Part 10

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

‘Liked anyone?’

‘A boy, I mean.’

‘Why, of course, Edward----’

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

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

‘Well, yes, in love.’

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

‘Oh, I just wondered.’

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘Did he know?’

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

‘Do you mean it’s over now?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did you lose your heart at once?’

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

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

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

Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.

‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Frightfully thick those woods are,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

Hypatia listened, slightly frowning.

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

‘Told you?’

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

Her voice died away into silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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