Chapter III: I (1)

When she opened the door with her latchkey on Monday evening, late from a class in Advanced Commercial Spanish at Skerry's College, and sat down in the hall to take her boots off, her mother cried out from the kitchen, "Ellen, I've got the grandest surprise for you!"

These fanciful women! "And what's that?" she cried back tolerantly, though the dark thoughts buzzed about her head like bees. She thought she could feel better if she could only tell someone how Mr. Philip had sat by her fire like a nasty wee black imp and said that awful thing. But she must not tell her mother, who would only be fretted by it and ask like a little anxious mouse, "You're sure you've not said anything, dear? You're sure you've been a careful girl with your work, dear?" and would brace herself with heartrending bravery to meet this culminating misfortune. "Ah, well, dear, if you do have to look round for a new post we must just manage." So she must keep silent and seem cheerful, though that memory was rolling round and round in her brain like a hot marble.

"Away into the dining-room and see what it is," said Mrs. Melville, coming out with the cocoa-jug in her hand. She had put on her brighter shawl, the tartan one.

"You look as we'd been left a fortune," said Ellen.

"No fear of that. If your grand-aunt Watson remembers you with a hundred pounds that's all we can expect. But there's something fine waiting for you. Finish taking off that muddy boot before you come. Now!"

She flung open the door.

"Roses!" breathed Ellen. "Mother--roses!"

On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars. Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. The flowers were beautiful in so many ways. They were beautiful just as roses, because "roses" is such a lovely word; as clear patches of red and white because red and white are such lovely colours; and because a red rose has so strange an air of complicity in human passion, and the first white rose was surely grown from some phosphorescent cutting that dropped through the starlight from the moon. And these were the furled, attenuated blooms of winter, born out of due season and nurtured in stoked warmth, like the delicate children of kings, and emanating a faint reluctant scent like the querulous sweet smile of an invalid.

They looked hard and cold, as if they had protected themselves against the cold weather by imitating the substance of precious stones.

They were an orgy and a prophecy, these flowers. They were an outburst of unnecessary loveliness in a house that did not dare open its doors to anything but necessities; and they showed, since they blossomed here though the rain roared down outside, that the world was not after all an immutably unpleasant place, and could be turned upside down very enjoyably if one had the money to buy things. It really was worth while struggling to get on....

"Mother, where did they come from?"

"Ah!" said Mrs. Melville waggishly.

"Och, tell me! I don't imagine you went out and pawned the family jewels. Och, do tell me! Come on!"

"A boy brought them up from Gilbey, the florist's, this morning. I could have fallen down when I opened the door. And the wee brat of a boy tried to convey to me that he wasn't used to coming to such a place. He wore a look like a missionary in Darkest Africa. They were left for Miss Melville, mind you. Not for your poor old mother. And they're from Mr. Yaverland. Yon's his card sticking up against your grandmother on the mantelpiece."

Ellen's hands, outspread over the roses, dropped to her side.

"I would have thought he had more sense," she said sulkily. "If he'd money to burn he should have sent this lot to the infirmary."

"Och, Ellen, are you not pleased?"

"What's the man thinking of to fill us up with flowers as if we were an Episcopal church on Easter Sunday?"

"Ellen, you've no notion of manners. Gentlemen often send flowers to ladies they admire. When your Aunt Bessie and I were girls many's the fine present of flowers we got from officers at the Castle."

"I've neither time nor taste for such things. It makes me feel like a hospital. He'll be sending us new-laid eggs and lint bandages next. The man's mad."

"Ellen, you're a queer girl," complained. Mrs. Melville. "If this argy-bargying about votes for women makes you turn up your nose at bonny flowers that a decent fellow sends you I'm sorry for you--it's just tempting Providence to scorn good mercies like this. I'll away and take the fish-pie out of the oven."

It was strange that as soon as her mother had left the room she began to feel differently about the roses. Of course they were very beautiful; and they were contenting in a quite magic way, for besides satisfying her longing for pretty things, they seemed to have deprived of urgency all her other longings, even including her desire for a vote, for eminence of some severe sort, for an income of three hundred pounds a year (which was the most she believed a person with a social conscience could enjoy), for a perpetual ticket for the Paterson Concerts at the MacEwan Hall, and for perfect self-possession. She felt as if these things were already hers, or as if they were coming so certainly that she need not fret about them any more than one frets about a parcel that one knows has been posted, or concerning some desires, as if it did not matter so much as she had thought whether she got them or not. Especially that dream of being one of a company of men and women whose bodies should be grave as elms with dignity and whose words should be bright as butterflies with wit struck her as being foolish. It was as idle as wanting to be born in the days of Queen Elizabeth. What she really wanted was a friend. She had felt the need of one since Rachael Wing went to London. Surely Richard Yaverland meant to be her friend, since he sent flowers to her. But she wished the gift could have been made secretly, and if he came to pay a visit she should be quite alone. For no reason that she could formulate, the thought of even her mother setting eyes on them together seemed a threat of disgrace. She wished that they could be standing side by side at the fire in that five minutes when it is sheer extravagance to light the gas but so dark that one may stare as one cannot by day, so that she might look at what the driving flamelight showed of his black, sea-roughened magnificence. At her perfect memory of him she felt a rush of exhilaration which left her confused and glad and benevolent.

"Mother, dear," she said, for Mrs. Melville had come back with the fish-pie, and was bidding her with an offended briskness to sit forward and eat her meal while it was hot, "they're the loveliest things. I can't think what for I was so cross."

"Neither can I. There's so little bonny comes our way that I do think we might be grateful when we get a treat."

"I'm sorry. I can't think what came over me."

"Never mind. But, you know, you're sometimes terribly like your father. You must fight against it."

They sat down to supper, looking up from their food at the roses.

"Mother, the gas is awful bad for them. Carbonic acid is just murderous to flowers."

"I was thinking that myself. It was well known that gas was bad for flowers even when I was young, though we didn't talk about carbonic acid. But if you don't see them by gaslight you'll never see them, for it's dark by five. They must fall faster than they would have done."

"Och, no! I'd rather you had the pleasure of them by day, and let the poor things last. I must content myself with a look at them at breakfast."

"Nonsense! They're your flowers, lassie. But do you not think it would do if we brought in the two candles and turned out the gas? It'll be a bit dark, but it isn't as if there were many bones in the fish-pie."

And that is what they did. It was a satisfactory arrangement, for then there was a bright soft light on the red and white petals, and a drapery of darkness about the mean walls of the room, and a thickening of the atmosphere which hid the archness on the older woman's face, so that the girl dreamed untormented and without knowing that she dreamed.

"Ah, well!" sighed Mrs. Melville after a silence, with that air of irony which she was careful to impart to her sad remarks, as if she wanted to remove any impression that she respected the fate that had assailed her. "I don't know how many years it is since I sat down with roses on the table."

"I never have before," said Ellen.

II

It was indeed much more as the friend that Ellen wanted than as the declared lover he had intended to be that Yaverland came to Hume Park Square on Saturday in answer to the letter of thanks which, after the careful composition of eight drafts, she had sent him. All week he had meant to ask her to marry him at the first possible moment. By day, when the thought of her rushed in upon him like a sweet-smelling wind every time he lifted his mind from his work, and by night, when she stood red-gold and white on every wall of his room in the darkness, it grew more and more incredible that he could meet her and not tell her that he wanted to spend all the rest of his life with her. He felt ashamed that he was not her husband, and at the back of his mind was a confused consciousness of inverted impropriety, as if continuance in his present course would bring upon him denunciations from the pulpit for living in open chastity apart from a woman to whom he was really married. There was, too, a strange sense of a severer guilt, as if by not letting his love for her have its way he was committing the crime a scientific man commits when he fails to communicate the result of a valuable research. Even when he went out to mount his motor-cycle for the ride to Edinburgh he meant to force on her at once as much knowledge of his love as her youth could hold.

But going down the garden he met the postman, who gave him a letter; and before he opened it it checked his enterprise. For the address was in his mother's handwriting, and though it was still black and exquisite, like the tracery of bare tree-boughs against the sky, it was larger than usual, and he had often before noticed that she wrote like that only when her eyes had been strained by one of her bouts of sleeplessness. "Why doesn't she go to a doctor and get him to give her something for it?" he asked himself impatiently, annoyed at the casting of this shadow on his afternoon; but it struck him what a lovely and characteristic thing it was that, though his mother had suffered great pain from sleeplessness for thirty years, she had never bought peace with a drug. Nothing would make her content to tamper with reality. He found, too, in her letter a phrase that bore out his suspicion, a complaint of the length of the winter, a confessed longing for his return in the New Year, which was a breach of her habitual pretence, which never took him in for an instant and which she kept up perhaps for that very reason, that she did not care when she saw him again.

"Oh, God, she must be going through it!" he muttered. He could see her as she would be at this hour, sitting at the wide window in her room, which she kept uncurtained so that the Thames estuary and the silver fingers it thrust into the marshes should lie under her eye like a map. Her nightlong contest with memory would not have destroyed her air of power nor wiped from her lips and eyes that appearance of having just finished smiling at a joke that was not quite good enough to prolong her merriment, but being quite ready to smile at another; it would only have made her rather ugly. Her hair would be straight and greasy, her skin leaden, the flesh of her face heavy except when something in the scene she looked on invoked that expression which he could not bear. Her face would become girlish and alive, and after one moment of forgetfulness would settle into a mask of despair. Something on the marshes had reminded her of her love. She had remembered how one frosty morning she and her lover had walked with linked arms through cold dancing air along the grassy terrace that divided the pastures, the green bank to the east sloping to a ditch whose bright water gave back the morning sky, the bank to the west sloping white with rime to a ditch of black ice; or she had remembered how, one summer night when the sky was a yellow clot of starshine, she had sat in the long grass under the sea-wall with his head in her lap. And then she had remembered the end.

It was strange that such things could hurt after thirty years. Yet it seemed less strange to him to-day than it had ever done before, because he could see that the love that would happen if he was Ellen's lover would be a living thing in thirty years' time.... It would be immutably glorious as his mother's love had been interminably grievous. Yet suddenly he did not want to think of Ellen or the prospect of triumphant wooing any more. It seemed disloyalty to be making happy love when his mother was going through one of her bad times. He would have to go to Hume Park Square, but he would talk coolly and stay only a little time.

And before he had gone very far on his way to Edinburgh something else happened to blanch his temper. A heavy motor-van rumbled ahead of him with a lurching course that made him wonder at the spirit of the Scotch that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.

But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking, lest her pride should forbid him to come in, he went into her room.

She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft voice.

For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly, glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had slept....

And she was going through a bad time like that now.

When at last he was free to continue his ride to Edinburgh he did not greatly want to go. He would have turned back to Broxburn had he not reflected that, although Ellen and her mother had not named any particular day for his visit, they might perhaps expect him this afternoon. Indeed, he became quite certain that they were expecting him. But nothing seemed agreeable to him in his abandonment to this ritualist desire to live soberly for a little so that he might share the sorrow of the woman who was enduring pain because she had given him life. He certainly would not make love to Ellen. He hoped that she was not so wonderful as he had remembered her.

But though his spirit doubled on his track it did not lead him back to solitude. Perhaps when the sun falls over the edge of polar-earth the Arctic fox laments that he must run through the night alone, for in the white livery he must assume at the year's death he feels himself beast of a different kind from the brown mate with whom he sported all the summer-time; and hears a soft pad on the snow and finds her running by his side, white like himself. So it was with Yaverland when he came to Hume Park Square, for the Ellen he found was a dove, a nun, a nurse. Up to the moment she opened the door to him she had been a sturdy, rufous thing, a terrier-tiger, exasperated because she had imperilled her immortal soul by coming off her Princes Street pitch when a truly conscientious woman would have gone on selling _Votes for Women_ for at least five minutes longer; and because she had had to pretend to her mother all through tea that she hadn't really expected him; and because after her mother had gone out she had begun to read the _Scotsman's_ report of an anti-Suffrage meeting in London. "Yon Lord Curzon's an impudent birkie," she said, with a rush of tears to her eyes that seemed even to herself an excessive comment on Lord Curzon; then the knock came. "It'll be my old boots back from the mending," she had told herself bitterly, and went to the door like a shrew. And because there had been some secret diplomacy between their souls of which they knew nothing, some mutual promises that each would attempt to give what the other felt was lacking in the universe at the moment, the first sight of him made her change herself from top to toe to a quiet, kind thing.

The little sitting-room was drowsy as a church, its darkness not so much lit as stained amber by candlelight, and her voice was quiet and pattering and gentle, like castanets played softly. She made him tea, though it was far too late, and he had politely said he did not want any, and afterwards she sat by the fire, listening without exclamation to the story of the accident, making no demand on him for argument or cheerfulness, sometimes letting the conversation sag into silence, but always showing a smile that such a time meant no failure of goodwill. The unique quality of her smile, which was exquisitely gay and comically irregular, lifting the left corner of her mouth a little higher than the right, reminded Yaverland that of course he loved her. It would make it all right if he wrote to his mother about her at once. He reflected how he could word the letter to convey that this girl was the most glorious and desirable being on earth without lapsing into the exuberance of phrase which was the one thing that made her turn on him the speculative gaze, not so much expressive of contempt as admitting that the word contempt had certainly passed through her mind, which she habitually turned on the rest of the world....

But Ellen was speaking now, apologising because she had made him eat by candlelight, offering to light the gas, explaining that she and her mother had burned candles all the week because they hurt his roses less. "But surely," he said, "these roses can't be the ones I sent you? That was five days ago. These look quite fresh." Her face became vivacious and passionate; she came to the table and bent over the vases with an excitement that would have struck most people as a little mad. "Of course these are your roses!" she exclaimed. "Five days indeed! They'll keep a fortnight the way mother and I do them. When they begin to droop you plunge the stalks into boiling water...."

He watched her with quiet delight. In the course of his life he had given flowers to several women, but none of them had ever plunged their stalks into boiling water. Instead they had stood up very straight in their shiny gowns and lifted the flowers in a pretence of inhaling the fragrance which the strong scent they used must certainly have prevented them from smelling, and had sent out from their little mouths fluttering murmurs of gratitude that were somehow not references to the flowers at all, but declarations of femaleness. Surely both the woman who performed that conventional gesture and the man who witnessed it were very pathetic. It was as if the man brought the flowers as a symbol of the wonderful gifts he might have given her if they had been real lovers, and as if the woman answered by those female murmurings that if they had been real lovers she would have repaid him with such miracles of tenderness. The gesture was always followed, he remembered, by a period of silence when she laid the flowers aside for some servant's attention, which was surely a moment of flat ironic regret.

But the roses that he had brought Ellen were no symbol but a real gift. They satisfied one of her starvations. She was leaning over them wolfishly, and presently straightened herself and stared at a dark wall and told how early one spring she had gone to a Primrose League picnic ("Mother brought me up as a Consairvative. It's been a great grief to her the way I've gone") at Melville Castle. There had been lilac and laburnums. Lilac and laburnums! She had evidently been transported by those delicate mauve and yellow silk embroideries on the grey canvas of the Scottish countryside, and his roses had taken her the same journey into ecstasy, just as the fact of her had brought him back into the happiness away from which he had been travelling for years. They had a magical power to give each other the things they wanted.

But she was uneasy. The clock had struck seven, and she had seemed perturbed by its striking. "Do you want me to go?" he asked, with the frank bad manners of a man who is making love in a hurry.

"Och, no!" she answered reluctantly, "but there's the shopping."

"Can't I come and carry the things for you?"

She brought her hands together with a happy movement that at the last instant she checked. But indeed she was very glad. For nowadays if anybody was unkind, and on Saturday nights people were tired and busy and altogether disposed to be unkind, she immediately noted it as fresh evidence that there did indeed exist that human conspiracy of malevolence in which the sudden unprovoked unceasing cruelty of Mr. Philip had made her believe. But if the client from Rio were with her, things would not happen perversely and she would not think dark thoughts. "That'll be fine. You'll make a grand jumentum."

"Ju--?"

"Jumentum, jumenti, neuter, second. A beast of burden. It's a word that Cæsar was much addicted to."

When she came in again from the hall he saw with delight that she had put on her hat and coat in the dark, and, though she went to the mantelpiece, it was not to revise the rough draft of her dressing at the glass, but to fish some money out of a ginger-jar. She brought the coins over to the table and began to arrange them in little heaps, evidently making some calculation concerning the domestic finance, while her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: he felt it to be a kind of spiritual adultery; he moved his clenched hand forward on the table till it almost touched her money. Immediately she ceased to add, slowly her gaze travelled from his fingers to his face, and she smiled a disturbed smile that expressed at first the greeting that one beautiful animal gives to another, and then poetic wonder at his beauty, and then happiness because they liked each other so, and at last it became a sheer grimace of courage because the happiness was turning into a slight physical misery because there was something she ought to do or say, and she did not know what it was. And he was smiling too, because he perfectly knew what she did not.

One of the candles had burnt to its socket, and at its guttering arms of shadow seemed to whirl about them, and at its death the darkness seemed to bend forward from the corners of the room and press them closer to each other. Very soon she would be in his arms, and there would be an exquisite, exciting contrast between the rough texture of the coat that his hands would grasp and the smooth skin that his lips would meet. But there would not. The passion that possessed him was so strong that it killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light, and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out like comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the table, and she seemed very real.

She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the evening as if it were a refuge from him.

But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat _ss. Glory_ with Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of London, and not a few came from the special schools for the feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper that makes a good boxer.

So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was, he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent than going home to supper.

It seemed a courageous little city as it lay at the base of the towering black and silver Northern night: a brave kindling of comfort in the midst of the indifferent universe. And Ellen's shopping manner, her east wind descent on salesmen, showed that she participated in the hardy quality of her surroundings. In the first shop she was still too much aware of him to get into her stride. It was a bakery--such a marvellously stocked bakery as could be found only in the land of that resourceful people, which, finding itself too poor to have bread and circuses, set about to make a circus of its bread. She bought a shepherd's bap, its pale smooth crust velvety with white flour, and an iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's carcase and liking the lovely springing arch of the ribs, was startled to hear her cry, "Mr. Lawson, you surprise me!" But it was only the price of a piece of a neck of mutton that had surprised her. After that he listened to the conversation that passed between her and the shopmen, and found it as different from the bland English chatter of such occasions as if it had been in a different tongue. It had the tweedy texture of Scotch talk, the characteristic lack of suavity and richness in sense, in casual informativeness, in appositeness. Here, it was plain, was a people almost demoniac with immense, unsensual, intellectual energy.

In the grocer's shop they had to wait their turn to be served. Ellen put in the time staring up at a Peter's milk chocolate advertisement that hung on the wall, a yodelling sort of landscape showing a mountain like a vanilla ice running down into a lake of Reckitt's blue; she was under the illusion that it was superb because it was a foreign place. Yaverland watched the silver-haired grocer slicing breakfast sausage, for Ellen had told him that this was one of the city fathers, and it seemed to him that there was something noble about the old man in his white apron which reminded one of his civic dignity. Doubtless, however, in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life. The old man seemed to like Ellen, though she was very rude about his ham and said, "If that's the best, then times have been hard for the pigs lately." Yaverland gave to their bickering amenities an attention that dwelt not so much on the words as the twanging, gibing intonations. But after they got into the streets again a question and answer began to tease his mind: "Would you be wanting your change in halfpence, Miss Melville?"

"Och, no, thank you, Mr. Lindsay."

They had come to the end of Ellen's shopping list and she was taking him home through St. Patrick's Square. "Look at that lighted window, where they've got a blue blind! That's where de Quincey stopped!" she said excitedly, and he answered, "Oh, is it?... I say, why did the old chap offer to give you change in halfpence?"

"Well, to-morrow's Sunday, you see."

"I'm afraid I don't. I'm stupid. Why do you want halfpence more on Sunday than on any other day?"

"Why, for the plate. For the collection. In church. But we always put in threepenny-bits. Mother's picked up a lot of English ways. What's taken you?" She stared up in wonder at his laughter, until it broke on her that she had unwittingly given him, an Englishman, food for the silly English taunt that the Scotch are mean. "Och, you don't understand," she began to stammer hastily. "I didn't mean that exactly."

And then a hot rage came on her. Why should she make excuses for her own people, because this stranger who was less than nothing to her chose to giggle? Wasn't he using his size, which was sheer luck, his experiences in foreign lands, of which she was bitterly jealous, and his maleness, which until she got a vote was a ground for hostility, to "come it over" her? She said acidly, "I'm glad you're amused. I suppose you don't do such things in England?" and at his laughing answer, "I don't know; I've never been to Church in England. But I shouldn't think so," her neatly-brushed and braided temper came down. She came to a sudden stop. They were on the unfrequented pavement of Buccleuch Place, a street of tall houses separated by so insanely wide a cobbled roadway that it had none of the human, close-pressed quality of a street, but was desolate with the natural desolation of a ravine, and under these windowed cliffs she danced with rage, a tiny figure of fury with a paper-bag flapping from each hand like a pendulous boxing-glove, while he stood in front of her in a humble, pinioned attitude, keeping his elbows close to his side lest he should drop any parcels.

He loved every word of it, from the moment she explosively told him that it was all very well to hee-haw up there like a doited giraffe, and his mind felt the same pleasure that the palate gets out of a good curry as she told him that the English were a miserable, decadent people who were held together only by the genius and application of the Scotch, that English industry was dependent for its existence on Scotch engineers, and that English education consisted solely of Univairsities that were no more than genteel athletic clubs, and begged him to consider the implication of the fact that the Scotch, though a smaller people than the English, had defended a larger country....

He woke up at that. He had been tranced in a pleasant reverie, for though she was angry he knew that she would not get too angry. She was running away from him, but in a circle.

"Scotland bigger than England!" he jeered. "Think of the map! Bigger than England!"

She thought of the map, and for a minute her mouth was a little round dismayed hole. But she was not to be beaten. "I was alluding to its surface," she said coldly. "It being such an elevated country, there must be many square miles standing practically on end, thus taking hardly any space on the map. Consequently I was correct in saying that Scotland is bigger than England." She drew breath to go on, but her lips began to twitch and her eyes to seek his half-ashamedly, and then she began to giggle at her own sophistry and was not angry when he joined her. They built a little bright vibrant cave in the night with their laughter, from which they did not wish to move. They were standing quite still on the broad pavement, staring intently at each other's faces, trying to remember the reality under the distortions painted by the strong moonlight. It was a precious moment of intimacy, and they did not quite know what to do with it. They did not even know whether to be grave or gay. It was as if they held between them a sheet of shot tissue and could not decide whether to hold it up to the light and show its merry rosy colour or let it sag and glow rich gold.

But indeed they had no choice. For he found himself saying huskily, "I didn't mean to be rude. I had forgotten you were Scotch. You're a person all by yourself. One doesn't think of you as belonging to any country."

"Well, of course," she murmured, "father was Irish; but he was just an expense."

He choked back a laugh. But this sense that she was funny did not blur the romantic quality of his love for her any more than this last manifestation of her funniness spoiled the clear beauty of her face, which now, in this moonlight that painted black shadows under her high cheek-bones, was candid and alert like the face of a narcissus. "I didn't mean to be rude," he repeated. "I didn't think that what I said could possibly touch you. As if I could say anything about you that wasn't...." His voice cracked like a boy's. He felt an agony of tenderness towards her, and a terrifying sense that love was not all delight. It was stripping him of the armour of hardness and self-possession that it had been the business of his adult years to acquire, and it was leaving him the raw and smarting substance, accessible and attractive to pain, that he had not been since he was a boy.

And it was all to no purpose. For nothing seemed more likely than that Ellen should look up at him fixedly and fully assume that expression of wisdom which sometimes intruded into the youth in her eyes; that she should say in a new deep voice, "You are not good enough for me." And of course it would be true, it would be true. Then she would walk on and turn the corner to her home, and he would be left alone among these desolate tall houses, eternally hungry. He could imagine how she would look as she turned the corner, the forward slant of her body, the upward tilt of her head, the awful irrevocable quality of her movements, the ghostlike glamour the moonlight would lay on her as if to warn him that she was as separate from him as though she were dead. He would not be able to pursue her, for there was something about her which would prevent him from ever trying on her those ordinary compulsions which men are accustomed to apply to women; quiet, menacing devotion, or persistent roaring importunities, or those forcible embraces, of which he thought with the disgust he now felt for the sexual processes of everybody in the world except himself and Ellen, which induce the body to betray the reluctant mind. Because he loved her he was obliged, in spite of himself, to acknowledge the sacredness of her will, even though that acknowledgement might frustrate every hope of his love. He greatly disliked that obligation.

She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig. Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."

"Take me there, Ellen."

"Would you like to come? Let's go next Saturday. I've got the whole day off. Mr. James said it was my due, what with the overtime I've been doing. It'll be lovely. I've had nobody to go with since Rachael Wing went to London. But would you truly care to come? It's just moors. You'll not turn up your nose at it?"

"Anywhere I went with you I'd like."

She started and began to walk on. It was as if the sheet of tissue had grown too heavy for her young hand and she had dropped it. Although he went on talking about how much he liked Scotland, and how intelligent he found the workmen at the cordite factory at Broxburn, she hardly answered, but moved her head from side to side like a horse galled by its collar. Had he thought her a bold girl, fixing up a walk with him so eagerly? And ought he to have called her by her Christian name? Of course he was so much older that perhaps he felt that he had a right to do it. When they passed through the arch into Hume Park Square she saw a light in the dining-room window and said, "Mother's home before us."

She did not know that in that minute she had decided the course of her life. For she did not know that just before she spoke she had sighed, and that Yaverland had heard her and perceived that she sighed because soon they would no longer be alone together. Perhaps something like fear would have come upon her if she had known how immense he felt with victory; how he contemplated her willingness to love him in a passion of timeless wonder, watching her journey from heaven, stepping from star to star, all the way down the dark whirling earth of his heart; and how even while he felt a solemn agony at his unworthiness he was busily contriving their immediate marriage. For there was a steely quality about his love that would have been more appropriate to some vindictive purpose.

It was apparent to him, when they went in, that Mrs. Melville understood what was going on, for she threw him a glance which was not quite a wink but which clearly suggested that had she been just a common body it was conceivable that she might have winked. As soon as they were alone he told her that he loved Ellen, that he wanted to marry her, that he had plenty of money, that he was all right, that they must marry at once. She did not seem to regard him as asking her permission, though he had tried to give his demand that flavour, but rather as acquainting her with an established fact at which she blinked in a curious confusion of moods. The demoniac music in the dancing-hall had begun to bludgeon the walls, and in the whirlpool of the physical vibrations of the noise and the spiritual vibrations of his passion the little woman seemed to bob like a cork. She was resigned and pleased, and plainly trusted him, but at the same time she was pitifully alarmed. "Mercy me! you've not been long.... Well, you've caught a Tartar and no mistake. Never say I didn't warn you.... But you'll let the bairn bide for a wee bit longer! She's but a bairn!"

It was as if she quite saw that a husband was necessary for Ellen, and wanted her to have one, and at the same time believed that any husband would inevitably bring her pain. He set it down as one of the despondent misinterpretations of life that the old invent in the depression of their physical malaise, and answered, reassuringly, insincerely, "Yes, yes, I'll wait...." But why should they wait? They were going to be radiantly and eternally happy. It might as well begin at once.

III

"Is it not beautiful? Is it not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them, laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do; there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic hues.

But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields, set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather, and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under changing skies even as the seas.

Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly, "Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity, and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which, when it was still, was sweet-flavoured with the sweetness of the firs and the bog-myrtle, and when it was disturbed by the diamond-hard wind was ice-cold and seemed to intoxicate the skin. There was a sound of wheels behind them, and they stepped aside to let a carriage pass down a track that turned aside from the road at this point and ran timorously between the moor and the white wall of the neat estate. In it sat an old lady, so very old that the flesh on the hand that was raised to her bonnet was a mere ivory web between the metacarpal bones, and her eyes had gone back to that indeterminate hue which is seen in the eyes of a new-born baby; but she sat up straight in the open carriage and directed on the two strangers a keen belittling gaze that without doubt extracted everything essential in their appearance. He liked this harsh country, these harsh, infrangible people that it bred.