed to the chaplaincy of a Union--of course a much smaller position than the one he had occupied."

"Didn't they give any reasons?"

"Oh yes--in a sort of a way. They said that they thought the rectorship of Cailsham was rather too responsible a post for him. They asked him to accept the other in such a way that it would have been hard to refuse. Of course, they couldn't actually turn him out. But mother hated him for going. It was soon after we left there that I came up to you in London. They were getting so poor. My brother couldn't be kept up at Oxford. The governess had to go. Father died not long after I left. I know what he died of. They called it a general break-up."

"Oh--I know that," said Janet. "There's the shot-gun prescription--all the pharmacopoeia ground into a pill and fired down the patient's throat. It must hit something. That general break-up is the double-barrelled diagnosis. You believe it was the resignation of the rectorship that finished him."

"Yes--I'm sure of it. I remember, the day I went away from home--when I came in to say good-bye to him, he was writing a sermon for Easter. It was just Easter then, don't you remember? I went to the little church on Kew Green. He read a bit of it out to me--something about there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ from the dead--and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the very lowest depth of despair."

Janet shook her head up and down. Not one of us is too old to learn some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine. To Janet it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel Bishop. But she had achieved her object. Sally was quieter after the relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said quietly--

"What are your mother and sisters doing now?"

"They've gone back to Cailsham. They've got a school there for little boys--sons of gentlemen--preparatory for the Grammar School at Maidstone. The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when she gets as poor as mother is."

Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to deal in her business of designing.

"There's one man," she said. "You know the place up the Tottenham Court Road--he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green in a motor-car that makes the noise of thirty horses galloping over a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside. He asked me down to dinner one night; I went. It meant business. His wife weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn't weigh seventeen stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor next Sunday. 'There's one fellow I know,' I remember him saying. 'He's something to do with the stage--his brother's in the booking-office at Daly's. He might get us some seats if we took him out.'"

Sally laughed. The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound since Janet had been with her.

"It's true," said Janet. "I'm not making it up. He got that car--allowing for his trade discount--for a hundred and thirty-five pounds--cape-cart hood and all. It only costs him thirteen pounds a year in tyres--and it can do twenty-five miles to a gallon of petrol with him inside, and he reckons he's been saved five shillings a week regularly in dinners since he got it. Well, what else do you think a man buys a motor-car for if he can't afford it? Some one has to pay for it--why not his friends? That's the English system of hospitality--what I buy you pay for; what you pay for I get, and what I've got I must have bought, otherwise I shouldn't have it. It's the principle of the _reductio ad absurdum_, if you know what that is. Everybody gets what they want, everybody else pays for it, and everybody's happy. I'll do your washing if you'll do mine. Can you have a more generous hospitality than that?"

Sally laughed again, and then Janet launched her boat of enterprise.

"You're fond of kiddies, aren't you, Sally?" she asked suddenly.

A tender look crept into Sally's eyes. "You know I am," she replied.

"Well--why don't you go down to your people at Cailsham and help them for a little while in the school?"

The look of tenderness died out. Her eyes roamed pitiably about the room.

"I couldn't leave here," she said powerlessly.

"Why not?"

"I couldn't. It's all reminding me I know; but I couldn't be happy anywhere else. I should be miserable away from here."

The meeting of such obstacles as this, Janet had anticipated. She knew well that slough of the mind which sucks in its own despair, and with all the concentration of her persuasion, she strove to lift Sally out of the morass. Failing on that occasion, she turned the conversation into another channel--let it drift as it pleased; but the next day she led it back again. At all costs Sally must be removed from the association of her surroundings, and no means offered better than these. Yet at the end of three weeks, notwithstanding all the patient persuasion that she employed, her object was as far from being reached as at the beginning.

"If you spoil your life, Sally," she said, as she was going, "it'll be the bitterest disappointment to me that I can think of. No man is worth it to a woman--no woman's worth it to a man. Can't you get some ambition to do something? All your time's your own, and you haven't got to work for your living. He's been generous enough--I'll admit that. Let me give you lessons in drawing."

"I could never learn anything like that," said Sally, wearily. "Haven't got it in me."

This mood of wilful depression, bordering upon melancholia, can be perhaps the most trying test to friendship that exists. To throw life into the balance of chance--to fling it absolutely away in a moment of heroism for a friend one loves, is a simple task compared with the unwearying patience that is needed to face the lightless gloom of another's misery. It taints all life, discolours all pleasures, tracks one--dogs one, like a shadow on the wall. Yet Janet passed the test with love the greater, even at the end of the gauntlet of those three weeks.

"I'll be with you all day, the day after to-morrow," she said, as she departed; "and think about teaching the kiddies--I would if I were you. You'd get awfully fond of them--as if they were your own. Sons of gentlemen! Think of them! Dear little chaps! My God--the mothers bore them, though."