Chapter IV: Part TWO: I (2)

And then Sophia Lane Watson came back. It seems odd now to think of that time without her, and then her coming back. She had mattered so much to me before, and now again in a different way, and in between she had not mattered at all.

It began in that Poetry Shop near Leicester Square. I was there with Hugo, looking at books, and I found a book on the shelf of new publications. _Verses_, by Sophia Watson. I was looking at the verses without thinking of her, for Sophia Watson seemed different somehow from Lane Watson, and then as I read the verses they reminded me of her. They reminded me of the poetry she used to write at school, and I suddenly wondered if it could be the same. I showed the book to Hugo, and he started to read it, and then he went on and on.

There was a great shaft of sunlight with dust in it—motes of dust floating in it; it shone through the little window high up at the back of the shop and across the foreign books in paper covers that were there, and on to Hugo, and I watched him as he read and felt pleased I had shown him the book, for he always found the new books as a rule.

‘By Jove,’ he said at length. ‘This is jolly stuff. Do you say you know the woman? Sophia Watson? I don’t remember her.’

‘She was at Ellsfield—at school you know. Don’t you remember, she came to Yearsly once? She was a great friend of mine then—at least I think this must be the same.’ Hugo puckered his brows.

‘Oh, a little dark thing. I believe I remember her. Was that her name?’

‘I wonder where she is now,’ I said. ‘I think I shall write to her again.’ I felt suddenly that I should like to see her.

Hugo bought the book, and I wrote to her and addressed the letter care of her publishers.

It was over a week before I had an answer. Then it was an answer very like her.

‘DEAR HELEN,—

‘Thank you for your letter. It was kind of you to write. I am glad you liked my poems. I don’t know if they are good. I am living in London now and this is my address.

‘Yours sincerely,

‘SOPHIA WATSON.’

It was like a child’s letter, so stiff and abrupt, and it made me laugh. I invited her to tea at Campden Hill, and Hugo and Mollie to meet her.

She was very like what she had been as a child, but I think less striking. Her hair was up, of course, and did not look so much and so black, and it mattered more now she was grown up that she was so badly dressed.

She was wearing a cotton dress that afternoon—a lilac check that might have been quite nice, but it was all washed out and hung down behind in a tail, as her skirts used to do at school, and she had a green straw hat that did not go with it at all, and grey stockings and brown shoes.

She was very stiff and polite when she came in. Grandmother spoke to her first; she remembered her coming to lunch when we were little, and she had known her father long ago, she said. She smiled at me, but gravely, in a distant sort of way.

She said:

‘It is a long time since we have met, but I should have known you again.’

‘And I you,’ I said. ‘I am sure I should.’

Grandmother laughed at us.

‘What, six years, is it, or five? I should hope you would remember.’

I laughed too. I said:

‘Six years is a great deal at our time of life.’

Sophia smiled. ‘It seems a very long time,’ she said.

Hugo was watching her, but he did not say much. He never spoke to people about their poetry or pictures or things they did, unless he knew them well.

It was impertinent, he used to say—like talking about their feelings for their husbands or wives.

George said that was a mistake—that out of every ten authors nine at least liked to talk about their own works.

I never wrote myself, or painted, and I don’t know which is true in general, but I am sure that with Sophia, Hugo was quite right.

She seemed to unfreeze after a bit, when she saw we were not going to talk about her book.

She was living by herself, she said, in rooms near Sloane Square.

‘Not far from us,’ said Mollie. ‘You must come and see us. Do come and see us.’

Sophia said she would like to come, and Mollie gave her their address.

‘Come to supper on Thursday,’ she said. ‘Can you? Just my brother and me.’

And Sophia said she would.

‘A funny, quiet, little person,’ said Grandmother when she had gone. ‘Not at all like her father, as I remember him.’

‘Oh, not quiet—wild,’ said Hugo. ‘Like a wild animal in a cage.’

‘I think she was very shy,’ said Mollie, ‘but I liked her.’

‘She was wild when she was at school,’ I said. ‘Wild underneath, I mean’; and I wondered how Hugo had seen so much in so short a time. But that was like Hugo.

XII

After that we saw a good deal of Sophia. She liked Mollie, and Mollie liked her. It surprised me rather, but I was glad. They were so unlike each other that they did not clash, and Mollie looked after Sophia, and treated her rather as a child. She was living in rooms alone, in a street off the King’s Road. We thought she had run away from home, but she never told us so.

She did not speak about her home to Mollie or me.

I believe she did to Hugo.

She was writing a play, but she did not speak about that either. But she talked a lot when she got more used to us very much as she used to talk at school, about impersonal things. I felt her inhuman, and too odd; it had not mattered so much when she was a child; but she was attractive still, in her own queer way. You couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking about, and wanting to know. George and Hugo liked talking to her, but not Guy.

He said:

‘She is too clever for me, I can’t live up to it.’

But Guy said that very easily—it was almost a pose in Guy.

Hugo understood her from the first. It was extraordinary how his mind seemed to interpret hers. I don’t know how else to describe it. But it was very often like that, as though she were speaking a foreign language and only Hugo understood. You would not have expected that at first, for they were so different, Hugo so gracious and lovable and gentle, and Sophia so fierce and buttoned up. And Hugo was not tolerant and easy-going like Mollie; he was easily jarred upon and irritated if people and things were ‘Wrong’—but Sophia never jarred upon him, even when she seemed rude and ungracious, and she had a curious influence upon him, in his most special things.

He began to read Russian novels, which he had not liked before, and he went with her to odd meetings of Russian Anarchists, ‘Friends of Freedom’ they were called. She tried at one time to persuade him to go to Russia and help the Revolution. Guy was worried about it, and so was I; we thought Hugo might really go; but George said no, he wouldn’t, and George, of course, was right.

It sometimes surprises me to think how often George was right; instinctively, too, we asked for George’s opinion, and were satisfied by it to a great extent; funny George, with his wide, humorous mouth; dear George, with his steady eyes. I don’t know which side of him was best.

XIII

I don’t believe now that Hugo was in love with Sophia. His relation to her was an intellectual one. He was fond of her, and very intimate with her in a certain way, and she did have a great influence in his life, yet in one way he was more like an elder brother. We all treated him rather as though he were a dear, precious child, even I, who was younger than him, felt always as though I must protect him and defend him from something. He protected her, and although he read the books she recommended and went to the meetings she liked, she seemed to look up to him and depend on him in a different way from us.

I did not see all this at the time. I see it more clearly now; I am less prejudiced, and less entangled, and much less afraid.

It is fear, I think, that spoils everything. If one was never afraid one would make no mistakes. George said that once, and I think again that George was right.

I tried very hard to be fair to Sophia, to look at her impartially and judge her suitable or not. I felt sure that Hugo would marry her, and I wanted to be glad, but I could not. I don’t suppose I could have been satisfied with any one for him; I loved him too much. If it had been Mollie I should have felt different about it. But Mollie was for Guy—that was settled.

Sophia was not beautiful enough for Hugo, nor comfortable enough. I could not imagine her in a home of her own, and Hugo coming back to her in the evening and being happy. He would not want always to read Turgueniev, and books about people who were hanged. There was a book called _The Seven that Were Hanged_: Sophia gave it to me for my birthday, and I hated it. She understood one side of Hugo, better perhaps than I did, but there was another side, the more personal side, that she would never understand.

And then I would be angry with myself and miserable.

I went for long walks by myself at this time. It was the autumn now. We had been at Yearsly and come back. Sophia had come too for a week. She had fitted in better than I expected, and I thought that Cousin Delia liked her.

Now it was October.

‘Very soon, now, they will be engaged,’ I thought, and wished almost that it would be soon.

I went for a walk in Kensington Gardens and tried to think it out. The gardeners were sweeping up the leaves—yellow leaves of lime trees and planes.

‘It is my own fault,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘I have spoilt it all myself.’

My relation to Hugo had been perfect once—a beautiful, almost a holy thing. He had been my brother and something more, for there was a freedom, an element of choice, which would not have been there if we were really brother and sister; and now it was as though I had made claims upon him that I had hardly realized myself. I felt hurt by him and injured, though he had done me no injury. ‘It is not his fault,’ I thought, ‘that he wants other people besides me, and I want only him. That is quite natural. It is only my feeling like this that is wrong’; and I felt ashamed and unhappy.

XIV

Hugo asked me to be kind to Sophia. It had not occurred to me that I was not.

He said:

‘She likes you so much, and you used to like her.’

He had come to dinner at Campden Hill. I could see that he was excited and happy, he talked so much at dinner, and his eyes shone. Grandmother noticed it too, for I saw her watching him, and she asked him, when the coffee came, what he had been doing that day.

He said:

‘I went for a walk with Sophia Watson in Richmond Park.’

Grandmother said:

‘Her father’s name was _Lane_ Watson.’

‘Yes, I know, but she thinks that sounds pretentious. She says their name was really only Watson to begin with. She hates fuss.’

‘It is generally simpler to have the same name as one’s parents until one is married,’

‘I don’t think Sophia’s parents can be very nice people. They have not been kind to her.’

‘Ah,’ said Grandmother slowly. ‘That is a different matter.’

‘The trees were beautiful in Richmond Park, so bright and red and gold. I suppose they have more colour when the summer has been hot. The leaves were coming down all round us, like rain, in the wind. It was very windy.’

Grandmother said:

‘Oh.’

She looked at Hugo over her spectacles, and Hugo flushed.

‘I wish you could have been there,’ he said rather lamely. ‘It was awfully nice.’

Grandmother laughed; she said:

‘You had better bring the young woman to see me, Hugo, I liked her much better than the other one—Miss . . . Connell, wasn’t it, with the fair hair, but—take your time.’

Hugo murmured something inarticulate; he was peeling a pear and I could not see his face, but I knew he was saying it wasn’t like that at all.

Coffee came in, and after the coffee grandmother went upstairs. She had not looked at me at all, and I was glad.

We went into the drawing-room, Hugo and I, and sat down by the fire. At least I sat down and Hugo stood up with his back to the fire. He took a cigarette from the jade box on the chimney-piece, and then he began to talk. The room was rather dark, for Grandmother would not have electric light, and there was only one lamp on the table behind.

He said:

‘Aunt Gerry is a dear, I am awfully fond of her. But she does get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. I suppose in her generation it would have been like that.’

I said:

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Hugo looked down at me and then away.

‘It isn’t a question of “taking time” at all, and of course Sophia is quite different from Paulina. One couldn’t think of them in the same sort of way at all.’

I said:

‘No, they aren’t at all alike.’

My cigarette had gone out. I asked Hugo for the matches. He gave them to me and went on:

He said:

‘I liked just looking at Paulina. Didn’t you? She was beautiful to look at, and she did speak her lines awfully well too, but of course—well, she hadn’t got a _mind_ like Sophia. Sophia is so frightfully interesting. It is like exploring in an unknown sea. . . .’ He laughed, a little apologetically. ‘You never know what Sophia will think or feel about a thing, but it is always real, what she thinks or feels.’

I said:

‘Yes, I think it is,’ and he looked pleased, ‘Of course you were interested in her at school,’ he said. ‘I remember that—you used to talk to me about her a lot, and I think you really described her rather well. But I don’t know how it was—she didn’t interest me a bit that first time I saw her, when you brought her to Yearsly.’

I said:

‘No, I was disappointed then that neither you nor Guy seemed to care for her much.’

‘Guy doesn’t appreciate her now, and I can understand that. She is not at her best with him. She is shy, and he doesn’t get any further.’

I said nothing, and he went on.

‘I don’t think people realize how shy she is. They think she is disagreeable and ungracious sometimes, and they don’t understand that she is just frightened of them. Do you know, Helen,’ he looked straight at me, and gave a little laugh, ‘she is even afraid of you! She admires you awfully, and would like you to like her, but she thinks you don’t. I told her, of course, that that was nonsense—that I was sure you liked her, and I told her that you used to talk a lot about her when you were at school.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Oh, she said that that was quite different. “People change and outgrow each other,” she said, and then she said that even then she had cared for you much more than you cared for her. She thinks you find her dull and dowdy. You do like her, don’t you, Helen?’

He asked it almost wistfully, and suddenly I wanted to cry. If I could have spoken quite frankly about Sophia, as though she did not affect me personally at all, it would have been all different; if I could have asked him straight out what he felt about her; if we could have talked to each other simply and without reserves, as we used to once, I think our lives might have been very different afterwards; but we couldn’t. He was trying to, I think, but I couldn’t respond. I was fighting against something in myself, and it was almost as though I was fighting against him. I did not want him to know my thoughts and my feelings as he used to know them; and I could not talk to him about Sophia.

I said:

‘Yes, I do like her, quite, but we haven’t an awful lot in common. I don’t think I am intellectual enough for her.’

Hugo ignored that. He said:

‘I should like you to be kind to her, Mollie is awfully kind to her, and she is very grateful to Mollie, but’—and he paused a moment—‘Mollie isn’t you.’

‘I don’t see what I can do for her that you and Mollie can’t do much better. What do you want me to do?’ Hugo fidgeted with the jade box on the chimney-piece.

‘Oh, I don’t know exactly—anything just to show her you like her. She minds about her clothes. Couldn’t you advise her about her clothes? She admires yours so much.’

And then I was angry. I wanted to say, ‘I am damned if I will.’ But I only did say, ‘I tried once to teach her to dance. It was no good.’ That was all I said, but Hugo knew I was angry. I could see that from the way he looked at me, and when he looked at me like that it was harder still not to cry. He looked hurt and puzzled, like a child who is spoken to crossly and doesn’t know what it has done wrong.

I was ashamed of myself again, and very unhappy.

XV

One day I was with Mollie in her flat, and we were dressing to go out. We were in her bedroom brushing our hair, and I remembered that dance at Yearsly on Guy’s twenty-first birthday, and old Nunky brushing my hair. I had been so pleased with my hair that night, and so had she, and now suddenly I hated it.

I said:

‘I do wish my hair was different, I am so tired of it like this,’

Mollie said:

‘Your hair is lovely, Helen. I always envy you the way it curls.’

I said:

‘It is so dull, just brown and ordinary. I wish it was bright yellow, or black and straight.’

Mollie looked round at me; she was brushing her own hair.

‘You poor pretty thing,’ she said, and threw her arms round my neck. ‘Oh, Helen, I’m so sorry for you, but don’t mind—it will be all right.’

Then I began to cry, and she comforted me. We never said what was the matter, but of course we both knew.

XVI

It was about a fortnight later that I went to Hugo’s room in Clifford’s Inn and found him out.

We were going to Richmond that afternoon, the Addingtons and Hugo and I, for a walk. I was to pick up Hugo first, and then we were to go on to the Addingtons in Chelsea.

When I got there, Hugo was out. Guy opened the door, and I thought he looked sorry.

He said:

‘He went off with Sophia to a Strindberg play. Did he know you were going to come?’

I said:

‘Yes, he knew—but I suppose he forgot. It doesn’t matter.’

We both stood still for a minute. I wanted to say something else, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Guy said:

‘Come along in.’

And I said:

‘No, I can’t. George and Mollie will be waiting.’

I wanted to say: ‘Don’t tell Hugo I came,’ but I couldn’t say it.

Guy said:

‘I’ll tell Hugo you came, I’ll blow him up.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t bother. It’s all right.’

Guy said:

‘I wish I could come, but I’ve got to finish this stuff.’

He nodded his head towards his room and the table spread with papers. It was a joke with us now that Guy was working hard.

I said:

‘I wish you could. Come next Saturday.’

He said:

‘Yes, next Saturday I can. But we’ll meet before that.’

‘Oh yes, lots of times. Good-bye.’

I turned down the stairs. I was glad to get away. It hurt me that Hugo should have gone out and forgotten—it had never happened before.

When I got to the Addingtons’ flat, Mollie was upstairs.

George was reading by the fire, with his back to the door.

He looked round and took his pipe out of his mouth.

‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Where’s Hugo?’

‘Hugo had gone out to a play with Sophia.’

I pulled off my gloves and sat down in the other chair.

‘Strindberg,’ I said. ‘I don’t like Strindberg.’

George bent forward, and tapped his pipe out on the hob.

‘Nor do I,’ he said.

I had chilblains on my fingers. It was cold that afternoon, and raw, and they tingled and hurt. It was partly the chilblains that made me feel so wretched. I stretched my hands out to the fire.

George filled his pipe slowly, and lit it. The flame flickered up and down against his face as he drew it in. He grunted and threw the match away.

He said:

‘Hugo is a fool.’

I said:

‘I don’t know. He has a right to like it if he likes.’

George puffed away in silence for a time.

There was some of Mollie’s restfulness about George. It was good to have him in the room when one was troubled.

‘I am losing patience with Hugo,’ he said at last. ‘It is time he grew up.’

I wanted to defend Hugo even from him. It was not Strindberg we were talking about. We both knew that.

I said:

‘I think it is a mistake to say that. One can’t choose for other people. Hugo knows what he wants.’

‘No,’ said George shortly. ‘He doesn’t. That’s the trouble.’

He glanced up at me, and away again into the fire.

‘We must be patient with Hugo,’ he said in a different tone. ‘He takes a long time to understand things sometimes, but he does understand in the end.’

‘I think perhaps he understands too much,’ I said, and wished I had not said it.

XVII

And then, that Christmas, I met Walter again.

We were on a walking tour along the Roman Wall, Guy and Hugo and the Addingtons and Sophia and I. We had begun at Hexham, and we walked along the wall towards Carlisle. It was on the fourth day that we met Walter, in the camp at Howstead.

It was a windy day, very cold and clear and bright, and we reached the camp about the middle of the day. We had sandwiches with us, and we sat down to eat them at the Northern Gate, looking out over the waste space of fell towards Scotland.

Suddenly I saw Walter. He had come up from behind somewhere, and was standing beside me.

‘Hullo,’ said George. ‘Where have you come from, Sebright?’

He said:

‘How do you do, Miss Woodruffe?’

I felt, that time, that he was looking at me, and that he was glad to see me.

He said:

‘I have waited three years for this.’

Mollie said:

‘It’s a wonderful place.’

He meant that he had waited to see me. He told me afterwards that he had meant it, and I knew before he told me. I knew, I think, when he said it, up there on the hill, and the odd thing is that I wasn’t surprised.

He sat down beside me on the stones of the Northern Gate.

He said:

‘The barbarians were down there. It looks like it, doesn’t it? And there were Southern soldiers up here. They must have hated it.’

He took us round the camp afterwards and explained to us what the places were—where they washed their clothes and where they cooked. It seemed to me very interesting, what he told us, and there were inscriptions on some of the stones that he showed us too.

‘Sebright is a dab at inscriptions,’ George said to Hugo.

‘He got some honour in Berlin for a thing on inscriptions.’

I thought that he made it very vivid, the life in that Roman camp, and I had never felt much interest in Rome before. Sophia was interested too, and George—but not Hugo. Hugo used to say sometimes that he had a blind spot in his mind for history; but I was vexed with him this time for not being interested. He was polite, of course—he was always polite; but I, who knew him well, could see that he was bored.

Sophia began talking to Walter; she did not seem shy of him at all.

‘They must have been hard, enduring sort of people, she said. Up here at the end of the world—it is like the end of the world,’ she went on half to herself, ‘looking out on to that . . . I like the Romans.’

Walter looked pleased—but he was talking to me, and I knew it and was glad.

I don’t know even now how much the difference was in him and how much in me. He seemed to me very different this time, from that afternoon at Oxford three years before. He seemed to me now to have more life and more assurance, as though he felt himself here on his own ground. But perhaps I was more ready to notice him now. There had been no room for him at all in my mind before.

When we had finished looking at the camp Guy said we must go on. We were to sleep at Gilsland that night if we could, and the evenings were short.

Walter had come that way the day before, and slept at a farm near by, but he said now that he would walk back with us. He did not say ‘if you don’t mind’ or ‘may I?’ as one somehow expected him to say. He just said:

‘I will go with you. I know this wall pretty well.’

We walked along the top of the wall for a long way, up hills and down, always at the edge of the cliff, with the barbarian country below. Then the others said they would take the lower track, farther down across the fell, but I wouldn’t. I kept along the top of the wall, and Walter came with me.

Once Hugo called me.

‘It is much easier along here,’ he said. ‘You had much better come down.’

And I said:

‘I won’t come down. I am going into the barbarian country.’

And I laughed at him, and then I jumped down on the other side of the wall and ran down along the slope of the hill. It was not so steep in this place—towards a little lake with trees beside it, down in the flat wild country.

‘Do you want to see the barbarians?’ Walter asked, and I said:

‘Yes, but they are all gone.’

Walter said:

‘They are not gone, only civilized. Do you ever wish you could get away from civilized people, and culture and books and all that sort of thing?’

And I said:

‘No, I have never wished that. I have never thought about it.’

He said:

‘Perhaps you haven’t been oppressed by it, as I have. Routines and curricula and examinations—always doing what you have got to do and never what you want.’

I said:

‘No, I generally do what I want—or at any rate I _don’t_ do what I _don’t_ want.’ And I thought of Cousin Delia and Yearsly, and how seldom the question had arisen.

Walter said:

‘That is better. That is much better. That is partly what I felt about you!’

He said it with a sudden vehemence and then stopped short. I looked at him and he was looking at me. I felt suddenly uneasy, and an odd ridiculous feeling came over me that I was really outside a safe wall, in a strange country, and I wanted to go back.

I said:

‘We will go back now, or we shall be lost. It will be too steep further on.’

Walter said:

‘It is too steep now. We must go on now we are here.’

And I felt as though we were walking in a dream, as though everything that he said and that I said were symbolic and fraught with a deeper meaning than we knew. It was an odd exciting feeling and made me a little bit afraid.

We found a track along the fell, and walked on it, and Walter began to talk about his work on the Roman inscriptions in Britain. He told me too that he had been appointed to a lectureship in Archæology in London University.

‘I shall be coming to live in London after Easter,’ he said, and then, ‘I hope I shall see you there.’

I said:

‘Yes, surely. We are all in London now.’

He said:

‘I know.’

We came at last to a place where the wall was lower and broken down, and we climbed back and over it into the Roman country. The others were waiting for us—sitting on big stones.

We stopped at Greenhead for the night, for it was getting dark already.

Walter stopped with us and went back the next day.

XVIII

Walter came to see me at Campden Hill Square.

Grandmother was in the drawing-room when he came in.

When I came downstairs I found them having tea.

Grandmother said:

‘Here is Mr. Sebright, my dear. He has been telling me about his studies in Roman Britain.’

It was like my grandmother not to be surprised. She had never heard of Walter, I am sure, for we had none of us thought or spoken of him before, and since that walk at Christmas, I had thought of him a good deal, and not wanted to speak.

Grandmother liked ‘antiquities.’ When she was a girl she had visited a great many museums; with her father first, who thought it was good for her, and then with her husband, who liked museums himself.

She used to say that it was a sign of our generation not to like museums, and a bad sign. Some things about us she considered good. I could see that she was pleased with Walter.

‘Mr. Sebright tells me that the inscribed rocks at Chester are not really so interesting as those at Corbridge,’ she said.

Walter was standing up to shake hands with me.

I knew again that he had been waiting for me, and wanting to see me very much.

Grandmother went on talking to him about the inscriptions at Corbridge.

It did not interest me at all what they were saying, but I felt excited at Walter’s being there. It was now that I noticed his hands, what beautiful hands they were, as he handed me my tea and bread and butter, and I watched his face as he was talking to Grandmother. He did not seem to me absurd now, as he had at first.

Afterwards he was talking about something in the British Museum—bas-reliefs, I think, with some inscriptions on them—and I said I didn’t know the British Museum. I had only been there once, with Hugo, to look at Greek vases, and he said:

‘Oh, but the Greek vases are very dull. It is the early things you should see—little pieces of things that mean nothing by themselves, but when you piece them together tell you about whole nations you didn’t know. You ought to see the Mycenaean fragments and the Hittite things. Won’t you come one day and let me show them to you?’

I said I should love to see them; and even while I was saying so I wondered why I said it, for I did not care for fragments of things at all, and I did not like the Museum the one time I was there.

‘Will you come next Thursday?’ Walter asked. ‘I shall be there all day Thursday. If you could come in the afternoon—any time in the afternoon—I shall be there. I could show you lots of things, and then,’ he added, more shyly, ‘we could have tea.’

Grandmother laughed. She said:

‘If you make an archæologist of Helen I will take off my hat to you.’

I said:

‘I will come at half-past three.’

I did not mind Grandmother’s laughing. She did not laugh in a way one would mind.

When Walter had gone away I wondered if I had been silly. Why had I said I would go and look at inscriptions? I felt uncomfortable about it, and not at ease with myself.

XIX

I went to the British Museum on Thursday. Walter was waiting for me on the steps, and there was another man with him. The other man was called Furze. He was a professor at some University in Wales. He was older than Walter, but not very much older. He had a very kind face, and a funny way of ducking down his head. I liked him and was glad he was there too. He had been working with Walter all the morning in the Assyrian Room, it seemed, and now he came round with us for a bit, till it was time for him to catch his train.

He did not talk much; Walter did the talking. I thought he knew quite as much about the things as Walter, but he was not so excited about them.

We looked at some Assyrian bas-reliefs of people hunting lions. They were more interesting than I had expected, and rather beautiful too, some of them—rather beautiful clean lines—but Walter said even these were too late, and we went on to cases of rougher broken things, and he explained what they once had been—pots and ovens and tiles and all sorts of household stuff.

‘You will get back to your “Urdummheit,”’ Mr. Furze said, smiling at Walter, ‘_I_ think these pots were not very well made.’

Walter tossed his head. He seemed self-confident here, as he had been at Howsteads; not a bit shy or nervous, as he was at Oxford.

‘Who cares if they were well made? This is not an Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Of course Praxiteles made pretty ornaments, if you want that.’

‘Well, I still maintain that if you make a pot at all, it is better to make a beautiful pot than a misshapen one.’

It was evidently an old argument. I could see that.

I agreed with Mr. Furze.

‘I do get so sick of beauty,’ Walter said. ‘Beauty is quite beside the point.’

And then he laughed, for he saw Mr. Furze was laughing.

‘What do you think, Miss Woodruffe?’ he asked.

And I said:

‘Oh, I am afraid I like beautiful pots best, if there have got to be pots at all.’

He looked at me oddly, with a troubled, perplexed expression.

‘I expect you think me a Philistine,’ he said. ‘I am too, I suppose. All these shapes and designs and proportions that people keep talking about—they just mean nothing to me. They seem to me so _dull_—like rows of pretty faces with no souls.’

‘When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe,’

I said, and Walter wrinkled his forehead.

‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘I ought to know it, I expect, but I don’t. Poetry is another of the fringes for me. I’ve never had time for it.’

I was sorry I had used the quotation, for he looked vexed, and I had not meant to vex him.

I said:

‘It’s the Ode to a Grecian Urn. That’s what made me think of it—talking about urns.’

Walter grunted, and I realized that he did not know the Grecian Urn, but I couldn’t say, ‘It’s by Keats.’

Mr. Furze interposed.

‘Sebright is quite incorrigible,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like Grecian Urns, and he doesn’t like poetry. He will certainly not read a poem about a Grecian Urn.’

Walter shrugged his shoulders and gave a little laugh, and I felt it had not mattered after all.

Soon after that Mr. Furze had to catch his train. I was sorry when he went away.

There was a tensity in the air when we were alone, and I felt somehow as though I were there on false pretences. Walter took me to a big stone in a square frame.

‘This is the Rosetta Stone,’ he said. ‘I think this is one of the most exciting things here.’

And he told me that there were three different languages on it, and three different scripts, and that had been the key to discovering a whole new civilization. People had worked out another language—Ancient Egyptian, he said it was—letter by letter, sign by sign, through comparing one side of the stone with the other, for the same legend was written on all three.

I could see that that was rather an exciting thing to do.

‘You know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I saw this stone first when I was ten years old. I had read about it in a book called _The Wonders of Antiquity_, and I came to see it with my mother, and it seemed to me even then the best thing in the world to work out new languages from old inscriptions, and discover new worlds like that—much better than discovering new things in this world. I have wanted to do it ever since, and now, partly, I can work at that; but I have to do Roman inscriptions too, because that was for a thesis to start with, to get my D.Litt., and I have to for the History school also. So I have got launched into Roman Britain, but what I really want to get at is the proto-Hittite script from Zenjirli and Sakjegöze and those things—those undeciphered hieroglyphs, you know.’

I did not know what the proto-Hittite script was then; it seems curious now to think of a time when I had not heard of it, but I thought I understood what he meant about discovering new worlds that way.

I asked:

‘Do you feel you can find out quite a lot about the people who wrote those inscriptions? Do they get quite real to you in the end?’

He said:

‘No, not like that. I don’t want them real like that. It is more to me like fitting pieces into a puzzle—thousands of tiny pieces, and a very big puzzle—and if they do fit, if even quite a small piece of the puzzle gets done, you know it’s right. That is one of the satisfactory things, it can’t be just better or worse, it must be right or wrong. Do you see what I mean at all?’

His voice changed; he asked the last question almost shyly. I think he did not expect people quite to understand.

I thought I did, and it interested me. This was a new world to me too; a cold intellectual world that I did not know at all; and I was in a mood to explore.

Afterwards we went out to tea in an A.B.C. near the Museum. At tea he was different again, more like he had been on the picnic. He was shyer and spoke more jerkily, and I felt much more that he admired me. The A.B.C. was crowded and rather noisy, and the marble top of the table was smudged with coffee that had been spilt. It seemed to me very odd to be sitting there with Walter. I seemed to be looking on from a long way off, and wondering how I came to be there.

After tea we got on to a bus. I said I could go home alone, but Walter would come with me. We did not talk very much on the bus. It was beginning to rain, and we pulled up the mackintosh cover from the seat in front.

He said good-bye to me on the steps of Campden Hill Square, and I thanked him for ‘a very interesting afternoon.’

He waited on the step.

‘May I come again?’ he asked. ‘May I take you out again?’

He asked it in his funny, jerky way, as though it mattered to him very much. I could not answer him at once. I felt somehow, irrationally, that my answer was very important.

I said:

‘You know; I don’t agree with you at all about Beauty and Poetry—and—all that sort of thing. I think perhaps I let you think this afternoon that I did agree.’

It sounded foolish even as I said it, and it was not even what I wanted to say.

He said very quietly:

‘I know that. You are the other side of life—all that I have not got, and don’t understand. I know I am one-sided. I would like to be different if I could.’

My heart began to thump. I had not realized that he would talk like that, yet. I was not ready. I wanted to go inside and shut the door, but I couldn’t shut the door while he stood there. The rain was falling faster now, and as I moved my head a little stream of water ran off the brim of my hat, down my neck.

I said:

‘I suppose everybody would like to be different if they could. I should like to have black hair, quite black and straight’; and I tried to laugh. ‘But we can’t be different really, ever.’

He said:

‘Not completely different, of course; but we can alter. People do alter. They can develop new sides in themselves without losing what they have got.’

I said:

‘It is too wet to talk any more now. Good-bye.’

He said:

‘I may come again, mayn’t I?’

I said:

‘Of course, if you like.’ I tried to answer lightly, to make what we were saying seem of no consequence.

I fumbled with my latch-key at the door. At last it opened, and a shaft of light shot out on to the steps. He turned away then and went down the steps, slowly at first and then faster. He turned down the Square to the north, towards Holland Park Road, and I went into the house. The hall was light and warm, and I shut the front door behind me with relief. Upstairs in my bedroom there was a fire. I took off my shoes and stockings and my wet coat, and then I sat down on the hearth-rug and cried for Hugo. He had never seemed so far away before.

XX

I did not speak to Mollie about Walter at first, nor to Hugo. It was almost a week before I saw Hugo again and then we were all together, and Sophia was there too. We were going to a concert, a Mozart concert at the Queen’s Hall. We did not go to dances so often since Sophia came, because she couldn’t dance. I danced with George and Guy sometimes, Mollie and I, without Hugo; but of course that was not the same thing.

The concert was lovely. It made us all happy. I felt that I had been horrid to Sophia, and that I would be nicer.

We went back to Hugo’s rooms and had coffee. It looked very pleasant, Hugo’s room that night, with the fire flickering on the low ceiling and the blue curtains and the charioteer.

Hugo said:

‘That music does one good. People could not be bad-tempered or fussed or worried if they heard some Mozart played every day before they got up.’

Guy hummed an Aria from Don Giovanni, a bit we had heard.

‘That is about the most perfect thing of all,’ he said.

Mollie was pouring out the coffee; she always did that part.

‘I think sometimes,’ said Sophia, ‘that music is all wrong, and poetry too, and all that we call art. I wonder sometimes if it isn’t all a kind of dope that we make for ourselves because we can’t face life; and it seems all pointless then.’

I said:

‘How odd that you should say that. It is almost what Mr. Sebright said.’

‘Sebright?’ said George. ‘When did he talk about it?’

‘I went to the British Museum with him the other day.’ I tried to say it nonchalantly, but I felt self-conscious, and that vexed me, for why shouldn’t I go with him? ‘He says Greek vases are like faces without souls.’

‘So they are,’ said George.

Hugo said:

‘No, they are not at all like that. They are more like souls without faces—impersonal and rather cold. Why did you go there?’ he asked abruptly.

And I said:

‘Because he asked me to. It was very interesting there.’

‘I don’t suppose he would care for vases,’ said Hugo, ‘or statues. He would like just objects of interest. Did you like them?’

I felt then that I could not discuss Walter, nor repeat what he had said, even what he had said while Mr. Furze was there. I felt suddenly that they were all hostile, my own dear people, and that Walter had somehow put his trust in me.

I said:

‘I did when he explained them to me.’

Guy said:

‘I should not have expected him to explain very well.’

‘Who is Mr. Sebright?’ asked Sophia. ‘Was that the man we met at the Roman Camp?’

‘Yes,’ said Mollie. ‘He is an archæologist.’

‘Epigraphist,’ corrected George.

Sophia said:

‘I liked him. He was a wild man.’

Guy said:

‘Oh, not at all wild. Quite a model young man—no vices and a credit to his college.’

Sophia said:

‘I didn’t mean wild in that way. More fanatical—or ruthless—I meant—as though he would be burned alive for something quite foolish—or burn other people.’

Sophia understood him better than the others, I thought, and I liked Sophia for it.

‘We might see Sebright some time,’ said George. ‘He is here now, isn’t he, at the Grey College?’

XXI

After that the Addingtons invited Walter to their flat. He came several times, and generally I was there. Sometimes Guy or Hugo came too, and once Sophia. Ralph Freeman was abroad at the time in Vienna, and Anthony Cowper had also been abroad.

Mollie talked to Walter about his work at Grey College and his pupils and the courses they were taking. Mollie could talk to people about that sort of thing. She did not find it boring, if it made the conversation easier. That was partly why people liked Mollie.

But he did not talk to her as he had to me, about the proto-Hittite script, and the Rosetta Stone. That side of his work was nearer, I felt, to him than the classes and lectures, and it was somehow a sort of secret between him and me.

I used to watch Walter when he was talking to Mollie or to George, and I used to wish he looked different from what he did.

I could not bear the black steel spectacles he wore, and I wished he would not speak so jerkily, nor come into a room as though he were afraid.

He was worst, always, when Guy and Hugo were there. He seemed ludicrous then somehow, like a caricature of himself. He would say provocative things in a nervous voice, and I could see that he irritated Guy.

He came for me again at Campden Hill Square, as he had said he would. Once he took me to a lecture on excavations in Syria. It was a dull lecture, but it seemed somehow an adventure to be there with him. It was like walking on a volcano, for I did not know his mind. I did not know what he would think or say next, as I did with Guy and Hugo, and with George.

Another time we went for a walk by the Serpentine, and he told me how he used to go for walks there when he was a little boy, on Sundays with his mother. He had lived near Earl’s Court all his life. He still lived there, with his mother. His father had been a clergyman at some church round there, and had died when he was five. He had a half-sister much older than himself, who was headmistress at a school. He had been at St. Paul’s himself.

He was devoted to his mother.

‘She gave all her life to me when my father died,’ he said. ‘She was with me always and did whatever I did. I can’t think how children grow up with ordinary mothers, when I think what mine was to me.

‘We were poor, of course,’ he said. ‘We were always poor. But I am glad of that. It made us closer together. In a household with lots of servants, children cannot be close to their mothers, as I was to mine.’

I thought of Cousin Delia, and disagreed. But I did not interrupt him. Walter was never easy to interrupt.

‘I owe a great deal to my sister too,’ he said. ‘She helped with my education. My mother would not have known about that, but Maud saw that I was well prepared, and that I worked hard. I don’t think I was idle by nature, but I am grateful to Maud.’

He did not ask me about my childhood. He did not seem to like it when I spoke of Yearsly. He talked mostly about himself. He was ambitious, he told me that, and determined to do great things with his proto-Hittite script.

And all that attracted me in an odd, contrary way. It was so unlike Hugo—and I thought of Walter as strong because Hugo was weak, and determined because Hugo was undetermined. I was trying hard during these weeks to think less well of Hugo. It seems a long time now, that time with Walter before we were engaged. It seems strange now, in a way, that Hugo did nothing—but when I think of the dates I know it was not long at all. It was at the end of February that Walter came first to Campden Hill, and he asked me to marry him on the 10th of April.

We had met, I suppose, a dozen times, not more. We did not know each other at all.

He came to me in the drawing-room at Campden Hill Square. He had not said that he was coming, and I was not expecting him.

The room was full of tulips from Yearsly, for Cousin Delia sent them to us every week, and the parcel had just come. It was a warm sunny day, and the sun streamed in through the window at the end of the room. I was sitting on the window-seat, and the window was open. I had been putting the tulips in water. They were done now. I was gathering up the ends. There was string and brown paper, and a note from Cousin Delia as well, and the little stalks and ends of leaves from the tulips.

I was thinking of Yearsly, and Cousin Delia, and not of Walter at all. I was thinking that I would go down to Yearsly for a bit; that I would write to Cousin Delia that evening and tell her I was coming. I had not been there lately even for week-ends. I would go alone now, without Hugo or Guy, and be there with Cousin Delia.

And then the door opened and the parlourmaid came in and said:

‘Mr. Sebright to see you, Miss.’

It was a red-haired parlourmaid called Hannah. She had not been with us very long, and she married a policeman soon afterwards, soon after I was married.

Walter came in, and she shut the door. It took me a little time to collect my thoughts—they had been so far from him—and then I looked at him, and I knew why he had come.

He came into the middle of the room, and stood there. I asked him to sit down, but he didn’t listen.

He said:

‘I have come to ask you to marry me. I have meant to always, since the first day that I saw you—at Oxford, in those rooms in the Broad.

‘I don’t see the good of waiting any longer. You are different from me, I know that. You are beautiful and bright, like a flower, and I love you for that. I love you for being what you are. I am a dull fellow in many ways. I know that too. But I could be different with you.’ He said it in a jerky, monotonous voice, as though he had learnt it by heart—and he did not look at me while he said it.