Part 12

‘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:

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul--

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!’