Chapter II: I (2)

"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of fire; nights when he looked up at the sky and could not tell which were the stars and which the lights which trouble the eyes of sleep-sick men. There was that week when he and Perez and the two French chemists and the handful of loyal workmen held the Romanones Works against the strikers. He was conscious that he had behaved well on these occasions and that they had been full of beauty, but they had not nourished him. They had ended when they ended. Such deeds gave a man nothing better than the exultation of the actor, who loses his value and becomes a suspended soul, unable to fulfil his function when the curtain falls. "But you are condemning the whole of human action!" he expostulated with himself. "Yes, I am condemning the whole of human action," he replied tartly.

There remained, of course, his scientific work. That was indubitably good. He had done well, considering he had not gone to South Kensington till he was twenty and had broken the habit of study by a life of adventure, simply because the idea of explosiveness had captured his imagination. That rust is a slow explosion, that every movement is the result of a physical explosion, that explosives are capricious as women about the forces to which they yield, so that this one will only ignite with heat and that only with concussion--these facts had from his earliest knowledge of them been gilded with irrational delight, and it had been no effort to him to work at the subject with an austere diligence that had shown itself worth while in that last paper he had read at the Paris Conference. That was a pretty piece of research. But now for the first time he resented his chemistry work because it was of no service to his personal life. Before, it had always seemed to him the special dignity of his vocation that it could conduct its researches without resorting to the use of humanity and that he could present his results unsigned by his own personality. He had often pitied doctors, who, instead of dealing with exquisitely consistent chemicals, have to work on men and women, unselected specimens of the most variable of all species, which was singularly inept at variating in the direction of beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but a Spirit.

But now none of these things mattered. He was caught in the net of life and nothing that was above it was of any use to him; as well expect a man who lies through the night with his foot in a man-trap to be comforted by the beauty of the stars. The only God he could have any use for would be the kind the Salvationists talk about, who goes about giving drunken men an arm past the public-house and coming between the pickpocket and Black Maria with a well-timed text. There was nothing in Science that would lift him out of this hell of loneliness, this conviction of impotence, this shame of achievementless maturity. He perceived that he had really known this for a long time, and that it was the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly over the commercial uses that were to be made of his work. What was the use of sweating his brains so that one set of fools could blow another set of fools to glory? Oh, this was hell!...

The detestable blonde was now holding the platform in attitudes such as are ascribed to goddesses by British sculptors, and speaking with a slow, pure gusto of the horrors of immorality. For a moment her allusions to the wrongs of unmarried mothers made him think of the proud but defeated poise of his mother's head, and then the peculiar calm, gross qualities of her phrases came home to him. He wondered how long she had been going on like this, and he stared round to see how these people, who looked so very decent, whom it was impossible to imagine other than fully dressed, were taking it. Without anticipation his eyes fell on Ellen and found her looking very Scotch and clapping sturdily. Of course it must be all right, since everything about her was all right, but he searched this surprising gesture as though he were trying to read a signal, till with a quick delight he realised that this was just the final proof of how very much all right she was. Only a girl so innocent that these allusions to sex had called to her mind no physical presentations whatsoever could have stood there with perked head and made cymbals of her hands. Evidently she did nothing by halves; her mind was white as her hair was red.

He felt less appalled by this speech now that he saw that it was powerless to wound simplicity, but he still hated it. It was doing no good, because it was a part of the evil it attacked; for the spirit that makes people talk coarsely about sex is the same spirit that makes men act coarsely to women. It was not Puritanism at all that would put an end to this squalor and cruelty, but sensuality. If you taught that these encounters were degrading, then inevitably men treated the women whom they encountered as degraded; but if you claimed that even the most casual love-making was beautiful, and that a woman who yields to a man's entreaty gave him some space of heaven, then you could insist that he was under an obligation of gratitude to her and must treat her honourably. That would not only change the character of immorality, but would also diminish it, for men have no taste for multiplying their responsibilities.

Besides, it was true. These things were very good. He had half forgotten how good they were. The meeting became a babble in his ears, a transparency of listening shapes before his eyes.... He was back in Rio; back in youth. He was waiting with a fever in his blood at that dinner at old Hermes Pessôa's preposterous house, that was built like--so far as it was like anything else on earth--the Villa d'Este mingled with the Alhambra. The dinner, considered as a matter of food, had come to an end, and for some little time had been a matter of drink; most of the guests had gathered in a circle at the head of the hall round fat old Pessôa, who had sent a servant upstairs for a pair of tartan socks so that he could dance the Highland fling. He had got up and strolled to the other end of the room, where the great black onyx fireplace climbed out of the light into the layer of gloom which lay beneath the ceiling that here and there dripped stalactites of ornament down into the brightness. Against the wall on each side of the fireplace there stood six great chairs of cypress wood, padded with red Spanish leather that smelt sweetly and because of its great age was giving off a soft red dust. These chairs pleased him; they were the only old things in this mad new house, in this mad new society. He had pulled one out and lain back, feeling rather ill, because he had eaten nothing and his heart was beating violently. He hated being there, but he had to make sure. Much rather would he have been out in the gardens, standing beside one of those magnolias, watching the stars travel across the bay. "Then marriage is right," he said to himself. "Where there is real love one wants to go to church first."

Others who had wearied of the party drifted down to this recess of peace. An elderly Frenchman with a pointed black beard, and a slim, fair English boy with tears on his long eyelashes, sat themselves down in two of these great chairs, with a bottle of wine at their feet and one glass, from which they drank alternately with an effect of exchanging vows, while the boy whimpered some confession, sobbing that it would all never have happened if he had still been with Father Errington of the Sacred Heart in Liverpool, and the older man repeated paternally, mystically, and yet with a purring satisfaction, "Little one, do not grieve. It is always thus when one forgets the Church."

There came later another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the high windows, black with the outer night but streaked and oiled with reflections of the inner feast. Opposite there hung a Bouguereau, which irritated him--nymphs ought not to look as if they had come newly unguented from a _cabinet de toilette_. Below it stood an immense Cloisonné vase, about the neck of which was tied a scarlet silk stocking. He remembered having seen it there on his last visit six months before. She must have been an exceptionally careless lady. Out here there were many ladies who were careless of their honour, but most of them were careful enough about tangible possessions like silk stockings. A fresh outburst in the babel at the other end of the room did not make him turn round, though the French banker had cried in an ecstasy, "_Tiens! c'est atroce!_" and had bounded up the hall. He sat on, hating this ugly place of his delay, while the Frenchman and the boy kept up an insincere, voluptuous whisper about God and the comfort of the Mass....

At last he rose to his feet. It was a quarter to twelve, and time for him to go. He went up the hall, treading on lobster claws and someone's wig, and looking about him for a certain person. He could not see him among the group of revellers that stood in the space before the large folding-doors, and for a minute a hand closed over his heart as he feared that for once the person whom he sought had gone home before morning. But presently he saw a long chair by the wall, and on its cushions a blotched face and a gross, full body. He bent over the chair and whispered, "De Rojas, de Rojas!" But the fat man slept. Hatred gushed up in him, and a joy that the night was secure, and he passed on to the folding-doors. But from the little group that was gathered round the table, which before the dinner had supported the Winged Victory that now lay spread-eagled on the floor, there stepped Pessôa. He bade him good-night and thanked him for a riotous evening, but perceived that Pessôa was waving a cocked revolver at him and saying something about Léonore. What could he be saying? It appeared incredible, even to-night, that he should really be saying that every departing guest must kiss Léonore's back and swear that it was the most beautiful back in Brazil.

He looked along the avenue of revellers that had turned grinning to see how his English stiffness would meet the occasion, and saw poor Léonore. She was sitting on the table, one hand holding her pink wrapper to her breast and the other patting back a yawn, and her nightdress was pulled down to her waist so that her back was bare. Such a broad, honest back it was, for she was the thick type of Frenchwoman, and might have stood as a model for Millet's "Angelus." She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him benignantly, perplexedly, and he saw that she was unhappy. They had fetched her down from her warm bed, whither doubtless she had gone with hopes of having a good night's rest for once, since Hermes was giving a stag-dinner. They had not even given her time to wipe off all the cold cream, some of which lay in an ooze round her jaw and temples, or to take the curl-papers out of her hair, which still sported some white snippets of the _Jornal de Commercio_. She bore no malice, the good soul was saying to herself, but once a woman is in her bed she likes to stay there: still, men are men, and mad, so what can one expect?

He would not treat her lightly, nor spoil his sense of dedication to one woman. He flicked the revolver out of Pessôa's hand and flung it through the nearest window. The thick glass took a little time to fall.

"My friends will wait on you in the morning," Pessôa had spouted, and he had said the appropriate courteous things, and gone up to Léonore, and kissed her hand and said something chaffing in her ear, at which she smiled sleepily, and said in English, "Go on, you bad man!" She spoke so slowly and so meaninglessly, as stupid people do when they speak a foreign tongue, that the words seemed to be uttered by some lonely ghost that had found a lodging in her broad mouth. Then the men fell back to let him go out through the folding-doors, and he went out into the Moorish arches of the entrance-hall, where Indian flunkeys in purple livery gave him his coat and hat, and he set his back to this queer mass of cupolas and towers, that radiated from its uncurtained windows rays of light which were pollutions of the moonlight. He thought of that blotched face, that gross, full body.... It was a night of strong moonlight. He was walking along a dazzling white causeway edged, where the wall cast its shadow, with a ribbon of blackness. Palms stood up glittering, touched by the moon to something madder than their daylight fantasy of form. The aluminium-painted railings in front of de Rojas' villa gleamed like the spears of heroes. He stared between them at the red façade; if she was a coward she would still be somewhere in there. The thought struck him with terror. If she were not waiting for him the moonlight would shatter and turn to darkness, the violence of his heart-beat turn to stillness.

Now he had come to the Villa Miraflores. This was his house. Yet he entered the gate like a thief, and crept along the shadow of the wall that enclosed his own gardens. The magnolias stood blazing white on the lawns, the stiff scarlet poinsettias twitched resentfully under the poising fireflies' weight, and from the dark geraniums scent rose like a smoke. He would have liked to go to her with an armful of flowers, but he did not dare to go out into the light. He passed the door that led from his to de Rojas' garden, which had been made when a father and son had been tenants of the two houses, and which had never been blocked up because de Rojas and he were such good neighbours. If it had not been unlocked to-night, if the marble summerhouse were empty.... He stood in the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple, not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his woman in his arms, finding her lips....

It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing. Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan. Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a blank dismissal which, if it had been given by a man to a woman, these Suffragettes would have called a Vile betrayal.

He could remember well enough his rage when he took her to him in that last embrace and she would not give him both her hands, because in one she held the ebony cross of her rosary, to make her strong to do this unnatural thing. Well, perhaps it was natural enough that that hour should seem most real to him, for it was then that he had found out their real relationship. To him it had seemed as if they were two children wandering in the unfriendly desert that is life, comforting each other with kisses, finding in their love a refuge from coldness and unkindness. But in her fear he perceived that she had never been his comrade. She had thought of him as an external power, like the Church, who told her to do things, and in the end the choice had been for her not between a dear and pitied lover and a creed, but between two tyrants; and since one tyrant threatened damnation while the other only promised love, a sensible woman knew which to choose. All he had thought of her had been an illusion. The years he had given to his love for her were as wasted as if he had spent them in drunkenness or in prison.

Oh, women were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the courage that adventures, the intellect that creates, the soul that questions how it came, they were hostile. They hated the complicated brains that men wear in their heads as men hated the complicated hats that women wear on their heads; they hated men to look at the stars because they are sexless; they hated men who loved them passionately because such love was tainted with the romantic and imaginative quality that spurs them to the folly of science and art and exploration. And yet surely there were other women. Surely there was a woman somewhere who, if one loved her, would prove not a mere possession who would either bore one or go and get lost just when one had grown accustomed to it, but would be an endless research. A woman who would not be a mere film of graceful submissiveness but real as a chemical substance, so that one could observe her reactions and find out her properties; and like a chemical substance, irreducible to final terms, so that one never came to an end. A woman who would get excited about life as men do and could laugh and cheer. A woman whose beauty would be forever significant with speculation. He perceived with a shock that he was thinking of this woman not as one thinks of a hypothetical person, but with the glowing satisfaction which one feels in recounting the charms of a new friend. He was thinking of some real person. It was someone he had met quite lately, someone with red hair. He was thinking of that little Ellen Melville.

He looked across the hall at her. Their eyes met.

IV

When he went over to her side at the end of the meeting she glowered at him and said, "Oh, it's you!" as if it was the first time she had set eyes upon him that evening; but he knew that that was just because she was shy, and he shook hands rather slowly and looked her full in the face as he said he had liked the speeches so that she might see she couldn't come it over _him_. And he asked if he might see her home.

She swallowed, and pushed up her chin, as if trying to rise to some tremendous occasion, and then pulled herself together, and with an air of having found a loophole of escape, enquired, "But where are you stopping?" and when he made answer that he was staying at the Caledonian Hotel, she exclaimed in a tone of relief, "Ah, but I live at Hume Park Square out by the Meadows!"

"I want to see you home," he said inflexibly.

"Oh, if you want the walk!" she answered resignedly. "Though you've a queer taste in walks, for the streets are terrible underfoot. But I suppose you're shut up all day at your work. You'll just have to sit down and wait till I've checked the literature and handed in the takings. I doubt yon stout body in plum-coloured velveteen who bought R.J. Campbell on the Social Evil with such an air of condescension has paid me with a bad threepenny-bit. Aren't folks the limit?" She was so full of bitterness against the fraudulent body in plum-coloured velveteen that she forgot her shyness and looked into his eyes to appeal for sympathy. "Ah, well!" she said, stiffening again, "I'll be back in a minute."

He leaned against a pillar and waited. The hall became empty, became melancholy; mysteriously and insultingly its emptiness seemed to summarise the proceedings that had just ended. It was as if the place were waiting till he and the few darkly dressed women who still stood about chewing the speeches were gone, and would then enact a satire on the evening; the rows of seats which turned their polished brown surfaces towards the platform with an effect of mock attentiveness would jeeringly imitate the audience, the chairs that had been left higgledy-piggledy on the platform would parody the speakers. And doubtless, if there is a beneficent Providence that really picks the world over for opportunities of kindliness, halls which are habitually let out for political meetings are allowed means of relieving their feelings which are forbidden to other collections of bricks and mortar. But he mustn't say that to Ellen. To her political meetings were plainly sacred rituals, and in any case he was not sure whether she laughed at things.

She called to him from the doorway, "I'm through, Mr. Yaverland!" She was wearing a tam-o'-shanter and a mackintosh, which she buttoned right up to her chin, and she looked just a brown pipe with a black knob at the top, a mere piece of plumbing. He thought it very probable that never before in the history of the human race had a beautiful girl dressed herself so unbecomingly. But that she had done so seemed so peculiarly and deliciously amusing that as he walked by her side he could hardly keep from looking at her smilingly in a way that would have puzzled and annoyed her. And outside the hall, when they found that the mist, like a sour man who will not give way to his temper but keeps on dropping disagreeable remarks, was letting down just enough of itself to soak Edinburgh without giving it the slightest hope that it would rain itself out by the morning, he caught again this queer flavour of her that in its sharpness and its freshness reminded him of the taste of fresh celery. He asked her if she hadn't an umbrella, and she replied, "I've no use for umbrellas; I like the feel of the rain on my face, and I see no sense in paying three-and-eleven for avoiding a positive pleasure."

By that time Ellen was almost sure that he was smiling to himself in the darkness, and was miserable. It was a silly, homely thing to have said. "Ah, what for can he be wanting to see me home?" she thought helplessly. "He is so wonderful. But then, so am I! So am I!" And as they went through the dark tangle of small streets she turned loose on him her enthusiasm for the meeting, so that he might see that women also have their serious splendours. Hadn't it been a magnificent meeting? Wasn't Mrs. Ormiston a grand speaker? Could he possibly, if he cared anything for honesty, affirm that he had ever heard a man speaker who came within a hundred miles of her? And wasn't Mrs. Mark Lyle beautiful, and didn't she remind him of the early Christian martyrs? Didn't he think the women who were forcibly fed were heroines, and didn't he think the Liberal Governments were the most abominable bloodstained tyrants of our times? "Though, mind you, I'd be with the Liberal Party myself if they'd only give us the vote." It was rather like going for a walk with a puppy barking at one's heels, but he liked it. Through her talk he noticed little things about her. She had had very little to do with men, perhaps she had never walked with a man before, for she did not naturally take the wall when they crossed the road. Her voice was soft and seemed to cling to her lips, as red-haired people's voices often do. Her heels did not click on the pavements; she walked noiselessly, as though she trod on grass.

Suddenly she clapped her bare hands. "Ah, if you're a sympathiser you must join the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. You will? Oh, that's fine! I've never brought in a member yet...." She paused, furious with herself, for she was so very young that she hated ever to own that she was doing anything for the first time. It was her aim to appear infinitely experienced. Usually, she thought, she succeeded.

To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could listen, he said, "I was converted long before to-night, you know. My mother's keen on the movement."

"Is she?" She searched her memory. "Yet I don't know the name. Does she speak, or organise?"

"Oh, she doesn't do anything in public. She lives very quietly in a little Essex village," he answered, speaking with an involuntary gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his mother was an invalid. She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and weaktasting foods. The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor. "Ah, the poor souls in there!" she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms. "It makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there in pain." Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any more than he asked himself how this night's knowledge of her was to be continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware that those questions existed. He simply noted that she was being happy. Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each other, going home in the rain.

They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope. "Edinburgh's a fine place," he said. "It can handle even an asphalt track with dignity."

"Oh, a fine place," she answered pettishly, "if you could get away from it." He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness. Why should a woman want to go wandering about the world?

From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, "How long were you a sailor?"

"Three years. From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty."

Then it struck him: "How did you know I'd been a sailor?"

"I just knew," she said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a mystic tie between them. But it soon flashed over Ellen's mind that the reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins. She wondered if she ought to tell him so. An unhappy silence fell upon her, which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything, when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her. But he began to feel anxiety because of the squalor of the district. This must be a mews, for there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that was the thud of sleeping horses' hooves that sounded like the blows of soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors. If she lived near here she must be very poor. But without embarrassment she turned to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained window, to be a very mean little house. "The Square's through here," she said. "Come away in and I'll find you a membership form for the Men's League...."

Beyond the archway lay the queerest place. It was a little box-like square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews. They sent out in front of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as a terrier shakes a rat. Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins. On the fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night. He, too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were sleeping in these little houses. They were probably poor little people, for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one lighted window. And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon, the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the door and invited him in with something of an air.

"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness, "Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said, "What's that you say, Ellen?"

"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find him a membership form."

She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr. Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit." A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as well as draggled by the winter, chirping sweetly and sadly on a bare bough that she could not have believed such things of the weather. Yet once she must have been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip, though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love. The aged are terrible--mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or what company gathered round them.

She struck him as being very old to be Ellen's mother, for when he had been seventeen his mother had still been a creature of brilliant eyes and triumphant moments, but perhaps it was poverty that had made her so dusty and so meagre. "Yes, they are very poor," he groaned to himself. The room was so low, the fireplace so small a hutch of cast-iron, the wallpaper so yellow and so magnified a confusion of roses, and so unsuggestive of summer; the fatigued brown surface of the leather upholstery was coming away in strips like curl-papers; there were big steel engravings of Highland cattle enjoying domestic life under adverse climatic conditions, and Queen Victoria giving religion a leg up by signing things in the presence of bishops and handing niggers Bibles--engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered somehow. And there was nothing pretty anywhere.

The little brown bird of a woman was asking in a kind, interested way if he were a stranger to Edinburgh, and he was telling her how long he had been in Broxburn and what he did there, and when he mentioned cordite she made the clucking, concerned noise that elderly ladies always made when they heard that his work lay among high explosives. And Ellen's rootings in the untidy desk culminated in a sudden sweep of mixed paper stuff on to the floor, at which Mrs. Melville remonstrated, "Ellen, it beats me how you can be so neat with your work and such a bad, untidy girl about the house!" and Ellen exclaimed, "Och, drat the thing, it must be upstairs!" and ran out of the room with her face turned away from them.

They heard a clatter on the staircase, followed by violent noises overhead as if a chest was being dashed open and the contents flung on the floor. "Dear, dear!" ejaculated Mrs. Melville adoringly. She began to look him over with a maternal eye. "For all you've been six months in the North, you've not lost your tan," she said.

"Well, I had a good baking in Spain and South America," he answered. Their eyes met and they smiled. In effect she had said, "Well, you are a fine fellow," and he had answered, "Yes, perhaps I am."

"I like a man to travel," she went on, tossing her head and looking altogether fierce Ellen's mother. "I never go into the bank without looking at the clerks and thinking what sumphs they are, sitting on their high stools." She seemed to have come to some conclusion to treat him as one of the family, for she retrieved her knitting from the mantelpiece and turned her armchair more cosily to the fire, and began a sauntering of the tongue that he knew meant that she liked him. "I hope you don't think Ellen a wild girl, running about to these meetings all alone. It's not what I would like, of course, but I say nothing, for this Suffrage business keeps the bairn amused. I'm not much of a companion to her. I'm getting on, you see. She was my youngest."

"The youngest!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know. I thought she was an only child." He flushed at this betrayal of the interest he felt in her.

"She's that now. But I had three others. They all died before Ellen was born. They sickened for influenza on a bad winter voyage my husband and I made from America." She mourned over some remote grievance as well as the sorrow. "One was a boy. He was just turned five. That's a snapshot of Ronnie on the mantelpiece. A gentleman on board took it the day he was taken ill."

He stood up to look at it. "He must have been a jolly little chap."

"He was Ellen's build and colour, and he was wonderfully clever for his age. He would have been something out of the ordinary if he had lived. I knew it wasn't wise to sail just then. I said to wait till the New Year...." Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough. Life had behaved very meanly to this woman. When she was young and sweet her sweetness had been violated and crushed by something harsh and reckless; and now she was not sweet any longer, but just a wisp of an old woman, and nobody would ever bother about her again; and life gives one no second chances. Yaverland lamented, as Ellen had done, the fate of those exceptional people who are old or not perfectly happy.

"You're not Irish, are you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naïve and touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming into this little home, where at least there was peace and quiet.

"No," he said reassuringly, "I'm not Irish. My people have been in Essex for hundreds of years. I'm afraid," he added, for so evident was it that most of her fellow-creatures had dealt cheatingly with her that decent people felt a special obligation to treat her honestly, "my grandmother was an O'Connor, but she was half French. Lord, what's that?"

It seemed as if a heavy sea was breaking on the back of the house as on a sea-wall. The gasolier trembled, the floor throbbed, the little goblin dwelling pulsated as if it were alarmed. Only the continued calm of Mrs. Melville at her knitting and the coarse threads of music running through the sound persuaded him that this riot was the result of some genial human activity.

"Oh, I suppose you notice it, being a stranger," said Mrs. Melville. "We hardly hear it now. You see, they've turned the Wesleyan Hall that backs on to the Square into a dancing-hall, and this is the grand noise they make with their feet. It's not a nice place. 'Gentlemen a shilling, ladies invited,' it says outside. Still, we don't complain, for the noise is nothing noticeable and it reduces the rent."

This was a masterpiece of circumstance. By nothing more than a thin wall which shook to music was this little home divided from a thick-aired place where ugly people lurched against each other lustfully; and yet it had been made an impregnable fort of loveliness and decency by this virtuous ageing woman, whose slight silliness was but a holy abstinence, a refusal to side with common sense because that was so often concerned in cruel decisions, by this girl who was so young that it seemed at the sight of her as if time had turned back again and earth rolled unstained by history, and so beautiful that it seemed as if henceforth eternity could frame nothing but happiness. The smile of Ellen had made a faery ring where heavy-footed dancers could not enter; her gravity had made a sanctuary as safe as any church crowned with a belfry and casketing the Host. And he, participating in the safety of the place, pitied the men behind the shaking wall, and all men over the world who had committed themselves to that search for pleasure which makes joy inaccessible. They had chosen frustration for their destiny. Because they desired some ecstasy that would lighten the leaden substance of life they turned to drunkenness, which did no more than jumble reality, steep the earth in aniline dyes, tinge the sunset with magenta. Because they desired love they sought out women who, although dedicated to sex, were sexually cancelled by repeated use, like postage-stamps on a much re-directed letter, who efficiently went through the form of passion, yet presented it so empty of all exaltation that their lovers left them feeling as if they were victims of a practical joke.

And here, not half a dozen yards from some of these seekers, was one who could bring to these desires a lovelier death than they would meet on the dirty bed of gratification or the hard pallet of renunciation. Because the untouched truth about her could give ecstasy one would not lose the power of seeing things as they are, and she made one forget the usual sexual story. Although she was formed for love and the intention of being her lover was now a fundamental part of him, she was so busy with her voice and body in playing quaint variations on the theme of herself that he did not mind how long might be the journey to their marriage. She was more interesting than any other person or thing in the world. She was going to have more interesting experiences; because her unique simplicity comprehended a wild impatience with lies she would have a claim on reality that would give her unprecedented wisdom. Now he could understand why saints in their narrow cells despise sinners as dull stay-at-homes.

And when she burst into the room again he saw that all he had been thinking about her was true. It might be that everybody else on earth would see her as nothing but a red-haired girl in an ill-fitting blue serge dress with an appalling tartan silk vest, but still it was true.

"Here you are," she said, "you put your name _there_." She bent over him as he wrote and wished she could put something on the form to show how magnificent he was and what a catch she had made for the movement.

Well, there was no possible excuse for staying any longer, and the poor old lady was yawning behind her knitting. He rose and said good-bye, wondering as he spoke how he could make his entrance here again and how he could break it to these women, who were like hardy secular nuns, that he came for love. If this had been a Spanish or a Cariocan mother and daughter how easy it would have been! The elder woman's eyes would have crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty, very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating that she knew nothing and yet could promise to submit to everything. But here was Mrs. Melville saying something quite vague about hoping that he would drop in if he was passing, and Ellen lifting to him a stubborn face that warned him there would be a thousand resistances to overcome before she would own herself a being accessible to passion. Yet this harsh inexpertness about life was the essence that made these people delightful to him. It was unreasonable, but it was true, that he adored them because they were difficult.

"Ellen, run out and light the hall gas for Mr. Yaverland." And from the courtesy in the tone and something gracious in Ellen's obedience he saw that they were too poor to keep the gas burning in the hall all the evening, and so the lighting of it ranked as a ceremonial for an honoured guest. They were dear people.

As he buttoned his oilskins to the chin while Ellen stood ready to open the front door he did not dare look at her because his stare would have been so fixed and bright. He set his eyes instead on the engravings, which for the most part represented Robert Burns as the Scotch like to picture their national poet, with hair sleek and slightly waved like the coat of a retriever hanging round a face oval and blank and sweet like a tea-biscuit.

"You seem to admire Burns," he said.

"Me? No, indeed. Those are my grandmother's pictures. I think nothing of the man. His intellectual content was miserably small."

"That's a proposition he never butted up against--"

"What?"

"A woman who said that his intellectual content was miserably small. You're one of Time's revenges...."

She didn't follow his little joke, although she smiled faintly with pleasure at being called a woman, because she was distressfully wondering if her reluctance to let him go was a premonition of some disaster that lurked for him outside. She so strangely wanted him to stay. She could actually have wound her arms about him, which was a queer enough thing to want to do, as if the feelers of some nightmare-crawling horned beast were twitching for him in the darkness beyond the door. This inordinate emotion must have some meaning, and it could have none other than that Great Granny Macleod had really had second sight, and she had inherited it; it was warning her that something dreadful was going to happen to him on his way to the hotel. "Well, if I see anything in the papers to-morrow morning about a big man being run down by a motor-car in the fog, I'll know there's something in the supernatural," said the cool elf that dwelt in her head. But agony transfixed her like an arrow because her thought reminded her that this glorious being whose eyes blazed with serenity as other people's eyes blaze only with rage, was susceptible to pain and would some day be subject to death.

"Good-night," he said. He did not know why her breath had failed and why she had raised her hand to her throat, but he knew that his presence was doing marvellous things to her, and he was sure that they were beautiful things, for everything that passed between them from now on till the end of time would be flawlessly beautiful. "Good-night," he said again, and stopped when he had gone a yard or two down the path simply that they might speak to each other again. "You must shut the door. You're letting in the rain and cold."

"No," she said dreamily, sleepily, and slowly closed the door.

He went on in the impatient mood of a man who has been secretly married and must leave his wife in a poor lodging until he can disclose his marriage.