Vashti leant up against the side of the shaft, as she had leant when James kissed her there, and shut her eyes; the sweat running down her brow had matted her lashes together into thick points, and the drops tickled her neck so that she put up her hand to it. Both she and the man were drawing the deep, hoarsebreaths of exhaustion, and for a few minutes they rested in silence—then he spoke. "You must be comin' back along o' me now," he told her, "the dawn'll be showin' soon."
"Yes, yes," cried Vashti, starting up, "us may meet some one going to bal, sure 'nough."
"'Tes all right—I've got t'mask on. Come."
He closed his fingers over her arm so harshly that she winced, and together they made their way back in the cold, bleak hush that preceded the autumnal dawn. Gradually, as they went, some glimmerings of what her life would be henceforth appeared to the woman. The fear of neighbours, the efforts to appear neutral, the memory of that slowly opening door, and the still thing by the fender, the consciousness of what lay at the bottom of the disused shaft; and, above all, the terrible reminder of her husband in the masked Willie—it would be like living with a ghost. . . .
Once back at the cottage, he drew her within and let the door swing to behind them. She moved away to find a light, but he caught her.
"Won't 'ee give me so much as a kiss, and me with red hands because of you?" he asked.
She felt the mask brush her cheek, and broke away with a cry. She heard him laugh as she lit a candle, and turned towards him.
"A black bridal!" he cried wildly; "did you think 'twas a black bridal? 'Tes a red one, do 'ee hear?"
"Willie," she begged him, "take off t'mask now we'm alone."
"Aren't 'ee afeared?" he asked.
"'Tes safe enough till mornin', and I do hate that mask more'n the devil. Take 'en off."
"I'll take 'en off—to please you, lass."
He seized the mask violently by the hem and ripped it away—and she saw it was her husband.
"You fool!" he said slowly, following her as she backed away from him, her mouth slack with fear, her eyes staring, her whole being showing her as almost bereft of her senses. "You fool to think to fool me! You was quick enough to say I was dead; I'm not so easy killed, Vassie. No so easy killed as your lover was—just the carven'-knife between his shoulders when he was stoopin' down, that's all. He was fearful of lookin' at the dead man; he never knew the dead man was lookin' at he. You heard him fall, Vassie, and thought it was him movin' me——"
"Put t'mask on," wailed Vashti, pressing her fingers against her eyes; "put t'mask on again, for the love o' God!"
"There's been enough o' masks," he retorted grimly. "You've got to bear to see me now; me, not your lover that you've helped to tip over Wheal Zenna shaft. Eh, you fool, did 'ee think I didn' knaw? I've knawed all these months; I've seen 'ee meet 'en; I told 'ee I was going to stop the night over to Truro so as to catch 'ee together; I listened outside the house; I let 'ee think I was dead, and heard t' the plan you thought to make. Only half a man am I, wi' no mouth left to kiss with? I've an eye left to see with, and an ear to hear with, and a hand to strike with, and a tongue to teach 'ee with."
"I'll tell on 'ee," said Vashti, "I'll tell the police on 'ee. Murderer, that's what you are."
"I doan't think 'ee will, my dear. 'Tedn a tale as'll do you any good—a woman who cheats herhusband, and tries to kill 'en, and helps to carry a body two miles over moor and tip 'en down shaft. And what have 'ee to complain on, I should like to knaw? When I wear t'mask you can pretend I'm Willie—handsome Willie. Willie who can kiss a maid and make a fine upstandin' husband. Willie was goin' to be me, why shudn' you think I was Willie? Do 'ee, my dear, if 'tes any comfort to 'ee."
He slipped on the mask as he spoke and knotted the strings. The door had swung open, and the candle flame shook in the draught as though trying, in fear, to strain away from the wick. The steel-cold light of dawn grew in the sky and filtered into the room, showing all the sordid litter of it; the frightened woman, with a pink ribbon awry in her disordered hair, and the ominous figure of the masked man. He came towards her round the table.
"'Tes our bridal night, lass!" he said. "Why do 'ee shrink away? Mind you that 'tes Willie speakin'! Don't let us think on James Glasson dead to the bottom 'o the shaft. I'm Willie—brave Willie who loves 'ee. . . ."
As his arms came out to catch her, she saw his purpose in his eye, and remembered his words, "A red bridal, lass, a red bridal!"
At the last moment she woke out of her stupor, turned, and ran, he after her. Across the little garden, down the moorland road, over heather and slippery boulders and clinging bracken, startling the larks from their nests, scattering the globes of dew. Once she tried to make for a side-track that led to Perran-an-zenna, but he headed her off, and once again she was running, heavily now, towards Wheal Zenna mineshaft.He was gaining on her, and her breath was nearly spent. Both were going slowly, hardly above a stumbling walk, as the shaft came in sight; the drawing of their breath sounded harsh as the rasping of a file through the still air. As she neared the shaft she turned her head and saw him almost on her, and saw the gleam of something in his uplifted hand. She gathered together all her will, concentrated in those few moments all the strength of her nature, determined to cheat him at the last. Up the rubble of stones she scrambled, one gave beneath her foot and sent her down, and abandoning the effort, she lay prone, awaiting the end.
But Vashti's luck held—it was the man who was to lose. A couple of miners who had been coming up the path from Perran-an-zenna had seen the chase and followed hot foot, unnoticed by the two straining, frantic creatures, who heard nothing but the roaring in their own ears. They caught Glasson as he ran across the patch of grass to the shaft, and he doubled up without a struggle in their arms. Physical and mental powers had failed together, and from that day James Glasson was a hopeless idiot—harmless and silent. Vashti had won indeed.
Admirable woman of affairs that she was, she took a good sleep before confronting the situation; then she made up her story and stuck to it. Willie's name was never mentioned, and his disappearance, so long threatened, passed as a minor event, swamped in the greater stir of Glasson's attempt to murder his wife. His madness had taken the one form that made Vashti safe—he had gone mad on secretiveness. How much he remembered not even she knew, but not a wordcould anyone drag from him. He would lay his finger where his nose should have been against the mask, and wag his head slyly. "Naw, naw, I was never one for tellin'," he would say. "James Glasson's no such fool that he can't keep 'enself to 'enself."
He lived on for several years in the asylum, and Vashti, after the free and easy fashion of the remote West, took to herself another husband. She went much to chapel, and there was no one more religious than she, and no one harder on the sins and vanities of young women. One thing in particular she held in what seemed an unreasoning abhorrence—and that was a black silk gown.
A GARDEN ENCLOSED
WhySophia Jervis went to Sant' Ambrogio she herself could not have told; to all outward seeming she merely drifted there, influenced by the many little urgencies of travel—the name seen casually in a guide-book and all unnoticed stamping itself on her brain; a chance mention of the place caught from some fellow-traveller, aided by the fact that the time-table had happened to open at the words "Sant' Ambrogio"—these were the trifles by which the power stronger than herself guided Sophia, with such cunning manipulation, such a fine lack of insistence even on the trifles, that she was unaware of any power at work. Also she was in that numbed condition which mercifully follows any great straining of emotion; even pain lay quiescent, though rather in a swoon than a sleep—a mere blankness from which it would struggle up more insistent than before.
When Sophia alighted from the train at the nearest station for Sant' Ambrogio, and found the carriage she had ordered awaiting her, she was not in the mood to take joy in anything she saw; and yet, as the wiry little Tuscan horse trotted swiftly along she found herself, though not actually responding, at least offering no blank wall of resistance to the country around. To say country, as though a landscape consisted ofmere earth and vegetation, is to make an incomplete statement; the quality of the light, the harmony or discordance where man's work meets Nature; and, above all, the intangible atmosphere, rarer and more vital than the actual enveloping air, that is the soul of a country—all these are of more potency than the position of a clump of trees or the existence of a particular crop. And nowhere is this atmosphere more elusive but more compelling than in Tuscany at spring time. Sophia was too deadened to respond, but she felt the echo of the thing, as it were, in much the same way that a stone-deaf person feels vibrations run through the floor and up his chair to his spine when certain chords are played on an organ.
It is a drive of about five miles from the railway station to Sant' Ambrogio, and the road winds across the plain, sometimes rising and falling, always leading towards the rim of interfolding hills. In the vineyards the vines, naked at first glance, were just beginning to flower, and the rows of pollarded planes from which they were festooned showed a glory of young leaf. The maize was a couple of feet in height, and where the sun shone through the blades of it they looked like thin green flames. The heat was intense, and the air seemed stifled with the subtle smell of the dust that lay thickly over the road and powdered the grassy edges. The whole plain of Tuscany, apparently empty of human life, and consequently filled with a sense of utter peace, seemed a vast green platter brimming with a divine ether and held up towards the heavens by the steady hands of genii. Only Sophia's carriage showed like a black insect winging a course fast enough to itself but slowto the gaze of any being who, looking down on this dish held for the gods, could see the whole expanse of it at once.
Everywhere was a sense of light—light steeping the sky, drenching the earth, and vibrating in the spaces between; light that gave a gracious blur to edges, that refracted from each subtle difference of plane and angle; light that permeated the very shadows so that they seemed semi-transparent. One with this sense of light, as body is one with soul, was the sense of colour—tender greens, at once pure and delicate; blues that paled to the merest breath or merged in a soft purple. The wideness of the view gave full value to the exquisitely fine curves which composed it—the curves of outline where hills and long sweeping slopes came against the sky, and the curves of surfaces, which inter-folded and led into each other like the waters of a vast lake where Time has stayed his foot and the spellbound water holds for ever the slopes and gradations blown into being by an arrested wind.
Something—an emotion impersonal in itself yet arousing the personality in her—began to stir at Sophia's heart; then, as the carriage rounded a curve in the road and she received the shock of Sant' Ambrogio against the distant arch of the sky, sudden tears burned in her eyelids. Leaning back as well as she could against the uncompromising cushions, she gazed from between lids half-closed so as to narrow her vision on the one thing.
Sant' Ambrogio is a little city of towers, some twenty of them, varying in height, all clustered together within the circling walls and pricking the sky like a group of tall-stemmed flowers in a garden. The townseems to have grown rather than been built on the crest of the only great hill for miles, but the ripples of the plain all converge towards it, leading the eye naturally up to this little crown of Tuscany. When they considered a tower a reminder of God, the ancients were not without a deeper spiritual foundation than they knew of; there is nothing of more direct psychological significance than line, and the many upward-springing lines of Sant' Ambrogio made it seem a thing so lightly poised as almost to be hanging from the heavens. A sense of something winged, which, though just resting on the earth, yet had plumes ready pricked for flight, impressed itself on Sophia's brain as she gazed.
"This might have been beautiful for me if only I could still feel," was her swift thought, and she closed her eyes to let the gleam of light thus evoked sink into her mind. As she lay with her consciousness turned inwards, the deadened fibres of her began to stir; pain moved in its swoon, and, waking, took the keenest form of all—remembrance. Quite suddenly there flashed before her mental vision the loggia at the top of the old palace in Florence where she and Richard had said good-bye. She, who was to see the cords of passion grow slack, had there seen them stretched at their tensest, and the memory of it clutched at her heart with that pity for him which had kept her calm for his comfort. Now, mingled with it, was her own pain, which, at the time, her thought for him had overwhelmed. She saw again his face as she had seen it then—his thin, hawk-like profile dark and sharply-cut against the evening sky. With the memory of the pain that had gone through her at that moment, the powerto feel stirred again, and it was that moment which struck at her anew. Her hands fastened suddenly on the hot sides of the carriage.
"Oh, oh!" she said in the low voice that overwhelming sorrow can wring from the tongue, a soliloquy terrible in its unself-consciousness: "oh, oh! I can't bear it; I can't bear it!"
As the horse slowed down at the beginning of the hill, the first poignancy of Sophia's reawakened feeling passed off, and she lay back, her hands laying palm upwards in her lap. With entry into the town came coolness; the ancient architects of the South knew better than to favour the broad streets planned by their descendants, and the narrow ways threaded so cunningly between the tall cliffs of houses were cool as shadowed streams. The greyness of the paved street fell like a suggestion of peace on Sophia after the searching sunlight of the plain, and the acuteness of her mental trouble subsided in response to the sense of physical ease; she had regained her grip of herself when the carriage drew up at the door of the Albergo Santo Spirito.
The Albergo is a whitewashed building set round a courtyard; clean, unfretted by detail, full of dim, sweet spaces and gay domestic sounds. Sophia, aware of its charm, yet realized, on looking back afterwards, that she had also been aware that the inn was for her but the ante-chamber to some other place or state, as yet unrevealed. At the time she was only conscious that a sense of waiting held the calm air, though, if she had thought to ask herself the question, she would have said that life held nothing for which it could be worth her while to wait.
After she had washed her face and hands in the bare little whitewashed room assigned to her, she went out to wander about the town till dinner. Motorists have not yet spoiled the population of Sant' Ambrogio, and, unmolested by any clamour for alms, Sophia passed along the shady street, where the black-haired, kerchiefed women, with their fine, rock-hewn faces and deep-set eyes, were knitting at their house doors. In the big, cool church, whose walls of banded black and white marble were quieted by the dim light, which just showed the dark gargoyles writhing like things of a dream over cornice and capital, Sophia knelt down, more to wrap herself in the peace of it than to pray. The very keenness of her cry for peace made her fail, and rising she wandered round the church till she came to the little chapel on whose walls the life of the town's saint, Beata, has been painted by some "Ignoto" who must have had a touch of genius. Sophia stood and gazed at the various scenes. Santa Beata, a child with corn-coloured hair lying along her back, running away from her resentful playmates, a set of curly-headed, sly, pinching, clear-eyed ragamuffins, such as those who quarrel and play in the streets of Sant' Ambrogio to this day. Santa Beata, wrapped in a cloud, conversing with the Beloved, while the children search the field vainly for her—the Beloved Himself being naïvely expressed by what looked like a small bonfire, but proved, in a strange medley of legend and Old Testament story, to be a burning bush. Santa Beata vowing herself to virginity and lying down on the narrow maiden bed she never left again; Santa Beata being visited by cherubim—little burning heads with awful eyes and folded wings—blown in at the door,while through the window showed the plain of Tuscany, pale silvery greens and blues, and in the distance Sant' Ambrogio himself, wafted on a cloud, approached the town to bear the saint away. By her side crouched her old mother, a knotted burnt-out woman with long wrists, just a literal transcript of many a prematurely old peasant mother before and since, her patient eyes seeing no one but her daughter.
The more she looked at Santa Beata the more Sophia, who without thinking much about it had a realization of her own type, was struck by the resemblance between them. The red-brown hair folded about Sophia's head was darker than the locks that lay combed out over the saint's pillow, but the long oval of the faces, the girlish thinness of modelling and the narrow eyes set in heavily folded lids over rather prominent cheekbones, were the same; and the same, too, were the pointed chins and the delicately full lips tucked in at the corners like those of a child. Santa Beata had only been sixteen at the time of her death and Sophia was twenty-two, but the earlier ripening of the South made the apparent years swing level. Suddenly Sophia turned away, fierce envy of this untroubled girl who had finished long ago with the business of life surging in her heart. The memory of the past weeks seemed shameful and she herself not fit to hold intercourse with other girls—girls to whom things had not happened. In that moment Sophia knew she had lost her girlhood none the less surely for having saved her virginity, which three things had helped to guard—a clarity of pre-vision which bade her not give Richard even what he most desired, because it showed her that it must inevitably work him misery; the knowledgethat he did not love her finely enough for such a gift to be fitting; and thirdly, the strongest thing of all—that no one who is accustomed, however imperfectly, to walk in the spiritual world, can lightly forgo the privilege. "I should have been afraid of losing touch," Sophia said long after, when she saw how that fear had constrained her. Now, looking at Santa Beata and realizing more vividly than ever before the power which virginity, as an idea, has always swayed, she felt she had forfeited, by her gain in experience, communion with those who were still virginal in soul as well as in body. On the steps of the church she passed some children playing—children still at the age when their heads are very big and round—and she remembered how, in a half-ruined castle Richard and she had visited together, two little peasant girls, clear-eyed, freckled young creatures, had taken them for husband and wife; and how one demanded shyly whether she had a baby at home. "No, I have no baby," Sophia had said quietly, and the child replied: "What a pity! He would be sweet, your baby. . . ."
"He would be sweet . . . my baby," thought Sophia, staring at the big round heads and little necks with that pang of yearning pity without which she could never look on children. It is a great truth that no woman has ever loved a man unless she has wanted to bear him a child, and the knowledge that she would never make this greatest of all offerings to Richard pressed on Sophia's heart. She was not one of those women who desire children as an end in themselves, to whom they would mean more than the husband; she was of those who long to bear them to the lovedman because for him the utmost must be suffered and given; but for any other man it would be a thing unspeakable. Therefore she saw the best put out of life for her, and she hurried away from the children on the steps. Turning down a narrow lane she came to a door in the wall, and pushing it open she looked into what seemed a lake of green light, flecked with swaying rounds of sun and chequered with deeper green shadows—a garden run luxuriantly wild. Sophia stepped inside, and on her right, built half against and half on the wall, she saw a little ochre-washed house with faded blue shutters. Wandering on, she came to some lilacs in hard, red bud that hung over a well, and passing under the arch they made she found the further end of the garden. There a flight of uneven old steps led to the top of the wall, and she went up them. At the head of the steps, the wall—which was the outer fortification of the town—widened into a circle some twenty feet across, with a stone seat inset in the parapet that ran round it, and a sundial without a hand in the middle. Sophia stood still and drew a long breath—the place, in its look of eld and aloofness, was so exactly like some enchanted spot in a fairy-story. Crossing the flagstones she looked out over the miles of plain lying below her; here and there were patches of olive-trees, not growing in masses like a grey-green sea as they did further north where he and she had seen them, but planted far apart; from where Sophia stood they looked like nothing so much as clouds of dust puffing up from the ground.
Sophia stretched herself long and slowly; then throwing off her hat, she laid her arms along the parapet and her sleek head down upon them.
"Oh, I wish I hadn't come," she moaned. "I'm going to feel again. . . ."
Her hand went out to the little hanging bag she carried and drew back again, then setting her mouth, she made herself unfasten the clasp and take out a bundle of letters which she laid on the seat beside her. As her eyes lit on the familiar writing a deadly nausea took hold of her, she felt physically sick and put her hand up to her throat to check its contraction. A letter from him always affected her in that way, so that she sat, sick and faint, unable to open it, and now these oft-read letters were as potent as ever. She noted with a vague, impersonal surprise that her hands were shaking, and folding them in her lap she sat still, forcing her thoughts, in spite of the pain it stirred in her, to go back over the past two weeks.
On looking back the whole time seemed set in a clear, sunlit atmosphere of its own as in a magic sphere where the present had always taken a more than normal clearness of edge and the past and future ceased to be. It struck her as curious that the prevailing note of those weeks should have been a sense of utter peace; not realizing that, peace being the thing his frayed nerves craved, she therefore supplied it, wrapping him round with it, living so in him and for him that while with him she received the impression of peace herself, only having sensations of her own when they were apart. His need—that was the great thing, and though she had not stopped to analysewhat his need was, she had felt it was for soothing and rest.
She was a writer, and on the money made by her first book she came to Italy, and in Florence she met him, a painter of some note, of whom she had vaguely heard in London. Although he was twenty years older than she, their minds chimed from the first; one of them had only to half say a thing for the other to understand it. At the beginning there was nothing between them but friendship, tinged—though for her quite unconsciously—with the element of sex. For him, he had since told her, things were very different from the moment he met her; to the average woman the term "physical attraction" is so meaningless that she stared in uncomprehension when he told her how profoundly she had troubled him from the first. For this girl, whose pulses had never been fluttered to quickness, and who, though in imagination she could project herself into passion, always shrank from any sign of it in actuality, was reserved the doubtful compliment of stirring the passionate side of the man's nature more violently than it had ever been before. He kept the ugly thing well hidden, and she never guessed at it until her own pity and trust and affection made her unwittingly tempt him beyond endurance. Pity, allied to the intellectual pleasure they took in each other, moved her first, for he was unhappy, and she, too, had the habit of pain. She remembered the first whole day they had taken together; how they climbed up to San Miniato and found a field in which they lay and talked, and how he came back with her to the thirteenth-century palace beside the Arno where she lodged. She had a little room with a paintedceiling, and the infant Bacchus and adoring nymphs disporting themselves in bas-relief on the mantelpiece, a room looking over the brown fluted roofs of Florence; but the great loggia where he and she sat faced the Arno, and they had coffee and cigarettes and watched the swift blue night fall over Florence while the swarm of lights waked broken reflections in the swirling water. On the loggia they exchanged a brief mention of their troubles, both commonplace enough; hers a childhood with parents who perpetually quarrelled, the mother a hard worldly woman who eventually took to drugs, and a father who had at last left for another woman the home which was so unbearable; while Sophia herself had only shaken off the horrors of it and earned her own living, barely enough at that, a few months earlier.
Richard's trouble was his wife, who seemed not unlike Sophia's mother. He was both too kindly and too weak—for his was one of those temperaments that shrink from any display of unpleasantness—to have mastered her brutally and for good—and strong enough to go on living in the same house with her because, although she made his life a weariness, she was an intensely conventional woman to whom the position of a wife separated from her husband before all the world would have been intolerable. Between him and Sophia the fact that they both knew the terror of not being able to slip out even to post a letter without dreading what they might find on going back, made a bond of sympathy.
Sophia, ignorant as she was, could not be a young, and, for some people, a beautiful woman, without having learned a few stray scraps of wisdom, and onewas that when a man began to confide his troubles to her it was as well to see less of him. But Sophia let herself drift, because she liked being with the man so much; and also the fact that he was from her own place, that the relentless gods had brought him to Florence to meet her, and would, in due course, send them both back to where, henceforth, they would know each other, gave her a curious feeling of being entrapped in some web too powerful to break. She never blamed him or let him blame himself for what inevitably happened.
"Sophia, my sweet," he wrote her in one of the letters she now picked up at random. "I didn't deliberately set to work to make love to you. I knew your beauty inflamed me and your wit delighted me. But when we first met I thought we should just see each other a few times and quarrel and laugh, and I should revel in your looks and no harm done. And now little Miss Jervis has turned into Sophia, and either I must have Sophia for ever and ever mine, or I ought to have stuck to an elderly uncle line and come away with no tears for her and no self-loathing for me, and no need to lie and shuffle and make her share in the lies and shuffles for the future."
"You'll never do that, dear," thought Sophia, laying the letter down. "When I have to come back to London we'll meet honestly, or not at all. For there's nothing on earth that's worth living in a sea of lies for. . . ." She remembered how he had asked her if she would come and see his wife, so that he and she might meet on an accepted footing, and how the doubtful taste of the proposition had jarred her. He argued that because they would be honestly "playingthe game" by his wife, Sophia need not mind the meeting; his knowledge of women was curiously insensitive and blunt, and he had no conception of how impossible it would be for Sophia to sit quietly and see another woman doing the honours of his house. In this he was not entirely to blame, for Sophia so contrived to hoodwink him that he never quite knew she loved him, certainly never knew the force of her love. He thought of her as a reckless, innocent child stung to lavish giving out of affection and pity, and so, to begin with, she had been. The woman Sophia kept up what had become a pose, not only from the pride of a maiden, but also because some instinct told her that sooner or later he would rather be able to think she had not given more.
For the first few days either of them would have declared that all was well and there was no danger, yet each day marked a distinct step further on, a definite phase passed through. Sometimes they wandered about Florence, in the Boboli and the Cascine gardens, or upon the windy heights of Fiesole; sometimes he hired a queer little carriage with swift, bedecked horses, and they drove far out into the country, not getting home till night. The day before the revelation came was one of the most exquisite they spent together, one of which Sophia could still hardly bear to think. Leaving the carriage at a little village, they wandered on foot into a lovely valley, and laughed because he called it "old mastery," pointing out the Turneresque effect of a ruined castle set high amidst a mass of olives which were being blown pale against it. Presently they came to a stream that stormed down the valley and fell into seven successive pools;deep, still pools, as green as ice, with sunlit bubbles sent driving through them by the impetus of the clear arch of descending water. Beside the largest pool, on a smooth grey slab of rock screened by the over-hanging cliff, they sat and ate their lunch of bread and hard-boiled eggs and wine, and the sun shone on the glossy red-brown hair so cunningly folded about Sophia's head, and shone in the depths of her grey eyes and on her tanned skin. When they had finished she lay a little below him, closing her eyes to feel the blown spray drift against her lids, and she never knew till he told her that his hand had been on her hair the whole time, and never knew till later still that she had been loving him even then. The day passed in a perfect harmony of speech and silences, and all the time Sophia was giving—giving peace and mothering and delight, giving the sky and the earth and the very air they breathed. Only some one who has ever made a gift of a day knows the joy that it is—how each golden moment, conscious of its own beauty, hangs poised like a held breath; how the sun and wind and flowers and the upward curves of the supporting earth are all parts of the gift, making the giver a god who pours out creation for his friend.
The next day they took train to Pisa on a moresophisticatederrand, since he had undertaken to make a sketch of the tower for a friend who was "sheeking" some Italian backgrounds. Sophia wandered happily about the town while he did so, and then they met for lunch in the garden of an old inn.
"I'm afraid of to-day," he told her, "because it can't be as perfect as yesterday. Nothing could—that's the worst of a day like that."
"I'llmakeit as perfect," Sophia replied, and she kept her word. She still had no idea she loved him, she only knew that she wanted to shield and protect him, that she was happy with him and felt the power to make him happy, and that she trusted him utterly. Without realizing it, she tempted him cruelly by her very trust, and that day her calm recklessness of speech, her gaze that meeting his so straight and untroubled, disturbed him so profoundly, were too much for him.
"Take off your glove," he said suddenly.
Sophia's notions of love had been culled from books, and she considered it inseparable from what she termed "thrills." How was she to know that a woman, especially what is called a "nice" woman, can love without the promptings of the pulses? Because she felt no sensuous "thrill" as the tone of command, it never occurred to her to think she could be in love, wherein she was making another common literary mistake—that of thinking that every woman enjoys being mastered. Sophia found her joy in ready compliance with the demands of the beloved, not in arranging set scenes of clashing wills and conciliations. Taking off her glove, she gave him her hand.
"When I say that I want to kiss you now," he said, "it doesn't mean in the way it would have, even a day or two ago. I told you then you affected me . . . but now it would be because I love you."
Sophia's hand moved slightly in his.
"Yes," she said hesitatingly, "in a way—of course. I know you're very fond of me—and all that."
"Intheway," he returned, "and I'm not fit to hold your hand. D'you know what the life of an average man is like—especially of a man in my circumstances?"
"You mean—women?"
"Yes—bought women," he said brutally. "Does it make a lot of difference to you?"
Sophia, refusing to let her mind so much as dwell with any effort of realization on his confession, closed her hand firmly over his.
"It doesn't make any difference. Nothing does. If I could look after you—if you were free to be looked after—you wouldn't have to go to other women any more. I care about you more than about any man I've ever met."
"And I don't care about you more than any woman I've ever met. You're unique and you're you, but I've been in love a good many times. And there's always the big one I've told you about. I feel I've so little left to give, and yet—by God, Sophia! Icouldgive to you, even battered old I!"
"I'd be such a wife to you," said Sophia proudly, clenching her free hand, "that I should fear no other woman on earth."
"And you wouldn't need to . . . Sophia!" he cried. "How you would give!"
"And we mustn't, either of us," said Sophia, and to soften the speech she bent her head swiftly and kissed the hand she held.
"My dear . . . !" he said huskily, and Sophia led the way out of the garden.
That night, after he had left her at her shabby old palace, he went back to his hotel and sat up, smoking heavily, most of the night. Towards morning, he wrote her a letter—the first in order of those beside her on the seat. She took it up now and read it once again:
"Sophia, Sophia," it ran, "I'm in the depths of misery. What have I done to you and what is going to come of it all? When this time is over? When we're back in London and out of lotus land? You know—stolen interviews and weeks without meeting, and that old and awful struggle between the 'game' at home and my inclinations abroad. And I've hardly written so far when I'm feeling better. Dear, what does all that matter? I feel the shadow of that coming gloom on me already, but how glorious the sunshine's been for me! I'm not going to think or worry—yet. What will happen when I'm back in London must happen, but if I had you by me now I shouldn't care a damn for that. I feel stupid and stockish. There are such millions of things I want to say to you, Sophia—and they're mostly middle-aged things. That's the worst of it. Warnings I feel I ought to give you about myself and my temper and my terrible ease in giving way to adverse circumstances. I've told you I'm not big enough or strong enough for you to care for me except as a useful old pal. You'll find me out and hate me. All sorts of ghastly bogies are waiting to jump out at me. They'll get me. But you, dear, you gracious, reckless woman-child, whatever you think of me in the future you can't rob me of to-day and yesterday and all those days, and especially to-day. Things like that are too sacred to write about, almost to think of. And we're deadly honest with each other, that's a great thing. The more I dream of you the more I want you here, now. I simply can't write, I've been nearly as high this afternoon as I shall ever get, perhaps quite—and one has to pay for that. Oh, my dear; please God, you'llnever pay for me! Sophia, you're very dear to me. Richard. You poor child—you glorious woman!"
The next day both fell from their high altitude. They had driven to a little half-deserted town, a white, dead, staring, crumbling place—a place of blind windows and glaring silences. Both felt a sense of tension, and leaving the carriage they wandered round the walls, and climbing over a broken gap sat down on a grassy spur of the hillside, with their backs to the terrible little town. As usual, by now, they talked about themselves, chiefly of him, and he told her that though several women had been fond of him as a friend and liked to "mother" him even as she did, no one of them had cared for him in another way or kissed him as a lover kisses. He slipped an arm round her shoulders as he spoke. Sophia was as ignorant as an infant of what kissing like a lover might be, and in a rush of pity and affection she turned her face up towards him.
"Oh, it isn't as if we were going on afterwards like this," she said; "this is just a bit cut out of life for me to give you. It's taking nothing from her, she doesn't want to give you anything. And I want to make this bit as splendid as I can for you."
He felt her shoulder touch his as she leant her warm young body towards him, he saw the glory of her eager eyes and mouth, and he caught her to him, crushing her fiercely. . . . Sophia wondered if this awful kiss were ever going to stop; she had never known there was such a way of kissing—a hard pressure, a sucking of her very soul—and she was filled with horror under it. When he loosed her she turned and buried her face against the wall. For a while they sat in silence, then she saw him kissing her coat, her sleeve, then herhead was pressed back against the wall and his mouth came to hers again. She stayed passive, dazed. In silence they went to the carriage and drove away, and almost silently they parted. Sophia spent the night in a misery of shame, he spent it in mingled excitement and remorse: fearful lest he had aroused in her a passion which would need to be satisfied at the cost of social disaster.
Next day they talked of nothing in particular in a desultory way and did not refer to what had happened until, wandering through one of the wooded mountain slopes beyond Florence, they came on a tiny sportsman's hut with a roof of red-fluted tiles and a huge chimney. Sophia peeped and went in; he followed. Within, the hut was only about five feet square; flame-coloured leaves had drifted in through the open doorway and lay piled on the hearth; on the wall were some names rudely scrawled in charcoal.
"How did you sleep?" he asked suddenly.
"I didn't. I was thinking what I should say to you to-day."
"What was it?"
"Never, never again be like you were yesterday. I didn't know it was like that. It was dreadful. I can't bear it."
He took her hands and held them.
"Never, I promise you. I had an awful night. I didn't know what to think or wish or do. Let's get out of this hut. It's too small."
The rest of the day they spent happily under the trees, and it seemed to her that the sense of rest and peace was stronger than if it had never been broken. Very soon came their last day together. They droveto a deserted castle on a hill, called Castello di Luna, and as they went Sophia turned to him.
"To-day's the last," she said, "and I'm going to make it the most beautiful present of all to you. We'll pretend, like children. We'll pretend there's only to-day in the world, that there are no obligations beyond here and now, that we are happy people—we'll pretend."
He gathered her in his arms and kissed her again and again fiercely, but not with the abandonment which had frightened her before, and her heart turned heavy within her and she knew she loved him. They stayed till evening in the neglected garden of the old castle, left discreetly alone by Lucia and Amadea, the little peasant custodians who lived with a beetle-browed mother and a score of younger children in the tower over the gate. It was Lucia who ventured an opinion as to Sophia's baby, and Sophia emptied her pocket-bottle of lavender water over the little girls' blue-check handkerchiefs and told Richard to give them fivelireapiece against the day when they should have babies of their own.
Then, in the quiet old garden, he and she sat and talked and were silent, and, with her arms round him, she drew his head on to her breast, and they played the dangerous game of saying what they would do when they were married.
"Your baby would be sweet!" he quoted to her. "Would you dare even that for me, Sophia?"
"Would I not?" she breathed.
"Oh, I can't give up hoping it may all become possible!" he cried at last, but she shuddered a little. "Don't," she said, "it's building on a grave."
But her heart ached at the sweetness of the vision. She never felt any temptation to fling her cap over the windmill for him, partly because it is very true that "Les bonnes femmes n'ont pas ces tentations-là," partly because of the much greater things she wanted to give—a hearth that would always warm him, a pillow that would always rest him, and on the hearth a cradle—and these were things that he could not come at through a back door.
They said good-bye on the loggia in Florence, and that night he left for Leghorn. He wrote to her in the train; and bringing her thoughts back to the present by an effort, Sophia picked up the letter now.
"Sophia, Sophia," she read, "is it only you who pay? My sweet, I hope you will never feel what I felt as I went home. The bare truth is I am a coward and a cad, besides being a fool. I began it, and if I didn't know where it was going to lead to I was a fool to play with fire, and I was a cad to go on. Dear, I'd rather go through years of anything you feel than ten minutes of what I'm feeling. But I've got to stick it henceforth when I'm not buoyed up with your presence. It's been so gorgeous, you've been so heavenly, that I'd do it all again. But now besides the awful want of you there's the clear vision of what I am, and it's hideous. I haven't the pluck or the passion to carry you right off before all the world whether you would or no, nor the sense and the honesty and the decency to be just friends with you. Oh, Sophia, I hate myself for it, and hate myself most for being glad, deep down, that Ididget what you gave me. I can't find anything solid or honest in me anywhere, except my feeling for you and my joy in our time together, andI've no right to that. This is cruelly unlike what I've preached to you about possessing for ever past joys. I suppose I shall forget my own wickedness and even come to regret that I didn't take more—takeallby force or guile—for perhaps, after all, it's better to be a downright brute than a half-and-halfer. If so, shan't I be even more unworthy of all you've given me, you sweet, foolish, lavish child? If you were here now, Sophia, I shouldn't be feeling all this. You'd only have to smile at me and I should get back my pride in having won what I have won. But without you I seem to see more clearly what I am. My sweet, wouldn't you be happier if you saw me so, too? All I feel now is a desperate need of you, your hands and your hair and your eyes and your mouth and your voice and your wit and your dear mothering. And next month? Secret meetings and concerted lies, and all the rest of the filthy game? And I drag you into it all because I want you and because my affairs make it necessary to do it or part for good. I'm trying to look at it clearly and see all the worst—misunderstandings, preoccupation, work, moods, fears, all the things that are going to prevent a wretched thing like me from being where he wants to be and doing what he could for you. I wish from the bottom of my soul the train would smash up and kill me to-night. Oh, if there were only the past few weeks to consider it would be simple enough. I've had such a time as I've never had before, and you made it. You said you would and you did. You've given me such a time as a woman never gave a man in our circumstances before. But there's you and the world and the future to consider. It's very small moral satisfaction to me that I didn'tdeliberately set to work to make love to you. It grew, as you showed me more and more how adorable you were, how gracious and desirable and generous and trusting, you dear nymph of the woods, virgin-mother, friend and lover and comforter. It's no good going on like this, man's a self-deceiving kind of brute, and perhaps before long all the glory of the days of you, you, you, will fit in quite comfortably and the poison of self-hatred cease to hurt. I stop to-morrow night at the Grand Hotel, Livorno. Will you write to me there, sweet? If I could really be sorry for it all I should like myself better. But I can't. I can only hate myself for glorying in what I got by such means. Write to me—I'm frightened and alone."Richard."
"Sophia, Sophia," she read, "is it only you who pay? My sweet, I hope you will never feel what I felt as I went home. The bare truth is I am a coward and a cad, besides being a fool. I began it, and if I didn't know where it was going to lead to I was a fool to play with fire, and I was a cad to go on. Dear, I'd rather go through years of anything you feel than ten minutes of what I'm feeling. But I've got to stick it henceforth when I'm not buoyed up with your presence. It's been so gorgeous, you've been so heavenly, that I'd do it all again. But now besides the awful want of you there's the clear vision of what I am, and it's hideous. I haven't the pluck or the passion to carry you right off before all the world whether you would or no, nor the sense and the honesty and the decency to be just friends with you. Oh, Sophia, I hate myself for it, and hate myself most for being glad, deep down, that Ididget what you gave me. I can't find anything solid or honest in me anywhere, except my feeling for you and my joy in our time together, andI've no right to that. This is cruelly unlike what I've preached to you about possessing for ever past joys. I suppose I shall forget my own wickedness and even come to regret that I didn't take more—takeallby force or guile—for perhaps, after all, it's better to be a downright brute than a half-and-halfer. If so, shan't I be even more unworthy of all you've given me, you sweet, foolish, lavish child? If you were here now, Sophia, I shouldn't be feeling all this. You'd only have to smile at me and I should get back my pride in having won what I have won. But without you I seem to see more clearly what I am. My sweet, wouldn't you be happier if you saw me so, too? All I feel now is a desperate need of you, your hands and your hair and your eyes and your mouth and your voice and your wit and your dear mothering. And next month? Secret meetings and concerted lies, and all the rest of the filthy game? And I drag you into it all because I want you and because my affairs make it necessary to do it or part for good. I'm trying to look at it clearly and see all the worst—misunderstandings, preoccupation, work, moods, fears, all the things that are going to prevent a wretched thing like me from being where he wants to be and doing what he could for you. I wish from the bottom of my soul the train would smash up and kill me to-night. Oh, if there were only the past few weeks to consider it would be simple enough. I've had such a time as I've never had before, and you made it. You said you would and you did. You've given me such a time as a woman never gave a man in our circumstances before. But there's you and the world and the future to consider. It's very small moral satisfaction to me that I didn'tdeliberately set to work to make love to you. It grew, as you showed me more and more how adorable you were, how gracious and desirable and generous and trusting, you dear nymph of the woods, virgin-mother, friend and lover and comforter. It's no good going on like this, man's a self-deceiving kind of brute, and perhaps before long all the glory of the days of you, you, you, will fit in quite comfortably and the poison of self-hatred cease to hurt. I stop to-morrow night at the Grand Hotel, Livorno. Will you write to me there, sweet? If I could really be sorry for it all I should like myself better. But I can't. I can only hate myself for glorying in what I got by such means. Write to me—I'm frightened and alone.
"Richard."
"My sweet," the next letter began, "your letter has come. It's what I knew it would be, so brave and sweet and good that I can only wonder at you all the more. It soothes and heals and cheers me, and once more I am drinking your life-blood and using your youth and splendour to live on. Is there anything you wouldn't do for my comfort? When I fell asleep this morning about dawn I dreamt of you and woke all hot and frightened, because I thought I heard you moaning, a horrible, strangled moan. Did I? Oh, my dear, I hope not. I can't get at the truth all these miles away. You see, that brave, wise letter of yours might have meant a huge effort of the will and brain, and not be a direct outflow from the you that gave me those days. Shall I ever see that you again, I wonder? Your letter's like the touch of your lips on my forehead—cooling, healing, bracing and most sweet. Dear, you're not only all I've told you beforethat you are, but you're wise as well. Oh! child, girl, most wonderfully woman-wise. My sweet, what you could do for me if only we could belong to each other. Sophia, I'm trying hard to knock it into my head that we can't, but I can see now that the trouble's going to be, not remorse or anxiety, but just the big, aching lack of you, and not of your beauty so much as of your tenderness and wit and your weak, clinging strength. Oh, Sophia, I'm writing a lot of rot, but it isn't rot really. I mean, you understand. D'you remember the day when you said you'd exactly fitted that long body of yours into the ground? That's how I feel when I rest my mind on yours, only it's the ground and not me that does the shaping."
"My sweet," the next letter began, "your letter has come. It's what I knew it would be, so brave and sweet and good that I can only wonder at you all the more. It soothes and heals and cheers me, and once more I am drinking your life-blood and using your youth and splendour to live on. Is there anything you wouldn't do for my comfort? When I fell asleep this morning about dawn I dreamt of you and woke all hot and frightened, because I thought I heard you moaning, a horrible, strangled moan. Did I? Oh, my dear, I hope not. I can't get at the truth all these miles away. You see, that brave, wise letter of yours might have meant a huge effort of the will and brain, and not be a direct outflow from the you that gave me those days. Shall I ever see that you again, I wonder? Your letter's like the touch of your lips on my forehead—cooling, healing, bracing and most sweet. Dear, you're not only all I've told you beforethat you are, but you're wise as well. Oh! child, girl, most wonderfully woman-wise. My sweet, what you could do for me if only we could belong to each other. Sophia, I'm trying hard to knock it into my head that we can't, but I can see now that the trouble's going to be, not remorse or anxiety, but just the big, aching lack of you, and not of your beauty so much as of your tenderness and wit and your weak, clinging strength. Oh, Sophia, I'm writing a lot of rot, but it isn't rot really. I mean, you understand. D'you remember the day when you said you'd exactly fitted that long body of yours into the ground? That's how I feel when I rest my mind on yours, only it's the ground and not me that does the shaping."
The next letter was from Marseilles. The last page, which Sophia read through twice, ran thus:
"So good-bye to it all, but not good-bye to Sophia. Dear, I believe very strongly in spiritual converse (I can't find the word I want for it). But don't you feel that my armsareround you? I can feel your head on my shoulder and your hair against my cheek. I mean that it isn't just cheating oneself with vain imaginations to meet like that. I mean to go on thinking of you hard and the vision soothes, not aggravates, the longing, and I will meet you like that at our Castello di Luna. But oh, my dear, I wish it were really truenow! There is so much I want from you and must go on wanting. Come to me in thought, my sweet, until we can see and touch and hear each other again. We will always say to each other whatever is in our hearts and minds. And so I'm just starting to go back—Sophia, I can't say 'home.' Home means what youare. Oh, I thought I should go back gaily and take it all up, but it makes me sick with dread. I ought never to have got out of harness. It's better to go on till one drops than to taste freedom and have to give it up. Sweet, your eyes and your mouth and your hair are with me always. Don't call me a materialist, and say it's only your body's beauty that I value. You're sweet to me through and through. Oh, Sophia, come often to meet me in Monte Luna. And there is Lucia to say sweet, impossible things to make us dream.Ti bacio gl'occhi."Richard."
"So good-bye to it all, but not good-bye to Sophia. Dear, I believe very strongly in spiritual converse (I can't find the word I want for it). But don't you feel that my armsareround you? I can feel your head on my shoulder and your hair against my cheek. I mean that it isn't just cheating oneself with vain imaginations to meet like that. I mean to go on thinking of you hard and the vision soothes, not aggravates, the longing, and I will meet you like that at our Castello di Luna. But oh, my dear, I wish it were really truenow! There is so much I want from you and must go on wanting. Come to me in thought, my sweet, until we can see and touch and hear each other again. We will always say to each other whatever is in our hearts and minds. And so I'm just starting to go back—Sophia, I can't say 'home.' Home means what youare. Oh, I thought I should go back gaily and take it all up, but it makes me sick with dread. I ought never to have got out of harness. It's better to go on till one drops than to taste freedom and have to give it up. Sweet, your eyes and your mouth and your hair are with me always. Don't call me a materialist, and say it's only your body's beauty that I value. You're sweet to me through and through. Oh, Sophia, come often to meet me in Monte Luna. And there is Lucia to say sweet, impossible things to make us dream.Ti bacio gl'occhi.
"Richard."
Sophia opened the last sheet of paper. It enfolded three primroses, and on it was written "Primavere per la Primavera." She looked at them a moment, then wrapped them up again and put letters and flowers back in the bag. Behind her the sun was near to setting, and the blaze of it lay full on the towers, making them a bright tawny-grey against the sky of deep steel-colour, and turning to tongues of flame the tufts of yellow gillyflowers—Santa Beata's own plant—that sprang out here and there from the sheer masonry. Some jackdaws flew out of the nearest belfry, and circled round it, black amid the brightness. Sophia sprang up and walked to and fro.
"I shall feel again, if I stay here. Unbearably. I wish I hadn't come. I'll go away to-morrow.Richard, Richard, Richard!"
But on the morrow, instead of leaving Sant' Ambrogio, Sophia moved from the inn to the little house in the walled garden. Not until she was installed there did she discover that though the house was comparatively modern, the garden was the very one whereSanta Beata had seen her visions and dreamed her dreams.
The first morning she spent in the place in the wall, writing him a letter.
"My dear boy," she wrote, "by the time you get this you will be back in the thick of things. If I have given you anything that will help you to go on it's all I want. You must just look on this past month as a holiday snatched from the lap of the gods, and realize, what you're always telling me, that what one's once had one has for always. For there can't be any more, and I'm not even going to write to you. Oh, I feel as though I were failing you in not writing, but I always meant not to, even when you were making plans about it. Letters keep up an atmosphere, and that's better not. Yes, I know what you mean about spiritual meeting. I'm sort of fused with you as I write. I'm not here—or even in the future with you—as you read, for I've pulled the future to me and made it now, now, now, and I'm with you, in the present, as you read this, and I'm drawing your tired head to me, and I feel the very way the thick stuff of your coat arches up under the pressure of my arm. I am you in every bit of me as I write; not yours, but you. But, for the future, in that way only. I felt nothing wrong in all I gave you here, because you needed what I had to give and we were hurting nobody. I'm sure that's the great thing, to hurt nobody, and that includes you and even me. It would be hurting both of us if we were to go on writingbecause it would keep it all up and we shouldn't be able to meet again just as friends, and if we make the break we shall; we are strong—or weak—enough for that. Richard, let your answer to this be a long one, won't you? Try and tell me everything I shall want to hear in it because it will be all I shall have to live on. Dear child, take care of yourself, don't overwork and don't forget that open windows are the best thing for that throat of yours. Don't let things at home worry you more than you can help, and always remember there's no need to worry about me at all."Sophia."
"My dear boy," she wrote, "by the time you get this you will be back in the thick of things. If I have given you anything that will help you to go on it's all I want. You must just look on this past month as a holiday snatched from the lap of the gods, and realize, what you're always telling me, that what one's once had one has for always. For there can't be any more, and I'm not even going to write to you. Oh, I feel as though I were failing you in not writing, but I always meant not to, even when you were making plans about it. Letters keep up an atmosphere, and that's better not. Yes, I know what you mean about spiritual meeting. I'm sort of fused with you as I write. I'm not here—or even in the future with you—as you read, for I've pulled the future to me and made it now, now, now, and I'm with you, in the present, as you read this, and I'm drawing your tired head to me, and I feel the very way the thick stuff of your coat arches up under the pressure of my arm. I am you in every bit of me as I write; not yours, but you. But, for the future, in that way only. I felt nothing wrong in all I gave you here, because you needed what I had to give and we were hurting nobody. I'm sure that's the great thing, to hurt nobody, and that includes you and even me. It would be hurting both of us if we were to go on writingbecause it would keep it all up and we shouldn't be able to meet again just as friends, and if we make the break we shall; we are strong—or weak—enough for that. Richard, let your answer to this be a long one, won't you? Try and tell me everything I shall want to hear in it because it will be all I shall have to live on. Dear child, take care of yourself, don't overwork and don't forget that open windows are the best thing for that throat of yours. Don't let things at home worry you more than you can help, and always remember there's no need to worry about me at all.
"Sophia."
* * * * *
During the time that she was waiting for the answer to her letter Sophia lived at tension, finding relief in the making of her last gift to him—for she wrote him a poem, and in spite of the deliberate placidity of the thing it eased the fierce pressure of her thoughts in the way that only creation can. Sophia was soon to enter on her greatest strength of feeling. Richard felt more intensely at the time than at looking back, when his emotions were stale to him, and he marvelled at the strength they had had; Sophia never knew till the actual hour was past what the depth of her emotion was. Partly this was that in their weeks together the need for calm and clarity on her side was so great, that when with him her being was absorbed in his and so her own feelings had no room for conscious movement until afterwards. There are times, when affairs are at the crest, when, by its intensity, sensation seems numb, but all the while each little thing seen by both inward and outward vision is registered on the mind with peculiar sharpness of edge; only to be realized when the wave of incident has passed, and even then aperiod of numbness may intervene before realization enters the soul, deep-driven by the intolerance of memory. Sophia was living in that tense numbness now, but through it external things made their potency felt. She grew to know every corner of the little town, and during the day she would wander several times into the cool dim church, to breathe the silence and the peace of it. And "Richard . . ." she prayed, "Richard . . ." She knew of no definite thing to ask for him, she could not pray he might be free, and happiness was an illusion she had learned to dread; she could only turn his name over and over in her mind, lift it up, hold it up and out with all the strength of her will. Still, in spite of this focusing of her life—a focusing that was to grow even more passionate in long, hot London months to come—there was no unity about it, little sights and impulses fraught with value, yet failed to show any coherent reason; some great cord that could bind everything together was still not gathered up.
One afternoon she wandered out of the town by the big gates, and turning to look back at the sweeping wall she saw a narrow path that girdled its base, rising and falling over the rippling flanks of the hill. As she looked at it some dim memory stirred in her—she remembered having read in her childhood that in olden days a man might own as much land as he could encompass in one walk, returning to his starting-point. The root-instinct of enclosure was in the idea, and Sophia had a sudden fancy to make the unconscious town her own by the old method. Without thinking of much beyond the physical act, she started along the little track noting idly yet definitely the look of the stones along the spreading base of the fortificationsand the sickles of light made by the sky's reflection on the curving-over grass blades on the other side of the path. She went slowly and when she had half-girdled the town she lay down on a smooth slope, and, locking her hands behind her head, gazed over the fertile plain. On an almond-tree near a nightingale began to sing; against the first pink of sunset she saw his little body as a slightly ruffled blot. She let her mind fill with the song so that it became the accompaniment to her thought, and slowly the first glimpse of comprehension began for her.
First she fell to wondering what the plain would look like seen from above—from the point of view of God. "The human mind, looking from such a standpoint, would have to concentrate on one thing at a time if it wanted to attain any idea but a general vagueness," thought Sophia. "One would have to focus on mountain-ranges, or rivers, or railway-lines. . . ."
She lay imagining it, seeing how the shining network of railroads formed a web over the roundness of the world; thinking how it would seem to this poised mind a mere web and nothing more. A meaningless web; instead of thousands of roads each leading to a different destination and intent on its own business. But if the mind, as well as the point of vision, were that of a god, then each line would be fraught with its individuality—and not merely because each led somewhere; there was more to it than that—Sophia struggled towards it. . . . A different time had seen the making of each railroad, different men worked at the making of them, men with souls which had thought and felt as they laid the steel ribbons on which other souls would be rushed along without guessing anything ofthe thoughts and feelings. And yet, surely those emotions could not die. . . . Perhaps, one evening, a workman, straightening his back and drawing his hand over his wet forehead, had looked towards the sunset, and in the vague irrational way some scenes are registered on the mind for always, that aspect of sky and darkening hedge against it would stay in his memory, oddly mixed with the feel of the wet drops on his hand and the easing of the muscles across his back, to be recalled by any similar moment for the rest of his life. If so, how steeped with humanity those few yards of steel would be! And, apart from the emotions connected with it by the sense of sight, what an important part the railroad must play to the men and their wives and children to whom it meant food and fire! And then, the lines finished, each train going over them would pile the human associations thicker yet, heaping up all the feelings, according to their intensity, of the people in the trains. A god, looking down, instead of merely seeing the network of steel, would see as well all the human emotions still clinging to the places where they were lived—a mystical web woven over tangible things, growing deeper with the years. "Which," said Sophia, the first gleam of personal light flashing through her, "is why walking round a place makes it yours if you do it for that. My seeing of this path will be here always, I'm making a belt of consciousness round the town. It's my city! My city set upon a hill!"
She scrambled to her feet and for a moment leant her cheek against the rough stone of the wall, then she went on round the town and in at the great gate.
That evening she sat in Beata's garden, finishing herpoem to Richard. Elate as she was, she still had no hint of what her discovery meant, or of how the garden would bring the final revelation to her, but even then she felt the soothing influence that held it and her as she wrote out her poem. It went to him without a title, but for herself she headed it:
To the Forbidden Lover