THE HOUSE AT MAADI

PART THE FIRST An Afternoon in April

‘UGLINESS, squalor, is only a nuisance,’ he told himself. ‘It is beauty that hurts.’ Even in the house at Maadi, the house that held Rosemary Fairfield, he could lose himself in musing; and he remained lost until he became aware that a tall elderly woman with fine eyes and silvering hair moved across the room to greet him.

‘You’re Mr. Redshawe, of course. I’m Rosemary’s mother. It was so good of you to come.’ The young man’s evident shyness moved her to add, ‘You have met Rosemary, haven’t you?’

‘Thank you.’ He found his voice at last. ‘Yes, I had that pleasure three days ago in Cairo. She was in the company of Mr. Bunnard, my chief.’

‘My brother-in-law,’ said Mrs. Fairfield. ‘You like your work?’

‘Well,’ began Redshawe, ‘an Irrigation Company....’

His hostess smiled. At ease now, and reposing in the charm of her Irish voice and the kindliness of her speaking eyes, he smiled in return. As he looked into her lined face he felt that by holding himself very still he could almost hear the silken rustle of beauty’s vanishing skirts.

‘Tell me,’ Mrs. Fairfield said, leaning forward a little, ‘does my brother-in-law do any work, or do you and the rest do it all?’

He stared a moment at the dubious crease in his trousers. When he looked up, with a slight smile, ‘I’ve a tremendous respect for Mr. Bunnard,’ he assured her. ‘More than respect, if it’s not presumptuous to say so. But of course he’s a very big wig indeed, don’t you see? It’s only natural that he shouldn’t do very much.’

Mrs. Fairfield glowed maternally at the sight of his blushes.

‘How very nice you are,’ she surprised herself by saying, with the shadow of a tremor in her voice. ‘I’m so glad you came.’

He blushed again as he answered: ‘I’m most amazingly glad. I was terrified at first.’

Her smile was friendlier than ever.

‘Not of me, I’m sure. Of Mrs. Bunnard, perhaps. She is a very positive person—always has been.’

He wanted to blurt out: ‘No, it was your daughter that I was afraid of’; but he could not shake off the grip of his reticence.

‘So are all of that cult,’ he said. ‘They teach one their entertaining guesswork as though it were an exact science.... And Miss Fairfield—is she too a believer?’

‘Rosemary is rather a baffling girl,’ replied Rosemary’s mother. ‘She spends a lot of time with her aunt, and listens, listens. Yes, that is almost all there is to be said about Rosemary: she listens. At this moment she is no doubt at the Cairo Lodge, hearing about Yoga and Prana and Kamaloka.’

‘And other patent breakfast foods,’ said Redshawe, with a cadence so bitter as to bring wonder into his new friend’s eyes.

‘It would be a pity, don’t you think,’ he answered the question in her glance, ‘if she took all that stuff seriously?’

‘Aren’t you a little positive?’ she quizzed him.... ‘Ah, here is Mr. Bunnard.’

Almost boyishly diffident, the spare familiar figure of Redshawe’s chief sidled towards them. Mr. Bunnard was rather above medium height, but his earnest concentration on the pattern of the carpet made him seem smaller. When he raised his head a pair of ingenuous wondering eyes peered, through the circular lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles, upon a new world.

‘Ah, Redshawe,’ said Mr. Bunnard, focussing his mild radiance upon the young man as they shook hands, ‘you’ve come then. How very nice.’

‘You’re just in time to tell us about the Atlantians, Dick,’ Mrs. Fairfield greeted him, with the air of having been discussing the Atlantians all the afternoon.

‘Very nice,’ repeated Mr. Bunnard, peering from one to the other.

‘Yes, I’ve come, sir,’ said Redshawe, ‘and I’ve brought every one of my seven bodies with me.’

Mr. Bunnard considered this remark with a smile that revealed for the fraction of a second an excellent set of artificial teeth.

‘Ah, you haven’t forgotten our little talk then.... But you’ve got a lot to learn yet. Seven planes and all interpenetrating. Is Hypatia at home, Sheila?’

‘My dear Dick! She is at the Lodge, of course, and Rosemary is with her. I expect we had better not wait tea for them. They’ll probably have something in Cairo.’

‘Perhaps Hassan will get us some tea,’ ventured Mr. Bunnard, ‘if we ask him.’

As though to his cue, the white-smocked, red-tarbooshed Hassan, the Berber servant, appeared at this moment in the doorway bringing tea on a large tray. In response to Mrs. Fairfield’s nod he shuffled noiselessly into the room, bowing and smirking in his expansive Oriental fashion, and set out the tea-things on an occasional table.

‘Seven planes and all interpenetrating,’ said Mr. Bunnard, appearing to extract a peculiar comfort from the idea. ‘We generally take tea in the French manner—or is it the Russian?—with lemon juice instead of milk. By the by, I’ve got some Thought Forms up in my den, Redshawe, that might interest you. Angry, affectionate, ambitious, pure, envious, sensual, and so on: all accurately coloured, you know. I’ve spent a lot of time on them. You’re not eating anything. I can recommend the shortbread: it came all the way from Scotland.’

Mrs. Fairfield, roused by a sound outside, turned in the act of filling Redshawe’s cup for the fifth time, to look out of the window.

‘Here are the truants,’ she said, ‘and we’ve nearly finished.’ And Redshawe, following her glance, saw the miraculous Rosemary standing on the gravel path outside. To his excited imagination it seemed that she was but for an instant poised lightly upon this globe before flying back to the paradise from which she had descended.

Then indeed came the whirlwind followed by the still small voice. Mrs. Bunnard, tall, angular, and, though quiet, masterful, with conscious power invaded the room: power which, however, broke like a spent wave on the adamant rock of Redshawe’s absorption in Rosemary Fairfield.

‘Mr. Redshawe, how are you?’ said Mrs. Bunnard, grasping his hand. ‘We have never been introduced, but I know you perfectly. This is my niece.’

‘We have met already,’ fell like a benediction from the lips of Rosemary, as she gave him her hand.

‘Now let us take our things off,’ said Mrs. Bunnard with ferocious good humour. ‘Come, Rosemary!’

A moment later Redshawe was conscious of having stared at the departing vision. The exodus completed by Mr. Bunnard, he turned to find the thoughtful eyes of Rosemary’s mother upon him. Divining that she had read some of his mind he became confused.

Mrs. Fairfield rose to ring the bell: an action so startling to the disordered nerves of Redshawe that he breathed deep relief when, a moment later, he heard her ask Hassan to make some fresh tea for the ladies. His hostess came back into the bay of the room and stared out at the clustering purple masses of bougainvillea that hung from the white house, her hands playing listlessly with a fly-whisk.

‘This is the coolest part of the house till the sun goes down,’ she said, in a tone so void of expression as to fix his instant attention. ‘Afterwards we will sit out on the piazza, and perhaps Rosemary will play to us.’

‘That will be delightful,’ he answered, politely acquiescent; but his mind was asking: ‘What is the matter? What is she going to say?’

He became agitated with the expectation of hearing something momentous about Rosemary. But, after a pause, Mrs. Fairfield did but add the commonplace remark that his was an uncommon name.

‘Yes.’ Disappointment and relief strove together in his tone.

‘Are you the son of a certain Stephen Redshawe, I wonder?’

‘Yes,’ he said again, with quickening interest.

‘You have his eyes,’ she assured him with a smile, and turned quickly to the window.

‘By Jove, you knew my father?’ He got out of his chair in his astonishment, and found himself, with a sense of shock, face to face with an old woman who smiled at him wanly.

‘Yes, many years ago.’

‘He never mentioned——’ he began; and stopped, blushing for his gaucherie. As if in atonement, ‘Please talk to me about my father, if it won’t distress you,’ he pleaded.

After a long silence, ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘There’s a story I can never tell you. But we’re going to be good friends, you and I, and some day we’ll have a long talk about your father.’

Embarrassed, he murmured lame thanks.

‘There’s forty years between us,’ she added, half to herself. ‘So we shall be good friends.’

The door was slightly ajar and in the contracted doorway flashed the smile of Mr. Bunnard.

‘Come along, Redshawe,’ chirped Mr. Bunnard. ‘The ladies are coming down to their tea. Slip away while you can and have a look at my Thought Forms.’

Redshawe, obeying this unwelcome summons, mused deeply on the story that he was never to hear.

PART THE SECOND Sheila Dyrle

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

‘Liked anyone?’

‘A boy, I mean.’

‘Why, of course, Edward——’

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

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

‘Well, yes, in love.’

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

‘Oh, I just wondered.’

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know?’

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

‘Do you mean it’s over now?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did you lose your heart at once?’

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

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

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

Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.

‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Frightfully thick those woods are,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypatia listened, slightly frowning.

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

‘Told you?’

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

Her voice died away into silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each one had a brown-paper cover bearing in large block letters a title specially designed to propitiate the eye of Authority, should Authority happen to come round some day with a master-key. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs clothed with righteousness the impious pages of Spencer’s First Principles, and The Life of Livingstone invested Monte Cristo with a garb of sanctity. Shelley beat his luminous wings behind the broad back of Robinson Crusoe.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Was it decent there?’

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

‘Unofficial, I suppose?’

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

‘Did you write stories, or what?’

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

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

‘I expect so.’

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

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

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

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

Hypatia laughed. ‘Are you Irish?’

‘Part of me is.’

‘The voice part,’ said Hypatia.

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

‘Your voice is lovely.’

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

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

She struck off at a tangent.

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

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

There was silence for a few minutes.

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

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

Darling Sheila.—Do not be surprised if I don’t write for several days. Dad died suddenly yesterday.

Your loving Kay.

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

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

‘And didn’t it?’

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

‘Yes?’

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

‘He was more Kayesque than ever?’

Sheila flinched.

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

‘But he was changed.’

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

‘And the mute poetry?’ asked Hypatia presently.

Sheila stared miserably at her own feet.

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

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

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

‘That it was hopeless?’

Sheila nodded.

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

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

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

She rose to her feet.

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

3

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

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

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

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

‘It’s very jolly here,’ said Sheila.

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

‘It is.’

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

‘My quest?’

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

‘I’m still seeking,’ admitted Sheila.

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

‘No?’ said Sheila good-humouredly.

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

‘Even your shade?’ interposed Sheila.

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

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

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

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

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

‘What about your brother?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypatia sniffed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheila murmured her pleasure.

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

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

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

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

Her father laughed.

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

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

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

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

‘No. Who’s Bunny?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sixty-two,’ murmured Hypatia.

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

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

‘Of what, me dear?’

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

Bunny laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her mother listened indulgently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They whirled away among the dancers.

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

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

Her heart danced with the music.

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

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

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

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

‘Feel better now?’

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

He studied the ground.

‘It’s a year since you were here.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve often thought of that visit.’

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

‘But you are not of her persuasion?’

‘Obviously not. Hypatia was my best friend.’

‘Was?’

He seemed to be offering a far from unwelcome sympathy.

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

‘Yes? I fancied so.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That would depend, I expect.’

She summoned her courage.

‘Well, to me, for instance?’

‘You!’

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

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

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

‘How astoundingly decent of you!’

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

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

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

Mr. Fairfield stood before them.

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

Later, feeling rather breathless and crumpled, she listened to Bunny’s ‘tune on the fiddle.’ She could see the violinist’s face, with a new expression in his eyes, spangled grotesquely with a red light from a fairy lamp. The moon was rising in a pale green sky. Two tall feathery trees, swaying in the gentle wind, seemed to caress each other as they merged for a moment and drew apart again. The music spoke—spoke to Sheila intimately. It seemed to have for her a secret message. It communicated a tremulous half-sobbing ecstasy of pain and beauty: it drew her, shuddering with delight, through divers moods. Now she was in a moonlit forest of tall poplars, walking, walking, alone in the universe. Now there was a flowered field, full of white and green, yellow and red, made glad with the twinkling feet of dancing shepherds and shepherdesses.

As if in response to the music, stars began tremblingly to peer through the luminous green curtain of the sky.

The next morning Edward invited her into the holy of holies where the book was being written.

It was a small room having some of the austerity of a monk’s cell. Two of the walls were lined with books, classified under such headings as Ancient History, Mediæval History, Modern History, Sociology, Science, Philosophy.

‘I do everything on a system,’ remarked Edward in a rather satisfied tone; but Sheila only laughed at his labels.

‘I could never read here,’ she said. ‘I should put a ticket on myself and stand in the corner all day. What a dreadfully orderly room!’

‘Don’t you like it?’ There was disappointment in his tone.

‘Yes, very much. It is little and quiet and studious. There’s no cabbage pattern on the wall and no Jorrocks pictures. There are no pictures of podgy children stroking big dogs, and no family photographs.... I’m sure that gentleman over there isn’t in the family.’ She pointed to a photograph of a Greek statue.

‘No, that’s Euripides. And yet there’s something about the room that you don’t like. What is it?’

‘Well, you do everything on a system, you said. I think that’s what’s wrong. You’ve done this room on a system. Ars est celare artem. Isn’t it the same with systems?’

‘Do you read Horace much?’ he enquired.

‘Not at all,’ confessed Sheila. ‘I found that tag at the end of a dictionary.’

He laughed. ‘You’re delightfully honest.’

A shaft of sunlight falling on his face made visible the little downy hairs over his cheekbones. Sheila caught her eyes involuntarily looking at them.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to work now?’

‘There’s no hurry.’

‘Come, come, I’m sure your system doesn’t permit loitering! Can you provide me with pen and paper?’

‘Do you really mean me to dictate to you?’

She felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment lest she was pressing unwanted assistance upon him.

‘You said I was honest just now. Will you be equally honest with me? If my presence would disturb you, please turn me out.’

He considered gravely for a moment. ‘One can hardly tell—save by experiment.’

‘You wouldn’t mind telling me, would you?’

‘No. I would tell you at once. You have sense enough not to be offended.’

She was absurdly elated by this curt compliment.

‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the book comes first with me always. Nothing else matters.’

She ruminated upon that thought for several seconds. The bluntness, the ungraciousness of it at once repelled and attracted her. She could not but admire Edward’s capacity for impersonal enthusiasm; it made him great; and she found something fascinating in his indifference to lesser things. Among those lesser things she was content, for the moment, to include herself. To be his tool, to help him in his work: such service, she felt, would be its own sufficient reward.

Noting her silence, ‘That seems to you inhuman?’ he asked.

‘It seems to me superhuman,’ answered Sheila. ‘Perhaps that’s the secret of fine living: to subordinate all personal things to some great impersonal passion.’

‘That’s just how I feel,’ he said.

Sheila continued. ‘Unless we’re content to be miserable and useless, we must have a consuming passion, if it’s only for collecting beetles: something that doesn’t depend on anybody else.... Persons change,’ she added sadly.

‘You’re thinking of Hypatia,’ he suggested.

‘Hypatia, yes. And someone else. It’s like building your house on sand, you know, ever to rely on persons.’

‘Still,’ said Edward, ‘if a person’s rational and consistent—and there are consistent persons.’

‘Yes, and there are clockwork toys. A perfectly consistent person must be very much like them, I should think.’

‘But surely you agree that man is just that: a mechanical toy in the hands of Necessity. The illusion of freewill is only disguised mechanism.’

‘How dreadful!’ Sheila exclaimed. ‘Then Henley’s lines:

are meaningless to you?’

‘The man who thinks that he is master of his fate is the most enslaved of all persons,’ said Edward. ‘For he is not even master of the facts.’

‘That’s a quotation from your book, I believe,’ said Sheila. And the young man blushed.

This was the beginning of a long and animated discussion, the first of many. In Edward Sheila discovered that reliability which she had thought could be attributed to no person. His mind was keen and critical: it worked with a certain deadly precision that was as impressive and at times almost as terrifying as a piece of gigantic machinery. He had doubts and hesitancies indeed: the hesitancies of one aware of the subtleties, the baffling complexity, of problems which less careful minds deemed simple; but once he had reached a definite decision, nothing short of overpowering ratiocination, no consideration of comfort or sentiment, could shake him from it. And while her sense of poetry revolted against a certain aridness in his philosophy, the very magnitude and the shattering presumption of his attempt to rationalize the universe overpowered her imagination and thrilled her with a sense of great adventure.

4

In sharp contrast with this austere enthusiasm for Edward Fairfield and his work, there flickered up in her heart a secret romantic compassion for the Honourable Richard Bunnard, that fair-haired, frank-eyed, simple-minded young man, whose nickname, Bunny, appeared even to the eye of affection so entirely suitable. For his youth and good nature, for his docility, for the irresponsible levity that even the Fairfield atmosphere could not entirely inhibit, and still more for the less definite charm he unconsciously exercised over her, Sheila conceived a liking that trembled sometimes dangerously on the verge of tenderness. She was stirred by his voluntary surrender of his personality into the grasping hands of Hypatia, the high-priestess of a new oracle, and trembled at the thought of his being immolated, a blood sacrifice, upon that godless altar. But, most of all, the memory of his music troubled the deep cool waters of her mind. She sought in him often, and sometimes for a fleeting instant found, the transfigured face of the violinist who had once laid his spell upon her.

She swayed for a while between these two magnetic points: Edward’s intellectuality and Bunny’s manifest need for being looked after; but if the one’s self-sufficiency sometimes repelled her the other’s comparative vacuity of mind no less tried her patience. With such an alternative, perhaps her womanhood would have urged her irresistibly towards Bunny, in spite of discouraging precedent, had not that youth remained unaware of her claim to be anything more exciting (and that was exciting enough, no doubt) than Hypatia’s friend.

‘If only he had Edward’s brains as well as his own niceness,’ Sheila said to herself; and humour compelled her to add, self-scornfully: ‘Well, what if he had? He’d perhaps be even more indifferent to me than he is now.’ And that would have been hard; for his absorption in Hypatia was so complete that he could even sing her praises in little solitary interviews with Sheila contrived for that very purpose.

‘Don’t you think she’s very clever?’ he said one day, incredulous of a hint of criticism.

‘I know she’s got wonderful brains,’ Sheila assured him. ‘But at present I believe they’re under a cloud. That sounds horribly dogmatic, I expect. But I really think Hypatia’s a little bit of a fanatic nowadays.’

He rebelled against that. ‘She’s an enthusiast, if you like.’

Sheila smiled. ‘Perhaps that’s all. I suppose fanaticism’s only the name we give to the other person’s enthusiasm.’

‘I must say she often puzzles me,’ admitted Bunny. ‘You know her very well, don’t you?’

‘Not so well as you do, I expect.’

‘Oh, but you were at school with her,’ he urged.

‘That’s five, six, seven years ago.’

‘Still....’ He ached to believe that Sheila out of the fulness of her knowledge of Hypatia could help him. ‘Do you think she’s capable of liking anybody?’

‘Liking?’ The clear inadequacy of the word arrested her.

‘Liking very much, I mean, don’t you see? It’s this way: supposing you wanted....’ He waited as if for her to help him out. But she rather pointedly didn’t. ‘She seems so aloof very often, don’t you think?’

To this mild proposition Sheila assented. ‘A little cold, you think, perhaps?’ She guided his stumbling feet thus far.

‘Cold, but not,’ he hoped, ‘incapable of—well, affection, as it were.’

Sheila agreed gravely that ‘incapable’ would be too absolute a word.

‘She is very fine-looking.’ He had the air of submitting this idea for her acceptation.

‘Fine is quite the right epithet,’ Sheila assured this incredible youth. ‘She has always been fearless; you can see that in her face. And she had a sense of humour once.’ To herself she added: ‘Am I so very maternal that he must confide in me?’

After a brief transitional hovering, when he was neither quite in Sheila’s company nor definitely out of it, he went away, no doubt to treasure all these things in his heart, leaving Sheila in a state that oscillated between amusement and a half-ashamed regret. And that night Hypatia, joining her friend in the spacious bedroom that they shared, displayed unwonted animation. Whether it was Bunny or the stirring in its sleep of old friendship that loosened her tongue, Sheila patiently waited to have revealed to her.

Hypatia was in a reminiscential mood. She sat on Sheila’s bed and talked of Selborne days, of feuds with Miss Fry, of Sheila’s Aunt Hester, and of what little she knew of Kay. She appeared rather to dwell on Kay. She called up once-familiar faces from the pit of oblivion and set them again speaking forgotten parts. And presently, without preamble, she remarked: ‘There’s more in Bunny than he allows to appear, don’t you think?’

‘Very likely,’ Sheila said, sleepily. ‘But you know him so much better than I.’

‘He’s ductile,’ said Hypatia, rather consciously selecting the word.

‘Too much so,’ Sheila ventured. ‘How beautifully he plays the violin. That night at the Folk Dancing he was wonderful.’

‘Yes. In his way he’s quite a genius. Though of course this musical glamour is not really healthy. It’s a kind of delusion, a magnetism. In Real Knowledge it doesn’t exist.’

‘He’s rather marvellous, your friend Bunny,’ Sheila said tritely, chilled by Hypatia’s eternal prosing.

‘He’s a very nice boy. But under mother’s thumb at present. I shall change that.’

Sheila shivered. ‘You! How?’

‘He proposed to me to-night.’

Sheila was dumbstruck for a moment. Then, ‘You’re very calm about it,’ she said. ‘Did you...?’

‘Not yet. But if I do accept him there’ll be a fine tussle with mother.’

‘Doesn’t your mother like him?’

‘Immensely. But mother has an inordinate appetite for affection. She’s like a spider with a fly. She won’t share him.’

‘How bitterly you speak!’

Hypatia loftily repudiated the suggestion. ‘Not at all. I’m merely stating a fact. You will see, if you’re here long enough.’

‘Poor Bunny!’ said Sheila.

‘Oh, don’t worry about him. I shan’t let mother gobble him up, you may be sure.’

‘I’m sure you won’t,’ Sheila replied, biting her lip. ‘You’ll marry him sooner than that.’

But irony was lost on Hypatia. ‘Mother shan’t have him,’ she reiterated.

5

Edward found the presence of another person distracting. The dictation of his book was soon abandoned, and he pursued his solitary way. Yet not solitary, for he was not unconscious that his solitude had been invaded, destroyed; and he was not yet sure whether he liked or resented the invasion. In spirit another walked by his side. For Sheila this book, child of his brain, became a living thing to be thought about with a reverent excitement. She was still enough of a child to find this making of books miraculous: it was like that creation of something out of nothing which the church attributed to God. The best of Edward went into his book, and Sheila was quick to remember this in his defence when vitality or humour seemed lacking in him. He worked with clocklike regularity. He wrote from nine till twelve-thirty. He resumed work, after lunch, at one-thirty and wrote till, at half-past four, some toast and tea was brought to him on a tray. For this refreshment he allowed himself twenty minutes, and for ten minutes he systematically did nothing. From five till seven was his final daily spell.

Seven o’clock released him from his self-imposed task. At half-past seven he dined with his family, and having dined was free to cultivate such social amenities as he did not utterly despise. He formed the habit of seeking out Sheila; he persuaded her to go for walks with him: strenuous almost racing walks, conscientious and concentrated exercise, essential to the maintenance of physical and therefore mental fitness. She, glad of an antidote for the daily dose of omniscience forced down her throat by Hypatia, welcomed this new friendship. She was a willing and intelligent listener; the quickness of her mind delighted him, and his appreciation evoked an answering delight in her. The variety and colour of her thinking, a habit she had of investing with emotion even the dry bones of argument, provided a foil for Edward’s exact logic. She took imaginative leaps in metaphysical speculation, while he plodded laboriously on from point to point, never retracing a step. They sharpened their wits against each other and felt marvellously stimulated by the process. And still it was of the book, and of cognate subjects, that he talked, in an unending torrent of discourse. He involved himself in sentences so prodigious that Sheila sometimes got lost in a labyrinth of phrases and subordinate clauses. More than once she felt rising in her a secret impatience; she even got to the point of contemplating the discontinuance of an intercourse that became daily more overpowering. Yet looking back, as the days passed, upon that vista of intimate, flushed, excited talk, she could not find heart to cut adrift from him; moreover, he had made her feel, not without a sense of her presumption, that she had somehow become necessary to his literary scheme. These enormously distended monologues of his helped him to clarify his thought, and her occasional interpolated criticism freshened his dialectic processes. She felt a certain responsibility for him.

Mrs. Fairfield observed this ripening intimacy with a curious admixture of benevolence and displeasure. One evening she came upon her son and Sheila sauntering in the garden together a few minutes before seven, and smiled at her guest with an inimical glint in her eye.

‘Sheila dear,’ she said bitter-sweetly, ‘you mustn’t take my son from his work.’

Sheila, flushing with resentment, could make no reply.

‘Mother,’ said Edward, neither hotly nor coldly, ‘you interrupt the thread of my argument.’

Mrs. Fairfield flashed a point of jealous fire at Sheila, who turned on her heel, biting her lips in vexation. She was astounded and ashamed by this momentary and involuntary revelation of a woman’s soul.

Edward followed her without an instant’s hesitation.

‘See you at dinner, mother,’ he said casually, over his shoulder.... ‘The matter is not quite so simple as that,’ he went on, speaking to the girl at his side. ‘The vitalist hypothesis has implications that lie deeper than that altogether, and that run, in my opinion, altogether counter to the ascertained facts of experience. Chemical analysis....’

Sheila let him ramble on, grateful that he took no notice of her evident embarrassment. She wished he had left her. She wanted to escape from the intolerable sense of having been delivered an insulting ultimatum, a warning, by Edward’s detestable mother. Yes, Edward’s detestable mother: that was how she thought of the woman in whose mien she had read ‘Hands off my property!’ Her instinct was to run away from the house and never return; but slowly, as Edward’s sentences gathered length and momentum, she came to regard such an action as merely melodramatic.

She cut one of his clauses in half by asking abruptly: ‘What did your mother mean by that?’

He was pulled up short, and left floundering.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sheila; ‘I’m very rude. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of what your mother said. What makes her hate me so?’

‘Hate you! Dear me, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re too sensitive. Mother is hurt because I give my confidence to you and not to her. Don’t worry about her. She’ll have to get used to it.’

‘Oh no, she won’t. I am going home to-morrow.’

‘To-morrow?’

‘I had already arranged to, you know,’ Sheila untruthfully assured him.

‘I hope you will stay longer,’ he said earnestly. ‘If mother has offended you she shall apologize. I’ll see to it.’

‘Pray do nothing of the kind. And let’s drop the subject.... Won’t you forgive my inattention and tell me what you were saying?’

They had by now reached a remote part of the garden, a part from which the house was hidden by a mass of sweet peas clustering over trelliswork. A rustic seat on the gravel path by the trim croquet-lawn invited them to rest.

‘By the way,’ he said, when they had sat down. ‘I’ve finished the magnum opus.’

‘Finished!’ she exclaimed, glowing with excited pleasure. ‘How fine! Aren’t you tremendously glad?’

‘It’s a relief,’ he admitted. ‘I shall take a week’s rest and then start the revision.’

She, exulting still in the accomplished work, could spare no thought for the revision.

‘How jolly to have finished! You didn’t tell me you were near the end?’

‘Ah, you’d forgotten then.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘I told you a fortnight ago that I should finish on the thirteenth of this month.’

She was suitably astonished.

‘You mean to say you knew to a day?’

‘I work on a programme, you see,’ he said, relishing her surprised admiration.

Now that the work was done he seemed to have time for human weaknesses. This unexpected boyish vanity made Sheila like him more than she had ever done before.

‘I suppose you’re pleased with yourself now!’ she mocked him gently.

‘Very!’ he confessed. They both laughed.

‘There was another thing that might have told you,’ he said. ‘I came out of my room before seven o’clock to-night. Have you ever known that happen before?’

‘You see, my watch had stopped,’ she explained. ‘So that is what your mother——’

‘Probably.’

‘Why didn’t you explain to her?’ she asked him.

‘I refuse to propitiate her,’ he said. ‘Besides, I wanted you to know first.’

She was silent.

‘Sheila,’ he said gently, ‘we could do such a lot together!’

She began to rise from her seat, but he placed on her knee a strong and strangely reassuring hand.

‘It’s a year since your last visit to us, isn’t it?’

Sheila found her voice, a very small voice now, and answered ‘Yes.’

‘Well, a year ago I made up my mind to ask you to marry me. Will you?’

There was a teeming silence. Sheila’s mind was in a whirl. There seemed something wanting in the richness of this moment, a disconcerting gap in the happiness that had come within her reach. But another feeling conquered. She looked at him with her heart in her eyes.

‘If I can help you.... Oh, Edward, I do want to help you!’

‘My dear!’ he said. He kissed her cheek in warm brotherly fashion. ‘We shall be very happy together, you and I.’ He took her hand in his.

For a moment they contemplated this prospective happiness without speaking. The gong summoned them to dinner.

Sheila accompanied Edward into the house with a numbed feeling in one corner of her mind. She could not banish a vague half-formed doubt that had crept into the heart of her new happiness. There was so much that was fine, so much that was bracing, about her relationship with Edward, and she told herself that this lurking discontent was mere perversity. A feeling of comradeliness struggled with a sense of chill. She was to be his friend, his wife, the partner of his life’s work; they were intellectually in tune: what more could she ask of life? What was this secret craving for tenderness, for romance, but a foolish lapse into the sentimental dreaming of her school-days? Edward offered her in abundance what that boy-lover Kay Wilton had been so conspicuously unable to offer: the sympathy of an alert mind. Sympathy and comradeship—were not these the fairest flowers of life? The rest were gaudy hothouse plants, nurtured in an artificial warmth and unable to endure the healthy rigours of continual daily intimacy.

She tried by such reflections to still the whispering voice within her; nevertheless she was not herself during dinner, and it was with a catch of the breath, afterwards, that she heard Edward announce their betrothal to his parents. Stated coldly, the compact had the terrifying air of something irrevocable. She controlled with effort an impulse to flee from the room.

Mrs. Fairfield was exclamatory and encouraging, and Mr. Fairfield vaguely echoed his wife’s expressions of pleasure. Mrs. Fairfield opened her plump arms and wrapped them round Sheila as though taking permanent possession of her.

‘My dear Sheila!’ she exclaimed. ‘A new daughter for me!’

From that capacious and efficient embrace Sheila emerged with a sense of having been rescued from a yawning gulf. The one thought in her mind was that she did not wish to be a daughter to Mrs. Fairfield. She felt that Edward’s mother would as readily take, if she could, the globe itself into that large embrace, and exult greedily in her newly-acquired property, like a child with a big ball that it may bounce to its heart’s content.

‘Now that is nice!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Very pleasant arrangement indeed! Well, well!’

A diversion was created by the entry of Bunny. He tried to conceal an air of desperate purpose under the affectation of breeziness.

‘Hullo, by Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘How are you, Mrs. Fairfield? How are you, sir? How do, Ted? And how are you, Miss Dyrle? Myself, I’m jolly fine. Thanks for kind inquiries.’

‘That’s a comfort anyhow,’ said Mrs. Fairfield grimly. ‘You seem a little upset.’

‘Upset! Me!’ cried Bunny. He calmed a little to add: ‘Bit excited perhaps. Got some news for you, Mrs. Fairfield.’

‘Ha!’ The light of triumph gleamed in Mrs. Fairfield’s eye. ‘You’ve agreed to be president of the Workers’ Federation after all.’

‘No, not exactly.’

‘You haven’t!’ Mrs. Fairfield became the picture of righteous indignation. ‘You refuse to do a little thing like that for me, when your name would be so valuable to us!’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to my father. He’s a bit old-fashioned, I dare say, but there it is. He can’t help being an earl. He makes rather a point of my not getting too deep in the movement.’

The Honourable Richard Bunnard stood on one toe and twirled once round to assure every one that he was perfectly at ease.

‘Please don’t fidget, Bunny, when you’re talking to me, even though I am only an old woman. Once again I ask you, and for the last time: will you do the right thing, the public-spirited thing?’

Bunny tried to soothe the exasperated lady.

‘My dear Mrs. Fairfield, I’ve already promised my father.’

The storm burst.

‘Your father! Fiddlesticks your father! Hypatia’s at the bottom of this!’

‘Don’t get excited, mother,’ urged Edward.

‘I will, I will,’ retorted his mother. ‘I’ve a perfect right to get excited. You young people, you’ve got hearts of stone. All the love we mothers lavish on you is nothing to you. Do we get any gratitude? Not a bit! Scorn, yes, plenty of it! Scorn of our grey hairs and our silly ways and our ignorance. But gratitude—the last thing in the world.... Some chit of a girl comes....’

Edward shrugged his shoulders in cold disgust.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mrs. Fairfield. There was an ominous pause. Her husband rushed towards her.

‘It’s all right, me dear. I’ve got you safe and sound. Sit down and have a bit of a rest.’

The afflicted lady sighed.

‘She’s going to faint,’ cried Mr. Fairfield. ‘Why didn’t you let her have her way, you young devils, you!’

‘Of course she’s going to faint,’ said Edward. ‘That is the last scene of the melodrama.’

Sheila watched the scene with a mixture of indignation and compassion. The indignation was short-lived: it died suddenly at sight of Edward’s complete detachment. He seemed utterly devoid of the filial sentiment that would have made allowances for his mother. For she was, after all, his mother, Sheila reflected. She had faced death to bring him into the world. He was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: for him she had spent herself, and he was still the centre of her life. Had Edward shewn anger, Sheila would have been wholeheartedly with him, but this cold disdain, this resolute refusal to be stirred a hair’s breadth either to pity or to wrath seemed to Sheila’s warmer heart almost inhuman, although it extorted from her an unwilling admiration.

‘I think I’d better clear out,’ said Bunny, moving towards the door. ‘Sorry to have been the cause of a disturbance.’

But Mrs. Fairfield’s recovery was as abrupt as her collapse had been. From the arm-chair into which her husband had placed her she urged the young man to stay.

‘Don’t go, Bunny. I’m better now. It was my son upset me, not you. Come and tell me your news?’

She spoke in a languid faded tone, the tone of one bearing bravely an immense burden of wrongs.

‘Well ...’ began Bunny nervously, glancing towards Sheila.

Edward, intercepting the glance, asked: ‘Are we de trop, Bunny?’

Mr. Fairfield intervened. ‘Edward and Miss Dyrle have just come to an understanding, Bunny.’

‘An understanding?’ asked Bunny.

‘Yes. Bit of sweethearting, you know.’

‘Really!’ cried Bunny, beaming. ‘I congratulate you. Well, that makes it easier for me. There’ll be a double event.’

‘A what?’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield, all the languor gone from her.

‘You see,’ Bunny explained, ‘I’m engaged to be married.’

‘Well I declare!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Engaged! Why, everybody’s getting engaged. Time we set about it, mother, eh?’

Edward made a congratulatory noise. Only Mrs. Fairfield was silent, watching Bunny with feline intentness.

‘Well,’ she said sharply. ‘Who’s the young lady, Bunny?’

Bunny, with his hands in his pockets agitating a bunch of keys, stood first on one leg and then on the other.

‘That was what I came for,’ he said, blushing, ‘to ask your blessing, don’t you know. You see, Hypatia....’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Fairfield curtly. ‘What about Hypatia?’

Even the amiable Bunny had not unlimited patience.

‘Hypatia?’ he said. ‘Well, nothing about her. You asked me who was the young lady. I’ve told you.’

‘Hypatia!’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield.

‘Exactly,’ answered Bunny, and strode out of the room.

‘Herbert!’ cried Mrs. Fairfield to her husband. ‘Go after him. At once. Hypatia shan’t have him. She shan’t!’

‘You’d better faint again, mother,’ remarked Edward.

‘Oh, Edward, how can you!’ cried Sheila, stung to speech.

She beckoned him to the bay window, as Mrs. Fairfield followed her husband to the door.

‘Edward,’ Sheila said, ‘are you sure you want me?’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘You know I do.’

Sheila felt that her question needed an apology. ‘It’s only that I hate to cause a fuss. Your mother does loathe me, I’m sure.’

He took both her hands in his for a moment. ‘Sheila, you’re not going to forsake me, are you?’

‘Not ... if you really care,’ she answered in a low voice.

Mrs. Fairfield from the passage stepped back into the room.

‘Children!’ she muttered, regarding the lovers with malevolence, ‘children ... no, vipers!’

Her husband returned, followed by Bunny wrapped in his dignity and by Hypatia armed with invincible placidity.

‘Now understand this,’ began Mrs. Fairfield. ‘We old folk refuse to be ignored. We just won’t put up with this insulting behaviour. You think we don’t count, but we’ll see. Bunny, let’s hear no more of this nonsense about marrying Hypatia. You shall not marry her. You’re a young snob. And Sheila shan’t marry my Edward either. I won’t be robbed of my children by young stuck-up creatures who despise me and my husband because we’re in trade.’

‘What a wicked lie!’ exclaimed Sheila, with flashing eyes. ‘You know we don’t despise you! Everybody’s parents are in trade ... except Bunny’s, I suppose.’

‘Herbert!... Edward! Will you stand here and hear this girl call your mother a wicked liar?’

‘Where do you want me to stand?’ enquired Edward. ‘Besides, I’m not Sheila’s controller. I’m not even her parent.’

‘You will leave my son alone,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, struggling with her rising passion. ‘Marry the Honourable Richard, if you want to marry.’

‘But that would still leave Edward and Hypatia unmarried,’ objected Bunny, lapsing into weak humour. ‘They can’t marry each other, you know.’

‘And you leave Hypatia alone!’ Hypatia’s mother turned upon Bunny. ‘I’ll make father disinherit them both if they disobey me.’

‘Is that all you have to say, mother?’ asked Hypatia, with the patient smile of the Christian Scientist.

‘No, it is not....’

‘Well, it’s quite enough,’ Hypatia assured her. ‘Come along, Bunny. Come and buy the licence.’

Without a word, the young man followed Hypatia out of the room.

The flame of battle was awake now in Sheila’s heart, burning away all lingering reluctance, all doubts and fears. If there was to be a feud, there was no doubt upon which side she would fight. Age had declared war upon Youth, and all the spirit in her woke to the challenge. Edward, her comrade, was being threatened with disinheritance. Sheila knew now that she was irrevocably his: a hint of doubt would have been shameful treason. She forgot the cold formality of his attitude to his mother: she remembered only his strength, his glorious unyielding strength.

‘Look here, mother,’ Edward was saying, ‘you’ll have to readjust your ideas a little.’ He waved aside a hysterical interruption. ‘No, it’s no use indulging in heroics: your storming only makes me tired. Storm in a teacup, that’s all. Listen to me.’

Mrs. Fairfield turned her back on him.

‘Yes, listen like that, if you wish. It’s extraordinarily rude, but never mind. I was saying that you’ve got to readjust your ideas a little. They’re about a hundred years behind the times. We young people, as you call us, have as much right to live as you, and as much right to freedom.’

His mother wheeled round swiftly. ‘Freedom! You’ve had too much freedom!’

‘Please don’t interrupt,’ said Edward. ‘There’s been quite enough shouting and stamping. I want you to reason the thing out calmly. Freedom consists in being left alone, left with room to grow, not in being penned round with affection and told every minute of the day that of course we can do as we like if we don’t love mother and father.’

‘You’re hitting too hard,’ whispered Sheila.

‘You think,’ Edward continued, ‘because you’ve born and bred us and sacrificed yourself for us that Hypatia and I belong to you.’

‘Oh no, you don’t belong to me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield in fierce sarcasm. ‘I’m only your mother: that’s all.’

‘Precisely,’ said Edward. ‘Our mother, not our owner. We belong to nobody. We have our separate lives to live, and we intend to live them in our own way.’

‘You’re mine, mine, mine!’ protested his mother. ‘Don’t you feel any common gratitude for what I’ve done for you? I gave you life; I fed you with my body; and now—is this the end?’

‘Those are services that cannot be repaid,’ he answered, without any trace of emotion. ‘If in return for what you did for me I had to submit to be your doll for ever, it were better that I had not been born at all.’

‘Brutal, brutal!’ interjected his father, waking from a spell of bewilderment.

‘Perhaps,’ conceded Edward, ‘but it’s nature. Nature is brutal. Do you think that because you gave me life, as you say, that you have the right to take it away, or smother it, or confine it, at your pleasure? You shut your eyes to logical inference. See to what absurd conclusions your wild unreasoning would lead you if you dared follow it to the end. Time and again civilization has been hindered in its march....’

For a moment Sheila ceased her loyal silent applause to ask herself: Why does Edward talk like a parliamentary candidate? But Mrs. Fairfield quickly distracted her attention from that question.