'In the clear spaces of heaven,As sisters and lovers, sitBeatrice and Thou embraced—Hand and hand, waist and waist,And smile at the worship givenBy Earth, and the men in itTo whom you were manifest.'
I quote my own poetry, because, oddly enough, nobody else has remarked upon the fact.”
He continued: “When she did what it pleased her to do, it was said by fools that I had inspired her. Fool among fools, I thought so myself at the time, and moved Earth and Heaven, and Hell and Ingram, to save her from an act of magnanimity the like of which I have never heard of. Bless you! if I had never lived, she would have acted as she did, because she was incapable of seeing evil, incapable of acting against her heart. Well! and the thing was done—and I had to face it. I had it all out with myself, and decided that no harm could come to her. From that hour I have never seen her with my waking eyes. Yet she is here. She is always here....
“My answer to you is simple. I have all of her of which I am capable. I have never left her because she has never left me....
“I wrote out my heart in my first years of knowing her; but since then I have gone under the harrow of this world, where there can be no singing. Now that I am at peace my voice has come back. I listen to what she tells me, and note it. Like Dante,vo significando:I am a drain-pipe for her spirit. She was Hymnia to me once, and I sang of Open Country; now she is Despoina, Mistress of the Night. Words come thronging to me, phrases, rhythms; but not Form. I shall get out a poem one of these days—when the harrow rests. And that will be its name: Rest Harrow.”
He broke out after a pause-“Her beauty! What is it to the purpose to put its semblance into words? Its significance is the heart of the matter. We see the earth as hill and valley, pasture and cloud, sky and sea. Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety. What are words to such a power? It is tothatI stretch out my arms. I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and I are one. I must be resumed into the divine energy whose appearance is but a broken hint of it. So it is with Her: not what she appears, but what she stands for is the miracle. Her beauty is not in dimple and curve, though her breasts are softer than the snowy hills, and the liquor of her mouth sweeter than honey of limes. If I lay on the floor of the Aegean and looked up to the sun I should not see such blue as glimmers in her eyes. But these are figures, halting symbols. Her form, her glow, her eager, lovely breath are her soul put into speech for us to read. You might say that her nobility was that of the Jungfrau on a night of stars. So her body's beauty is but a poem written by God about her soul.”
Glyde sat up and looked at him across the fire. “I know you. There is but one man who has loved her as you do. You are her poet. You are Senhouse.”
Senhouse nodded. “That is my name. You know her, then?” His face glowed darkly. “You have known her—you!”
“I saw her four months ago. I was in servitude in a house where she too was made a servant. For her sake, I tell you again, I downed Ingram.”
Senhouse said sharply, “It was for your own. You aren't fit to talk to her. You have unclean lips. You don't hurt her, for you cannot. You hurt yourself infinitely. Why, a dog would do as you did, and possibly be right; but you, not being a dog, have broken your own rules. You have trodden on your own honour, and, like the dull fool that you are, come out wrapped in your silly self-esteem as if it was a flag. I wish that you could see yourself as I see you—or rather I hope you never may; for if you did you would see no reason to live.” The words, frozen with scorn, cut like hailstones. The guest cowered, with the whip about his face. Senhouse rose.
“Follow me,” he said.
Glyde also rose to his feet, and, as if he was giddy, looked blankly about him. “O God, what have I done? O God, what am I?” He dashed his hand over his eyes. “I can't see. I suppose I never could.” He turned upon Senhouse. “You! Why do you harbour such a rat as I?”
Senhouse gave him pitiful eyes. “If you think yourself a rat, you are in the way to be more. Come, we will be friends yet. You're near the end of your tether, I think. Let me tuck you into a blanket.”
In the morning Glyde, in a humble mood, drank quantities of small beer. In other words, he told his story of Sanchia, of Ingram, and of Mrs. Wilmot. He was so steered by questions from Senhouse that he came, towards the end, to see that if any one had driven his mistress into a life of bondage to Ingram it was himself and his presumptuous arm.
“You must have offended her beyond expression,” he was told. “First, her fine esteem in her own spotless robe, which you have smeared with beastly blood and heat; next, her sense of reason clear as day; next, and worst, her logical faculty by which she sees it to be a law of the earth that nothing can be bought without a price. Oh, you precious young donkey! And who the mischief are you, pray, to meddle in the affairs of high ladies—you who can't manage your own better than to do with your foolish muscles what is the work of a man's heart? Love! You don't know how to spell the word. But I am getting angry again, and I don't want to do that. I'll tell you what I shall do with you. You shall stay with me here till you are well, and then you shall go to London and find Despoina—”
“Do you mean Sanchia?” Glyde was still unregenerate at heart.
“I mean whom I say, your mistress and mine. You are not fit to name her by any other name.”
“No, no—I know it,” said the youth; “but her name is so beautiful.”
“Everything about her is beautiful,” said Senhouse, “therefore see that you go to her cleansed and sweetened. Now, when you have found her you shall beg her pardon on your knees—”
“Never!” said Glyde, grittily in his teeth.
“On your heart's knees, you fool,” cried Senhouse, with a roar which rolled about the hills. “On the knees of your rat's heart. You shall beg her pardon on your knees for your beastly interference, presumption, mulishness, and graceless manhood; and then you shall leave her immediately, and thank God for the breath of her forgiveness. This also is important. You are not to name me who have sent you.” His eyes shone with the gleam of tears. “Never name me to her, young Glyde, for I'll tell you now that for every stripe I've dusted your jacket with you owe me forty—and you can lay on when you please.”
“For I,” he continued, after a pause for breath, while Glyde stared fearfully upon him, “for I, too, have betrayed her.”
They said no more at that time, but all day Glyde followed Senhouse about like a dog.
In the evening of what to the undrilled youth was a hard-spent day, Senhouse unfolded his heart and talked long and eloquently of love and other mysteries of our immortal life.
“The attainment of our desires,” he said, “appears to every one of us to be a Law of Nature, and so, no doubt, it is. But that is equally valid which says, 'To every man that which he is fit to enjoy.' The task of men is to reconcile the two. That once done you are whole—nay, you are holy.”
“I believe that I am in the way of that salvation, look you, for I know now that there is hardly a thing upon the earth which I cannot do without. That being so, and all things of equal value, or of no value,I have them all. They are at the disposal of that part of myself which enters no markets and cannot be chaffered away. Wind, rain, and sun have bleached me; dinners of herbs have reduced my flesh to obedience; incessant toil, with meditation under the stars, have driven my thoughts along channels graved deep by patient plodding of the field. I am become one with Nature. I have watched the wheeling of the seasons until, to escape vertigo, I picture myself as a fixed point, and see the spheres in their courses revolve about me.”
Mystic sayings, aphorisms oozed from him like resin from a pine.
“It is error to suppose that discomfort is holy. Holiness is harmony. Men have lost sight of the sanctity of the body. Rightly considered, indigestion is a great sin.”
“Passion, which is a state of becoming, is not holy, for holiness is a state of being. But it is noble, because it is a straining after appeasement, which is a harmony.
“Man is an ape, or a god, but certainly a god in this, that he can make himself either. It is by no means certain, however, that this potentiality is not also possessed by the ape.
“Appeasement of passion is fulfilment of our being, which out of ferment makes wine, though riot seeks rest.”
He was not always so transcendental. Here we have him closer to the matter.
“A woman when she loves is a seraph winged. When she does not she is a chrysalis, a husk, or a shell. In love she follows the man, but appears to fly him, as a shepherd goes before the sheep he is really driving. Out of it she is an empty vase, to be revered by us for the sacred wine which she may hold, as a priest handles fearfully the chalice.
“She has but one law, the law of her love, which says to her, 'Give, give, give.' See here how she differs from the man, to whom love is but one of many healthy appetites—not a divine mission. Love, hunger, hunting, or a taste for picture-dealing, say to him, 'Take, take.'
“Yet it is no wonder that the sexes go in fear of each other, each a mystery to each. For my part, I have never been close to a woman without a desire to cover my eyes.”
And here he got level with her, and showed her radiant beside him.
“A young woman with shining eyes, blown-back hair and face on fire, holding out her heart from the threshold, stretching it out at arms' length, crying, 'Who will take this? To whom may I give it?' A vision here of Heaven's core of light. I have seen it. I, Senhouse, have seen the Holy Grail.
“She stood with me upon the threshold of the world, just so, with blown-back hair and shining eyes. Blessed one, blessed prodigal! She poured out her heart like water-for a dog to lap. He was dog-headed, full in the eye, a rich feeder. She decked him with the fair garlands of her thoughts, she made him glisten with her holy oils. She crowned him with starry beams from her eyes, she sweetened him with the breath of her pure prayers. She robed him in white and scarlet, for he was wrapped in her soul and sprinkled with her passion. And she said, 'I love a divine person. I am ready to die for him. Make haste. Pile the fire, sharpen the knife; bind me with cords, and drive deep. I die that he may live.' O Gods, and Sanchia gave herself for Nevile Ingram!”
He was never alone, it appeared, for she was with him constantly, a vivifying principle. He had ensphered her in light; she was unassailable—his fly in amber. Ingram, Chevenix, all Wanless, might have daily converse with her, and one might grudge her her self-sufficiency, and another see her a pretty girl in a mess. To him she was a fairy in harness, “a lovely lady garmented in light,” to whom the rubs of the world could do no harm. She wore crystal armour. They did not know her, could not see her, those who used her for their elemental needs. “Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart.”
He told young Glyde that he had reached this transcendental eyrie of his by painful degrees. No person of Sanchia's acquaintance had suffered more than he by her desperate affair. He had been her first lover, and her only confidant, for she had been what one calls a “difficult” girl, who gave out nothing and had no friends. Her sisters knew very little about her, her mother nothing. It had been Senhouse who had called up the spirit that was in her—that extraordinary candour of vision which shrank from the judgment of nothing in heaven or earth “upon the merits.” He had himself been at first amazed by her quality; but before he had discovered it he had adored her; so it had seemed all of a piece with her exquisite perfection. That first sight he had had of her, in the sun-dappled woodland glade, with her gown above her knees, setting her foot in the unknown depths of a black pool—that she might rescue lilies from suffocation—was surely typical of that which followed—when, barely twenty-one, she trod deliberately, in her world's shocked face, a road which leads without return to a point at which the world says, “I cannot see you, you are dead.” But she had never faltered, had seen no shame, and felt none. Nevile was unhappy, and needed her. If there was no other way of serving him, she must take that way. So she told him, Senhouse, her only friend; and he cried aloud in his agony, “God save her,” while his soul was saying, “Beatrice never shrank from hell, nor ever looked back. No more, God be thanked, does Sanchia.” When the thing was done, and she had gone with unbowed head into the deeps, he had known his hours of desolation; but from that hour she had stood for him “a thing enskied and sainted.” He felt that he was set apart for her worship, and only regretted that Beatrice had had a better poet for the business than Sanchia could ever hope for.
For a year after her flight he continued a correspondence with her which had begun with their first acquaintance; and then he had stopped it, not she. His reason shall be admitted, to his credit or not. It appeared that she read his letters, as they came, to Nevile Ingram—she told him so—and, further, that Ingram was bored. Sanchia did not tell him that, but he gathered it; and whether he felt that the intimacy was fatally invaded, or whether he was piqued—he stopped. Within two years or so from that he wrote once more to tell her that he was about to “join fortunes” with Mary Germain, a young widow.
She knew what he meant by that; he was too much of a poet to be anything but shocked at the marriage-bond. She hoped the best for him, but his letter did not encourage her.
He wrote, “She is good, sweet and wholesome. I have taught her what she knows—I mean by that that I have helped her to pick up a clue here and there to take her by some means to the heart of our mystery. She has had a dreadful mauling by the world; but her brain is sound. I intend to make her happy, but not here. We go to Baden a-painting. She vows she will keep the door of my tent like a Bedouin's wife. It's a great test. If she comes through it—with her upbringing—she will show mettle. Farewell, Queen Mab. One does what one must, being man. Pray for us both.”
She answered him frankly and kindly. Ingram was away on one of his long absences, and she felt acold. “I shall always wish for your happiness. How could I ever forget what you did to give me mine?” He read that as meaning that she had found and had it still, so wrote no more—not even when his venture, not too hopefully begun, had ended. His head was low in the dust, his zest was gone. It needed his austerities and solitude to restore his tone.
But now, in his hidden valley, she never left him, though she was always veiled. He could not call up her blue eyes' magic, nor her slow smile, nor the touch of her thin fingers. She had no bodily semblance; she was a principle. In his exalted mood, being tiptoe for Mystery, he identified her with the Spirit of all Life. For life to him was a straining at the leash, a reaching for the unattainable, a preparation to soar. He saw all things flowing towards heaven, which to him was Harmony, Rest, what he called Appeasement. And all this straining and yearning in infinite variety was figured to him in Sanchia, as he discerned, but could not perceive, her presence. He made her out in elemental images, into the contours of the hills read her bountiful shape, into the onslaught of the wind her dauntless ardour. In fire leaped her pride, in the mantling snow her chastity was proclaimed. The rain was her largess, her treasure poured to enrich mankind. All flowers were sacred to her—frail beauty salient from the earth. He never looked on one but he blessed her name.
On a later day he read a poem to his guest—which he called the Song of Mab. By this name, it seems, he also figured Sanchia, whose synonyms, threatened to be as many as those of Artemis or the Virgin Mary. From poring for signs of her in the face of earth he was come to see little else. If the west wind was her breath and the hills were her breasts, it needed a mystic to see them so; and he was become a mystic. A glorified and non-natural Sanchia pervaded the poem, which, for the form, was a barbaric, rough-hewn chant, stuffed with words and great phrases which had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain-pipe for the spirit—a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic piece. He was for ever on the point to drink, and had the cup snatched away. Senhouse tormented you with possibilities of bliss—where sight merges in sound and both lift together into a triumphant sweep of motion—whirled you, as it were, to the gates of dawn, showed you the amber glories of preparation, thrilled you with the throb of suspense; then, behold! coursing vapours and gathering clouds blot out the miracle—and you end in the clash of thunderstorms and dissonances. Something of this the listener had to urge. Senhouse admitted it, but he said, “You know that the splendour is enacting behind. You guess the opening of the rose. One stalks this earth agog for miracles. It is full of hints—you catch a moment—for flashed instants you are God. Then the mist wraps you, and you blunder forward, two-legged man swaying for a balance. Translate the oracle as you will—with your paint-pans, with your words—we get broken lights, half-phrases. But we guess the rest, and so we strain and grow. Who are you or I, that we should know her!”
He stuffed the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said—“A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. But it's a dangerous power to put into a man's hands that he shall instruct his betters. I was tempted by that deadliest flattery of all, and I fell. Despoina heard me, smiled at me, and went her way regardlessly; but my poor Mary was a victim. She heard me, and took it seriously. She thought me a man of God. I failed absolutely, and so badly that by rights I ought never to have held up my head again. But she is happy, dear little soul, after her own peculiar fashion,—which she never could have been with me. She writes to me now and then. The man, her husband, is her master, but not a bad one. She knows it, and glories in him. Isn't that extraordinary?”
“Not at all,” Glyde said, who knew nothing of Mary. “It's a law of Nature. The woman follows the man. I suppose you treated her as an equal?”
“No, as a superior, which she plainly was,” said Senhouse.
“Then,” Glyde said, looking at him, “then you made her so. If you fly against Nature, you must get the worst of it.” He waited, then asked, “It's against your principles to marry a woman, no doubt.”
“Quite,” Senhouse said. “It seems to me an insult to propose it to her.”
“Your Mary didn't think so.”
“She did at first; but she couldn't get used to it.”
“She felt naked without the ring? And ashamed?”
“God help me,” said Senhouse, “that's true. The moment I realised what had happened, I gave in.”
“And then she refused?”
“She neither accepted nor refused. She lived apart. We were in Germany at the time. I was naturalising plants for the Grand Duke of Baden—filling the rocks and glades in the Black Forest. She went into an hotel in Donaueschingen, and I went to see her every day. We were friends. Then we went to England, to London. She held to that way of life, and I did the best I could for myself. At any moment I would have taken her. I considered myself bound in every way. I could have been happy with her. She had great charm for me—great physical charm, I mean—and sweet, affectionate ways. I could have made her a wife and a mother.
“I intended her the highest honour I could show to a woman. To make her your property by legal process and the sanction of custom seems to me like sacrilege. But, however—One day she told me that a former lover of hers wanted to marry her, and left it for me to judge. She wouldn't say whether she wished it herself or not; but I knew that she did, for when I advised her to accept him she got up and put her arms round my neck and kissed both my cheeks. I was her elder brother, I perceived, and said so. She laughed, and owned to it. And yet she had loved me, you know. She had refused that same man for me. She was afraid of him, and gave me her hand before his face.”
“That to me,” Glyde said, “is proof positive that she loved him. Of course she feared him. It is obvious. My poor master!”
Senhouse serenely replied, “She's happy, and I've done her no harm at all. But it's impossible for me to treat any living creature otherwise than as my better.”
“I believe you,” said Glyde, “and so it may be in a rarer world than this. In this world, however, a man is the most cunning animal, and in that both are flesh he is the stronger of the sexes. In this world the law is that the woman follows the man.” He thought before he spoke, then added, “That applies all this world over. You will marry Sanchia.”
Senhouse would not look up. He sat, nursing one leg. He bent his brows, and a hot flush made his skin shine in the firelight.
The poet and his disciple continued their partnership through the sogging rains of Christmas, well into the chill opening of the new year. Then came the snow to fill up the valley in which stood the hut, and blur the outlines of the folded hills. Poetry and Sanchia drew together a pair who could have little in common.
But Glyde became the slave of the strange man who blended austerity with charitable judgment, and appeased his passion by blood from his heart. He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world's rubs had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or you earn it by practice. Glyde had found out that the less you say to your maltreaters the less, in time, you have to say about it to yourself. He was conscious of his parts and all too ready to be arrogant. Senhouse's goddess had been kind to him, and he had presumed upon that. Senhouse's own method was to alternate extreme friendliness with torrential contempt. He knocked Glyde down and picked him up again with the same hand. He treated him as his equal whenever he was not considering him a worm. There is no better way of gaining the confidence of a youth of his sort. At the end of a fortnight there was nothing Glyde would not have told him; at the end of six months he would have crossed Europe barefoot to serve him.
He was nothing of a mystic, and therefore had his own ideas of what seemed to afford his master so much satisfaction; he was enough of a poet to be sure that Senhouse's romantic raptures were only a makeshift at best. To his mind here was a man aching for a woman. He thought that the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating of these two—Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long-enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you—into you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either so arresting in himself or possessed of such utterance as will cause the weathered eye to check its scanning of distance and concentrate upon an immediate presence. To such an eye, communing with infinite and eternal things, no creature of time and space can interpose solidly. Each must be vain and clear as bubbles of air. Behind it float spirits invisible to other men—essential forms, of whose company the seer into distance really is. He will neither heed you nor hear you; his conversation is other-where. And what then would Senhouse do confronted with Sanchia? Would he look beyond her, towards some horizon where she could never stand? Or would he not see in her blue eyes the goal of all his searching—the content of his own? What would he say but “You!” and take her? What she but sigh her content to be taken? Appeasement is holiness, says Senhouse. And what of their holy life thereafter, breast to breast, fronting the dawn? Glyde's heart, purged of his dishonesty, beat at the thought. He turned all his erotic over to the more generous emotion, and faced with glowing blood the picture of the woman he had coveted in the arms of the master he avowed.
When February began to show a hint of spring, in pairing plovers and breaking eglantine, Senhouse, in a temporary dejection, ceased work upon his poem, and Glyde said that he must know the news. All through the winter they had had little communication with the world beyond their gates. A shepherd homing from the folds, a sodden tinker and his drab, whom he touchingly cherished, a party of rabbit-shooters beating the furze bushes, had been all their hold upon a life where men meet and hoodwink each other. Once in a week one of them ploughed through the drifts to the cottage at the foot of the third valley, and got as he needed flour and candles, soap or matches. It had not yet occurred to either of them—to Senhouse it never did occur—to beg the sight of a newspaper. But Saint Valentine's call stirred the deeps of Glyde, who now said that he must have news. He departed for Sarum, and stayed away until March was in.
He returned with certain information, absorbed by Senhouse with far-sighted patient eyes and in silence. The only indication he afforded was inscrutable. His cheek-bones twitched flickeringly, like summer lightning about the hills.
Sanchia, Glyde said, was well and in London. She was living in a street off Berkeley Square, with an old lady who wore side-curls and shawls, and drove out every afternoon in a barouche with two stout horses and two lean men-servants. Sanchia sometimes accompanied her, stiff and pliant at once, bright-eyed and faintly coloured. She was taken about to parties also, and to the opera—and very often there were parties at the old lady's house—carriage-company, and gentleman in furred coats, who came in hansom cabs. He thought that she had suitors. There was a tall, thin man who came very often in the afternoons. He was sallow and melancholy, and wore a silk muffler day and night. Glyde thought that he was a foreigner, perhaps a Hungarian or Pole.
He had seen Sanchia often, but she could not have caught a glimpse of him. He admitted that he had haunted the house, had seen her come out and go in, knew when she dressed for dinner and when she went to bed. Long practice had acquainted him with the significance of light and darkness seen through chinks in shutters. “I know her room,” he said, “and the times of her lights. She looks out over the streets towards the Park twice every night—once when she is dressed, and once before she goes to bed. It is as if she is saying her prayers. She looks long to the west, very seriously. I think her lips move. I believe that she always does it.” Senhouse, who may have been listening, bowed his head to his knees, below his clasped hands.
“Twice she looked full at me without knowing me. Why should she know me now? Her pale and serious face, master, was as beautiful as the winter moon, as remote from us and our little affairs. No words of mine can express to you the outward splendour of her neck and bosom. She was uncovered for a party at the house. In the morning she came out to walk. You know her way, how she glides rather than seems to move her feet—the soaring, even motion of a sea-bird. She walked across the Park, and I followed, praising God, whose image she is. On the further side the Pole met her in his furs, and she walked with him for an hour in the sun. She had no wrappage to hide her blissful shape. Close-fitted, erect, free-moving, gracious as a young birch-tree. Master, she is the Holy One.”
“You played Peeping Tom, my ingenuous young friend,” said Senhouse, who was fastidious in such matters.
But Clyde cried out, “God forbid! Are you prying when you look at the sun! Master, you need not grudge the Pole. He is nothing.”
“I grudge no man anything he can get of her,” said Senhouse. “He will get precisely what lies within his scope.”
“He has the eyes of a rat,” Glyde said.
Senhouse answered, “Rats and men alike seek their meat of the earth. And the rats get rat-food, and the men man's food. Despoina's breasts are very large.” He turned to his poem, folded his jelab about his middle, and went out over the downs. Glyde saw him no more that day, nor, indeed, till the next morning, when he found him squatted over a pipkin simmering on the fire.
The year went on its course, and windy March broke into a wet, warm April. Glyde sat at the knees of his master, and imbibed learning and fundamental morality. But now and then he absented himself for a day at a time, and was understood to get news from Salisbury market. He came back one day with a newspaper. Senhouse read without falter or comment:
“A marriage is arranged, and will take place in July, between Nevile Ingram of Wanless Hall, Felsboro', Yorks, and Sanchia-Josepha, youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival of—Great Cumberland Place, W., and The Poultry, E.G.”
In that night, or very early in the morning, Glyde disappeared without word or sign left behind him.
London in mid-May, slogging at its pleasures under the pale sun, might read one morning of an affray in Yorkshire, of a magistrate assaulted, or undergardener in arms, and forget it in half-an-hour; but to Sanchia, unaccustomed to cower, some such chance paragraph seemed one spot the more upon her vesture, which contact with the Fulham Road had smirched already. She had never taken cover before—and how could one be in such a place but to hide in it? With contracted brows and bosom oppressed, she watched the drifting millions go by, and her heart sank. Was she become as one of these? Is not to be ashamed to be shameful? And had she not been put to shame? If she was to hold up the head and feel the mouth of the winged steed that she rode, she must stable him elsewhere.
She wished to forget Wanless. Let it be as if it was not, and had never been. But she found that Glyde and his outrageous act made that not possible. They brought her down to London's level—her in her white robe out of stainless air; here she was still, as Glyde had made her there, just a woman for men to quarrel over, or a bone for dogs. Her heart surged hot against Wanless; she could not, if she would, forget it—least of all in the Fulham Road.
She felt spotted in Mrs. Benson's spotless dwelling—largely because it was Mrs. Benson's, partly because a smell of fried herrings drifted in daily from the street. She felt herself the chosen of a servant, one for whom a clown had held battle; and then she found herself resenting the phrases, growing hot over them. A servant—Mrs. Benson, that staunch protectress! A clown—Struan—his thin frame throbbing with fire, and his eyes of a hawk in a cage, farset, communing with invisible things! Why, when he was rapt in his work he never saw her at all. She was a speck at his feet! He had sent her away once. “I'm busy,” he had said, without looking at her; and she had gone away on tiptoe. These things vexed her to remember, and she felt that Mrs. Benson's dwelling could not be hers.
Mrs. Benson, too, it must be owned, had an incumbrance, which she kept as far as might be in the lower regions of her house, but which was now and again encountered on the stair—a shambling son, one Joe, mostly in shirt—sleeves, distilling familiarity and beer from every pore. He was a ne'er-do-well, whom it was his mother's cross and crown to keep in complete idleness. He cast dreadful looks, as of an equal in snugness, a fellow-minion, at the chiselled profile of our goddess, and was not long before he tried for a full-faced effect. Sanchia's eyes of clear amaze should have cut him down, but they did not. His “Morning, Miss,” was daily reminder of a shared clay. Sanchia made herself inaccessible, and Mrs. Benson agonised.
To apologise for her son had been as futile as to make excuses for death; but she tried it. “You'll overlook the partiality of a mother, Miss Percival? What am I to do? It's not that I want him to lap syrup from a spoon—far from that. Idleness leads to impiety, and impiety anywhere, from Tattersal's to the public, we all know. But think of what stings me. I can't abide the thought that here am I, large Mrs. Benson, with money to spare, turning my back upon my fatherless child. Yet nothing short of that will do it.” Sanchia readily excused her; and then she turned her own back upon the Fulham Road. Pimlico found her a lodging, at the gates of whose dingy mysteries were parks, Westminster, the sky and the river, eternal things, making for tranquillity.
It had been her first impulse, the moment she reached London, to go to her father, with whom alone she had corresponded during her years of exile. There was Vicky Sinclair, to be sure, her sister next in age; but Vicky was married to a man she knew nothing of, and she found herself shy. Fought for! Blared across London in a paragraph—championed by a clown! How was she to meet a Captain Sinclair? Her father, surely, was different. She never doubted his love, nor that he would take her to his heart if she asked to go there. But could she? It would have to be done by stealth; she must go to the city, to his office—for her mother ruled in Great Cumberland Place, and she could not go there. She hated secrets, and couldn't pose as a culprit; so she delayed and delayed. It was a comfort to her to know that he was at hand: meantime, she sought about for scope to spread her wings.
For a fortnight she drank of the gales of liberty, filled her bosom with beauty, and let art smooth out her brows. She listened to music, looked at pictures, renewed her reader's ticket, and spent whole days browsing under the Bloomsbury dome. Climbing the heights, she planned out schemes of work, felt her critical faculties renewed, studied men and women, and found her old pleasure in quiet chuckling over their shifts. But she had to chuckle alone, for she never spoke to a soul. For a fortnight or so all went well—and then, quite suddenly, without any warning, going, as it were, to the fountain for water, she found there was no bottom to her cruse. She went to bed sanguine, she awoke morose. She saw the day with jaundiced eyes, scorned herself, cried “Liver!” and took medicine. She was glued to her books all day, returned late to her lodging, and found herself in tears. She discovered a tenderness, a yearning; she lay awake dreaming of her childhood, of her girlhood, of Vicky, of her father's knee, of Senhouse, her dear, preposterous friend, whose grey eyes quizzed while they loved her. Golden days with him—golden nights when she dreamed over his eager, profuse, interminable letters! All these sweet, seemly things were dead! Ah, no, not that, else must she die. She cried softly, and stretched out her arms in the dark to the gentle ghosts that peopled it. Then, being practical in grain, she jumped up, lit candles, and wrote deliberately to each of her sisters—finally, after much biting of the pen, to her father. Before her mood could cool she dressed hastily, slipped out, and posted her letters. Coming back to bed, she paused in the act to enter it—one knee upon it. Wide-eyed she wondered why she had not written to Senhouse. To him, of all people in the world, first of all! And his answer—a certainty. Hot came the reply to her question, and smote her in the face. Never to him again—never. There are certain things no woman can bring herself to do. The more she has need of a man the less possible is it to tell him so. She sighed as she got into her bed, and her eyes were very kind.
Of the five fair daughters of Thomas Welbore Percival, East India Merchant in The Poultry, Philippa, the eldest, the trenchant and clear-sighted, lived in Bryanston Square, mother of three children. Her husband, Mr. Tompsett-King, was a solicitor, but he was much more than that, An elderly, quiet gentleman, who talked in a whisper, and seemed to walk in one too, he presided over more than one learned Society, and spoke at Congresses on non-controversial topics. A sound churchman, he deplored Romish advance on the one hand and easy divorce on the other. The salvation of human society lay, he held, within these limits. Distrust the emotions; submit all things to reason-love of God and love of women. On these terms he prospered like his father before him. It all seemed very simple to him. The handsome Philippa respected him, obeyed him particularly, and never differed from him in opinion. But she coloured every compliance with his decrees with an idiosyncrasy so marked as to make them seem her own. Where he held that Rome pandered to the emotions, she laughed it to scorn as a forcing—house of spiritual foppery; where he saw in divorce a treason to the law of contract, she said that it tempted women to fall. Is it not easy enough to sin? Must we legalise it? Why put a tax upon marriage? Mr. Tompsett-King deprecated all dottings of iotas; when Philippa stormed at society he hummed a sad little tune. Before he left for Bedford Row he patted her shoulder and said, “Gently does it.” Some such scene must ensue upon the prodigal's letter.
Hawise, Lady Pinwell, next in age to Philippa, lived in the country. Her husband was a baronet, and a handsome blond. A pretty, apple-cheeked, round-eyed girl, very much of a kitten, she was now grown plump, sleek, rather slow to move, and many times a mother. She deferred to her husband in all things, and by his wish received her parents on a formal visit once a year. She saw very little of her sisters, and as for Sanchia—the thing was not to be heard of, not even mentioned to Sir George. As, in fact, she burned the child's letter before she left her bedroom, she does not come into the tale at all.
But the pensive Melusine, three years younger than Philippa, seven older than Sanchia, may be reckoned with. She was also married, to a Mr. Gerald Scales, the son of a baronet. He was not, however, to inherit the title, for he had a brother, Sir Matthew, and frequent nephews. But his means were ample for his rank and discreet amusements, and went further and did more for him than prolific Sir Matthew's; for Melusine gave him no sons. His circle of being, in and through which trailed with charming languor his wife, was of more dappled sheen and of ampler circumference than that of Bryanston Square. Having its centre in Kensington Gore, it reached to Ranelagh on one side, to Maidenhead on the other. There was a riverside villa down there, where Mrs. Scales gave parties in the summertime and was punted about by flushed gentlemen in pink shirts. She was the tallest of the five sisters, and the most graceful; near-sighted enough for lorgnettes, an elegant young woman. She had an instinct for attitudes, turns of the head, which were useful intete-a-teteconversations. Mentally, she was not strong, and perhaps her manner was too elaborate: she draped herself when she sat down as if her skirts were window-curtains. Toy Pomeranians were a hobby of hers, and the early Florentine masters. She could read off the names of the saints in a sacred conversation as easily as you or I a row of actresses in a photograph shop. Mrs. Jameson's books were at her fingers' ends. Her mother favoured her more than any of her children, and was often at her house on visits. Gerald Scales called her the Dowager, and pleased her vastly. He himself was Tubby to his friends.
Vicky, a year older than Sanchia, had married a Captain Sinclair, who was stationed at Aldershot. She had been the romp of former days and, when the storm had burst, hotly on the culprit's side. But Vicky had been flighty, and marriage changes one. Sanchia's eyes grew wistful as she sat, her letters on the wing, and thought of Vicky.
Her first response was from Melusine, in a telegram from Taplow which read, “Darling, alas!” and no more. Her comment was shrewd: “Mamma is there”—and she was right. Then came her father's letter, to pluck at her heart-strings. He invited her to the Poultry at “any hour of the day—and the sooner the better;” but was clear that she could not visit Great Cumberland Place without writing to Mamma. “Doing the civil” was his jocular way of putting it—one of Papa's little ways when he meant more. She knew that he was right, and postponed the fond man and his injunction. His love might be taken for granted by a favourite child. Just now it was her sisters' judgment she craved.
Philippa wrote with her accustomed steel. It might have been a bayonet: yet she meant to be kind.