Part 14

After tea they went out into the sandy paddock and talked for an hour of indifferent things, of trains, of luggage, of books and bad music ... until a stillness fell, heralding dusk. Evening became personal and urgent to enfold them: they could hear in the wash of the water, rhythmically plashing the sand, the rise and fall of her bosom; they could feel her breath sweeter than apples in the autumn air. And all the skies that during the past weeks of stolen companionship they had seen together, all the tides they had watched moving upon the shore, became fused with that sky, with that tide; all the hours of their comradeship were gathered up into that hour. They surrendered themselves to the embracing arms of silence.

To Sheila it was as if infinity had been spilled into time: the moments throbbed by, brimming with beauty, until the silence that these two guarded became a music, a poem, a flower of loveliness. It was a flower that budded and blossomed till their vision dimmed with the glory of it, a flower that burst and fell scattering pollen and perfume.

He bent towards her, with cheeks flaming. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said, and for a moment could not go on. To Sheila life was become exquisitely unreal, a work of art. ‘You must know,’ he said brokenly, ‘that I adore you.’

Compassionately she laid her cool hand on his.

‘Yes,’ she said, in a low tone tenderly soothing.

‘Ah!’ His breath fluttered. She gave him her trembling lips.

They kissed, first, like boy and girl, timidly; then like comrades united after a long parting; again, and a red splendour flamed through the throbbing world. He lifted her into his arms, and divine madness seized her. He carried her with strong unfaltering stride into the house.

And this day, which they had called the end, was really the beginning. She returned on the morrow to Edward’s house and confided to her husband that she wished him to divorce her. Edward listened patiently, like the disinterested friend he was; but his disinterestedness made her pride wince, and the old hated surroundings were bleak about her. Yet on that night of her return, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she undressed with a new joy. She stood nude before the wardrobe mirror and gazed with awe upon the pure rounded loveliness of her own form. She stroked gently her white velvet skin. Her body, so long disdained, had become sacred to her again. As she laid her head, that kingdom of heaven, upon her pillow, and murmured Stephen’s name, Stephen himself, in a suburb fourteen miles away, posted his weekly letter to the girl--no adventuress, she--who was to become his wife and the mother of his only son. For Stephen, too, was back in the old routine, enfolded and pressed close to the bosom of his family, conscious of his mother’s eyes watching him with an angry solicitude. Not without a struggle did he succumb. To Grace, whose pretty simplicity no longer held him, he hinted dire things; but at the first gesture of suffering from her he winced, and surrendered. And he wrote to Sheila in his best literary style. She carried the letter, as she had carried its predecessors, into the summer-house, that she might commune with her lover undisturbed.

‘Darling,’ she read, ‘the thought of how I must hurt you is hell to me.’

She caught her breath, looked once upon the sky, and then bent her eyes again to receive the blow....

With mind benumbed she looked up from the fastidious caligraphy to find Stephen himself standing, like a whipped dog, before her. For a moment they strangely stared.

‘Why have you come?’

He broke out into self-pity. ‘Oh, I can’t bear it. Don’t for God’s sake look like that.... I couldn’t leave you without a word from your lips.’

She tried to harden her heart. ‘Is that all?’

His hands made a helpless gesture. ‘I’m such a despicable coward. I’ve lived always among dreams. Real life is too hard for me--I’d be better dead.’

‘Why have you come?’ she asked. ‘Have you anything to add to this?’ She held out his letter. ‘Why not leave it at that?’

‘I had to see you,’ he said. ‘I had to ask your forgiveness. I hoped to get here before that thing. Oh, how detestable I am!’

He dropped on to the seat beside her and sat, hunched and shaking, a figure of desolation.

‘Never mind,’ said Sheila firmly. ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk. You’re quite free now to go back to her. And you’ve done me no harm.’

He stammered in amazement. ‘You can say that! Don’t you see how contemptible I am! I would like to kill myself!’

He brooded on that thought. Death was the only escape from his own insufferable egoism. Then he began to perceive that he was extracting enjoyment even from the savour of his own self-loathing. He was rolling the bitterness round on his tongue till it had a certain sweetness for him. He was indulging in an orgy of painful emotions that was delicious to the very egoism it wounded. He was discovering hitherto unplumbed depths in his nature and being fascinated by the stupendous spectacle of his own soul’s suffering. And he knew that the experience was far too morbidly interesting to drive him to suicide.

The perception of his self-pity afflicted Sheila with a new and more sickening pain. Something of this change must have been visible in her face, for with a manifest effort he became calm, and began speaking in more normal tones.

‘Perhaps we shall be glad afterwards,’ he said slowly. ‘The scandal would have killed my mother....’

Sheila winced. ‘Oh, Stephen, are you trying to make me hate you? Why did you say that?...’

‘Why----’

‘Why do you talk in that unreal way? Why do you pretend ... try at the last moment to blind me with false pious reasoning!’

‘But what I said about my mother----’

‘--Was false as water. You didn’t mean a word of it. You are too dreadfully sorry for yourself to care about your mother. You’re breaking faith, and because it hurts you you’re trying to feel good about it. God knows I haven’t disputed your decision--nor even blamed you for it. But now, please go!’

He rose. ‘I am not to come back?’

‘No, no. Go away.’

‘But, Sheila----’

‘Why will you torture me so?’ she cried. ‘It’s your own choice. If only you’d never come to-night--it would have been so much kinder.’

‘Oh, I can’t bear this!’ He trembled towards her.

She rose, to confront him with lustreless eyes.

‘Are you made of straw? Can you neither take me nor leave me?... Good-bye.’

‘God, how you hate me now!’ he murmured, as she swept past him.

She paused to say: ‘That should be nothing to you. But it’s not true. You have done me no harm. I had never known happiness before you came ... but,’ she added, with his child in her womb, ‘I shall soon forget, and you will have made no difference. None at all.’

She stumbled out into the hateful sunlight and went, half-running, towards the house.

3

In Edward’s house, and with Edward’s bored approval--for he was busy at the time on a scathing history of the Jesuits--Stephen’s child was born. And, in the triumph that followed agony, the spirit of Sheila rose from the dead. Four years later, determined to purge herself of bitterness, she visited the scene of her love. When she entered the paddock again, her silent but excited child at her side, her eyes filled with tears at the sight of the old romantic disorder that had once so charmed her. ‘These poppies,’ her heart said, ‘are children of flowers that witnessed our love.’ The paddock was shut in on three sides by a hedge of briar. In the long rank grass numberless weeds had rioted unchecked for many years, and the hand of the picnicker lay heavy on the land. A medley of docks, nettles, thistles, poppies, empty cigarette packets, paper bags, ginger-beer bottles, and corks, greeted Sheila’s eyes. ‘What a pickle!’ she said.

‘What a lovely pickle, Sheila,’ the little girl echoed. She began collecting corks with the solemnity of an elderly spinster gathering a cautionary nosegay for a drunkard’s grave. This was a simile that Sheila, gravely nonsensical, suggested to Rosemary, who with perfect dignity assented. ‘How fortunate that Edward isn’t here to be shocked by my vulgarity,’ Sheila thought.

Entering the house she found there matter for surprise: a greasy plate, a crust of bread, and a breakfast cup, caked with tannin, standing ankle-deep in a saucer half-full of spilt tea. The next moment Mrs. Boddy arrived, a little red berry of humanity to whom had been entrusted a duplicate key and the duty of preparing the place for habitation.

‘Oh, ma’am!’ said Mrs. Boddy. ‘To think that you should have got ’ere before me, without a bit of tea ready or nothing.’ The sight of those inglorious festal remains was the culminating assault on her feelings. ‘There! Just look at that.’

Sheila nodded, smiling. ‘Some one’s been here evidently. The question is, Who?’

‘And how?’ added Mrs. Boddy. ‘’Ow?’ she repeated, by way of emphasis. ‘And oh,’ she cried, enveloping Rosemary, ‘here’s the dear little ducky duck. Hasn’t she got a kiss for the wicked old woman that didn’t get her mother’s tea ready?’

Having released Rosemary, Mrs. Boddy stood brooding. ‘There’s been a man here. One of those persons of the tramp class.’

After a moment’s contemplation of this hypothetical tramp, ‘It’s not at all nice,’ she added, and drew away from the polluted table. ‘You might be murdered in your beds.’

‘Well, if one must be murdered, one could hardly choose a more comfortable place,’ said Sheila. ‘Let’s try to make a fire to boil the kettle on, shall we? I’m longing for my tea.’

Mrs. Boddy became the embodiment of bustle. She shot out of the house in search of dry sticks for the fire.

‘And do you know what I would do if I were you, ma’am?’ she enquired, reappearing after a brief and successful forage. ‘I’d have my tea and go straight back to town. Straight back. I wouldn’t stay another minute.’

‘Not stay!’ echoed Sheila in weak astonishment. ‘Not stay for a holiday?’

‘Not to be murdered, I wouldn’t.’

‘After coming all this way?’

‘Not to be murdered,’ repeated Mrs. Boddy firmly.

‘But perhaps we shan’t be murdered.’

‘You mark my words,’ Mrs. Boddy admonished her.

Sheila laughed. ‘I’m not going to be frightened away by a dirty cup and saucer.’

‘Well, let’s hope for the best,’ said Mrs. Boddy, with an unexpected access of cheerfulness. ‘And after all, if anything nasty _does_ happen, I’m not above half a mile away, am I?’

She emerged, goggle-eyed, from the pantry.

‘And blest if me lord haven’t helped himself to the stores I got in for you!’ she exclaimed, shrilly indignant; and then, with lingering pathos: ‘Oh, _ma’am_!’

After tea Mrs. Boddy went home, and Sheila took her child into the belittered paddock, and sat in a deck-chair, crocheting, and watching the shadows lengthen, while Rosemary in her busily silent fashion wandered in the long grasses. From time to time the little girl took an occasional bite out of an apple with which Mrs. Boddy had sought to win her regard, until she made a discovery that sent her running to her mother, somewhat sternly demanding why she had been given an apple from which the cork had not been removed. Later, the paddock was invaded by a sleek brown dog with melancholy eyes, velvet ears, and a general air of unctuous virtue, with whom Rosemary instantly made friends.

‘What a dear dog,’ she said, returning to Sheila’s chair after spending twenty minutes in the company of this engaging creature.

‘Yes. He seems at home here,’ replied Sheila, thinking of Mrs. Boddy’s tramp.

‘Of _course_ he’s at home,’ said the child with magisterial emphasis. ‘I asked him to make himself at home. And he did.’

‘How friendly of him.’ Sheila’s eyes drank in eagerly the absurd delicious gravity of Rosemary’s thought-puckered face. ‘I wonder what his name is.’

‘His name,’ answered the child casually, ‘is Poker.’ After a pause she added: ‘Poker Morgan his name is. He’s just come home from school.’ Sheila waited with becoming seriousness for further details of Poker Morgan’s eventful life. ‘He goes to school every day,’ Rosemary went on. ‘Every day except Sunday. On Sunday he doesn’t go to school, he doesn’t. He stays at home with his mother.’

‘How nice for Mrs. Morgan,’ said Sheila. ‘And what does Poker learn at school?’

‘Oh, just lessons; that’s all.’ Rosemary dismissed the question with the air of having sufficiently explained everything. ‘May I have another sponge finger, please, Sheila?’

Irresponsibly light-hearted, Sheila retired to bed, joining Rosemary in the little attic room with the homicidal slanting roof. She stood for some time at the east window, bathing in the moonlight, and looking towards the sea which broke within twenty yards of the crumbling wall. The wind fluttered her night-dress.

Nocturnal calm was abruptly shattered by a beer-thickened voice uttering a passionate demand for admittance. Sheila stepped quickly across the room to the western window.

‘You let me in before yourrurt,’ urged the voice. And Sheila, leaning out of the window, saw a gentleman in baggy corduroys that were tied with string at the knees peering up at her malevolently from under a huge cloth cap. The moon focussed her light upon his impressive figure.

‘Mrs. Boddy’s tramp,’ murmured Sheila, secure in the knowledge of having made fast all doors and windows.

‘I’ll soon show you whose ’ouse it is,’ promised the gentleman in the garden.

‘Please go away,’ Sheila advised him. ‘I’m sure you must be ready for your bed.’

Mrs. Boddy’s tramp found this well-meant counsel literally staggering. He executed a series of curious plunges, and having described a complete circle resumed his original stance.

‘Oh, it’s go away, is it?’

‘It really is,’ Sheila assured him. ‘I’m too tired to entertain a strayed reveller. Please go away. I’m going to shut the window.’

‘Oh, it’s shut the window, is it?...’ enquired the strange gentleman, in a slightly more conciliatory tone. ‘’Oose window? Answer me that.’

But the spirit of nonsense in Sheila had tired itself out. She withdrew into the room, and when the voice broke loose again from its owner’s control, she began to feel impatient. Presently this nuisance would waken Rosemary, and perhaps even frighten her. This fear sent her quickly back to the window.

‘If you don’t go away at once my husband will fetch a policeman.’

‘I’m a Nopper by trade,’ continued the visitor, unaccountably and savagely hurling his cap on the ground. ‘Can’t I turn me head a minute without a mob like you stealing the ’ouse off me back? Answer me that.’

The serene little figure of Rosemary sat up suddenly in bed.

‘Who’s that shouting to you, Sheila?’

‘The gentleman’s a hopper, dear. Go to sleep again, like a good girl.’

‘I don’t like him,’ said Rosemary. ‘Tell Mr. Hopper to go away.’

Sheila shut the window; and after a while the visitor withdrew, leaving behind him a dirty cloth cap and the germ of a new mythology.

* * * * *

In the morning Rosemary found inscrutable but sufficient cause to reverse her condemnation of Mr. Hopper. She spent the odd moments of the next day embellishing the ideal portrait that her surprising young fancy had drawn. At breakfast Mr. Hopper was a nice large gentleman; by lunchtime he was wearing blue spectacles, had developed a taste for sponge fingers, and was clad in a velvet jacket, like Edward’s, with cavernous pockets containing a clockwork train and a woolly-pated black doll. The next day he mysteriously acquired a brown beard and a pair of spotty trousers similar to those of a certain harlequin prominent among Rosemary’s cherished memories, and before the week was out he was provided with a Botticelli halo that added sanctity to an already distinguished appearance. Stories of his wonderful doings began to circulate: how he had travelled in a train to the City to buy feeding-bottles for Rosemary’s children; how his several mothers (a generic term that included wives) had had to physic his cough; and how bravely he could ride elephants. Mr. Hopper had various secondary designations: sometimes he was known as the man with a lot of mothers (a distinction he perhaps derived from Bluebeard); sometimes, more tersely, as ‘my friend’; and sometimes as Poker Morgan’s father. In short Mr. Hopper was canonized; Mr. Hopper became a legend. He went triumphantly upon his swaggering, nonsensical, polygamous, but none the less kindly way in Rosemary’s mind, a figure of flaming glory and infinite adaptability; until abruptly, and without pity, she tired of him and turned to other joys.

On Sunday morning she was taken, for the first time, to church; whence she returned consumingly curious. To Sheila, who had hoped for no more than a vague æsthetic enjoyment, the ceremony had been disappointing. She felt unequal to explaining why Rosemary must on no account bestow the big pockets and spotty trousers of her generous imagination upon members of the Holy Trinity, whose names the little girl had fatally remembered. But blasphemy being so clearly imminent, Sheila addressed herself with a sigh to the task of averting it.

‘Jesus, dear, was the name of a real person, someone who really lived. Not like Mr. Hopper.’

Rosemary’s intense dark eyes grew profoundly reproachful. This lapse from poetic faith on the part of so skilled a fellow-artist as Sheila was terrible. It was as though the whole beautiful city of pretence was threatened with hostile invasion.

‘But Mr. Hopper is real too,’ Rosemary said, with quivering lip.

‘Of course he is,’ agreed Sheila hastily. ‘How silly of me! But he is different. You mustn’t mix him up with these others.’

When some working agreement in this delicate matter had been reached, they went to the beach together to dig sand castles and tell each other stories: an idyllic experience, type of many shared during this magical holiday.

4

Then upon the smooth sands of this quietude Terror planted his ugly hoof. Rosemary was seized with illness. Unaccountably, in spite of Sheila’s lavish care, she had caught a dangerous chill.

Sheila locked up the house, and ran, already feverish with anxiety, to Mrs. Boddy. She arrived breathless, to find that amiable woman with her arms up to the elbows in soapy water.

‘It’s Rosemary--she’s ill,’ gasped Sheila. ‘Please fetch someone quickly.’ She dropped into the nearest chair, breathing hard.

The red hands leaped out of the wash-tub and were rubbed on an immaculate white apron.

‘Pore lamb!’ cried Mrs. Boddy. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

Sheila was now upon her feet again, her breath recovered. ‘I don’t quite know. She caught cold yesterday. I doctored her as best I could. But this morning she’s worse--breathing badly and almost delirious. Please go at once. She’s alone in the house--I’m going back.’

The vision of the sick child calling in vain for its mother stabbed Sheila to an impossible speed. After running a few hundred yards she was overtaken and picked up by a man driving a trap.

Back in the cottage, ‘I must keep calm. I mustn’t lose control of myself,’ she urged upon her wildly beating heart; and she climbed the stairs trying not to be terrified by the deathly silence of the place. When she opened the bedroom door she could hear the sawing noise of the child’s breathing, and fear laid a cold finger on her brain: could that be what they called the death-rattle?

‘Ah,’ she said, half-aloud, ‘if I lose my nerve I shall be useless to her in her greatest need.’ And, deciding that she could do no more, she forced herself to sit down and await with iron patience the doctor’s coming. She wondered whether she would do wrong if she opened the window she had in her first panic shut. The room was unbearably stuffy. ‘Pure air _must_ be better than bad,’ she told herself; and unfastened the catch. The garden seemed full of sunshine and birds and the smell of honeysuckle.

She turned her head at the sound of steps on the stairs. ‘At last!’

A commanding and resolute female figure appeared in the doorway: Edward’s sister, Hypatia.

‘Well, Sheila,’ said Hypatia, humorously grim. ‘You keep open house, I see.’

Sheila stared, unable and uncaring to hide her disappointment. ‘Oh, you mean my leaving the front door open. That’s for the doctor.’

Hypatia stepped into the room. ‘Something’s wrong.’ Her tone became gentle as her glance fell upon Rosemary. ‘Rosemary--she’s ill?’

‘Yes ... Rosemary.’ Sheila’s voice lingeringly caressed the name.

‘Poor little kid,’ Hypatia murmured. ‘What is it?’

In an undertone Sheila began repeating her simple story. ‘Oh, I do wish the doctor would come!’ she broke off. ‘It may be pneumonia or something even more dreadful.’

Instantly forgetting Hypatia, she paced to the door and began running downstairs. And at that moment a trap drew up outside the house, and the doctor entered, followed at a respectful distance by Mrs. Boddy. He was a tall curvilinear man with a stoop and an air of intense preoccupation. With a perfunctory response to Sheila’s eager greeting he followed her upstairs. Furtively, with eyes veiling mistrust, she watched him approach the bedside.

Twenty seconds later her feelings towards him had totally changed. He won her heart by the smile that flickered for a moment in his face at first sight of his patient, and by the gentleness with which he unclasped Rosemary’s fingers from the woolly bear that her arm embraced. Sheila gave herself to the answering of his professional questions.

* * * * *

Her fears a little stilled by the doctor’s reassurances, she surrendered to Hypatia’s importunity by withdrawing with her into the garden for a few moments.

‘Now, Sheila, my dear,’ Hypatia urged, taking her arm with a sisterly caressing, ‘you’re not to worry. Worry’s fatal. The kid’s going to get well quite soon.’

‘Do you really think so?’ asked Sheila, pathetically eager.

Hypatia feigned exasperated wonder. ‘Well, I’m dashed!’ she exclaimed, in the old school-girl tone of nearly forty years ago. ‘What’s the good of calling in a doctor and paying him ridiculous fees if you don’t believe what he tells you? Didn’t Mr. New Moon say she’d be out of bed in a fortnight?’

‘With care,’ supplemented Sheila, on whose brain the doctor’s words were indelibly written.

‘Of course, with care. Without care we should all come to grief.’

Sheila faintly smiled. ‘Do you remember when you so hotly denied the reality of sin, sickness, and death?’

‘Ah, that’s long ago,’ said Hypatia good-humouredly. ‘I’ve had a varied career since then. Still, we live and learn.’

‘What’s the latest?’ asked Sheila.

‘The latest?’

‘The latest religious nostrum.’

‘Back in the fold for a time.’ Hypatia seemed to enjoy the new-found pleasure of poking fun at herself. ‘Do you remember Herbert Spencer, Sheila? But one can’t rest there. For me it’s Woman Suffrage now. It’s got to come. And I’m reading Butler again. Good stuff. _Life and Habit_ especially, and _Unconscious Memory_. Jumps on Darwin for having banished mind from the universe. But you haven’t asked me why I’ve come yet. Aren’t you surprised to see me?’

‘Why have you come?’ Sheila asked obediently. ‘I’m very glad you did come,’ she added.