PART THREE PART THREE

I

Judith, looking dazed, shut the door of the mistress’s room behind her, and after a quarter of an hour’s wandering, found her way back to her own room. She sat on a hard chair and said to herself: Independence at last. This is Life. Life at last is beginning; but rather because it seemed so much more like a painful death than because she believed it.

She surveyed the four walls in which her independence was to flower. They were papered in sage green with perpendicular garlands of white and yellow rosebuds. There was a desk, a kitchen chair, a cane table, a narrow iron bedstead behind a faded buff curtain; and a distinctive carpet. It was of a greenish-brown shade, striped round the edge with yellow and tomato-colour, and patterned over with black liquorice-like wriggles.

‘But I can’t _live_ in ugliness....’

A clamorous bell roused her from a state of apathetic despair; and she opened her door and crept along in the wake of the click of heels and the laughter of many voices.

This was Hall--huge, bare, full of echoes and hard light, whiteness and cold blue curtains ... blue and high like twilight above ice and snow when the full moon is rising.

‘I can always think of that and not mind if nobody talks to me....’

Down one wall, a row of black frocks and white aprons at attention; at the top of the room, High Table beginning to fill up: black garments, grey, close-brushed intellectual heads, serious thin faces looking down the room, one young one, drooping a little: piles of chestnut hair and a white Peter Pan collar. Crowds of dresses of all colours, shapes and sizes, all running about briskly, knowing where to go; a sea of faces bobbing and turning, chattering, bright-eyed, nodding and laughing to other faces, sure of themselves.

‘Margaret, come and sit here ... here ... here! Next to me! Sylvia, next to me.... Is there a place for Sylvia?...’

‘I am lost, lost, abandoned, alone, lost,’ thought Judith wildly and pounced for the nearest chair and clung to it. She was between two girls who stared at her, then looked away again. She bowed her head: the old terror of faces engulfed her.

There fell a silence. A voice like a bell went through the room, calling: _Benedictus, benedicat_. And then came a roar,--a scraping, an immense yelling that rose to the ceiling and there rolled, broke, swelled again without pause. Beneath its volumes she felt herself lost again; but nobody else appeared to have noticed it.

‘Can I pass you the salt?’ said her neighbour.

‘After you,’ said Judith earnestly.

‘Thanks.’

The conversation swirled on around her.

‘Who d’you think’s engaged? Three guesses.... Let’s look at the tombstone. Soup....... how classically simple ... just soup.... Take a hundred dirty dishcloths, soak them in hot water, add a few onions.... Dorothy’s bobbed her hair. It suits her. It doesn’t suit her.... My dear, who _is_ that girl next to you?... I’ve done six hours every day this vac.... May you be forgiven.... Well anyway, four regularly.... I’m going to _work_ this term, seven hours solid, no dances.... I’ve got to ... you should have heard the jawing I got from Miss Marsh because I only got a third in Part I.... Well I think that was jolly good: I shall think myself jolly lucky if I get the same.... Old Marsh has lost every human instinct.... D’you know Sibyl Jones has done ten hours every day for two months?... She’s _bound_ to collapse.... Third years ought to be more sensible at their age.... I _say_, I _do_ believe Miss Ingram’s dyed her hair. I’m _sure_ it’s a different colour.... D’you suppose she’s in _love_?... I knew a girl at Oxford who overworked most fearfully, and she woke up one morning and every hair on her head had come off and was lying on the pillow beside her, looking like a nasty practical joke. Rather a jar, wasn’t it? But she took to a wig, my dears, a flaxen waved wig and it was such an improvement that she left off her glasses and became quite flighty and took to powdering her nose as well, so it was a blessing in disguise; and then her Maths coach proposed to her and they got married, and all I wonder is whether he got a shock or whether she’d warned him, because I s’pose she takes it off at night and she’s as bald as an egg without it; but I suppose anyway baldness doesn’t matter in true love.... It’s a warning isn’t it?’

‘Pleasant idiocy,’ said Judith very quietly in the yell of laughter that followed. ‘Idiotic pleasantry.’

‘Did you speak?’ said the girl on her other side.

‘N--no.’

‘I suppose you’ve come up for a little visit? I wonder whose guest?...’

‘No, no. I’ve come up for good--I’ve just arrived. I came up a day late. I----’

‘You mean you’re a fresher?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re at the wrong table!’ said the girl, horrified. ‘There’s your table at the other end of the room. This is a second year table.’

‘Oh, dear! How awful! Does it matter? I couldn’t recognize anybody and nobody told me anything.... I don’t know a soul....’ She felt the shameful tears coming. Such a bad beginning....

‘Never mind,’ said the girl almost kindly. ‘It doesn’t matter for once. And you’ll soon get to know people. Isn’t there anyone here from your school?’

‘I’ve never been to school. This is the first time I’ve ever been away from home....’ Stupid weakening thing to say, inducing self-pity, bringing more tears.

‘Oh, really?’ said the girl, and added politely after a pause:

‘Do you know Cambridge?’

‘A bit. I came once with Da--my father. He simply adored it. He was always coming back. That’s why he wanted me to----’

‘Oh, really? How naice. I expect he’ll often be running up to see you then, won’t he?’

She turned her head away in silence. Never, never would he be running up to see her, to rescue her. Why had she mentioned him? He had vanished and left her stranded among creatures who dared to assume he was still alive....

Trips. Labs. Lectures. Dons. Vacs. Chaperons. The voices gabbled on. The forks clattered. The roof echoed.

‘Ugly and noisy,’ muttered Judith. ‘Ugly and noisy and crude and smelly....’ You could go on for ever.

There were eyes staring from everywhere, necks craning to look at her....

‘But I can abstract myself. I can ignore their rudeness....’

It was the moonlight filling the blue that made it so cold and pure. Above the icefields and the snow lay the cold translucent pastures of the air....

She studied the row of faces opposite her, and then more rows, and more, of faces. Nearly all plain, nearly all with a touch of beauty: here and there well-cut heads, broad white placid brows; young necks; white teeth set in pleasant smiles; innocent intelligent lovely eyes. Accepting, revealing faces they were, with no reserves in them, looking at each other, at things--not inward at themselves. But just a herd, when all was said: immature, untidy, all dull, and all alike, commonplace female creatures in the mass. But boring it was! If you could see Mariella’s clear thorough-bred face among them,--would that too get merged?

That was where she should be humbly sitting, among those quieter heads, right at the end. There was a light there, flashing about: the tail of her eye had already caught it several times. She looked more closely. It was somebody’s fair head, so fiercely alive that it seemed delicately to light the air around it: a vivacious emphatic head, turning and nodding; below it a white neck and shoulder, generously modelled, leaned across the table. Then the face came round suddenly, all curves, the wide mouth laughing, warm-coloured.... It made you think of warm fruit,--peaches and nectarines mellowed in the sun. It seemed to look at Judith with sudden eager attention and then to smile. The eyes were meeting her own, inquiring deeply.

‘Who’s that?’ said Judith excitedly, forgetful of her position.

‘Oh, one of the freshers. I don’t know her name.’

Her name, her very name would be sure to have the sun on it.

All at once Judith found courage to eat her pudding.

Another scraping of chairs, and they were all on their feet. Someone, highly flushed, flew to the door at the edge of the däis and wrenched it open, holding it back while the Mighty streamed slowly out. They were gone. The girl returned, even more highly flushed.

‘My dears! _Do_ you think they saw me giggling? Bunny, you _were_ a beast to make me giggle! Did I do it all right? I thought I’d never get it open in time. Miss Thompson looked _so_ severe: but did you see what a sweet smile I got from Miss Ingram? Oh, what an experience! Hold me up someone.’

Willing hands supported her limp form. The roar broke out again, pouring out of Hall along the corridors.

Judith went back to her room and sat by the window. Outside, the dusk was chill and deep. The treetops were all round her window. It was like being in a nest, to sit here with all the highest boughs swirling round the pane. If only the corridors did not echo with high voices and strange feet, if only you could forget the carpet, if only you could turn round and see Martin--(not Roddy--he was too unreal a memory to bring consolation) it might be possible to be comforted.

The feet were less frequent now, the voices quieter. What were the mysterious animals doing? The vast building was full of them, streaming in and out of their burrows, busy with their strange separate affairs.

Night, dropping across the flat fields of Cambridgeshire had blotted out a dim west slashed with fire. The tree trunks threw up their branches in a stiff black net and caught a few stars.

Now shut your eyes and see the garden at home, the summer sun wildly rich on the lawn, hear the hot whirr and pause of the mowing machine; smell the mown grass mixed with the smell of roses and pinks and lavender; see the white butterflies dancing above the herbaceous border; see Mamma, going slowly up the steps with a basket of sweet peas, pause and draw up the striped Venetian blind; because now it is evening; the sun is behind the massed, toppling dark-green luxuriance of the unmoving chestnut trees, has drained its last ray out of the rooms and left them warm, throbbing and wan. Now it is night. Go down to the river: they are all there, waiting in the dark for you.... Now there is only Roddy, coming close, just touching your shoulder, his head bent to look into your lifted one. Listen and hear him say: “Darling” ... of course it had been in fun. But his rich voice goes on whispering and repeating it.... His eyes drown again and again with yours....

Then all at once a far train-whistle roused her, cutting across this immense strangeness with a suggestion of ordinary familiar things; and Judith, faint with homesickness, sent towards it the desire of all her being to fly in its wake back to the life she knew....

Impossible to stay in this room. She opened the door and wandered down the corridor. At the far end was a great chatter of voices through a half-open door. Peering in she saw a cloud of cigarette smoke and a room full of girls sprawling in chairs and on the floor.

‘Who’s captain of hockey? Jane, of course you’re going to play hockey? And lacrosse.... Jane, I must say it’s topping to see you again.... Jane, your year looks a dull lot.... Who’s the one who planted herself at our table?... Oh, d’you think so? She’s got such a haughty expression ... sort of superior.... Perhaps she’s shy....’ A clear voice, high and extraordinarily resonant cut in. ‘She’s the most beautiful person I ever saw. I adore her.... Have some toffee someone.’

Judith half-saw half-imagined the flash of a head under the lamp as she fled past. If that voice ... that voice had the sun in it?

She went on downstairs, looked for the fifth time in the box labelled E for letters addressed to herself, knew for the fifth time there could be none, and went on again, wandering among the ground-floor corridors; desired in sudden panic to get back to her room and found she had lost her way.

A girl came out of a door carrying a hot water can. She wore a pink flannel dressing-gown.

‘Could you tell me,’ asked Judith. ‘How to get to a corridor called C?’

The girl looked at her closely and then beamed behind her glasses.

‘Oh, Miss Earle! Of course! We were up together for Scholarship Exams. Come in.’

Judith, helplessly conscious that this unpleasant dream was becoming a definite nightmare, followed her.

‘Sit down,’ said the girl. ‘I’m so glad you came to find me. You remember my name--Mabel Fuller.’

O God! The creature thought she had been singled out for the purpose of soliciting friendship....

‘I am so very glad you came to see me. I dare say you feel very strange?’

‘A little. But I’m quite all right, thank you.’

‘One feels very lonely at first. Never mind. Do you know any one else? No, nor do I.’ Her eyes glinted. ‘We must stick together till we’ve got our bearings. It’s a great thing to--I had a friend here once. She said the life was very jarring--such a whirl. We must try to make our little rooms as restful as possible. Do come to my room and work whenever you like. I always think it helps, don’t you, to have somebody else in the room concentrating.’

Earnestly her eyes beamed and glinted behind their glasses. Presumably she was kind and well-meaning, but her skin was greasy and pink was not her colour; and her lank hair smelt; and when she talked she spat. The colourless face had nothing of youth in it. Perhaps this was what really clever girls looked like.

‘I’ve spent to-day putting my room to rights,’ said Mabel, looking happily round her. ‘I do enjoy having a little corner of my own, my own things round me and.... To-morrow I must start work in earnest. How do you feel about your work? You’re bound to waste time at first unless you plan out your day methodically. You must come and work in here. I won’t disturb you. I’m a very hard worker myself. I shan’t mix much with the other students. She flushed. ‘I shan’t have time. And then of course there’s getting into Cambridge for lectures and.... Do you ride a bicycle? I find since I had pneumonia it tires me so.... We must go to lectures together at first--keep each other company....’

‘Are you reading English too?’ said Judith with sinking heart.

‘Oh yes.’ Mabel bit her finger nervously. ‘I didn’t manage to get a scholarship, you know. It was a disappointment. I was feeling very poorly and altogether.... I didn’t do myself justice, Miss Fisher said. She wrote such a nice letter and ... I was so set on coming here, it meant so much to me, I want to teach, you know--if my health permits.... I haven’t very good health ... so with what I’d managed to save and a little help from my mother ... she couldn’t afford it really but when she saw what it meant to me ... so I must do well ... I can’t disappoint her.... Are you preparing to earn your living?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Judith blankly.

‘You don’t look like it,’ said the other hurriedly with a furtive half-hostile glance at Judith’s clothes. ‘Most girls who come here have got to depend on their brains for a livelihood, so of course no one’s got a right to come here just to amuse themselves, have they? But I dare say you’re going to do very well. Miss Fisher told me this morning you’d done very good work for the scholarship. Oh yes. She quite praised you. I thought perhaps ... some of my notes and essays might be of use to you.... I take very full notes--my memory rather fails me sometimes and then.... I thought perhaps if we worked together we might--you know--help each other.... Another mind coming fresh to a subject.... We might....’

Her eyes betrayed her: brain-sucker, probing for new full-blooded life. Judith thanked her politely and rose to go.

‘Don’t hurry,’ said Mabel. ‘I’ll make you a cup of cocoa. I always think cocoa’s so nourishing.’

She busied herself with a saucepan over the fire and breathed stertorously through her nose. Her skin glistened unhealthily in the firelight. The room was very close, full of pink casement cloth, and china ornaments. She had not minded the carpet: she had decorated the room to suit it. On the mantelpiece stood many photographs of creatures stoutly whaleboned about the throat or heavily whiskered and collared according to sex; and alone on top of the book-case was set the incongruous lovely photograph of a girl with curly bobbed hair. The large eyes laughed at you mischievously: the face insisted on being looked at--a soft face, sensuous and wilful, with a wide bow of a mouth; the smile a trifle consciously sweet, but irresistible.

‘Oh, how pretty!’ said Judith delightedly.

‘My sister Freda,’ said Mabel. ‘Yes, she’s generally admired.’ She glanced suspiciously at Judith, as if to intercept the look of one saying incredulously: ‘_Your_ sister?’ But Judith only looked dreamy.

For which minded most: Mabel because Freda was so pretty, or Freda because Mabel was so repulsive? Or were they fond of each other, sharing confidences and joking about Freda’s lovers?... And was Freda vain and heartless or....

‘Here’s your cocoa,’ said Mabel. ‘Drink it hot.’

It was thick and syrupy, and Judith gave up after a few sips; but Mabel drank hers with obvious relish and ate doughnuts greedily out of a bag.

And did Mabel’s mother console her by saying she was proud to have a clever daughter at College?--because she couldn’t say, for instance, with any truth: ‘Your hair, Mabel, is of a much finer quality than Freda’s’--there was nothing of that sort to be said. Or did she pet Freda and neglect Mabel?...

‘I really must go now,’ said Judith. ‘Thank you very much. Good-night.’

‘Would you like to go for a walk with me on Sunday after church? We might go and hunt for pretty autumn leaves and berries. I always think they make a room look so bright....’

‘Thank you very much.’

College leaves, college berries, picked with Mabel....

Supposing you looked like Mabel, would you love beauty even more passionately, or be so jealous of it that you hated it?

Her eyes yearned at Judith. It was curious: they had in them a sort of avid glint--almost like the eyes of old men in railway-carriages.... And did Freda maliciously encourage her to wear pink flannel? And....

‘One thing more,’ she said. ‘I do hope you won’t allow yourself.... I mean we mustn’t allow ourselves to--to get into a foolish set. It’s so difficult to know at first.... There’s a set here, I’m told’--she paused, flushing unbecomingly to her forehead--‘there’s a set here that thinks a great deal too much about--about going out, and dancing, and--men--all that sort of silliness.... There, I’m sure you don’t mind my telling you. You can always come to me for advice.... I’m told the Mistress judges so by the people we go about with....

‘Good night, Miss Earle,’ she finished earnestly. ‘There’s your way: up the stairs and turn to the right. I’ll look out for you at breakfast to-morrow.’

Black Mabel. Haunted days and nights stretched out. No hope. No escape. Three years of Mabel settling down like a nightmare-bat, blotting out the light. Nobody but Mabel was going to speak to you for three years.

She passed two maids, flaxen-haired, red-cheeked, thick-featured Cambridgeshire types. They were turning out the lights in the corridors; and they smiled broadly at her. Maids were always nice, anyway.

‘Good night,’ she said shyly.

‘Good night, Miss.’

At the corner of the corridor she heard one remark to the other: ‘There’s a sweet faice.’

A little comforted, she came to her own room, undressed and dropped a few tears.

If he could have known how very unlike his Cambridge this place was! Too late now.... There was not a spire, not a light of Cambridge to be seen, not a whisper to be heard. Almost she could believe something Childe Rolandish had happened to it and it was gone; so that even its unseen nearness was no comfort.

‘Come in,’ she said in startled response to a tap at her door. Someone stood there in a dressing-gown, with bright hair rolling over her shoulders.

‘Oh!’ cried Judith in uncontrollable rapture. ‘I did hope....’

They gazed at each other, blushing and radiant.

‘I saw you at Hall.’

‘Yes. I saw you.’

‘I sat at the wrong table. It was awful.’

‘I wish you’d been sitting beside me.... What’s your name?’

‘Judith Earle. What’s yours?’

‘Jennifer Baird.’

Yes. Jennifer was the right name.

‘That’s a nice name.’

‘Why didn’t you come yesterday?’

‘I just forgot. I muddled the date.... Wasn’t it an awful beginning?’ They laughed.

‘I always make muddles, don’t you? I never remember dates and things.’

‘Nor do I.’

They laughed again.

‘I am thankful to find you, I can tell you,’ said Jennifer. ‘I was thinking I should be obliged to leave.’

‘So was I.’

They beamed at each other.

‘This is the third time I’ve come to find you. Where on earth have you been? I was afraid you’d locked yourself into the lavatory to cry or something.’

‘I’ve been....’ Judith laughed happily. ‘I’ve been with something awful.’

‘What?’

‘It’s called Mabel Fuller.’

‘My God! Fuller. Has she pounced on you already? She tried me this morning. It’s a funny thing,--she makes straight for the pretty ones. That sounds as if I meant I was pretty.’

‘So you are.’

‘I only meant I wasn’t so hideous as her and you’re lovely. She’s a vampire-bat. D’you know, I found out something: she’s twenty-seven at least. Think of it! I was rude to her. I suppose you weren’t. I should say you were much more well-bred than me.’

‘I wondered if she wasn’t a _tiny_ bit pathetic?’

‘God, no! What an idea! She hasn’t a notion how revolting she is. She actually prattled about dress to me,--wondering how she’d look in a jumper like mine. As if anything but an Invisible Cloak would improve her. I can’t stand people who spit when they talk.’

‘I do wonder,’ pondered Judith, ‘how people like that get produced from quite normal parents. It must be the working-out of some ancient and fearful curse.’

‘She’s an ancient and fearful curse anyway,’ said Jennifer gloomily. ‘I’ll tell you another thing. I believe she’s got sex-repression.’ She stared impressively at Judith; then broke into loud whistling. ‘Have you got a cigarette? Never mind.... I’ve just learnt to blow smoke-rings. I’ll teach you.’ More whistling. ‘It’s terrible to be so swayed by appearances. I’m afraid it’s a sign of a weak character. Ugly people rouse all Hell’s devils in me. And beautiful ones make me feel like the morning stars singing together. I want beauty, beauty, beauty.... Don’t you? Lovely people round me, lovely stuffs, lovely colours--lashions and lashions of gorgeous things to touch and taste and look at and smell.’ She flung her head back on its round white throat and took a deep sighing breath. ‘O colours!... I could eat them. I’m awfully sensuous--I look it, don’t you think? Or do I mean sensual? I always get them muddled; but I know it’s unladylike to be one of them. I say--why didn’t you speak to me after Hall?’

‘Oh, how could I? You had people all round you. I passed your room, and there were dozens of girls in it.’

‘Oh yes! Creatures I was at school with. I had a year in Paris after I left school. I think it developed me. I feel so much more mature than my contemporaries. I used to hunt at Chantilly. Have you ever done that?... They were all talking about you.’

‘I heard them say I had such a haughty expression. I haven’t, have I?’

‘Of course not. That’s women all over. I wonder if men are really nicer? I suppose you’re not engaged?’

‘Oh no!’

‘Nor am I. I don’t suppose I shall ever marry. I’m too tall,--six foot in my stockings. It’s awful, because I’m sure I shall always be falling in love myself--and I’m terrified of getting repressions. Are you in love?’

Judith thought of Roddy, blushed and said no.

‘Oh well, you’re too young I suppose. I’m twenty and two months--God!... Perhaps we shall both get engaged while we’re here. Me first, I hope.’ She chuckled deeply.

‘But we shan’t have time for anything except work,’ said Judith. ‘Mabel says we’re expected to do at least eight hours a day.’

‘Christ! Does she though! Just the sort of miserable immorality she would feed you up with. We’re in the world to enjoy ourselves, not to pass exams, aren’t we? Well then ... I have a prejudice against intellectualism. It leads to all sorts of menaces. Perhaps you don’t know.... I dare say you were brought up in blackest ignorance,--like me. But I’ve managed to overcome all obstacles in the way of enlightenment. Do you call innocence a virtue? I don’t. I call it stupidity.’ She talked on so rapidly that her words ran into each other and got blurred. Leaning heavily on the mantelpiece she continued. ‘Are these photographs your people? They look divinely aristocratic. You’re not an Honourable are you? You look as if you might be. Come and see my room. I say, let’s make our rooms absolutely divine, shall we?’

‘Mother told me to get whatever furniture and things I wanted,’ said Judith. ‘But what’s the good with that carpet?’

‘I’ve turned mine upside down,’ said Jennifer. ‘It’s an artistic buff now. Come and look.’

She led the way back to her room and opened the door upon a scene of chaos. Her clothes had been half-unpacked and left about in heaps. The room was full of smoke and reeked of stale Gold Flakes. Gramophone records, biscuits, apples, cake-knives, spoons, glasses and cups smeared with cocoa-sediment were strewn about the floor.

‘It isn’t as nice as I thought,’ said Jennifer. ‘The swine have feasted and rioted; _and_ left me to clear up after them. Christ! What a spectacle! Have an apple.’

She sat down in her trunk and looked discouraged.

‘I say, Judith Earle, do you think you’re going to enjoy College?’

‘Not much. It’s so ugly and vulgar.’

‘It is. And the students are such very jolly girls.’

‘Yes. And I’m frightened of them. I don’t know a soul. I’ve never in my life been with a lot of people and I don’t feel I shall ever get used even to the smell of them. It’s different for you. You’ve heaps of friends already.’

‘Nonsense. There’s no one. I’ve been screeching like a parrot all the evening, pretending to be awfully jolly too; but it strikes me as pretty grim....’ She brooded and whistled. ‘More than a little grim....’ She drooped, flickered out completely.

‘We’d--we’d better stick it out together,’ said Judith with a blush, fearful lest her suggestion should condemn her to Jennifer--for Mabel had said it and she had felt sick.

‘I should say we will. A thing’s much less bloody if you can talk about its bloodiness to someone else. Do you mind the word bloody? I noticed you flinched. It’s all a question of habit.’ She revived--‘Christ! To think only a few days ago I was stalking in Scotland with my angel cousins! It’s a very broadening thing for a young girl to have boy-cousins of her own age. I’m indebted to them for a lot of useful information--about sex and one thing and another. One of them gave me a bottle of champagne as a parting present. We’ve been drinking it--out of tooth glasses. Ugh! I dare say I’m a little tight. Don’t you think so? One’s got to do something.... I’d offer you some, but I’m afraid the swine finished it. The bottle’s in the cupboard.’ She climbed over a trunk, opened the cupboard door and looked in. ‘As I thought. Not a drop....’

There was a silence. She lit a cigarette, formed her full and vivid lips into an O and struggled painstakingly with smoke-rings.

The suddenness, thought Judith--the sureness, the excitement!... glorious, glorious creature of warmth and colour! Her blue eyes had a wild brilliance between their thick lashes: they flew and paused, stared, flew again.... Oh, Jennifer!...

‘Isn’t it awful,’ said Jennifer, ‘to have enlightened parents? They never ask you whether you care to be enlightened too, but offer you up from the age of ten onwards as a living sacrifice to examiners. And _then_ they expect you to be grateful. Hmm!’ She glowered at the photographs of a pleasant-looking couple on the mantelpiece. ‘God! I’m tired. Give me a hand out of this trunk, and I’ll get to bed.’

She struggled up, slipped off her dressing gown and stood revealed in striped silk pyjamas.

‘Too late for my exercises to-night,’ she said. ‘Are you keen on muscle? It’s more womanly not to be. I’ve over-developed mine. I can lend you a book called “How to Keep Fit” with pictures of young men in loin-cloths. You look wiry. Can you run?’

‘Yes--and climb----’ said Judith excitedly.

‘Oh!... I can’t imagine you doing anything except wander about looking innocent and bewildered. We might have some tests to-morrow!’

She went to the window, opened it wide and leaned out. Judith came and stood beside her. The night was still, dark and starry.

‘The grounds are beautiful,’ murmured Judith.

‘Yes--great trees----’ she murmured softly back. ‘And nightingales, I believe, in spring.’

‘Nightingales....’

‘Oh, there’s lots of things to look forward to,’ said Jennifer, turning round and smiling full at Judith. Their eyes sparkled and flashed: sympathy flowed like an electric current between them. She went on:

‘Oh Lord! Look at my bedroom. I’ll just clear a space and sleep among the wreckage. Won’t my gyp be pleased? It’s best to begin as I shall certainly go on, so I’ll leave it to her. She’ll like it as soon as I’ve won her heart.... Good night, Judith. I must tell you most people call me Jane.’

‘I shall call you Jennifer. It’s delicious,--different from anyone else. It’s like you.’

From the pillow Jennifer’s face broke into shy smiles, like a gratified child’s.

Judith busied herself quietly in the sitting-room, tidying the cups and knives,--enjoying the novel sensation of rendering service. After a few moments she called:

‘You wouldn’t suppose from their conversation that these girls are intellectual--would you?’

There was no reply. After a few more minutes she peeped into the bedroom. Jennifer’s peaceful flushed countenance and regular breathing greeted her astonished senses.

She was sleeping the sleep of the slightly intoxicated just.

2

The Indian summer stretched out through October that year. The closing harmonies were so complete that the gardens of the earth seemed but to repeat and enrich the gardens of the sky; and a day like a sunflower broadened to a sunset full of dahlias and late roses; with clouds above them massed, burnished and edged with bloom like the foliage of the trees of earth. Slowly at night the chill mists, bitter-sweet in smell, luminous beneath the moon, crept over and blotted all out.

The weeks drifted on. College became a pleasant habit. Lecturers ceased to be oracles. Work ceased to be important. Young men stared in lecture rooms and streets. There grew the consciousness of fundamental masculine apartness: of the other sex mysteriously calling to and avoiding it across an impassable gulf. Bookshops became places in which to wander and browse whole mornings. Towards the town, back from the town, the long road stretched out daily between the flat ploughed fields: the immense and crushing arc of the sky was swept forever with rich changes.

And the buildings,--the fall of sunlight and shadow on grey stone, red stone, the unblurred design of roofs and walls at dusk,--the buildings lifted their bulk, unfolded their pattern, glowed upon the mind by day and by night, breaking in upon essays, disturbing time-papers.

Jennifer’s shining head, curved cheek, lifted white throat lay against the blue curtain, just beyond the lamplight. Very late she sat there and said nothing, did nothing; made you lift eyes from the page, watch her, dream, wait for her smile to answer yours.

The garden, the river, the children next door were far away. Sometimes when you listened, there was nothing to be heard, not even Roddy; sometimes the bird-calls, the wet green scatters of buds, the flowering cherry-tree; sometimes the sunny mown lawn in stripes, the red rambler clouds heavy on the hot wall; sometimes the mists, the bloom on the clouds, the fallen yellow leaves in the dew; sometimes the rooks rocking in the blown treetops, the strong dark bewildering pattern of bare branches swirling across the sky, the tragic light crying out for a moment at sunset, haggard through torn clouds, then drowned again: sometimes these moved in their seasons through the garden so faintly behind your shut eyes they stirred no pang. Sometimes the silent group waiting in the darkness by the river had vanished as if they had been childish things put away.

Time flowed imperceptibly, casting up trifles here and there upon its banks.

3

King’s Chapel at Evensong. The coloured windows faded gradually out: only a twilight blue was left beneath the roof: and that died too. Then, only the double rows of candle-flames gave light, pointing and floating above the immemorial shadows of the floor and the shadows of benches and the shadowed faces of old men and youths. Hushed prayer echoed; and the long rolling organ-waves rose and fell, half-drowning the singing and setting it free again. All was muffled, flickering, submerged deep under cloudy water. Jennifer sat there motionless, wistful-eyed and unconscious, neither kneeling nor standing with others, but leaning rigidly back with eyes fixed and brilliant.

And afterwards came the emerging into a strange town swallowed up in mist. White surprising faces glimmered and vanished under the lamps. The buildings loomed formlessly in the dense sky, picked out by dimly-lit windows, and forlorn lanterns in the gateways. The life of Cambridge was thickly enshrouded; but under the folds you felt it stir more buoyantly than ever, with sudden laughter and talk dropping from the windows, weighing oddly in the air: as if the town were encouraging her children to sleep by drawing the curtain; while they, very lively at bedtime, went on playing behind it.

4

The lecture room window-pane was full of treetops--a whirl and sweep of black twigs on the sky. The room swam and shone in a faint translucent flood; and a bird called on three wild enquiring notes. These skies of February twilights had primroses in them, and floods; and with the primroses, a thought of green.

The small creakings, breathings and shufflings of the lecture room went on. The men: rows of heads of young looking hair; bored restless shoulders hunched beneath their gowns; sprawling grey flannel legs. The women: attentive rather anxious faces under their injudicious hats; well-behaved backs; hands writing, writing. Clods, all of them, stones, worse than senseless things.

The lecturer thought smoothly aloud, not caring who besides himself listened to him.

It was a situation meet for one of those paragraphic poems beginning

“_The solemn greybeard lecturer drones on_;”

and after a few more lines of subtly satirical description some dots and a fresh start:

“_Sudden a blackbird calls.... Ah sweet! Who heeds?_”

No one heeds. Attention to greybeards has made everyone insensible to blackbirds. The conclusion would develop neatly along those lines.

A year or two ago, how fervently you would have written, how complacently desired to publish that sort of thing! No regret could be quite so sickly as that with which one wished out of existence the published record of last year’s errors of taste.

‘My dear, he’s the sort of person who’d _make arrangements_ to have his juvenilia published after his death.’

That was the sort of condemnatory label Tony and his friends would attach, spreading their hands, leaving it at that.

‘Oh, Roddy, where are you? Why do you never come?’

He flashed into mind,--leaning idly against the mantelpiece, listening with an obscure smile to Tony’s conversation.

It was the sort of evening on which anything might happen. Excitement took her suddenly by the throat and made her feeble and tingling to her finger-tips.

The last of the light fell lingeringly on the grey stone window-frame. If the gold bloom lasted till you counted fifty, it would be a good omen. One, two, three, four and so on to twenty, thirty, forty ... crushing the temptation to count faster than her own heartbeats ... forty-five ... fifty.

It was still there, vanishing softly, but with a margin of at least another twenty to spare.

The ecstasy grew, making her stomach feel drained and helpless and beating in odd pulses all over her.

She bent over the desk, pretending to write, and making shaky pencil marks.

Somebody got up and switched on the light; and all at once darkness had fallen outside, and the window-pane was a purple-blue blank.

Roddy was in Tony’s room, leaning against the mantelpiece, quite near. She would pass Tony’s staircase on her way out: it was the one in the corner, facing the Chapel. She had seen his name every time she went by. Once she had met him coming out of the doorway, and he had looked through her; and once as she passed, someone in the court had shouted ‘Tony’! and he had leaned from his high window to reply.

Oh, this intolerable lecture!

Suddenly it was over. She came out and saw the bulk of King’s Chapel in the deep twilight with its row of buttresses rising up pale, like giant ghosts.

‘Oh, I’ve left my essay behind in the lecture room. I must go back. Don’t wait for me.’

She went back a few steps until the gloom had swallowed them, and waited alone in the dark court. There was a light in Tony’s window. Lingeringly she crept towards it and paused beneath it, stroking the wall. She lifted her head and cried speechlessly: ‘Oh come! Come!’

Nobody came and looked out through the uncurtained pane. Nobody came running down the stairs.

And if she did not go on quickly the bus would start without her.

Let it start and then walk up and knock on Tony’s door and say quite simply:

“I’ve missed my bus, so I’ve come to see Roddy.” Roddy would spring forward to greet her. All would be made right with Tony.

For a moment that seemed the clear, delightful inevitable solution.

But what would their faces hide from her or betray? What unbearable amusement, suspicion, astonishment, contempt?

And what was there to do on such a night save to say to Roddy: “I love you,” and then go away again? To dare everything, run to him and cry:

_I am Lazarus come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I will tell you all._

But what if he should answer with that disastrous answer:

_That is not what I meant at all, That is not it, at all._

If he were to stare and coldly reply, with real speech:

‘Are you mad?’

Oh, but it should be risked!...

She stood still, hesitating, her hand pressing the wall, power and intoxication dying out of her. She felt the night cold and damp, and heard approaching footsteps, a torn fragment of laughter, a male voice raised for a moment in the distance.

She looked up once more at Tony’s window and saw that the curtains had been drawn; and she sprang away from the wall and ran towards the street in urgent flight from her wound, from the deliberate-seeming insult, the cruelty of drawn curtains.

The college bus was packed with girls. Heads were craning out in search of her.

‘Oh, Judy! There you are! We’ve been keeping the bus and keeping it. What on earth happened to you?’

‘I couldn’t get in. The room was locked. And then--Oh dear, I’ve run so! Is there room for me?’

‘Yes, here. Come on, Judy. Here. Come and sit down. You’re all out of breath. Come in.’

They welcomed her. Their little voices and gestures seemed to stroke and pat. They were so glad she had come in time, so considerate and kindly, so safe.

The bus rolled through the streets, past where the solemn lamps and the buildings ended, out on to the road where was only the enveloping night wind. The bus swayed and the rows of bodies swayed and the faces smiled faintly across at each other, amused at their own shaking and jerking; but all half-dreaming, half-hypnotized by the noise and the motion; all warm, languid, silent.

The noise and the motion and the swaying faces seemed eternal. Nothing else had ever been, would ever be. Of course Roddy had not been there: he had never been there at all.

5

Martin was a great athlete. He was always rowing, always training; but once or twice he borrowed a motor-bicycle and came out to tea, when Judith and Jennifer gave combined tea-parties to young men. On these occasions his face was very red and he looked too big for the room. He was quite silent and stared with concentration at Judith and Jennifer alternately; and seemed not to take to his fellow guests. He was undoubtedly a heavy young man to have at a tea-party--a bad mixer. Jennifer’s jokes, oaths and sallies brought no gleam to his countenance, and Jennifer was bored with him. Impossible to convince her that Martin was not a dull young man.

Martin dull?...

God-like in form he dived from the raft and swam over the river, swiftly, with laughter, water and sun upon his face. He sat among them all and smoked his pipe, looking kindly and comforting. You could depend on his eyes solicitously watching, his smile inviting you to come in, when all the others, neither kindly nor comforting, had shut the door and gone away. He was the one to whom Mariella chattered at her ease and made little childish jokes, calling him ‘darlin’,’ looking at him with candour and affection, sometimes even with a glint of mischief, as if she were a girl like any other girl; as if that something never fell across her clear face and obscured it. He shared a bedroom with Roddy; had a little screen at home, so he said, which Roddy had decorated, and given to him; he came walking up garden-paths with Roddy laughing and talking at his side.

In the darkness under the cherry-tree he bent his head and tried to speak, twisting his scrap of cherry, trembling with enchantment. He had been a thing to fly from, surprised, with beating heart.

But when Jennifer said he was a dull young man, it was very difficult to argue with her; for it seemed almost as if, transplanted alone to this new world, he were indeed quite dull, rather ordinary.

He came to tea three times. The last time Judith went with him down the stairs--his deliberate, assured masculine tread sounding significant, almost alarming in that house of flustered uneven foolish-sounding steps--and said good-night to him at the front door.

Fumbling with the lamps of his motor-bicycle he said:

‘Why can’t one ever see you alone?’

‘It’s not allowed, Martin. I can’t ask you to tea alone. And I can’t come to your rooms without a chaperon.’

‘Oh, damn the chaperon. I shan’t ask you to tea at all. Can’t you break a footling rule for anybody you know as well as me?’

She said deprecatingly that it was impossible.

‘You mean you won’t.’

That was what she meant. It was not worth while to break rules for dull Martin.

‘Who’s that Jennifer person you’re always with?’

‘A person I’m very fond of----’ She flared at his tone.

‘Never see you anywhere without her,’ he muttered.

‘Well you needn’t come to tea with me.’

‘Oh, I shan’t come again.’

‘I shan’t ask you.’

Silence fell. She looked up at the dark and starless sky; then at him still adjusting lamps, his head averted.

What were they about, parting in anger? How far indeed they were from the other world to mistrust and misunderstand so obstinately they had to quarrel!

Her heart misgave her suddenly at sight of the great building looming above her: there was no security in it, no kindness. Supposing when she went back Jennifer’s room were empty, and Jennifer, utterly weary of her, had taken the chance to escape, and were even now knocking at strangers’ doors, sure of her welcome?... How quickly without that form, that voice, all would crumble and dissolve and be but a lightless confusion! She should never have left the places where Martin stood by her side, listening, watching, waiting everywhere to wrap her in safety.

She said softly:

‘Martin, when’s Roddy coming to see you?’

‘He was here,’ said Martin, ‘a week or two ago. Staying with Tony Baring,’ he added. And then again: ‘Only for a night or two.’

Then finally trying in great embarrassment to soothe the pain which, even to his ears, cried out terribly in the silence and could not find words to cover it:

‘I scarcely saw him myself. He was very busy--so many people to see. He’ll be up again soon, I expect and then we must have a party.’

‘Oh yes, Martin.... You know, it’s very naughty of him. He said he’d come and see me.’

Her voice was thin and cheerful.

‘He’s very forgetful,’ said Martin helplessly.

‘I suppose,’ she suggested lightly, ‘he forgot even to ask after me.’

‘Oh no, he asked after you. I’m sure he did.’

She laughed.

‘Well I must go in.... Tell him when you write to him.... No, don’t tell him anything. But, Martin, you must come and see me sometimes, please, _please_,--in this hateful place. I feel I shall lose you all again. You know mother’s going to live abroad for a year or two? So I shan’t be there in the summer, next door. It’s awful. She let the house without telling me. What shall I do without it? Please come and see me. Or listen, I tell you what: it doesn’t seem to work somehow, your coming here. I can’t talk to you and I feel I don’t know you; but when the days get longer we’ll go for a long walk together, miles and miles. Shall we? Remember!’

‘Rather!’

He was happy again.

She called after him:

‘And, Martin, I’m sorry I was cross.’

‘My fault,’ came his ringing cheerful voice; and his engine started and he departed with a roar and a rush.

Alone in the dark she stood still and contemplated the appalling image of Roddy risen up again, mockingly asserting that only he was real; that his power to give himself or withhold himself was as the power of life and death.

It was urgent, now, to find Jennifer quickly. She was in her room, lying on the floor, staring at the flicker of firelight over her yellow velvet frock.

‘Oh, Jennifer!’

Judith sank down beside her, burying her face in her lap.

‘Darling.’

‘I’m not very happy to-night. It’s a mood. I think I don’t feel very well. And the night seems so sad and uneasy, with this wind. Don’t you feel it?’

Jennifer put out her hands and clasped them round Judith’s face, gazing at her sombrely.

‘What has he said to you?’ she whispered.

‘Who?’

‘That Martin.’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing to do with him.’

‘You love somebody, I think. Who is it you love?’

‘I love nobody.’

Jennifer must never never know, suspect, dream for a moment....

‘You mustn’t love anybody,’ said Jennifer. ‘I should want to kill him. I should be jealous.’ Her brooding eyes fell heavily on Judith’s lifted face. ‘I love you.’

And at those words, that look, Roddy faded again harmlessly: Jennifer blinded and enfolded her senses once more, and only Jennifer had power.

* * * * *

When the longer days came and Martin wrote to ask her to come for a walk one Sunday, she had another engagement and regretfully refused; and after that he wrote to tell her to bring a friend to a river picnic with him and another young man. She brought Jennifer; and Jennifer flirted broadly with the other young man; and the picnic was not a success.

After that the year closed without sight or sign of him; and she forgot to care.

6

Gradually Judith and Jennifer drew around them an outer circle of about half a dozen; and these gathered for conversation in Jennifer’s room every evening. That untidy luxuriant room, flickering with firelight, smelling of oranges and chrysanthemums, was always tacitly chosen as a meeting-place; for something of the magnetism of its owner seemed to be diffused in it, spreading a glow, drawing tired heads and bodies there to be refreshed.

Late into the night they sat about or lay on the floor, smoked, drank cocoa, ate buns, discussed--earnestly, muddle-headedly--sex, philosophy, religion, sociology, people and politics; then people and sex again. Judith sat in a corner and watched the firelight caress and beautify their peaceful serious faces; talked a great deal suddenly now and then, and then was silent again, dreaming and wondering.

Even the most placid and commonplace faces looked tragic, staring into the fire, lit by its light alone. They were all unconscious; and she herself could never be unconscious. Around her were these faces, far away and lost from themselves, brooding on nothing; and there was she, as usual, spectator and commentator, watching them over-curiously, ready to pounce on a passing light, a flitting shade of expression, to ponder and compare and surmise; whispering to herself: ‘Here am I watching, listening. Here are faces, forms, rooms with their own life, noise of wind and footsteps, light and shadow. What is this mystery?...’ And even in her futile thoughts never quite stepping over the edge and staring mindlessly and being wholly unaware.

They broke up at last with sighs and yawns, lingered, drifted away little by little. Judith was left alone with Jennifer.

‘One more cigarette,’ she suggested.

‘Well, just one.’

Jennifer let down her hair and brushed it out, holding it along her arm, watching it shimmer in the fire-light with an engrossed stare, as if she never could believe it was part of her.

* * * * *

Always Jennifer. It was impossible to drink up enough of her; and a day without her was a day with the light gone.

Jennifer coming into a room and pausing on the threshold, head up, eyes wide open, darting round, dissatisfied until they found you. That was an ever fresh spring of secret happiness. Jennifer lifting you in her arms and carrying you upstairs, because she said you looked tired and were such a baby and too lovely anyway to walk upstairs like other people.

Jennifer basking in popularity, drawing them all to her with a smile and a turn of the head, doing no work, breaking every rule, threatened with disgrace, plunged in despair; emerging the next moment new-bathed in radiance, oblivious of storm and stress.

Jennifer dispensing her hospitality with prodigal and careless ease, recklessly generous in public and in secret, flashing the glow of her magnetism suddenly into unlit and neglected lives, allowing them to get warm for a little, and then light-heartedly forgetting them. But never forgetting Judith--or not for long; and coming back always to sit with her alone, and drop all masks and love her silently, watchfully with her eyes.

Jennifer singing Neapolitan folk-songs to a be-ribboned guitar. Where she had picked up the airs, the language, the grace and fascination of her manner, no one knew. But when she sat by the window with bright streamers falling over her lap, singing low to her soft accompaniment, then, each time, everyone fell madly in love with her.

Jennifer chattering most when she was tired, or depressed, her words tripping over each other, her absurd wit sparkling, her laugh frequent and excited: so silent, so still when she was happy that she seemed hypnotized, her whole consciousness suspended to allow the happiness to flow in.

Jennifer looking shattered, tortured after a few hours spent by mistake over coachings and time-papers in stuffy rooms; starting up in the end with a muttered: “O God, this place!...” wrenching open the door and rushing downstairs, oblivious of all but the urgency of her mood. From the window you could see her in the grounds, running, running. Soon the trees hid her. She was tramping over the ploughed fields, her cheeks glowing, her hair like a light against the dark hedges. She was going, alone, tensely, over the long fields. What was she thinking of? She had her evasions. No good to ask her: her eyes would fly off, hiding from you. She would not let herself be known entirely.

By Judith’s shadowy side ran the hurrying flame of Jennifer; and from all that might give her pause, or cloud her for a moment Jennifer fled as if she were afraid.

The lonely midnight clouded her. Jennifer was afraid of the dark.

Was it that people had the day and the night in them, mixed in varying quantities? Jennifer had the strength of day, and you the strength of night. By day, your little glow was merged in her radiance; but the night was stronger, and overcame her. You were stronger than Jennifer in spite of the burning life in her. The light hid the things for which you searched, but the darkness and the silence revealed them. All your significant experiences had been of the night. And there, it was suddenly clear, was the secret of the bond with Roddy. He too had more shadow in him than sun. “_Chevalier de la lune_” that was he--“_Que la lumiere importune_”--ah! yes! “_Qui cherche le coin noir_”--yes, yes--“_Qui cherche le coin noir._” Some time--it did not matter when, for it was bound to happen--he would say in the dark “I love you.”

Meanwhile there was Jennifer to be loved with a bitter maternal love, because she was afraid. And because, some day, she might be gone. For Jennifer said “I love you” and fled away. You cried “Come back!” and she heard and returned in anguish, clasping you close but dreading your dependence. One day when you most needed her, she might run away out of earshot, and never come back.

But there was value in impermanence, in insecurity; it meant an ache and quickening, a perpetual birth; it meant you could never drift into complacence and acceptance and grow old.

* * * * *

There was Mabel, drifting into Judith’s life when conscience pricked and being joyfully dismissed again when the exigencies of duty seemed satisfied. There were little notes from Mabel found, with a sinking feeling, among her letters.

Dear J.,

Would you care to come to church with me on Sunday? I shall be ready at 10.15. I do hope you will come this week. Yrs. M.F.

Dear Judith,

I thought you did not look quite yourself at lunch to-day. If there is anything worrying you, perhaps I might help you? Or if you are tired, come and rest in my armchair. I shall be working and will not disturb you.

Yours Mabel.

P.S. It’s all _this rushing_ about that _wears you out_ and makes you _unfit_ for work.

M.F.

Mabel wrote her advice now, more often than she dared speak it.

Mabel, always pathetic, so that you could never entirely disregard her; always grotesque and untouched by charm so that it was impossible to think of her or look at her without revulsion; so that the whole thing was a tedious and barren self-discipline.

Mabel little by little relinquishing the effort to draw Judith into her life and desperately endeavoring to fit herself into Judith’s: chattering to other girls, trying to be amused by their jokes, to share their enthusiasms and illusions; pretending to have a gay home-life, full of interesting friends and fun; pretending to laugh at the thought of work and to treat lightly that nightmare of the Tripos which crushed her to the earth.

Once or twice Judith tried to draw her into the evening circle, explaining her loneliness, appealing beforehand for her pathos.... But it was no good. She was of another order of beings,--dreary and unadaptable. And Jennifer, with a wicked light in her eye, spoke loudly and with malicious irreverence of dons, the clergy and the Bible; and mentioned the body with light-hearted frankness; and Judith felt ashamed of herself for thinking Jennifer funny.

Mabel striving doggedly to believe that Jennifer was in the nature of an illness from which Judith would recover by careful treatment, then striving to ignore the importance of the relationship--staking out an exclusive claim in Judith by references suggestive of a protective intimacy.

‘Now, now! Pale cheeks! What will your mother say, I’d like to know, if I let you go home looking like this? I shall have to come and put you to bed myself.’

And there followed the flush and the hungry gleam while awkwardly she touched Judith’s cheek.

Mabel at long last voluntarily dropping out of all the places into which she had tried to force herself, going back without a word to her solitary room and her doughnuts. There were no more little notes rearing unwelcome heads in the letter-box. She asked nothing.

From the window late at night Judith could see her lamp staring with a tense wan hopeless eye across the court. In the midst of talk and laughter with Jennifer, she saw it suddenly and knew that Mabel was sitting alone, hunched over note-books and dictionaries, breathing stertorously through her nose hour after hour, dimly hoping that her uncurtained window might attract Judith’s attention, persuade her to look in and say good-night.

‘Oh, Jennifer, I won’t be five minutes. I must just go and see Mabel. It’s awful. You don’t know. She expects me; and she’ll sit up all night working if I don’t go.’

‘Tell her about the young lady of Bute with my love and a kiss,’ said Jennifer in the loud voice edged with brutality which she reserved for Mabel. ‘And say the mistress is very disappointed in her because she’s discovered she doesn’t wear corsets. She’s going to speak about it publicly to-morrow night because it’s very immoral. And ask her what _will_ her mother say if you let her go home with all those spots on her face.’

Judith escaped, laughing, ran down the dark stairs to Mabel’s room and tapped.

‘Come in.’

It was clear from her voice she had been alert at the sound of the known footsteps. She raised a pallid face that tried for a moment to begrudge its gladness and preserve a stiffness.

‘Now, Mabel, I’m come to put you to bed. I like all your talk of looking after _me_. It’s you who need it. What do you suppose you’ll feel like to-morrow if you work any more? Come on now.’

That was the way she loved to be talked to. Judith filled her hot-water bottle and made cocoa, while with laborious modesty she donned her flannel nightdress with its feather-stitched collar; and pouted coyly and happily, like any other girl, because Judith was such a dragon.

Then she leaned back in her chair with the work-lines in her face smoothing out, and yawned contentedly and talked of little intimate things, giving them to Judith without reserve, as Judith gave hers to Jennifer--suddenly, pitifully like any other girl.

These were her happy compensating moments: they made her think for a while that the friendship was rare and firm.

How easy it was, thought Judith, to permit her to enjoy your incongruous presence; to step right into her world and close the gates on your own so fast that no chill air from it might breathe against her security! Alone with her like this, no lapse of taste on her part ruffled the nerves. You accepted her and let her reveal herself; and she was, after all, interesting, human, gentle, and simple. There was nothing--this time you must remember--nothing grotesque or ridiculous to report to Jennifer afterwards, hatefully betraying and mocking....

She spoke of her life in the narrow church-bound village home; her future: she would teach, and so have her own little independent place in the world. She didn’t think she was the marrying sort; but you never knew. Independence was what she craved: to support herself and be beholden to no one. Only she must pass well: (and her eyes would wander haggardly to the books)--It all depended on her health--she’d never enjoyed very good health. She always thought if she felt better she wouldn’t forget so. It made work very hard. Freda had always been the strong one. Everything came easy to Freda. Everyone admired and petted her: she was getting so spoilt, and extravagant too. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she and Freda had much in common, but you couldn’t help but love her in spite of all her naughtiness. And the quick way she had of answering back! She recited some of Freda’s quick answers, giggling like any other girl.

There was a curate who had coached her in Greek and Latin. He was a wonderful man, a real saint: not like any one else at all, young, a beautiful face and such eyes. Once he had come to tea with her, and they had had a wonderful talk, just the two of them. Freda had been out. It really seemed as if he looked on her as a friend. She hoped so.... He had helped her.

Judith listened, asked questions, sympathized, cheered her with offers of notes and essays; tucked her into bed with an effort at motherliness; and flew with a light heart back to Jennifer.

The curate ... at all costs, she must _not_ tell Jennifer about the curate.

7

The long days of May stretched out before Judith and Jennifer. Each day was a fresh adventure in the open air, and work an unimportant and neglected nuisance. For weeks the weather remained flawless. Life narrowed to a wandering in a green canoe up small river-channels far from the town, with Jennifer paddling in wild bursts between long periods of inaction. To all Judith’s offers of help she answered firmly that a woman should never depart from her type.

They landed finally and made ready to bathe.

‘Off, off, you lendings!’ cried Jennifer. ‘Do you know, darling, that comes home to me more than anything else in all Shakespeare? I swear, Judith, it seems much more natural to me to wear no clothes.’

She stood up, stretching white arms above her head. Her cloud of hair was vivid in the blue air. Her back was slender and strong and faultlessly moulded.

‘Glorious, glorious Pagan that I adore!’ whispered the voice in Judith that could never speak out.

Beside Jennifer she felt herself too slim, too flexible, almost attenuated.

‘You are so utterly lovely,’ Jennifer said, watching her.

They swam in cool water in a deep circular pool swept round with willows, and dried themselves in the sun.

They spent the afternoon in the shade of a blossoming may bush. All round them the new green of the fields was matted over with a rich and solid layer of buttercup yellow. Jennifer lay flat on her back with the utter relaxed immobility of an animal, replenishing her vitality through every nerve.

Slowly they opened books, dreamed through a page, forgot it at once, laid books aside; turned to smile at each other, to talk as if there could never be enough of talking; with excitement, with anxiety, as if to-morrow might part them and leave them for ever burdened with the weight of all they had had to tell each other.

Judith crept closer, warming every sense at her, silent and utterly peaceful. She was the part of you which you never had been able to untie and set free, the part that wanted to dance and run and sing, taking strong draughts of wind and sunlight; and was, instead, done up in intricate knots and overcast with shadows; the part that longed to look outward and laugh, accepting life as an easy exciting thing; and yet was checked by a voice that said doubtfully that there were dark ideas behind it all, tangling the web; and turned you inward to grope among the roots of thought and feeling for the threads.

You could not do without Jennifer now.

The sun sank, and the level light flooded the fields and the river. Now the landscape lost its bright pure definitions of outline, its look as of a picture embroidered in brilliant silks, and veiled its colours with a uniform pearl-like glow. A chill fell and the scent of May grew troubling in the stillness. They turned the canoe towards home.

Nearer the town, boats became more frequent. Gramophones clamoured from the bowels of most of them; and they were heavily charged with grey-flannelled youth. Jennifer, observing them with frank interest, pointed out the good-looking ones in a loud whisper; and all of them stared, stared as they passed.

Above the quiet secretly-stirring town, roofs, towers and spires floated in a pale gold wash of light. What was the mystery of Cambridge in the evening? Footfalls struck with a pang on the heart, faces startled with strange beauty, and every far appearing or disappearing form seemed significant.

And when they got back to College, even that solid red-brick barrack was touched with mystery. The corridors were long patterns of unreal light and shadow. Girls’ voices sounded remote as in a dream, with a murmuring rise and fall and light laughter behind closed doors. The thrilling smell of cowslips and wall-flowers was everywhere, like a cloud of enchantment.

In Jennifer’s room, someone had let down the sun-blind, and all was in throbbing shadow. Her great copper bowl was piled, as usual, with fruit, and they ate of it idly, without hunger.

‘Now a little work,’ said Judith firmly. ‘Think! only three weeks till Mays....’

But it was impossible to feel moved.

Jennifer, looking childish and despondent, sat down silently by the window with a book.

Judith wrote on a sheet of paper:

_Tall oaks branch-charmèd by the earnest stars_; and studied it. That _was_ a starry night: the sound of the syllables made stars prick out in dark treetops.

Under it she wrote:

... _the foam Of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn_.

What a lot there were for the sea and the seashore!... The page became fuller.

_Upon the desolate verge of light Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea._

_The unplumbed salt estranging sea._

_From the lone sheiling of the misty island Mountains divide us and a world of seas: But still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland; And we in dreams behold the Hebrides._

Ah, that said it all....

The lines came flocking at random.

_But the majestic river floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land Into the frosty starlight, and there flowed Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste Under the solitary moon...._

_Ah sunflower weary of time That countest the steps of the sun...._

_Ah sunflower!_... Where were they--the old gardens of the sun where my sunflower wished to go? They half unfolded themselves at the words ...

_Nous n’irons plux aux bois Les lauriers sont coupés._

_O mors quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis...._

How with one tongue those both cried alas! And then in the end, sleep and a timeless peace.

_Nox est perpetua una dormienda._

There were so many tumbling and leaping about in your head you could go on for ever....

Now to study them. What did it all mean? Was there any thread running through them with which to make a theory? Anybody could write down strings of quotations,--but a student of English literature was expected to deal in theories. It was something to do with the sound ... the way sound made images, shell within shell of them softly unclosing ... the way words became colours and scents ... and the surprise when it happened, the ache of desire, the surge of excitement, the sense of fulfilment, the momentary perception of something unknowable.... Some sort of truth, some answer to the question: What is poetry?... No it was no good. But it had been very enjoyable, writing things down like that and repeating them to yourself.

Jennifer was half asleep with her head upon the window-sill. The bowl of fruit burned in the dimness. How like Jennifer was her room! Yellow painted chairs, a red and blue rug on the hearth, cowslips in coloured bowls and jars, one branch of white lilac in a tall blue vase; the guitar with its many ribbons lying on the table; a silken Italian shawl, embroidered with great rose and blue and yellow flowers flung over the screen: wherever you looked colour leapt up at you; she threw colour about in profuse disorder and left it. Her hat of pale green straw with its little wreath of clover lay on the floor. Nobody else had attractive childish hats like hers. A wide green straw would remind you of Jennifer to the end of your life; and beneath it you would see the full delicious curve of her cheek and chin, her deep-shadowed eyes, her lips that seemed to hold all life in their ardent lines.

She turned her head and smiled sleepily.

‘Hullo!’ said Judith. ‘Haven’t we been quiet? I’ve done such a lot of work.’

‘I’ve done none. I couldn’t remember the difference between ethics and æsthetics. What rot it all is!... Now listen and we’ll hear a nightingale. He’s tuning up.’

They leaned out of the window.

The icy aching flute in the cedar called and called on two or three notes, uncertain, dissatisfied; then all at once found itself and bubbled over in rich and complicated rapture.

Jennifer was listening, tranced in her strange immobility, as if every other sense were suspended to allow her to hear aright.

She roused herself at last as Judith bent to kiss her good night.

‘Good night my--darling--darling--’ she said.

They stared at each other with tragic faces. It was too much, this happiness and beauty.

The end of the first year.

8

The next moment so it seemed, the soft and coloured Autumn days were there again; the corridors, the echoing steps, the vast female yell of voices in Hall, the sense of teeming life in all the little rooms, behind the little closed doors--all these started again to weave their strange timeless dream; and the second year had begun.

Midway through the term came Martin’s letter.

Dear Judith,

Roddy is in Cambridge for two nights, staying with Tony. He wants to see you. Will you come to tea with me to-morrow at 4.30? I am to tell you he will never forgive you (a) if you don’t come (b) if you come with a chaperon. He says that chance alone prevented him from being your bachelor Uncle; and that I myself was a maiden aunt from the cradle. So please come.

Martin. Dear Martin,

Bachelor uncles are notorious; and curious things are apt to happen to strictly maiden aunts as all we enlightened moderns know. But an aunt and uncle bound by holy matrimony are considered safe (as safety goes in this world) and I have notified the authorities of their brief presence in the university and am cordially permitted to wait on them at tea to-morrow at 4.30.

Judith.

Judith looked around Martin’s room. It was untidy and rather dirty, with something forlorn and pathetic and faintly animal about it, like all masculine rooms. It made you want to look after him. Men were helpless children; it was quite true. You might have known Martin’s room would give you a ridiculous pull at the heart.

‘I’m afraid things are in a bit of a mess,’ said Martin, blowing cigarette ash off the mantelpiece into the fire.

He was smoking an enormous pipe. His face was red. His great form looked lumbering and shapeless in an ancient tweed coat and a pair of voluminous grey flannel trousers.

‘How are you, Judith?’ His brown eye fixed itself on her. He was very shy.

‘I’ve been ill, Martin.’

‘Oh!...’ He looked troubled and embarrassed. ‘Did you--did you have a decent doctor?’

‘Oh yes. It was almost pneumonia, but not quite.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been ill....’

‘You haven’t been to see me for ages, Martin.’

‘I know. I’ve been so busy.’ Violently he blew the ash about. What a shame to pretend to reproach him. He was obviously overcome.... ‘And I didn’t think you wanted.... I suppose you’re all right again now?’

Footsteps sounded outside on the stair. Judith collected herself and sat rigid. The door opened and Roddy, smiling, eager, debonair, came into the room.

‘Hullo, Judy! Marvellous to see you.’

‘Roddy!’

He stood before her and looked down into her face.

‘I thought I was never going to see you again, Judy. You’re looking marvellous.’

He was going to be irresistible. Already something in her was starting to leap up in response to him; and watching his face, she saw with a terrible pang that it was true, unarguable, proved over again more clearly than ever, that he had some quality which separated him from everybody else in the whole world, startled the imagination and made him of appalling significance to her.

‘I’m cold. Thank God for a good fire. It’s starting to snow.’ He flung himself down on the hearth-rug. ‘Trust Martin to make a good thick atmosphere with no beastly fresh air about it. Tea! Tea! Tea! Let me make you some toast, Judy. I make it so well.’

While he toasted great hunks of bread, Martin buttered scones and cut the cake, and Judith poured out tea.

They chattered, joked, teased each other. They played absurd drawing and rhyming games. Judith made them laugh with malicious stories of dons and students. Roddy threw back his head, his whole face wrinkled and flattened with silent laughter, his eyes gleaming with amusement under their lids. Martin stared, laughed, Ha! Ha!--stared again. They encouraged her, listened to her, were delighted with her; and the old sense of abnormal self-assurance grew within her taut mind.

At last she made herself look at the clock. So late! There would barely be time to get back before Hall.

‘I’ve got a car outside,’ said Roddy carelessly. ‘I can run you out in no time.’

He added, interrupting her thanks:

‘It isn’t mine, it’s got no hood, it always breaks down and it’s hellishly uncomfortable, so I don’t advise it really.’

It sounded as if he were suddenly regretting his offer, trying to withdraw it. She looked at him, all her confidence collapsing in a moment. His face had become a mask.

She said swiftly:

‘If you would take me I should be very grateful.’ Her voice sounded to herself strained, beseeching, horrible.

He bowed.

It took ten minutes to get the car started, with Martin and Roddy madly swinging her by turns.

‘Good night, Martin. Thank you for my lovely tea party. I’ll see you again soon, won’t I?’

He nodded, looking gravely down at her in the lamp-light.

‘Don’t catch cold,’ he said. There was something dejected about his attitude, a flatness in his voice.... Things had gone wrong for him.... Ever since that panic-stricken voice had broken in on the laughter and talk, the game for three, with its vibrating cry: “If you would take me home ...” from that moment all had been faintly blown upon by a ruffle of uneasy wind. They were no longer three persons, but two men and one woman.

She knew it and loathed herself because Martin knew it too.

‘I’m due to dine with Tony in twenty minutes,’ said Roddy.... ‘You’d better come along too. I’ll call for you on my way back. I shan’t be long.’

Roddy’s voice had forced a note of carelessness ... as if he were trying to pretend to Martin that nothing had happened; that the female had not suddenly singled him out and stretched an inviting hand to him as he stood beside his friend.

Even Roddy was aware of it.

‘No,’ said Martin, ‘I won’t dine with Tony. I’ll see you to-morrow perhaps.’

He waved his hand and turned away. The car started. She was alone with a strange man.

The night was dark, with a piercing wind and a faint flurry of snow in the air. Roddy drove at a great pace, and she sat beside him in silence, her shoulder touching his.

‘Cold?’ he said suddenly.

‘No, I don’t feel--anything.’

All of life was concentrated in her dark beating mind: her body was insensible to the weather. She saw the gates of College fly past. Its lights gleamed and were gone; and she could not speak. On they went, the long straight empty road flung before them in small lengths by the headlights and rolled up into nothingness behind them, cast away for ever.

He stopped the car suddenly.

‘Where’s this place?’

‘I think we’ve passed it long ago.’

The wind took her small voice away from him. He leaned towards her.

‘What?’

She turned to him.

‘I think we’ve passed it long ago.’

‘I think we have.’

Silence. The great wind blowing through illimitable deeps of night lifted and whirled her beyond time and space. She saw his hand lying on the wheel--a pale blur; and her own crept out and lay beside it; and she stared at them both. He watched her hand fall beside his and did not move a hair’s breadth nearer to touch it. He and she were alone together. No need for speech or movement. Their hands would lie motionless, side by side, for ever and ever.

She heard him laugh softly; and as he laughed her hand came quickly to her lap.

‘Well, what d’you want to do?’ he said very low.

‘I don’t want to go back.’

‘Do you want to go on?’

‘Yes.’

The car went forward again. Once she leaned towards him and said in his ear:

‘Roddy!’

‘Yes?’

‘_You_ didn’t want to go back, did you?’

‘No.’

She lay back again, mindlessly at peace in the midst of the roaring of the wind, and the road’s monotonous unfolding.

Once he burst out laughing, patted her knee and cried:

‘_Aren’t we mad?_’

His voice rang boyishly, happily.

Now came the snow, thinly at first, but soon in wild drifting clouds, blotting out the road, settling thick and fast over all, sifting and piling on the wind-screen.

‘Oh Lord, we must turn,’ said Roddy. ‘This is frightful.’

He turned the car and then stopped her to light a cigarette. She saw his face, lit by the flare of the match, glow suddenly, warmly out of the darkness with unknown curves and strange planes of light and shadow, and narrowed eyes, eyes not human, never-to-be-forgotten.

He waved the dwindling flame in her face.

‘Solemn face! What are you staring at? Smile--quick, quick, before the match goes out!’

The match went out.

‘I am smiling, Roddy.’

‘That’s right. Poor Judy covered with snow! There you sit, so modest and unassuming. Shall I get you home alive?’

‘I don’t care.’

She slipped her arm through his, and he gave it a quick friendly pressure and drove on.

Now they were before the gates of College. After all they had not driven very far. Time started again with a reluctant painful beat as the car crept in under the archway; and she realized that it was little more than an hour since they had left Martin. It seemed so short now--less than a moment; a pause between a breath and another breath.

They sat side by side in the car without moving.

‘I suppose I must go in now,’ she said at last. ‘They’ll still be at Hall.’

He shivered and beat his hands together. She took one and felt it, and it was icy.

‘Your hands. Oh, Roddy! Will you come in and get warm by my fire?’

He seemed to be considering and then said in a stilted way:

‘If I may--just for a minute--I’ve got rather chilled driving without gloves.’

She could find nothing to say. A cold shy politeness had descended on them both. She led the way into the hall and up the stairs. At every step snow fell off them: their shoulders and arms were covered in it. The corridors were silent and deserted, echoing only her light footsteps, and his heavier ones. She heard her tread, and his following after it, marching, marching towards her far-off door. Judith was bringing Roddy, Judith was in sober truth bringing Roddy to her room. If anyone saw her there would be trouble.

Somebody--Jennifer perhaps--must have drawn the curtains and heaped the fire in the little room. The warmth drew out the smell of the chrysanthemums; and their heavy golden heads, massed in a blue jar, held mysterious intensity of life in the firelight. She switched on the reading lamp, and all the colours in the room leapt up dimly, secretly: purple, blue and rose-colour glowed around them, half-lit, half obscured.

‘This is rather seductive,’ he said. He sank on his knees by the fire and held out his hands to the blaze, looking about him with a faint smile. She came and knelt beside him; and his eyes fastened narrowly on her face.

‘It’s like you: seductive,’ he said softly.

‘Oh, Roddy! Seductive. That’s all it is. I see it now. I hate it. Am _I_ nothing more than that?’

‘You.... I don’t know what you are. I can’t make you out. You _never_ behave as I think you probably will.’

‘I’m glad of that.’

‘Why are you glad?’

‘Because I believe you ascribe to me the worst motives,--the most ambiguous. You suspect me--you guard yourself against me.’

‘I don’t, Judy.’

‘Ah, you do. But you needn’t. I won’t do you any harm. Unless being--very fond of you can do you harm. But I don’t think I’m a _femme fatale_.’

‘I don’t know what you are. You disturb me very much. You seem to me completely incalculable. Your eyes watch me and watch me. Such marvellous eyes.’

She lifted them to his in a long steady look and remained silent.

‘You’re very nice,’ he said. ‘Rather a dear. I believe you’re quite without guile really. Why do you trust people so? It’s very foolish of you.’

‘Is it foolish of me to trust you?’

‘Incredibly foolish.’ He added, raising his voice and speaking slowly: ‘It’s no good trying to make me--adequate.’

‘Ah, you like to destroy yourself to me.’

‘But don’t you see? I go through the days in a sort of apathy; blind and deaf; blinder and deafer every day. I never think, I never care. I’d much better be dead only,--I’m too lazy to shoot myself.’

‘Oh, Roddy, don’t.’

She covered her ears with her hands. He had never spoken at such length, or with such obvious intent to convince.

‘I’m only trying to warn you,’ he said, rather defiantly, ‘I’m not worth saving. Nobody must _ever_ take me seriously. I’m not worth wasting a moment over. Nobody can do anything with me.’

His mood was verging towards laughter. His face broke up teasingly as he finished speaking and turned to look at her. But she averted her face, drearily pondering.

Why had he spoken like that? A self-contempt so settled, so hopeless.... He had seemed to be warning her to keep away from him for her own sake.

‘It’s no good,’ she said suddenly, involuntarily.

‘What’s no good?’

‘You’re what I choose to think you are. There’s no point in heaping yourself with abuse. You can’t make me dislike you; you can only make me sad. But I suppose that gives you pleasure.’

He was silent. She went on tremulously,

‘And when you--when people say they don’t feel or care--that they’re no good--it only makes me think--I could show them how to feel and care. I could make them happy. I could look after them. I dare say you know that’s--the effect it has on me. That’s why you say it.’

He was still silent. She leaned her head forward against the wall and felt tears smart under her lids.

He seemed to be musing, his eyes fixed on the fire, his hands held out to it.

‘Are your hands still cold?’ she said wearily. ‘Get them warm before you go.’

Suddenly he held them out to her.

It was a gesture so impulsive, so uncharacteristic it seemed of startling significance; and she could not answer it.

‘Yes, they are cold,’ he said. ‘Let me feel yours. Yours are cold too. What funny hands--so thin and narrow, such delicate bones. Rather lovely.’ He clasped them hard in his own. ‘When I do that they seem to go to nothing.’

She smiled at him dimly, half-tranced, feeling her eyelids droop over her eyes, giving him, with her helpless hands, all of herself; as if, through her finger-tips, he drew her in to himself in a dark stemlessly flowing tide. He stroked her palms, her whole hand, over and over with a lingering careful touch, as if learning the outline by heart.

‘They feel so kind,’ he said musingly. ‘They are, aren’t they, Judy? Dear little kind things--like the rest of you. Are you always kind, Judy?’

‘Always to you, Roddy, I shouldn’t wonder.’

He relinquished his clasp suddenly, saying with a shake of the head:

‘You shouldn’t be.... However, I’ve warned you.’

‘Yes, you’ve warned me.’

She smiled at him sadly.

In a minute she must tell him to go. They would be coming out of the Hall, bursting into the room to discover the cause of her absence.

‘Are you tired?’ he said.

She nodded, realizing suddenly the collapsed forward droop of her body, the whole pose of deadly fatigue.

‘I’ve been very ill, you know.’

‘Oh, Judy! You never told me. You let me take you for that bloody cold drive. You’ll be ill again.’

‘It’s all right. I shan’t be ill again.’

‘You _are_ naughty,’ he said, looking at her anxiously.

He never could bear people to be ill or in pain.

‘Come and lie down at once on the sofa,’ he said.

She obeyed him, and let him arrange the cushions beneath her shoulders, with a delicious sense of dependence.

‘The drive won’t have hurt me,’ she said, ‘because I enjoyed it so much.’

He stood looking down at her.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ he said softly.

‘Yes, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wasn’t it a queer unreal drive?’

‘Quite unreal, I suppose.’

‘I wish it had never stopped.’

He made no answer to this but still stood watching her.

‘You’ll have to go, Roddy. They mustn’t find you. Besides you’ll be missing your dinner.’

‘I’ve missed that long ago, I should think.’

‘Oh, Roddy, how awful! I’ve made you miss your dinner.’

‘I know. It’s monstrous of you. And I’m so hungry.’

‘I’ve missed mine too but I’m not hungry.... Roddy, what will Tony say to you?’

‘He’ll be very much annoyed.’

‘Shall you say you were with me? He wouldn’t like that, would he?’

‘No.’

‘Tony is jealous of me. Once he looked at me with pure hatred. I’ve never forgotten it. Does he love you?’

‘I think he does.’

‘I think he does too. Do you love him? You needn’t answer. I know I mustn’t ask you that.’

‘You can ask me anything you like.’

But he did not answer.

‘It is so terrible to be hated. Tell him I won’t do you any harm.’

But perhaps that was not true. Perhaps she meant endless mischief. Supposing she were to take Roddy from Tony, from all his friends and lovers, from all his idle Parisian and English life, and attach him to herself, tie him and possess him: that would mean giving him cares, responsibilities: it might mean changing him from his free and secret self into something ordinary, domesticated, resentful. Perhaps his lovers and friends would be well advised to gather round him jealously and guard him from the female. She saw herself for one moment as a creature of evil design, dangerous to him, and took her hand away from his that held it lightly.

‘I’ll tell him you won’t do me any harm,’ he repeated absently. He was staring into her face.

‘You’re going away now,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know when I shall see you again.’

‘I don’t know either,’ he said smiling.

‘To-morrow you’ll have forgotten. But I shan’t forget this evening.’

‘Nor shall I. I don’t forget you, Judy. I sometimes wish I could. I’m a little afraid of you.’

‘Afraid of me?’

‘Afraid of you--and me.’

Later on when he was gone she must make herself think of that. It might have power to hurt: she could not tell now, with his unmasked, disturbed face watching her. Now there was nothing but depth under depth of welling happiness.

‘You know, Roddy,’ she said after a silence, ‘the awful thing about you is that I can never pick up again where we left off. To-night you’ve talked to me as I’ve always longed for you to talk to me, as if we could trust each other, as if we were two creatures of the same sort alone together. Don’t you feel we know each other better after to-night, Roddy?’

He was silent for a moment, his eyes twinkling; then he said:

‘I feel you’ve made me say a great many indiscreet things.’

‘Poor Roddy! You’d better go, before I wring something out of you you’ll regret to your life’s end,’ she said bitterly. ‘You know I shan’t rest until I’ve forced you to tell me all your secrets. And when you have, I’ll go and tell them to everybody else.’

She shut her eyes and turned her face from him. There was a long silence.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ he said in the end.

‘I’m not.’

‘Didn’t I tell you I was inadequate?’

‘Yes, you told me.’

‘Well now you believe it don’t you?’

‘No. No. No.’

‘Ah--you’re incorrigible.... Good-bye, Judy.’

She turned towards him again, took his hand in both hers and clung to it.

‘Roddy, you _have_--quite liked--being with me ... haven’t you?’

His face softened.

‘I’ve adored it,’ he said gently.

‘And when shall I see you again?’

He shook his head.

‘Oh, Roddy, when?’

He stooped swiftly until his face almost touched hers, and murmured, watching her:

‘Whenever you like.’

His lips closed on hers very lightly. She put her arms round his neck and kissed his cheek and forehead. When after a moment or two he raised himself she thought he was smiling again.

She lay perfectly still, watching him while he lit a cigarette, smoothed his hair, put on his coat and went to open the door. Then he turned, still smiling, and nodding as if encouraging her to smile back. But she continued to lie and stare up at him as if from the bottom of a well; as if all of her were dead except the eyes which just moved, following him.

The door closed after him. Soon the sound of his footsteps faded along the corridor.

She raised her hand slowly and with difficulty, as if a weight were holding it to her side, and pulled the lamp’s green shade down; and the whole room sank softly into semi-obscurity.

Some trick of green light brought suddenly to mind the look of early spring woods at twilight: fresh buds and little leaves dashed with rain, an air like dark clear water lighting the branches with a wan glimmer.

She looked at her body lying long, slender and still on the couch; she saw her breast rise and fall faintly with her breathing; and she had a sense of watching herself return from a long swoon, bathed in crystalline new life, transformed and beautified.

The trivial femininities of the room had made, she thought, an inept background for his elegance. But now there seemed something graceful, foreign, curious in the lights and shades, in the forms of flowers, books, furniture; as if he had left his impress upon them.

She heard the footsteps of Jennifer coming swiftly towards her door.... Not a word, not a whisper to Jennifer. She and he could never meet, even in mind. The profoundest instinct forbade it.

Jennifer came gaily in.

‘Tired, darling?’ she said. ‘You were quite right not to come to Hall. It was bloodier than ever. Come, darling, let me put you to bed--you’re so tired. I’ll look after you. I’ll make you some scrambled eggs after you’re in bed.’

Then Jennifer suspected nothing. She did not see that all was changed. She was deep in the mood of tender solicitude which came upon her now and then since the illness, when she remembered to think Judith fragile. She lifted her in her arms, and carried her into the bedroom....

Nothing has changed after all. There was Jennifer laughing, talking, letting the eggs get burnt while she did her hair; bending down finally to kiss you a tender good-night. Judith tried to think of Roddy. A little while ago he had been stooping over her as Jennifer stooped now, with eyes that were different and yet the same. But he had disappeared; she could not now remember what he looked like.

Nothing was altered then, no order was reversed or even shaken. There were these moments; but all around and about the extravagant incongruous brilliances, the divine crudities, the breath-taking magnificences of their pattern, life went on weaving uninterruptedly: weaving uncoloured trivial things into secure fabric.

9

Then, almost it seemed, while she still told herself these things; while the memory of Roddy’s brief presence still surged up bewilderingly to drown her a hundred times a day, and then slipped away again, lost in the mysterious and doubtful darkness cast by his ensuing silence; while Jennifer remained the unquenched spring of all gaiety and reassurance, all delight: while the whole ordered dream went on as if it could never break; even then, with the third year, the shadow of change began to fall.

It was a look, a turn of the head, a new trick of speech, a nothing in Jennifer which struck at her heart in a moment; and then all had started to fall to pieces. Jennifer was no longer the same. Somewhere she had turned aside without a word, and set her face to a new road. She did not want to be followed. She had given Judith the slip, in the dark; and now, when she still pretended to be there, her voice had the false shrillness of a voice coming from far away.

She remembered Jennifer saying once, suddenly: “There’s one thing certain in my life: that is, that I shall always love you.” And afterwards her eyes had shone as if with tears and laughter. She remembered the surprise and joy, the flooding confidence of that moment; for it had been said so quietly, as if the realization of that “always” held for something sorrowful, a sobering sense of fate. Her manner had had a simplicity far removed from the usual effervescence and extravagance: she had seemed to state a fact to be believed in forever, without question. In her life where all else was uncertain, fluid and undirected, where all turned in mazes of heat and sound, that only was the deep unshaken foundation, the changeless thing.... She had seemed to mean that, sitting back in her chair, her arms laid along her lap, her hands folded together, everything about her quiet and tender, her eyes resting on Judith as they never had before or since, long and full, with a depth of untroubled love.

That had been on a day in late April, at the beginning of the last Summer term. The happiness of reunion had never before seemed so complete. She had been in Scotland, Judith in Paris with Mamma, living resentfully in a reflection of Mamma’s alien existence. And then they were together again, and the summer term had opened with its unfailing week or so of exquisite weather.

They had taken the green canoe one morning and wandered up the river to Grandchester. There was no one at all in the Orchard when they reached it.

“Thank God I see no grey flannels,” said Jennifer. “I suppose the grass is still too wet for undergraduates to sit out.”

A light breeze was blowing through the orchard, ruffling long grass, dandelions, buttercups, and daisies. Under the trees, the little white tables, set in the green silken brilliance, were dappled with running light and shadow, and the apple branches, clotted with full blossom, gleamed against the sky in a tender childish contrast of simple colours,--pale pink upon pale blue. The air was dazed with a bewilderment of bird-song.

A rough brown terrier with golden eyes came prancing out on them, making known their presence with barkings half-ferocious, half-friendly. The dark waitress came lazily from the house, reluctant to serve them.

‘Is the Orchard open?’

‘Oh yes, it’s open.’

‘Can you let us have lunch?’

‘Oh I dare say.’

‘What can you let us have?’

‘You can have a cheese omelette and some fruit-salad.’

‘Divine,’ said Jennifer, and leapt for joy.

‘You better have it in the shelter. The grass is wet.’

She wandered away, smoothing her black untidy hair. She would not smile. There was something arresting and romantic in the thin sallow dark-browed young woman, preserving her ugliness, her faint unrelaxing bitterness among all the laughing renewals of her surroundings.

‘I’d like to pick her up and shake her into life. Make her smile and be young. Make her cheeks pink and her eyes bright,’ said Jennifer. ‘If I were a man I’d fall bang in love with her. What is her name do you think? Jessica? Anne? Rosa?’

‘Miriam.’

‘Yes, Miriam.’

How the remembered insignificant words brought flooding back the irrecoverable quality of that day!

Tits and robins, perching all around them, and the golden-eyed dog, had helped them to finish their meal.

Then they had lain back in their chairs, staring and saying nothing. And then it was that Jennifer had turned and broken the silence with her quiet, inevitable-seeming declaration; and after it Judith had reached out to touch her hand for a moment; and continued to sit beside her and dream.

Later in the afternoon they had seen grey-flannelled legs approaching and risen to go.

They met the dark girl walking down the gravel path towards the orchard, carrying a trayful of crockery.

‘We’ve come to pay you,’ said Jennifer radiantly smiling.

She gave the price without a flicker.

‘Judith, have you that much on you, darling?’ said Jennifer, and added, turning again to the girl: ‘We _have_ so enjoyed ourselves.’

There was no response save a quick suspicious glance.

Currant bushes, wallflowers, narcissi, pansies, yellow daisies and tulips blossomed richly on each side of the path.

‘What a delicious garden!’ said Jennifer. ‘It’s at its very best, isn’t it?’

‘It’s looking nice,’ she admitted.

Jennifer pointed to a clump of stiff, serious purple-black tulips.

‘Those tulips are like you,’ she said, her eyes and mouth, all her glowing face, coaxing and appealing.

And suddenly the girl gave a little laugh, looking with soft eyes first at Jennifer, then away, shyly and deprecatingly, as who should say: ‘The idea! Me like a tulip! Well, you _are_ a one--Daft ...’ but gratified and amused all the same.

‘I shall always think of you when I see tulips like that,’ said Jennifer. ‘Good-bye!’

‘Good-bye, Miss....’ She smiled, almost mischievously this time, and hurried on with her tray.

‘She was quite human,’ said Jennifer. ‘I wonder if she’s got a lover or if she’s longing for one, or if she’s been jilted, or what.... What makes her all shadowy and tight inside herself?’

She stood looking after the girl, as if meditating going back to ask her.

How Jennifer struck sparks from ordinary people! She knew how to live. To be with her was to meet adventure; to see, round every corner, the bush become the burning bush.

In a little while she would have forgotten the girl whose problem was now so urgent and exciting; but you yourself would always remember,--seeing it all dramatically, seeing it as a quiet story, hearing it as an unknown tune: making of it a water colour painting in gay foolish colours, or an intricate pencil pattern of light and shadow.

They left the Orchard.

‘I think,’ said Jennifer, ‘we will never come here again.’

They had not come again. That time had remained unblurred by any subsequent return in a different mood, with more companions, in another weather or season.

But Judith had thought, while she nodded agreement: ‘Some day, when I’m much older, I’ll come back alone and think of her; and then perhaps write and say: do you remember? Or perhaps not, in case she has forgotten.’

And now, it seemed, far sooner even than Judith had feared, Jennifer was forgetting everything. They had meant to go away together during the summer vacation; go to Brittany, and bathe and walk and read: but in the end Jennifer’s don had said cold things regarding Jennifer’s progress, and requested her to attend college during the Long. Judith had gone on a reading party with three of the circle, and written Jennifer long letters which were answered briefly and at rare intervals. But that was not surprising. Jennifer’s letters had always been spasmodic, if passionately affectionate. Then the letters had ceased altogether. Judith had written asking if they could not spend September together, and Jennifer had answered in five lines, excusing herself. She was going to shoot in Scotland in September.

And then the third year had started, with everything as it had always been, or seeming so, for a few moments; and then in one more moment shivered to pieces.

She would not stay behind alone, after the others had gone, to say good-night. She ceased to talk with abandonment and excitement, her eyes shining to see you listening, to feel you understanding. There seemed nothing to say now. In particular, she would not speak of the Long.

It was, of course, Mabel who was the first to hint of ill-tidings. Eating doughnuts out of a bag, late one night, during one of Judith’s charity visits, she said:

‘Has that Miss Manners been up lately?’

‘Who’s Miss Manners?’

‘Why--that Miss Manners, Jennifer’s friend, who stayed with her so much during the Long.’

‘Oh yes----’

‘I was sure you must have heard about her, because they seemed such very great friends. They were always about together and always up to some lark.’ She gave a snigger. ‘We used to wonder, we really did, how long it would be before Jennifer got sent down, the way they used to go on, coming in so late and all. But somehow Jennifer never gets found out, does she?’ Another snigger. ‘What a striking-looking girl she is.’

‘Who?’

‘Miss Manners.’

‘Oh yes.... I’ve never seen her. Only photographs.’

‘Everybody said what a striking pair they made.... I expect she’ll be up soon again, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know at all,’ said Judith. ‘I expect so.’ Mabel looked solemn.

‘The wrestling matches they used to have out there on the lawn! I used to watch them from my window. I wonder they didn’t.... I really wonder ... any of the don.... It looked so ... throwing each other about like that.... It’s not the sort of thing you expect--quite, is it? I mean....’

‘Oh, wrestling’s glorious,’ said Judith. ‘I love it. Jennifer’s tried to teach me. But I’m not strong enough for her; the--the--Manners girl is much more of a match for her.’

Mabel pursed up her mouth and was silent.

It was necessary to leave her quickly for fear of striking her; because her deliberate intent was obvious; because she knew quite well now that you had never before heard of Miss Manners; because you were seeing that girl plainly, tall, dark and splendid, striding on the lawn with Jennifer, grasping her in strong arms, a match for her in all magnificent unfeminine physical ways, as you had never been. Her image was all at once there, ineffaceably presenting itself as the embodiment of all hitherto unco-ordinated and formless fears, the symbol for change, and dark alarms and confusions. And the unbearable image of Mabel was there too, watching by herself, gloating down from the window with glistening eyes that said:

‘At last!’

She stopped short in the corridor, and moaned aloud, aghast at the crowding panic of her thoughts.

* * * * *

Judith, returning from her bath, heard voices and laughter late at night behind Jennifer’s door. Should she stop? All the circle must be there as usual, laughing and talking as if nothing were amiss. She alone had excluded herself, sitting with a pile of books in her room, pretending to have important work. It was her own fault. She had said she was busy, and they had believed her and not invited her to join their gathering. She would go in, and sit among them and smoke, and tell them things,--tell them something to make them laugh; and all would be as before. They would drift away in the end and leave her behind; she would turn and look at Jennifer in the firelight, put out a hand and say: ‘Jennifer....’

She opened the door and looked in.

The voices stopped, cut off sharply.

In the strange, charged, ensuing silence, she saw that the curtains were flung back. Purple-black night pressed up against the windows, and one pane framed the blank white globe of the full moon. They were all lying on the floor. Dark forms, pallid, moon-touched faces and hands were dimly distinguishable; a few cigarette points burned in the faint hanging cloud of smoke across the room. The fire was almost out. Where was Jennifer?

‘Hullo, there’s Judith,’ said one.

‘Is there room for me?’ said Judith in a small voice. She came in softly among them all, and went directly over to the window and sat on the floor, with the moon behind her head. She was conscious of her own unnatural precision and economy of movement; of her long slender body wrapped in its kimono crossing the room in three light steps, sinking noiselessly down in its place and at once remaining motionless, expectant.

Where was Jennifer?

‘All in the dark,’ she said, in the same soft voice. And then: ‘What a moon! Don’t you know it’s very dangerous to let it shine on you like this? It will make you mad.’

One or two of them laughed. She could now recognize the three faces in front of her. Jennifer must be somewhere by the fireplace. There was constraint in the room. She thought with awful jealousy: ‘Ah, they hate my coming. They thought they were getting rid of me at last. They come here secretly without me, to insinuate themselves. They all want her. They have all hated me always.’ She said:

‘Give me a cigarette, someone.’

Jennifer’s voice broke in suddenly with a sort of harsh clangour. From her voice, Judith knew how wild her eyes must be.

‘Here, here’s a cigarette, Judith.... Have something to eat. Or some cocoa. Oh--there was a bottle of cherry-brandy, but I believe we’ve finished it.’

Horrible confusion in her voice, a stumbling hurry of noise....

‘I have just licked up the last dregs,’ said a deep voice.

‘Who’s that who spoke then?’ said Judith softly and sweetly.

‘Oh ...’ cried Jennifer shrilly, ‘Geraldine, you haven’t met Judith yet.’

What was she saying? Geraldine Manners was staying the week-end, no, was wrestling on the lawn with her; had just arrived, no, had been in the room for months, since the summer, for they were such very great friends....

‘How do you do? I’m guessing what you are like from the way you speak,’ said Judith softly, laughingly.

‘Oh, I’m no good at that.’

How bored, how careless a voice!

‘Shall I switch on the light?’ said someone.

‘No!’ said Judith loudly.

She lifted up her arm against the window. The kimono sleeve fell back from it, and it gleamed cold and frail in the moonlight, like a snake. She spread out her long fingers and stared at them.

‘I would like to be blind,’ she said. ‘I really wish I were blind. Then I might learn to see with my fingers. I might learn to hear properly too.’

And learn to be indifferent to Jennifer; never to be enslaved again by the lines and colours of her physical appearance, the ever new surprise and delight of them; learn, in calm perpetual darkness, how the eyes’ tyrannical compulsions had obscured and distorted all true values. To be struck blind now this moment, so that the dreadful face of the voice by the fireplace remained for ever unknown!... Soon the light would go on, and painfully, hungrily, with awful haste and reluctance, the eyes would begin their work again, fly to their target.

‘Don’t be absurd, Judith,’ said someone. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’; and went on to talk of work among the blind, of blinded soldiers, of St. Dunstan’s.

The conversation became general and followed the usual lines: it was better to be deaf than blind, blind than deaf. Jennifer and Geraldine were silent.

‘Oh, it’s time we went to bed,’ said someone. ‘Jennifer, I must go to bed. I’m almost asleep. What’s the time?’

Now the light would go on.

It went on. The room suddenly revealed its confusion of girls, cushions, chairs, cups, plates and cigarette-ends. Everybody was getting up, standing about and talking.

Jennifer was on her feet, voluble, calling loud good-nights. They made a group round her and round somebody still sitting on the floor beside her. Judith caught a glimpse of a dark head leaning motionless against the mantelpiece. Now they were all going away. Judith followed them slowly to the door and there paused, looking over her shoulder towards the fireplace.

‘Stay,’ said Jennifer shrilly. She was standing and staring at Judith with wild eyes; pale, with a deep patch of colour in each cheek, and lips parted.

‘No, I must go. I’ve got some work,’ said Judith, smiling over her shoulder. She let her eyes drop from Jennifer’s face to the other one.

At last it confronted her, the silent-looking face, watching behind its narrowed eyes. The hair was black, short, brushed straight back from the forehead, leaving small beautiful ears exposed. The heavy eyebrows came low and level on the low broad brow; the eyes were long slits, dark-circled, the cheeks were pale, the jaw heavy and masculine. All the meaning of the face was concentrated in the mouth, the strange wide lips laid rather flat on the face, sulky, passionate, weary, eager. She was not a young girl. It was the face of a woman of thirty or more; but in years she might have been younger. She was tall, deep-breasted, with long, heavy but shapely limbs. She wore a black frock and a pearl necklace, and large pearl earrings.

Judith said politely:

‘Is this the first time you have been here?’

‘No.’ She laughed. Her voice was an insolent voice.

‘I’m tired,’ said Jennifer suddenly, like a child.

‘You look it,’ said Judith. ‘Go to bed.’

‘I’ll get undressed.’ Jennifer passed a hand across her forehead and sighed.

The woman by the fireplace fitted a cigarette into an amber holder slowly, and lit it.

‘I’m not sleepy yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait till you’re in bed and come and tuck you up.’

‘This room feels----’ cried Jennifer staring around her in horror. She dashed to the window and flung it wide open; then disappeared into her bedroom; and there was not another sound from her.

The woman started singing to herself very low, as if forgetful of Judith’s presence; then broke off to say:

‘I like your kimono.’

Judith wrapped the long red and blue silk garment more closely round her hips.

‘Yes. It was brought me from Japan. I gave Jennifer one. A purple one.’

‘Oh, that one. She’s lent it to me. I forgot to bring a dressing-gown.’

She turned her head away, as if to intimate that so far as she was concerned conversation was neither interesting nor necessary.

Judith bit back the ‘Good-night, Jennifer’ which she was about to call; for she was never going to care any more what happened to Jennifer; never again soothe her when she was weary and excited, comfort her when she was unhappy. She would look at Jennifer coldly, observe her vagaries and entanglements with a shrug, comment upon them with detached and cynical amusement: hurt her, if possible, oh, hurt her, hurt her.

Now she would leave her with Geraldine and not trouble to ask herself once what profound and secret intimacies would be restored by her withdrawal.

She smiled over her shoulder and left the room.

10

A week later, Geraldine was still there. She and Judith had not met again; when she and Jennifer, arm in arm, were seen approaching, Judith avoided them; and changing her place at Hall--her place which had been beside Jennifer for two years--went and sat where she could not see the sleek dark head next to the fair one, turning and nodding in response.

All day they were invisible. Geraldine had a car, and they must go miles and miles into the country in the soft late autumn weather.

It seemed to Judith that life had ceased to bear her along upon its tide. It flowed past her, away from her; and she must stay behind, passive and of no account, while the current of Jennifer met and gaily mingled with a fresh current and fled on. It seemed as if even the opportunity for the gesture of relinquishment was to be denied her. And then, wearily returning from lectures one morning she found upon her table a torn scrap of paper scrawled over violently in an unknown hand.

‘_Please be in your room at six o’clock this evening. I want to see you._

‘_Geraldine Manners._’

It was an insolent note. She would ignore such a command. She would put a notice up on her door: _Engaged_--and turn the key; and when the woman came she would just have to go away again.

But at six o’clock Geraldine knocked loudly and she cried: ‘Come in.’ They stood facing each other.

‘Sit down,’ said Judith. But neither of them made any movement.

‘I wanted to see you.’ Her voice was low and emotional--angry perhaps; and Judith had a moment’s fainting sense of impotence. The woman was so magnificent, so mature and well-dressed; if there was to be a fight, what chance was there for a thin young student in a woollen jumper?

She leaned against the mantelpiece and, staring at Judith, flung at her:

‘What’s all this about?’

Judith sat down again, without a word, and waited, steadily holding the green eyes with her own. She heard the blood beat deafeningly in her ears.

Geraldine went on:

‘I think it’s the damnedest bit of impertinence I ever heard. Schoolgirls! My God!’ She flung her head back theatrically.

Judith thought, with a shudder of excitement and anguish: ‘Wait, wait. It is because you are unused to it that it seems like physical blows. Soon you will be able to collect yourself. This is anger and you are the cause. You are being insulted and called to account for the first time in your life. Carry it off. Carry it off.’

And her blood went on repeating ‘Jennifer’ in her ears.

Geraldine took a gold cigarette case and the amber holder from a gold chain bag with a sapphire clasp.

‘It’s pretty awful, isn’t it, to be so mean and petty? I’m sorry for you, I must say.’

‘Please don’t be sorry for me.’ She noted her own voice, icy and polite.

Geraldine had inserted a thin, yellow cigarette in the holder and was searching for a match.

‘Here,’ said Judith. She got up, took the matchbox from the mantelpiece and struck a light. Geraldine stooped her head down over the little flare. White lids, black curling lashes, broad cheek-bones, Egyptian lips--the heaviness, the thick waxen texture of the whole face: Judith saw them all with an aching and terrible intensity, her eyes clinging to the head bowed above her hand. She should have smelt like a gardenia.

‘Thank you,’ said Geraldine. She lifted her head, narrowed her eyes and puffed out smoke, moving and stretching her mouth faintly round the amber. She smoked like a man.

Judith sat down again.

Geraldine seemed now very much at her ease. She leaned against the mantelpiece, dominating the room: and she seemed of gigantic height and significance.

‘Are you a friend of Jennifer’s?’ she said.

‘Jennifer--is a person I know well.’

She looked at Judith as if in surprise at her tone and manner.

‘I had no idea of that. She never mentioned you.’

For a moment that dealt a blinding blow, with its instantaneous implications of dishonesty and indifference. But she repeated:

‘I’ve known her well for two years. You can ask her. She _might_ admit it.’ And as she spoke the last words she thought with sudden excitement: ‘Just as I never mentioned Roddy....’

‘Oh, I can’t get anything out of her,’ said Geraldine and added truculently: ‘You might as well tell me what it’s all about.’

‘I have nothing whatever to tell you. I don’t know why you’ve come. I’d like _you_ to tell me what it’s all about--or else go away, please.’ She was conscious all at once of a terrible inward trembling, and got up again. The other watched her in silence, and she added: ‘I haven’t been near her--since that night in her room. I’ve kept away--you know that night....’

‘What night?’

Judith broke into a sort of laugh; and then checked herself with a vast effort: for the suppressed hysteria of weeks was climbing upwards within her and if it broke loose, it might never, never cease.

‘Well--one night,’ she said, ‘I thought perhaps you remembered.’

There was not a flicker on Geraldine’s face. She must be very stupid or very cruel.

‘What beats me,’ said Geraldine, ‘is why this dead set against me?--against her and me. What do you want to interfere with us for? It’s not your business, any of you. I thought I’d come and tell you so.’

There was a curious coarseness about her: almost a vulgarity. It was difficult to combat.

Judith lifted her eyes and looked at her in silence.

‘So you’ve all sent Jennifer to Coventry.’ She laughed. ‘It’s marvellous. A female institution is really marvellous. At least it would be if it weren’t so nauseating.’ Still Judith was silent, and she added contemptuously:

‘I should have thought a bit better of you if you’d come yourself. Do you generally get other people to do your dirty work for you?’

Judith got up and went towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’ said Geraldine sharply.

‘To Jennifer, to ask her to explain.’

‘You can’t do that.’ The change in her voice and manner was noticeable. ‘Jennifer’s lying down. I left her trying to sleep. She mustn’t be disturbed.’

‘I can go to Jennifer whenever I like. I can always go to Jennifer. I don’t ask you whether I am to or not.’

At last this was anger, anger! At last she was able to want to wound, to cry: ‘I! I! I!’ brutally, aggressively, triumphantly in the face of her enemy. Pure anger for the first time in life.

‘_Please!_ Listen,’ Geraldine took a few steps towards her. ‘Please, don’t go now. She’s very much upset. I left her crying.’

Crying--crying? Oh, that was a good thing. It was splendid that Jennifer should have been made to cry.... And yet ... if this woman had made her cry--poor Jennifer, darling Jennifer--you would----

The situation seemed suddenly to have become reversed. Judith felt herself momentarily strong in self-assurance; and Geraldine was hesitating, as if doubtful what to say.

‘What’s she crying about? It takes a good deal to make Jennifer cry.’

Geraldine shot her a glance and said venomously:

‘Yes. As far as I can make out, one of your charming friends must have taken a good deal of trouble to make her cry this morning. Anyway she seemed to have got it into her head that she’s treated somebody, or one of you, very badly--and that somebody was hurt--_you_ were hurt--because she’d been neglecting you for me.’

‘How do you know she meant me?’

She was silent, and then said:

‘She was crying a good deal and thoroughly upset and I heard her say your name. So I went and asked someone where your room was and came straight. But you were out.’

‘Did she tell you to come?’

‘She didn’t tell me not to.’

‘Then she told you where my room was. She knows you’re here.’

‘I didn’t ask her where your room was. I--found out.’

‘And does she know you’re here?’

‘No.’ She added after a silence. ‘I didn’t come here to be cross-questioned.’

‘What did you come here for?’

‘Just to tell you we care _that_’--she snapped her fingers--‘for your mean little jealousies.’

‘Oh, it seems scarcely worth coming, just for that. It wasn’t worth losing your temper over, was it? Little jealousies are so common--in a female institution. I do think you over-estimate their importance. It isn’t as if you cared what we said, because you’ve just told me you don’t--either of you.’

‘And,’ she said, raising her voice angrily; ‘_and_ to tell you I consider you owe me an apology--me and Jennifer.’

‘Oh!’ Judith buried her face in her hands and laughed. ‘Oh! that’s very funny.’

She looked up at Geraldine with a sudden fantastic hope that she would see her laughing too; but the face presented to her was hostile and heavy. At sight of it she felt the laughter begin to shake her terrifyingly; and checked it with a gasp.

Geraldine said:

‘I suppose you will deny having anything to do with this?’

‘Oh, deny it--of course I do,’ said Judith with weary contempt.

‘Deny having insinuated--suggested----’ she began loudly.

‘I have never bothered to mention your name to anyone. Why should I? It’s nothing to do with me.’

‘No,’ she said, her face and voice rousing a little from their heavy deliberate monotony. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’ She thought a moment and added slowly: ‘Then there’s some misunderstanding.’

‘Yes, some misunderstanding. Why go on treating it as if it were important?’

After a silence she said:

‘Anything, however slight, that comes between me and Jennifer is important.’

Judith felt herself start to tremble again. Those slow words rang a doom for her; and her spurious advantage was at an end.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said uncertainly, ‘if I have come between you and Jennifer.’

‘Not _you_,’ she said. (Yes, she was a stupid or a cruel woman.) ‘But I know what people’s mischievous tongues can do, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it before I go away. Just to assure myself that I’m not leaving her to face anything--unpleasant or distressing.’

‘Ah, so you realize how easily she’s influenced.’

That was it then: the woman was afraid. She had given herself away at last: she knew the terrible insecurity of loving Jennifer. Judith felt a quiver of new emotion dart through her: it seemed like a faint pity.

‘I don’t want her bothered,’ said Geraldine aggressively. ‘I loathe this interfering.’

‘You don’t quite understand,’ said Judith in a voice of calm explanation, ‘how much Jennifer means to some people--a lot of people here. They love her. Naturally they resent it a little when somebody else comes in and claims all her attention. They miss her. Isn’t it natural? And then you see, since you’ve been here I believe she’s been getting into awful trouble for neglecting her work. I heard one of them say so a day or two ago--and another one said it was time someone spoke to her or she’d be sent down. So I daresay that’s what happened: somebody tried to give her a sort of warning. Of course it was silly: but then, as you say, girls are silly. It was meant kindly.’ She paused, feeling a kind of faintness, took a deep sighing breath and continued:

‘If my name was brought into it, it was because I have had--I think--a certain amount of influence with Jennifer. She and I were a good deal together at one time. But lately I have been working very hard. They have no business at all....’

She felt her voice dwindling and stopped, trembling now uncontrollably.

Geraldine lit another cigarette and leaned back against the mantelpiece. Oh, she was going to lean there for ever! If only she would allow you to soften her into some emotion of pity and understanding so that you might fling yourself down and weep, crying: “Now you must understand. Now I have told you all. Leave me.” But there was no hope of that. Her hostility was hardening. She was more alert now; and she seemed to be taking note for the first time since her sweeping entrance of Judith’s person. Her eyes went attentively over face, hands, feet, hair, clothes, and over the whole room. Something alive was rearing itself from the stony envelope. She was silent for a long time, and then said uncertainly:

‘I hope you won’t--mention all this to her.’ Judith laughed.

‘I can’t quite promise that,’ she said. ‘You see, we’ve been used to telling each other most things. There’s no reason to make a mystery of it. Is there?’

She was silent again; and then said:

‘I think it would be best not to say anything to her. I don’t want her to think there’s been any fuss. I don’t think she’ll care to hear any more about it. She was very unwilling to--to dwell----’

That brought home Jennifer’s attitude with painful clarity. She was, of course, flying to escape. Why should she go free always, always? This time it would be easy to make her uncomfortable, if not to hurt her. And yet, it could not be done. Once more she felt the faintest stir of sympathy with Geraldine. She said with a shrug:

‘Very well, I won’t refer to it.’

‘We’ll agree,’ said Geraldine, ‘to keep it to ourselves.’

Judith nodded.

Geraldine threw away her cigarette, smoothed her sleek hair, stood upright as if preparing to go and said with brisk indifference:

‘Well, I’m sorry if I’ve been a nuisance.’

‘Oh, you haven’t been a nuisance.’

Judith crushed her cold hands into her lap. Now it was almost over: soon she could let herself collapse. But Geraldine still lingered, looking about her.

‘You’ve got nice things,’ she said. ‘Most of the rooms I’ve seen are too frightful.’

‘I’m luckier than most girls here. I have more money.’

‘Do you like being here?’

‘I have liked it--and disliked it.’

‘Hmm. Jennifer hates it. I don’t wonder. I think I’ve persuaded her to leave and come abroad with me.’

Defeat at last. She had no answer to that, not one weapon left. She stared before her, paralyzed.

‘I can’t think,’ added Geraldine, ‘how she’s stuck it so long.’

Judith heard herself say slowly, softly:

‘As I told you, there are a great many people here who love her. That makes a difference, doesn’t it? People have to love Jennifer.’ She buried her face in her hands, and thought aloud, in a sort of whisper: ‘People have to love her and then she seems cruel. But she doesn’t mean to be. There’s something about her--people don’t seem to be able to love her clearly and serenely: they have to love her too much. Everything gets dark and confused and aching, and they want to--touch her and be the only one near her; they want to look after her and give her everything she wants. It’s tiring. And then when they’re tired she gives them back life. She pours life into them from herself.’

She stopped short, seeing in a flash how it had always been between herself and Jennifer. Tired, you had come again and again to her, pressing close to be replenished from her vitality. But Jennifer had not drunk life from you in return: quietness and tenderness and understanding, but not life. And the quietness had passed into sadness--yes, you knew now you had seen it happening sometimes,--sadness, flatness: the virtue had gone out of her in the incessant giving of herself, the incessant taking on of an alien quietness. You had wanted too much, you had worn her out. Perhaps after all you had been unlucky to Jennifer, committed that crime of trying to possess her separateness,--craved more than even she could give without destroying herself. So in the end she had gone to someone more wholesome for her nature. Perhaps after all the balance had been sorely ill-adjusted: she your creator, you her destroyer. Perhaps she should be surrendered to Geraldine now, ungrudgingly. She said, looking up at Geraldine:

‘I daresay you make her very happy.’

Geraldine said, answering Judith’s gaze unwaveringly:

‘Yes, we are very happy together. Absolutely happy.’

‘She is a good companion, isn’t she?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, her heavy lips lifting in a faint curious smile.

What was in her voice?--insolence?--triumph?--malice?--an obscure challenge? She seemed to be implying that she knew things about Jennifer of which you had no knowledge. She was a terrible woman.

Judith could find no words, and the other continued:

‘She’s starting to find herself. It’s very interesting. Of course nobody’s understood her here.’

‘And you think you do?’

‘I do, yes.’

‘Oh, but I’d never dare say that about a person I loved! You might seem to touch everywhere and all the time be strangers.’ Judith clasped her hands and spoke urgently:

‘Oh, don’t you feel how you might long to say to someone you love: I give you all myself, all myself--and all the time be sad because with all your efforts and longing you _know_ you never could--that the core can’t ever be stirred at all? It seems such dreadful arrogance to say--’ she stopped short, pressing her hand to her lips, shutting her eyes. After a pause she added quickly: ‘But I don’t doubt you love her ...’ she sighed. ‘Thank God this term is nearly over. This is a terrible place for getting overwrought.’

Geraldine seemed to be thinking deeply. Her face was awake and preoccupied behind its heavy mask.

‘It’s very odd,’ said Judith, ‘how she doesn’t value her brains in the very least--isn’t interested in them--can’t be bothered. I suppose you know she’s the most brilliant history student of her year. Easily. Of course she’s never worked, but she could have done anything she liked. In spite of all her idleness and irresponsibility they were still excited about her--they thought she’d do something in the end. And I was going to make her pull it off. I could have--in one term. I mean I could have once. Not now of course.’

Her voice ceased drearily. As if it would matter to Geraldine how much Jennifer wasted brains, or academic opportunities ... as if it would move her!

The bell started to ring for Hall.

‘There!’ said Judith, ‘I must brush my hair I suppose, and go down. Are you coming to Hall?’

‘No. I’m going to dine in Cambridge.’

Judith rose and stood before her, looking full at her for the last time. She thought suddenly: ‘But she’s not beautiful! She’s hideously ugly, repulsive.’

That broad heavy face and thick neck, those coarse and masculine features, that hothouse skin: What taste Jennifer must have to find her attractive!...

Oh no, it was no good saying that. In spite of all, she was beautiful: her person held an appalling fascination. She was beautiful, beautiful. You would never be able to forget her face, her form. You would see it and dream of it with painful desire: as if she could satisfy something, some hunger, if she would. But she was not for you. The secret of her magnetism, her rareness must be for ever beyond reach; but not beyond imagination.

Judith cried out inwardly: ‘Tell me all your life!’ All about herself, where she had come from, why she was alone and mysterious, why she wore such clothes, such pearls, how she and Jennifer had met, what knowledge her expression half-hid, half-revealed. Time had swept her down one moment out of space, portentously, and now was sweeping her away again, unknown. And now, in the end, you wanted to implore her to stay, to let herself be known, to let you love her. Yes, to let you love her. It was not true that you must hate your enemies. What was all this hatred and jealousy? Something so terrifyingly near to love, you dared not contemplate it. You could love her in a moment, passionately, for her voice, her eyes, her beautiful white hands, for loving Jennifer--anything.

The bell stopped ringing.

‘Good-bye,’ said Judith. ‘I’m late.’ She held out her hand.

Geraldine took it. Her hand was cool, smooth and firm.

‘Good-bye.’

‘Are you--staying much longer?’

‘I’m going away to-morrow.’

‘I’d like to have known you better,’ said Judith, very low, and she lifted her eyes to the long, hidden eyes of Geraldine. ‘I hope you and she will be happy when you go abroad.’ She opened the door politely, and then said, smiling: ‘We won’t forget each other, will we?’

‘No,’ said Geraldine, still watching her. But she did not smile.

They went their different ways along the corridor.

Now to go down to the dull food and clamour, to sit among them all and torture herself with fancying intercepted glances which might have pity in them; to hear perhaps, her name and Jennifer’s in a whispered aside; to try with anguish to guess which of them it was who had dared to drag her pain from its hiding-place and proclaim it aloud.

11

Jennifer lay in bed; and on her door was pinned a notice signed by the matron: _No visitors allowed_.

Her friends were disconsolate, and the evening gatherings were leaden spirited. It was certain there had not been so much evening work done before in the whole two years. There was nothing better to do now: no excitement, no laughter or colour. They went on tiptoe past the shut door and the notice: for Jennifer, so it was said, was threatened with nervous collapse, and her only chance lay in sleep and quiet. But in all the rumours, discussions and communications which went on over Jennifer’s case, Judith took no part.

Once indeed when they were all at Hall and the corridor was empty of echoes, Judith had crept up to the door, lingered hesitating, then noiselessly turned the handle and looked in.

The electric lamp shone beside the bed and Jennifer lay with her face turned to the wall. All that was visible was her hair, tossed in a rough mass over the pillow and palely burning where the dim light struck it. Her death-like unconsciousness was intolerable pain. She should have stirred at least, feeling a presence through all the seals of sleep.... But she did not move; and night after night the sight of that unstirring hair upon the pillow returned, mocking her longing to reach to Jennifer with a picture that seemed the symbol for all that was eternally uncommunicating and imperturbable.

They said she was to be sent home before the end of term; then that her mother had arrived, was to take her away on the morrow.

That night the message came: Jennifer wanted to say good-bye to Judith.

* * * * *

Jennifer’s boxes stood packed and strapped in a corner. Her personality had already, terrifyingly, been drained from her two rooms. There was now only a melancholy whisper of that which, during the two years of her tenancy, had filled the little space between her walls with a warm mystery. She had become identified with the quickening of imagination, the lyrical impulse. Oh, how ridiculous, how sad, to have made one person into all poetry! To-morrow it would all be finished.

Judith went softly from the sitting-room into the bedroom: and there was Jennifer lying back on her pillow and waiting.

‘Hullo, darling,’ she said. Her voice was low and mournful.

‘Jennifer!’

She put out her hand and Judith took it, clung to it, while Jennifer drew her down beside her on the bed.

‘Jennifer, darling, how are you?’

‘I’m better, I’ve slept. I was so tired. But I’m going away.’

‘I know.’

‘Don’t tell anyone, Judith, but I’m not coming back.’

‘Oh, Jennifer, what shall I do without you?’

‘Darling, I _can’t_ come back,’ she said in an urgent, painful whisper.

‘I know. I know. And I must come back, I suppose. I’m like that: I can’t uproot. You’re wise, you never grow roots. So you can go away when you want to without making a wound in yourself. It’s no good my pretending I could do the same. I must wait; though goodness knows for what: the examinations I suppose. This place without you.... Oh!’

She pressed her forehead against the hand that still held hers, abandoning, with her last words, the effort to speak lightly.

‘Darling,’ said Jennifer. ‘It is making a wound--you ought to know. You’re making a wound.’

‘Then why do you go away from me?’

‘Oh, Judith, I’ve got to go!’ She sighed wearily. ‘What I really wanted to say to you was: please forgive me for everything.’

‘Forgive.... Oh, Jennifer....’

‘Don’t say there’s nothing to forgive. Say I forgive you.’

‘I forgive you then.’

‘Because I have hurt you, haven’t I?’

‘It wasn’t your fault. Nothing’s been your fault.’

‘I’ve been unhappy too. I thought I was going off my head a little while ago.’ She sighed again. ‘It’s all such a muddle. I do get into such muddles. I’m so used to flying to you to be got out of them, I can’t think how I shall manage without you.’

Judith was silent, her throat aching with tears. Never to hear Jennifer’s step hurrying along the corridor, never again to see her burst flushed and desperate into the room crying: ‘Oh, darling, I’m in such a muddle....’ That had been such a thing to look forward to: it had been such pleasure to comfort, advise, explain, even though the muddles had generally been found to be laughable trifles.

‘I wanted to say some more things, but it’s so difficult,’ Jennifer went on. ‘Now you’re here I can’t say anything.’

‘Don’t try, darling. I’m quite happy.’

Her face had got thinner, thought Judith, her expression had little if anything of the child left in it, and her lips which had always been slightly parted in repose were now folded together in an unnatural line.

‘Mother’s come to fetch me.’ She laughed. ‘She is being extremely dutiful and chilling and grieved at me. I hope you haven’t come across her. She’s not a bit nice. I’m going to Scotland. Oh, the moors! I’ll soon get better there. Then I’ll go abroad or something.’ She laughed again. ‘I suppose Mother’ll try to send me back here next term. I shall have some glorious wrangling. Perhaps they’ll wash their hands of me for ever. If only they would! Oh, if I could be on my own!--no ties!’

Her eyes sparkled at the thought of breaking her fetters. Already, in spite of her sorrow, she was thinking with excitement: _What next?_ She was ready to contemplate a fresh start. Soon her indomitable vitality would light upon and kindle fresh objects; and all around her would live, as once you had lived, in her glow. She would have no time, no room, to remember what had once absorbed her. Judith turned her head away, tasting despair; for it seemed that the zest for life they had both shared burned in Jennifer undiminished now that the time of sharing was over; while for her it had gone out, like a snuffed candle.

Jennifer fastened her great eyes upon her, whispering: ‘You don’t know how I shall miss you.’

Ah, she saw she had wounded,--was trying, too late, to make amends. Judith answered, making her voice harsh and scornful:

‘Oh no, you won’t. You’ll find heaps of new thrilling people and you’ll soon forget me.’

‘Oh----’ was all Jennifer said, beneath her breath. She shut her eyes, and Judith saw her mouth alter and quiver. ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered after a long time. ‘No, you don’t understand. God, I’m in such a muddle.’

It was no use trying to find comfort from hurting Jennifer. There was nothing but pain to be had from the spectacle of that beloved face shrinking and helpless. Whatever it cost all must be made easy for her.

‘I’m sorry, Jennifer, I’m sorry, my darling. There! don’t worry. I understand. Don’t cry. Listen: it’s like this, isn’t it? You’re not happy here any more. You’re restless. And you’ve been--been living too hard and you’re worn out. So you want to get away from all the people you’ve been with--all the ones you associate with feeling ill and awful--you want to start afresh, somewhere quite new. Isn’t that it?’

‘Partly,’ whispered Jennifer.

‘Things have all gone wrong lately. And I’m involved, aren’t I? It’s really about me that things have gone wrong. I don’t know why--but I know it is so. So you really can’t bear to see me any more.’

‘Oh, Judith!’ She hid her face. ‘It sounds so terrible when you say it like that: “Can’t bear to see me any more”.... Oh!’

‘But I’m right, aren’t I, Jennifer?’

‘Oh, it sounds as if it were your fault, as if you thought it was something you’d done----’

‘Then it’s not--something I’ve done?’

‘God, no!’

The relief of that fierce denial brought a momentary illusion of happiness, for she had painfully persisted in trying to fasten the chief blame on herself.

‘I’m glad.... But it is true, isn’t it, that I’m involved in all that’s gone wrong; and that you must get away from me?’

‘Oh yes, oh yes, because I can’t bear myself--because I must forget--because the thought of you is such a reproach ... the way I’ve treated you----’ her voice was almost inaudible.

‘Don’t, Jennifer, don’t. You’ve nothing to blame yourself for. It’s just the way things happen. That’s how I look at it. As long as it’s not anything I’ve done, as long as you tell me I haven’t--disappointed you somehow, I don’t mind--much not understanding----’

‘Oh, you’re so good to me, you’re so kind. And there’s nothing I can do except hurt you. I’ve never done anything for you.’

‘Oh, Jennifer, you’ve been all my happiness for two years.’

‘It was very silly of you to be made happy by a person like me. You might have known I’d let you down in the end.’

‘You haven’t let me down.’

‘Yes. I’ve made you unhappy.’

It was not much use denying that.

Geraldine seemed to be in the room, watching and listening. Judith felt her head droop as if beneath a tangible weight, and a most dreary sense of impotence fastened upon her. What was the use of talking, when all the time Geraldine, absent and untalked-of, controlled their secret decisions? To ignore her made a mockery of all attempted solutions and consolations, and yet to speak of her seemed impossible.

‘Well, you’ve been unhappy too.’

‘Yes. Oh yes. Oh, Judith! There’s something I must ask you.’

She put her face against Judith’s arm, and the desperate pressure of her eyes, nose, lips upon the bare flesh was strange and breath-taking. Her lips searched blindly over wrist and forearm into the hollow of the elbow where they paused and parted; and Judith felt the faint and thrilling touch of her teeth....

But then Jennifer flung her arm away and said in a dry and careful voice.

‘I wanted to know: did you cry in your room night after night because I--because of the way I was behaving?’

‘I’ve never cried, Jennifer.’

That was true enough. There were no tears to soften such arid and infecund griefs.

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘You say that as if----’

‘Why did you think I’d cried?’

‘Oh, it was just an idea I got. Something somebody said put it into my head and I couldn’t get rid of it. But now--I don’t know. The way you spoke makes me almost wish you had cried: because you seemed to mean you hadn’t been able to.’

She shut her eyes and lay still.

‘Jennifer, don’t. Don’t let’s go on. What’s the use? You know we’re not putting anything right or doing each other any good. It’s getting late--so I’d better go. You’ll be so tired to-morrow and it’ll be my fault. I ought never to have come.’

‘Oh, don’t go yet!’ she besought. ‘Look. We won’t talk any more. There’s some things I must say, but perhaps I’ll be able to say them later.’ She sat up in bed. ‘I’ve been feeling so gloomy! Let’s try to be cheerful for a change. Really, my gloom has been beyond a joke. I’ve wanted to hide in a dark hole. Imagine! I think my hair must look awful. Fetch me my brush, darling. I simply haven’t had the heart to give it a good brushing for ages.’

Her spirits were rising: the tone of her voice had changed, and the peculiar individuality of her manner of speech had returned with surprising suddenness.

‘Would you like me to brush it?’ asked Judith.

‘Oh yes, darling. You’ve a lovely hand with the hair brush. Geraldine would brush my hair for me every night, and my God, the agony!’

The brush wavered and stopped for a moment in Judith’s hand. But Jennifer seemed unaware of any cause for embarrassment. It was as if she had cast from her the self whose lips were sealed upon that name. It was of no more account to her in her present mood to announce that Geraldine had brushed her hair than to declare, as she did in the next breath, that her hair needed washing. Geraldine no longer existed for her as a person of dark significance. She had become dissolved like all other grave perplexities into a uniform light ebullience and froth; and her name had been thrown off unconcernedly and forgotten on the instant.

Amazing, terrifying, admirable creature--thought Judith--who, when life pressed too heavily upon her, could resolve life into airy meaninglessness; could pause, as it were deliberately, and re-charge herself with vitality.

Judith brushed out the strange, springy electric stuff, and then buried her face in it a moment. Surely Jennifer’s secret lay in her hair: perhaps, if it were cut off the virtue would go out of her.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Jennifer. ‘Darling, there’s some cake in the cupboard. Mother brought it. She does know how to minister to the flesh I will say. She’s that sort of woman you know: holds you with hot-water bottles and pudding and destroys you spiritually. And would you like to make some chocolate, darling? Let’s feel bilious together for the last time.’ She laughed cheerfully.

They ate and drank, and then Judith came and lay on the bed beside her, and she slipped her arm beneath Judith’s thin shoulder, patting it as she talked.

‘I forgive all my enemies,’ said Jennifer. ‘Tell Mabel I forgive her and I hope God will cure her spots in time. She has been an enemy, hasn’t she? She’d like to knife me. Give all my chemistry and biology books to Dorothy. She can’t afford to buy any. I shan’t ever look at them again, thank God. If I have to earn my living I shall direct my talents towards something more flashy. Where shall I be, I wonder, by the summer? When you’re all sweating over your exams I shall laugh to think of you.

‘Darling, I’ve left you my copper bowl. You always said it had nice lights in it. If I go to Italy I’ll send you a crate of oranges for it. It looks its best with oranges. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever had, so of course it’s for you. Take it and don’t forget me.’ She lay back looking white and tired.

‘Oh, Jennifer----’ Judith clutched her hand and was speechless. After a while she added: ‘I shall feel I haven’t quite lost you. Your lovely bowl. It’s always seemed such a part of you.’

‘It’s all of me,’ whispered Jennifer. ‘I leave it to you.’

The momentary lightness was now past, vanishing as swiftly as it had come. There was now such a sense of approaching desolation as had never been before in life. This was the end.

‘Then I must say good-bye,’ said Judith.

‘Draw back the curtain.’

Judith obeyed. As she went to the window she felt Jennifer’s eyes upon her.

The night was frosty, dark and still, and the midnight stars glittered in trembling cold multitudes over the arch of the sky. Below the window the unmoving trees made a blot of yet profounder darkness. Across the court, the opposite wing of the building was just distinguishable, a mass impenetrably deep; but there were no lights in the windows: not even in Mabel’s. Everybody in College was asleep.

‘Oh!’ sighed Jennifer. ‘The smell of the limes, and the nightingales! I’d like to have had them once again.’

Judith let the curtain drop and came quickly and sank on her knees by the bed.

‘Then come back, Jennifer, and have them with me. Why not, why not? You’ll be well by next term. Everything will be forgotten. Our last term ... Jennifer!’

‘No!’ she covered her face with her hands. ‘No, Judith, I could never come back here. Everything’s gone all wrong. Everything’s as if--as if it had been poisoned. I must go away and get it straight. Listen.’ She put both arms around Judith’s neck and held her in a hard painful embrace. ‘The things I meant to say,--I don’t think I can say them. I thought I could before I saw you, but now you’re here it doesn’t seem clear any more. I don’t really know what I think--what I mean, and if I tried to explain you might--might not understand. Oh, Judith!’

She began to cry, and stopped herself. ‘There are things in life you’ve no idea about. I can’t explain. You’re such a baby really, aren’t you? I always think of you as the most innocent thing in the world.’

‘Jennifer, you know you can tell me anything.’

Yet she knew, while she pleaded, that she shrank from knowing.

‘Oh yes, it’s true, you understand everything.’ Jennifer tightened her arms desperately and seemed to be hesitating, then said at last: ‘No, I’m in a muddle. I’m afraid. I should explain all wrong, as I always do. But I’ll write to you, darling. I may not write to you for some time: or it may be to-morrow. But I swear I’ll write. And then I’ll explain everything.’

‘And we’ll see each other again, Jennifer? We’ll meet often?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. It depends,’ she whispered. Her face was still hidden, her arms firm in their strangling grip.

‘Oh yes, yes, Jennifer! Oh please! Why these mysteries? Jennifer--if--if there’s somebody else you’re fond of I don’t mind. Why should it make any difference to you and me? I’m not jealous.’

‘I’ll write to you,’ repeated Jennifer, very wearily whispering.

‘Soon then, soon, Jennifer. Tell me how you are, what you’re going to do. Tell me if you go abroad, who--who you go with. Tell me everything. Because I shall wonder and wonder. I shall imagine all sorts of things.... Jennifer....’

‘Hush, darling. I’ll be all right, I swear. And I swear that _directly_ everything gets clear I’ll write to you. And then we’ll see. You do trust me, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you must promise me to answer.’

‘Yes.’

‘But don’t write before I write to you.’

‘No.’

‘Good-bye, my darling.’ She let her arms fall to her sides.

At the door Judith turned, forcing her mouth into a smile, but Jennifer was not looking at her. Once again, only the tangle of her hair was visible, burning in the lamplight.

* * * * *

The end of the term.

There had been no word from Jennifer. She had vanished. But she was to be trusted: you had only to wait and she would write. Or was she not to be trusted?

Her copper bowl stood on the table, and there seemed no other rumour of her left in the whole place, save on the tongues of people; and even they were sparing of her name, spoke it with doubt and hesitation.

On the last day of term, Judith, peering a moment into the aching emptiness of Jennifer’s room, saw the cord of her old manly Jaeger dressing-gown lying in the grate.

12

Then, for months, there was nothing in life save work: a careful planning out of day and night in order that sleeping and eating and exercise might encroach as little as possible on the working hours.

Soon, Midsummer term was back with unprecedented profusion of blossom on the fruit trees, buttercups in the meadows, nightingale choruses in the cedars and limes. But now it seemed neither exciting nor delightful to be kept awake till dawn by nightingales; for sleepless nights lowered your examination value. By day the two thrilling and unearthly pipe-notes of the cuckoo seemed a mechanical instrument of torture: you found yourself desperately counting the calls, waiting between each, with a shrinking of all the nerves, for the next to strike. Almost you resented the flowery orchards and meadows with their pagan-like riot of renewal. You noted them with a dull eye from behind the stiff ponderous academic entrenchment of your mind. But sometimes in the night, in dreams, the orchards would not be denied: they descended upon you and shook out fragrance like a blessing; they shone in pale drifts, in clouds, in seas,--all the orchards of England came before you, luminous and stirring beneath the moon.

From early morning till late at night the desperate meek untidy heads of girls were bowed over tables in the library, their faces when they lifted them were feverish and blurred with work.

Pages rustled; pencils whispered; squeaking shoes tiptoed in and out. Somebody tapped out a dreary tune on her teeth; somebody had a running cold; somebody giggled beneath her breath; somebody sighed and sighed.

Outside, in the sunshine, tennis racquets struck vibrantly. Long ago, you also had played tennis in May.

Mabel had a fortification of dictionaries around her corner; whenever you looked up she caught your eye and smiled weakly from a hollow and twisted face. Mabel had wished evil to Jennifer. But that was so long ago it had ceased to matter.

‘Mabel, you’ve worked four hours on end. Come to lunch now.’

‘No, thank you, Judith. I feel I don’t want any lunch. I’d rather go straight on and perhaps have a cup of tea later.’

‘Mabel, you’re to come with me.’

She came. But as often as not she laid down her fork after one mouthful and sat and stared in front of her; then crept back to the library.

The copper bowl was filled this term with golden tulips or with dark brown wallflowers.

Where was Jennifer?

* * * * *

Examination week. The sky was fiercely blue all day; the air breathless, heavy. To walk into the town was to walk into a steam bath, where footsteps moved ever more languidly, and the dogs lay panting on the pavement, and the clocks seemed to collect themselves with a vast effort for their chiming.

This week there was nothing in your mind save the machine which obeyed you smoothly, turning out dates and biographies, contrasting, discussing, theorizing.

Judith walked in a dream among the pale examination faces that flowed to their doom. Already at nine o’clock the heat struck up from the streets, rolled downwards from the roofs. By midday it would be extremely unpleasant in Cambridge.

This was the great examination hall. Girls were filing in, each carrying a glass of water, and searching in a sort of panic for her place. Here was a white ticket labelled Earle, J. So Judith Earle really was expected, an integral part of this grotesque organized unreality. No hope now.

The bench was hard. Beside her sat a kind broad cow-like creature with sandy hair and lashes. Her ruminative and prominent eyes shed pity and encouragement. She was a good omen.

All over the room girls’ heads turned, nodding and winking at friends, whispering, giggling and grimacing with desperate bravery. One simulated suicide by leaning her bosom on her fountain pen.

Just behind sat Mabel. Her face was glistening and ghastly, and she sniffed at a bottle of smelling salts.

‘Mabel, are you going to faint?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I generally feel faintlike first thing in the morning. I’ll get better later.’

‘Mabel, you’re not fit--you mustn’t----’

‘Sh! I’m all right. Only it makes my head feel stupid.’ She stared aghast. ‘I don’t seem to be able to remember a thing.’

‘Don’t worry, Mabel. It’ll all come back when you settle down to it. I’ll look around now and then and see if you’re all right.’

‘Thanks, Judith.’

‘Poor Mabel! Good luck. Wait for me afterwards and I’ll take you to have a cup of coffee. That’ll do you good.’

‘I shall enjoy that. Good luck, Judith.’

She summoned a smile, even flushed faintly with pleasure.

Then panic descended suddenly upon Judith. Her head was like a floating bubble; there was nothing in it at all. She caught at threads of knowledge and they broke, withered and dissolved like cobwebs in the hand. She struggled to throw off a crowding confusion of half-remembered words.

_Unarm Eros, the long day’s task is done. And we must sleep.... Peace! Peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?..._ Who said that? Who could have said such a thing? _I am Duchess of Malfi still.... Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young._ Beatrice died young too. _Here Mother ... bind up this hair in any simple knot ... ay that does well.... Prithee undo this button.... Thank you, Sir.... Cordelia! Cordelia!_ So many of them died young. There were those two, you had forgotten their names now, and Cordelia, and Desdemona too. _O, thou weed!..._ It might be useful to remember them.... But they had already slipped away. _This was the parting that they had Beside the haystack in the floods._ William Morris. _Speak but one word to me over the corn. Over the tender bowed locks of the corn._ Gold cornfield like Jennifer. _A bracelet of bright hair about the bone._ That had always been Jennifer’s bright hair. _Only a woman’s hair.... Calm hair, meandering in pellucid gold._ But Jennifer’s hair had never been calm.... _Speak but one word to me._ Roddy, one whisper from you!

It was Tennyson who said: _The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls_.... And Browning who said: _The old June weather Blue above lane and wall._ Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley.... What had they said? and Blake:

_Bring me my bow of burning gold; Bring me my arrows of desire_.... Once you had composed a tune for that. _Bring me my bow of burning gold_.... Oh, stop saying that now. Think about the origins of drama, the rise of the universities, the development of the guilds, the order of Shakespeare’s plays.... O God! A headful of useless scraps rattling about in emptiness--

The clock struck nine.

‘You can begin now,’ said a thin voice from the däis.

There was an enormous sigh, a rustling of paper, then silence.

The questions had, nearly all, at first glance a familiar reassuring look. It was all right. Panic vanished, the mind assembled its energies, cooly, precisely, the pen flew.

After an hour the first pause to cool her forehead with a stick of frozen Eau de Cologne and to sip some water. Behind, poor Mabel’s dry little cough and sniff went on. The head bowed low over her writing looked as if it could never raise itself again.

Girls were wriggling and biting their pens. Somewhere the tooth-tapper was playing her dreary tune. The Cow looked up, shed a peaceful smile around her and continued to write, with deliberation, a little impeded by her bosom.

Another hour fled. The trouble was having too much to say, rather than too little. The room was rigid, dark with concentration now. There came an appalling confusion of haste and noise, and a girl rose and ran from the room, supported by the invigilator. The handkerchief she held to her nose was stained sickeningly with scarlet. She returned in a little while, pallid and tearful, resumed her seat, bowed herself once more over the paper.

Three hours. It was over. You could not remember what you had written; but you had never felt more firm and sure of mind. Three hours nearer to life.

Into the street once more, beneath the noon sun’s merciless down-beating. But now its rays seemed feeble: their warmth scarcely penetrated chilled hands and feet, or shivering, aching back.

A troop of undergraduates passed on the way from their examination room. They looked amused and exhilarated. They stuffed their papers into their pockets, lit pipes, straightened their shoulders and went cheerfully to lunch.

The girls crept out in twos and threes, earnestly talking, comparing the white slips they carried.

‘Did you do this one?’

‘What did you put for that?’

‘Oh, I say! Will they take off marks do you think?’

‘It was a beast.’

‘Oh, it might have been worse.’

Girls really should be trained to be less obviously female students. It only needed a little discipline.

There was Mabel to be looked after. She was grateful, passive: she drank much coffee but refused food. She broke the heavy silence once to say with a quiet smile: ‘Of course I see now I shan’t pass--It seems a pity, after all that work--My memory is practically gone----’

Back to the vault now for another three hours.

Suddenly round the corner came a slender, dark, sallow boy. He walked with an idle grace, leaning slightly forward. His faint likeness to Roddy made the heart leap; and his expression was dejected and obstinate, just as Roddy’s would be if he were forced to spend an afternoon scribbling infernal rubbish.

Judith paused at the entrance of the vault and looked back. His eyes were eagerly fixed on her: and she smiled at him.

He was delighted. His funny boy face lost its heaviness and broke up with intimate twinklings; and flashed a shyly daring inquiry at her before he vanished round the corner.

It was like a message from Roddy, sent forward to meet her from the new life, to say: ‘Remember I am coming.’

That day passed smoothly; and the next. The days sinking to evenings drenched with the smell of honeysuckle and draining to phantasmal and translucent twilights of blossom and tree-tops and starry skies, flowed imperceptibly to their end.

Suddenly there were no answers to be written from nine till twelve, from two till five--no lectures, no coachings, no notes, no fixed working hours. Instead, a great idleness under whose burden you felt lost and oppressed. The academic years were gone for ever.

13

The evening before the end of term.

Judith walked with the rest of the circle arm in arm across the grass, down the wooded path, past the honeysuckle for the last time.

The garden spread out all her beauties that were hers alone, overburdening the watchers, insisting:

‘See what you are leaving. Look at what you will never have again.’

The whole shrine lay wide open for the last time, baring its mysteries of cedar and limes and nightingales, of lawns and mown hay, of blossoming shrubs and wild flowers growing beneath them, of copper beeches and all the high enclosing tree-tops, serenely swimming like clouds in the last of the light.

They chose careers for each other, light-heartedly discussing the future, and making plans for regular reunions.

‘But what’s the good?’ said one. ‘We shall all be scattered really. We can’t come back year after year as if things would all be the same. There’s nothing more awful than those gatherings of elderly people trying to be girls together again. The ghastliness of pretending to get back to where one was! If we meet again, let it be in the big world. I shall never come back here.’

‘Oh, but I shan’t have the strength to resist it,’ said another. ‘You see I more or less know I shall never be so happy again. I’ve got to teach brats algebra. I shall be _pulled_ back to indulge in vain regrets.’

‘Does it mean so much to you?’ murmured Judith. ‘You talk as if your life was over.’

‘Something that matters--terribly to me is over,’ she said, almost fiercely.

‘Oh!’ Judith sighed.

‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you then?’

Judith was silent, thinking how it had all meant the single tremendous calamitous significance of Jennifer; how since her going it had been like the muddy bed of a lake whose waters have been sapped day after day in a long drought; like a tasteless meal to be swallowed without appetite; like a grey drizzling unwholesome weather. Nothing had brought even a momentary illusion of restored contentment: nothing save her copper bowl glowing for her sake with flowers or fruit. Not one of those to whom she had turned had been able to sooth the gnawing perpetual sore, or bury for a single day that one face. And they knew it. The three years’ absorption in Jennifer had separated her irrevocably from them, and, though they had kindly welcomed her, it had been with the tacit assumption that she was not of them.

They were so charming, so gentle, so sensitive and intelligent: fascinating creatures: how fascinating she had never troubled to realize and would never know now. To all, save Jennifer, that had offered itself, she had turned an unheeding ear, a blind eye. And so much that might have been of enduring value had offered itself: so many possible interests and opportunities had been neglected.

There had been that girl the first year who, from the pinnacle of her third-year eminence, had stooped, blushing and timid, with her invitation to an evening alone. Frail temples, narrow exquisite bone of cheek and jaw, clear little face with lips whose composure seemed the result of a vast nervous effort, so still were they, so nearly quivering, so vulnerable; eyes with a sad liquid brilliance in their steadfast gaze; small head with smooth brown hair parted in the middle; narrow hands folded in her lap; she had sat, the most important scholar in the College, like a shadow, a moth, a bird, listening, questioning, listening again.

She was a poet. She never showed her verses, but to you she promised to show them. She had a mind of such immaculate clarity that you feared to touch it: yet she was offering it to you, all that evening.

It had come to nothing after all. She had retired very soon, shrinking from Jennifer as if she were afraid.

There had been the girl with the torturing love affair that had gone wrong. One night she had suddenly spoken of it, telling you all. You had lingered by her with a little tenderness and pity and then passed on. She had said, “You won’t tell Jennifer, will you?”

There had been the girl who drew portraits and who had wanted you for a model. There had been the silent girl who read “The Book of the Dead” night after night in her room, who was studying, so it was whispered, to raise the devil and who looked at you with a secret smile, half malice, half something else; there had been that most beautiful young girl in the first year, with her cold angelic face and shining silver-fair hair; all those and countless others had offered themselves. There had been Martin ignored and neglected because he disliked Jennifer. And there had been books, far more books in far more libraries: and new poetry, new music, new plays,--a hundred intellectual diversions which you had but brushed against or missed altogether by secluding yourself within the limits of an unprofitable dream.

She said at last:

‘Oh yes. It means something. I don’t know yet how much. I’m afraid now I’ve missed a lot.’

They were all silent, and she thought with nervous dread that they were all thinking of Jennifer.

‘Isn’t it extraordinary,’ said another, ‘how time seems to have stood still in this place? Nothing’s moved since we’ve been here. Even though I suppose it’s all been advancing towards the Tripos, I don’t _feel_ as if there’d been any step forward. Everything--what’s the word?--static. Or else just making circles. I feel I’ve been sitting in a quiet safe pool for three years.’

‘And now we’re going to be emptied out.’

And swept into new life, thought Judith longingly. Yet her heart misgave her. The building, caressed with sunset, looked motherly and benign, spreading its sheltering breast for the last time above its midgets. New life might find nothing so secure and tranquil as its dispassionate protection.

The clock struck the hour pensively.

‘Well, I think it’s beastly,’ said one. ‘I’m going in to finish packing.’

Where, on this calm lime-scented last evening, was Jennifer?

14

In the end there was no time to say good-bye to anyone. Girls were scattering, flying about with labels and suitcases, or with flat-irons to press the frocks they were to wear in May Week.

May Week had been fun last year: five nights’ dancing on end, with Jennifer and a young cousin of hers at Trinity, and a boy in the Navy. This year it had not seemed worth while to accept invitations.

While Judith was engaged in strapping her boxes and throwing the accumulated rubbish of three years out of drawers and cupboards into a heap on the floor, a maid came smiling and said a gentleman was waiting downstairs.

It was Martin.

‘Martin! Oh, my dear!’

‘I came on the chance, Judith. I motored up to see a man who’s going abroad. Are you--are you staying up for May Week?’

‘No, Martin. I’m catching a train in about two hours and going straight home.’

‘_Really_ home, do you mean? Next door to us?’

‘Yes. Thank Heaven. It’s not let any more. Mother and I will be there part of the summer anyway. Will you--will any of you be there?’

‘Mariella’s down there now, with the boy. And Roddy and I are going for a bit. In fact I’m going to-day--motoring. That’s what I came for--to see if you’d care to motor back with me.’

‘Drive home? Oh, how marvellous! You are an angel, Martin, to think of me.’

He was as shy as ever, bending his head as he talked to her. Observing him she thought that she herself had grown up. The loss of Jennifer had given her a kind of self-assurance and maturity of manner, a staidness. For the first time she was seeing Martin from an entirely detached and unromantic angle, and she thought: “Then this is how I shall see Roddy. He won’t confuse and entangle me any more. All that sort of thing is over for me.”

‘It’s very nice to see you again, Judith. It’s ages since.... You look a bit thin, don’t you?’

‘It’s those miserable exams, Martin. I did work so hard.... I don’t know why.’

‘Oh! You shouldn’t have.’

He seemed quite overcome.

Dear Martin!... In some corner of her heart a weight was lifting.... Jennifer was suddenly remote.

‘Wait for me, Martin.... I’ll be ready in a quarter of an hour.’

She had not said good-bye to Mabel. She had been dreading that last duty.... No time now, thank heaven, for anything prolonged.... Simplest to write a little note and tell someone to stick it in her door.

She wrote:

‘Dear Mabel,

‘I have been called for unexpectedly in a car. I have only ten minutes to finish packing and do all the last things. I knocked on your door a little while ago but got no answer.’

She hesitated. Was it too gross? It was; but it must stand now; it could not be crossed out.

‘And now I’m afraid I haven’t a minute to try and find you. I’m _dreadfully_ sorry not to see you to say good-bye, Mabel. Won’t it be sad when next October comes to think we shan’t all be meeting again? You must write and tell me what happens to you, and I will write to you. I dare say we shall see each other again. You must let me know if you ever come my way----’ That must stand too.... What else?... Results would be out to-morrow--Better not to refer to them; for Mabel had certainly failed. She had not been able to remember anything in the end. The last three days she had given in one of two sheets of paper blank save for a few uncertain lines.

She finished:

‘I do hope you are going to get a good long rest. You do need it. You worked so marvellously. Nobody ever could have worked harder. We’ve all been so sorry for you feeling so ill during tripos week. It was terribly hard luck.

‘Good-bye and love from

‘Judith.’

Nothing could be added--There was nothing more to be said. Mabel’s face this last week came before her, blank, haggard, still watching her from moribund eyes, and she dismissed it. She had thought she would have to kiss Mabel good-bye: and now she would not have to.

She must be quick now, for Martin.

The car turned out of the drive and took the dusty road.

Almost she forgot to look back to see the last of those red walls.

‘I’m saying good-bye to it, Martin. Ugh! I hate it. I love it.’

The poplars seemed to grow all in a moment and hide it. It was gone.

‘Well, Martin, how are you? What’s been happening to everybody? How are they all?’

She was slipping back, she was slipping back.

They left Cambridge behind them, and she tried to recall it, to make it come before her eyes, and could not. The dream of wake, the dream of sleep--which had it been?

She wondered if she would ever remember it again.

Yesterday Martin had been standing with her under the cherry tree.

Now he was telling her about his home in Hampshire. He acted as estate agent for his mother now that his father was dead. She must really come and stay with them and meet his mother. He was perfectly happy farming his own land: he never wanted to do anything else. He was improving the fishing and shooting: they had just bought a bit of land they had been after for two years: half a mile more river and a biggish wood. Forestry was the most fascinating subject: he was going to take it up more seriously. Martin’s life seemed very happy, very ordered, very clear and useful. He knew what he wanted.

The cousins had all been scattered this last year or so. Mariella had been working with a woman vet. in London. She had spent most of last summer at his home because she had been hard up and obliged to let the house on the river. Peter had been there too. He seemed a nice enough little chap, but nervy. He had a nursery governess now, and Mariella seemed to think more about her dogs than him. At least that was the impression she gave. Mariella, so Martin said, had not changed at all.

Julian he had scarcely seen. He thought he wrote about music for one or two weeklies, but he didn’t know which. Also he had heard that he was writing a ballet, or an opera or something; but he did not suppose it was serious. He had developed asthma since the war, poor chap, and he spent all the winter abroad and sometimes the summer too.

And Roddy. Oh, Roddy seemed to be messing about in Paris or in London nearly always, doing a bit of drawing and modelling. Nobody could get him to do any work: though last year he had done some sort of theatrical work in Paris--designing some scenery or something--which had been very successful. He was saying now that he would like to go on the stage. Martin laughingly said he was afraid Roddy was a bit of a waster. Anyway he was coming for a week or so, and Judith would see him for herself.

At six o’clock in the evening they stopped before the front door of her home. There, waiting to enfold her again, was the garden. The air was sweet with the smell of roses and syringa, the sun-flooded lawn stretched away towards the river, and the herbaceous border was burning miraculously with blue delphinium spires, white and yellow lilies, and great poppies.

‘Good-bye, Martin. It’s been lovely. We’ll meet soon, won’t we? Come and fetch me.’

She went into the cool and shadowed hall. There was the old butler hastening forward to receive her; and her mother’s voice came from the drawing-room saying softly:

‘Is that my girl?’