SHE never could understand machinery. So when the chauffeur tried to explain what was so seriously the matter with the automobile that it would take a whole two hours to repair, she cut him short and said, ‘Never mind, Harrowby. Accidents will happen, and anyway it’s much nicer than travelling by train.’ She noticed a look of real perturbation round his nice eyes, and was puzzled till a flash of comprehension came to her, and she hastily explained, ‘Oh, it’s all right about my being late. I’m not expecting—anyone.’ But she did wish Essington would not get so angry when she was late that the servants noticed. It wasn’t her dignity she was thinking of; she was too tired to think of that. But it dug away her defences. For if nobody else knew how he behaved, then when she woke in the middle of the night and felt like a trapped rat she could pretend that things weren’t so bad, she could say to herself, ‘I expect I imagine most of it. For he’s awfully fond of me, really. He can’t get on without me. Look how he always wants me to go away with him for his holidays. Yes, I’m silly, that’s what I am.’ But if other people knew about it she couldn’t fool herself, and had to go on feeling like a trapped rat.
She shivered, and said, ‘Well, I suppose I can’t go on sitting here if you’re going to do all that to her. I’ll go for a walk,’ and stepped out of the automobile. The garage yard was full of the clear light of May, and it was a pleasanter place than most of its kind, for it had evidently been an old livery-stable and its walks were of mellow red brick, patterned with streaks of moss and golden patches like freckles where time and sunshine had toasted away the surface. In the end wall was an archway barred by an iron gate, through which one could see a green country garden that was as much orchard as garden, with fruit trees standing in grass too long and strong for a lawn, and rows of rhubarb. It made her think of the orchards round Chiswick when she was a little girl. They had been so pretty; and she had had time to look at them, for then her days had been too empty as now they were too full. She was glad that this breakdown which gave her an hour to herself had happened in this little market town, where there were orchards.
‘Harrowby,’ she asked, ‘didn’t we pass a pretty place with water, just before we came into the town?’
‘Yes, Miss, a kind of big pond it was, with lily pools. A gentleman’s estate left to the district for a park, I should say it was. There were seats. About three quarters of a mile back, it was.’
‘Oh, dear! That’s too far. I’d have to walk a mile and a half in all. I suppose I won’t have time. And it was so pretty. It seems as if one never could do anything one wanted, doesn’t it?’ She felt like crying. Nowadays she was all to pieces.
‘But you said, Miss, that you hadn’t got to hurry. And I could run you back to town in an hour and a half from here. This is Packbury, you know. I should go if I were you, Miss. It’ll do you good.’
It was all right. There was really no reason at all why she should not go. It was simply that she was so unused to liberty, so seldom free from the leash that jerked her back to heel whenever she was doing anything she enjoyed, that she felt at a loss when she was on her own. She pulled herself together and said gaily, ‘All right. I’ll come back here. Don’t try to fetch me, for I’ll take a footpath if I can.’ She hadn’t been on a footpath for years. He tuned up his engine and took the car, calling over his shoulder, ‘Never known you have an hour to yourself before, Miss!’ She smiled and waved her hand, and turned towards the street. She meant to buy some fruit and chocolate, and eat it sitting by the pond.
But a young man in overalls, the man Harrowby had been talking to about the car, stopped her. ‘I’m proud to have your car in my garage, Miss Fassendyll.’
She did so want to buy that fruit and get away by herself to the pretty place. But she had to pause and look pleased, since he meant to be kind. ‘Oh, that’s very nice of you. Fancy your knowing me!’
‘Well, who wouldn’t? My wife—’ he gave a broad, shy smile, ‘she’ll be real sorry she isn’t down to see you, she’s laid up just now. Some people say she could pass herself off as you any day. Quite a joke it is among our friends.’
‘Isn’t that interesting! I do wish I’d seen her. But I expect she’s far nicer than me really. Tell her I’m ever so sorry I didn’t see her, won’t you?’
‘I will, Miss. I can’t tell you how disappointed she’ll be, for you’re her favourite actress. When we were passing through London last year on our honeymoon we went and saw you. She wouldn’t hear of going and seeing anybody else. “I want to see Miss Sybil Fassendyll,” she said, and that was that. Rosalind you were.’
‘Oh, was I!’ She sighed. ‘The papers said I was awful.’
‘We thought it was lovely. Never enjoyed an evening at the theatre more, particularly considering it was Shakespeare. I suppose there’s a lot of jealousy and that to account for what they write in the papers.’
‘No, I don’t think it’s that. They’re kind, most people. I didn’t know anybody when I started, and look how they’ve let me get on. But sometimes it’s hard to understand what they want you to do …’ Her eyes wandered vacantly round the yard. She became absorbed in contemplation of this mystery which nowadays was constantly vexing her, as to what the art of living could possibly be. One went on to the stage properly dressed and made up as the character and said the words as they would be said in real life. How could there be anything more to it? Yet it seemed, from the way that people went on, as if there was. She wished this man would not go on forever standing between her and oranges, and the pretty place with water, and rest. Apart from making her think of uncomfortable things he was horrid with his flat, smug, deliberate voice, his characterless, genteel phrases, and his peculiarly wide smile, which showed a gold-crowned tooth in his lower jaw. But there he stood in her path, quite undislodgeable, slowly turning a spanner in his hand, and smiling fixedly and over-broadly. She looked away again, and a spike of white lilac, thrusting above the tortoiseshell reds and golds of the wall, caught her wandering eye. Absently she said, ‘You’ve got a nice place here. It looks old, too.’
‘As old as you can think, Miss,’ he said, still turning the spanner, still smiling. ‘This was the stable yard of the White-Faced Stag Inn before it was burned down, and nobody knows how old that was. Queen Elizabeth slept there, anyway.’ It seemed that he must be about to stop, for the pause was long, but he did not. ‘We had an awful job to get the place right. Had to take up all the old cobblestones, for one thing.’
‘Isn’t that a shame! I always think they look so pretty.’
His smile grew broader. ‘That’s just what my wife says. But you wouldn’t like to drive into a garage all bumpitty-bumpitty, would you?’ He laughed tenderly, as if something in that feeling about the cobblestones struck him as very comic and lovable; labouring the point ridiculously. Then he began to tell her interminably how much it had cost to set the place in order, how he had spent every penny of his gratuity on it, to which she said wearily, remembering the cloud-marbled surface of that pond, ‘Well, I hope you’re doing well now.’
In a moment during which she nearly groaned aloud, he did not reply. Then he muttered, ‘Well, we were able to get married on it a year ago,’ and looked at her with shining eyes and a smile that was not fixed at all but trembled on the tide of a deep feeling. He opened his mouth, and closed it. He had ceased to turn the spanner in his hand, and was holding it away from him stiffly, exhibitingly, like a priest holding a reliquary; it might have been the symbol of something sacred that he possessed and wanted to tell her about and could not because he was overcome by reverence. It came to her suddenly, for she was clever about people though she could get the hang of nothing else, that he had been telling her all these dreary things about the cost of removing cobblestones and the price of petrol-pumps because they were part of a story that he knew to be wonderful; and from a kind of glow of love about him, that was as real and perceptible as might have been the flush of rage or the pallor of despair, she knew that he was right and that the story was really wonderful. This man and this woman were in love, and it was lasting though they had got each other; they were living a marvellous life. This aroused in her feelings not only of happy sympathy but of partisanship, for she had been accustomed though not resigned to a world where everything—politics, business, the arts and sciences—were esteemed above life. ‘Why do they make such a fuss about Shakespeare because of “Romeo and Juliet”? It’s more wonderful to be “Romeo and Juliet”, like these people, than just to write it down,’ she thought contentiously while she smiled into the man’s blindish, radiant gaze, and cried, ‘Isn’t that lovely! Isn’t that lovely!’ She felt a little guilty, because she used what they had taught her about modulating her voice to help herself to sound really glad. It seemed to her—and the thought was painful, as if dwelling upon it would force her to the realisation of some immense loss—that had they both been inarticulate they might have found it easier to understand each other. For it was not as if she were wholly articulate. That would have been all right. But though they had taught her to say a lot of things, these were chiefly passwords that made possible entrance into restricted circles, like saying ‘gehl’ instead of ‘gurl’, so that rather than widen her power of communicating with her fellow-beings they had narrowed it. ‘I’ve been muckered about,’ she thought resentfully. It was a sign of the general incalculable queerness of things that her clear, rounded sentences and definite gestures should proceed from a condition that was not at all satisfying, while the completion of this man who was happy with his wife expressed itself in these broken, inadequate, stockish mutterings. ‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘I had to have enough and a bit more, for she came from a good home, a very good home. Much better people than me she comes from …’
‘Yes, yes, I know what you mean,’ she nodded sagely.
He began again to turn the spanner in his hand, looking down at it. ‘It’s a queer thing you should have come like this. It’s always been something remarkable like, you being so like my wife. We’ve often talked about it.’ He spoke with great gravity, and she understood why. She could not have found it out for herself, it was a little too difficult for her. But it had been explained to her by Essington, in one of those rare moments when he stood back and looked at her and thought about her, instead of just crying out for her with closed eyes, utterly dependent and quite uninterested in how she might be, like a very young baby with its mother. One night after dinner he had been very kind and happy, she could not at first think why, till she remembered that it was from no more substantial cause than a walk along the Row, tender and melancholy and achingly contenting, with the pale coin of dead leaves spinning down the aisles of dark wet earth, under trees that were but bare tracery, as if the year, crazed with her losses, were playing pitch and toss with her last wealth in a ruined church, and the blue mist above the Serpentine making it look like the place where the dead of London might go the night they die and linger, wistful but too drowsy to be afraid; while the warm lights came out in the houses overlooking the park and one remembered that one was not dead, and that at home there would be toast. They had hurried home, skipping when there was nobody about because the cold air was working on them like wine, and had muffins for tea, and she had played Farnaby and Purcell to him on the pianola all evening, and there had been a perfect little dinner with a pheasant that was just right. It showed how really good he was, and how sweet, that it was only simple things like that which made him happy. His successes did not; it was part of his tryingness that he would come back from all his big political meetings in an itching fury of self-loathing, as if he had looked down into the abyss of vanity and hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty that engulfs those who believe the people when it praises them. But that night he had been very happy. He had made her sit on the little stool at his feet in front of the wood fire, and had actually asked her about her work, which as a rule he resentfully ignored in the same spirit that an old-fashioned housewife ignores the follower who prevents her servant from giving all her time and energy to her domestic duties. She went to her desk and brought out some photographs that she had been wanting to show him for some days, but had not dared to because he had been going through one of his bad times. Two girls, one a mill-girl in Oldham, the other the manageress of a sweet-shop in Huddersfield, had spent what must have been a lot of money to them on being photographed in the poses of her own best-known portraits, and they had sent her their own photographs and the ones they had copied with long letters exultantly pointing out the closeness of the resemblance, and asked her to sign her own, so that they could put them together in the same frame for their sweethearts. ‘Isn’t it funny,’ she had wondered, ‘that anybody should be proud of being like somebody else? Wouldn’t you think everyone would want to be just like themselves? It’s so modest of the poor things.’
Essington had taken the photographs, though he did not look at them for more than a second. Nowadays it seemed as if hardly anything concerning personality could hold his attention; he cared only for thick books, for interminable talks about ideas that would go on being true if the human body had no flesh on its bones, if trees were not green in summer, if there were no such thing in the world as sound. It made him terribly difficult to amuse in the times when his brain was tired and he had to rest from work. But he looked down at her, as she sat on the stool at his feet, for quite a long time. When he spoke his china blue eyes were wet. ‘It’s because you’re one of the two or three people in every century, Sunflower, that are more than what they are. You’re supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world—’ ‘Isn’t it funny!’ she had interjected, ‘They never notice that my nose isn’t straight.’ At that he gravely felt her nose all the way from the bridge to the tip, and said he thought that it was straight enough, and told her that, whether she truly was or not, the people liked to think of her as the most beautiful woman in the world; and that they liked too how she had risen to her acclamation out of nothing, for everybody knew that only a month before her famous appearance in ‘Farandole’ she had been serving in a stationer’s shop in Chiswick High Street. Indeed, she contained within herself two of the great legendary figures that man has invented everywhere and in all times: Venus and Cinderella. And they were not—he bade her remember—invented idly. They fed desires that must be fed if man is not to lose heart and die. For Venus promises him that there shall be absolute beauty in this world, that the universe shall bring forth perfection which shall make its imperfection a little thing, lightly to be borne; and Cinderella promises him that this harsh order of things which is life may be only temporary and subject to reversal at any time, so that the mighty may be put down from their seats and those of low degree exalted. These things are not understood by the people, but they are felt by them. The mill-girl in Oldham, the sweet-shop girl in Huddersfield, believing themselves to be like Sybil Fassendyll, obscurely know themselves to be by that resemblance related to some system which proved Oldham and Huddersfield a dream, and the waking a fair one. And their sweethearts, obscurely too but more intensely, because only the most passionate egoist can love himself as one loves others, rejoiced in that conviction. ‘Think of it, Sunflower! There’s a cotton operative in Oldham, a railway clerk in Huddersfield, who feels like a pious Catholic in the Middle Ages who fell in love with a woman who was like some miracle-working Madonna, just because his girl is like you …’
And Essington had been right. This little man, with his shy, flickering, devout smile and the solemn, ritualistic movement of his hands as they turned and turned that spanner, was plainly thinking of the resemblance between his wife and her as proof of some imminent sacredness. It was astonishing that Essington, the brilliant and important Essington, whom only the jealous denied to have the greatest mind in the world, who with an almost vicious fastidiousness desired to know as little as possible of all those minds that were not nearly equal to his, should have known the heart of a stupid, flat-spoken little man who kept a garage in Packbury! It showed the power of love. He understood this lover because he himself loved her. Ecstasy shook her. She wished that they could all four be standing here in this yard within the red-gold walls, a group of kindly, friendly lovers, she, Essington, this little man who had so much in his heart, and his wife whom she conceived as a younger, lovelier sister of her own, with a nose that was quite straight …
There interrupted the happy grazing of her mind one of those sudden, splintering, ripping noises that are apt to break out whenever there are men in overalls. She clapped her hands over her ears and spun round protestingly, because her nerves were so broken that any loud noise made the tears stand in her eyes, and she had so greatly liked the quietness in which she had been standing with the little man. A mechanic was breaking open a large packing-case just inside the garage, with an immense appearance of gusto, and flinging himself upon the crust-coloured boards, tearing off strips of sallow sacking, releasing innumerable shavings to the mercy of the draughts. She marvelled at the way that men did not mind noise, till it struck her that she herself had not minded noise before she was with Essington, and that as a rule single girls could bear what troubles their ears brought them with calmness. ‘They wear one down,’ she muttered, and drooped; for if they wore one down, well, one had to be worn down. But she was diverted from that sad strain of thought by the nature of the object which was being disclosed by the mechanic’s onslaught. It was a perambulator, a new and really prodigious perambulator. Its navy blue body was varnished till it was glossy as water sliding to a weir; its spokes gleamed with the sober but even brightness of the very best japanning, and there were foppishly white rubber tyres; the experienced eye could note that the leather hood was the kind that really washes and does not crack. ‘C-springs, stops, a safety-chain and all!’ she breathed, ‘A really nice one!’ She knew a great deal about prams. It had been part of her duty at the stationer’s shop in Chiswick High Street to take out baby Doris in her pram every afternoon. That one had not had ball-bearings. This one had. Somebody wouldn’t have to break her back pushing the thing when there was bad weather. With that nasty cheap thing the Jenningses had, into which it was a shame to put a pretty little dear like baby Doris, she had often halted in front of baby-carriage shops and gazed enviously at the really nice ones in the windows, and indeed had indulged in dreams of buying the most expensive one on her own account some day, for she had then never doubted but that her future would hold a pram. Oddly enough, as it had turned out, that future was to hold nearly every other kind of manufactured article—telephones, Rolls-Royces, fitted dressing-cases, Paris-to-London aeroplanes, there didn’t seem any limit to what she might buy or use—but never a pram. Yet say what you like, there was something nice about a good pram, about this one, for instance, as the man wheeled it off the floor of its case and on to the concrete, where it stood quivering as Essington’s greyhounds sometimes did, evidently so resilient that it would run nicely over the bumps, so stable that it would not overturn too easily. ‘I don’t say it mightn’t be better finished,’ she pronounced, ‘I don’t suppose it’s one of Hitchings’, but I do say it’s well-built and handy …’
In the midst of these technical musings a wonder, an exciting wonder, struck her. Whose pram was it anyway? Was that why the little man’s wife could not come down and see her? She imagined the girl who was like her sitting waiting upstairs at one of those windows that overlooked the garage, behind those nice clean Nottingham lace curtains. That must be lovely. One would not have to keep on worrying about trying to make oneself cleverer, because one was doing what was recognised as a whole-time job. Everybody in the house, particularly one’s man, would be thinking of one with kindly concern; there would not be that awful feeling of having to keep up to scratch, of having to win approbation that would be coldly withheld if one’s performance was not good enough. One would be able to sit there resting, waiting, obtaining that peaceful entertainment which animals must know out of the accidents of substances near at hand: pressing the paint blisters on the sun-scorched edges of the shutter, putting one’s eye close to the flaw in the pane and watching how it made the red-gold wall and the surmounting spike of lilac waver as if they were deep under an uncoloured, viscous sea. But the poor young thing had still that awful agony to go through. She shuddered, for like people of almost any age, she hated to think of anyone younger than herself in pain; it perpetually seems to us, whether we are twenty or thirty or forty or fifty, that it is only just in the last two or three months that we have learned how harsh this business of life is and armoured ourselves against it, and we cannot bear to think of mere tender youngsters (as we were before the few months) having to face this dreadful knowledge and assume that armour, which is not light. Oh, poor young thing, poor young thing …
Perhaps, however, the baby had come already. But the little man would have told her if it had. No, he need not. He might have kept it to the very last, then it would be mentioned casually, lest the Fates should hear and guess how well things were going with him and his wife and do something to spoil it all. She often used to feel like that when she first lived with Essington. But she did wish the little man would say it out now, because if that pram really did belong to him and not to a neighbour it made it all the lovelier that he was so much in love with his wife, since he must have seen her looking ugly and had to look after her. She must know that before she went back to town. It was something to hang on to, knowing that even if you were not happy other people were. She must say something that would lead up to it, though of course he would not tell her if it had not happened. It was only rich smart people who talked about babies before they were born; she had turned scarlet when she first heard them at it. Pondering what she could say that would help him to tell her if he wanted to and not press him to if he didn’t, she looked into the distance; and met the eyes of four people who were standing beside a small yellow car.
Nice manners they had, staring at a person like that. They might think that though a person was on the stage that wasn’t to say that they liked being treated off the stage as if they were a waxwork. She was always slow of thought, and never slower than when she was forced to suspect that the world was not kind, but the look of them made her apprehensive, for though they were all smiling as they looked at her there was a kind of grease on the surface of their gaze, a kind of scum of squalid feeling …
And at her elbow the mechanic said, ‘Beg pardon, Mr Pantridge, but that party with the yellow Morris-Cowley was asking if Lord Essington lived in the neighbourhood. I’ve never heard of him being round here, have you?’
‘No, not a bit of it,’ said the little man. ‘His place is down Cookham way. Some of us went over from Reading Hospital first time I was wounded. His wife gave us tea. A very nice lady she was. Tell ’em they’re dreaming. What do they want to know for? Got a cousin who does his lordship’s lamps?’ He was annoyed at being interrupted, and immediately went on telling her about his wife’s eldest brother, who had done so well in the war that he got a commission.
Her jaw dropped. She stared at the four, wondering how they could do such a thing. When startling things happened to her she always became a child again at the impact and felt as if she had no previous experience of the sort. For a moment these people seemed to her as prodigious as gnomes and giants; and then noting the cheap, smart make of the women’s clothes, the excessive something about the men’s skirted overcoats, the common look they had of trying to look not better but worse than they really were, a kind of aspirant unpurity, she wearily placed them as members of a type she had encountered hundreds of times before. ‘What we want to know’ cads, they were. One saw them sometimes at the Embassy Club; they did not belong to it, but men who had to be nice to them because of business took them for a treat and they sat about staring at the people, bobbing forward suddenly to ask who they were, and getting pop-eyed if they had asked about anybody who was divorced or kept. A blush began to sweep over her face, her neck, her breasts, which had begun to smart since she realised that they were thinking of her as a sexual being. These men she thought would have liked to buy all the women in the world, but the money hadn’t run to it. These women would have liked to be bought by all the men in the world, but they hadn’t found their way in to the market. So they dreamed beastly dreams of the world as they would have liked it to be, men and women all sticking together like jujubes in a box, and to make them more solidly satisfying they pretended that they were real things that happened to real people. It was they who said that Connie Maddox had had a black baby; who said that Lettie Aylmer, who was straight, had had an affair with the Duke of Victoria, so that when she got engaged to young Lennie Isaacs his people, who minded, being Jews, were horrid to her for quite a long time. And God knew what they had said about her; what they were saying about her at this very minute. In pain, for she was silly and never got used to this sort of thing, she stared across at them to see what they were saying. It would be something new and lying, for the true thing, about Essington, was too old to amuse. They were sniggering together, with pleased moist smiles under noses wrinkled with disgust, like horrid children talking of a nasty secret. There wasn’t any knowing what they might be saying, she said to herself again and again, lest when she stopped she should maybe know what they were saying.
When the little man had paused in his story of how well his wife’s eldest brother had done in the war, she put out her hand and said, ‘I must go. I promised to call back somewhere we passed on the road …’
He was a very nice little man. Though he would plainly have liked the bright presence of the patron saint of his family imagination to be for ever in his yard, he let her go at once. ‘Well, it’s been very kind of you to let me talk to you like this. Eh, my wife will be vexed she couldn’t see you. I wonder … I wonder …’
Ah, he was not going to let her go, after all. But there was evidently something he quite dreadfully wanted.
‘What is it? You were going to say—’
‘I wonder if you’d just wait one second while I get my wife’s photograph. It was taken just after we were married. We thought of sending it to you at the time, it was so like, but we didn’t have the nerve. She would be so pleased if you’d seen it …’
The poor darling. If the girl was waiting upstairs this might help to pass the time for her. She smiled unsteadily. The tears in her eyes were incommoding her. Those awful people would not go away. ‘Of course. I’d love to see it.’
It would be all right if he asked her to come into his house. But he did not. He thought of doing so, she could see, for his eyes went to the green side-door and then back to her, but was checked by some thought. Doubtless there was a tyrannous nurse installed there already who was capturing the house for her fuss and litter of preparation and resented visitors. She gave him a little encouraging smile, as if she quite liked waiting in the yard; and he left her.
Well, the yard was still full of pleasantness. One ought to think of that. There was still the May sunshine, and the red, gold-freckled walls; there was the spike of white lilac, now bobbing springily under some bird-gymnastics executed lower down on its bough: there was the iron gate, and the homely orchard garden. But in that direction she did not dare to look, because they were standing there. What was the use of trying to think of pleasant things when they were standing there! People couldn’t have been taught right when they were young if they could do a thing like that. They were just blatantly gaping, with one man fiddling with a suitcase on the carrier as an excuse for delay that would not have taken in a cat. It was Essington’s theory which he had constantly and irritably impressed on her that she ought not to mind this sort of thing, that indeed it was impossible that she could sincerely mind it; but that did not at the moment seem to be true. She tried to imagine what would be thought about it by those people who in her mind were most remote from him, most unlike him in that vein of unfriendliness to her and all her instincts which ran like a dark vein through his love for her; by Rettie Adamson, a girl she was at school with whom she used to walk with on the Monkey’s Parade in Chiswick High Street, and Olga Hammond, who used to dress next to her when she was in ‘Farandole’. She had really loved both of them, but of course she hadn’t been able to keep up with them. Either of them, put in her place, would have gained some satisfaction by reflecting on her superiority in looks over the two women who were tormenting her. She tried to brave it out that way. They certainly were a couple of miseries and no mistake, with their umbrella legs and their palais-de-danse faces. Now she was all right: she was five foot eight and every bit of her measured what it ought to; her hair was real gold, lay it against a sovereign and it didn’t look so bad; lots of people thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world; if she was turned into a statue they could put her into a museum without getting an artist to alter her. But coldly she realised this would not do. She was as far away from Rettie and Olga as Essington was, though not in the same direction: and in that position, which she felt to be very lonely, she knew that her immense physical conspicuousness made her situation far worse. She could not quite see how; but there gleamed deep in her mind a picture of herself as a vast naked torso, but not of stone, of living, flushing flesh, fallen helpless on its side in some public place of ruins like the Forum in Rome, with ant-droves of tourists passing incessantly round her quickly, inquisitively, too close. Sometimes it was hot, and dry winds swung against her weakly like a tired arm, flung dust on her, and dropped again; and tourists crowding along in the shadow of her limbs put up their sweaty hands to experience her texture and stroked the grit into her flesh. Sometimes it was wet, and her groins were runnelled with thick shining ropes of water; and the tourists, going quicker than ever, rushed along her flanks and pricked them with the spokes of their umbrellas.
The queer things one thinks of! And there sounded in her ears the tones that somehow had something to do with this picture, of Mr Thursby Jingal, who writes the Spy-Glass in the Daily Show. It was last week that he had said to her, ‘There are people who are News. Not because of anything they do, not because of anything they are. But just because they’re News.’ She had objected. ‘But so is every leading actress, isn’t she?’ And he had answered, ‘No. Nina Purefoy is a leading actress of far higher standard than yourself. But she isn’t News. You know as well as I do that Lillah Plumptre is almost as beautiful as you are. But she isn’t News. And—er—social things have nothing to do with it. Betty Packhard has had—er—a very interesting life. But she isn’t News. It’s something all of itself. And you’ve got it. You had it when you were a little girl doing your little five minutes in “Farandole” and drawing your five pounds. Even in those days if you went into the Carlton with a young fellow and had a bite and Nina was sitting there after the most colossal first night in history and Lillah was looking as glorious as Helen of Troy, and Betty was there with her diamonds and her Duke, it would be your pink hat and green gloves that the Spy-Glass would notice. I tell you, you’re News …’ His tones had been creamily congratulatory. But being News was like living under a glass bell, a transparent prison, in whose walls the normal light of day was changed to heat that made every incident of one’s life grow to an unnatural size, an unnatural sappiness …
The bird that had been bobbing on the lilac-bough whirred and shot itself up into the sunshine. It must be fun to be able to fire oneself off like a gun and be the gun, to press the trigger and be the bullet; and such fun to bounce and bounce in the thin bright upper air among the pretty dustless treetops. Well, one could swim and dive. Really, this was a good world. It would be all right if one was brave. It was cowardly of her to mind that the people were talking about her and Essington, because it was true. If she had not been willing to stand by what she did she might not have done it. But, oh, why couldn’t Essington have married her, and made it not true any more? Now he was out of politics he could have afforded to let Lady Essington divorce him. But it was wrong of her to think of that, for there was a principle involved; though she was not quite sure what it could be. It could not be disbelief in the institution of marriage, for he always did his formal entertaining at Lady Essington’s house and in lots of ways he seemed to feel that a wife ought to be better treated than someone you live with. There was that time when he had made her cancel her rooms at the hotel she always went to at Cannes because Lady Essington had suddenly made up her mind to go there. She was quite sure, however, that there was some sort of principle involved. It might just be that one had a right to do what one likes. But it could hardly be that, for being stared at by beasts was exactly what she did not like doing. Nevertheless, though the principle continued to elude her, she never doubted but that it existed. Her failure to perceive it she ascribed without question to her own incapacity; for she well knew that always when she tried to make a generalisation out of the abundant and confused facts of life she found herself in the position of the people in a comic advertisement of meat extract that she had once seen: one earnest worker was holding up a bull while another tried to press it with a shoe horn into a small bottle which dangled on one of its hooves like a glass boxing-glove. She never hoped to confine the great bull life in her minute and brittle mind. But Essington was different. His mind was as large as life. He would know this principle. Mildly she marvelled at his greatness, and at his queer kind vagary in loving her, who was so stupid; and reflecting that anyway all this was irrelevant, since the point was that what these people were saying was true, and she must therefore not mind them saying it, she lifted her head and faced them.
That defence went at once. She had to look away and droop her head. For from the grease that floated on these people’s gaze she perceived that what they were saying was not true. It was probably a lie about her and some man that she had never seen; if by chance it stuck to the facts close enough to give her Essington as a lover it lied in making them live a beastly sort of life together. Drinking, and rowdy parties, and all the kind of things that come into some people’s minds when they think of legs, though goodness knows why, for legs are just legs. That was downright funny. She didn’t drink at all; and Essington drank nothing at lunch and only weak whisky-and-soda with his dinner. They didn’t give parties. Essington hardly liked anybody. And she didn’t go out to parties much now; she had so often had to break engagements because he turned up unexpectedly that now she hardly liked to accept invitations. Sometimes, indeed nearly always when she was not rehearsing, he would tell her that he would come to her during the day, but that he could not say at what hour; and then she could go out only for a little while at a time, nervous dashes into the park with one eye on a watch, and come back to sit about alone, for he hated to find people out when he came. There was nothing at all to do then. One could not do any housework, with all the servants about; and being beautiful one must not sew, for that brings on the little fine lines round the eyes which are the beginning of the end. There was the pianola, of course, but music did not interest her very much; and there were books, but she was stupid. Sometimes, sitting in the quiet rooms, she used to think that though she had a nice house and pretty things and all the flowers she wanted, she did not have as amusing a time as her mother had had at 69 Tyndrum Road, Chiswick. She had had a horrid little house and not very much money, but there was always a lot doing, what with cooking and running up clothes on the sewing machine and talking to the milkman and the neighbours and going round to Aunt Bessie and Aunt Polly and doing the shopping. Shopping on Saturday night was particularly exciting, with the naphtha flares burning outside the shops in the High Street, and all one’s friends bumping by with their stuffed string bags, all very jolly and amiable with the joy of buying things. That was a hard life: but this was a dull one. What was she saying? She had forgotten that it was all right when Essington did at last come, so great, so cleverly, so childishly dependent on her, even after ten years. He would drop his face into the curve of her neck and shoulder and rub his face against her warm flesh like a baby or a puppy … ‘Let’s go to bed quite early. I am so tired. I couldn’t sleep at that damned house. Sunflower, let me lie up close to you …’
Of course there was that for them to think nastily about. Essington did do that to her. But why in the name of goodness did people get so worked up about that? When one came to think of it, which one hardly ever did, there was so little in it, either way. It was no use pretending it was such a marvellous thing, because it wasn’t, at least not for women. Those women over there could have all she’d ever had of it, as far as she cared. But they ought to know better, being women. It wasn’t so very bad either. It was odd rather than really horrid, like giving a man a queer kind of medicine. And, anyway, however you looked at it surely she had been good. There had never been anybody but Essington, though there might have been. There might have been. It seemed to her, as she remembered the chief among those there might have been, that a cold wind had breathed into the yard through the iron gate. Those fools were giggling about her because they thought she was bad; but it was rather her fault that she was too good. Wouldn’t it have been better for her to have been bad and given Marty Lomax what he wanted? Then, though he would have died just the same, he would not have died crying out against her cruelty. She knew people said that you ought not to let a man do that to you unless you were married to him, and that anyway if you had to break that rule you must never, never let two men do it; yet when she remembered his thin voice saying over and over again, ‘I want Sunflower. I love Sunflower,’ she felt a chill of guilt, as if she were a nurse who out of malice had failed to dress a patient’s wound and stop a deathly bleeding, an unnatural mother who had withheld food from her weak child. Surely nothing really mattered except being kind. She wondered achingly how she could have refused anything to anybody who was so lovely to look at as Marty. There never can have been anybody much lovelier. He must have been a most beautiful baby, for when you looked closely at his hair you saw that it looked drab only because it was clipped so short, and it was really bright gold. And he had such nice grey eyes, which were so purely smiling light that they came out white in all his photographs. And he was so tall, yet as pretty in his movements as a polo-pony. Besides, just as the sight of a clergyman always reminds one of a church and religion, so the sight of Marty always reminded one of something, though one could not say exactly of what, except that it was warm and pleasant and yet so unsettling that one wanted to run out into the open air and not come back.
She found herself thinking of Francis Pitt. That always happened when she thought of Marty, now that he was dead, and it was odd. She couldn’t guess why the image of a man she had known very well should invariably recall and be immediately wiped out by the image of a man who was not at all like him and whom she had only seen once, and that quite a long time ago. It must be six or seven years now, for it was during the war. She had gone to the office of a charity to see the secretary about a matinée, and since the lift was out of order she had had to walk upstairs. As she stopped on a landing and looked at the names on the wall directory to see if it was here the office was, a little man with hair the colour of a fox and a very big mouth ran very quickly downstairs from the floor above. He paused and looked at her out of queer grey eyes which were the colour of bad weather, with extreme appreciation and utter lack of interest. It was plain that he cared for women, for he looked at her as a sailor looks at a ship, but everything in him was absorbed in anticipation of something he was going to do. With her mouth a little open, because what he did seemed to be charged with significance, like the movements of a really great actor, she noted the dead halt at which his feeling for beauty made him come to a stop in front of her, and the springy vehemence with which his eagerness for what he was going to do made him pull himself together, strike his gloved hand with the other glove as if that were a spurring signal, and race on down the stairs. She leaned against the wall, listening to his quick footfalls, that were as explicit as laughter. When the sound changed and she knew he had come to the hall she went to the banisters and leaned over, but there was nothing to be seen. In the silence she stood and turned over the thought of him in her mind. No doubt what she had noticed about the dramatic effect of the two contrasting movements—the sudden halt, the sudden racing spurt—would come in useful some day in some part that she had to play. She reminded herself that she must think more of her work. Many people found complete happiness in their work. Then she went on to the office, which was on the next floor, and they told her that she had just missed meeting the chairman of the committee, Francis Pitt, the Australian millionaire. She was glad at that, for if they had met he might have felt bound to stop and talk to her out of politeness, and that would have distracted him from full enjoyment of his happiness. He had been so happy! The recollection of it always gave her a curious fluttering, laughing feeling. Sometimes it came to her when she was sitting learning a part, and she had to get up and walk about the room, rubbing her hands which then felt as if they were charged with electricity. It had come to her hardly at all while she was seeing Marty, but it had come to her often since his death and she was glad. That the man who had been so happy still existed somewhere was proof that the tomb had not taken all youth to itself, that other things survived besides those which did not challenge death by being over-much alive; which was what one thought sometimes, when one was tired.
She had remembered a man stopping and looking at her on a landing and then running past her down the stairs. That was all. Why should she feel as if some veiled figure had raised a rod and struck what it was her religion to pretend a rock, and drawn a hollow sound? Suddenly she found herself admitting that everything was wrong with this situation in particular, with her situation in general, and that there was no way of thinking it into being right. If Essington really loved her he would not put her into a position which made horrid people giggle at her and make up ugly stories; and she was always suffering things from him which it was not bearable that she should suffer from a man who did not really love her. But all that was nothing beside the central falsity of her life, which she could not put into words, which she could not grasp with her mind, because she was so stupid, but which appalled her. She saw a vast desert. The words bankruptcy, starvation, crashed through her mind. The trapped rat feeling that came to her often in the night came on now in spite of the sunshine, which indeed it dimmed; and she wanted to run and run and run. But she could not do that, any more than she could ever do anything she wanted to do, because the horrid people were still looking at her and would go away and say that they had seen her drunk, if she did anything odd; and the good little man was coming towards her with the photograph.
She took it in her hand, which was now clammy and shaking, and breathed: ‘Oh! … Isn’t she lovely!’
Of course it was far lovelier than if the girl had been lovely. How fondly her husband must love her, to think her beautiful! She reflected wistfully, yet with joy at their happiness, that this ugly girl knew a triumph that she would never know. For if a man says that you are beautiful, and you are, then he is merely making a statement of fact, and you cannot guess from it whether he is in love with you or not. Even if you know he is, the statement still gives you no pleasure, for there is nothing private or even personal about it, since innumerable people have made it before him and no doubt some have subjected it to the last disenchantment of print. But if a man says that you are beautiful and you are not, then it is a proof that he loves you. The alchemy of loyalty is working on him, he is not separate from you. And since no one else says so it is as intimate as if it were a part of the little language that people who love each other always talk. Decidedly there are other fair seasons than the spring, other conditions than beauty for making people live kindly. A wave of intense emotion passed through her. There was a haze before her mind in which there floated her vast flushed torso, dear Marty, Francis Pitt, this hideous and beloved girl. The upshot was a kind of aching happiness.
‘Yes, she’s very lovely!’
‘Well, I think so.’
‘Far lovelier than me …’
‘Oh no, Miss. I wouldn’t say that. But you do see the likeness, don’t you? Funnily enough, there’s a photo of you in this morning’s Daily Show that takes you in almost that very pose. I don’t know if you’ve—’ He held the folded page beside the photograph. ‘Isn’t it exact?’
She hadn’t seen it. At Clussingford where she had spent the weekend they did not take in the Daily Show. At least they may have, for many newspapers and weeklies and reviews lay about on the tables, arranged according to some system of journalistic affinities, so that they lay on the dark wood in curious shapes such as the foundations of an unerected village form on the sward; and indeed they might be taken as the foundations of an unerected intellectual structure, for nobody ever read them, or anything else. The nice fresh-faced people in sports clothes sat about in the library, with the plump, pompous busts, the globe that showed the countries of the world, really so vexed and dangerous, in sweet pale colours like the silks that lay neatly in the work-boxes of long dead women beside it, and the shelves of bindings that made the eye feel as the palate does when it is drinking old port; and it could not be doubted that they knew what it all meant, for these people loved their homes so much that they almost understood them. But they never read. They seemed to feel that their eighteenth-century forebears had done all the reading that was necessary for their class. It was a persuasion that made them restful to visit, but dull to live with compared with these common people, who bent their noses over the cheap prints and tracked down arguments for the reality of their romantic dreams among the trivial, smudgy words …
‘It’s got a lot about you underneath …’
He was smiling. Evidently there was something intimate that had confirmed the family in its love of her.
‘The latest photograph of Miss Sybil Fassendyll, the famous actress, who is England’s favourite representative of the type of blonde beauty. Tall and slim and golden-haired and sunny in face and disposition, she is known to her friends as “Sunflower”.’
She drew her forefinger across her lips, compelling them to remain set in a foolish little smile. She felt frightened. There would be terrible trouble over this, for no one but Essington called her Sunflower. He would be furious at seeing his private name for her in print. Though he behaved to her much of the time as if she were his most alienated enemy, he could simultaneously behave to her as if he were an ardent lover in the first and most sensitive days of courtship, so far as the ready harbouring of tender grievances was concerned. On the ground that she did not love him as much as he loved her, that she had missed some fine shade of his devotion, he would hate her malevolently for a week. She knew the line he would take over this. Though it was as likely as not that her secret name had leaked into print through his indiscretion, for he was careless in talking to her on the telephone in front of the servants and secretaries, he was sure to say grimly, ‘Sunflower, your little friends talk …’ He loathed her having friends. She had almost none left. There was really only Maxine Tempest now who came about the house. He would certainly say that it was she who had given this to the press. There would be scenes. She would get so tired, and she had to start rehearsing tomorrow. Again she felt as if she were a rat in a trap. There floated before her once more the images of the vast flushed fallen torso, of Marty, of Francis Pitt, of the hideous and beloved girl, but this time they did not make any meaning of happiness. They had of course no meaning, they could not, for they had no connection with each other. Yet somehow life was not bearable unless they were connected, unless they had a meaning. She tried to steady herself by thinking of the ugly girl, for whom at any rate all was well. Yet was even that certain? For Essington had been very good to her when first they were together. It was not till after two or three years that he had made a scourge of his love. She might come back to this yard in some future spring and find nothing fair but the sunshine and the lilac, sourness on the face of the little man and the only thing that mattered gone out of the place. As it had gone …
She did not know what to think. She did not know what to think and be able to go on living. She looked wildly round her and became aware again of the four detestable people who were still standing there lechering with their minds upon her body. There came on her an impulse to throw her arms above her head and shout at them every ugly word she knew, meeting them on their own vile ground and bludgeoning them with her extreme brutality. The world was changing her, spoiling her.
She leaned forward to the little man and said, ‘These people keep on staring at me! I can’t stand it!’
Again she was obliged to be artificial with this person who had made her so greatly desire to be honest. But she did not mind so much now that she had begun to doubt if he would always think the ugly girl beautiful. So she gave him a consciously exquisite, benignant, and confidential smile, raised her finger to her lips with a gesture that she knew he would enjoy recognising as one she had used in ‘As You Like It’, and hastened out into the street.
When she had thought of the pond with lilies she could not see it, and no idea was any use to her unless she could see it as a picture. She no longer wanted to go there, and even if she had still wanted to she could not have managed the walk, for she felt spent as she did after a scene with Essington. There was something frightening in the way that though nothing had really happened to her during the last twenty minutes, except that four people had stared at her and another had said things that did not particularly matter, she seemed to have been standing up to an enemy, disputing with him, crying out to friends who did not hear, escaping sometimes to safety, but at the last falling under blows. It was as if the situation Essington had created had been given actual separate life by the power of his genius so that it could torment her even in his absence. But here she was, thinking bitterly about him, and that was wrong, for he was a great man, and often so sweet and kind and dependent on her. Nowadays her thoughts were terribly apt to go sour if she let them settle for a moment. Since everything was really all right, and she was of course quite happy, this was ridiculous. She must find something to do in this little town during the hour or so it was going to take to put the car in order, which would not let her think. Across the road there was a picture theatre, which might or might not be open. She went over to investigate, but stopped before she got to the other kerb because she saw that the posters which had looked so attractive advertised one of her own films.
‘What’s the good of a person going to a film theatre to forget themself if all there is for them to see is themself?’ asked Sunflower almost weeping.
She turned round to go back to the other pavement, but saw that her four tormenters had come out of the garage and were standing about to watch where she was going so that they could follow her. They might as well cross the road as her. She looked up and down the market-place, and decided to go to the more impressive end, where there was a big red-brick building with a clock-tower, because she was always attracted by that kind of architecture, which reminded her of the big buildings around Hammersmith and Chiswick and Turnham Green. Though they were ugly she liked them better than the beautiful places in the West End, which were what they were not because the inhabitants of that detestable part of London really cared for beauty, but they all had nothing to do but talk and criticise each other to bits, so that people who were putting up a building were compelled to make it magnificent out of self-defence. But in Hammersmith and Chiswick and Turnham Green they were busy living, and had no time to chatter about the look of things. Down there it was the little houses that mattered. Not that they were pretty, either, but they sheltered lives that seemed to her, who had to bear the glaring discomfort of publicity, infinitely precious in their privateness. None of the women who lived in the rows of little houses in those ugly parts of London need ever feel as she was being made to feel by the four people who were keeping time with her on the opposite pavement.
It was a shame. Because of them there seemed to lie on her a disagreeable obligation to move on, as if she were a criminal shadowed by the police. When a messenger boy, wheeling his bicycle across the pavement in front of her, stared into her eyes and stopped whistling, she ducked her head in a panic; and then made matters worse by looking back at him imploringly to persuade herself that there was nothing in his face but recognition of her beauty, so that it struck him that she was behaving oddly, and he came to a standstill, gaping. She hurried on with her head down until she bumped into woman who was coming out of a shop. Looking up to apologise she found that the little body’s eyes were set derisively on her coat, which was a very lovely fantasy in checks by Molyneux. She was not hurt by that, for often before she had noticed that good clothes, like any other form of fine art, were always greeted with ridicule when they were brought out into the open among ordinary people; and she knew that there is nothing base about this ridicule, since it springs, like the giggling of children who are taken to see a tragedy, not from a lack of sensibility but from its excess. Children are as far as possible from all knowledge of tragedy, ordinary people have few chances of encountering the rarer sorts of decoration, so these contacts are to them news of an unfamiliar variation in life. They are dismayed that it should exist at all, for it intimates that life covers a range far wider than the octave of their daily routine and that the demands which it may make upon them are endless and incalculable. They are dismayed, too, at its quality: for the beauty of tragedy, and the beauty of good clothes, which is one and the same beauty, asks from those who use it a sympathetic nobility and an unembittered but firm discontent with the emotion that is not right, with the colour, the line that is not right. It sends them off on that search for harmony which is as delicious as love for a woman who is perfect and loving, as agonising as love for a woman about whom one knows nothing, not even that she has been born. This is a hard thing to lay on children, on simple people. They will not have it, they pretend that what they have seen is of no significance, and merely a ludicrous accident of folly which calls for nothing from the sane but laughter. Essington had made her see all that when she had told him how the people in Cricklewood Broadway had giggled at her when her car had broken down on the way to the Fairshams’ at Harrow, and she had had to step out into the street in a Nicole Groult picture gown and cloak.
That had been Essington’s thought; it was now hers. Though she rebelled against him, she was a part of him. How could she leave him? How can one leave oneself? And she had nobody to go to. Marty was dead. She could not go back to the people she had come from, the people who were round her now in this street, because of everything that had happened to her in the last twelve years. She did not mean the sexual things, for she knew, as all women know, that these are of the slightest importance. She meant the things that had made her public and exalted. As she walked along she looked up at the big red building as one who saw the towers of a forbidden city, obscure, mediocre, sacred.
It was guarded at all its three doors by policemen. That made her remember something. Mr Justice Sandbury had lunched at Clussingford on Sunday and had taken her a little walk in the afternoon to see the famous white cattle at the home farm. She nearly always liked judges: as a class they were far preferable to retired prime ministers, who were inclined to pinch. This one was specially nice, quite elderly with silver hair and a voice at once rich and thin, like a bell of pure metal worn down by time to paper-thickness; and he had that old-fashioned way of treating a woman as if she were a flower in a vase, which is very pleasant for a little while, though tiresome if it goes on too long, since one is not a flower in a vase. He had told her the old man’s story of the stage of the past: of Henry Irving who, with his queer legs that looked like long legs seen through a refracting depth of water, and the ragged plume of stuttered, booming speech that he crazily held between his clenched teeth, somehow made a comprehensive hieroglyphic that expressed all noble variations of romantic passion; of Ellen Terry, who stands for ever in old men’s memories in a long white gown holding out paper flowers that have indeed been for remembrance, her face crisped with plaintiveness like a clear pool crisped by the wind; of Adelaide Neilson, who was beautiful, who died young, and in gaiety, dressed in her best, walking on Sunday in a sunny park in Paris with some splendid lover. From conflicting timbres in his voice she could guess that he himself had longed to step on to that stage, but that he was refraining from telling her so lest he should have to explain that he had not done so because in those days it was considered social suicide for a man of his class to become an actor. That made her smile, it was so delicate and so foolish, for of course a gentleman ought not to go on the stage. In the manner of one counting up what is not gain but merely compensation, the nice old man went on to tell her wistfully that of course there was a great deal of drama in his own profession, and to describe some curious cases in which he had taken part as counsel or judge. She had listened very attentively, partly to help him in his task of persuading himself that he had had as interesting a life as he possibly could have had, and partly because she loved to hear anything about real people, so long as it was true and not publicity. So when he said goodbye he had told her, pleased with her listening, that on Monday he would be trying the Assizes at Packbury, and that if she came in to the court for an hour on the way back he would be delighted to see her.
That would be a good thing to do. For one thing she would like to see the old man again. He was so very well-bred; one felt he would place the pleasantest interpretation on everything that was said or done so that life would be nice all round him. One could not imagine him putting a woman in a humiliating position. And it would keep her mind busy watching the trials, though she hoped everybody would be acquitted. She crossed the road and went past the policeman at the main door.
Inside there was a lobby and a stone staircase, with an ugly iron balustrade and a fat policeman with a blue-black moustache looking down from the landing above. She mounted the steps in a sudden glow of tender, familiar amusement, because the prevailing mode of ugliness, and in particular the yellow plaster walls, reminded her of the elementary school she had gone to in Chiswick. The prevailing smell, too, which puzzled the nostrils with a simultaneous suggestion of fustiness and funny astringency, reminded her of school; though indeed it belonged to all places—even the stage sometimes—where charwomen were given plentiful supplies of cleansing agents but kept faith with their deeper natures by applying them with filthy cloths. Funny old things, charwomen! Funny old things, fat policemen with blue-black moustaches! This one was just like the constable that had chased Lily and her all along the Mall after they had picked the syringa from the garden of the empty house in Duke’s Avenue, though goodness knows why they shouldn’t have taken it, since nobody was getting any good out of it where it was. She felt refreshed, as if instead of being cast in the dreadful, difficult plays that came her way nowadays, like that awful thing by Claudel she had had to play in last Sunday to please Brenda Burton, she had been put back into musical comedy. She supposed it was getting back among ordinary people. This place belonged to them. There was a crowd of them in the big hall at the top of the staircase, standing about in groups. Not one of them was beautiful, their squarish faces were for the most part fair, but negatively, without radiance. Yet they were somehow more moving to look upon than if they had been beautiful. There was a sturdiness about them that seemed the bodily sign of a strong instinct for keeping faith, and on most of the faces was a look of fatigue and patience, like the look on the face of a woman who is going to have a baby very soon. She respected them for what they were doing, which was stupid and obstinate, and yet sensible; for they were evidently talking over the cases that they were concerned in, saying for the hundredth time what they had said from the beginning and saying it too late, since the court was already sitting. Yet it was the right thing to do, it observed the appropriate rhythm. They had talked more and more of whatever their individual scandal and vexation might be as it came nearer the crisis of its trial, and they would talk less and less of it when it had passed that crisis. The tide had risen, it would ebb. Now, when Essington was going to Versailles he had known quite well that he would probably be thrown overboard there and his career broken, but he had not spoken of it. A leader must be proud and impersonal. When it did happen he hardly spoke of it, though night after night he gave way to childlike gusts of angry weeping in her bed. And now he never spoke of it: though he talked perpetually about the ruin that had come in Europe because they would not listen to him at the Peace Conference, he never distorted the logic of his argument to avenge his disappointment. But the thing was in his mind like an abscess that would not mature, so that he danced about in agony, unreasonable, complaining, cruel: perhaps more cruel than could be borne. She wished that he had not been called upon to be a great man, they might have been so happy together. Wistfully she gazed at the crowd, who in their dull clothes looked dark and strong, like trees in winter. Down amongst them, from the tops of the long windows on one side of the hall, there slanted down shafts of pale, dusty sunlight, like blessings from gods that were benign but had begun to doubt their own omnipotence, to vacillate; that could not now match their own creations in sturdiness …
Sunflower wanted to move on, to go some place where she would be distracted and would not think. Since she was stupid, there was no good her thinking. Turning on her charm again, she told the policeman why she was there, and he called a man who took her a way round the building that led out of little rooms where ledgers bound in marbled covers lay on dusty tables, and glass doors swung open in front of shelves of crumbling volumes because the key was gone, and there was an air of something just less than disease, as if ageing little men sat there all day in the drowse that comes from security of tenure. It occurred to her that she would have enjoyed spending the afternoon in dusting and tidying up the place; but of course that could not be. So at length she went through a door and found herself behind two chairs, so massive that they formed a kind of screen, on the other side of which Mr Justice Sandbury’s voice was sounding clear but very weak, like a fountain whose reservoir is running dry. She turned to the left as she had been told and found herself at the end of a short row of seats that faced the court. As she sat down she smiled over her shoulder at the Bench, and was shocked by the tired old face that smiled back at her, so yellow did it seem between the white wig and the scarlet robe, and as wrinkled as if the tired flesh had fallen back against the bone and was letting the skin fare as it would. She remembered that he had told her that he was going to retire quite soon, because his health had been broken by years of overwork at the Bar. These great men, they hurt themselves so by being great. She wished that some magic power would make him quite little, so that she could go and lift him out of his big chair, his robe flapping round him like a baby’s long clothes, and carry him to some comfortable place where he could rest. She looked round the court with hostility, as the place of his martyrdom, and was immediately disarmed. That there was here some honourable work to which a man might think it worth while to give himself, even so that he was spent before his time, was somehow borne in upon her. She forgot her fear that people were looking at her in her intention of taking all this in so that she would not forget it: the court room, which was older than the rest of the building and was planned with the sober grace of the Georgian genius, making its adaptations to its special purpose, its jury-box, its dock, its barriers, with such propriety that they seemed embellishments, declarations of the austere magnificence of discipline, the shining darkness of the oak-panelled walls which looked down on the proceedings with that air of vigilance and criticism that old wood always seems to have in human habitations, as if nature that cannot speak or do were challenging nature that can to match its worth and beauty; the gaping rows of fairish ordinary people at the back of the court, and the huddled others who craned from the galleries with a gracelessness that was a sign of sincerity, since it showed that they did not condition their expression of what they felt by any thought of how they might look; the jury, their gentle, stupid faces perturbed with conscientiousness; the barristers, sitting just below her in two opposing lines, nearly all of them darker than the ordinary people, more alert, one might say more peevish; the young man in the dock. He made her heart turn over. His pallor seemed to be cast upon him from above by a ray that disclosed at once that this was an end of him, and that all his enemies had said was true; and that in some ultimate sense he was in the right, and that the world could not atone for what it had done to him. Just thus tiresome Aunt Emma who drank had looked when she lay dead.
Poor, silly dears. The lanky, whitish, celery-like young man who had tried to kill himself by putting his head in a gas-stove, because he had not filled up the proper paper when he moved to a new district, and so had not received his pension and found himself a burden on his family. The funny little puckish man with the curl in the middle of his forehead like a smile done in hair, who had spent his whole life stealing suitcases, so artlessly that he was always detected, but who was not quite mad enough to be put away. The tired old thing with bags under his eyes and the dark iridescence of hair dye on his bowed head, the manager of a boot-store, who had muddled his books and run away so stupidly that they had caught him at once. None of these people would have got into all this trouble if only they had had someone who really loved them helping them to run their lives. She was thinking of them with a wide-eyed and slightly condescending pity, as if they were in an exceptional case which was the antithesis of her own, until she suddenly discovered in her mind, complete and established, the knowledge that her own case was the same. She had nobody who really loved her and would stand by her. Essington pretended to do so but he did not. When anything went wrong he always made it worse. A great many of her rehearsals were dreadful, for though dramatists sought her out on account of her supremacy as a box-office attraction, they were invariably embittered by her rendering of their lines. When she came back from these ordeals and Essington saw her tear-stains he would nag at her for being so stupid and tell her that she must hurry up and learn to act because she was thirty now and would not be able to hold the public by her beauty much longer. If she should fall into any form of this police-court disgrace he would pay the very best lawyers to get her off and then he would take her home and scold and scold and scold her till she would have to go out and kill herself. She was as much alone as any of these people. There opened before her a sense of some danger to which she was liable by reason of her situation. It was so strong that it became a hallucination and it seemed to her as if the floor had been cut away in front of her chair and she looked down at a blue depth where some time she would be shattered. She pushed back her chair and drew her knuckles over her eyes.
She must not think of Essington. Present or absent, he made all things unquiet and unhappy. She looked about her for something on which her mind might come to rest, and found her eyes dwelling, with such pleasure that she instantly smiled, on the face of an old woman. It was such a nice old face; but terribly pale. It struck her with horror that this was the dock-pallor that she had noted in all the prisoners she had seen tried that afternoon. The old woman was actually standing in the dock, with the sallow, cubist wardress at her elbow. But that was wrong. She was a good old woman. One could see that by the way that the dock-pallor made her merely pale, not guilty. The ray of which it was the end had proved the other prisoners right in eternity but wrong in time: it proved this old woman right in eternity and right in time. She was a very good old woman. Sunflower resolved that if there was any need of money for a fine or lawyer’s fees she would pay it and not tell Essington. It was so very obvious that she was a very good old woman. But the strange thing was that when one had got over the shock of seeing her standing there as if she were a criminal one ceased to think of what one could do for her but thought enviously of how much she would have done for one if one had had the luck to belong to her. Though she was standing in the dock it seemed ridiculous to think that one could help anybody who was so rich. She was like a barn full of grain.
The judge, who had been bending forward and talking to his clerk, straightened himself, caught sight of her, and exclaimed, ‘Oh! Let the prisoner sit, if she wishes.’ Sunflower gave him a smile of partisanship. Mr Sandbury was a real gentleman.
She could not make out why this old woman was having this effect on her. She could not even see her face very clearly, for she was so astigmatic that had it not been for the obligations of her beauty she would have worn glasses. Now, Essington could have told her all about this old woman at once. He had a joyless comprehension of all humanity. He could say, ‘This man is a liar, but he cares for knowledge, and one can get good work out of him if one gives him enough praise,’ and every word of it would be true; only before he had finished saying it he would lose all interest, and turn away irritably. She was so stupid, she could only feel. But there was one way of understanding what was going on inside people. She had discovered it in the course of her struggle with her profession. She had always terribly wanted to find out how one did act; and she had found out that if she imitated the facial expression and bodily motions of a really good actor she began to experience feelings that were evidently what he was feeling since they were not her own and made her understand his conception of the part. Often she had stood in the darkness of a stage-box and mimicked someone great, and found it work; though she had never gone on with it very long, for she found that the feelings that were roused in her were such as she wanted to use not on the stage but in real life, and she stopped in a dark, confused, rebellious dismay. At last this device was really going to come in useful. She looked over at the old woman and noted how she was seated in the chair, and tried to reproduce her pose. The body, which was at once coarse and frail, like earthenware that time had worn to the thinness of delicate china, was held very straight; the bonneted head was held low, so that the onlooker’s eye fell first on the puckered brownish silk of her brow and downcast eyelids. As Sunflower assumed the pose a sense of its rightness flowed like water through her body. It meant that about those things concerning which it is right to be proud and hard the old woman was proud and hard, and about those things concerning which it is right to be humble and soft she was utterly humble and soft. But now she was making queer passes with her poor gnarled hands: sometimes making scuffling movements with the fingers of each hand gathered together. What was that? Ah, this one was knitting, the other sewing. That meant that her ordinary life had been so full of goodness that when she was frightened she tried to get in touch with it again by pretending she was doing all the little things she did every day in the household, as a pious person might make the sign of the cross. This was a marvellously good woman.
But they were reading the indictment against her.
‘Alice Hester, you are charged with bigamy and the particulars are that on the fourteenth day of March nineteen hundred and twenty-three you went through a ceremony of marriage with Robert Stallibrass, your lawful husband Amos Bullen being then alive.’
But it was not possible.
‘Are you guilty or not guilty?’
‘Guilty,’ she said. Though one could clearly hear the word, it seemed to spin feebly and fall in mid-air, like a quoit thrown by too feeble a hand. Her pale old mouth opened suddenly, and within its vault her tongue could be seen quivering like the tongue of an asp. The wardress gave her a glass of water. She minded to thank the giver before she drank, like a well-taught child. Then she sat with the glass on her lap, shaking her head and murmuring protestingly to herself. She was not rebelling against whatever injustice had brought her into the dock, neither was she feeling fear. Rather was she expressing the embarrassment of one who comes up to town to go to the Horse Show with a friend, and is let in by her for attending a wedding or some ceremony that required other clothes. She had prepared for one event and been precipitated into another. Why, the event she had prepared for was death. This woman would move mildly towards the innermost things.
‘Now, what is all this about?’ asked Mr Justice Sandbury.
A wigged and gowned figure rose from the bench of his fellows in the well of the court and said in an embarrassed, here-it-is-but-it-is-none-of-my-doing voice, ‘The facts of the case are quite straightforward, my lord. Fifty years ago the prisoner married an agricultural labourer who is now in Southend workhouse. Last March she went through a form of marriage with this other man, who has since died.’
‘Who has since died?’
‘I am informed by the police that he died a few days after the bigamous marriage.’
‘Was there any question of fraudulent motive, of inheriting anything from this man that would come to her only if she was his wife, any pension or so on?’
‘No, my lord. So far as the police know there was no such motive.’
The judge put his fine white hand to his mouth, and looked deliberately at the prisoner. Sunflower almost hated him, because she knew that he was savouring the quality of this good old woman as he had savoured the quality of Irving or Ellen Terry. It was not right. He might let her go at once.
Kindly he said to her: ‘Have you any statement to make? Is there anything you want to tell us, about the reason why you did this thing?’
They heard her remote old voice exclaim to herself, ‘O mercy, I must speak now.’ She stood up, steadying herself by resting her hands, which were like grey skeleton leaves, on the ledge of the dock; and after curtseying she began to speak. Oh, that one could watch and watch and listen and listen harder and harder, so that one could get everything possible out of the moment. This was a real thing. Everybody in court was feeling it, for there was a hush, and the thin stream of her words might have been trickling through a wood at night.
She said: ‘Sir, ‘tis true what the policeman says I did. I have been treated fairly, and I make no complaint. But I could not help doing what I did, though I meant no harm. ‘Twas this way. My first man was not a good man to me. ‘Twas not his fault. He had a mother who came from Foulness Island, and ‘tis well known the folks there are outlandish and don’t know how to do things right, so he’d had a bad home. Before ever we’d wedded he was used to drinking and that. And ‘twas hard on him, too, we had so many little ones. Ten we had before I was thirty, and we had only twelve shillings a week to bring them up on, and our cottage was a poor sort of place. ‘Twas not his fault. But when he had been drinking he did knock me and the children about so that it could not be borne, though they was very good children. Then he got tired of it all, and tried to make us go into the workhouse, and I had to stand out against him. None of my folks had ever gone into the workhouse, and I could not let my little ones go there. So we came to having hard words over it, and one night he came home drunk, and he made me get up and dress the little ones, and he turned us all out of the house. We stood in the garden for a while and then he come and drive us into the lane with an old rook rifle my father had given him. ‘Twas only because he was in drink. He was a kind man sometimes when he was himself.
‘So we walked up and down the lane, for I thought we might go back later when he had fallen asleep. But my little ones cried, and the young fellow who was ploughman at the same farm where my man was, he woke up in his bed where he slept in his cottage across the road, and he came down after us, with a lantern. I had not spoken to him before but to be civil. But he spoke to me kindly as he picked up two of my littlest ones and he took us to the barn, and we slept on the hay, and he stayed by me and begged me not to carry on so. And in the morning he brought us two loaves and some water, and then he took me up to the cottage before he went to work. But my husband had gone. I haven’t seen him since. And I did not know what to do; for the cottage belonged to the farmer, and he wanted it for the man he hired to take my husband’s place. So it looked as if he had got us into the workhouse, for all I had done against it. But this young fellow said I must not go for to do that, and he wrote to his uncle who lived up over Patchloy in these parts to find a place for him, and said he had married a widow. So we all come over here, and we had another little one of our own, and all was nice and decent for forty years. There was no drinking and not a cross word. He always treated me right, and he was kind to my little ones.
‘Then last winter he got a pain in his innards. His food did roar up in him, no matter what I give him. And last February the doctor told him he must go into hospital and be cut. And he came back, and he told me that, and he said, “There is just one thing I would like to do before I go into hospital. I might die, and I would like to be married to you before I die.” I knew quite well that it was not right to do it, for my sister who lives in Prittlewell had told me my first was in the workhouse over there and I had sent him some money for baccy and that to be slipped to him private-like without my name. But I knew my man was like to die, and I could see his heart was set on this thing, so I told him I would do it. The pity of it was that my sister’s grandson Tom was stopping in the house with us, him not being liked in his own parish. He is kind of queer. He does no good at school and goes about all day playing on a penny whistle and doing what he ought not to do. ‘Tis not his fault. His mother was frightened by a ferret when he was on the way. I heard a board creak and I said to myself he had been listening at the door. And I was sure he knew there was something funny about me and my old man, for people had talked in front of him as they should not, and though he is kind of dull he remembers everything. But what could I do, with my man wanting it so bad?
‘So we told the registrar we wanted to marry, and then when the day came we went to the office. And all the way going through the streets from the house to the office I heard someone playing a penny whistle just behind me. But I did not turn round, for with my man set on marrying me, what could I do? And while the registrar was writing our names in the big book I heard someone playing a penny whistle out in the street just under the window. But what could I do? And then my man went into the county hospital and the doctors cut him and he died. And as he lay dying he was main pleased he was married to me. So when the policeman came for me I knew it was right he should take me to the station. But what could I do?’
She asked it with her eyes set steadily on the judge, as if she really wanted an answer. It had seemed to her that life had made it impossible for her not to do wrong, and she was grieved by it. She would like to have that disproved, even if the explanation meant that she would have to blame herself. So kind was she, and so honest, that she was willing to clear God’s character at the expense of her own.
Sunflower had taken off her gloves and was rubbing her hands, which seemed as if they were charged with electricity. Looking at this old woman made her feel as she sometimes did in church when she looked up at the cross over the altar; only this feeling did not run up and lose itself in the empty sky. Looking at Alice Hester one looked down, towards the ground, and one’s feelings seemed to run along the earth, to delve into it, to shoot up into the light, triumphant … She found herself living again a moment at her mother’s funeral, which at the time had made her jaw drop with amazement. They had lowered her mother’s body into the grave. It lay there in its coffin, finished. And round the hole in the earth stood four black figures, Lily, Mabel, Maurice and herself, who but for that body would not have been there. Who had been made by it out of nothing! And now they were putting this marvel-making body in the ground, as if the proper time to sow was after it had germinated and engendered its plant. She had gaped at that extraordinary rite. It had seemed to bring to the surface of life a process that nobody talked about, that could hardly be seen, that she could not have told Essington about at all; that was the most important thing in the world. She didn’t know what it was or what it did, but she knew what it was like. It was savagely persistent, it was at once miraculous and the soul of the natural, it went on and on to some aim … She could have burst out crying because she was not taking part in the process, and never could do so, since she did not understand what it was, nor how she could force herself into it. She was so stupid! There swept over her a tide of that emotion which Essington most loathed in her, but which she recognised shamefacedly as the most fundamental emotion she ever knew: a desire to be passive which was as acute as thirst. Indignantly she felt that she ought not to be calling on her own will and thought to find a way into this process. Someone ought to have done it for her. She felt cheated because they had not.
Because of that final sagging conviction of betrayal, she had remembered as rarely as she could that queer moment beside the grave: which was a pity, because it was something real, and almost the only thing she had ever found out for herself. But now this old woman made her think of it; and added to her thought the news that if you did this—this thing, without rebelling because it was so hard and feeling love for everybody from the idiot boy who betrayed you up to the God who made you, you got something that was like religion. But better. Religion was like everything that men made. It was all very fine but it didn’t work. It was like Essington’s ideas which were all wonderful but which didn’t get carried into effect and didn’t make him happy. It did not work. Religion vanishes out of a building without a spire, as scent vanishes out of a bottle without a stopper. It has to be tethered to people’s attention by pretty services with incense and vestments and music; by creeds that men can argue about without coming to any conclusion that has to be acted on; by priests and vicars and district visitors and all. What men do is thin as paper, dry as dust. But this other thing … Without being reinforced by being talked about, since it could not be put into words, it had survived for seventy years within this body that had never been beautiful, that had been starved and chilled, vexed with rough clothing, hurt by blows, deformed and torn by baby and baby, laid waste altogether by age. And it had worked. How it had worked!
Mr Justice Sandbury was saying, ‘Well, you mustn’t do that sort of thing, you know …’
If she were punished it could not be borne.
But he went on: ‘Still, you’ve had a very hard life, and you’ve been through a great deal of trouble just lately, and I see that you may not have known what you were doing at the time. So I am going to bind you over on your own recognisances to come up for judgment when you are called.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Alice Hester. Yet she would rather have had the answer that proved herself and not life at fault. She took trouble to look grateful, for not to do so would have been unkind to the old gentleman, who had done his best for her; but as she turned aside, leaning on the wardress’s arm, the interest flowed out of her old face, as if she felt that now she had dealt with this situation she could continue to drift quietly towards death. As she went out of the dock and into the well of the court the wardress and the policeman kept on laying their hands upon her and guiding her, as if she were weightless as a dead leaf and might be whirled by any current of air away from the place to which she ought to go. They brought her to the big book at the table, but there was a hitch in the proceedings. Her bonneted head bobbed up, her tilted face offered some mild objection to the giants above her; their bullet heads bobbed down and offered some reassurance, passing broad explanatory fingers along the page. It seemed that she could not sign her name, but had to make her mark. So she also was stupid.
She straightened herself and curtseyed to the judge. The giants turned her about and patted her, as one pats a ball through water, towards a door in the wall near the witness box, where there waited a bearded man. Embarrassment was on his face like a flickering light. ‘It must be horrid to have one’s children knowing that one once was loved,’ thought Sunflower. But the old woman went straight up to him, laid her hand on his arm, and spoke to him, not, as one might have foretold, brokenly, but chidingly. Peace and docility came into his face. She had done the right thing: she had asserted her authority, and they were back as they ought to be, mother and son. But of course she would always know what was the right thing to do, in any conceivable phase of every possible human relationship. She was inspired. Sunflower thought of all the times in the theatre when she had failed to save situations, when she had let a scene drop or an actor’s blunder show across the footlights, because she had not known the right thing to do, because she was not inspired, because she was empty as this woman was full. Hungrily she looked at the door which was now closing on Alice Hester and her son. He looked about forty. Perhaps he was the youngest child. It must have been wonderful, when she had child after child by the husband she did not love, at last to have a child by the man she loved. There could be no child of hers she would not love; but this one must have been covered at its birth with a special sort of love like a caul of light.
The tears were streaming down Sunflower’s face. She was amazed by them as by any other sudden and prodigious shower. She dried them with her gloves, for she had lost her handkerchief, as Essington said she always did, and she got up and pushed away the chairs, which seemed interested and resistant, and went out of the gallery into the passage. There she leaned against the yellow plaster wall, whose cold surface was like an admonition to be sensible, and tried to stop this independent weeping. Why should she cry! It was so foolish when Alice Hester had proved that everything was all right if only one had love, which meant that everything was really all right with her and Essington for they loved each other. If she told Essington about Alice Hester it would make him understand that they must stop being unkind to one another. She wished that she could tell him at once, without having to wait to get home. And then her heart sank, for she remembered that he had told her he would stay down at Evescote till Tuesday afternoon, which meant that she would not see him for another twenty-four hours. She could have cried again for disappointment. Things were always happening like this. If she found something in the newspapers that might make him laugh he was never there, and if she clipped it out and kept it then somehow it mattered too much if it turned out not funny enough to make him laugh; and when she woke up and laid her arm across the other pillow and said, ‘I have had such a lovely dream,’ it was always one of the nights he was not there. And his return to her house was never simple, like the coming home of an ordinary man, but always had to be announced, confirmed, altered, and maybe postponed by that maddening telephone, or to be waited for without any trust that any special hour would bring him. But these were little, little things compared with the adversities against which Alice Hester’s love had struggled and survived. She would never think of them again. And at any rate she could go and tell Harrowby. He was not married, she had often wondered why, for he was a very nice man. Perhaps he would get married when he heard this story.
She hurried back through the little rooms, whose drowsiness now seemed a curious affectation in view of the real, rushing nature of life. The hall was still full of groups of ordinary people, standing talking, their good heads lowered. For a little she stood and looked at them, smiling as one might at children who were taking some game very seriously but also wrung with pity because their own seriousness was paining them, and impatient because they had stood there looking down on the ugly linoleum when just behind the courtroom doors a woman had proved to all who cared to listen that no matter what happened life was all right. Regretfully she stroked her useless throat, thinking how bitter it was that with her trained voice she could have made them all hear every word she might have said, but that her stupid brain could not put two words together to convey the brightness that possessed her. But at any rate she could tell Harrowby. She hurried down the stairs and past the policemen, on whom she smiled with dazzling gratitude, since they had upheld the gates of her entrance into everlasting happiness, and she went out into one of these stage-scene hours that sometimes come between a sunlit day and its twilight. The townsfolk were walking in radiance over prodigiously lengthened shadows, like bold and happy souls not awed by any consequences; and in the upper windows of one half of the marketplace blazed a piecemeal sunset more glorious than that in the opposing sky. Under the assault of the strong slanting shafts of light no house-fronts seemed much more solid than canvas; the lit shops seemed factitious, sets for the harlequinade; pale householders stepped out of their doors and had ruddiness clapped on their faces as a mask. These appearances seemed to her confirmation of her belief that everything in the world had suddenly been changed by the disclosure of some knowledge, and that now all was well; and she almost ran to the garage to tell her news.
The yard also was wrought on by the hour. The two sides of it, the proprietor’s house and the opposite wall, were tepid in shadow, colder than one would have thought anything red could be; but the wall at the end glowed like the wings of a Painted Lady butterfly, and the gate in it seemed to have had its iron convolutions veneered with strips of sunset. The blossom on the lilac bough that bobbed over from the next garden had been dipped in a honey of thick yellow light. Pulled out into the middle of the yard was the Wolseley, its glossy sides suffused with fire in which reflections swam as dilating and contracting islets; and in it sat Harrowby, reading Captain Coe.
He jumped out when he saw her coming. ‘Did you find the place all right, Miss?’
‘Oh, Harrowby, I didn’t go! But I saw something much more wonderful! I went to see the people being tried in that place with a clock, because that nice old gentleman at Clussingford was the judge, and I saw the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Just think there was an old woman of seventy tried for committing bigamy last March …’ She had to stop and gasp for breath.
‘Dear, dear, Miss!’ commented Harrowby mildly, folding up the Star. ‘An old woman of seventy committing bigamy! That’s what I call carrying coals to Newcastle.’
‘Oh, but it was wonderful of her! She was the most wonderful person I’ve ever seen. Alice Hester her name was, and somehow it suited her. I don’t think she’d ever been beautiful. You felt she’d never had to bother about all that. But, oh, she looked so nice …’ She paused again for breath.
‘They often do,’ said Harrowby, who had evidently not yet found his equilibrium in the story.
‘She looked so good, and you felt she’d always been nice to everybody. And she’d had lots of children ever so long ago, and her husband turned them all out of doors, and a ploughman came and took them to a barn, and then they came here and pretended they were married, and they were awfully happy for forty years, though they weren’t married—’
‘Oh, that,’ said Harrowby, with a certain fierceness, ‘don’t matter any more nowadays. If people are straight, they are, and that’s that.’
‘Well, then he got ill, and he knew he was going to die, and he wanted to be married to her. And though there was a horrid sort of boy in the house, and she knew that he would tell, she did go and get married, though she knew that she’d get put in prison, and he was awfully happy, and he did die. Wasn’t it wonderful of her? Wasn’t it wonderful?’
‘Yes, indeed it was,’ said Harrowby. But it struck her that she had not told the story quite as well as she might have done, though on thinking it over she did not see that she had left out anything. So to clench matters she declared earnestly, ‘Really, Harrowby, she was the most wonderful person I’ve ever, ever seen!’ Then she saw she had impressed him, for he stared at her with large eyes and said, ‘It does you all the good in the world to take a day off, Miss,’ which was so irrelevant that he could only have said it to disguise his emotions. So that was all right.
She drew a deep breath of contentment and looked round her. ‘Isn’t it a lovely evening?’ she murmured. Her gaze ranged lovingly over everything, and came to the sash-windows in the proprietor’s house, with their shining panes and neat curtains of Nottingham lace. She smiled happily, for now she had seen Alice Hester she could be unreservedly happy about those people. It was quite likely that the little man would go on loving the ugly girl until he died. She said, ‘I’d like to say good-bye to that little man who was there.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t say there was much chance of seeing him this evening. There’s been a lot of coming and going since you went out. A domestic event, I should say. That’s the doctor’s car over there.’
They gazed up at the little house, which looked stern and knowing there in the shadow.
‘She’s very young,’ said Sunflower.
But Alice Hester must have been as young when she began, and it had turned out glorious for her.
‘I wish I knew if it were a boy or a girl,’ she speculated with a new shamelessness. ‘I’d like to send it something.’
They continued to gaze up at the grave little house.
‘We’d best be making a move,’ said Harrowby at length. ‘You’ll be getting tired, Miss. I’ve got to take you down to rehearsal tomorrow at eleven, I know.’
‘It’s funny. I am a little tired. But I’ve had a lovely, lovely day.’ She got into the car, and he settled the rugs round her. She would have her dinner in bed; a boiled egg, and some bread and honey.