Chapter VI: Part THE SECOND: Sheila Dyrle (1)

1

Somewhere, no doubt, in Sheila’s personality, the story was written down; and she could have turned for young Redshawe the pages that she so seldom and so reluctantly turned for herself. She was an emotional but not a sentimental woman, and retrospect was a melancholy luxury that for the most part she denied herself. So far as she could she denied it to herself now, although the young man had troubled the deep waters of her mind. If for a moment she looked back her life appeared to her as a fruitless quest for something--who knows what?--for beauty, for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. Intimations of such a reality had again and again quickened desire within her. But, even in the moment of stretching out the hands to clasp it, ‘beauty vanishes, beauty passes’....

* * * * *

Half a century before, in her early teens, Sheila had emerged from her sister’s bedroom into the green distempered corridor of the school infirmary, hotly denying in her heart that Helena was dying. She wondered at the obtuseness of these people who had seen the sweet bloom of Helena’s cheeks and the lustre of her eyes, and yet drained their vocabulary of euphemisms hinting at death. Weak and wasted indeed she was, but full, still, of the serene joy that was her peculiar gift to the world. God couldn’t be so foolish or so cruel as to let Helena die. That would surely have been too sorry a joke even for the deity of Aunt Hester’s imagination.

‘Why is every one so silly?’ she complained to Aunt Hester, who had waited in trembling silence till her coming. ‘Helena’s getting better. Of course she is.’

‘Yes, dear,’ agreed Aunt Hester submissively. ‘Did you have a nice talk?’

‘We couldn’t let her talk much. She’s still so weak. But she said she would soon be out and about again.’

Tears began trickling down the lined leathery cheeks of Aunt Hester: cheeks that had suddenly the grotesque air of having been corrugated for the sole purpose of being wept upon. ‘Poor darling! Did she say that?’

‘Oh, aunt, why will you believe those silly people?’ Sheila’s voice rang out. ‘She must get well--she _must_!’

‘We must hope on,’ quavered Aunt Hester, furtively dabbing her eyes with a little sodden ball of handkerchief.

Sheila, alone in her faith, succumbed to the fear that tried to hide itself in anger. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘It’s a beastly shame ... to give up hope. Think how _well_ she looks! She’s been making plans for the summer holidays.’

At that Aunt Hester turned away her head, hunched up her back, and frankly sobbed, leaning against the back of a chair. All her prim dignity had vanished, and for the first time Sheila saw in her aunt an old frail woman. The shock of that discovery passing, she stared for a moment in sullen misery at the queer-shaped convulsive figure; then turned abruptly away and went, dry-eyed, into their bedroom.

In bed she thought she could hear her sister’s voice in delirium, although she knew that there were two walls and a passage between them: it muttered interminably until she had to bite her lips together to prevent herself from screaming. Aunt Hester soon came into the room, undressed herself by moonlight, and tumbled on to her knees. She remained kneeling, with her face and arms lying limply across her bed, for what seemed hours; and Sheila stared stupidly at the ceiling and strained her ears at every trivial sound. For a moment she closed her eyes....

And when she opened them again, birds were chattering outside her window and pale dawnlight, like a ghost, was in the room. ‘Like a ghost,’ Sheila said, and shuddered. Aunt Hester was not there; her bed had not been slept in.

Sheila got quickly out of bed, a dry sob of fear breaking from her, and ran barefooted into the green corridor. She stood quite motionless for a while, one hand resting on the door handle, and listened; tiptoed a few steps up the passage, her eyes fixed dreadfully on the room that held Helena; and drew back again. Time became a throbbing agony. Her thought dizzied itself by ceaselessly revolving round the glazed white door that had brass figures, 17, screwed upon its middle panel, but her eyes steadily stared. ‘Seventeen,’ said some chattering thing in her brain: ‘that’s her age. Is that why they put 17, or is it a coincidence?’ But she was not to be distracted by silly questions. The door began to open.

Slowly the glazed white door that had stared back at her for so long, mutely reiterating ‘17,’ began to open, as though it had come to life. ‘A big white waistcoat,’ said Sheila’s chattering brain. Like a silly flat face it moved aside to make room for something that with funereal step passed out: a bent figure in black tight-fitting bodice and white lace cap. Aunt Hester’s right hand drew the door to behind her, and with an abrupt resolute gesture she flung up her head and stood, regally tall, a black figure of doom framed in the white doorway. In a silence like death itself the eyes of these two stricken creatures met.

That meeting of eyes was an icy blast in the green twilit corridor. It froze the running water of Sheila’s thought and made her catch her breath. Gradually, while they looked at each other, Aunt Hester crumpled and shrank again to the meagre dimensions of a bent old woman; she stumbled forward to meet her niece with feebly gesticulating arms. The next morning she had answered the mute question of Sheila’s eyes and was enfolding her rigid passive body.

The single word she saw forming on her aunt’s lips released the locked flow of Sheila’s thought. Her mind became once more almost insanely active. One dry gasp escaped her, and no other sound. The springs of pity were barren in her: this sobbing woman was a stranger. Helena was dead. She turned away from her aunt and went slowly back into the bedroom. Helena was dead. ‘Very well,’ said Sheila’s mind, and she, ignoring that, suddenly thought that if God were to appear to her at that moment she would strike him with her hand. And that would have been how silly! He would only laugh. Helena was dead. She stared, dry-eyed, out of the window and saw the sun newly risen in his glory. The leaves of the acacia were a luminous green; a thrush in its branches poured out bubbling melody. All the universe was alive with a stabbing futile beauty. Helena was dead.

No tears came to release the pent grief. Why was that? ‘Like the woman in the poem,’ muttered that mental chatterbox and began iterating ‘Home they brought her warrior dead. Home they brought her warrior dead.’ It was in a little red book. ‘Rose a nurse of ninety years.’ Was it ninety or eighty? And Rose was a girl’s name, but it wasn’t the nurse’s name. Rose a nurse. A nurse rose. Rise, rose, risen. And on the third day he rose again from the dead. Who was it did that? The little red book had an odd name on its cover.... And suddenly Helena came before her, alive, alive, and happy as she had always been. What nonsense. Helena was dead.... Like a city besieged Sheila fought against the cruel memories that invaded her.

Aunt Hester came with food on a tray, and urged her to try to eat something, just a morsel, just a sip. What was the good of it all? And the voice of Aunt Hester stayed with her interpolating dull remarks about funerals, trains, Penlington, nice to be home again, poor dear mother, make a friend of Jesus, try not to brood, into Sheila’s busy thought. But Sheila pushed them all from her. She was eager to brood. Without brooding, life was empty: a dry husk. She surrendered herself now, opened her heart to that host of memories: they tumbled in, a looting rabble. She lived over and over again her days with Helena: her thought sped through the years ever more quickly, until in a sickening rush it reached the dead wall of the present. Helena was dead, God had stupidly killed her. And would they have to try to sing a hymn about--what was it?--each within his narrow bed, safe home at last, Jesu’s breast, blend the living with the dead.... Aunt Hester was back again, urging her to cry. ‘You do the crying, aunt.’ Had she said that or only thought it? She wished Aunt Hester would go away with her talk of the kind nurse, just a sip or two, quite a peaceful passing dear, try to pray, home again soon, take her with us. What was the sense in saying ‘take her with us’ when Helena was dead? There was nothing to take home. There was nothing to take home except what was in the white room, number seventeen. They’d put it in a box ... not Helena; Helena was gone away ... Sheila was jealous of anything that came to thrust itself between her and her memories; but she could not still the almost febrile activity of her aching brain: her random thoughts danced on dizzily over the bottomless black pit.

* * * * *

Back in the house at Penlington. A locked room now, with It, shut up in a shiny coffin, on trestles. And to-day, at noon, It was to be taken away.

Noon. The long-tailed black horses trampled on Sheila’s heart. Six men entered the house and mounted the stairs--tramp, tramp, tramp--and stopped.... They returned more slowly, their breathing more noisy, their footsteps less regular. Sheila turned her face from the window lest she should find horror made visible.

She stood in the stuffy room, waiting for the others to come downstairs. Although the windows were wide open the atmosphere was stiflingly hot. The drowsy hum in which all summer sounds were merged floated in oppressively, and the clock’s ticking was a burden.

She was very uncomfortable and wretched in her black clothes; her gloved hands perspired. She caught sight, through the trees in the garden, of the waiting carriage.... Why were all these things necessary?

Uncle Peter came downstairs, followed by Aunt Hester and a school chum of Helena’s. Other draped figures came, including a strange girl-cousin with her husband; but none was of the slightest consequence.

In the crawling carriage now; and idiot birds were singing happily outside. Sunshine, dusty roads, blue cloudless sky, hot air, silly singing birds, the window-fittings in the carriage, Uncle Peter with his expanse of waistcoat and great gold chain and perspiring face, the split in the third finger of her black glove, the ill-repressed sniffling of the cousin, a scratch in the paint over Uncle Peter’s head, the houses and hedges moving slowly past them, people at the side of the road with raised hats, a team of cricketers in a distant field and the gleam of their white flannels in the sunlight: of all these things she was conscious, and of the black pit, Helena dead, and the slow miserable rumble of wheels.

She wondered why God would not speak to her. A new hope flickered. She would listen for His voice, that still small voice in the soul. But the only voice she heard, whether within or without, was Uncle Peter’s. ‘It really _is_ hot,’ he said conversationally, as they got out of the carriage.

And now added to the horror and the heat was the sight of the coffin being borne into that squat evil building, that house of death, the cemetery chapel, and, presently, a dull droning voice in melancholy monotone:

‘_In the morning it is green and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up and withered. For when thou art angry all our days are gone; we bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told. The days of our years are three score years and ten._’

And Sheila, a tiny girl again, was having happy romps with Helena in a garden full of flowers and sunshine. Helena was clapping her hands and laughing; Helena was lifting her, shoulder-high, to kiss a very tall rose that was really a princess imprisoned by black magic.... And then she was going to Helena for her music lesson, and Helena pretended she was just an ordinary pupil (for that was part of the game) named Linda Smith. ‘And what are you going to play this afternoon, Linda?’...

‘_The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death._’

The man was still there, the long-faced cadaverous man droning out his words. And now they were out again in the scorching sun, standing, the men bare-headed, round an open grave. She heard the women sobbing; she saw Uncle Peter with bent head, a great red boil peeping over his collar from the pink folds of neck. And now the coffin was being lowered. Something seemed to clutch her by the throat; but the tears would not come.

‘_For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy...._’

‘Come along, dear,’ said Aunt Hester, taking her arm. And Sheila, waking as from an evil dream, saw compassion looking out of the eyes of Uncle Peter. She was the centre of this tragedy. For an instant she luxuriated in the emotion of her position; enjoyed the accession of self-importance; rolled mourning like syrup on her tongue. She caught herself in the act; and her heart turned sour and said to her, ‘How hateful you are!’

2

Helena’s death is of signal importance in the history of Sheila because it was the occasion of her first serious quarrel with God. And though, as the years went on, she did in a measure make it up with Him, the reconciliation was never complete. She never ceased, from that day, to relish Mr. Hardy’s gestures of contempt for the President of the Immortals. The name of God, none the less, resumed something of its old majesty. She depersonalized Him, disembodied Him, transmuted Him from solid substance into a kind of immanent gas, a presence that disturbed her with the sense of elevated thoughts. She dabbled in the literature of popular mysticism, deriving comfort from its comfortable abstract phrases, its Cosmic Urges, its Universal Self. She read a text-book on Hegel; and the Hegelian paradox, ‘Being and not-being are identical,’ she rolled on her tongue until it assumed the flavour of truism. While she was on the crest of this enthusiasm Kay Wilton came, to renew the promise of a transcendental happiness.

But let us turn the pages more quickly until we come upon a Sheila of nineteen years, with the Kay adventure past but still fresh in her mind. With her school-friend Hypatia Fairfield she sat in a coign of the cliff at Selborne and gazed musingly at sea and sky. Sheila was too busy with her dream to be very interested in Hypatia’s talk about her clever brother who had just gone to Cambridge: his profound knowledge of history, his intellectual honesty, and his sarcasm poured so liberally on a certain Paley whose _Evidences of Christianity_ he had been forced to study for the Little Go. Slightly bored by the recital of this brother’s deeds and sayings, Sheila began a little to scorn her friend’s sisterly partiality. Even the severe, the rational, the proudly unconventional Hypatia was not immune from that human weakness.

‘Have you ever liked anybody very much, Hypatia?’

‘Liked anyone?’

‘A boy, I mean.’

‘Why, of course, Edward----’

‘Oh, not your brother.’ Sheila waved an impatient hand. ‘Have you never been....’

‘Do you mean in love?’ asked Hypatia, in some surprise.

‘Well, yes, in love.’

‘No.’ Hypatia shook her head, firmly, but without the scorn that Sheila had half-expected to see. ‘I never have. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I just wondered.’

For a moment Hypatia contemplated a distant ship. ‘Look at the sun on that sail,’ she said.... ‘Have _you_ ever been?’

Sheila nodded, scrutinizing closely a smooth white stone she had dug up with her fingers from the chalky soil.

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know?’

‘Yes. There was a kind of engagement. It was while I was at St. Margaret’s.’

‘Do you mean it’s over now?’

Sheila began trying to explain everything. The effort took her away for a moment to the first dim beginnings of love, four or five years back, and then brought her swiftly to the greater glory and deeper pain of the year just gone. Hypatia listened with quiet attention to the rambling, shy, and inadequate narration.

‘It was at a Band of Hope that I first saw him,’ began Sheila.

‘What_ever_ made you go to a Band of Hope?’ asked Hypatia.

‘I had a friend, Sophie Dewick. She used to go. And they used to have lantern lectures and concerts and things. It wasn’t bad.’

The lantern slides had been a disappointment, being concerned almost entirely with graphical statistics about alcohol. The only picture worth while was that of a flea, magnified some thousandfold, happily reminiscent of the _New Geology Reader_ and of Poe’s stories. This was an inadequate sugar coating to the pill of chemical analysis. But Mr. Beak made everything worth while--Mr. Beak, with spare figure, polished pate, and black bushy eyebrows. When he rose, lifting his hand for silence in order that he might announce ‘Hymn Number twenty-thwee--the twenty-third hymn,’ he seemed like a military commander admitting defeat but determined not to surrender; he seemed, to himself perhaps as to his sympathizers, the last champion of sobriety in a drunken world. This sense of desperate purpose pervaded the whole proceedings of which Mr. Beak had the conducting: the religious service had always this invincible air of being held round an open grave--the open grave of one who, without doubt, had sipped claret-cup at some festival in his youth and in riper years had taken to wife-beating, smoking, swearing, and the other vices incidental to dipsomania. Mrs. Beak, plump, rosy, and smiling, chatted pleasantly to every one and made optimistic secretarial announcements.

‘And that was where I met him,’ Sheila told Hypatia.

‘Did you lose your heart at once?’

‘Not a bit. There was something about him: I don’t know how to express it--a sort of mute poetry in his face. But I didn’t really give a thought to him then. He seemed a nice boy; nothing more.’

Later she discovered that he had sad grey eyes, a submissive mouth, untidy light brown hair. He wore his high double collar and his black tie with an incongruous effect, like a cherub masquerading as a clerk. Sheila’s interest in Kay, her urgent desire to protect him, led her into strange places; for he was a youth of inscrutable impulses. The Band of Hope was good fun; and to accept sometimes the hospitality of Sophie’s pew in a strange chapel full of green gloom was a defection from Wesleyanism that Aunt Hester found it easy to forgive: the easier when she reflected that it was a further step from the dreaded Popery. But the Seven Days’ Mission was something that taxed Sheila heavily. A new humility was growing upon her; the beatific vision of Kay drew her with a power she found irresistible. So innocent, so shy a boy, so unaware of his own attractiveness, he seemed to be crying out for sympathy. She read an unspoken appeal in his big eyes; she discovered a pathos of inexpressiveness in his lame confused speeches. That he admired her was a gradual revelation that at first she hardly dared to face: that she longed to know him and to be his friend she admitted to herself at once with her usual candour. Why then did this young prince, this strayed denizen of the celestial meads, choose such odd ways of spending his time? What force impelled him to attend that curious orgy of emotion, the Seven Days’ Mission? She found the riddle hard to read. Humbly and patiently she set herself the task of trying to understand these religious fervours.

Sheila and Kay talked rarely, and never of matters more deep than the Band of Hope, _Pickwick Papers_, the weather, the oddities of common acquaintances, and the mock-tragedy in blank verse that Clive Bunter had written for the Social Evening. The rehearsals for this play drew them together every Tuesday for four weeks; but the play was never presented to the public, for the dress-rehearsal was attended by Mr. Beak and Mr. Turley, and these gentlemen, deacons both, were seized with alarm at the prospect of theatricals, however innocuous, taking place in a lecture-hall so near the sacred precincts of the church.

Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.

‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.

‘But they were awfully funny, those two,’ Sheila remarked. ‘People so comic must have a spark of goodness in them somewhere.’

‘Goodness!’ said Clive Bunter, ‘Gallons and gallons of it. It ought to be put a stop to, this monopoly of goodness. But as for brains--all the brains in the Band of Hope wouldn’t fill a pin’s head.’

‘You’re not including your own, are you?’ asked Kay.

Sheila, who considered Clive rather conceited, laughed with relish. She was at some pains to show her appreciation. Perhaps it was this that encouraged Kay to ask, when, later, she turned to leave the others: ‘May I come a little way with you?’

She said ‘Please do,’ and pointedly refrained from calling out ‘Good night’ to Sophie, who was walking some yards ahead with the Hero of the doomed play, a gentleman by whom of late she had been rather engrossed.

Sheila and Kay walked for a while in silence down a broad avenue of trees bordered on one side by dark woods, and on the other by scattered houses. A yellow strip of moon hung, glowing in the blue, above the woods.

She began telling him that she was to be sent away to St. Margaret’s, a school in Selborne; that the term was thirteen weeks long; and that her aunt talked of going to live in Selborne permanently. This meant that she and Kay might never meet again.

Kay surveyed this prospect dismally. They discussed it in elaborately casual tones. And all the while she was thinking how delicious were the stillness and the moonlight and this unspoken love. Even the impending separation was beautiful, tragic, uplifting. When at his suggestion they sat down on a borough council seat facing the woods, she caught her breath and trembled at the exquisite beauty of his shy avoidance of her eyes.

‘Frightfully thick those woods are,’ he said.

But that was said to gain time, she knew. A feeling almost of fear came over her. He was going to try to put into words this wonderful, this unutterable love.... If only it could remain unspoken, and they sit here for ever in silence!

‘I say, Sheila,’ he burst out. ‘I wish you weren’t going!’

‘Do you?’ She stared at the dark gravel path.

‘Dash it all--I’m awfully fond of you.’

She turned to him with flushed cheeks and fluttering heart, trying to speak.

‘I think ... I think you’re a perfect dear,’ she said. ‘Oh, Kay!’

His eyes filled with light. Rather awkwardly he put his hand on her shoulder.

They kissed shyly, hesitatingly, as though afraid lest by doing so they should break the spell of beauty that bound them.

* * * * *

Hypatia listened, slightly frowning.

‘After that dress-rehearsal,’ said Sheila, ‘he told me.’

‘Told you?’

‘Told me that he ... liked me. I knew before, but he told me then.’

Her voice died away into silence.

‘Nothing can ever come near that,’ she said, in a low tone. ‘Nothing, ever.’

She resumed her story after a pregnant silence. The sound of the sea soothed her with its rhythm.

‘A few days afterwards I came to St. Margaret’s. And then....’

She stopped speaking. Hypatia looked up to find her gaze fixed upon the horizon.

‘Well?’ said Hypatia gently, after a long pause. ‘Did he forget all about you or something of that sort?’

‘No,’ answered Sheila, ‘he didn’t forget. He kept writing me letters.’

‘Why, of course! Didn’t you want him to?’...

The first letter made her eyes moist with tenderness; but every one that followed came with a whisper of impending tragedy. He wrote always of the church, of the office, of the garden, of the Band of Hope: round these things his immortal soul revolved.

Next Sunday fortnight I am to give a paper at the Young People’s
Bible Class. Mr. Dewick asked me if I would and he said he would be
very pleased if I would say yes and I could not very well get out
of it as I had no excuse ready. I have chosen for my subject Sunday
Observance; it is a good subject but I find it hard to put many
thoughts down on paper about it. I will write and tell you how I get
on. We had a really broad-minded sermon last Sunday on the text ‘By
their fruits ye shall know them,’ it upset some of the very strict
people I fancy but Mr. Dewick liked it and so did I. The preacher,
whose name I forget, he was from Barnet, said that there had been
some quite good atheists, but I thought he took a very extreme view
when he said that some atheists lived much better lives than the
average christian. It seemed to me that he put that bit in just so
as to sound paradoxical and daring. Father has been very busy in the
garden, pruning his roses, as the weather has greatly improved these
last few days. There is a new fellow now at the office, but I cannot
say I like him much, he is a bit of a rough diamond; rough anyhow, I
am not so sure about the diamond. I think he drinks and he certainly
uses bad language, but if one tells him of it he only gets more
offensive. By the by, isn’t it funny that you should be still at
school while I’m at business when we are both seventeen and within a
few months of each other?

Passages like this frightened Sheila by indicating a gulf of mental disparity fixed between Kay and her. ‘It’s only superficial,’ whispered her love. ‘He’s not like that really. He’s not a good letter-writer: that’s all.’ And she tried to silence her own critical spirit with tender memories of his wooing. ‘Can love be scared away by a bad literary style?’ she asked herself. But her mind worked on against her: by no manner of violence could she prevent its probing into the substance of Kay’s frequent letters. In spite of her protests it coined for her a new word, Kayesque, to express a certain indefinable quality, a taint, manifest in his way of thinking and writing. Indefinable or not, it was undefined, for she dared not define it. To have confessed even to herself that it meant complacency, mediocrity, total absorption in the commonplace, would have precipitated disaster.

And to quicken her faculty for detecting the Kayesque there was the constant companionship of Hypatia Fairfield. From the moment when Sheila woke, one midnight, to find Hypatia sitting up in bed reading by candlelight _The City of Dreadful Night_ the two girls were fast friends. This was but one book from the secret hoard of five that Hypatia discovered to Sheila on that exciting night. She found the school library altogether too prim, too like Miss Fry the head, to suit her taste.

‘They starve you here, don’t they?’ she said, opening her locker and exhibiting her treasures one by one.

Each one had a brown-paper cover bearing in large block letters a title specially designed to propitiate the eye of Authority, should Authority happen to come round some day with a master-key. _Foxe’s Book of Martyrs_ clothed with righteousness the impious pages of Spencer’s _First Principles_, and _The Life of Livingstone_ invested _Monte Cristo_ with a garb of sanctity. Shelley beat his luminous wings behind the broad back of Robinson Crusoe.

‘It’s a pity Miss Fry is such a frump,’ said Sheila, when they had got into their beds and Hypatia had blown the light out.

Hypatia agreed. ‘I’m awfully glad you woke up. We might never have got to know each other if you hadn’t caught me reading.’

‘I don’t expect we should,’ responded Sheila, glowing with the excitement of a new friendship.

‘I was absolutely isolated,’ Hypatia said. ‘Oh, why ever didn’t you come to St. Margaret’s before?’

Sheila laughed. ‘I would have done it if I’d known, perhaps. And yet I was sorry to leave my other school.’

‘Was it decent there?’

‘Well, they didn’t teach us much, but it was very comfortable and homelike. I’d practically grown up there. It was a day school. They didn’t worry me much. Two or three of us in the Sixth used to spend a lot of our school hours producing a school mag.’

‘Unofficial, I suppose?’

‘Very. We wrote it out by hand and handed it round.’

‘Did you write stories, or what?’

‘Oh, things, you know,’ said Sheila. ‘It was only a lark. A kind of skit on the official journal.’

‘They’re too ladylike here for anything so vulgar as journalism,’ complained Hypatia to the darkness.

‘I expect so.’

‘Miss Fry with her Ministering Children!’ added Hypatia scornfully.... ‘By the way, are you church, chapel, or what?’

‘The last,’ said Sheila. ‘I’m rather keen on Edward Carpenter just now. Have you read him?’

‘Yes. Whitman and water,’ replied Hypatia. ‘I’m an agnostic personally. So are my people.’

‘Your people too!’ exclaimed Sheila. ‘I thought one’s people were always orthodox.’

Hypatia laughed. ‘Are you Irish?’

‘Part of me is.’

‘The voice part,’ said Hypatia.

‘Mother was Irish, and father had some Irish blood--just a drop or two.’

‘Your voice is lovely.’

Sheila heard Hypatia’s bed creak, and then the sound of a match being struck. Hypatia bent over her.

‘And you’ve Irish eyes too,’ she said. The match flickered out, and she went back to her bed. ‘They’re blue. Blue eyes and dark hair.’

She struck off at a tangent.

‘You’ll like Spencer. He makes your brain simmer. I said that before, didn’t I? Especially on the Unknowable. Funny, some people think there’s nothing unknowable.’

‘Beautiful people,’ said Sheila. ‘The salt of the earth. You’d think, to hear them talk, that they were present at the Creation of the world taking shorthand notes.’

There was silence for a few minutes.

‘I believe I’m too excited to sleep,’ said Sheila presently. ‘But I suppose we ought to....’

* * * * *

For weeks together, in defiance of Kay’s letters, Sheila abandoned herself to her dream of love, and the Kay of her imagination was a lover beyond criticism. It was become an article of her faith that it was this perfect lover, not the author of the letters, whom she would meet again on her return from school. Him she had indeed seen on the night of their love’s visible flowering. They had but to be together again, and she would know him for what he was, master of a speech more eloquent than words. And while she dreamed of this blissful reunion a letter came that rent her heart.

DARLING SHEILA.--Do not be surprised if I don’t write for several
days. Dad died suddenly yesterday.
Your loving KAY.

She recalled Helena’s death, re-living some of that agony; and compassion for Kay wrung bitter tears from her. Into her letter she poured a torrent of love and pity and passionate protest. She yearned for the moment when she would see him face to face and offer for his comfort the balm of her lips.

* * * * *

‘You see,’ explained Sheila, ‘I couldn’t tell you then, Hypatia. It would have been disloyal. I didn’t admit even to myself that there was anything to spoil our happiness. I thought that as soon as I saw him again, and touched him, that horrible doubt would vanish.’

‘And didn’t it?’

‘Yes, for a moment or two. Then it came back ... and grew and grew ... to a hateful certainty.’

‘Yes?’

‘The separation had lasted for the best part of a year, because I didn’t go home for the long summer holiday: Auntie came here instead. And during that time we’d both developed, he and I.’

‘He was more Kayesque than ever?’

Sheila flinched.

‘Oh, don’t remind me of that detestable invention of mine,’ she begged.... ‘He’d changed--oh, incredibly! Even his appearance. There were still wonderful moments--sometimes when the light fell on his hair ... and he was slightly freckled, you know,’ she added.

‘But he was changed.’

‘He was just like his letters. And when he was saying certain things--stuffy things--he even _looked_ like his letters.’

‘And the mute poetry?’ asked Hypatia presently.

Sheila stared miserably at her own feet.

‘I don’t know what became of that,’ she confessed. ‘It was there, you know,’ she added, seeing a gentle incredulous smile flit over her friend’s face. ‘Hypatia, it was, really. I _saw_ it.’

‘And then----’ suggested Hypatia after a silence.

‘Well, as soon as I was certain,’ said Sheila simply, ‘I had to tell him, of course.’

‘That it was hopeless?’

Sheila nodded.

‘We lived in different worlds.... And of course he didn’t understand.’

‘No,’ said Hypatia. ‘He wouldn’t. That was the whole tragedy, wasn’t it?’

‘He thought--’ Sheila began, with a little bitter laugh ... then stopped, and looked at Hypatia with pain in her eyes. ‘He thought I had stopped caring, Hypatia!’

She rose to her feet.

‘It must be getting on for teatime,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’

3

Seven years later, on the platform of Penny’s Heath station, Sheila discovered a new Hypatia Fairfield: tall, dark, severe, with thoughtful eyes and aggressive chin; by everyday standards a plain young woman, but redeemed from unattractiveness by an air of absorbed interest in some vision of her own. Since leaving school the two girls had exchanged letters of prodigious length. Once or twice they had visited each other’s homes, but these visits had provided an intercourse less intimate, less real, than that of their letters. Into the bubbling pot of that correspondence was poured all the raw egoism, all the shy solemn discoveries, of two active minds passing through the adventure of adolescence. Their knowledge of each other at school had been a mere passing acquaintanceship compared with this new intimacy that only distance and the postal service had made possible.

Recently they had begun to drift apart. Aunt Hester’s disapproval of normal life made the house at Penlington something of a prison; Aunt Hester’s friends were anæmic, uncongenial. ‘Nothing ever happens to me,’ she said to herself. ‘I never meet anyone or do anything. Things just go on, every day alike.’ She began to indulge herself in pessimism. Compared with the soothing syrup of Aunt Hester’s religion, despair was almost intoxicating: she tasted it eagerly, as though it had been wine. In those days she and Hypatia had echoed each other rapturously enough, agreeing--with what delight--that life was but a dry husk and death a fit ending to a witless scheme. But now Hypatia, with a fatal instinct for novelty, had subsided into the arms of a new religion, a religion that made summary end of all problems by denying their existence. It was this, Sheila divined, that had put that look of assured calm into her eyes.

‘So here you are then,’ said Hypatia, shy, as ever, of demonstration. ‘Where’s your trunk? I’ve got the trap in the station-yard.’

With Sheila and her belongings safely in the trap Hypatia took the reins between her capable fingers and drove away.

‘It’s very jolly here,’ said Sheila.

‘Yes. Much the same as before. Why, it must be a year since your last visit!’

‘It is.’

‘Scandalous!’ Hypatia smiled reproof. ‘Well, has your quest succeeded yet?’

‘My quest?’

‘You wrote some months ago saying that you could never rest until you had found a philosophy that would hold water?’

‘I’m still seeking,’ admitted Sheila.

‘You’ll never find it,’ remarked Hypatia, with calm certainty, ‘in the direction you are looking in.’

‘No?’ said Sheila good-humouredly.

‘Well, you’ll have plenty of chance here of inspecting every fad,’ said Hypatia. ‘They’re a lively set, our neighbours. There’s almost every shade of belief and unbelief possible to the human mind represented here, you’ll remember, and every shade has its club or church or soap-box.’

‘Even your shade?’ interposed Sheila.

‘Yes. Though that’s altogether different,’ Hypatia retorted. ‘Still I can understand that you think it just one more little sect and nothing else. When you are in science you will see everything more clearly.’

‘I shall see that there’s nothing to see at all,’ said Sheila. ‘Isn’t that your fundamental doctrine?’

‘True, matter does not exist, if that’s what you mean,’ said Hypatia. ‘That is perhaps Our Leader’s greatest discovery. God is All-Good, the very Principle of Goodness, and man is His reflection. Sin, disease, and death----’

‘Exist in the reflection but not in the reflector,’ remarked Sheila. ‘Are your people of the same way of thinking?’

‘Oh no.’ Hypatia shook her head. ‘Mother’s _trying_ to understand, but Father’s making no attempt at all.’

‘What about your brother?’

‘Of course, Edward’s hopeless. He’s utterly absorbed in his precious book.’

‘I thought he was going in for law,’ said Sheila.

‘So did I. So did everybody. He got a good first in his Tripos. But he doesn’t really care for law. History’s his great subject.’

‘What’s the book about?’ Sheila was excited by the thought of meeting in the flesh this maker of books.

‘I believe he calls it _A History of the Religious Idea_, but he’s very reticent about it. It’s a very proud exhibition of ignorance, no doubt.’

‘Hypatia!’ protested Sheila. ‘How very unkind of you!’

Hypatia sniffed.

‘Not at all. You misunderstand me. Edward, you see, is an agnostic. _Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne sais rien_, you know. He professes to know nothing about God and so on, and is just as proud of his ignorance as I used to be of mine.’

‘It must be nice for you to know all about it now,’ said Sheila.

‘It is,’ agreed the seer. ‘But it’s knowledge anyone can share who will try to understand.’

From the field they were passing _Fairfield’s Hygienic Corsets_ blazed in letters of red above the hedge. The factory chimneys blotted out the horizon.

* * * * *

Hypatia’s father was a spare, bullet-headed man with mutton-chop whiskers of a sandy hue and an indomitable nose that he had followed faithfully _per aspera ad astra_. The stars of Mr. Fairfield’s attainment were commercial prosperity and for his son the education that he himself had been denied. It became more and more apparent to Sheila, during that drive from the station, that for Hypatia’s parents Edward, the firstborn, was the being round whom the world revolved. For him the sun shone and the little stars clapped their hands. Fairfield senior, at first indifferent to Edward, had been trained in son-worship by his wife. Behind a brusqueness that passed for eccentric humour Mrs. Fairfield concealed power. Worshipping her son, for his advancement she had used her husband unsparingly, guiding his energy consistently in the direction of most commercial gain, and curbing his desire to spend himself, a prophet in the wilderness, in fruitless public advocacy of freethought. Her subjugation of her husband, himself a being of great though erratic energy, was the gradual achievement of twenty-five years.

‘Well, Miss Dyrle,’ said Hypatia’s father briskly. ‘Here you are again! We’re glad to see you. You know that.’

He looked at Sheila kindly, but as if to say: ‘Deny it if you can.’

‘Ah,’ he added, ‘here’s my wife. The honoured guest’s arrived, me dear, and I’m just extending to her, in the name of the family, a hearty welcome.’

The arrival of Mrs. Fairfield displaced a lot of air.

‘Now this _is_ a treat,’ she said, holding out both her hands. ‘My dear Sheila! I may still call you Sheila, mayn’t I? You are so _often_ in our thoughts!’

Sheila murmured her pleasure.

‘Must take us as you find us,’ admonished Mr. Fairfield. ‘We’re homely folk with no airs. No education to speak of. Couldn’t afford it. And now that we can afford it--it’s too late.’

‘Not too late for Edward, father dear,’ Edward’s mother reminded him.

‘Ah no. One scholar in the family at any rate.’

‘One scholar, three agnostics, and a religious crank, eh, dad?’ remarked Hypatia.

Her father laughed.

‘Heard the news?’ He turned to Sheila. ‘Hypatia’s saved. Got a new religion. Mine wasn’t good enough for her.’

‘What is yours, dad? I didn’t know you had one.’

‘When you and Edward were nippers I told you my religion. Be afraid of nothing except doing wrong. That’s mine. Everything in the garden’s lovely: that’s yours.’

‘Well, stop arguing all of you, and come to tea,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘Sheila must be ready for hers, I’m sure. Have you met Bunny, Sheila?’

‘No. Who’s Bunny?’

‘One of mother’s young men,’ explained Hypatia. ‘Quite an acquisition. Aristocratic by birth, democratic in sentiment. Isn’t that it, mother?’

At tea they were joined by Edward, rather reluctantly, and by the Honourable Richard Bunnard, _alias_ Bunny. Bunny was a fair freckled youth, with sleek hair brushed straight back from his forehead and well plastered to the head. His blue eyes followed Hypatia’s every movement with patient doglike devotion, except when recalled from this dereliction by the voice of Mrs. Fairfield.

‘Now then, Bunny! I want to hear what you think about this minimum wage question. Is thirty-two shillings enough for a skilled worker like a plate-layer?’

Bunny, very nervous, began opening and shutting his mouth soundlessly like a goldfish.

‘Well, Mrs. Fairfield, I hardly think so. A fellow could hardly live on such a mere pittance, could he? Forty-two or fifty-two or even....’

‘Sixty-two,’ murmured Hypatia.

‘Yes, sixty-two,’ he said, catching eagerly at a straw. ‘Or say three guineas, sixty-three. Not much more than a hundred and fifty a year, you know.’

‘There, father!’ cried Mrs. Fairfield. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘Of what, me dear?’

‘Why, the plate-layers are to have a minimum of sixty-three shillings a week?’

Bunny laughed.

‘Oh no, Mrs. Fairfield. It doesn’t follow. I only said they ought to have that.’

‘Well, you must see to it,’ retorted Mrs. Fairfield. ‘You young people, that’s your work in life, to stir things up. I think you must go into parliament, Bunny. Yes. I shall send you to parliament to put things right for us.’

‘But perhaps Bunny would rather not be sent to parliament, mother?’ suggested Hypatia.

‘Indeed,’ said the young man, ‘I’d much rather not. Edward would make a much better politician than I.’

Mrs. Fairfield proudly surveyed her son. ‘Ah, we must see about Edward. We’re not quite ready for parliament yet, are we, Edward?’

Edward smiled. ‘For my part, I never shall be ready.’

‘Mother ought to go there herself,’ said Hypatia. ‘She’d put the world straight in ten minutes.’

Her mother listened indulgently.

‘Do you know, Sheila, my children are very lucky children. They’ve been brought up in perfect freedom. They’ve got the habit of freedom. They do and think just as they like, have never known what compulsion was. Here’s Hypatia now, with her religion: she’s never been taught it by me; I’ve never forced anything down her throat. I believe that everybody has a right to follow his own bent.’

‘It must be very nice,’ said Sheila, ‘to be brought up in an atmosphere like that.’

‘It would be,’ Hypatia murmured, but Mrs. Fairfield did not take up the challenge.

‘I wish you’d teach me your New Thought,’ begged Bunny of Hypatia.

‘Which is it, New Thought or Higher Thought?’ asked Sheila.

‘Neither,’ answered Edward. ‘It’s something newer and higher than either. Unfortunately you have to believe it implicitly before you can understand it to be anything but nonsense.’

‘You can be quiet, Edward,’ said his sister, ‘even if you can’t be just.’

‘But, really,’ protested the scared Bunny. ‘I am quite in earnest, Hypatia. I would listen respectfully to anyone’s religion, especially yours. Won’t you tell me about it?’

Hypatia relented. ‘I will, some time. It’s useless with Edward about.’

‘It was founded by a woman,’ said Edward, ‘and she’s written a book that is the beginning and end of all Truth. Read it, Bunny, read it and live.’

‘You see.’ Hypatia smiled patiently. ‘That’s what I have to put up with.’

‘It’s too bad,’ Bunny reproached Edward.

‘Oh, don’t sympathize with me, _please_!’ said Hypatia.

Sheila thought: ‘How hard she has grown!’ and, having already tasted of her friend’s sublime certainties, she felt some relish for Edward’s mockery.

Edward seemed the most likeable person in the room, except perhaps Bunny. Edward was for the most part very quiet and self-contained. He possessed rather an impressive dome of forehead, but he maintained an impenetrable reserve without assuming that air of learning and distinction in which his mother sought so earnestly to invest him. Mrs. Fairfield’s maternal glance conveyed unmistakably to the rest: ‘We must not trouble Edward with our trivial talk. His thoughts are not our thoughts; neither are his ways our ways. He has taken his degree, and he is writing a book.’ Sometimes she referred questions to him, as to an authority; it was as though she was continually thrusting upon him his bachelor’s hood, he as continually repudiating it with a confession of ignorance or indifference. His anxiety to avoid oracular authority kept him more silent than the rest; and this very silence gave him in Sheila’s eyes a distinction that was almost fascination. She guessed him to be modest, unassuming, and clever. The mystery of his inner life drew her interest towards him.

But Bunny, too, was interesting; for Bunny had good looks and that air of trustfully appealing for affection to which Sheila was so susceptible. There was something pathetic about his obvious devotion to Hypatia. Except the commanding Mrs. Fairfield he seemed to look at no one else. He deferred to Hypatia constantly.

‘I suppose you would say that a headache is essentially unreal, Hypatia? If we knew the truth about ourselves we shouldn’t have headaches, should we?’

‘We shouldn’t have even heads,’ said Edward. ‘I see you’ve already had a dose, Bunny.’

‘Shut up, Fairfield!’ said the Honourable Richard. ‘Give your sister a hearing. Am I right, Hypatia?’

‘Certainly,’ agreed Hypatia. ‘Our failure to apprehend the truth is the root of all so-called evil and pain.’

‘I see,’ said Bunny, wrinkling his brow.

Sheila was touched to see the poor boy falling so easy a pray to the dominating Hypatia. But Mrs. Fairfield thought it was time to look after her property.

‘You don’t, my poor Bunny,’ cut in Mrs. Fairfield. ‘Nor does anyone else. No sense, anyhow. Don’t fill your mind with such stuff just to please Hypatia.... You must be a good boy,’ she added, ‘and do as I tell you.’

‘Mother means that, Bunny,’ said Hypatia. ‘She means every word, although she tries to make a joke of it. If you want to please mother, obey her in all things. It is the only way.’

Mrs. Fairfield became pale and distressed. Signs of an approaching fainting-fit were perceptible. Observing them, her husband broke in sharply. ‘Hypatia, hold your noise!’

So there was a feud, thought Sheila, between the young woman and the old: a duel for the soul of Bunny. Since he had apparently no brains of his own worth considering, the scalp would no doubt fall to Hypatia, who had youth as an ally. And then what terrible vengeance would fall upon him? Could nothing save him from them both? A highly dangerous pity awoke in Sheila’s heart.

‘You shall all go to the Folk Dancing to-night,’ announced Mrs. Fairfield.

* * * * *

The lure of Folk Dancing led them across two fields to a turreted eccentric stone building known as the Summer School, which was at once a gigantic advertisement and a place of mental and physical recreation for Fairfield’s factory hands. He had spent thousands of pounds on this long-cherished scheme, and only a well-timed fainting-fit of his wife’s had prevented his spending thousands more.

Fairfield’s Summer School was as hygienic as his corsets. It was a curious horseshoe-shaped building enclosing a large well-kept lawn in the middle of which, on festive occasions, a maypole was erected; a tower and belfry loomed at the back. To these cloisters the factory hands were wont to repair for free instruction in the theory and practice of arts and modern languages, for lectures on history, sociology, science, for concerts and dances on the green. It claimed to be, and was, a local centre of liberal popular culture. Anything and everything could be discussed there save one thing: it was a point of honour with the founder that Fairfield’s Hygienic Corsets should never be mentioned.

Dusk had already fallen when the Fairfield party reached the green, and the dancing had already begun. Someone began lighting the lamps.

‘This is jolly!’ said Bunny with infectious good spirits. ‘Won’t you dance with me, Hypatia?’

‘I’ve never been taken for Hypatia before,’ Sheila answered.

‘Oh, sorry! It’s Miss Dyrle. Do dance with me, Miss Dyrle. It’s a waltz this time, without trimmings.’

They whirled away among the dancers.

‘I don’t know these old dances, do you?’

‘No. But what does it matter? They stick in a few ordinary things now and again specially for Philistines like us.’

Her heart danced with the music.

‘You brought your violin, didn’t you, Mr. Bunnard? When are you going to play for us?’

But Bunny did not answer. Sheila was rather chilled to observe his abrupt change of mood. He had caught sight of Hypatia dancing with her brother.

They finished the set in silence, and Sheila was immediately claimed by Edward. She felt bitterly alone in the world. She and Hypatia had come to a definite parting of the ways; and she had no other friend.

After a few moments she complained to Edward of giddiness. He led her to a seat.

‘Feel better now?’

‘Quite, thanks. But I’d rather not begin again just yet.’

He studied the ground.

‘It’s a year since you were here.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve often thought of that visit.’

‘Have you?’ said Sheila. ‘I live with my aunt, you know, and she doesn’t approve of my visits to a home of free-thinkers.’

‘But you are not of her persuasion?’

‘Obviously not. Hypatia was my best friend.’

‘Was?’

He seemed to be offering a far from unwelcome sympathy.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I wouldn’t have you tell her for the world. But we’ve drifted away from each other.’

‘Yes? I fancied so.’

‘I suppose it’s this religion of hers,’ said Sheila. ‘Of course I don’t care a rap what she believes, but she’s grown so ... so remote.’

‘I agree with you entirely. I’m glad she hasn’t converted _you_ anyhow. My friend Bunny is doomed, I fear. Hypatia begs the whole question. If matter is only an appearance it is none the less real to our minds: it exists mentally. The whole philosophy is nothing but a silly quibble about terms.’

‘How is your book getting on?’ asked Sheila.

‘Slowly, but it _is_ getting on. Writing a hundred thousand words is a great labour. The mere pen-pushing alone is a bore.’

‘It must be. Couldn’t you dictate it?’

‘That would be difficult for me and very dull for the unfortunate secretary. I’m afraid I should be too self-conscious to work well.’

‘At first, perhaps,’ said Sheila. ‘But that would wear off. And it would be a privilege for the secretary, I should think.’

‘A privilege!’ He laughed. ‘Why, the book is scandalous and atheistical.’

‘That’s why to help would be a privilege,’ she answered with a nervous smile. ‘Would it really help you to be able to dictate to someone?’

‘That would depend, I expect.’

She summoned her courage.

‘Well, to me, for instance?’

‘_You!_’

‘Yes, me,’ she said humbly. ‘I _can_ spell, you know.’

‘You would do that for me?’ he exclaimed in amazement.

‘I’d willingly do it--for the cause,’ she added rather mischievously.

‘How astoundingly decent of you!’

‘It’s not very polite to be so surprised to find me decent,’ she said, laughing at him.

He looked with undisguised admiration into her Irish eyes. ‘By Jove, what things we could do together!’

A flame of comradeship leaped to life in Sheila. The word ‘together’ made an echoing music in her mind.

Mr. Fairfield stood before them.

‘Miss Dyrle, give me the honour. A real old-fashioned dance this time instead of these new-fangled folk things. Sir Roger de Coverley. And after that Bunny’s going to give us a tune on the fiddle.’