Olivier

12. Maturity

VII.

November, and Mark's last morning. He had got promotion. He was going back to India with a new battery. He would be stationed at Poona, a place he hated. Nothing ever happened as he wanted it to happen.

She was in Papa's room, helping him to pack. The wardrobe door gave out its squeaking wail again and again as he opened it and threw his things on to the bed. Her mother had gone away because she couldn't bear to see them, his poor things.

They were all folded now and pressed down into the boxes and portmanteaus. She sat on the bed with Mark's sword across her knees, rubbing vaseline on the blade. Mark came and stood before her, looking down at her.

"Minky, I don't like going away and leaving Mamma with you.... When I went before you promised you'd be kind to her."

"What do I do?"

There was a groove down the middle of the blade for the blood to run in.

"Do? You do nothing. Nothing. You don't talk to her. You don't want to talk to her. You behave as if she wasn't there."

The blade was blunt. It would have to be sharpened before Mark took it into a battle. Mark's eyes hurt her. She tried to fix her attention on the blade.

"What makes you?"

"I don't know," she said. "Whatever it is it was done long ago."

"She hasn't got anybody," he said. "Roddy's gone. Dan's no good to her. She won't have anybody but you."

"I know, Mark. I shall never go away and leave her."

"Don't talk about going away and leaving her!"

---

He didn't want her to see him off at the train. He wanted to go away alone, after he had said good-bye to Mamma. He didn't want Mamma to be left by herself after he had gone.

They stood together by the shut door of the drawing-room. She and her mother stood between Mark and the door. She had said good-bye a minute ago, alone with him in Papa's room. But there was something they had missed--

She thought: "We must get it now, this minute. He'll say good-bye to Mamma last. He'll kiss her last. But I must kiss him again, first."

She came to him, holding up her face. He didn't see her; but when his arm felt her hand it jerked up and pushed her out of his way, as he would have pushed anything that stood there between him and Mamma.





XXVI

I.

Old Mr. Peacock of Sarrack was dead, and Dr. Kendal was the oldest man in the Dale. He was not afraid of death; he was only afraid of dying before Mr. Peacock died. Mamma had finished building the rockery in the garden. You had carried all the stones. There were no more stones to carry. That was all that had happened in the year and nine months since Mark had gone.

To you nothing happened. Nothing ever would happen. At twenty-one and a half you were old too, and very wise. You had given up expecting things to happen. You put 1883 on your letters to Mark and Dan and Roddy, instead of 1882. Then 1884. You measured time by the poems you wrote and by the books you read and by the Sutcliffes' going abroad in January and coming back in March.

You had advanced from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment and the Prolegomena. And in the end you were cheated. You would never know the only thing worth knowing. Reality. For all you knew there was no Reality, no God, no freedom, no immortality. Only doing your duty. "You can because you ought." Kant, when you got to the bottom of him, was no more exciting than Mamma. "Du kannst, weil du sollst."

Why not "You can because you shall"? It would never do to let Mamma know what Kant thought. She would say "Your Bible could have told you that."

There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn't cheat you. There was "reine Anschauung," pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted "Wille und Vorstellung," the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy.

And there was Mamma's disapproving, reproachful face. Sometimes you felt that you couldn't stand it for another minute. You wanted to get away from it, to the other end of the world, out of the world, to die. When you were dead perhaps you would know. Or perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps death would cheat you, too.

II.

"Oh--have I come too soon?"

She had found Mr. Sutcliffe at his writing-table in the library, a pile of papers before him. He turned in his chair and looked at her above the fine, lean hand that passed over his face as if it brushed cobwebs.

"They didn't tell me you were busy."

"I'm not. I ought to be, but I'm not."

"You are. I'll go and talk to Mrs. Sutcliffe till you've finished."

"No. You'll stay here and talk to me. Mrs. Sutcliffe really is busy."

"Sewing-party?"

"Sewing-party."

She could see them sitting round the dining-room: Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin, Mrs. Belk with her busy eyes, and Miss Kendal and Miss Louisa, Mrs. Oldshaw and Dorsy; and Mrs. Horn, the grocer's wife, very stiff in a corner by herself, sewing unbleached calico and hot red flannel, hot sunlight soaking into them. The library was dim, and leathery and tobaccoey and cool.

The last time she came on a Wednesday Mrs. Sutcliffe had popped out of the dining-room and made them go round to the tennis court by the back, so that they might not be seen from the windows. She wondered why Mrs. Sutcliffe was so afraid of them being seen, and why she had not looked quite pleased.

And to-day--there was something about Mr. Sutcliffe.

"You don't want to play?"

"After tea. When it's cooler. We'll have it in here. By ourselves." He got up and rang the bell.

The tea-table between them, and she, pouring out the tea. She was grown up. Her hair was grown up. It lay like a wreath, plaited on the top of her head.

He was smoothing out the wrinkles of one hand with the other, and smiling. "Everybody busy except you and me, Mary.... How are you getting on with Kant?"

"I've done with him. It's taken me four years. You see, either the German's hard or I'm awfully stupid."

"German hard, I should imagine. Do you like Kant?"

"I like him awfully when he says exciting things about Space and Time. I don't like him when he goes maundering on about his old Categorical Imperative. You can because you ought--putting you off, like a clergyman."

"Kant said that, did he? That shows what an old humbug he was.... And it isn't true, Mary, it isn't true."

"If it was it wouldn't prove anything. That's what bothers me."

"What bothers me is that it isn't true. If I did what I ought I'd be the busiest man in England. I wouldn't be sitting here. If I even did what I want--Do you know what I should like to do? To farm my own land instead of letting it out to these fellows here. I don't suppose you think me clever, but I've got ideas."

"What sort of ideas?"

"Practical ideas. Ideas that can be carried out. That ought to be carried out because they can. Ideas about cattle-breeding, cattle-feeding, chemical manuring, housing, labour, wages, everything that has to do with farming."

Two years ago you talked and he listened. Now that you were grown up he talked to you and you listened. He had said it would make a difference. That was the difference it made.

"Here I am, a landowner who can't do anything with his land. And I can't do anything for my labourers, Mary. If I keep a dry roof over their heads and a dry floor under their feet I'm supposed to have done my duty.... People will tell you that Mr. Sootcliffe's the great man of the place, but half of them look down on him because he doesn't farm his own land, and the other half kow-tow to him because he doesn't, because he's the landlord. And they all think I'm a dangerous man. They don't like ideas. They're afraid of 'em.... I'd like to sell every acre I've got here and buy land--miles and miles of it--that hasn't been farmed before. I'd show them what farming is if you bring brains to it."

"I see. You could do that."

"Could I? The land's entailed. I can't sell it away from my son. And he'll never do anything with it."

"Aren't there other things you could have done?"

"I suppose I could have got the farmers out. Turned them off the land they've sweated their lives into. Or I could have sold my town house instead of letting it and bought land."

"Of course you could. Oh--why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I? Ah--now you've got me. Because I'm a lazy old humbug, Mary. All my farming's in my head when it isn't on my conscience."

"You don't really like farming: you only think you ought to. What do you really like?"

"Going away. Getting out of this confounded country into the South of France. I'm not really happy, Mary, till I'm pottering about my garden at Agaye."

She looked where he was looking. Two drawings above the chimney-piece. A chain of red hills swung out into a blue sea. The Estérel. A pink and white house on the terrace of a hill. House and hill blazing out sunshine.

Agaye. Agaye. Pottering about his garden at Agaye. He was happy there.

"Well, you can get away. To Agaye."

"Not as much as I should like. My wife can't stand more than six weeks of it."

"So that you aren't really happy at Agaye.... I thought I was the only person who felt like that. Miserable because I've been doing my own things instead of sewing, or reading to Mamma."

"That's the way conscience makes cowards of us all."

"If it was even my conscience. But it's Mamma's. And her conscience was Grandmamma's. And Grandmamma's--"

"And mine?"

"Isn't yours a sort of landlord's conscience? Your father's?"

"No. No. It's mine all right. My youth had a conscience."

"Are you sure it wasn't put off with somebody else's?"

"Perhaps. At Oxford we were all social reformers. The collective conscience of the group, perhaps. I wasn't strong enough to rise to it. Wasn't strong enough to resist it...."

Don't you do that, my child. Find out what you want, and when you see your chance coming, take it. Don't funk it."

"I don't see any chance of getting away."

"Where do you want to get away to?"

"There. Agaye."

He leaned forward. His eyes glittered. "You'd like that?"

"I'd like it more than anything on earth."

"Then," he said, "some day you'll go there." "No. Don't let's talk about it. I shall never go."

"I don't see why not. I don't really see why not."

She shook her head. "No. That sort of thing doesn't happen."

III.

She stitched and stitched, making new underclothing. It was going to happen. Summer and Christmas and the New Year had gone. In another week it would happen. She would be sitting with the Sutcliffes in the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée express, going with them to Agaye. She had to have new underclothing. They would be two days in Paris. They would pass, in the train, through Dijon, Avignon, Toulon and Cannes, then back to Agaye. She had no idea what it would be like. Only the sounds, Agaye, rose up out of the other sounds, like a song, a slender foreign song, bright and clear, that you could sing without knowing what it meant. She would stay there with the Sutcliffes, for weeks and weeks, in the pink and white house on the terrace. Perhaps they would go on into Italy.

Mr. Sutcliffe was going to send to Cook's for the tickets to-morrow. Expensive, well-fitting clothes had come from Durlingham, so that nothing could prevent it happening.

Mr. Sutcliffe was paying for her ticket. Uncle Victor had paid for the clothes. He had kept on writing to Mamma and telling her that she really ought to let you go. Aunt Bella and Uncle Edward had written, and Mrs. Draper, and in the end Mamma had given in.

At first she had said, "I won't hear of your going abroad with the Sutcliffes," and, "The Sutcliffes seem to think they've a right to take you away from me. They've only to say 'Come' and you'll go." Then, "I suppose you'll have to go," and, "I don't know what your Uncle Victor thinks they'll do for you, but he shan't say I've stood in your way." And suddenly her face left off disapproving and reproaching and behaved as it did on Christmas Days and birthdays.

She smiled now as she sat still and sewed, as she watched you sitting still and sewing, making new underclothes.

Aunt Bella would come and stay with Mamma, then Aunt Lavvy, then Mrs. Draper, so that she would not be left alone.

Stitch--stitch. She wondered: Supposing they weren't coming? Could she have left her mother alone, or would she have given up going and stayed? No. She couldn't have given it up. She had never wanted anything in her life as she wanted to go to Agaye with the Sutcliffes. With Mr. Sutcliffe. Mrs. Sutcliffe didn't count; she wouldn't do anything at Agaye, she would just trail about in the background, kind and smiling, in a shawl. She might almost as well not be there.

The happiness was too great. She could not possibly have given it up.

She went on stitching. Mamma went on stitching. Catty brought the lamp in.

Then Roddy's telegram came. From Queenstown.

"Been ill. Coming home. Expect me to-morrow. Rodney."

She knew then that she would not go to Agaye.

IV.

But not all at once.

When she thought of Roddy it was easy to say quietly to herself, "I shall have to give it up." When she thought of Mr. Sutcliffe and the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train and the shining, gold-white, unknown towns, it seemed to her that it was impossible to give up going to Agaye. You simply could not do it.

She shut her eyes. She could feel Mr. Sutcliffe beside her in the train and the carriage rocking. Dijon, Avignon, Cannes. She could hear his voice telling her the names. She would stand beside him at the window, and look out. And Mrs. Sutcliffe would sit in her corner, and smile at them kindly, glad because they were so happy.

"Roddy doesn't say he is ill," her mother said. "I wonder what he's coming home for."

Supposing you had really gone? Supposing you were at Agaye when Roddy--

The thought of Roddy gave her a pain in her heart. The thought of not going to Agaye dragged at her waist and made her feel weak, suddenly, as if she were trying to stand after an illness.

She went up to her room. The shoulder line of Greffington Edge was fixed across the open window, immovable, immutable. Her knees felt tired. She lay down on her bed, staring at the immovable, immutable white walls. She tried to think of Substance, of the Reality behind appearances. She could feel her mind battering at the walls of her body, the walls of her room, the walls of the world. She could hear it crying out.

She was kneeling now beside her bed. She could see her arms stretched out before her on the counterpane, and her hands, the finger-tips together. She pressed her weak, dragging waist tighter against the bed.

"If Anything's there--if Anything's there--make me give up going. Make me think about Roddy. Not about myself. About Roddy. Roddy. Make me not want to go to Agaye."

She didn't really believe that anything would happen.

Her mind left off crying. Outside, the clock on the Congregational Chapel was striking six. She was aware of a sudden checking and letting go, of a black stillness coming on and on, hushing sound and sight and the touch of her arms on the rough counterpane, and her breathing and the beating of her heart. There was a sort of rhythm in the blackness that caught you and took you into its peace. When the thing stopped you could almost hear the click.

She stood up. Her white room was grey. Across the window the shoulder of the hill had darkened. Out there the night crouched, breathing like an immense, quiet animal. She had a sense of exquisite security and clarity and joy. She was not going to Agaye. She didn't want to go.

She thought: "I shall have to tell the Sutcliffes. Now, this evening. And Mamma. They'll be sorry and Mamma will be glad."

But Mamma was not glad. Mamma hated it when you upset arrangements. She said, "I declare I never saw anybody like you in my life. After all the trouble and expense."

But you could see it was Roddy she was thinking about. She didn't want to believe there was anything the matter with him. If you went that would look as though he was all right.

"What do you suppose the Sutcliffes will think? And your Uncle Victor? With all those new clothes and that new trunk?"

"He'll understand."

"Will he!"

"Mr. Sutcliffe, I mean."

V.

She went down to Greffington Hall that night and told him. He understood.

But not quite so well as Mrs. Sutcliffe. She gave you a long look, sighed, and smiled. Almost you would have thought she was glad. He didn't look at you. He looked down at his own lean fine hands hanging in front of him. You could see them trembling slightly. And when you were going he took you into the library and shut the door.

"Is this necessary, Mary?" he said.

"Yes. We don't quite know what's wrong with Roddy."

"Then why not wait and see?"

"Because I do know. And Mamma doesn't. There's something, or he wouldn't have come home."

A long pause. She noticed little things about him. The proud, handsome corners of his mouth had loosened; his eyelids didn't fit nicely as they used to do; they hung slack from the eyebone.

"You care more for Roddy than you do for Mark," he said.

"I don't care for him half so much. But I'm sorry for him. You can't be sorry for Mark.... Roddy wants me and Mark doesn't. He wants nobody but Mamma."

"He knows what he wants.... Well. It's my fault. I should have known what I wanted. I should have taken you a year ago."

"If you had," she said, "it would have been all over now."

"I wonder, would it?"

For the life of her she couldn't imagine what he meant.

When she got home she found her mother folding up the work in the work-basket.

"Well, anyhow," Mamma said, "you've laid in a good stock of underclothing."

VI.

She was sitting in the big leather chair in the consulting-room. The small grey-white window panes and the black crooked bough of the apple tree across them made a pattern in her brain. Dr. Charles stood before her on the hearthrug. She saw his shark's tooth, hanging sharp in the snap of his jaws. He was powerful, savage and benevolent.

He had told her what was wrong with Roddy.

"What--does--it--mean?"

The savage light went out of his eyes. They were dull and kind under his red shaggy eyebrows.

"It means that you won't have him with you very long, Mary."

That Roddy would die. That Roddy would die. Roddy. That was what he had come home for.

"He ought never to have gone out with his heart in that state. It beats me how he's pulled through those five years. Five weeks of it were enough to kill him.... Jem Alderson must have taken mighty good care of him."

Jem Alderson. She remembered. The big shoulders, the little screwed up eyes, the long moustaches, the good, gladiator face. Jem Alderson had taken care of him. Jem Alderson had cared.

"I don't know what your mother could have been thinking of to let him go."

"Mamma doesn't think of things. It wasn't her fault. She didn't know. Uncle Edward and Uncle Victor made him."

"They ought to be hung for it."

"They didn't know, either. It was my fault. I knew."

It seemed to her that she had known, that she had known all the time, that she remembered knowing.

"Did he tell you?"

"He didn't tell anybody.... Did he know?"

"Yes, Mary. He came to me to be overhauled. I told him he wasn't fit to go."

"I did try to stop him."

"Why?"

He looked at her sharply, as if he were trying to find out something, to fix responsibility.

"Because I knew."

"You couldn't have known if nobody told you."

"I did know. If he dies I shall have killed him. I ought to have stopped him. I was the only one who knew."

"You couldn't have stopped him. You were only a child yourself when it happened. If anybody was to blame it was his mother."

"It wasn't. She didn't know. Mamma never knows anything she doesn't want to know. She can't see that he's ill now. She talks as if he ought to do something. She can't stand men who don't do things like Mark and Dan."

"What on earth does she suppose he could do? He's no more fit to do anything than my brother James.... You'll have to take care of him, Mary."

A sharp and tender pang went through her. It was like desire; like the feeling you had when you thought of babies: painful and at the same time delicious.

"Could you?" said Dr. Charles.

"Of course I can."

"If he's taken care of he might live--"

She stood up and faced him. "How long?"

"I don't know. Perhaps--" He went with her to the door. "Perhaps," he said, "quite a long time."

(But if he didn't live she would have killed him. She had known all the time, and she had let him go.)

Through the dining-room window she could see Roddy as he crouched over the hearth, holding out his hands to the fire.

He was hers, not Mamma's, to take care of. Sharp, delicious pain!

VII.

"Oh, Roddy--look! Little, little grouse, making nice noises."

The nestlings went flapping and stumbling through the roots of the heather. Roddy gazed at them with his fixed and mournful eyes. He couldn't share your excitement. He drew back his shoulders, bracing himself to bear it; his lips tightened in a hard, bleak grin. He grinned at the absurdity of your supposing that he could be interested in anything any more.

Roddy's beautiful face was bleached and sharpened; the sallow, mauve-tinted skin stretched close over the bone; but below the edge of his cap you could see the fine spring of his head from his neck, like the spring of Mark's head.

They were in April now. He was getting better. He could walk up the lower slopes of Karva without panting.

"Why are we ever out?" he said. "Supposing we went home?"

"All right. Let's."

He was like that. When he was in the house he wanted to be on the moor; when he was on the moor he wanted to be back in the house. They started to go home, and he turned again towards Karva. They went on till they came to the round pit sunk below the track. They rested there, sitting on the stones at the bottom of the pit.

"Mary," he said, "I can't stay here. I shall have to go back. To Canada, I mean."

"You shall never go back to Canada," she said.

"I must. Not to the Aldersons. I can't go there again, because--I can't tell you why. But if I could I wouldn't. I was no good there. They let you know it."

"Jem?"

"No. He was all right. That beastly woman."

"What woman?"

"His aunt. She didn't want me there. I wasn't fit for anything but driving cattle and cleaning out their stinking pigsties.... She used to look at me when I was eating. You could see she was thinking 'He isn't worth his keep.' ... Her mouth had black teeth in it, with horrible gummy gaps between. The women were like that. I wanted to hit her on the mouth and smash her teeth.... But of course I couldn't."

"It's all over. You mustn't think about it."

"I'm not. I'm thinking about the other thing.... The thing I did. And the dog, Mary; the dog."

She knew what was coming.

"You can't imagine what that place was like. Their sheep-run was miles from the farm. Miles from anything. You had to take it in turns to sleep there a month at a time, in a beastly hut. You couldn't sleep because of that dog. Jem would give him me. He yapped. You had to put him in the shed to keep him from straying. He yapped all night. The yapping was the only sound there was. It tore pieces out of your brain.... I didn't think I could hate a dog.... But I did hate him. I simply couldn't stand the yapping. And one night I got up and hung him. I hung him."

"You didn't, Roddy. You know you didn't. The first time you told me that story you said you found him hanging. Don't you remember? He was a bad dog. He bit the sheep. Jem's uncle hung him."

"No. It was me. Do you know what he did? He licked my hands when I was tying the rope round his neck. He played with my hands. He was a yellow dog with a white breast and white paws.... And that isn't the worst. That isn't It."

"It?"

"The other thing. What I did.... I haven't told you that. You couldn't stand me if you knew. It was why I had to go. Somebody must have known. Jem must have known."

"I don't believe you did anything. Anything at all."

"I tell you I did."

"No, Roddy. You only think you did. You only think you hung the dog."

They got up out of the pit. They took the track to the schoolhouse lane. A sheep staggered from its bed and stalked away, bleating, with head thrown back and shaking buttocks. Plovers got up, wheeling round, sweeping close. "Pee-vit--Pee-vit. Pee-vitt;"

"This damned place is full of noises," Roddy said.

VIII.

"The mind can bring it about, that all bodily modifications or images of things may be referred to the idea of God."

The book stood open before her on the kitchen table, propped against the scales. As long as you were only stripping the strings from the French beans you could read.

The mind can bring it about. The mind can bring it about. "He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much the more in proportion as he more understands himself and his emotions."

Fine slices of French beans fell from the knife, one by one, into the bowl of clear water. Spinoza's thought beat its way out through the smell of steel, the clean green smell of the cut beans, the crusty, spicy smell of the apple pie you had made. "He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return."

"'Shall we gather at the river--'" Catty sang as she went to and fro between the kitchen and the scullery. Catty was happy now that Maggie had gone and she had only you and Jesus with her in the kitchen. Through the open door you could hear the clack of the hatchet and the thud on the stone flags as Roddy, with slow, sorrowful strokes, chopped wood in the backyard.

"Miss Mary--" Catty's thick, loving voice and the jerk of her black eyes warned her.

Mamma looked in at the door.

"Put that book away," she said. She hated the two brown volumes of Elwes's Spinoza you had bought for your birthday. "The dinner will be ruined if you read."

"It'll be ruined if I don't read."

For then your mind raged over the saucepans and the fragrant, floury pasteboard, hungry and unfed. It couldn't bring anything about. It snatched at the minutes left over from Roddy and the house and Mamma and the piano. You knew what every day would be like. You would get up early to practise. When the cooking and the housework was done Roddy would want you. You would play tennis together with Mr. Sutcliffe and Dorsy Heron. Or you would go up on to the moors and comfort Roddy while he talked about the "things" he had done in Canada and about getting away and about the dog. You would say over and over again, "You know you didn't hang him. It was Jem's uncle. He was a bad dog. He bit the sheep." In the winter evenings you would sew or play or read aloud to Mamma and Roddy, and Roddy would crouch over the fender, with his hands stretched out to the fire, not listening.

But Roddy was better. The wind whipped red blood into his cheeks. He said he would be well if it wasn't for the bleating of the sheep, and the crying of the peewits and the shouting of the damned villagers. And people staring at him. He would be well if he could get away.

Then--he would be well if he could marry Dorsy.

So the first year passed. And the second. And the third year. She was five and twenty. She thought: "I shall die before I'm fifty. I've lived half my life and done nothing."

IX.

Old Dr. Kendal was dead. He had had nothing more to live for. He had beaten Mr. Peacock of Sarrack. Miss Kendal was wearing black ribbons in her cap instead of pink. And Maggie's sister was dead of her cancer.

The wall at the bottom of the garden had fallen down and Roddy had built it up again.

He had heaved up the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't have built a better wall.

It had all happened in the week when she was ill and went to stay with Aunt Lavvy at Scarborough. Yesterday evening, when she got home, Roddy had come in out of the garden to meet her. He was in his shirt sleeves; glass beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, his face was white with excitement. He had just put the last dab of mortar to the last stone.

In the blue and white morning Mary and her mother stood in the garden, looking at the wall. In its setting of clean white cement, Roddy's bit showed like the map of South Africa. They were waiting for him to come down to breakfast.

"I must say," Mamma said, "he's earned his extra half-hour in bed."

She was pleased because Roddy had built the wall up and because he was well again.

They had turned. They were walking on the flagged path by the flower-border under the house. Mamma walked slowly, with meditative pauses, and bright, sidelong glances for her flowers.

"If only," she said, "he could work without trampling the flowers down."

The sun was shining on the flagged path. Mamma was stooping over the bed; she had lifted the stalk of the daffodil up out of the sunk print of Roddy's boot. Catty was coming down the house passage to the side door. Her mouth was open. Her eyes stared above her high, sallow cheeks. She stood on the doorstep, saying something in a husky voice.

"Miss Mary--will you go upstairs to Master Roddy? I think there's something the matter with him. I think--"

Upstairs, in his narrow iron bed, Roddy lay on his back, his lips parted, his eyes--white slits under half-open lids--turned up to the ceiling. His arms were squared stiffly above his chest as they had pushed back the bedclothes. The hands had been clenched and unclenched; the fingers still curled in towards the palms. His face had a look of innocence and candour.

Catty's thick, wet voice soaked through his mother's crying. "Miss Mary--he went in his first sleep. His hair's as smooth as smooth."

X.

She was alone with Dan in the funeral carriage.

Her heart heaved and dragged with the grinding of the brakes on the hill; the brake of the hearse going in front; the brake of their carriage; the brake of the one that followed with Dr. Charles in it.

When they left off she could hear Dan crying. He had begun as soon as he got into the carriage.

She tried to think of Dr. Charles, sitting all by himself in the back carriage, calm and comfortable among the wreaths. But she couldn't. She couldn't think of anything but Dan and the black hearse in front of them. She could see it when the road turned to the right; when she shut her eyes she could see the yellow coffin inside it, heaped with white flowers; and Roddy lying deep down in the coffin. The sides were made high to cover his arms, squared over his chest as if he had been beating something off. She could see Roddy's arms beating off his thoughts, and under the fine hair Roddy's face, innocent and candid.

Dr. Charles said it wasn't that. He had just raised them in surprise. A sort of surprise. He hadn't suffered.

Dan's dark head was bowed forward, just above the level of her knees. His deep, hot eyes were inflamed with grief; they kept on blinking, gushing out tears over red lids. He cried like a child, with loud sobs and hiccoughs that shook him. Her eyes were dry; burning dry; the lids choked with something that felt like hot sand, and hurt.

(If only the carriage didn't smell of brandy. That was the driver. He must have sat in it while he waited.)

Dan left off crying and sat up suddenly.

"What's that hat doing there?"

He had taken off his tall hat as he was getting into the carriage and laid it on the empty seat. He pointed at the hat.

"That isn't my hat," he said.

"Yes, Dank. You put it there yourself."

"I didn't. My hat hasn't got a beastly black band on it."

He rose violently, knocking his head against the carriage roof.

"Here--I must get out of this."

He tugged at the window-strap, hanging on to it and swaying as he tugged. She dragged him back into his seat.

"Sit down and keep quiet."

She put her hand on his wrist and held it. Down the road the bell of Renton Church began tolling. He turned and looked at her unsteadily, his dark eyes showing bloodshot as they swerved.

"Mary--is Roddy really dead?"

A warm steam of brandy came and went with his breathing.

"Yes. That's why you must keep quiet."

Mr. Rollitt was standing at the open gate of the churchyard. He was saying something that she didn't hear. Then he swung round solemnly. She saw the flash of his scarlet hood. Then the coffin.

She began to walk behind it, between two rows of villagers, between Dorsy Heron and Mr. Sutcliffe. She went, holding Dan tight, pulling him closer when he lurched, and carrying his tall hat in her hand.

Close before her face the head of Roddy's coffin swayed and swung as the bearers staggered.

XI.

"Roddy ought never to have gone to Canada."

Her mother had turned again, shaking the big bed. They would sleep together for three nights; then Aunt Bella would come, as she came when Papa died.

"But your Uncle Victor would have his own way."

"He didn't know."

She thought: "But I knew. I knew and I let him go. Why did I?"

It seemed to her that it was because, deep down inside her, she had wanted him to go. Deep down inside her she had been afraid of the unhappiness that would come through Roddy.

"And I don't think," her mother said presently, "it could have been very good for him, building that wall."

"You didn't know."

She thought: "I'd have known. If I'd been here it wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't have let him. I'd no business to go away and leave him. I might have known."

"Lord, if Thou hadst been here our brother had not died."

The yellow coffin swayed before her eyes, heaped with the white flowers. Yellow and white. Roddy's dog. His yellow dog with a white breast and white paws. And a rope round his neck. Roddy thought he had hanged him.

At seven she got up and dressed and dusted the drawing-room. She dusted everything very carefully, especially the piano. She would never want to play on it again.

The side door stood open. She went out. In the bed by the flagged path she saw the sunk print of Roddy's foot and the dead daffodil stalk lying in it. Mamma had been angry.

She had forgotten that. She had forgotten everything that happened in the minutes before Catty had come down the passage.

She filled in the footprint and stroked the earth smooth above it, lest Mamma should see it and remember.



XXVII

I.

Potnia, Potnia Nux--

Lady, our Lady, Night, You who give sleep to men, to men labouring and suffering-- Out of the darkness, come, Come with your wings, come down On the house of Agamemnon.

Time stretched out behind and before you, time to read, to make music, to make poems in, to translate Euripides, while Mamma looked after her flowers in the garden; Mamma, sowing and planting and weeding with a fixed, vehement passion. You could hear Catty and little Alice, Maggie's niece, singing against each other in the kitchen as Alice helped Catty with her work. You needn't have been afraid. You would never have anything more to do in the house. Roddy wasn't there.

Agamemnon--that was where you broke off two years ago. He didn't keep you waiting long to finish. You needn't have been afraid.

Uncle Victor's letter came on the day when the gentians flowered. One minute Mamma had been happy, the next she was crying. When you saw her with the letter you knew. Uncle Victor was sending Dan home. Dan was no good at the office; he had been drinking since Roddy died. Three months.

Mamma was saying something as she cried. "I suppose he'll be here, then, all his life, doing nothing."

II.

Mamma had given Papa's smoking-room to Dan. She kept on going in and out of it to see if he was there.

"When you've posted the letters you might go and see what Dan's doing."

Everybody in the village knew about Dan. The postmistress looked up from stamping the letters to say, "Your brother was here a minute ago." Mr. Horn, the grocer, called to you from the bench at the fork of the roads, "Ef yo're lookin' for yore broother, he's joost gawn oop daale."

If Mr. Horn had looked the other way when he saw you coming you would have known that Dan was in the Buck Hotel.

The white sickle of the road; a light at the top of the sickle; the Aldersons' house.

A man was crossing from the moor-track to the road. He carried a stack of heather on his shoulder: Jem's brother, Ned. He stopped and stared. He was thicker and slower than Jem; darker haired; fuller and redder in the face; he looked at you with the same little, kind, screwed-up eyes.

"Ef yo're lookin' for yore broother, 'e's in t' oose long o' us. Wull yo coom in? T' missus med gev yo a coop o' tea."

She went in. There was dusk in the kitchen, with a grey light in the square of the window and a red light in the oblong of the grate. A small boy with a toasting-fork knelt by the hearth. You disentangled a smell of stewed tea and browning toast from thick, deep smells of peat smoke and the sweat drying on Ned's shirt. When Farmer Alderson got up you saw the round table, the coarse blue-grey teacups and the brown glazed teapot on a brown glazed cloth.

Dan sat by the table. Dumpling, Ned's three-year-old daughter, sat on Dan's knee; you could see her scarlet cheeks and yellow hair above the grey frieze of his coat-sleeve. His mournful black-and-white face stooped to her in earnest, respectful attention. He was taking a piece of butterscotch out of the silver paper. Dumpling opened her wet, red mouth.

Rachel, Ned's wife, watched them, her lips twisted in a fond, wise smile, as she pressed the big loaf to her breast and cut thick slices of bread-and-jam. She had made a place for you beside her.

"She sengs ersen to slape wid a li'l' song she maakes," Rachel said. "Tha'll seng that li'l' song for Mester Dan, wuntha?"

Dumpling hid her face and sang. You had to stoop to hear the cheeping that came out of Dan's shoulder.

"Aw, dinny, dinny dy-Doomplin',
Dy-Doomplin', dy-Doomplin',
Dinny, dinny dy-Doomplin',
Dy-Doomplin' daay."

"Ef tha'll seng for Mester Dan," Farmer Alderson said, "tha'llt seng for tha faather, wuntha, Doomplin'?"

"Naw."

"For Graffer then?"

"Naw."

Dumpling put her head on one side, butting under Dan's chin like a cat. Dan's arm drew her closer. He was happy there, in the Aldersons' kitchen, holding Dumpling on his knee. There was something in his happiness that hurt you as Roddy's unhappiness had hurt. All your life you had never really known Dan, the queer, scowling boy who didn't notice you, didn't play with you as Roddy played or care for you as Mark had cared. And suddenly you knew him; better even than Roddy, better than Mark.

III.

The grey byre was warm with the bodies of the cows and their grassy, milky breath. Dan, in his clean white shirt sleeves, crouched on Ned's milking stool, his head pressed to the cow's curly red and white flank. His fingers worked rhythmically down the teat and the milk squirted and hissed and pinged against the pail. Sometimes the cow swung round her white face and looked at Dan, sometimes she lashed him gently with her tail. Ned leaned against the stall post and watched.

"Thot's t' road, thot's t' road. Yo're the foorst straanger she a' let milk 'er. She's a narvous cow. 'Er teats is tander."

When the milking was done Dan put on his well-fitting coat and they went home over Karva to the schoolhouse lane.

Dan loved the things that Roddy hated: the crying of the peewits, the bleating of the sheep, the shouts of the village children when they saw him and came running to his coat pockets for sweets. He liked to tramp over the moors with the shepherds; he helped them with the dipping and shearing and the lambing.

"Dan, you ought to be a farmer."

"I know," he said, "that's why they stuck me in an office."

IV.

"If the killer thinks that he kills, if the killed thinks that he is killed, they do not understand; for this one does not kill, nor is that one killed."

Passion Week, two years after Roddy's death; Roddy's death the measure you measured time by still.

Mamma looked up from her Bible; she looked over her glasses with eyes tired of their everlasting reproach.

"What have you got there, Mary?"

"The Upanishads from the Sacred Book of the East."

"Tchtt! It was that Buddhism the other day."

"Religion."

"Any religion except your own. Or else it's philosophy. You're destroying your soul, Mary. I shall write to your Uncle Victor and tell him to ask Mr. Sutcliffe not to send you any more books from that library."

"I'm seven and twenty, Mamma ducky."

"The more shame for you then," her mother said.

The clock on the Congregational Chapel struck six. They put down their books and looked at each other.

"Dan not back?" Mamma knew perfectly well he wasn't back.

"He went to Reyburn."

"T't!" Mamma's chin nodded in queer, vexed resignation. She folded her hands on her knees and waited, listening.

Sounds of wheels and of hoofs scraping up the hill. The Morfe bus, back from Reyburn. Catty's feet, running along the passage. The front door opening, then shutting. Dan hadn't come with the bus.

"Perhaps," Mamma said, "Ned Anderson'll bring him."

"Perhaps.... ('There is one eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts, who, though one, fulfils the desires of many....') Mamma--why won't you let him go to Canada?"

"It was Canada that killed poor Roddy."

"It won't kill Dan. He's different."

"And what good would he be there? If your Uncle Victor can't keep him, who will, I should like to know?"

"Jem Alderson would. He'd take him for nothing. He told Ned he would. To make up for Roddy."

"Make up! He thinks that's the way to make up! I won't have Dan's death at my door. I'd rather keep him for the rest of my life."

"How about Dan?"

"Dan's safe here."

"He's safe on the moor with Alderson looking after the sheep, and he's safe in the cowshed milking the cows; but he isn't safe when Ned drives into Reyburn market."

"Would it be safer in Canada?"

"Yes. He'd be thirty miles from the nearest pub. He'd be safer here if you didn't give him money."

"The boy has to have money to buy clothes."

"I could buy them."

"I daresay! You can't treat a man of thirty as if he was a baby of three."

She thought. "No. You can only treat a woman.... 'There is one eternal thinker'--"

A knock on the door.

"There," her mother said, "that's Dan."

Mary went to the door. Ned Alderson stood outside; he stood slantways, not looking at her.

"Ah tried to maake yore broother coom back long o' us, but 'e would na."

"Hadn't I better go and meet him?"

"Naw. Ah would na. Ah wouldn' woorry; there's shepherds on t' road wi' t' sheep. Mebbe 'e'll toorn oop long o' they. Dawn' woorry ef tes laate like."

He went away.

They waited, listening while the clock struck the hours, seven; eight; nine. At ten her mother and the servants went to bed. She sat up, and waited, reading.

"...My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists.... That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it."

Substance, the Thing-in-itself--You were It. Dan was It. You could think away your body, Dan's body. One eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts. Dreaming horrible dreams. Dan's drunkenness. Why?

Eleven. A soft scuffle. The scurry of sheep's feet on the Green. A dog barking. The shepherds were back from Reyburn.

Feet shuffled on the flagstone. She went to the door. Dan leaned against the doorpost, bent forward heavily; his chin dropped to his chest. Something slimy gleamed on his shoulder and hip. Wet mud of the ditch he had fallen in. She stiffened her muscles to his weight, to the pull and push of his reeling body.

Roddy's room. With one lurch he reached Roddy's white bed in the corner.

She looked at the dressing-table. A strip of steel flashed under the candlestick. The blue end of a matchbox stuck up out of the saucer. There would be more matches in Dan's coat pocket. She took away the matches and the razor.

Her mother stood waiting in the doorway of her room, small and piteous in her nightgown. Her eyes glanced off the razor, and blinked.

"Is Dan all right?"

"Yes. He came back with the sheep."