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The Prussian Officer

by D. H. Lawrence · English · Gutenberg #22480 · 452,381 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Prussian Officer

Author: D. H. Lawrence


        
Release date: August 31, 2007 [eBook #22480]
                Most recently updated: September 17, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22480

Credits: David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER ***

cover 




THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER

_and Other Stories_


by D. H. Lawrence



LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO,
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

Published December 1914



Contents


 The Prussian Officer 
 The Thorn in the Flesh 
 Daughters of the Vicar 
 A Fragment of Stained Glass
 The Shades of Spring
 Second Best
 The Shadow in the Rose Garden
 Goose Fair 
 The White Stocking 
 A Sick Collier
 The Christening 
 Odour of Chrysanthemums




The Prussian Officer

I

They had marched more than thirty kilometres since dawn, along the
white, hot road where occasional thickets of trees threw a moment of
shade, then out into the glare again. On either hand, the valley, wide
and shallow, glittered with heat; dark green patches of rye, pale young
corn, fallow and meadow and black pine woods spread in a dull, hot
diagram under a glistening sky. But right in front the mountains ranged
across, pale blue and very still, snow gleaming gently out of the deep
atmosphere. And towards the mountains, on and on, the regiment marched
between the rye fields and the meadows, between the scraggy fruit trees
set regularly on either side the high road. The burnished, dark green
rye threw on a suffocating heat, the mountains drew gradually nearer
and more distinct. While the feet of the soldiers grew hotter, sweat
ran through their hair under their helmets, and their knapsacks could
burn no more in contact with their shoulders, but seemed instead to
give off a cold, prickly sensation.

He walked on and on in silence, staring at the mountains ahead, that
rose sheer out of the land, and stood fold behind fold, half earth,
half heaven, the heaven, the banner with slits of soft snow, in the
pale, bluish peaks.

He could now walk almost without pain. At the start, he had determined
not to limp. It had made him sick to take the first steps, and during
the first mile or so, he had compressed his breath, and the cold drops
of sweat had stood on his forehead. But he had walked it off. What were
they after all but bruises! He had looked at them, as he was getting
up: deep bruises on the backs of his thighs. And since he had made his
first step in the morning, he had been conscious of them, till now he
had a tight, hot place in his chest, with suppressing the pain, and
holding himself in. There seemed no air when he breathed. But he walked
almost lightly.

The Captain’s hand had trembled at taking his coffee at dawn: his
orderly saw it again. And he saw the fine figure of the Captain
wheeling on horseback at the farm-house ahead, a handsome figure in
pale blue uniform with facings of scarlet, and the metal gleaming on
the black helmet and the sword-scabbard, and dark streaks of sweat
coming on the silky bay horse. The orderly felt he was connected with
that figure moving so suddenly on horseback: he followed it like a
shadow, mute and inevitable and damned by it. And the officer was
always aware of the tramp of the company behind, the march of his
orderly among the men.

The Captain was a tall man of about forty, grey at the temples. He had
a handsome, finely knit figure, and was one of the best horsemen in the
West. His orderly, having to rub him down, admired the amazing
riding-muscles of his loins.

For the rest, the orderly scarcely noticed the officer any more than he
noticed himself. It was rarely he saw his master’s face: he did not
look at it. The Captain had reddish-brown, stilt hair, that he wore
short upon his skull. His moustache was also cut short and bristly over
a full, brutal mouth. His face was rather rugged, the cheeks thin.
Perhaps the man was the more handsome for the deep lines in his face,
the irritable tension of his brow, which gave him the look of a man who
fights with life. His fair eyebrows stood bushy over light blue eyes
that were always flashing with cold fire.

He was a Prussian aristocrat, haughty and overbearing. But his mother
had been a Polish Countess. Having made too many gambling debts when he
was young, he had ruined his prospects in the Army, and remained an
infantry captain. He had never married: his position did not allow of
it, and no woman had ever moved him to it. His time he spent
riding—occasionally he rode one of his own horses at the races—and at
the officers’ club. Now and then he took himself a mistress. But after
such an event, he returned to duty with his brow still more tense, his
eyes still more hostile and irritable. With the men, however, he was
merely impersonal, though a devil when roused; so that, on the whole,
they feared him, but had no great aversion from him. They accepted him
as the inevitable.

To his orderly he was at first cold and just and indifferent: he did
not fuss over trifles. So that his servant knew practically nothing
about him, except just what orders he would give, and how he wanted
them obeyed. That was quite simple. Then the change gradually came.

The orderly was a youth of about twenty-two, of medium height, and well
built. He had strong, heavy limbs, was swarthy, with a soft, black,
young moustache. There was something altogether warm and young about
him. He had firmly marked eyebrows over dark, expressionless eyes, that
seemed never to have thought, only to have received life direct through
his senses, and acted straight from instinct.

Gradually the officer had become aware of his servant’s young,
vigorous, unconscious presence about him. He could not get away from
the sense of the youth’s person, while he was in attendance. It was
like a warm flame upon the older man’s tense, rigid body, that had
become almost unliving, fixed. There was something so free and
self-contained about him, and something in the young fellow’s movement,
that made the officer aware of him. And this irritated the Prussian. He
did not choose to be touched into life by his servant. He might easily
have changed his man, but he did not. He now very rarely looked direct
at his orderly, but kept his face averted, as if to avoid seeing him.
And yet as the young soldier moved unthinking about the apartment, the
elder watched him, and would notice the movement of his strong young
shoulders under the blue cloth, the bend of his neck. And it irritated
him. To see the soldier’s young, brown, shapely peasant’s hand grasp
the loaf or the wine-bottle sent a flash of hate or of anger through
the elder man’s blood. It was not that the youth was clumsy: it was
rather the blind, instinctive sureness of movement of an unhampered
young animal that irritated the officer to such a degree.

Once, when a bottle of wine had gone over, and the red gushed out on to
the tablecloth, the officer had started up with an oath, and his eyes,
bluey like fire, had held those of the confused youth for a moment. It
was a shock for the young soldier. He felt something sink deeper,
deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. It left him
rather blank and wondering. Some of his natural completeness in himself
was gone, a little uneasiness took its place. And from that time an
undiscovered feeling had held between the two men.

Henceforward the orderly was afraid of really meeting his master. His
subconsciousness remembered those steely blue eyes and the harsh brows,
and did not intend to meet them again. So he always stared past his
master, and avoided him. Also, in a little anxiety, he waited for the
three months to have gone, when his time would be up. He began to feel
a constraint in the Captain’s presence, and the soldier even more than
the officer wanted to be left alone, in his neutrality as servant.

He had served the Captain for more than a year, and knew his duty. This
he performed easily, as if it were natural to him. The officer and his
commands he took for granted, as he took the sun and the rain, and he
served as a matter of course. It did not implicate him personally.

But now if he were going to be forced into a personal interchange with
his master he would be like a wild thing caught, he felt he must get
away.

But the influence of the young soldier’s being had penetrated through
the officer’s stiffened discipline, and perturbed the man in him. He,
however, was a gentleman, with long, fine hands and cultivated
movements, and was not going to allow such a thing as the stirring of
his innate self. He was a man of passionate temper, who had always kept
himself suppressed. Occasionally there had been a duel, an outburst
before the soldiers. He knew himself to be always on the point of
breaking out. But he kept himself hard to the idea of the Service.
Whereas the young soldier seemed to live out his warm, full nature, to
give it off in his very movements, which had a certain zest, such as
wild animals have in free movement. And this irritated the officer more
and more.

In spite of himself, the Captain could not regain his neutrality of
feeling towards his orderly. Nor could he leave the man alone. In spite
of himself, he watched him, gave him sharp orders, tried to take up as
much of his time as possible. Sometimes he flew into a rage with the
young soldier, and bullied him. Then the orderly shut himself off, as
it were out of earshot, and waited, with sullen, flushed face, for the
end of the noise. The words never pierced to his intelligence, he made
himself, protectively, impervious to the feelings of his master.

He had a scar on his left thumb, a deep seam going across the knuckle.
The officer had long suffered from it, and wanted to do something to
it. Still it was there, ugly and brutal on the young, brown hand. At
last the Captain’s reserve gave way. One day, as the orderly was
smoothing out the tablecloth, the officer pinned down his thumb with a
pencil, asking,

“How did you come by that?”

The young man winced and drew back at attention.

“A wood axe, Herr Hauptmann,” he answered.

The officer waited for further explanation. None came. The orderly went
about his duties. The elder man was sullenly angry. His servant avoided
him. And the next day he had to use all his willpower to avoid seeing
the scarred thumb. He wanted to get hold of it and—— A hot flame ran in
his blood.

He knew his servant would soon be free, and would be glad. As yet, the
soldier had held himself off from the elder man. The Captain grew madly
irritable. He could not rest when the soldier was away, and when he was
present, he glared at him with tormented eyes. He hated those fine,
black brows over the unmeaning, dark eyes, he was infuriated by the
free movement of the handsome limbs, which no military discipline could
make stiff. And he became harsh and cruelly bullying, using contempt
and satire. The young soldier only grew more mute and expressionless.

What cattle were you bred by, that you can’t keep straight eyes? Look
me in the eyes when I speak to you.

And the soldier turned his dark eyes to the other’s face, but there was
no sight in them: he stared with the slightest possible cast, holding
back his sight, perceiving the blue of his master’s eyes, but receiving
no look from them. And the elder man went pale, and his reddish
eyebrows twitched. He gave his order, barrenly.

Once he flung a heavy military glove into the young soldier’s face.
Then he had the satisfaction of seeing the black eyes flare up into his
own, like a blaze when straw is thrown on a fire. And he had laughed
with a little tremor and a sneer.

But there were only two months more. The youth instinctively tried to
keep himself intact: he tried to serve the officer as if the latter
were an abstract authority and not a man. All his instinct was to avoid
personal contact, even definite hate. But in spite of himself the hate
grew, responsive to the officer’s passion. However, he put it in the
background. When he had left the Army he could dare acknowledge it. By
nature he was active, and had many friends. He thought what amazing
good fellows they were. But, without knowing it, he was alone. Now this
solitariness was intensified. It would carry him through his term. But
the officer seemed to be going irritably insane, and the youth was
deeply frightened.

The soldier had a sweetheart, a girl from the mountains, independent
and primitive. The two walked together, rather silently. He went with
her, not to talk, but to have his arm round her, and for the physical
contact. This eased him, made it easier for him to ignore the Captain;
for he could rest with her held fast against his chest. And she, in
some unspoken fashion, was there for him. They loved each other.

The Captain perceived it, and was mad with irritation. He kept the
young man engaged all the evenings long, and took pleasure in the dark
look that came on his face. Occasionally, the eyes of the two men met,
those of the younger sullen and dark, doggedly unalterable, those of
the elder sneering with restless contempt.

The officer tried hard not to admit the passion that had got hold of
him. He would not know that his feeling for his orderly was anything
but that of a man incensed by his stupid, perverse servant. So, keeping
quite justified and conventional in his consciousness, he let the other
thing run on. His nerves, however, were suffering. At last he slung the
end of a belt in his servant’s face. When he saw the youth start back,
the pain-tears in his eyes and the blood on his mouth, he had felt at
once a thrill of deep pleasure and of shame.

But this, he acknowledged to himself, was a thing he had never done
before. The fellow was too exasperating. His own nerves must be going
to pieces. He went away for some days with a woman.

It was a mockery of pleasure. He simply did not want the woman. But he
stayed on for his time. At the end of it, he came back in an agony of
irritation, torment, and misery. He rode all the evening, then came
straight in to supper. His orderly was out. The officer sat with his
long, fine hands lying on the table, perfectly still, and all his blood
seemed to be corroding.

At last his servant entered. He watched the strong, easy young figure,
the fine eyebrows, the thick black hair. In a week’s time the youth had
got back his old well-being. The hands of the officer twitched and
seemed to be full of mad flame. The young man stood at attention,
unmoving, shut on.

The meal went in silence. But the orderly seemed eager. He made a
clatter with the dishes.

“Are you in a hurry?” asked the officer, watching the intent, warm face
of his servant. The other did not reply.

“Will you answer my question?” said the Captain.

“Yes, sir,” replied the orderly, standing with his pile of deep Army
plates. The Captain waited, looked at him, then asked again:

“Are you in a hurry?

“Yes, sir,” came the answer, that sent a flash through the listener.

“For what?”

“I was going out, sir.”

“I want you this evening.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. The officer had a curious stiffness of
countenance.

“Yes, sir,” replied the servant, in his throat.

“I want you tomorrow evening also—in fact, you may consider your
evenings occupied, unless I give you leave.”

The mouth with the young moustache set close.

“Yes, sir,” answered the orderly, loosening his lips for a moment.

He again turned to the door.

“And why have you a piece of pencil in your ear?”

The orderly hesitated, then continued on his way without answering. He
set the plates in a pile outside the door, took the stump of pencil
from his ear, and put it in his pocket. He had been copying a verse for
his sweetheart’s birthday card. He returned to finish clearing the
table. The officer’s eyes were dancing, he had a little, eager smile.

“Why have you a piece of pencil in your ear?” he asked.

The orderly took his hands full of dishes. His master was standing near
the great green stove, a little smile on his face, his chin thrust
forward. When the young soldier saw him his heart suddenly ran hot. He
felt blind. Instead of answering, he turned dazedly to the door. As he
was crouching to set down the dishes, he was pitched forward by a kick
from behind. The pots went in a stream down the stairs, he clung to the
pillar of the banisters. And as he was rising he was kicked heavily
again, and again, so that he clung sickly to the post for some moments.
His master had gone swiftly into the room and closed the door. The
maid-servant downstairs looked up the staircase and made a mocking face
at the crockery disaster.

The officer’s heart was plunging. He poured himself a glass of wine,
part of which he spilled on the floor, and gulped the remainder,
leaning against the cool, green stove. He heard his man collecting the
dishes from the stairs. Pale, as if intoxicated, he waited. The servant
entered again. The Captain’s heart gave a pang, as of pleasure, seeing
the young fellow bewildered and uncertain on his feet, with pain.

“Schöner!” he said.

The soldier was a little slower in coming to attention.

“Yes, sir!”

The youth stood before him, with pathetic young moustache, and fine
eyebrows very distinct on his forehead of dark marble.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yes, sir.”

The officer’s tone bit like acid.

“Why had you a pencil in your ear?”

Again the servant’s heart ran hot, and he could not breathe. With dark,
strained eyes, he looked at the officer, as if fascinated. And he stood
there sturdily planted, unconscious. The withering smile came into the
Captain’s eyes, and he lifted his foot.

“I—I forgot it—sir,” panted the soldier, his dark eyes fixed on the
other man’s dancing blue ones.

“What was it doing there?”

He saw the young man’s breast heaving as he made an effort for words.

“I had been writing.”

“Writing what?”

Again the soldier looked him up and down. The officer could hear him
panting. The smile came into the blue eyes. The soldier worked his dry
throat, but could not speak. Suddenly the smile lit like a name on the
officer’s face, and a kick came heavily against the orderly’s thigh.
The youth moved a pace sideways. His face went dead, with two black,
staring eyes.

“Well?” said the officer.

The orderly’s mouth had gone dry, and his tongue rubbed in it as on dry
brown-paper. He worked his throat. The officer raised his foot. The
servant went stiff.

“Some poetry, sir,” came the crackling, unrecognizable sound of his
voice.

“Poetry, what poetry?” asked the Captain, with a sickly smile.

Again there was the working in the throat. The Captain’s heart had
suddenly gone down heavily, and he stood sick and tired.

“For my girl, sir,” he heard the dry, inhuman sound.

“Oh!” he said, turning away. “Clear the table.”

“Click!” went the soldier’s throat; then again, “click!” and then the
half-articulate:

“Yes, sir.”

The young soldier was gone, looking old, and walking heavily.

The officer, left alone, held himself rigid, to prevent himself from
thinking. His instinct warned him that he must not think. Deep inside
him was the intense gratification of his passion, still working
powerfully. Then there was a counter-action, a horrible breaking down
of something inside him, a whole agony of reaction. He stood there for
an hour motionless, a chaos of sensations, but rigid with a will to
keep blank his consciousness, to prevent his mind grasping. And he held
himself so until the worst of the stress had passed, when he began to
drink, drank himself to an intoxication, till he slept obliterated.
When he woke in the morning he was shaken to the base of his nature.
But he had fought off the realization of what he had done. He had
prevented his mind from taking it in, had suppressed it along with his
instincts, and the conscious man had nothing to do with it. He felt
only as after a bout of intoxication, weak, but the affair itself all
dim and not to be recovered. Of the drunkenness of his passion he
successfully refused remembrance. And when his orderly appeared with
coffee, the officer assumed the same self he had had the morning
before. He refused the event of the past night—denied it had ever
been—and was successful in his denial. He had not done any such
thing—not he himself. Whatever there might be lay at the door of a
stupid, insubordinate servant.

The orderly had gone about in a stupor all the evening. He drank some
beer because he was parched, but not much, the alcohol made his feeling
come back, and he could not bear it. He was dulled, as if nine-tenths
of the ordinary man in him were inert. He crawled about disfigured.
Still, when he thought of the kicks, he went sick, and when he thought
of the threat of more kicking, in the room afterwards, his heart went
hot and faint, and he panted, remembering the one that had come. He had
been forced to say, “For my girl.” He was much too done even to want to
cry. His mouth hung slightly open, like an idiot’s. He felt vacant, and
wasted. So, he wandered at his work, painfully, and very slowly and
clumsily, fumbling blindly with the brushes, and finding it difficult,
when he sat down, to summon the energy to move again. His limbs, his
jaw, were slack and nerveless. But he was very tired. He got to bed at
last, and slept inert, relaxed, in a sleep that was rather stupor than
slumber, a dead night of stupefaction shot through with gleams of
anguish.

In the morning were the manœuvres. But he woke even before the bugle
sounded. The painful ache in his chest, the dryness of his throat, the
awful steady feeling of misery made his eyes come awake and dreary at
once. He knew, without thinking, what had happened. And he knew that
the day had come again, when he must go on with his round. The last bit
of darkness was being pushed out of the room. He would have to move his
inert body and go on. He was so young, and had known so little trouble,
that he was bewildered. He only wished it would stay night, so that he
could lie still, covered up by the darkness. And yet nothing would
prevent the day from coming, nothing would save him from having to get
up and saddle the Captain’s horse, and make the Captain’s coffee. It
was there, inevitable. And then, he thought, it was impossible. Yet
they would not leave him free. He must go and take the coffee to the
Captain. He was too stunned to understand it. He only knew it was
inevitable—inevitable however long he lay inert.

At last, after heaving at himself, for he seemed to be a mass of
inertia, he got up. But he had to force every one of his movements from
behind, with his will. He felt lost, and dazed, and helpless. Then he
clutched hold of the bed, the pain was so keen. And looking at his
thighs, he saw the darker bruises on his swarthy flesh and he knew
that, if he pressed one of his fingers on one of the bruises, he should
faint. But he did not want to faint—he did not want anybody to know. No
one should ever know. It was between him and the Captain. There were
only the two people in the world now—himself and the Captain.

Slowly, economically, he got dressed and forced himself to walk.
Everything was obscure, except just what he had his hands on. But he
managed to get through his work. The very pain revived his dull senses.
The worst remained yet. He took the tray and went up to the Captain’s
room. The officer, pale and heavy, sat at the table. The orderly, as he
saluted, felt himself put out of existence. He stood still for a moment
submitting to his own nullification, then he gathered himself, seemed
to regain himself, and then the Captain began to grow vague, unreal,
and the younger soldier’s heart beat up. He clung to this
situation—that the Captain did not exist—so that he himself might live.
But when he saw his officer’s hand tremble as he took the coffee, he
felt everything falling shattered. And he went away, feeling as if he
himself were coming to pieces, disintegrated. And when the Captain was
there on horseback, giving orders, while he himself stood, with rifle
and knapsack, sick with pain, he felt as if he must shut his eyes—as if
he must shut his eyes on everything. It was only the long agony of
marching with a parched throat that filled him with one single,
sleep-heavy intention: to save himself.

II

He was getting used even to his parched throat. That the snowy peaks
were radiant among the sky, that the whity-green glacier-river twisted
through its pale shoals, in the valley below, seemed almost
supernatural. But he was going mad with fever and thirst. He plodded on
uncomplaining. He did not want to speak, not to anybody. There were two
gulls, like flakes of water and snow, over the river. The scent of
green rye soaked in sunshine came like a sickness. And the march
continued, monotonously, almost like a bad sleep.

At the next farm-house, which stood low and broad near the high road,
tubs of water had been put out. The soldiers clustered round to drink.
They took off their helmets, and the steam mounted from their wet hair.
The Captain sat on horseback, watching. He needed to see his orderly.
His helmet threw a dark shadow over his light, fierce eyes, but his
moustache and mouth and chin were distinct in the sunshine. The orderly
must move under the presence of the figure of the horseman. It was not
that he was afraid, or cowed. It was as if he was disembowelled, made
empty, like an empty shell. He felt himself as nothing, a shadow
creeping under the sunshine. And, thirsty as he was, he could scarcely
drink, feeling the Captain near him. He would not take off his helmet
to wipe his wet hair. He wanted to stay in shadow, not to be forced
into consciousness. Starting, he saw the light heel of the officer
prick the belly of the horse; the Captain cantered away, and he himself
could relapse into vacancy.

Nothing, however, could give him back his living place in the hot,
bright morning. He felt like a gap among it all. Whereas the Captain
was prouder, overriding. A hot flash went through the young servant’s
body. The Captain was firmer and prouder with life, he himself was
empty as a shadow. Again the flash went through him, dazing him out.
But his heart ran a little firmer.

The company turned up the hill, to make a loop for the return. Below,
from among the trees, the farm-bell clanged. He saw the labourers,
mowing barefoot at the thick grass, leave off their work and go
downhill, their scythes hanging over their shoulders, like long, bright
claws curving down behind them. They seemed like dream-people, as if
they had no relation to himself. He felt as in a blackish dream: as if
all the other things were there and had form, but he himself was only a
consciousness, a gap that could think and perceive.

The soldiers were tramping silently up the glaring hillside. Gradually
his head began to revolve, slowly, rhythmically. Sometimes it was dark
before his eyes, as if he saw this world through a smoked glass, frail
shadows and unreal. It gave him a pain in his head to walk.

The air was too scented, it gave no breath. All the lush green-stuff
seemed to be issuing its sap, till the air was deathly, sickly with the
smell of greenness. There was the perfume of clover, like pure honey
and bees. Then there grew a faint acrid tang—they were near the
beeches; and then a queer clattering noise, and a suffocating, hideous
smell; they were passing a flock of sheep, a shepherd in a black smock,
holding his crook. Why should the sheep huddle together under this
fierce sun. He felt that the shepherd would not see him, though he
could see the shepherd.

At last there was the halt. They stacked rifles in a conical stack, put
down their kit in a scattered circle around it, and dispersed a little,
sitting on a small knoll high on the hillside. The chatter began. The
soldiers were steaming with heat, but were lively. He sat still, seeing
the blue mountains rising upon the land, twenty kilometres away. There
was a blue fold in the ranges, then out of that, at the foot, the
broad, pale bed of the river, stretches of whity-green water between
pinkish-grey shoals among the dark pine woods. There it was, spread out
a long way off. And it seemed to come downhill, the river. There was a
raft being steered, a mile away. It was a strange country. Nearer, a
red-roofed, broad farm with white base and square dots of windows
crouched beside the wall of beech foliage on the wood’s edge. There
were long strips of rye and clover and pale green corn. And just at his
feet, below the knoll, was a darkish bog, where globe flowers stood
breathless still on their slim stalks. And some of the pale gold
bubbles were burst, and a broken fragment hung in the air. He thought
he was going to sleep.

Suddenly something moved into this coloured mirage before his eyes. The
Captain, a small, light-blue and scarlet figure, was trotting evenly
between the strips of corn, along the level brow of the hill. And the
man making flag-signals was coming on. Proud and sure moved the
horseman’s figure, the quick, bright thing, in which was concentrated
all the light of this morning, which for the rest lay a fragile,
shining shadow. Submissive, apathetic, the young soldier sat and
stared. But as the horse slowed to a walk, coming up the last steep
path, the great flash flared over the body and soul of the orderly. He
sat waiting. The back of his head felt as if it were weighted with a
heavy piece of fire. He did not want to eat. His hands trembled
slightly as he moved them. Meanwhile the officer on horseback was
approaching slowly and proudly. The tension grew in the orderly’s soul.
Then again, seeing the Captain ease himself on the saddle, the flash
blazed through him.

The Captain looked at the patch of light blue and scarlet, and dark
heads, scattered closely on the hillside. It pleased him. The command
pleased him. And he was feeling proud. His orderly was among them in
common subjection. The officer rose a little on his stirrups to look.
The young soldier sat with averted, dumb face. The Captain relaxed on
his seat. His slim-legged, beautiful horse, brown as a beech nut,
walked proudly uphill. The Captain passed into the zone of the
company’s atmosphere: a hot smell of men, of sweat, of leather. He knew
it very well. After a word with the lieutenant, he went a few paces
higher, and sat there, a dominant figure, his sweat-marked horse
swishing its tail, while he looked down on his men, on his orderly, a
nonentity among the crowd.

The young soldier’s heart was like fire in his chest, and he breathed
with difficulty. The officer, looking downhill, saw three of the young
soldiers, two pails of water between them, staggering across a sunny
green field. A table had been set up under a tree, and there the slim
lieutenant stood, importantly busy. Then the Captain summoned himself
to an act of courage. He called his orderly.

The name leapt into the young soldier’s throat as he heard the command,
and he rose blindly stifled. He saluted, standing below the officer. He
did not look up. But there was the flicker in the Captain’s voice.

“Go to the inn and fetch me....” the officer gave his commands.
“Quick!” he added.

At the last word, the heart of the servant leapt with a flash, and he
felt the strength come over his body. But he turned in mechanical
obedience, and set on at a heavy run downhill, looking almost like a
bear, his trousers bagging over his military boots. And the officer
watched this blind, plunging run all the way.

But it was only the outside of the orderly’s body that was obeying so
humbly and mechanically. Inside had gradually accumulated a core into
which all the energy of that young life was compact and concentrated.
He executed his commission, and plodded quickly back uphill. There was
a pain in his head, as he walked, that made him twist his features
unknowingly. But hard there in the centre of his chest was himself,
himself, firm, and not to be plucked to pieces.

The captain had gone up into the wood. The orderly plodded through the
hot, powerfully smelling zone of the company’s atmosphere. He had a
curious mass of energy inside him now. The Captain was less real than
himself. He approached the green entrance to the wood. There, in the
half-shade, he saw the horse standing, the sunshine and the tuckering
shadow of leaves dancing over his brown body. There was a clearing
where timber had lately been felled. Here, in the gold-green shade
beside the brilliant cup of sunshine, stood two figures, blue and pink,
the bits of pink showing out plainly. The Captain was talking to his
lieutenant.

The orderly stood on the edge of the bright clearing, where great
trunks of trees, stripped and glistening, lay stretched like naked,
brown-skinned bodies. Chips of wood littered the trampled floor, like
splashed light, and the bases of the felled trees stood here and there,
with their raw, level tops. Beyond was the brilliant, sunlit green of a
beech.

“Then I will ride forward,” the orderly heard his Captain say. The
lieutenant saluted and strode away. He himself went forward. A hot
flash passed through his belly, as he tramped towards his officer.

The Captain watched the rather heavy figure of the young soldier
stumble forward, and his veins, too, ran hot. This was to be man to man
between them. He yielded before the solid, stumbling figure with bent
head. The orderly stooped and put the food on a level-sawn tree-base.
The Captain watched the glistening, sun-inflamed, naked hands. He
wanted to speak to the young soldier, but could not. The servant
propped a bottle against his thigh, pressed open the cork, and poured
out the beer into the mug. He kept his head bent. The Captain accepted
the mug.

“Hot!” he said, as if amiably.

The flame sprang out of the orderly’s heart, nearly suffocating him.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, between shut teeth.

And he heard the sound of the Captain’s drinking, and he clenched his
fists, such a strong torment came into his wrists. Then came the faint
clang of the closing of the pot-lid. He looked up. The Captain was
watching him. He glanced swiftly away. Then he saw the officer stoop
and take a piece of bread from the tree-base. Again the flash of flame
went through the young soldier, seeing the stiff body stoop beneath
him, and his hands jerked. He looked away. He could feel the officer
was nervous. The bread fell as it was being broken The officer ate the
other piece. The two men stood tense and still, the master laboriously
chewing his bread, the servant staring with averted face, his fist
clenched.

Then the young soldier started. The officer had pressed open the lid of
the mug again. The orderly watched the lid of the mug, and the white
hand that clenched the handle, as if he were fascinated. It was raised.
The youth followed it with his eyes. And then he saw the thin, strong
throat of the elder man moving up and down as he drank, the strong jaw
working. And the instinct which had been jerking at the young man’s
wrists suddenly jerked free. He jumped, feeling as if it were rent in
two by a strong flame.

The spur of the officer caught in a tree-root, he went down backwards
with a crash, the middle of his back thudding sickeningly against a
sharp-edged tree-base, the pot flying away. And in a second the
orderly, with serious, earnest young face, and under-lip between his
teeth, had got his knee in the officer’s chest and was pressing the
chin backward over the farther edge of the tree-stump, pressing, with
all his heart behind in a passion of relief, the tension of his wrists
exquisite with relief. And with the base of his palms he shoved at the
chin, with all his might. And it was pleasant, too, to have that chin,
that hard jaw already slightly rough with beard, in his hands. He did
not relax one hair’s breadth, but, all the force of all his blood
exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man, till
there was a little cluck and a crunching sensation. Then he felt as if
his head went to vapour. Heavy convulsions shook the body of the
officer, frightening and horrifying the young soldier. Yet it pleased
him, too, to repress them. It pleased him to keep his hands pressing
back the chin, to feel the chest of the other man yield in expiration
to the weight of his strong, young knees, to feel the hard twitchings
of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame, which was pressed
down on it.

But it went still. He could look into the nostrils of the other man,
the eyes he could scarcely see. How curiously the mouth was pushed out,
exaggerating the full lips, and the moustache bristling up from them.
Then, with a start, he noticed the nostrils gradually filled with
blood. The red brimmed, hesitated, ran over, and went in a thin trickle
down the face to the eyes.

It shocked and distressed him. Slowly, he got up. The body twitched and
sprawled there, inert. He stood and looked at it in silence. It was a
pity it was broken. It represented more than the thing which had kicked
and bullied him. He was afraid to look at the eyes. They were hideous
now, only the whites showing, and the blood running to them. The face
of the orderly was drawn with horror at the sight. Well, it was so. In
his heart he was satisfied. He had hated the face of the Captain. It
was extinguished now. There was a heavy relief in the orderly’s soul.
That was as it should be. But he could not bear to see the long,
military body lying broken over the tree-base, the fine fingers
crisped. He wanted to hide it away.

Quickly, busily, he gathered it up and pushed it under the felled
tree-trunks, which rested their beautiful, smooth length either end on
logs. The face was horrible with blood. He covered it with the helmet.
Then he pushed the limbs straight and decent, and brushed the dead
leaves off the fine cloth of the uniform. So, it lay quite still in the
shadow under there. A little strip of sunshine ran along the breast,
from a chink between the logs. The orderly sat by it for a few moments.
Here his own life also ended.

Then, through his daze, he heard the lieutenant, in a loud voice,
explaining to the men outside the wood, that they were to suppose the
bridge on the river below was held by the enemy. Now they were to march
to the attack in such and such a manner. The lieutenant had no gift of
expression. The orderly, listening from habit, got muddled. And when
the lieutenant began it all again he ceased to hear. He knew he must
go. He stood up. It surprised him that the leaves were glittering in
the sun, and the chips of wood reflecting white from the ground. For
him a change had come over the world. But for the rest it had not—all
seemed the same. Only he had left it. And he could not go back. It was
his duty to return with the beer-pot and the bottle. He could not. He
had left all that. The lieutenant was still hoarsely explaining. He
must go, or they would, overtake him. And he could not bear contact
with anyone now.

He drew his fingers over his eyes, trying to find out where he was.
Then he turned away. He saw the horse standing in the path. He went up
to it and mounted. It hurt him to sit in the saddle. The pain of
keeping his seat occupied him as they cantered through the wood. He
would not have minded anything, but he could not get away from the
sense of being divided from the others. The path led out of the trees.
On the edge of the wood he pulled up and stood watching. There in the
spacious sunshine of the valley soldiers were moving in a little swarm.
Every now and then, a man harrowing on a strip of fallow shouted to his
oxen, at the turn. The village and the white-towered church was small
in the sunshine. And he no longer belonged to it—he sat there, beyond,
like a man outside in the dark. He had gone out from everyday life into
the unknown, and he could not, he even did not want to go back.

Turning from the sun-blazing valley, he rode deep into the wood.
Tree-trunks, like people standing grey and still, took no notice as he
went. A doe, herself a moving bit of sunshine and shadow, went running
through the flecked shade. There were bright green rents in the
foliage. Then it was all pine wood, dark and cool. And he was sick with
pain, he had an intolerable great pulse in his head, and he was sick.
He had never been ill in his life, he felt lost, quite dazed with all
this.

Trying to get down from the horse, he fell, astonished at the pain and
his lack of balance. The horse shifted uneasily. He jerked its bridle
and sent it cantering jerkily away. It was his last connection with the
rest of things.

But he only wanted to lie down and not be disturbed. Stumbling through
the trees, he came on a quiet place where beeches and pine trees grew
on a slope. Immediately he had lain down and closed his eyes, his
consciousness went racing on without him. A big pulse of sickness beat
in him as if it throbbed through the whole earth. He was burning with
dry heat. But he was too busy, too tearingly active in the incoherent
race of delirium to observe.

III

He came to with a start. His mouth was dry and hard, his heart beat
heavily, but he had not the energy to get up. His heart beat heavily.
Where was he?—the barracks—at home? There was something knocking. And,
making an effort, he looked round—trees, and litter of greenery, and
reddish, night, still pieces of sunshine on the floor. He did not
believe he was himself, he did not believe what he saw. Something was
knocking. He made a struggle towards consciousness, but relapsed. Then
he struggled again. And gradually his surroundings fell into
relationship with himself. He knew, and a great pang of fear went
through his heart. Somebody was knocking. He could see the heavy, black
rags of a fir tree overhead. Then everything went black. Yet he did not
believe he had closed his eyes. He had not. Out of the blackness sight
slowly emerged again. And someone was knocking. Quickly, he saw the
blood-disgfigured face of his Captain, which he hated. And he held
himself still with horror. Yet, deep inside him, he knew that it was
so, the Captain should be dead. But the physical delirium got hold of
him. Someone was knocking. He lay perfectly still, as if dead, with
fear. And he went unconscious.

When he opened his eyes again, he started, seeing something creeping
swiftly up a tree-trunk. It was a little bird. And the bird was
whistling overhead. Tap-tap-tap—it was the small, quick bird rapping
the tree-trunk with its beak, as if its head were a little round
hammer. He watched it curiously. It shifted sharply, in its creeping
fashion. Then, like a mouse, it slid down the bare trunk. Its swift
creeping sent a flash of revulsion through him. He raised his head. It
felt a great weight. Then, the little bird ran out of the shadow across
a still patch of sunshine, its little head bobbing swiftly, its white
legs twinkling brightly for a moment. How neat it was in its build, so
compact, with pieces of white on its wings. There were several of them.
They were so pretty—but they crept like swift, erratic mice, running
here and there among the beech-mast.

He lay down again exhausted, and his consciousness lapsed. He had a
horror of the little creeping birds. All his blood seemed to be darting
and creeping in his head. And yet he could not move.

He came to with a further ache of exhaustion. There was the pain in his
head, and the horrible sickness, and his inability to move. He had
never been ill in his life. He did not know where he was or what he
was. Probably he had got sunstroke. Or what else?—he had silenced the
Captain for ever—some time ago—oh, a long time ago. There had been
blood on his face, and his eyes had turned upwards. It was all right,
somehow. It was peace. But now he had got beyond himself. He had never
been here before. Was it life, or not life? He was by himself. They
were in a big, bright place, those others, and he was outside. The
town, all the country, a big bright place of light: and he was outside,
here, in the darkened open beyond, where each thing existed alone. But
they would all have to come out there sometime, those others. Little,
and left behind him, they all were. There had been father and mother
and sweetheart. What did they all matter? This was the open land.

He sat up. Something scuffled. It was a little, brown squirrel running
in lovely, undulating bounds over the floor, its red tail completing
the undulation of its body—and then, as it sat up, furling and
unfurling. He watched it, pleased. It ran on friskily, enjoying itself.
It flew wildly at another squirrel, and they were chasing each other,
and making little scolding, chattering noises. The soldier wanted to
speak to them. But only a hoarse sound came out of his throat. The
squirrels burst away—they flew up the trees. And then he saw the one
peeping round at him, half-way up a tree-trunk. A start of fear went
through him, though, in so far as he was conscious, he was amused. It
still stayed, its little, keen face staring at him halfway up the
tree-trunk, its little ears pricked up, its clawey little hands
clinging to the bark, its white breast reared. He started from it in
panic.

Struggling to his feet, he lurched away. He went on walking, walking,
looking for something for a drink. His brain felt hot and inflamed for
want of water. He stumbled on. Then he did not know anything. He went
unconscious as he walked. Yet he stumbled on, his mouth open.

When, to his dumb wonder, he opened his eyes on the world again, he no
longer tried to remember what it was. There was thick, golden light
behind golden-green glitterings, and tall, grey-purple shafts, and
darknesses further off, surrounding him, growing deeper. He was
conscious of a sense of arrival. He was amid the reality, on the real,
dark bottom. But there was the thirst burning in his brain. He felt
lighter, not so heavy. He supposed it was newness.

The air was muttering with thunder. He thought he was walking
wonderfully swiftly and was coming straight to relief—or was it to
water?

Suddenly he stood still with fear. There was a tremendous flare of
gold, immense—just a few dark trunks like bars between him and it. All
the young level wheat was burnished gold glaring on its silky green. A
woman, full-skirted, a black cloth on her head for head-dress, was
passing like a block of shadow through the glistening, green corn, into
the full glare. There was a farm, too, pale blue in shadow, and the
timber black. And there was a church spire, nearly fused away in the
gold. The woman moved on, away from him. He had no language with which
to speak to her. She was the bright, solid unreality. She would make a
noise of words that would confuse him, and her eyes would look at him
without seeing him. She was crossing there to the other side. He stood
against a tree.

When at last he turned, looking down the long, bare grove whose flat
bed was already filling dark, he saw the mountains in a wonder-light,
not far away, and radiant. Behind the soft, grey ridge of the nearest
range the further mountains stood golden and pale grey, the snow all
radiant like pure, soft gold. So still, gleaming in the sky, fashioned
pure out of the ore of the sky, they shone in their silence. He stood
and looked at them, his face illuminated. And like the golden, lustrous
gleaming of the snow he felt his own thirst bright in him. He stood and
gazed, leaning against a tree. And then everything slid away into
space.

During the night the lightning fluttered perpetually, making the whole
sky white. He must have walked again. The world hung livid round him
for moments, fields a level sheen of grey-green light, trees in dark
bulk, and the range of clouds black across a white sky. Then the
darkness fell like a shutter, and the night was whole. A faint mutter
of a half-revealed world, that could not quite leap out of the
darkness!—Then there again stood a sweep of pallor for the land, dark
shapes looming, a range of clouds hanging overhead. The world was a
ghostly shadow, thrown for a moment upon the pure darkness, which
returned ever whole and complete.

And the mere delirium of sickness and fever went on inside him—his
brain opening and shutting like the night—then sometimes convulsions of
terror from something with great eyes that stared round a tree—then the
long agony of the march, and the sun decomposing his blood—then the
pang of hate for the Captain, followed, by a pang of tenderness and
ease. But everything was distorted, born of an ache and resolving into
an ache.

In the morning he came definitely awake. Then his brain flamed with the
sole horror of thirstiness! The sun was on his face, the dew was
steaming from his wet clothes. Like one possessed, he got up. There,
straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender, the mountains
ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky. He wanted them—he
wanted them alone—he wanted to leave himself and be identified with
them. They did not move, they were still and soft, with white, gentle
markings of snow. He stood still, mad with suffering, his hands
crisping and clutching. Then he was twisting in a paroxysm on the
grass.

He lay still, in a kind of dream of anguish. His thirst seemed to have
separated itself from him, and to stand apart, a single demand. Then
the pain he felt was another single self. Then there was the clog of
his body, another separate thing. He was divided among all kinds of
separate beings. There was some strange, agonized connection between
them, but they were drawing further apart. Then they would all split.
The sun, drilling down on him, was drilling through the bond. Then they
would all fall, fall through the everlasting lapse of space. Then
again, his consciousness reasserted itself. He roused on to his elbow
and stared at the gleaming mountains. There they ranked, all still and
wonderful between earth and heaven. He stared till his eyes went black,
and the mountains, as they stood in their beauty, so clean and cool,
seemed to have it, that which was lost in him.

IV

When the soldiers found him, three hours later, he was lying with his
face over his arm, his black hair giving off heat under the sun. But he
was still alive. Seeing the open, black mouth the young soldiers
dropped him in horror.

He died in the hospital at night, without having seen again.

The doctors saw the bruises on his legs, behind, and were silent.

The bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary,
the one white and slender, but laid rigidly at rest, the other looking
as if every moment it must rouse into life again, so young and unused,
from a slumber.



The Thorn in the Flesh

I

A wind was running, so that occasionally the poplars whitened as if a
flame flew up them. The sky was broken and blue among moving clouds.
Patches of sunshine lay on the level fields, and shadows on the rye and
the vineyards. In the distance, very blue, the cathedral bristled
against the sky, and the houses of the city of Metz clustered vaguely
below, like a hill.

Among the fields by the lime trees stood the barracks, upon bare, dry
ground, a collection of round-roofed huts of corrugated iron, where the
soldiers’ nasturtiums climbed brilliantly. There was a tract of
vegetable garden at the side, with the soldiers’ yellowish lettuces in
rows, and at the back the big, hard drilling-yard surrounded by a wire
fence.

At this time in the afternoon, the huts were deserted, all the beds
pushed up, the soldiers were lounging about under the lime trees
waiting for the call to drill. Bachmann sat on a bench in the shade
that smelled sickly with blossom. Pale green, wrecked lime flowers were
scattered on the ground. He was writing his weekly post card to his
mother. He was a fair, long, limber youth, good looking. He sat very
still indeed, trying to write his post card. His blue uniform, sagging
on him as he sat bent over the card, disfigured his youthful shape. His
sunburnt hand waited motionless for the words to come. “Dear
mother”—was all he had written. Then he scribbled mechanically: “Many
thanks for your letter with what you sent. Everything is all right with
me. We are just off to drill on the fortifications——” Here he broke off
and sat suspended, oblivious of everything, held in some definite
suspense. He looked again at the card. But he could write no more. Out
of the knot of his consciousness no word would come. He signed himself,
and looked up, as a man looks to see if anyone has noticed him in his
privacy.

There was a self-conscious strain in his blue eyes, and a pallor about
his mouth, where the young, fair moustache glistened. He was almost
girlish in his good looks and his grace. But he had something of
military consciousness, as if he believed in the discipline for
himself, and found satisfaction in delivering himself to his duty.
There was also a trace of youthful swagger and dare-devilry about his
mouth and his limber body, but this was in suppression now.

He put the post card in the pocket of his tunic, and went to join a
group of his comrades who were lounging in the shade, laughing and
talking grossly. Today he was out of it. He only stood near to them for
the warmth of the association. In his own consciousness something held
him down.

Presently they were summoned to ranks. The sergeant came out to take
command. He was a strongly built, rather heavy man of forty. His head
was thrust forward, sunk a little between his powerful shoulders, and
the strong jaw was pushed out aggressively. But the eyes were
smouldering, the face hung slack and sodden with drink.

He gave his orders in brutal, barking shouts, and the little company
moved forward, out of the wire-fenced yard to the open road, marching
rhythmically, raising the dust. Bachmann, one of the inner file of four
deep, marched in the airless ranks, half suffocated with heat and dust
and enclosure. Through the moving of his comrades’ bodies, he could see
the small vines dusty by the roadside, the poppies among the tares
fluttering and blown to pieces, the distant spaces of sky and fields
all free with air and sunshine. But he was bound in a very dark
enclosure of anxiety within himself.

He marched with his usual ease, being healthy and well adjusted. But
his body went on by itself. His spirit was clenched apart. And ever the
few soldiers drew nearer and nearer to the town, ever the consciousness
of the youth became more gripped and separate, his body worked by a
kind of mechanical intelligence, a mere presence of mind.

They diverged from the high road and passed in single file down a path
among trees. All was silent and green and mysterious, with shadow of
foliage and long, green, undisturbed grass. Then they came out in the
sunshine on a moat of water, which wound silently between the long,
flowery grass, at the foot of the earthworks, that rose in front in
terraces walled smooth on the face, but all soft with long grass at the
top. Marguerite daisies and lady’s-slipper glimmered white and gold in
the lush grass, preserved here in the intense peace of the
fortifications. Thickets of trees stood round about. Occasionally a
puff of mysterious wind made the flowers and the long grass that
crested the earthworks above bow and shake as with signals of oncoming
alarm.

The group of soldiers stood at the end of the moat, in their light blue
and scarlet uniforms, very bright. The sergeant was giving them
instructions, and his shout came sharp and alarming in the intense,
untouched stillness of the place. They listened, finding it difficult
to make the effort of understanding.

Then it was over, and the men were moving to make preparations. On the
other side of the moat the ramparts rose smooth and clear in the sun,
sloping slightly back. Along the summit grass grew and tall daisies
stood ledged high, like magic, against the dark green of the tree-tops
behind. The noise of the town, the running of tram-cars, was heard
distinctly, but it seemed not to penetrate this still place.

The water of the moat was motionless. In silence the practice began.
One of the soldiers took a scaling ladder, and passing along the narrow
ledge at the foot of the earthworks, with the water of the moat just
behind him, tried to get a fixture on the slightly sloping wall-face.
There he stood, small and isolated, at the foot of the wall, trying to
get his ladder settled. At last it held, and the clumsy, groping figure
in the baggy blue uniform began to clamber up. The rest of the soldiers
stood and watched. Occasionally the sergeant barked a command. Slowly
the clumsy blue figure clambered higher up the wall-face. Bachmann
stood with his bowels turned to water. The figure of the climbing
soldier scrambled out on to the terrace up above, and moved, blue and
distinct, among the bright green grass. The officer shouted from below.
The soldier tramped along, fixed the ladder in another spot, and
carefully lowered himself on to the rungs. Bachmann watched the blind
foot groping in space for the ladder, and he felt the world fall away
beneath him. The figure of the soldier clung cringing against the face
of the wall, cleaving, groping downwards like some unsure insect
working its way lower and lower, fearing every movement. At last,
sweating and with a strained face, the figure had landed safely and
turned to the group of soldiers. But still it had a stiffness and a
blank, mechanical look, was something less than human.

Bachmann stood there heavy and condemned, waiting for his own turn and
betrayal. Some of the men went up easily enough, and without fear. That
only showed it could be done lightly, and made Bachmann’s case more
bitter. If only he could do it lightly, like that.

His turn came. He knew intuitively that nobody knew his condition. The
officer just saw him as a mechanical thing. He tried to keep it up, to
carry it through on the face of things. His inside gripped tight, as
yet under control, he took the ladder and went along under the wall. He
placed his ladder with quick success, and wild, quivering hope
possessed him. Then blindly he began to climb. But the ladder was not
very firm, and at every hitch a great, sick, melting feeling took hold
of him. He clung on fast. If only he could keep that grip on himself,
he would get through. He knew this, in agony. What he could not
understand was the blind gush of white-hot fear, that came with great
force whenever the ladder swerved, and which almost melted his belly
and all his joints, and left him powerless. If once it melted all his
joints and his belly, he was done. He clung desperately to himself. He
knew the fear, he knew what it did when it came, he knew he had only to
keep a firm hold. He knew all this. Yet, when the ladder swerved, and
his foot missed, there was the great blast of fear blowing on his heart
and bowels, and he was melting weaker and weaker, in a horror of fear
and lack of control, melting to fall.

Yet he groped slowly higher and higher, always staring upwards with
desperate face, and always conscious of the space below. But all of
him, body and soul, was growing hot to fusion point. He would have to
let go for very relief’s sake. Suddenly his heart began to lurch. It
gave a great, sickly swoop, rose, and again plunged in a swoop of
horror. He lay against the wall inert as if dead, inert, at peace, save
for one deep core of anxiety, which knew that it was _not_ all over,
that he was still high in space against the wall. But the chief effort
of will was gone.

There came into his consciousness a small, foreign sensation. He woke
up a little. What was it? Then slowly it penetrated him. His water had
run down his leg. He lay there, clinging, still with shame, half
conscious of the echo of the sergeant’s voice thundering from below. He
waited, in depths of shame beginning to recover himself. He had been
shamed so deeply. Then he could go on, for his fear for himself was
conquered. His shame was known and published. He must go on.

Slowly he began to grope for the rung above, when a great shock shook
through him. His wrists were grasped from above, he was being hauled
out of himself up, up to the safe ground. Like a sack he was dragged
over the edge of the earthworks by the large hands, and landed there on
his knees, grovelling in the grass to recover command of himself, to
rise up on his feet.

Shame, blind, deep shame and ignominy overthrew his spirit and left it
writhing. He stood there shrunk over himself, trying to obliterate
himself.

Then the presence of the officer who had hauled him up made itself felt
upon him. He heard the panting of the elder man, and then the voice
came down on his veins like a fierce whip. He shrank in tension of
shame.

“Put up your head—eyes front,” shouted the enraged sergeant, and
mechanically the soldier obeyed the command, forced to look into the
eyes of the sergeant. The brutal, hanging face of the officer violated
the youth. He hardened himself with all his might from seeing it. The
tearing noise of the sergeant’s voice continued to lacerate his body.

Suddenly he set back his head, rigid, and his heart leapt to burst. The
face had suddenly thrust itself close, all distorted and showing the
teeth, the eyes smouldering into him. The breath of the barking words
was on his nose and mouth. He stepped aside in revulsion. With a scream
the face was upon him again. He raised his arm, involuntarily, in
self-defence. A shock of horror went through him, as he felt his
forearm hit the face of the officer a brutal blow. The latter
staggered, swerved back, and with a curious cry, reeled backwards over
the ramparts, his hands clutching the air. There was a second of
silence, then a crash to water.

Bachmann, rigid, looked out of his inner silence upon the scene.
Soldiers were running.

“You’d better clear,” said one young, excited voice to him. And with
immediate instinctive decision he started to walk away from the spot.
He went down the tree-hidden path to the high road where the trams ran
to and from the town. In his heart was a sense of vindication, of
escape. He was leaving it all, the military world, the shame. He was
walking away from it.

Officers on horseback rode sauntering down the street, soldiers passed
along the pavement. Coming to the bridge, Bachmann crossed over to the
town that heaped before him, rising from the flat, picturesque French
houses down below at the water’s edge, up a jumble of roofs and chasms
of streets, to the lovely dark cathedral with its myriad pinnacles
making points at the sky.

He felt for the moment quite at peace, relieved from a great strain. So
he turned along by the river to the public gardens. Beautiful were the
heaped, purple lilac trees upon the green grass, and wonderful the
walls of the horse-chestnut trees, lighted like an altar with white
flowers on every ledge. Officers went by, elegant and all coloured,
women and girls sauntered in the chequered shade. Beautiful it was, he
walked in a vision, free.

II

But where was he going? He began to come out of his trance of delight
and liberty. Deep within him he felt the steady burning of shame in the
flesh. As yet he could not bear to think of it. But there it was,
submerged beneath his attention, the raw, steady-burning shame.

It behoved him to be intelligent. As yet he dared not remember what he
had done. He only knew the need to get away, away from everything he
had been in contact with.

But how? A great pang of fear went through him. He could not bear his
shamed flesh to be put again between the hands of authority. Already
the hands had been laid upon him, brutally upon his nakedness, ripping
open his shame and making him maimed, crippled in his own control.

Fear became an anguish. Almost blindly he was turning in the direction
of the barracks. He could not take the responsibility of himself. He
must give himself up to someone. Then his heart, obstinate in hope,
became obsessed with the idea of his sweetheart. He would make himself
her responsibility.

Blenching as he took courage, he mounted the small, quick-hurrying tram
that ran out of the town in the direction of the barracks. He sat
motionless and composed, static.

He got out at the terminus and went down the road. A wind was still
running. He could hear the faint whisper of the rye, and the stronger
swish as a sudden gust was upon it. No one was about. Feeling detached
and impersonal, he went down a field-path between the low vines. Many
little vine trees rose up in spires, holding out tender pink shoots,
waving their tendrils. He saw them distinctly and wondered over them.
In a field a little way off, men and women were taking up the hay. The
bullock-waggon stood by on the path, the men in their blue shirts, the
women with white cloths over their heads carried hay in their arms to
the cart, all brilliant and distinct upon the shorn, glowing green
acres. He felt himself looking out of darkness on to the glamorous,
brilliant beauty of the world around him, outside him.

The Baron’s house, where Emilie was maidservant, stood square and
mellow among trees and garden and fields. It was an old French grange.
The barracks was quite near. Bachmann walked, drawn by a single
purpose, towards the courtyard. He entered the spacious, shadowy,
sun-swept place. The dog, seeing a soldier, only jumped and whined for
greeting. The pump stood peacefully in a corner, under a lime tree, in
the shade.

The kitchen door was open. He hesitated, then walked in, speaking shyly
and smiling involuntarily. The two women started, but with pleasure.
Emilie was preparing the tray for afternoon coffee. She stood beyond
the table, drawn up, startled, and challenging, and glad. She had the
proud, timid eyes of some wild animal, some proud animal. Her black
hair was closely banded, her grey eyes watched steadily. She wore a
peasant dress of blue cotton sprigged with little red roses, that
buttoned tight over her strong maiden breasts.

At the table sat another young woman, the nursery governess, who was
picking cherries from a huge heap, and dropping them into a bowl. She
was young, pretty, freckled.

“Good day!” she said pleasantly. “The unexpected.”

Emilie did not speak. The flush came in her dark cheek. She still stood
watching, between fear and a desire to escape, and on the other hand
joy that kept her in his presence.

“Yes,” he said, bashful and strained, while the eyes of the two women
were upon him. “I’ve got myself in a mess this time.”

“What?” asked the nursery governess, dropping her hands in her lap.
Emilie stood rigid.

Bachmann could not raise his head. He looked sideways at the
glistening, ruddy cherries. He could not recover the normal world.

“I knocked Sergeant Huber over the fortifications down into the moat,”
he said. “It was an accident—but——”

And he grasped at the cherries, and began to eat them, unknowing,
hearing only Emilie’s little exclamation.

“You knocked him over the fortifications!” echoed Fräulein Hesse in
horror. “How?”

Spitting the cherry-stones into his hand, mechanically, absorbedly, he
told them.

“Ach!” exclaimed Emilie sharply.

“And how did you get here?” asked Fräulein Hesse.

“I ran off,” he said.

There was a dead silence. He stood, putting himself at the mercy of the
women. There came a hissing from the stove, and a stronger smell of
coffee. Emilie turned swiftly away. He saw her flat, straight back and
her strong loins, as she bent over the stove.

“But what are you going to do?” said Fräulein Hesse, aghast.

“I don’t know,” he said, grasping at more cherries. He had come to an
end.

“You’d better go to the barracks,” she said. “We’ll get the Herr Baron
to come and see about it.”

Emilie was swiftly and quietly preparing the tray. She picked it up,
and stood with the glittering china and silver before her, impassive,
waiting for his reply. Bachmann remained with his head dropped, pale
and obstinate. He could not bear to go back.

“I’m going to try to get into France,” he said.

“Yes, but they’ll catch you,” said Fräulein Hesse.

Emilie watched with steady, watchful grey eyes.

“I can have a try, if I could hide till tonight,” he said.

Both women knew what he wanted. And they all knew it was no good.
Emilie picked up the tray, and went out. Bachmann stood with his head
dropped. Within himself he felt the dross of shame and incapacity.

“You’d never get away,” said the governess.

“I can try,” he said.

Today he could not put himself between the hands of the military. Let
them do as they liked with him tomorrow, if he escaped today.

They were silent. He ate cherries. The colour flushed bright into the
cheek of the young governess.

Emilie returned to prepare another tray.

“He could hide in your room,” the governess said to her.

The girl drew herself away. She could not bear the intrusion.

“That is all I can think of that is safe from the children,” said
Fräulein Hesse.

Emilie gave no answer. Bachmann stood waiting for the two women. Emilie
did not want the close contact with him.

“You could sleep with me,” Fräulein Hesse said to her.

Emilie lifted her eyes and looked at the young man, direct, clear,
reserving herself.

“Do you want that?” she asked, her strong virginity proof against him.

“Yes—yes——” he said uncertainly, destroyed by shame.

She put back her head.

“Yes,” she murmured to herself.

Quickly she filled the tray, and went out.

“But you can’t walk over the frontier in a night,” said Fräulein Hesse.

“I can cycle,” he said.

Emilie returned, a restraint, a neutrality, in her bearing.

“I’ll see if it’s all right,” said the governess.

In a moment or two Bachmann was following Emilie through the square
hall, where hung large maps on the walls. He noticed a child’s blue
coat with brass buttons on the peg, and it reminded him of Emilie
walking holding the hand of the youngest child, whilst he watched,
sitting under the lime tree. Already this was a long way off. That was
a sort of freedom he had lost, changed for a new, immediate anxiety.

They went quickly, fearfully up the stairs and down a long corridor.
Emilie opened her door, and he entered, ashamed, into her room.

“I must go down,” she murmured, and she departed, closing the door
softly.

It was a small, bare, neat room. There was a little dish for
holy-water, a picture of the Sacred Heart, a crucifix, and a
_prie-Dieu_. The small bed lay white and untouched, the wash-hand bowl
of red earth stood on a bare table, there was a little mirror and a
small chest of drawers. That was all.

Feeling safe, in sanctuary, he went to the window, looking over the
courtyard at the shimmering, afternoon country. He was going to leave
this land, this life. Already he was in the unknown.

He drew away into the room. The curious simplicity and severity of the
little Roman Catholic bedroom was foreign but restoring to him. He
looked at the crucifix. It was a long, lean, peasant Christ carved by a
peasant in the Black Forest. For the first time in his life, Bachmann
saw the figure as a human thing. It represented a man hanging there in
helpless torture. He stared at it, closely, as if for new knowledge.

Within his own flesh burned and smouldered the restless shame. He could
not gather himself together. There was a gap in his soul. The shame
within him seemed to displace his strength and his manhood.

He sat down on his chair. The shame, the roused feeling of exposure
acted on his brain, made him heavy, unutterably heavy.

Mechanically, his wits all gone, he took off his boots, his belt, his
tunic, put them aside, and lay down, heavy, and fell into a kind of
drugged sleep.

Emilie came in a little while, and looked at him. But he was sunk in
sleep. She saw him lying there inert, and terribly still, and she was
afraid. His shirt was unfastened at the throat. She saw his pure white
flesh, very clean and beautiful. And he slept inert. His legs, in the
blue uniform trousers, his feet in the coarse stockings, lay foreign on
her bed. She went away.

III

She was uneasy, perturbed to her last fibre. She wanted to remain
clear, with no touch on her. A wild instinct made her shrink away from
any hands which might be laid on her.

She was a foundling, probably of some gipsy race, brought up in a Roman
Catholic Rescue Home. A naïve, paganly religious being, she was
attached to the Baroness, with whom she had served for seven years,
since she was fourteen.

She came into contact with no one, unless it were with Ida Hesse, the
governess. Ida was a calculating, good-natured, not very
straightforward flirt. She was the daughter of a poor country doctor.
Having gradually come into connection with Emilie, more an alliance
than an attachment, she put no distinction of grade between the two of
them. They worked together, sang together, walked together, and went
together to the rooms of Franz Brand, Ida’s sweetheart. There the three
talked and laughed together, or the women listened to Franz, who was a
forester, playing on his violin.

In all this alliance there was no personal intimacy between the young
women. Emilie was naturally secluded in herself, of a reserved, native
race. Ida used her as a kind of weight to balance her own flighty
movement. But the quick, shifty governess, occupied always in her
dealings with admirers, did all she could to move the violent nature of
Emilie towards some connection with men.

But the dark girl, primitive yet sensitive to a high degree, was
fiercely virgin. Her blood flamed with rage when the common soldiers
made the long, sucking, kissing noise behind her as she passed. She
hated them for their almost jeering offers. She was well protected by
the Baroness.

And her contempt of the common men in general was ineffable. But she
loved the Baroness, and she revered the Baron, and she was at her ease
when she was doing something for the service of a gentleman. Her whole
nature was at peace in the service of real masters or mistresses. For
her, a gentleman had some mystic quality that left her free and proud
in service. The common soldiers were brutes, merely nothing. Her desire
was to serve.

She held herself aloof. When, on Sunday afternoon, she had looked
through the windows of the Reichshalle in passing, and had seen the
soldiers dancing with the common girls, a cold revulsion and anger had
possessed her. She could not bear to see the soldiers taking off their
belts and pulling open their tunics, dancing with their shirts showing
through the open, sagging tunic, their movements gross, their faces
transfigured and sweaty, their coarse hands holding their coarse girls
under the arm-pits, drawing the female up to their breasts. She hated
to see them clutched breast to breast, the legs of the men moving
grossly in the dance.

At evening, when she had been in the garden, and heard on the other
side of the hedge the sexual inarticulate cries of the girls in the
embraces of the soldiers, her anger had been too much for her, and she
had cried, loud and cold:

“What are you doing there, in the hedge?”

She would have had them whipped.

But Bachmann was not quite a common soldier. Fräulein Hesse had found
out about him, and had drawn him and Emilie together. For he was a
handsome, blond youth, erect and walking with a kind of pride,
unconscious yet clear. Moreover, he came of a rich farming stock, rich
for many generations. His father was dead, his mother controlled the
moneys for the time being. But if Bachmann wanted a hundred pounds at
any moment, he could have them. By trade he, with one of his brothers,
was a waggon-builder. The family had the farming, smithy, and
waggon-building of their village. They worked because that was the form
of life they knew. If they had chosen, they could have lived
independent upon their means.

In this way, he was a gentleman in sensibility, though his intellect
was not developed. He could afford to pay freely for things. He had,
moreover, his native, fine breeding. Emilie wavered uncertainly before
him. So he became her sweetheart, and she hungered after him. But she
was virgin, and shy, and needed to be in subjection, because she was
primitive and had no grasp on civilized forms of living, nor on
civilized purposes.

IV

At six o’clock came the inquiry of the soldiers: Had anything been seen
of Bachmann? Fräulein Hesse answered, pleased to be playing a rôle:

“No, I’ve not seen him since Sunday—have you, Emilie?”

“No, I haven’t seen him,” said Emilie, and her awkwardness was
construed as bashfulness. Ida Hesse, stimulated, asked questions, and
played her part.

“But it hasn’t killed Sergeant Huber?” she cried in consternation.

“No. He fell into the water. But it gave him a bad shock, and smashed
his foot on the side of the moat. He’s in hospital. It’s a bad look-out
for Bachmann.”

Emilie, implicated and captive, stood looking on. She was no longer
free, working with all this regulated system which she could not
understand and which was almost god-like to her. She was put out of her
place. Bachmann was in her room, she was no longer the faithful in
service serving with religious surety.

Her situation was intolerable to her. All evening long the burden was
upon her, she could not live. The children must be fed and put to
sleep. The Baron and Baroness were going out, she must give them light
refreshment. The man-servant was coming in to supper after returning
with the carriage. And all the while she had the insupportable feeling
of being out of the order, self-responsible, bewildered. The control of
her life should come from those above her, and she should move within
that control. But now she was out of it, uncontrolled and troubled.
More than that, the man, the lover, Bachmann, who was he, what was he?
He alone of all men contained for her the unknown quantity which
terrified her beyond her service. Oh, she had wanted him as a distant
sweetheart, not close, like this, casting her out of her world.

When the Baron and Baroness had departed, and the young man-servant had
gone out to enjoy himself, she went upstairs to Bachmann. He had
wakened up, and sat dimly in the room. Out in the open he heard the
soldiers, his comrades, singing the sentimental songs of the nightfall,
the drone of the concertina rising in accompaniment.

“Wenn ich zu mei...nem Kinde geh’...
In seinem Au...g die Mutter seh’...”


But he himself was removed from it now. Only the sentimental cry of
young, unsatisfied desire in the soldiers’ singing penetrated his blood
and stirred him subtly. He let his head hang; he had become gradually
roused: and he waited in concentration, in another world.

The moment she entered the room where the man sat alone, waiting
intensely, the thrill passed through her, she died in terror, and after
the death, a great flame gushed up, obliterating her. He sat in
trousers and shirt on the side of the bed. He looked up as she came in,
and she shrank from his face. She could not bear it. Yet she entered
near to him.

“Do you want anything to eat?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, and as she stood in the twilight of the room with
him, he could only hear his heart beat heavily. He saw her apron just
level with his face. She stood silent, a little distance off, as if she
would be there for ever. He suffered.

As if in a spell she waited, standing motionless and looming there, he
sat rather crouching on the side of the bed. A second will in him was
powerful and dominating. She drew gradually nearer to him, coming up
slowly, as if unconscious. His heart beat up swiftly. He was going to
move.

As she came quite close, almost invisibly he lifted his arms and put
them round her waist, drawing her with his will and desire. He buried
his face into her apron, into the terrible softness of her belly. And
he was a flame of passion intense about her. He had forgotten. Shame
and memory were gone in a whole, furious flame of passion.

She was quite helpless. Her hands leapt, fluttered, and closed over his
head, pressing it deeper into her belly, vibrating as she did so. And
his arms tightened on her, his hands spread over her loins, warm as
flame on her loveliness. It was intense anguish of bliss for her, and
she lost consciousness.

When she recovered, she lay translated in the peace of satisfaction.

It was what she had had no inkling of, never known could be. She was
strong with eternal gratitude. And he was there with her. Instinctively
with an instinct of reverence and gratitude, her arms tightened in a
little embrace upon him who held her thoroughly embraced.

And he was restored and completed, close to her. That little,
twitching, momentary clasp of acknowledgment that she gave him in her
satisfaction, roused his pride unconquerable. They loved each other,
and all was whole. She loved him, he had taken her, she was given to
him. It was right. He was given to her, and they were one, complete.

Warm, with a glow in their hearts and faces, they rose again, modest,
but transfigured with happiness.

“I will get you something to eat,” she said, and in joy and security of
service again, she left him, making a curious little homage of
departure. He sat on the side of the bed, escaped, liberated,
wondering, and happy.

V

Soon she came again with the tray, followed by Fräulein Hesse. The two
women watched him eat, watched the pride and wonder of his being, as he
sat there blond and naïf again. Emilie felt rich and complete. Ida was
a lesser thing than herself.

“And what are you going to do?” asked Fräulein Hesse, jealous.

“I must get away,” he said.

But words had no meaning for him. What did it matter? He had the inner
satisfaction and liberty.

“But you’ll want a bicycle,” said Ida Hesse.

“Yes,” he said.

Emilie sat silent, removed and yet with him, connected with him in
passion. She looked from this talk of bicycles and escape.

They discussed plans. But in two of them was the one will, that
Bachmann should stay with Emilie. Ida Hesse was an outsider.

It was arranged, however, that Ida’s lover should put out his bicycle,
leave it at the hut where he sometimes watched. Bachmann should fetch
it in the night, and ride into France. The hearts of all three beat hot
in suspense, driven to thought. They sat in a fire of agitation.

Then Bachmann would get away to America, and Emilie would come and join
him. They would be in a fine land then. The tale burned up again.

Emilie and Ida had to go round to Franz Brand’s lodging. They departed
with slight leave-taking. Bachmann sat in the dark, hearing the bugle
for retreat sound out of the night. Then he remembered his post card to
his mother. He slipped out after Emilie, gave it her to post. His
manner was careless and victorious, hers shining and trustful. He
slipped back to shelter.

There he sat on the side of the bed, thinking. Again he went over the
events of the afternoon, remembering his own anguish of apprehension
because he had known he could not climb the wall without fainting with
fear. Still, a flush of shame came alight in him at the memory. But he
said to himself: “What does it matter?—I can’t help it, well then I
can’t. If I go up a height, I get absolutely weak, and can’t help
myself.” Again memory came over him, and a gush of shame, like fire.
But he sat and endured it. It had to be endured, admitted, and
accepted. “I’m not a coward, for all that,” he continued. “I’m not
afraid of danger. If I’m made that way, that heights melt me and make
me let go my water”—it was torture for him to pluck at this truth—“if
I’m made like that, I shall have to abide by it, that’s all. It isn’t
all of me.” He thought of Emilie, and was satisfied. “What I am, I am;
and let it be enough,” he thought.

Having accepted his own defect, he sat thinking, waiting for Emilie, to
tell her. She came at length, saying that Franz could not arrange about
his bicycle this night. It was broken. Bachmann would have to stay over
another day.

They were both happy. Emilie, confused before Ida, who was excited and
prurient, came again to the young man. She was stiff and dignified with
an agony of unusedness. But he took her between his hands, and
uncovered her, and enjoyed almost like madness her helpless, virgin
body that suffered so strongly, and that took its joy so deeply. While
the moisture of torment and modesty was still in her eyes, she clasped
him closer, and closer, to the victory and the deep satisfaction of
both of them. And they slept together, he in repose still satisfied and
peaceful, and she lying close in her static reality.

VI

In the morning, when the bugle sounded from the barracks they rose and
looked out of the window. She loved his body that was proud and blond
and able to take command. And he loved her body that was soft and
eternal. They looked at the faint grey vapour of summer steaming off
from the greenness and ripeness of the fields. There was no town
anywhere, their look ended in the haze of the summer morning. Their
bodies rested together, their minds tranquil. Then a little anxiety
stirred in both of them from the sound of the bugle. She was called
back to her old position, to realize the world of authority she did not
understand but had wanted to serve. But this call died away again from
her. She had all.

She went downstairs to her work, curiously changed. She was in a new
world of her own, that she had never even imagined, and which was the
land of promise for all that. In this she moved and had her being. And
she extended it to her duties. She was curiously happy and absorbed.
She had not to strive out of herself to do her work. The doing came
from within her without call or command. It was a delicious outflow,
like sunshine, the activity that flowed from her and put her tasks to
rights.

Bachmann sat busily thinking. He would have to get all his plans ready.
He must write to his mother, and she must send him money to Paris. He
would go to Paris, and from thence, quickly, to America. It had to be
done. He must make all preparations. The dangerous part was the getting
into France. He thrilled in anticipation. During the day he would need
a time-table of the trains going to Paris—he would need to think. It
gave him delicious pleasure, using all his wits. It seemed such an
adventure.

This one day, and he would escape then into freedom. What an agony of
need he had for absolute, imperious freedom. He had won to his own
being, in himself and Emilie, he had drawn the stigma from his shame,
he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to
go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in
her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of
ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity.

Suddenly he heard voices, and a tramping of feet. His heart gave a
great leap, then went still. He was taken. He had known all along. A
complete silence filled his body and soul, a silence like death, a
suspension of life and sound. He stood motionless in the bedroom, in
perfect suspension.

Emilie was busy passing swiftly about the kitchen preparing the
children’s breakfasts when she heard the tramp of feet and the voice of
the Baron. The latter had come in from the garden, and was wearing an
old green linen suit. He was a man of middle stature, quick, finely
made, and of whimsical charm. His right hand had been shot in the
Franco-Prussian war, and now, as always when he was much agitated, he
shook it down at his side, as if it hurt. He was talking rapidly to a
young, stiff Ober-leutnant. Two private soldiers stood bearishly in the
doorway.

Emilie, shocked out of herself, stood pale and erect, recoiling.

“Yes, if you think so, we can look,” the Baron was hastily and
irascibly saying.

“Emilie,” he said, turning to the girl, “did you put a post card to the
mother of this Bachmann in the box last evening?”

Emilie stood erect and did not answer.

“Yes?” said the Baron sharply.

“Yes, Herr Baron,” replied Emilie, neutral.

The Baron’s wounded hand shook rapidly in exasperation. The lieutenant
drew himself up still more stiffly. He was right.

“And do you know anything of the fellow?” asked the Baron, looking at
her with his blazing, greyish-golden eyes. The girl looked back at him
steadily, dumb, but her whole soul naked before him. For two seconds he
looked at her in silence. Then in silence, ashamed and furious, he
turned away.

“Go up!” he said, with his fierce, peremptory command, to the young
officer.

The lieutenant gave his order, in military cold confidence, to the
soldiers. They all tramped across the hall. Emilie stood motionless,
her life suspended.

The Baron marched swiftly upstairs and down the corridor, the
lieutenant and the common soldiers followed. The Baron flung open the
door of Emilie’s room and looked at Bachmann, who stood watching,
standing in shirt and trousers beside the bed, fronting the door. He
was perfectly still. His eyes met the furious, blazing look of the
Baron. The latter shook his wounded hand, and then went still. He
looked into the eyes of the soldier, steadily. He saw the same naked
soul exposed, as if he looked really into the _man_. And the man was
helpless, the more helpless for his singular nakedness.

“Ha!” he exclaimed impatiently, turning to the approaching lieutenant.

The latter appeared in the doorway. Quickly his eyes travelled over the
bare-footed youth. He recognized him as his object. He gave the brief
command to dress.

Bachmann turned round for his clothes. He was very still, silent in
himself. He was in an abstract, motionless world. That the two
gentlemen and the two soldiers stood watching him, he scarcely
realized. They could not see him.

Soon he was ready. He stood at attention. But only the shell of his
body was at attention. A curious silence, a blankness, like something
eternal, possessed him. He remained true to himself.

The lieutenant gave the order to march. The little procession went down
the stairs with careful, respectful tread, and passed through the hall
to the kitchen. There Emilie stood with her face uplifted, motionless
and expressionless. Bachmann did not look at her. They knew each other.
They were themselves. Then the little file of men passed out into the
courtyard.

The Baron stood in the doorway watching the four figures in uniform
pass through the chequered shadow under the lime trees. Bachmann was
walking neutralized, as if he were not there. The lieutenant went
brittle and long, the two soldiers lumbered beside. They passed out
into the sunny morning, growing smaller, going towards the barracks.

The Baron turned into the kitchen. Emilie was cutting bread.

“So he stayed the night here?” he said.

The girl looked at him, scarcely seeing. She was too much herself. The
Baron saw the dark, naked soul of her body in her unseeing eyes.

“What were you going to do?” he asked.

“He was going to America,” she replied, in a still voice.

“Pah! You should have sent him straight back,” fired the Baron.

Emilie stood at his bidding, untouched.

“He’s done for now,” he said.

But he could not bear the dark, deep nakedness of her eyes, that
scarcely changed under this suffering.

“Nothing but a fool,” he repeated, going away in agitation, and
preparing himself for what he could do.



Daughters of the Vicar

I

Mr Lindley was first vicar of Aldecross. The cottages of this tiny
hamlet had nestled in peace since their beginning, and the country folk
had crossed the lanes and farm-lands, two or three miles, to the parish
church at Greymeed, on the bright Sunday mornings.

But when the pits were sunk, blank rows of dwellings started up beside
the high roads, and a new population, skimmed from the floating scum of
workmen, was filled in, the cottages and the country people almost
obliterated.

To suit the convenience of these new collier-inhabitants, a church must
be built at Aldecross. There was not too much money. And so the little
building crouched like a humped stone-and-mortar mouse, with two little
turrets at the west corners for ears, in the fields near the cottages
and the apple trees, as far as possible from the dwellings down the
high road. It had an uncertain, timid look about it. And so they
planted big-leaved ivy, to hide its shrinking newness. So that now the
little church stands buried in its greenery, stranded and sleeping
among the fields, while the brick houses elbow nearer and nearer,
threatening to crush it down. It is already obsolete.

The Reverend Ernest Lindley, aged twenty-seven, and newly married, came
from his curacy in Suffolk to take charge of his church. He was just an
ordinary young man, who had been to Cambridge and taken orders. His
wife was a self-assured young woman, daughter of a Cambridgeshire
rector. Her father had spent the whole of his thousand a year, so that
Mrs Lindley had nothing of her own. Thus the young married people came
to Aldecross to live on a stipend of about a hundred and twenty pounds,
and to keep up a superior position.

They were not very well received by the new, raw, disaffected
population of colliers. Being accustomed to farm labourers, Mr Lindley
had considered himself as belonging indisputably to the upper or
ordering classes. He had to be humble to the county families, but
still, he was of their kind, whilst the common people were something
different. He had no doubts of himself.

He found, however, that the collier population refused to accept this
arrangement. They had no use for him in their lives, and they told him
so, callously. The women merely said, “they were throng,” or else, “Oh,
it’s no good you coming here, we’re Chapel.” The men were quite
good-humoured so long as he did not touch them too nigh, they were
cheerfully contemptuous of him, with a preconceived contempt he was
powerless against.

At last, passing from indignation to silent resentment, even, if he
dared have acknowledged it, to conscious hatred of the majority of his
flock, and unconscious hatred of himself, he confined his activities to
a narrow round of cottages, and he had to submit. He had no particular
character, having always depended on his position in society to give
him position among men. Now he was so poor, he had no social standing
even among the common vulgar tradespeople of the district, and he had
not the nature nor the wish to make his society agreeable to them, nor
the strength to impose himself where he would have liked to be
recognized. He dragged on, pale and miserable and neutral.

At first his wife raged with mortification. She took on airs and used a
high hand. But her income was too small, the wrestling with tradesmen’s
bills was too pitiful, she only met with general, callous ridicule when
she tried to be impressive.

Wounded to the quick of her pride, she found herself isolated in an
indifferent, callous population. She raged indoors and out. But soon
she learned that she must pay too heavily for her outdoor rages, and
then she only raged within the walls of the rectory. There her feeling
was so strong, that she frightened herself. She saw herself hating her
husband, and she knew that, unless she were careful, she would smash
her form of life and bring catastrophe upon him and upon herself. So in
very fear, she went quiet. She hid, bitter and beaten by fear, behind
the only shelter she had in the world, her gloomy, poor parsonage.

Children were born one every year; almost mechanically, she continued
to perform her maternal duty, which was forced upon her. Gradually,
broken by the suppressing of her violent anger and misery and disgust,
she became an invalid and took to her couch.

The children grew up healthy, but unwarmed and rather rigid. Their
father and mother educated them at home, made them very proud and very
genteel, put them definitely and cruelly in the upper classes, apart
from the vulgar around them. So they lived quite isolated. They were
good-looking, and had that curiously clean, semi-transparent look of
the genteel, isolated poor.

Gradually Mr and Mrs Lindley lost all hold on life, and spent their
hours, weeks and years merely haggling to make ends meet, and bitterly
repressing and pruning their children into gentility, urging them to
ambition, weighting them with duty. On Sunday morning the whole family,
except the mother, went down the lane to church, the long-legged girls
in skimpy frocks, the boys in black coats and long, grey, unfitting
trousers. They passed by their father’s parishioners with mute, clear
faces, childish mouths closed in pride that was like a doom to them,
and childish eyes already unseeing. Miss Mary, the eldest, was the
leader. She was a long, slim thing with a fine profile and a proud,
pure look of submission to a high fate. Miss Louisa, the second, was
short and plump and obstinate-looking. She had more enemies than
ideals. She looked after the lesser children, Miss Mary after the
elder. The collier children watched this pale, distinguished procession
of the vicar’s family pass mutely by, and they were impressed by the
air of gentility and distance, they made mock of the trousers of the
small sons, they felt inferior in themselves, and hate stirred their
hearts.

In her time, Miss Mary received as governess a few little daughters of
tradesmen; Miss Louisa managed the house and went among her father’s
church-goers, giving lessons on the piano to the colliers’ daughters at
thirteen shillings for twenty-six lessons.

II

One winter morning, when his daughter Mary was about twenty years old,
Mr Lindley, a thin, unobtrusive figure in his black overcoat and his
wideawake, went down into Aldecross with a packet of white papers under
his arm. He was delivering the parish almanacs.

A rather pale, neutral man of middle age, he waited while the train
thumped over the level-crossing, going up to the pit which rattled
busily just along the line. A wooden-legged man hobbled to open the
gate, Mr Lindley passed on. Just at his left hand, below the road and
the railway, was the red roof of a cottage, showing through the bare
twigs of apple trees. Mr Lindley passed round the low wall, and
descended the worn steps that led from the highway down to the cottage
which crouched darkly and quietly away below the rumble of passing
trains and the clank of coal-carts in a quiet little under-world of its
own. Snowdrops with tight-shut buds were hanging very still under the
bare currant bushes.

The clergyman was just going to knock when he heard a clinking noise,
and turning saw through the open door of a black shed just behind him
an elderly woman in a black lace cap stooping among reddish big cans,
pouring a very bright liquid into a tundish. There was a smell of
paraffin. The woman put down her can, took the tundish and laid it on a
shelf, then rose with a tin bottle. Her eyes met those of the
clergyman.

“Oh, is it you, Mr Lin’ley!” she said, in a complaining tone. “Go in.”

The minister entered the house. In the hot kitchen sat a big, elderly
man with a great grey beard, taking snuff. He grunted in a deep,
muttering voice, telling the minister to sit down, and then took no
more notice of him, but stared vacantly into the fire. Mr Lindley
waited.

The woman came in, the ribbons of her black lace cap, or bonnet,
hanging on her shawl. She was of medium stature, everything about her
was tidy. She went up a step out of the kitchen, carrying the paraffin
tin. Feet were heard entering the room up the step. It was a little
haberdashery shop, with parcels on the shelves of the walls, a big,
old-fashioned sewing machine with tailor’s work lying round it, in the
open space. The woman went behind the counter, gave the child who had
entered the paraffin bottle, and took from her a jug.

“My mother says shall yer put it down,” said the child, and she was
gone. The woman wrote in a book, then came into the kitchen with her
jug. The husband, a very large man, rose and brought more coal to the
already hot fire. He moved slowly and sluggishly. Already he was going
dead; being a tailor, his large form had become an encumbrance to him.
In his youth he had been a great dancer and boxer. Now he was taciturn,
and inert. The minister had nothing to say, so he sought for his
phrases. But John Durant took no notice, existing silent and dull.

Mrs Durant spread the cloth. Her husband poured himself beer into a
mug, and began to smoke and drink.

“Shall you have some?” he growled through his beard at the clergyman,
looking slowly from the man to the jug, capable of this one idea.

“No, thank you,” replied Mr Lindley, though he would have liked some
beer. He must set the example in a drinking parish.

“We need a drop to keep us going,” said Mrs Durant.

She had rather a complaining manner. The clergyman sat on uncomfortably
while she laid the table for the half-past ten lunch. Her husband drew
up to eat. She remained in her little round armchair by the fire.

She was a woman who would have liked to be easy in her life, but to
whose lot had fallen a rough and turbulent family, and a slothful
husband who did not care what became of himself or anybody. So, her
rather good-looking square face was peevish, she had that air of having
been compelled all her life to serve unwillingly, and to control where
she did not want to control. There was about her, too, that masterful
_aplomb_ of a woman who has brought up and ruled her sons: but even
them she had ruled unwillingly. She had enjoyed managing her little
haberdashery-shop, riding in the carrier’s cart to Nottingham, going
through the big warehouses to buy her goods. But the fret of managing
her sons she did not like. Only she loved her youngest boy, because he
was her last, and she saw herself free.

This was one of the houses the clergyman visited occasionally. Mrs
Durant, as part of her regulation, had brought up all her sons in the
Church. Not that she had any religion. Only, it was what she was used
to. Mr Durant was without religion. He read the fervently evangelical
_Life of John Wesley_ with a curious pleasure, getting from it a
satisfaction as from the warmth of the fire, or a glass of brandy. But
he cared no more about John Wesley, in fact, than about John Milton, of
whom he had never heard.

Mrs Durant took her chair to the table.

“I don’t feel like eating,” she sighed.

“Why—aren’t you well?” asked the clergyman, patronizing.

“It isn’t that,” she sighed. She sat with shut, straight mouth. “I
don’t know what’s going to become of us.”

But the clergyman had ground himself down so long, that he could not
easily sympathize.

“Have you any trouble?” he asked.

“Ay, have I any trouble!” cried the elderly woman. “I shall end my days
in the workhouse.”

The minister waited unmoved. What could she know of poverty, in her
little house of plenty!

“I hope not,” he said.

“And the one lad as I wanted to keep by me——” she lamented.

The minister listened without sympathy, quite neutral.

“And the lad as would have been a support to my old age! What is going
to become of us?” she said.

The clergyman, justly, did not believe in the cry of poverty, but
wondered what had become of the son.

“Has anything happened to Alfred?” he asked.

“We’ve got word he’s gone for a Queen’s sailor,” she said sharply.

“He has joined the Navy!” exclaimed Mr Lindley. “I think he could
scarcely have done better—to serve his Queen and country on the
sea....”

“He is wanted to serve _me_,” she cried. “And I wanted my lad at home.”

Alfred was her baby, her last, whom she had allowed herself the luxury
of spoiling.

“You will miss him,” said Mr Lindley, “that is certain. But this is no
regrettable step for him to have taken—on the contrary.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Mr Lindley,” she replied tartly. “Do you
think I want my lad climbing ropes at another man’s bidding, like a
monkey——?”

“There is no _dishonour_, surely, in serving in the Navy?”

“Dishonour this dishonour that,” cried the angry old woman. “He goes
and makes a slave of himself, and he’ll rue it.”

Her angry, scornful impatience nettled the clergyman and silenced him
for some moments.

“I do not see,” he retorted at last, white at the gills and inadequate,
“that the Queen’s service is any more to be called slavery than working
in a mine.”

“At home he was at home, and his own master. _I_ know he’ll find a
difference.”

“It may be the making of him,” said the clergyman. “It will take him
away from bad companionship and drink.”

Some of the Durants’ sons were notorious drinkers, and Alfred was not
quite steady.

“And why indeed shouldn’t he have his glass?” cried the mother. “He
picks no man’s pocket to pay for it!”

The clergyman stiffened at what he thought was an allusion to his own
profession, and his unpaid bills.

“With all due consideration, I am glad to hear he has joined the Navy,”
he said.

“Me with my old age coming on, and his father working very little! I’d
thank you to be glad about something else besides that, Mr Lindley.”

The woman began to cry. Her husband, quite impassive, finished his
lunch of meat-pie, and drank some beer. Then he turned to the fire, as
if there were no one in the room but himself.

“I shall respect all men who serve God and their country on the sea,
Mrs Durant,” said the clergyman stubbornly.

“That is very well, when they’re not your sons who are doing the dirty
work. It makes a difference,” she replied tartly.

“I should be proud if one of my sons were to enter the Navy.”

“Ay—well—we’re not all of us made alike——”

The minister rose. He put down a large folded paper.

“I’ve brought the almanac,” he said.

Mrs Durant unfolded it.

“I do like a bit of colour in things,” she said, petulantly.

The clergyman did not reply.

“There’s that envelope for the organist’s fund——” said the old woman,
and rising, she took the thing from the mantelpiece, went into the
shop, and returned sealing it up.

“Which is all I can afford,” she said.

Mr Lindley took his departure, in his pocket the envelope containing
Mrs Durant’s offering for Miss Louisa’s services. He went from door to
door delivering the almanacs, in dull routine. Jaded with the monotony
of the business, and with the repeated effort of greeting half-known
people, he felt barren and rather irritable. At last he returned home.

In the dining-room was a small fire. Mrs Lindley, growing very stout,
lay on her couch. The vicar carved the cold mutton; Miss Louisa, short
and plump and rather flushed, came in from the kitchen; Miss Mary,
dark, with a beautiful white brow and grey eyes, served the vegetables;
the children chattered a little, but not exuberantly. The very air
seemed starved.

“I went to the Durants,” said the vicar, as he served out small
portions of mutton; “it appears Alfred has run away to join the Navy.”

“Do him good,” came the rough voice of the invalid.

Miss Louisa, attending to the youngest child, looked up in protest.

“Why has he done that?” asked Mary’s low, musical voice.

“He wanted some excitement, I suppose,” said the vicar. “Shall we say
grace?”

The children were arranged, all bent their heads, grace was pronounced,
at the last word every face was being raised to go on with the
interesting subject.

“He’s just done the right thing, for once,” came the rather deep voice
of the mother; “save him from becoming a drunken sot, like the rest of
them.”

“They’re not _all_ drunken, mama,” said Miss Louisa, stubbornly.

“It’s no fault of their upbringing if they’re not. Walter Durant is a
standing disgrace.”

“As I told Mrs Durant,” said the vicar, eating hungrily, “it is the
best thing he could have done. It will take him away from temptation
during the most dangerous years of his life—how old is he—nineteen?”

“Twenty,” said Miss Louisa.

“Twenty!” repeated the vicar. “It will give him wholesome discipline
and set before him some sort of standard of duty and honour—nothing
could have been better for him. But——”

“We shall miss him from the choir,” said Miss Louisa, as if taking
opposite sides to her parents.

“That is as it may be,” said the vicar. “I prefer to know he is safe in
the Navy, than running the risk of getting into bad ways here.”

“Was he getting into bad ways?” asked the stubborn Miss Louisa.

“You know, Louisa, he wasn’t quite what he used to be,” said Miss Mary
gently and steadily. Miss Louisa shut her rather heavy jaw sulkily. She
wanted to deny it, but she knew it was true.

For her he had been a laughing, warm lad, with something kindly and
something rich about him. He had made her feel warm. It seemed the days
would be colder since he had gone.

“Quite the best thing he could do,” said the mother with emphasis.

“I think so,” said the vicar. “But his mother was almost abusive
because I suggested it.”

He spoke in an injured tone.

“What does she care for her children’s welfare?” said the invalid.
“Their wages is all her concern.”

“I suppose she wanted him at home with her,” said Miss Louisa.

“Yes, she did—at the expense of his learning to be a drunkard like the
rest of them,” retorted her mother.

“George Durant doesn’t drink,” defended her daughter.

“Because he got burned so badly when he was nineteen—in the pit—and
that frightened him. The Navy is a better remedy than that, at least.”

“Certainly,” said the vicar. “Certainly.”

And to this Miss Louisa agreed. Yet she could not but feel angry that
he had gone away for so many years. She herself was only nineteen.

III

It happened when Miss Mary was twenty-three years old, that Mr Lindley
was very ill. The family was exceedingly poor at the time, such a lot
of money was needed, so little was forthcoming. Neither Miss Mary nor
Miss Louisa had suitors. What chance had they? They met no eligible
young men in Aldecross. And what they earned was a mere drop in a void.
The girls’ hearts were chilled and hardened with fear of this
perpetual, cold penury, this narrow struggle, this horrible nothingness
of their lives.

A clergyman had to be found for the church work. It so happened the son
of an old friend of Mr Lindley’s was waiting three months before taking
up his duties. He would come and officiate, for nothing. The young
clergyman was keenly expected. He was not more than twenty-seven, a
Master of Arts of Oxford, had written his thesis on Roman Law. He came
of an old Cambridgeshire family, had some private means, was going to
take a church in Northamptonshire with a good stipend, and was not
married. Mrs Lindley incurred new debts, and scarcely regretted her
husband’s illness.

But when Mr Massy came, there was a shock of disappointment in the
house. They had expected a young man with a pipe and a deep voice, but
with better manners than Sidney, the eldest of the Lindleys. There
arrived instead a small, chétif man, scarcely larger than a boy of
twelve, spectacled, timid in the extreme, without a word to utter at
first; yet with a certain inhuman self-sureness.

“What a little abortion!” was Mrs Lindley’s exclamation to herself on
first seeing him, in his buttoned-up clerical coat. And for the first
time for many days, she was profoundly thankful to God that all her
children were decent specimens.

He had not normal powers of perception. They soon saw that he lacked
the full range of human feelings, but had rather a strong,
philosophical mind, from which he lived. His body was almost
unthinkable, in intellect he was something definite. The conversation
at once took a balanced, abstract tone when he participated. There was
no spontaneous exclamation, no violent assertion or expression of
personal conviction, but all cold, reasonable assertion. This was very
hard on Mrs Lindley. The little man would look at her, after one of her
pronouncements, and then give, in his thin voice, his own calculated
version, so that she felt as if she were tumbling into thin air through
a hole in the flimsy floor on which their conversation stood. It was
she who felt a fool. Soon she was reduced to a hardy silence.

Still, at the back of her mind, she remembered that he was an
unattached gentleman, who would shortly have an income altogether of
six or seven hundred a year. What did the man matter, if there were
pecuniary ease! The man was a trifle thrown in. After twenty-two years
her sentimentality was ground away, and only the millstone of poverty
mattered to her. So she supported the little man as a representative of
a decent income.

His most irritating habit was that of a sneering little giggle, all on
his own, which came when he perceived or related some illogical
absurdity on the part of another person. It was the only form of humour
he had. Stupidity in thinking seemed to him exquisitely funny. But any
novel was unintelligibly meaningless and dull, and to an Irish sort of
humour he listened curiously, examining it like mathematics, or else
simply not hearing. In normal human relationship he was not there.
Quite unable to take part in simple everyday talk, he padded silently
round the house, or sat in the dining-room looking nervously from side
to side, always apart in a cold, rarefied little world of his own.
Sometimes he made an ironic remark, that did not seem humanly relevant,
or he gave his little laugh, like a sneer. He had to defend himself and
his own insufficiency. And he answered questions grudgingly, with a yes
or no, because he did not see their import and was nervous. It seemed
to Miss Louisa he scarcely distinguished one person from another, but
that he liked to be near her, or to Miss Mary, for some sort of contact
which stimulated him unknown.

Apart from all this, he was the most admirable workman. He was
unremittingly shy, but perfect in his sense of duty: as far as he could
conceive Christianity, he was a perfect Christian. Nothing that he
realized he could do for anyone did he leave undone, although he was so
incapable of coming into contact with another being, that he could not
proffer help. Now he attended assiduously to the sick man, investigated
all the affairs of the parish or the church which Mr Lindley had in
control, straightened out accounts, made lists of the sick and needy,
padded round with help and to see what he could do. He heard of Mrs
Lindley’s anxiety about her sons, and began to investigate means of
sending them to Cambridge. His kindness almost frightened Miss Mary.
She honoured it so, and yet she shrank from it. For, in it all Mr Massy
seemed to have no sense of any person, any human being whom he was
helping: he only realized a kind of mathematical working out, solving
of given situations, a calculated well-doing. And it was as if he had
accepted the Christian tenets as axioms. His religion consisted in what
his scrupulous, abstract mind approved of.

Seeing his acts, Miss Mary must respect and honour him. In consequence
she must serve him. To this she had to force herself, shuddering and
yet desirous, but he did not perceive it. She accompanied him on his
visiting in the parish, and whilst she was cold with admiration for
him, often she was touched with pity for the little padding figure with
bent shoulders, buttoned up to the chin in his overcoat. She was a
handsome, calm girl, tall, with a beautiful repose. Her clothes were
poor, and she wore a black silk scarf, having no furs. But she was a
lady. As the people saw her walking down Aldecross beside Mr Massy,
they said:

“My word, Miss Mary’s got a catch. Did ever you see such a sickly
little shrimp!”

She knew they were talking so, and it made her heart grow hot against
them, and she drew herself as it were protectively towards the little
man beside her. At any rate, she could see and give honour to his
genuine goodness.

He could not walk fast, or far.

“You have not been well?” she asked, in her dignified way.

“I have an internal trouble.”

He was not aware of her slight shudder. There was silence, whilst she
bowed to recover her composure, to resume her gentle manner towards
him.

He was fond of Miss Mary. She had made it a rule of hospitality that he
should always be escorted by herself or by her sister on his visits in
the parish, which were not many. But some mornings she was engaged.
Then Miss Louisa took her place. It was no good Miss Louisa’s trying to
adopt to Mr Massy an attitude of queenly service. She was unable to
regard him save with aversion. When she saw him from behind, thin and
bent-shouldered, looking like a sickly lad of thirteen, she disliked
him exceedingly, and felt a desire to put him out of existence. And yet
a deeper justice in Mary made Louisa humble before her sister.

They were going to see Mr Durant, who was paralysed and not expected to
live. Miss Louisa was crudely ashamed at being admitted to the cottage
in company with the little clergyman.

Mrs Durant was, however, much quieter in the face of her real trouble.

“How is Mr Durant?” asked Louisa.

“He is no different—and we don’t expect him to be,” was the reply. The
little clergyman stood looking on.

They went upstairs. The three stood for some time looking at the bed,
at the grey head of the old man on the pillow, the grey beard over the
sheet. Miss Louisa was shocked and afraid.

“It is so dreadful,” she said, with a shudder.

“It is how I always thought it would be,” replied Mrs Durant.

Then Miss Louisa was afraid of her. The two women were uneasy, waiting
for Mr Massy to say something. He stood, small and bent, too nervous to
speak.

“Has he any understanding?” he asked at length.

“Maybe,” said Mrs Durant. “Can you hear, John?” she asked loudly. The
dull blue eye of the inert man looked at her feebly.

“Yes, he understands,” said Mrs Durant to Mr Massy. Except for the dull
look in his eyes, the sick man lay as if dead. The three stood in
silence. Miss Louisa was obstinate but heavy-hearted under the load of
unlivingness. It was Mr Massy who kept her there in discipline. His
non-human will dominated them all.

Then they heard a sound below, a man’s footsteps, and a man’s voice
called subduedly:

“Are you upstairs, mother?”

Mrs Durant started and moved to the door. But already a quick, firm
step was running up the stairs.

“I’m a bit early, mother,” a troubled voice said, and on the landing
they saw the form of the sailor. His mother came and clung to him. She
was suddenly aware that she needed something to hold on to. He put his
arms round her, and bent over her, kissing her.

“He’s not gone, mother?” he asked anxiously, struggling to control his
voice.

Miss Louisa looked away from the mother and son who stood together in
the gloom on the landing. She could not bear it that she and Mr Massy
should be there. The latter stood nervously, as if ill at ease before
the emotion that was running. He was a witness, nervous, unwilling, but
dispassionate. To Miss Louisa’s hot heart it seemed all, all wrong that
they should be there.

Mrs Durant entered the bedroom, her face wet.

“There’s Miss Louisa and the vicar,” she said, out of voice and
quavering.

Her son, red-faced and slender, drew himself up to salute. But Miss
Louisa held out her hand. Then she saw his hazel eyes recognize her for
a moment, and his small white teeth showed in a glimpse of the greeting
she used to love. She was covered with confusion. He went round to the
bed; his boots clicked on the plaster floor, he bowed his head with
dignity.

“How are you, dad?” he said, laying his hand on the sheet, faltering.
But the old man stared fixedly and unseeing. The son stood perfectly
still for a few minutes, then slowly recoiled. Miss Louisa saw the fine
outline of his breast, under the sailor’s blue blouse, as his chest
began to heave.

“He doesn’t know me,” he said, turning to his mother. He gradually went
white.

“No, my boy!” cried the mother, pitiful, lifting her face. And suddenly
she put her face against his shoulder, he was stooping down to her,
holding her against him, and she cried aloud for a moment or two. Miss
Louisa saw his sides heaving, and heard the sharp hiss of his breath.
She turned away, tears streaming down her face. The father lay inert
upon the white bed, Mr Massy looked queer and obliterated, so little
now that the sailor with his sunburned skin was in the room. He stood
waiting. Miss Louisa wanted to die, she wanted to have done. She dared
not turn round again to look.

“Shall I offer a prayer?” came the frail voice of the clergyman, and
all kneeled down.

Miss Louisa was frightened of the inert man upon the bed. Then she felt
a flash of fear of Mr Massy, hearing his thin, detached voice. And
then, calmed, she looked up. On the far side of the bed were the heads
of the mother and son, the one in the black lace cap, with the small
white nape of the neck beneath, the other, with brown, sun-scorched
hair too close and wiry to allow of a parting, and neck tanned firm,
bowed as if unwillingly. The great grey beard of the old man did not
move, the prayer continued. Mr Massy prayed with a pure lucidity, that
they all might conform to the higher Will. He was like something that
dominated the bowed heads, something dispassionate that governed them
inexorably. Miss Louisa was afraid of him. And she was bound, during
the course of the prayer, to have a little reverence for him. It was
like a foretaste of inexorable, cold death, a taste of pure justice.

That evening she talked to Mary of the visit. Her heart, her veins were
possessed by the thought of Alfred Durant as he held his mother in his
arms; then the break in his voice, as she remembered it again and
again, was like a flame through her; and she wanted to see his face
more distinctly in her mind, ruddy with the sun, and his golden-brown
eyes, kind and careless, strained now with a natural fear, the fine
nose tanned hard by the sun, the mouth that could not help smiling at
her. And it went through her with pride, to think of his figure, a
straight, fine jet of life.

“He is a handsome lad,” said she to Miss Mary, as if he had not been a
year older than herself. Underneath was the deeper dread, almost
hatred, of the inhuman being of Mr Massy. She felt she must protect
herself and Alfred from him.

“When I felt Mr Massy there,” she said, “I almost hated him. What right
had he to be there!”

“Surely he had all right,” said Miss Mary after a pause. “He is
_really_ a Christian.”

“He seems to me nearly an imbecile,” said Miss Louisa.

Miss Mary, quiet and beautiful, was silent for a moment:

“Oh, no,” she said. “Not _imbecile_——”

“Well then—he reminds me of a six months’ child—or a five months’
child—as if he didn’t have time to get developed enough before he was
born.”

“Yes,” said Miss Mary, slowly. “There is something lacking. But there
is something wonderful in him: and he is really _good_——”

“Yes,” said Miss Louisa, “it doesn’t seem right that he should be. What
right has _that_ to be called goodness!”

“But it _is_ goodness,” persisted Mary. Then she added, with a laugh:
“And come, you wouldn’t deny that as well.”

There was a doggedness in her voice. She went about very quietly. In
her soul, she knew what was going to happen. She knew that Mr Massy was
stronger than she, and that she must submit to what he was. Her
physical self was prouder, stronger than he, her physical self disliked
and despised him. But she was in the grip of his moral, mental being.
And she felt the days allotted out to her. And her family watched.

IV

A few days after, old Mr Durant died. Miss Louisa saw Alfred once more,
but he was stiff before her now, treating her not like a person, but as
if she were some sort of will in command and he a separate, distinct
will waiting in front of her. She had never felt such utter steel-plate
separation from anyone. It puzzled her and frightened her. What had
become of him? And she hated the military discipline—she was
antagonistic to it. Now he was not himself. He was the will which obeys
set over against the will which commands. She hesitated over accepting
this. He had put himself out of her range. He had ranked himself
inferior, subordinate to her. And that was how he would get away from
her, that was how he would avoid all connection with her: by fronting
her impersonally from the opposite camp, by taking up the abstract
position of an inferior.

She went brooding steadily and sullenly over this, brooding and
brooding. Her fierce, obstinate heart could not give way. It clung to
its own rights. Sometimes she dismissed him. Why should he, inferior,
trouble her?

Then she relapsed to him, and almost hated him. It was his way of
getting out of it. She felt the cowardice of it, his calmly placing her
in a superior class, and placing himself inaccessibly apart, in an
inferior, as if she, the sensient woman who was fond of him, did not
count. But she was not going to submit. Dogged in her heart she held on
to him.

V

In six months’ time Miss Mary had married Mr Massy. There had been no
love-making, nobody had made any remark. But everybody was tense and
callous with expectation. When one day Mr Massy asked for Mary’s hand,
Mr Lindley started and trembled from the thin, abstract voice of the
little man. Mr Massy was very nervous, but so curiously absolute.

“I shall be very glad,” said the vicar, “but of course the decision
lies with Mary herself.” And his still feeble hand shook as he moved a
Bible on his desk.

The small man, keeping fixedly to his idea, padded out of the room to
find Miss Mary. He sat a long time by her, while she made some
conversation, before he had readiness to speak. She was afraid of what
was coming, and sat stiff in apprehension. She felt as if her body
would rise and fling him aside. But her spirit quivered and waited.
Almost in expectation she waited, almost wanting him. And then she knew
he would speak.

“I have already asked Mr Lindley,” said the clergyman, while suddenly
she looked with aversion at his little knees, “if he would consent to
my proposal.” He was aware of his own disadvantage, but his will was
set.

She went cold as she sat, and impervious, almost as if she had become
stone. He waited a moment nervously. He would not persuade her. He
himself never even heard persuasion, but pursued his own course. He
looked at her, sure of himself, unsure of her, and said:

“Will you become my wife, Mary?”

Still her heart was hard and cold. She sat proudly.

“I should like to speak to mama first,” she said.

“Very well,” replied Mr Massy. And in a moment he padded away.

Mary went to her mother. She was cold and reserved.

“Mr Massy has asked me to marry him, mama,” she said. Mrs Lindley went
on staring at her book. She was cramped in her feeling.

“Well, and what did you say?”

They were both keeping calm and cold.

“I said I would speak to you before answering him.”

This was equivalent to a question. Mrs Lindley did not want to reply to
it. She shifted her heavy form irritably on the couch. Miss Mary sat
calm and straight, with closed mouth.

“Your father thinks it would not be a bad match,” said the mother, as
if casually.

Nothing more was said. Everybody remained cold and shut-off. Miss Mary
did not speak to Miss Louisa, the Reverend Ernest Lindley kept out of
sight.

At evening Miss Mary accepted Mr Massy.

“Yes, I will marry you,” she said, with even a little movement of
tenderness towards him. He was embarrassed, but satisfied. She could
see him making some movement towards her, could feel the male in him,
something cold and triumphant, asserting itself. She sat rigid, and
waited.

When Miss Louisa knew, she was silent with bitter anger against
everybody, even against Mary. She felt her faith wounded. Did the real
things to her not matter after all? She wanted to get away. She thought
of Mr Massy. He had some curious power, some unanswerable right. He was
a will that they could not controvert.—Suddenly a flush started in her.
If he had come to her she would have flipped him out of the room. He
was never going to touch _her_. And she was glad. She was glad that her
blood would rise and exterminate the little man, if he came too near to
her, no matter how her judgment was paralysed by him, no matter how he
moved in abstract goodness. She thought she was perverse to be glad,
but glad she was. “I would just flip him out of the room,” she said,
and she derived great satisfaction from the open statement.
Nevertheless, perhaps she ought still to feel that Mary, on her plane,
was a higher being than herself. But then Mary was Mary, and she was
Louisa, and that also was inalterable.

Mary, in marrying him, tried to become a pure reason such as he was,
without feeling or impulse. She shut herself up, she shut herself rigid
against the agonies of shame and the terror of violation which came at
first. She _would_ not feel, and she _would_ not feel. She was a pure
will acquiescing to him. She elected a certain kind of fate. She would
be good and purely just, she would live in a higher freedom than she
had ever known, she would be free of mundane care, she was a pure will
towards right. She had sold herself, but she had a new freedom. She had
got rid of her body. She had sold a lower thing, her body, for a higher
thing, her freedom from material things. She considered that she paid
for all she got from her husband. So, in a kind of independence, she
moved proud and free. She had paid with her body: that was henceforward
out of consideration. She was glad to be rid of it. She had bought her
position in the world—that henceforth was taken for granted. There
remained only the direction of her activity towards charity and
high-minded living.

She could scarcely bear other people to be present with her and her
husband. Her private life was her shame. But then, she could keep it
hidden. She lived almost isolated in the rectory of the tiny village
miles from the railway. She suffered as if it were an insult to her own
flesh, seeing the repulsion which some people felt for her husband, or
the special manner they had of treating him, as if he were a “case”.
But most people were uneasy before him, which restored her pride.

If she had let herself, she would have hated him, hated his padding
round the house, his thin voice devoid of human understanding, his bent
little shoulders and rather incomplete face that reminded her of an
abortion. But rigorously she kept to her position. She took care of him
and was just to him. There was also a deep craven fear of him,
something slave-like.

There was not much fault to be found with his behaviour. He was
scrupulously just and kind according to his lights. But the male in him
was cold and self-complete, and utterly domineering. Weak, insufficient
little thing as he was, she had not expected this of him. It was
something in the bargain she had not understood. It made her hold her
head, to keep still. She knew, vaguely, that she was murdering herself.
After all, her body was not quite so easy to get rid of. And this
manner of disposing of it—ah, sometimes she felt she must rise and
bring about death, lift her hand for utter denial of everything, by a
general destruction.

He was almost unaware of the conditions about him. He did not fuss in
the domestic way, she did as she liked in the house. Indeed, she was a
great deal free of him. He would sit obliterated for hours. He was
kind, and almost anxiously considerate. But when he considered he was
right, his will was just blindly male, like a cold machine. And on most
points he was logically right, or he had with him the right of the
creed they both accepted. It was so. There was nothing for her to go
against.

Then she found herself with child, and felt for the first time horror,
afraid before God and man. This also she had to go through—it was the
right. When the child arrived, it was a bonny, healthy lad. Her heart
hurt in her body, as she took the baby between her hands. The flesh
that was trampled and silent in her must speak again in the boy. After
all, she had to live—it was not so simple after all. Nothing was
finished completely. She looked and looked at the baby, and almost
hated it, and suffered an anguish of love for it. She hated it because
it made her live again in the flesh, when she _could_ not live in the
flesh, she could not. She wanted to trample her flesh down, down,
extinct, to live in the mind. And now there was this child. It was too
cruel, too racking. For she must love the child. Her purpose was broken
in two again. She had to become amorphous, purposeless, without real
being. As a mother, she was a fragmentary, ignoble thing.

Mr Massy, blind to everything else in the way of human feeling, became
obsessed by the idea of his child. When it arrived, suddenly it filled
the whole world of feeling for him. It was his obsession, his terror
was for its safety and well-being. It was something new, as if he
himself had been born a naked infant, conscious of his own exposure,
and full of apprehension. He who had never been aware of anyone else,
all his life, now was aware of nothing but the child. Not that he ever
played with it, or kissed it, or tended it. He did nothing for it. But
it dominated him, it filled, and at the same time emptied his mind. The
world was all baby for him.

This his wife must also bear, his question: “What is the reason that he
cries?”—his reminder, at the first sound: “Mary, that is the
child,”—his restlessness if the feeding-time were five minutes past.
She had bargained for this—now she must stand by her bargain.

VI

Miss Louisa, at home in the dingy vicarage, had suffered a great deal
over her sister’s wedding. Having once begun to cry out against it,
during the engagement, she had been silenced by Mary’s quiet: “I don’t
agree with you about him, Louisa, I _want_ to marry him.” Then Miss
Louisa had been angry deep in her heart, and therefore silent. This
dangerous state started the change in her. Her own revulsion made her
recoil from the hitherto undoubted Mary.

“I’d beg the streets barefoot first,” said Miss Louisa, thinking of Mr
Massy.

But evidently Mary could perform a different heroism. So she, Louisa
the practical, suddenly felt that Mary, her ideal, was questionable
after all. How could she be pure—one cannot be dirty in act and
spiritual in being. Louisa distrusted Mary’s high spirituality. It was
no longer genuine for her. And if Mary were spiritual and misguided,
why did not her father protect her? Because of the money. He disliked
the whole affair, but he backed away, because of the money. And the
mother frankly did not care: her daughters could do as they liked. Her
mother’s pronouncement:

“Whatever happens to _him_, Mary is safe for life,”—so evidently and
shallowly a calculation, incensed Louisa.

“I’d rather be safe in the workhouse,” she cried.

“Your father will see to that,” replied her mother brutally. This
speech, in its indirectness, so injured Miss Louisa that she hated her
mother deep, deep in her heart, and almost hated herself. It was a long
time resolving itself out, this hate. But it worked and worked, and at
last the young woman said:

“They are wrong—they are all wrong. They have ground out their souls
for what isn’t worth anything, and there isn’t a grain of love in them
anywhere. And I _will_ have love. They want us to deny it. They’ve
never found it, so they want to say it doesn’t exist. But I _will_ have
it. I _will_ love—it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry—that
is all I care about.”

So Miss Louisa stood isolated from everybody. She and Mary had parted
over Mr Massy. In Louisa’s eyes, Mary was degraded, married to Mr
Massy. She could not bear to think of her lofty, spiritual sister
degraded in the body like this. Mary was wrong, wrong, wrong: she was
not superior, she was flawed, incomplete. The two sisters stood apart.
They still loved each other, they would love each other as long as they
lived. But they had parted ways. A new solitariness came over the
obstinate Louisa, and her heavy jaw set stubbornly. She was going on
her own way. But which way? She was quite alone, with a blank world
before her. How could she be said to have any way? Yet she had her
fixed will to love, to have the man she loved.

VII

When her boy was three years old, Mary had another baby, a girl. The
three years had gone by monotonously. They might have been an eternity,
they might have been brief as a sleep. She did not know. Only, there
was always a weight on top of her, something that pressed down her
life. The only thing that had happened was that Mr Massy had had an
operation. He was always exceedingly fragile. His wife had soon learned
to attend to him mechanically, as part of her duty.

But this third year, after the baby girl had been born, Mary felt
oppressed and depressed. Christmas drew near: the gloomy, unleavened
Christmas of the rectory, where all the days were of the same dark
fabric. And Mary was afraid. It was as if the darkness were coming upon
her.

“Edward, I should like to go home for Christmas,” she said, and a
certain terror filled her as she spoke.

“But you can’t leave baby,” said her husband, blinking.

“We can all go.”

He thought, and stared in his collective fashion.

“Why do you wish to go?” he asked.

“Because I need a change. A change would do me good, and it would be
good for the milk.”

He heard the will in his wife’s voice, and was at a loss. Her language
was unintelligible to him. And while she was breeding, either about to
have a child, or nursing, he regarded her as a special sort of being.

“Wouldn’t it hurt baby to take her by the train?” he said.

“No,” replied the mother, “why should it?”

They went. When they were in the train, it began to snow. From the
window of his first-class carriage the little clergyman watched the big
flakes sweep by, like a blind drawn across the country. He was obsessed
by thought of the baby, and afraid of the draughts of the carriage.

“Sit right in the corner,” he said to his wife, “and hold baby close
back.”

She moved at his bidding, and stared out of the window. His eternal
presence was like an iron weight on her brain. But she was going
partially to escape for a few days.

“Sit on the other side, Jack,” said the father. “It is less draughty.
Come to this window.”

He watched the boy in anxiety. But his children were the only beings in
the world who took not the slightest notice of him.

“Look, mother, look!” cried the boy. “They fly right in my face”—he
meant the snowflakes.

“Come into this corner,” repeated his father, out of another world.

“He’s jumped on this one’s back, mother, an’ they’re riding to the
bottom!” cried the boy, jumping with glee.

“Tell him to come on this side,” the little man bade his wife.

“Jack, kneel on this cushion,” said the mother, putting her white hand
on the place.

The boy slid over in silence to the place she indicated, waited still
for a moment, then almost deliberately, stridently cried:

“Look at all those in the corner, mother, making a heap,” and he
pointed to the cluster of snowflakes with finger pressed dramatically
on the pane, and he turned to his mother a bit ostentatiously.

“All in a heap!” she said.

He had seen her face, and had her response, and he was somewhat
assured. Vaguely uneasy, he was reassured if he could win her
attention.

They arrived at the vicarage at half-past two, not having had lunch.

“How are you, Edward?” said Mr Lindley, trying on his side to be
fatherly. But he was always in a false position with his son-in-law,
frustrated before him, therefore, as much as possible, he shut his eyes
and ears to him. The vicar was looking thin and pale and ill-nourished.
He had gone quite grey. He was, however, still haughty; but, since the
growing-up of his children, it was a brittle haughtiness, that might
break at any moment and leave the vicar only an impoverished, pitiable
figure. Mrs Lindley took all the notice of her daughter, and of the
children. She ignored her son-in-law. Miss Louisa was clucking and
laughing and rejoicing over the baby. Mr Massy stood aside, a bent,
persistent little figure.

“Oh a pretty!—a little pretty! oh a cold little pretty come in a
railway-train!” Miss Louisa was cooing to the infant, crouching on the
hearthrug opening the white woollen wraps and exposing the child to the
fireglow.

“Mary,” said the little clergyman, “I think it would be better to give
baby a warm bath; she may take a cold.”

“I think it is not necessary,” said the mother, coming and closing her
hand judiciously over the rosy feet and hands of the mite. “She is not
chilly.”

“Not a bit,” cried Miss Louisa. “She’s not caught cold.”

“I’ll go and bring her flannels,” said Mr Massy, with one idea.

“I can bath her in the kitchen then,” said Mary, in an altered, cold
tone.

“You can’t, the girl is scrubbing there,” said Miss Louisa. “Besides,
she doesn’t want a bath at this time of day.”

“She’d better have one,” said Mary, quietly, out of submission. Miss
Louisa’s gorge rose, and she was silent. When the little man padded
down with the flannels on his arm, Mrs Lindley asked:

“Hadn’t _you_ better take a hot bath, Edward?”

But the sarcasm was lost on the little clergyman. He was absorbed in
the preparations round the baby.

The room was dull and threadbare, and the snow outside seemed
fairy-like by comparison, so white on the lawn and tufted on the
bushes. Indoors the heavy pictures hung obscurely on the walls,
everything was dingy with gloom.

Except in the fireglow, where they had laid the bath on the hearth. Mrs
Massy, her black hair always smoothly coiled and queenly, kneeled by
the bath, wearing a rubber apron, and holding the kicking child. Her
husband stood holding the towels and the flannels to warm. Louisa, too
cross to share in the joy of the baby’s bath, was laying the table. The
boy was hanging on the door-knob, wrestling with it to get out. His
father looked round.

“Come away from the door, Jack,” he said, ineffectually. Jack tugged
harder at the knob as if he did not hear. Mr Massy blinked at him.

“He must come away from the door, Mary,” he said. “There will be a
draught if it is opened.”

“Jack, come away from the door, dear,” said the mother, dexterously
turning the shiny wet baby on to her towelled knee, then glancing
round: “Go and tell Auntie Louisa about the train.”

Louisa, also afraid to open the door, was watching the scene on the
hearth. Mr Massy stood holding the baby’s flannel, as if assisting at
some ceremonial. If everybody had not been subduedly angry, it would
have been ridiculous.

“I want to see out of the window,” Jack said. His father turned
hastily.

“Do _you_ mind lifting him on to a chair, Louisa,” said Mary hastily.
The father was too delicate.

When the baby was flannelled, Mr Massy went upstairs and returned with
four pillows, which he set in the fender to warm. Then he stood
watching the mother feed her child, obsessed by the idea of his infant.

Louisa went on with her preparations for the meal. She could not have
told why she was so sullenly angry. Mrs Lindley, as usual, lay silently
watching.

Mary carried her child upstairs, followed by her husband with the
pillows. After a while he came down again.

“What is Mary doing? Why doesn’t she come down to eat?” asked Mrs
Lindley.

“She is staying with baby. The room is rather cold. I will ask the girl
to put in a fire.” He was going absorbedly to the door.

“But Mary has had nothing to eat. It is _she_ who will catch cold,”
said the mother, exasperated.

Mr Massy seemed as if he did not hear. Yet he looked at his
mother-in-law, and answered:

“I will take her something.”

He went out. Mrs Lindley shifted on her couch with anger. Miss Louisa
glowered. But no one said anything, because of the money that came to
the vicarage from Mr Massy.

Louisa went upstairs. Her sister was sitting by the bed, reading a
scrap of paper.

“Won’t you come down and eat?” the younger asked.

“In a moment or two,” Mary replied, in a quiet, reserved voice, that
forbade anyone to approach her.

It was this that made Miss Louisa most furious. She went downstairs,
and announced to her mother:

“I am going out. I may not be home to tea.”

VIII

No one remarked on her exit. She put on her fur hat, that the village
people knew so well, and the old Norfolk jacket. Louisa was short and
plump and plain. She had her mother’s heavy jaw, her father’s proud
brow, and her own grey, brooding eyes that were very beautiful when she
smiled. It was true, as the people said, that she looked sulky. Her
chief attraction was her glistening, heavy, deep-blond hair, which
shone and gleamed with a richness that was not entirely foreign to her.

“Where am I going?” she said to herself, when she got outside in the
snow. She did not hesitate, however, but by mechanical walking found
herself descending the hill towards Old Aldecross. In the valley that
was black with trees, the colliery breathed in stertorous pants,
sending out high conical columns of steam that remained upright, whiter
than the snow on the hills, yet shadowy, in the dead air. Louisa would
not acknowledge to herself whither she was making her way, till she
came to the railway crossing. Then the bunches of snow in the twigs of
the apple tree that leaned towards the fence told her she must go and
see Mrs Durant. The tree was in Mrs Durant’s garden.

Alfred was now at home again, living with his mother in the cottage
below the road. From the highway hedge, by the railway crossing, the
snowy garden sheered down steeply, like the side of a hole, then
dropped straight in a wall. In this depth the house was snug, its
chimney just level with the road. Miss Louisa descended the stone
stairs, and stood below in the little backyard, in the dimness and the
semi-secrecy. A big tree leaned overhead, above the paraffin hut.
Louisa felt secure from all the world down there. She knocked at the
open door, then looked round. The tongue of garden narrowing in from
the quarry bed was white with snow: she thought of the thick fringes of
snowdrops it would show beneath the currant bushes in a month’s time.
The ragged fringe of pinks hanging over the garden brim behind her was
whitened now with snow-flakes, that in summer held white blossom to
Louisa’s face. It was pleasant, she thought, to gather flowers that
stooped to one’s face from above.

She knocked again. Peeping in, she saw the scarlet glow of the kitchen,
red firelight falling on the brick floor and on the bright chintz
cushions. It was alive and bright as a peep-show. She crossed the
scullery, where still an almanac hung. There was no one about. “Mrs
Durant,” called Louisa softly, “Mrs Durant.”

She went up the brick step into the front room, that still had its
little shop counter and its bundles of goods, and she called from the
stair-foot. Then she knew Mrs Durant was out.

She went into the yard to follow the old woman’s footsteps up the
garden path.

She emerged from the bushes and raspberry canes. There was the whole
quarry bed, a wide garden white and dimmed, brindled with dark bushes,
lying half submerged. On the left, overhead, the little colliery train
rumbled by. Right away at the back was a mass of trees.

Louisa followed the open path, looking from right to left, and then she
gave a cry of concern. The old woman was sitting rocking slightly among
the ragged snowy cabbages. Louisa ran to her, found her whimpering with
little, involuntary cries.

“Whatever have you done?” cried Louisa, kneeling in the snow.

“I’ve—I’ve—I was pulling a brussel-sprout stalk—and—oh-h!—something
tore inside me. I’ve had a pain,” the old woman wept from shock and
suffering, gasping between her whimpers—“I’ve had a pain there—a long
time—and now—oh—oh!” She panted, pressed her hand on her side, leaned
as if she would faint, looking yellow against the snow. Louisa
supported her.

“Do you think you could walk now?” she asked.

“Yes,” gasped the old woman.

Louisa helped her to her feet.

“Get the cabbage—I want it for Alfred’s dinner,” panted Mrs Durant.
Louisa picked up the stalk of brussel-sprouts, and with difficulty got
the old woman indoors. She gave her brandy, laid her on the couch,
saying:

“I’m going to send for a doctor—wait just a minute.”

The young woman ran up the steps to the public-house a few yards away.
The landlady was astonished to see Miss Louisa.

“Will you send for a doctor at once to Mrs Durant,” she said, with some
of her father in her commanding tone.

“Is something the matter?” fluttered the landlady in concern.

Louisa, glancing out up the road, saw the grocer’s cart driving to
Eastwood. She ran and stopped the man, and told him.

Mrs Durant lay on the sofa, her face turned away, when the young woman
came back.

“Let me put you to bed,” Louisa said. Mrs Durant did not resist.

Louisa knew the ways of the working people. In the bottom drawer of the
dresser she found dusters and flannels. With the old pit-flannel she
snatched out the oven shelves, wrapped them up, and put them in the
bed. From the son’s bed she took a blanket, and, running down, set it
before the fire. Having undressed the little old woman, Louisa carried
her upstairs.

“You’ll drop me, you’ll drop me!” cried Mrs Durant.

Louisa did not answer, but bore her burden quickly. She could not light
a fire, because there was no fire-place in the bedroom. And the floor
was plaster. So she fetched the lamp, and stood it lighted in one
corner.

“It will air the room,” she said.

“Yes,” moaned the old woman.

Louisa ran with more hot flannels, replacing those from the oven
shelves. Then she made a bran-bag and laid it on the woman’s side.
There was a big lump on the side of the abdomen.

“I’ve felt it coming a long time,” moaned the old lady, when the pain
was easier, “but I’ve not said anything; I didn’t want to upset our
Alfred.”

Louisa did not see why “our Alfred” should be spared.

“What time is it?” came the plaintive voice.

“A quarter to four.”

“Oh!” wailed the old lady, “he’ll be here in half an hour, and no
dinner ready for him.”

“Let me do it?” said Louisa, gently.

“There’s that cabbage—and you’ll find the meat in the pantry—and
there’s an apple pie you can hot up. But _don’t you_ do it——!”

“Who will, then?” asked Louisa.

“I don’t know,” moaned the sick woman, unable to consider.

Louisa did it. The doctor came and gave serious examination. He looked
very grave.

“What is it, doctor?” asked the old lady, looking up at him with old,
pathetic eyes in which already hope was dead.

“I think you’ve torn the skin in which a tumour hangs,” he replied.

“Ay!” she murmured, and she turned away.

“You see, she may die any minute—and it _may_ be swaled away,” said the
old doctor to Louisa.

The young woman went upstairs again.

“He says the lump may be swaled away, and you may get quite well
again,” she said.

“Ay!” murmured the old lady. It did not deceive her. Presently she
asked:

“Is there a good fire?”

“I think so,” answered Louisa.

“He’ll want a good fire,” the mother said. Louisa attended to it.

Since the death of Durant, the widow had come to church occasionally,
and Louisa had been friendly to her. In the girl’s heart the purpose
was fixed. No man had affected her as Alfred Durant had done, and to
that she kept. In her heart, she adhered to him. A natural sympathy
existed between her and his rather hard, materialistic mother.

Alfred was the most lovable of the old woman’s sons. He had grown up
like the rest, however, headstrong and blind to everything but his own
will. Like the other boys, he had insisted on going into the pit as
soon as he left school, because that was the only way speedily to
become a man, level with all the other men. This was a great chagrin to
his mother, who would have liked to have this last of her sons a
gentleman.

But still he remained constant to her. His feeling for her was deep and
unexpressed. He noticed when she was tired, or when she had a new cap.
And he bought little things for her occasionally. She was not wise
enough to see how much he lived by her.

At the bottom he did not satisfy her, he did not seem manly enough. He
liked to read books occasionally, and better still he liked to play the
piccolo. It amused her to see his head nod over the instrument as he
made an effort to get the right note. It made her fond of him, with
tenderness, almost pity, but not with respect. She wanted a man to be
fixed, going his own way without knowledge of women. Whereas she knew
Alfred depended on her. He sang in the choir because he liked singing.
In the summer he worked in the garden, attended to the fowls and pigs.
He kept pigeons. He played on Saturday in the cricket or football team.
But to her he did not seem the man, the independent man her other boys
had been. He was her baby—and whilst she loved him for it, she was a
little bit contemptuous of him.

There grew up a little hostility between them. Then he began to drink,
as the others had done; but not in their blind, oblivious way. He was a
little self-conscious over it. She saw this, and she pitied it in him.
She loved him most, but she was not satisfied with him because he was
not free of her. He could not quite go his own way.

Then at twenty he ran away and served his time in the Navy. This made a
man of him. He had hated it bitterly, the service, the subordination.
For years he fought with himself under the military discipline, for his
own self-respect, struggling through blind anger and shame and a
cramping sense of inferiority. Out of humiliation and self-hatred, he
rose into a sort of inner freedom. And his love for his mother, whom he
idealised, remained the fact of hope and of belief.

He came home again, nearly thirty years old, but naïve and
inexperienced as a boy, only with a silence about him that was new: a
sort of dumb humility before life, a fear of living. He was almost
quite chaste. A strong sensitiveness had kept him from women. Sexual
talk was all very well among men, but somehow it had no application to
living women. There were two things for him, the _idea_ of women, with
which he sometimes debauched himself, and real women, before whom he
felt a deep uneasiness, and a need to draw away. He shrank and defended
himself from the approach of any woman. And then he felt ashamed. In
his innermost soul he felt he was not a man, he was less than the
normal man. In Genoa he went with an under officer to a drinking house
where the cheaper sort of girl came in to look for lovers. He sat there
with his glass, the girls looked at him, but they never came to him. He
knew that if they did come he could only pay for food and drink for
them, because he felt a pity for them, and was anxious lest they lacked
good necessities. He could not have gone with one of them: he knew it,
and was ashamed, looking with curious envy at the swaggering,
easy-passionate Italian whose body went to a woman by instinctive
impersonal attraction. They were men, he was not a man. He sat feeling
short, feeling like a leper. And he went away imagining sexual scenes
between himself and a woman, walking wrapt in this indulgence. But when
the ready woman presented herself, the very fact that she was a
palpable woman made it impossible for him to touch her. And this
incapacity was like a core of rottenness in him.

So several times he went, drunk, with his companions, to the licensed
prostitute houses abroad. But the sordid insignificance of the
experience appalled him. It had not been anything really: it meant
nothing. He felt as if he were, not physically, but spiritually
impotent: not actually impotent, but intrinsically so.

He came home with this secret, never changing burden of his unknown,
unbestowed self torturing him. His navy training left him in perfect
physical condition. He was sensible of, and proud of his body. He
bathed and used dumb-bells, and kept himself fit. He played cricket and
football. He read books and began to hold fixed ideas which he got from
the Fabians. He played his piccolo, and was considered an expert. But
at the bottom of his soul was always this canker of shame and
incompleteness: he was miserable beneath all his healthy cheerfulness,
he was uneasy and felt despicable among all his confidence and
superiority of ideas. He would have changed with any mere brute, just
to be free of himself, to be free of this shame of self-consciousness.
He saw some collier lurching straight forward without misgiving,
pursuing his own satisfactions, and he envied him. Anything, he would
have given anything for this spontaneity and this blind stupidity which
went to its own satisfaction direct.

IX

He was not unhappy in the pit. He was admired by the men, and well
enough liked. It was only he himself who felt the difference between
himself and the others. He seemed to hide his own stigma. But he was
never sure that the others did not really despise him for a ninny, as
being less a man than they were. Only he pretended to be more manly,
and was surprised by the ease with which they were deceived. And, being
naturally cheerful, he was happy at his work. He was sure of himself
there. Naked to the waist, hot and grimy with labour, they squatted on
their heels for a few minutes and talked, seeing each other dimly by
the light of the safety lamps, while the black coal rose jutting round
them, and the props of wood stood like little pillars in the low,
black, very dark temple. Then the pony came and the gang-lad with a
message from Number 7, or with a bottle of water from the horse-trough
or some news of the world above. The day passed pleasantly enough.
There was an ease, a go-as-you-please about the day underground, a
delightful camaraderie of men shut off alone from the rest of the
world, in a dangerous place, and a variety of labour, holing, loading,
timbering, and a glamour of mystery and adventure in the atmosphere,
that made the pit not unattractive to him when he had again got over
his anguish of desire for the open air and the sea.

This day there was much to do and Durant was not in humour to talk. He
went on working in silence through the afternoon.

“Loose-all” came, and they tramped to the bottom. The whitewashed
underground office shone brightly. Men were putting out their lamps.
They sat in dozens round the bottom of the shaft, down which black,
heavy drops of water fell continuously into the sump. The electric
lights shone away down the main underground road.

“Is it raining?” asked Durant.

“Snowing,” said an old man, and the younger was pleased. He liked to go
up when it was snowing.

“It’ll just come right for Christmas,” said the old man.

“Ay,” replied Durant.

“A green Christmas, a fat churchyard,” said the other sententiously.

Durant laughed, showing his small, rather pointed teeth.

The cage came down, a dozen men lined on. Durant noticed tufts of snow
on the perforated, arched roof of the chain, and he was pleased.

He wondered how it liked its excursion underground. But already it was
getting soppy with black water.

He liked things about him. There was a little smile on his face. But
underlying it was the curious consciousness he felt in himself.

The upper world came almost with a flash, because of the glimmer of
snow. Hurrying along the bank, giving up his lamp at the office, he
smiled to feel the open about him again, all glimmering round him with
snow. The hills on either side were pale blue in the dusk, and the
hedges looked savage and dark. The snow was trampled between the
railway lines. But far ahead, beyond the black figures of miners moving
home, it became smooth again, spreading right up to the dark wall of
the coppice.

To the west there was a pinkness, and a big star hovered half revealed.
Below, the lights of the pit came out crisp and yellow among the
darkness of the buildings, and the lights of Old Aldecross twinkled in
rows down the bluish twilight.

Durant walked glad with life among the miners, who were all talking
animatedly because of the snow. He liked their company, he liked the
white dusky world. It gave him a little thrill to stop at the garden
gate and see the light of home down below, shining on the silent blue
snow.

X

By the big gate of the railway, in the fence, was a little gate, that
he kept locked. As he unfastened it, he watched the kitchen light that
shone on to the bushes and the snow outside. It was a candle burning
till night set in, he thought to himself. He slid down the steep path
to the level below. He liked making the first marks in the smooth snow.
Then he came through the bushes to the house. The two women heard his
heavy boots ring outside on the scraper, and his voice as he opened the
door:

“How much worth of oil do you reckon to save by that candle, mother?”
He liked a good light from the lamp.

He had just put down his bottle and snap-bag and was hanging his coat
behind the scullery door, when Miss Louisa came upon him. He was
startled, but he smiled.

His eyes began to laugh—then his face went suddenly straight, and he
was afraid.

“Your mother’s had an accident,” she said.

“How?” he exclaimed.

“In the garden,” she answered. He hesitated with his coat in his hands.
Then he hung it up and turned to the kitchen.

“Is she in bed?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Miss Louisa, who found it hard to deceive him. He was
silent. He went into the kitchen, sat down heavily in his father’s old
chair, and began to pull off his boots. His head was small, rather
finely shapen. His brown hair, close and crisp, would look jolly
whatever happened. He wore heavy moleskin trousers that gave off the
stale, exhausted scent of the pit. Having put on his slippers, he
carried his boots into the scullery.

“What is it?” he asked, afraid.

“Something internal,” she replied.

He went upstairs. His mother kept herself calm for his coming. Louisa
felt his tread shake the plaster floor of the bedroom above.

“What have you done?” he asked.

“It’s nothing, my lad,” said the old woman, rather hard. “It’s nothing.
You needn’t fret, my boy, it’s nothing more the matter with me than I
had yesterday, or last week. The doctor said I’d done nothing serious.”

“What were you doing?” asked her son.

“I was pulling up a cabbage, and I suppose I pulled too hard; for,
oh—there was such a pain——”

Her son looked at her quickly. She hardened herself.

“But who doesn’t have a sudden pain sometimes, my boy. We all do.”

“And what’s it done?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t suppose it’s anything.”

The big lamp in the corner was screened with a dark green, so that he
could scarcely see her face. He was strung tight with apprehension and
many emotions. Then his brow knitted.

“What did you go pulling your inside out at cabbages for,” he asked,
“and the ground frozen? You’d go on dragging and dragging, if you
killed yourself.”

“Somebody’s got to get them,” she said.

“You needn’t do yourself harm.”

But they had reached futility.

Miss Louisa could hear plainly downstairs. Her heart sank. It seemed so
hopeless between them.

“Are you sure it’s nothing much, mother?” he asked, appealing, after a
little silence.

“Ay, it’s nothing,” said the old woman, rather bitter.

“I don’t want you to—to—to be badly—you know.”

“Go an’ get your dinner,” she said. She knew she was going to die:
moreover, the pain was torture just then. “They’re only cosseting me up
a bit because I’m an old woman. Miss Louisa’s _very_ good—and she’ll
have got your dinner ready, so you’d better go and eat it.”

He felt stupid and ashamed. His mother put him off. He had to turn
away. The pain burned in his bowels. He went downstairs. The mother was
glad he was gone, so that she could moan with pain.

He had resumed the old habit of eating before he washed himself. Miss
Louisa served his dinner. It was strange and exciting to her. She was
strung up tense, trying to understand him and his mother. She watched
him as he sat. He was turned away from his food, looking in the fire.
Her soul watched him, trying to see what he was. His black face and
arms were uncouth, he was foreign. His face was masked black with
coal-dust. She could not see him, she could not even know him. The
brown eyebrows, the steady eyes, the coarse, small moustache above the
closed mouth—these were the only familiar indications. What was he, as
he sat there in his pit-dirt? She could not see him, and it hurt her.

She ran upstairs, presently coming down with the flannels and the
bran-bag, to heat them, because the pain was on again.

He was half-way through his dinner. He put down the fork, suddenly
nauseated.

“They will soothe the wrench,” she said. He watched, useless and left
out.

“Is she bad?” he asked.

“I think she is,” she answered.

It was useless for him to stir or comment. Louisa was busy. She went
upstairs. The poor old woman was in a white, cold sweat of pain.
Louisa’s face was sullen with suffering as she went about to relieve
her. Then she sat and waited. The pain passed gradually, the old woman
sank into a state of coma. Louisa still sat silent by the bed. She
heard the sound of water downstairs. Then came the voice of the old
mother, faint but unrelaxing:

“Alfred’s washing himself—he’ll want his back washing——”

Louisa listened anxiously, wondering what the sick woman wanted.

“He can’t bear if his back isn’t washed——” the old woman persisted, in
a cruel attention to his needs. Louisa rose and wiped the sweat from
the yellowish brow.

“I will go down,” she said soothingly.

“If you would,” murmured the sick woman.

Louisa waited a moment. Mrs Durant closed her eyes, having discharged
her duty. The young woman went downstairs. Herself, or the man, what
did they matter? Only the suffering woman must be considered.

Alfred was kneeling on the hearthrug, stripped to the waist, washing
himself in a large panchion of earthenware. He did so every evening,
when he had eaten his dinner; his brothers had done so before him. But
Miss Louisa was strange in the house.

He was mechanically rubbing the white lather on his head, with a
repeated, unconscious movement, his hand every now and then passing
over his neck. Louisa watched. She had to brace herself to this also.
He bent his head into the water, washed it free of soap, and pressed
the water out of his eyes.

“Your mother said you would want your back washing,” she said.

Curious how it hurt her to take part in their fixed routine of life!
Louisa felt the almost repulsive intimacy being forced upon her. It was
all so common, so like herding. She lost her own distinctness.

He ducked his face round, looking up at her in what was a very comical
way. She had to harden herself.

“How funny he looks with his face upside down,” she thought. After all,
there was a difference between her and the common people. The water in
which his arms were plunged was quite black, the soap-froth was
darkish. She could scarcely conceive him as human. Mechanically, under
the influence of habit, he groped in the black water, fished out soap
and flannel, and handed them backward to Louisa. Then he remained rigid
and submissive, his two arms thrust straight in the panchion,
supporting the weight of his shoulders. His skin was beautifully white
and unblemished, of an opaque, solid whiteness. Gradually Louisa saw
it: this also was what he was. It fascinated her. Her feeling of
separateness passed away: she ceased to draw back from contact with him
and his mother. There was this living centre. Her heart ran hot. She
had reached some goal in this beautiful, clear, male body. She loved
him in a white, impersonal heat. But the sun-burnt, reddish neck and
ears: they were more personal, more curious. A tenderness rose in her,
she loved even his queer ears. A person—an intimate being he was to
her. She put down the towel and went upstairs again, troubled in her
heart. She had only seen one human being in her life—and that was Mary.
All the rest were strangers. Now her soul was going to open, she was
going to see another. She felt strange and pregnant.

“He’ll be more comfortable,” murmured the sick woman abstractedly, as
Louisa entered the room. The latter did not answer. Her own heart was
heavy with its own responsibility. Mrs Durant lay silent awhile, then
she murmured plaintively:

“You mustn’t mind, Miss Louisa.”

“Why should I?” replied Louisa, deeply moved.

“It’s what we’re used to,” said the old woman.

And Louisa felt herself excluded again from their life. She sat in
pain, with the tears of disappointment distilling her heart. Was that
all?

Alfred came upstairs. He was clean, and in his shirt-sleeves. He looked
a workman now. Louisa felt that she and he were foreigners, moving in
different lives. It dulled her again. Oh, if she could only find some
fixed relations, something sure and abiding.

“How do you feel?” he said to his mother.

“It’s a bit better,” she replied wearily, impersonally. This strange
putting herself aside, this abstracting herself and answering him only
what she thought good for him to hear, made the relations between
mother and son poignant and cramping to Miss Louisa. It made the man so
ineffectual, so nothing. Louisa groped as if she had lost him. The
mother was real and positive—he was not very actual. It puzzled and
chilled the young woman.

“I’d better fetch Mrs Harrison?” he said, waiting for his mother to
decide.

“I suppose we shall have to have somebody,” she replied.

Miss Louisa stood by, afraid to interfere in their business. They did
not include her in their lives, they felt she had nothing to do with
them, except as a help from outside. She was quite external to them.
She felt hurt and powerless against this unconscious difference. But
something patient and unyielding in her made her say:

“I will stay and do the nursing: you can’t be left.”

The other two were shy, and at a loss for an answer.

“Wes’ll manage to get somebody,” said the old woman wearily. She did
not care very much what happened, now.

“I will stay until tomorrow, in any case,” said Louisa. “Then we can
see.”

“I’m sure you’ve no right to trouble yourself,” moaned the old woman.
But she must leave herself in any hands.

Miss Louisa felt glad that she was admitted, even in an official
capacity. She wanted to share their lives. At home they would need her,
now Mary had come. But they must manage without her.

“I must write a note to the vicarage,” she said.

Alfred Durant looked at her inquiringly, for her service. He had always
that intelligent readiness to serve, since he had been in the Navy. But
there was a simple independence in his willingness, which she loved.
She felt nevertheless it was hard to get at him. He was so deferential,
quick to take the slightest suggestion of an order from her,
implicitly, that she could not get at the man in him.

He looked at her very keenly. She noticed his eyes were golden brown,
with a very small pupil, the kind of eyes that can see a long way off.
He stood alert, at military attention. His face was still rather
weather-reddened.

“Do you want pen and paper?” he asked, with deferential suggestion to a
superior, which was more difficult for her than reserve.

“Yes, please,” she said.

He turned and went downstairs. He seemed to her so self-contained, so
utterly sure in his movement. How was she to approach him? For he would
take not one step towards her. He would only put himself entirely and
impersonally at her service, glad to serve her, but keeping himself
quite removed from her. She could see he felt real joy in doing
anything for her, but any recognition would confuse him and hurt him.
Strange it was to her, to have a man going about the house in his
shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his throat bare, waiting on
her. He moved well, as if he had plenty of life to spare. She was
attracted by his completeness. And yet, when all was ready, and there
was nothing more for him to do, she quivered, meeting his questioning
look.

As she sat writing, he placed another candle near her. The rather dense
light fell in two places on the overfoldings of her hair till it
glistened heavy and bright, like a dense golden plumage folded up. Then
the nape of her neck was very white, with fine down and pointed wisps
of gold. He watched it as it were a vision, losing himself. She was all
that was beyond him, of revelation and exquisiteness. All that was
ideal and beyond him, she was that—and he was lost to himself in
looking at her. She had no connection with him. He did not approach
her. She was there like a wonderful distance. But it was a treat,
having her in the house. Even with this anguish for his mother
tightening about him, he was sensible of the wonder of living this
evening. The candles glistened on her hair, and seemed to fascinate
him. He felt a little awe of her, and a sense of uplifting, that he and
she and his mother should be together for a time, in the strange,
unknown atmosphere. And, when he got out of the house, he was afraid.
He saw the stars above ringing with fine brightness, the snow beneath
just visible, and a new night was gathering round him. He was afraid
almost with obliteration. What was this new night ringing about him,
and what was he? He could not recognize himself nor any of his
surroundings. He was afraid to think of his mother. And yet his chest
was conscious of her, and of what was happening to her. He could not
escape from her, she carried him with her into an unformed, unknown
chaos.

XI

He went up the road in an agony, not knowing what it was all about, but
feeling as if a red-hot iron were gripped round his chest. Without
thinking, he shook two or three tears on to the snow. Yet in his mind
he did not believe his mother would die. He was in the grip of some
greater consciousness. As he sat in the hall of the vicarage, waiting
whilst Mary put things for Louisa into a bag, he wondered why he had
been so upset. He felt abashed and humbled by the big house, he felt
again as if he were one of the rank and file. When Miss Mary spoke to
him, he almost saluted.

“An honest man,” thought Mary. And the patronage was applied as salve
to her own sickness. She had station, so she could patronize: it was
almost all that was left to her. But she could not have lived without
having a certain position. She could never have trusted herself outside
a definite place, nor respected herself except as a woman of superior
class.

As Alfred came to the latch-gate, he felt the grief at his heart again,
and saw the new heavens. He stood a moment looking northward to the
Plough climbing up the night, and at the far glimmer of snow in distant
fields. Then his grief came on like physical pain. He held tight to the
gate, biting his mouth, whispering “Mother!” It was a fierce, cutting,
physical pain of grief, that came on in bouts, as his mother’s pain
came on in bouts, and was so acute he could scarcely keep erect. He did
not know where it came from, the pain, nor why. It had nothing to do
with his thoughts. Almost it had nothing to do with him. Only it
gripped him and he must submit. The whole tide of his soul, gathering
in its unknown towards this expansion into death, carried him with it
helplessly, all the fritter of his thought and consciousness caught up
as nothing, the heave passing on towards its breaking, taking him
further than he had ever been. When the young man had regained himself,
he went indoors, and there he was almost gay. It seemed to excite him.
He felt in high spirits: he made whimsical fun of things. He sat on one
side of his mother’s bed, Louisa on the other, and a certain gaiety
seized them all. But the night and the dread was coming on.

Alfred kissed his mother and went to bed. When he was half undressed
the knowledge of his mother came upon him, and the suffering seized him
in its grip like two hands, in agony. He lay on the bed screwed up
tight. It lasted so long, and exhausted him so much, that he fell
asleep, without having the energy to get up and finish undressing. He
awoke after midnight to find himself stone cold. He undressed and got
into bed, and was soon asleep again.

At a quarter to six he woke, and instantly remembered. Having pulled on
his trousers and lighted a candle, he went into his mother’s room. He
put his hand before the candle flame so that no light fell on the bed.

“Mother!” he whispered.

“Yes,” was the reply.

There was a hesitation.

“Should I go to work?”

He waited, his heart was beating heavily.

“I think I’d go, my lad.”

His heart went down in a kind of despair.

“You want me to?”

He let his hand down from the candle flame. The light fell on the bed.
There he saw Louisa lying looking up at him. Her eyes were upon him.
She quickly shut her eyes and half buried her face in the pillow, her
back turned to him. He saw the rough hair like bright vapour about her
round head, and the two plaits flung coiled among the bedclothes. It
gave him a shock. He stood almost himself, determined. Louisa cowered
down. He looked, and met his mother’s eyes. Then he gave way again, and
ceased to be sure, ceased to be himself.

“Yes, go to work, my boy,” said the mother.

“All right,” replied he, kissing her. His heart was down at despair,
and bitter. He went away.

“Alfred!” cried his mother faintly.

He came back with beating heart.

“What, mother?”

“You’ll always do what’s right, Alfred?” the mother asked, beside
herself in terror now he was leaving her. He was too terrified and
bewildered to know what she meant.

“Yes,” he said.

She turned her cheek to him. He kissed her, then went away, in bitter
despair. He went to work.

XII

By midday his mother was dead. The word met him at the pit-mouth. As he
had known, inwardly, it was not a shock to him, and yet he trembled. He
went home quite calmly, feeling only heavy in his breathing.

Miss Louisa was still at the house. She had seen to everything
possible. Very succinctly, she informed him of what he needed to know.
But there was one point of anxiety for her.

“You _did_ half expect it—it’s not come as a blow to you?” she asked,
looking up at him. Her eyes were dark and calm and searching. She too
felt lost. He was so dark and inchoate.

“I suppose—yes,” he said stupidly. He looked aside, unable to endure
her eyes on him.

“I could not bear to think you might not have guessed,” she said.

He did not answer.

He felt it a great strain to have her near him at this time. He wanted
to be alone. As soon as the relatives began to arrive, Louisa departed
and came no more. While everything was arranging, and a crowd was in
the house, whilst he had business to settle, he went well enough, with
only those uncontrollable paroxysms of grief. For the rest, he was
superficial. By himself, he endured the fierce, almost insane bursts of
grief which passed again and left him calm, almost clear, just
wondering. He had not known before that everything could break down,
that he himself could break down, and all be a great chaos, very vast
and wonderful. It seemed as if life in him had burst its bounds, and he
was lost in a great, bewildering flood, immense and unpeopled. He
himself was broken and spilled out amid it all. He could only breathe
panting in silence. Then the anguish came on again.

When all the people had gone from the Quarry Cottage, leaving the young
man alone with an elderly housekeeper, then the long trial began. The
snow had thawed and frozen, a fresh fall had whitened the grey, this
then began to thaw. The world was a place of loose grey slosh. Alfred
had nothing to do in the evenings. He was a man whose life had been
filled up with small activities. Without knowing it, he had been
centralized, polarized in his mother. It was she who had kept him. Even
now, when the old housekeeper had left him, he might still have gone on
in his old way. But the force and balance of his life was lacking. He
sat pretending to read, all the time holding his fists clenched, and
holding himself in, enduring he did not know what. He walked the black
and sodden miles of field-paths, till he was tired out: but all this
was only running away from whence he must return. At work he was all
right. If it had been summer he might have escaped by working in the
garden till bedtime. But now, there was no escape, no relief, no help.
He, perhaps, was made for action rather than for understanding; for
doing than for being. He was shocked out of his activities, like a
swimmer who forgets to swim.

For a week, he had the force to endure this suffocation and struggle,
then he began to get exhausted, and knew it must come out. The instinct
of self-preservation became strongest. But there was the question:
Where was he to go? The public-house really meant nothing to him, it
was no good going there. He began to think of emigration. In another
country he would be all right. He wrote to the emigration offices.

On the Sunday after the funeral, when all the Durant people had
attended church, Alfred had seen Miss Louisa, impassive and reserved,
sitting with Miss Mary, who was proud and very distant, and with the
other Lindleys, who were people removed. Alfred saw them as people
remote. He did not think about it. They had nothing to do with his
life. After service Louisa had come to him and shaken hands.

“My sister would like you to come to supper one evening, if you would
be so good.”

He looked at Miss Mary, who bowed. Out of kindness, Mary had proposed
this to Louisa, disapproving of herself even as she did so. But she did
not examine herself closely.

“Yes,” said Durant awkwardly, “I’ll come if you want me.” But he
vaguely felt that it was misplaced.

“You’ll come tomorrow evening, then, about half-past six.”

He went. Miss Louisa was very kind to him. There could be no music,
because of the babies. He sat with his fists clenched on his thighs,
very quiet and unmoved, lapsing, among all those people, into a kind of
muse or daze. There was nothing between him and them. They knew it as
well as he. But he remained very steady in himself, and the evening
passed slowly. Mrs Lindley called him “young man”.

“Will you sit here, young man?”

He sat there. One name was as good as another. What had they to do with
him?

Mr Lindley kept a special tone for him, kind, indulgent, but
patronizing. Durant took it all without criticism or offence, just
submitting. But he did not want to eat—that troubled him, to have to
eat in their presence. He knew he was out of place. But it was his duty
to stay yet awhile. He answered precisely, in monosyllables.

When he left he winced with confusion. He was glad it was finished. He
got away as quickly as possible. And he wanted still more intensely to
go right away, to Canada.

Miss Louisa suffered in her soul, indignant with all of them, with him
too, but quite unable to say why she was indignant.

XIII

Two evenings after, Louisa tapped at the door of the Quarry Cottage, at
half-pas six. He had finished dinner, the woman had washed up and gone
away, but still he sat in his pit dirt. He was going later to the New
Inn. He had begun to go there because he must go somewhere. The mere
contact with other men was necessary to him, the noise, the warmth, the
forgetful flight of the hours. But still he did not move. He sat alone
in the empty house till it began to grow on him like something
unnatural.

He was in his pit dirt when he opened the door.

“I have been wanting to call—I thought I would,” she said, and she went
to the sofa. He wondered why she wouldn’t use his mother’s round
armchair. Yet something stirred in him, like anger, when the
housekeeper placed herself in it.

“I ought to have been washed by now,” he said, glancing at the clock,
which was adorned with butterflies and cherries, and the name of “T.
Brooks, Mansfield.” He laid his black hands along his mottled dirty
arms. Louisa looked at him. There was the reserve, and the simple
neutrality towards her, which she dreaded in him. It made it impossible
for her to approach him.

“I am afraid,” she said, “that I wasn’t kind in asking you to supper.”

“I’m not used to it,” he said, smiling with his mouth, showing the
interspaced white teeth. His eyes, however, were steady and unseeing.

“It’s not _that_,” she said hastily. Her repose was exquisite and her
dark grey eyes rich with understanding. He felt afraid of her as she
sat there, as he began to grow conscious of her.

“How do you get on alone?” she asked.

He glanced away to the fire.

“Oh——” he answered, shifting uneasily, not finishing his answer.

Her face settled heavily.

“How close it is in this room. You have such immense fires. I will take
off my coat,” she said.

He watched her take off her hat and coat. She wore a cream cashmir
blouse embroidered with gold silk. It seemed to him a very fine
garment, fitting her throat and wrists close. It gave him a feeling of
pleasure and cleanness and relief from himself.

“What were you thinking about, that you didn’t get washed?” she asked,
half intimately. He laughed, turning aside his head. The whites of his
eyes showed very distinct in his black face.

“Oh,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

There was a pause.

“Are you going to keep this house on?” she asked.

He stirred in his chair, under the question.

“I hardly know,” he said. “I’m very likely going to Canada.”

Her spirit became very quiet and attentive.

“What for?” she asked.

Again he shifted restlessly on his seat.

“Well”—he said slowly—“to try the life.”

“But which life?”

“There’s various things—farming or lumbering or mining. I don’t mind
much what it is.”

“And is that what you want?”

He did not think in these times, so he could not answer.

“I don’t know,” he said, “till I’ve tried.”

She saw him drawing away from her for ever.

“Aren’t you sorry to leave this house and garden?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered reluctantly. “I suppose our Fred would come
in—that’s what he’s wanting.”

“You don’t want to settle down?” she asked.

He was leaning forward on the arms of his chair. He turned to her. Her
face was pale and set. It looked heavy and impassive, her hair shone
richer as she grew white. She was to him something steady and immovable
and eternal presented to him. His heart was hot in an anguish of
suspense. Sharp twitches of fear and pain were in his limbs. He turned
his whole body away from her. The silence was unendurable. He could not
bear her to sit there any more. It made his heart go hot and stifled in
his breast.

“Were you going out tonight?” she asked.

“Only to the New Inn,” he said.

Again there was silence.

She reached for her hat. Nothing else was suggested to her. She _had_
to go. He sat waiting for her to be gone, for relief. And she knew that
if she went out of that house as she was, she went out a failure. Yet
she continued to pin on her hat; in a moment she would have to go.
Something was carrying her.

Then suddenly a sharp pang, like lightning, seared her from head to
foot, and she was beyond herself.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked, controlled, yet speaking out of a
fiery anguish, as if the words were spoken from her without her
intervention.

He went white under his dirt.

“Why?” he asked, turning to her in fear, compelled.

“Do you want me to go?” she repeated.

“Why?” he asked again.

“Because I wanted to stay with you,” she said, suffocated, with her
lungs full of fire.

His face worked, he hung forward a little, suspended, staring straight
into her eyes, in torment, in an agony of chaos, unable to collect
himself. And as if turned to stone, she looked back into his eyes.
Their souls were exposed bare for a few moments. It was agony. They
could not bear it. He dropped his head, whilst his body jerked with
little sharp twitchings.

She turned away for her coat. Her soul had gone dead in her. Her hands
trembled, but she could not feel any more. She drew on her coat. There
was a cruel suspense in the room. The moment had come for her to go. He
lifted his head. His eyes were like agate, expressionless, save for the
black points of torture. They held her, she had no will, no life any
more. She felt broken.

“Don’t you want me?” she said helplessly.

A spasm of torture crossed his eyes, which held her fixed.

“I—I——” he began, but he could not speak. Something drew him from his
chair to her. She stood motionless, spellbound, like a creature given
up as prey. He put his hand tentatively, uncertainly, on her arm. The
expression of his face was strange and inhuman. She stood utterly
motionless. Then clumsily he put his arms round her, and took her,
cruelly, blindly, straining her till she nearly lost consciousness,
till he himself had almost fallen.

Then, gradually, as he held her gripped, and his brain reeled round,
and he felt himself falling, falling from himself, and whilst she,
yielded up, swooned to a kind of death of herself, a moment of utter
darkness came over him, and they began to wake up again as if from a
long sleep. He was himself.

After a while his arms slackened, she loosened herself a little, and
put her arms round him, as he held her. So they held each other close,
and hid each against the other for assurance, helpless in speech. And
it was ever her hands that trembled more closely upon him, drawing him
nearer into her, with love.

And at last she drew back her face and looked up at him, her eyes wet,
and shining with light. His heart, which saw, was silent with fear. He
was with her. She saw his face all sombre and inscrutable, and he
seemed eternal to her. And all the echo of pain came back into the
rarity of bliss, and all her tears came up.

“I love you,” she said, her lips drawn and sobbing. He put down his
head against her, unable to hear her, unable to bear the sudden coming
of the peace and passion that almost broke his heart. They stood
together in silence whilst the thing moved away a little.

At last she wanted to see him. She looked up. His eyes were strange and
glowing, with a tiny black pupil. Strange, they were, and powerful over
her. And his mouth came to hers, and slowly her eyelids closed, as his
mouth sought hers closer and closer, and took possession of her.

They were silent for a long time, too much mixed up with passion and
grief and death to do anything but hold each other in pain and kiss
with long, hurting kisses wherein fear was transfused into desire. At
last she disengaged herself. He felt as if his heart were hurt, but
glad, and he scarcely dared look at her.

“I’m glad,” she said also.

He held her hands in passionate gratitude and desire. He had not yet
the presence of mind to say anything. He was dazed with relief.

“I ought to go,” she said.

He looked at her. He could not grasp the thought of her going, he knew
he could never be separated from her any more. Yet he dared not assert
himself. He held her hands tight.

“Your face is black,” she said.

He laughed.

“Yours is a bit smudged,” he said.

They were afraid of each other, afraid to talk. He could only keep her
near to him. After a while she wanted to wash her face. He brought her
some warm water, standing by and watching her. There was something he
wanted to say, that he dared not. He watched her wiping her face, and
making tidy her hair.

“They’ll see your blouse is dirty,” he said.

She looked at her sleeves and laughed for joy.

He was sharp with pride.

“What shall you do?” he asked.

“How?” she said.

He was awkward at a reply.

“About me,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?” she laughed.

He put his hand out slowly to her. What did it matter!

“But make yourself clean,” she said.

XIV

As they went up the hill, the night seemed dense with the unknown. They
kept close together, feeling as if the darkness were alive and full of
knowledge, all around them. In silence they walked up the hill. At
first the street lamps went their way. Several people passed them. He
was more shy than she, and would have let her go had she loosened in
the least. But she held firm.

Then they came into the true darkness, between the fields. They did not
want to speak, feeling closer together in silence. So they arrived at
the Vicarage gate. They stood under the naked horse-chestnut tree.

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” he said.

She laughed a quick little laugh.

“Come tomorrow,” she said, in a low tone, “and ask father.”

She felt his hand close on hers.

She gave the same sorrowful little laugh of sympathy. Then she kissed
him, sending him home.

At home, the old grief came on in another paroxysm, obliterating
Louisa, obliterating even his mother for whom the stress was raging
like a burst of fever in a wound. But something was sound in his heart.

XV

The next evening he dressed to go to the vicarage, feeling it was to be
done, not imagining what it would be like. He would not take this
seriously. He was sure of Louisa, and this marriage was like fate to
him. It filled him also with a blessed feeling of fatality. He was not
responsible, neither had her people anything really to do with it.

They ushered him into the little study, which was fireless. By and by
the vicar came in. His voice was cold and hostile as he said:

“What can I do for you, young man?”

He knew already, without asking.

Durant looked up at him, again like a sailor before a superior. He had
the subordinate manner. Yet his spirit was clear.

“I wanted, Mr Lindley——” he began respectfully, then all the colour
suddenly left his face. It seemed now a violation to say what he had to
say. What was he doing there? But he stood on, because it had to be
done. He held firmly to his own independence and self-respect. He must
not be indecisive. He must put himself aside: the matter was bigger
than just his personal self. He must not feel. This was his highest
duty.

“You wanted——” said the vicar.

Durant’s mouth was dry, but he answered with steadiness:

“Miss Louisa—Louisa—promised to marry me——”

“You asked Miss Louisa if she would marry you—yes——” corrected the
vicar. Durant reflected he had not asked her this:

“If she would marry me, sir. I hope you—don’t mind.”

He smiled. He was a good-looking man, and the vicar could not help
seeing it.

“And my daughter was willing to marry you?” said Mr Lindley.

“Yes,” said Durant seriously. It was pain to him, nevertheless. He felt
the natural hostility between himself and the elder man.

“Will you come this way?” said the vicar. He led into the dining-room,
where were Mary, Louisa, and Mrs Lindley. Mr Massy sat in a corner with
a lamp.

“This young man has come on your account, Louisa?” said Mr Lindley.

“Yes,” said Louisa, her eyes on Durant, who stood erect, in discipline.
He dared not look at her, but he was aware of her.

“You don’t want to marry a collier, you little fool,” cried Mrs Lindley
harshly. She lay obese and helpless upon the couch, swathed in a loose,
dove-grey gown.

“Oh, hush, mother,” cried Mary, with quiet intensity and pride.

“What means have you to support a wife?” demanded the vicar’s wife
roughly.

“I!” Durant replied, starting. “I think I can earn enough.”

“Well, and how much?” came the rough voice.

“Seven and six a day,” replied the young man.

“And will it get to be any more?”

“I hope so.”

“And are you going to live in that poky little house?”

“I think so,” said Durant, “if it’s all right.”

He took small offence, only was upset, because they would not think him
good enough. He knew that, in their sense, he was not.

“Then she’s a fool, I tell you, if she marries you,” cried the mother
roughly, casting her decision.

“After all, mama, it is Louisa’s affair,” said Mary distinctly, “and we
must remember——”

“As she makes her bed, she must lie—but she’ll repent it,” interrupted
Mrs Lindley.

“And after all,” said Mr Lindley, “Louisa cannot quite hold herself
free to act entirely without consideration for her family.”

“What do you want, papa?” asked Louisa sharply.

“I mean that if you marry this man, it will make my position very
difficult for me, particularly if you stay in this parish. If you were
moving quite away, it would be simpler. But living here in a collier’s
cottage, under my nose, as it were—it would be almost unseemly. I have
my position to maintain, and a position which may not be taken
lightly.”

“Come over here, young man,” cried the mother, in her rough voice, “and
let us look at you.”

Durant, flushing, went over and stood—not quite at attention, so that
he did not know what to do with his hands. Miss Louisa was angry to see
him standing there, obedient and acquiescent. He ought to show himself
a man.

“Can’t you take her away and live out of sight?” said the mother.
“You’d both of you be better off.”

“Yes, we can go away,” he said.

“Do you want to?” asked Miss Mary clearly.

He faced round. Mary looked very stately and impressive. He flushed.

“I do if it’s going to be a trouble to anybody,” he said.

“For yourself, you would rather stay?” said Mary.

“It’s my home,” he said, “and that’s the house I was born in.”

“Then”—Mary turned clearly to her parents, “I really don’t see how you
can make the conditions, papa. He has his own rights, and if Louisa
wants to marry him——”

“Louisa, Louisa!” cried the father impatiently. “I cannot understand
why Louisa should not behave in the normal way. I cannot see why she
should only think of herself, and leave her family out of count. The
thing is enough in itself, and she ought to try to ameliorate it as
much as possible. And if——”

“But I love the man, papa,” said Louisa.

“And I hope you love your parents, and I hope you want to spare them as
much of the—the loss of prestige, as possible.”

“We _can_ go away to live,” said Louisa, her face breaking to tears. At
last she was really hurt.

“Oh, yes, easily,” Durant replied hastily, pale, distressed.

There was dead silence in the room.

“I think it would really be better,” murmured the vicar, mollified.

“Very likely it would,” said the rough-voiced invalid.

“Though I think we ought to apologize for asking such a thing,” said
Mary haughtily.

“No,” said Durant. “It will be best all round.” He was glad there was
no more bother.

“And shall we put up the banns here or go to the registrar?” he asked
clearly, like a challenge.

“We will go to the registrar,” replied Louisa decidedly.

Again there was a dead silence in the room.

“Well, if you will have your own way, you must go your own way,” said
the mother emphatically.

All the time Mr Massy had sat obscure and unnoticed in a corner of the
room. At this juncture he got up, saying:

“There is baby, Mary.”

Mary rose and went out of the room, stately; her little husband padded
after her. Durant watched the fragile, small man go, wondering.

“And where,” asked the vicar, almost genial, “do you think you will go
when you are married?”

Durant started.

“I was thinking of emigrating,” he said.

“To Canada? or where?”

“I think to Canada.”

“Yes, that would be very good.”

Again there was a pause.

“We shan’t see much of you then, as a son-in-law,” said the mother,
roughly but amicably.

“Not much,” he said.

Then he took his leave. Louisa went with him to the gate. She stood
before him in distress.

“You won’t mind them, will you?” she said humbly.

“I don’t mind them, if they don’t mind me!” he said. Then he stooped
and kissed her.

“Let us be married soon,” she murmured, in tears.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go tomorrow to Barford.”



A Fragment of Stained Glass

Beauvale is, or was, the largest parish in England. It is thinly
populated, only just netting the stragglers from shoals of houses in
three large mining villages. For the rest, it holds a great tract of
woodland, fragment of old Sherwood, a few hills of pasture and arable
land, three collieries, and, finally, the ruins of a Cistercian abbey.
These ruins lie in a still rich meadow at the foot of the last fall of
woodland, through whose oaks shines a blue of hyacinths, like water, in
Maytime. Of the abbey, there remains only the east wall of the chancel
standing, a wild thick mass of ivy weighting one shoulder, whil

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