Adelaide Rutherford was leading her young men across the floor. Now if only Connie were sensible and had a fairly full programme, she might still carry things off. She certainly looked well to-night, and one of Adelaide's young men from York, while talking to Gertrude Larkinton, seemed continually to be watching Connie's gay blue dress. Supposing that Connie, unconscious of the doctor's perfidy, were keeping dances for him? She must be told, and told quickly. Muriel, who did not mind, would do it best, but Muriel was talking to Rosie Harpur. That was one of Muriel's irritating habits. People might begin to think of them together, as poor Rosie Harpur and poor Muriel Hammond. Failure is so contagious.
"Muriel, dear, just a moment."
"Yes, Mother?"
"Is she—do you know whether she has been keeping any dance for Dr. McKissack?"
"Several, I think."
"You've got to tell her, now, that he's engaged to that Hemmingway girl." Her voice quivered fiercely. "It's disgraceful. Disgraceful."
Muriel's mouth twisted into a small, cold smile. "It's not the first time that it's happened. Are you surprised?" Being used to these reverses, she was hardly interested. The little doctor was just one of the many men who had come to their house, and gone. Then she saw that her mother had been surprised. Pity as usual froze her to stiff shyness, though she wanted then to carry Mrs. Hammond away home and kiss her better, for she had looked for a moment as small and defenceless as a hurt child. But Mrs. Hammond was not a hurt child. She braced herself for battle.
"We must tell Connie." She had seen the young man from York leave Gertrude Larkinton to ask Adelaide some question, looking all the time in the direction of Connie's blue dress. If only Connie could have this little piece of flattery to soothe her directly she had been told about the doctor, like a chocolate after the dose, it might just save the situation. Mrs. Hammond hurried to her daughter.
"Connie, you'll never guess." They must take it lightly. "Sucha piece of news, isn't it, Muriel?"
"Oh, I suppose so. Dr. McKissack and that Hemmingway girl are going to be married," remarked Muriel without enthusiasm.
Adelaide was leading the young man across the room. Connie started and looked up.
"How did you hear?" she asked quickly.
"He told me now. She's here. In the green dress."
They waited for a time that seemed to be years long, while the first notes of "The Pink Lady" summoned couples from their seats. Then Connie's shrill laugh rang out.
"So you've only just heard? You know, he told me days ago."
Adelaide was there with her young man.
"Hullo, Addie, how's the world with you?"
"I am very fit, thanks, and I want to introduce you to Mr. Fennington, or rather, he wants to be introduced to you. He's been pestering me all the evening."
Adelaide smiled indulgently. Out of her plenty she could afford to throw an occasional partner to the Hammond girls.
Mrs. Hammond and Muriel withdrew, well pleased.
"No partner for this one, dear? Oh, well, that's that. I wonder why she never told us, though? She'll be all right this evening, I think. That young man meant business. And what about you?"
"Oh, I'm all right. Don't worry about me."
What need to worry about her, about anyone? Muriel sat against the wall, her brooding eyes fixed on the kaleidoscope of colour before her. Two years ago, she would have smiled uncomfortably over her fan, pretending to wait for a non-existent partner. But now she was tired of pretence. The world was like that. There were always some people who danced and some who sat by the wall, watching until the candles guttered in their sockets, until the dancers wearied of encircling arms, until the bleak, grey light peered through the curtained window. Muriel was just one of those. That was all.
Connie passed, dancing with the young man from York, her red head high, her eyes bright. Which was Connie, one of the dancers, or one of those who watched? It was hard to tell about Connie. Nobody might ask her to dance, and yet, and yet, Muriel could not somehow picture Connie sitting by the wall. But to go forward on one's own was against the rules of the game. And never was game more hedged about with rules than this which women played for contentment or despair.
These were silly thoughts. Nobody was asking Muriel to be contented or desperate. She was simply being sentimental because the little Scotch doctor, who was nothing to the Hammonds, had become engaged. Her next partner, Mr. Mullvaney from the Bank of England, had come across the room to claim her.
The dance passed much as other dances. Muriel's partners were scattered but reliable. Connie seemed to be more than usually happy. Everywhere that Mrs. Hammond looked, she seemed to see the bright hair and laughing face of her younger daughter. Then, after supper, the strange thing happened.
Muriel's waltz with Godfrey Neale had come, the waltz that he unfailingly offered her. Godfrey liked regularity and tradition. They had waltzed sedately, and now sat on a plush-covered sofa in the corridor, silent as usual, for they had little enough to say to one another. Even the excitement of thinking that she really was dancing with Godfrey Neale had left Muriel. He had been too long the goal of Marshington maidenhood.
She wished that the passage were not so draughty, and that she did not feel so dumb.
Suddenly from behind a screen along the passage, rang out a clear, shrill laugh. A resounding kiss shattered the silence more boldly than a cannon shot. There followed the sound of a slap—bare flesh on flesh. A voice called, broken with laughter, "Oh, you naughty boy!"
Muriel and Godfrey sat up. Such things simply did not happen in Marshington ball-rooms.
Muriel always remembered the stiffening of Godfrey's figure. He hated so emphatically all that sort of thing. And yet, she herself shuddered with fear. For she thought that she had recognized the voice.
In another moment the orchestra would play. The next dance would begin. Probably the couple might emerge from behind the screen. It couldn't have been Connie. She was sometimes rather silly, but she would never do a thing like that. All the same, it was not safe to wait until she was sure.
Muriel never knew whether she ran away because she did not want Godfrey Neale to know, or because she did not want to know herself. She always tried to hide unpleasant truths for as long as possible.
"Isn't there rather a draught here?" she asked. "Shall we be strolling back?"
They went, and Muriel thrust misgivings from her mind.
As she undressed that night, her mother came to her.
"I think that Connie's all right now, don't you?"
The misgivings returned. Had Connie cared?
"Oh, quite all right, I think, mother."
What business had Muriel with misgivings? Mrs. Hammond was pitifully tired and needed to be reassured.
"Well, good night, then, dear. We needn't have worried, need we? Really, I'm very glad that it has turned out like this. Heisrather a commonplace young man."
"Oh, I never thought that there was anything in it."
The memory of Connie's face before she had laughed returned to Muriel. Yet she could not have cared for him, not Connie, for that little man.
"Well, then, it all went off very nicely."
"Very. Good night."
The door closed. Her mother's soft slippers padded away down the passage, and Muriel went to bed. But through the early morning darkness her thoughts strayed in drowsy confusion, and she saw again the glittering ball-room, and heard that horrible laugh from behind the screen, and saw, though she had forgotten them during the curious evening, the mocking eyes of a girl in the rain-dark street.
It had all happened so quickly that Muriel found no time to readjust her thoughts to the hurried sequence of events, Delia's engagement, Connie's queerness about it, and the invitation to tea at the Vicarage.
"Go by all means," Connie had said. It was a wet day, and she could not even play golf, and nobody had asked her out, and she was bored. "If you like to be patronized all over about this Twentieth Century Reform League, or whatever it is that Delia runs, go by all means. But don't expect me."
"Didn't Mrs. Cartwright say that he was quite a distinguished man?" Mrs. Hammond murmured dreamily. It was hard that Delia should not only have defied Marshington, but have defied it with success, moving steadily from college to a secretaryship in London, and from this to the organization of the Twentieth Century Reform League. Mrs. Hammond could not approve of the Reform League, but she had to admit that the list of Vice-Presidents impressed her. And now, here was this Martin Elliott added to Delia's triumphal procession through life. She sighed, aware that she had never thought before of Delia with such toleration. The girl might be unpleasant, but she was not negligible. Perhaps Muriel had been wise to maintain with her that queer, half wistful, half antagonistic friendship.
"His book,Prosperity and Population, is supposed to have revolutionized sociology," said Muriel.
"The warden of a slum settlement," Connie sneered. "She's welcome to him. Still, it's surprising really that she's caught anything. She must be over thirty, and that skinny figure of hers and then all those stories about her being a suffragette, and going to prison. It's just the kind of thing that all nice men hate."
So Connie, in spite of Mrs. Hammond's protests, had refused Delia's half-smiling invitation to meet Mr. Elliott at tea at the Vicarage, and Muriel found herself walking down the road alone. She felt strangely excited, because of the absurd though insistent feeling that there existed between her and Delia some tie. It was as though Delia in her London office, looking up from the work which her brilliant, courageous mind directed, might think of Muriel in Marshington, living her drab ineffectual life among tea-parties, and nursing accounts and faded dreams, and might say to herself, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Delia Vaughan." Most successful people, thought Muriel sadly, have a shadow somewhere, a personality sharing their desires, and even part of their ability, but without just the one quality that makes success.
"All the same, I was right," she told herself fiercely. "I had to look after Mother. I had no choice. It was not my fault, but theirs. People don't choose."
She stopped to unfasten the bars of the big Vicarage gate. It had been wet all day, and the garden was musical with the manifold noises of the rain, of the murmuring runnels through the clean washed pebbles of the drive, of the ceaseless rustle of water in the branches. All the spring garden sang with youth and promise. The crocus chalices had overflowed. Here and there the wind had overturned their brimming cups, showering their burden to the grass below, in a mystical communion of earth and rain.
Muriel stood by the gate, listening and looking. As though this were the last hour that she would look on beauty, she opened her heart eagerly to scent and sound and colour. The deep significance of the spring oppressed her. Beyond the sodden trees, a firelit window glowed like a jewel of warm liquid light. Undoubtedly that was where Delia now sat with her lover.
Muriel had no part in the silent movement of nature's slow regeneration. Delia, who had striven in the artificial world of books and men and jangling rules of government, was now to be akin to wind and water, obedient to an older law than man's. She had won the best from both worlds, because she had been selfish. Wise, fortunate, beloved Delia! Was there no justice in life's scheme of things?
Muriel, who had neither success nor love, nor any great emotion, moved forward slowly, a small grey figure beneath the dripping trees.
Delia opened the door for her.
"Did you get wet? You must be washed away." She was a new creature, thought Muriel, gentler, saner, with an indefinable bloom of happiness that lent to her real charm. "If I had known that you were going to walk, I should have told that idle creature Godfrey Neale to call for you with his car."
"Father does not like us to use our car when it's wet. I did not know that Godfrey Neale was coming." She had not met him since that dance in Kingsport when the girl had laughed. She did not want to meet him now, when she had intended to forget everything except her sympathy with Delia's happiness.
They entered the comfortable, book-lined room, splashed with liquid firelight. The chairs and tables and people seemed to float as in a fiery sea. She could see nothing clearly until Delia followed her with a lamp.
"Father, Martin, Miss Hammond. Muriel, this is Martin. Godfrey Neale you know."
The room seemed to be full of books, tea-cups, and men. Mr. Vaughan smiled blandly through his spectacles. Godfrey rose and bowed beautifully. Then Muriel found herself shaking hands with Martin Elliott.
He was not at all as she had expected him to be, ironic, lean and scholarly. She stared openly at the short, stocky man, dressed like the shabbier kind of farmer, and smiling at her from a broad humorous face. His untidy hair stood up on end, his tie was crooked, giving a curious effect below his unexpectedly pugnacious mouth and chin, so that he always looked as though he had just emerged from a street row, which indeed, more frequently than most people, he had. Altogether the effect of him was so surprising that Muriel forgot her manners.
He bore her scrutiny for a moment. Then he turned to Delia.
"Delia, she doesn't like me. She doesn't like me a bit."
"I'm not surprised. You look like a perfect hooligan. Have you been arguing with Father again? Muriel, don't mind them. Clear some books off that seat and sit down."
"But I do like him," exploded Muriel, not sitting down, because she found nowhere to sit, except a pile of formidable looking volumes crowned by an ink-pot.
"Delia, you are a shocking hostess," remarked the vicar mildly, handing Muriel his own plate and a half-eaten scone with the well-intentioned vagueness that characterized his dealings with all such mundane objects as tea-things and collar-studs.
"Sorry, Muriel. It's all right, Father." Delia quietly transferred the scone to its rightful owner, cleared a seat for Muriel and passed her a clean plate. "Muriel's used to me. I scandalized her years ago, when I told her that she was wasted in Marshington, and she came prepared for an uncomfortable afternoon."
"My dear, how arrogant of you to say such things to Miss Hammond," reproved the vicar, stirring his tea absently. "That's so like all these strenuous young people who call themselves reformers, isn't it, Neale? They think all activity except their own a waste of time. They forget that if every one thought as they did, they would be out of work."
"Think, think!" cried Delia, laughing. "We don't expect them to think at all. That would be hoping for too much."
"Delia wants to teach people so many things," continued the vicar calmly. "She is certain that human nature can be rendered perfectible by parliamentary institutions. I am an old man. And I have written three standard textbooks upon parliamentary institutions. And I should hesitate to put into the minds of my parishioners anything but some simple and final expression of wisdom like the Gospels."
"Of course you are right as far as you go, sir," broke in Martin Elliott, obviously resuming some hot but interrupted argument. "My contention was simply that in a district like the Brady Street area in Bethnal Green people cannot understand the Gospels; and in a case like that to sell all that you have and give it to the poor simply is unsound economics. Don't you agree with me, Neale?"
"I'm afraid it's not much in my line." Godfrey was sitting upright in his chair, glowering a little, as he always did if the conversation passed beyond his sphere of interest.
"Muriel is the person to argue with on economics—and on morals," interposed Delia. "Try her, Martin. She has the mind of a mathematician. She ought to have been on the staff of theStatisticianinstead of giving sewing-classes in Marshington."
Martin Elliott crossed to Muriel's side. "How much am I to take seriously from that madwoman? Do you really take sewing-classes? I think that must be rather interesting, because all teaching is rather fun, I think, don't you? If only one's pupils are kind to one; but sewing must be more satisfactory than most things, because you can actually see the work growing under your fingers."
"I know what you mean. But I don't really do much sewing."
"You read then?"
"Not much now. I used to, but the books in the Kingsport libraries are all so much alike, and one gets out of the way of ordering other things."
She spoke diffidently. It was incredible that a man should really want to talk to her about herself. Men talked about motors, or their own insides, or hunting.
Martin Elliott smiled at her. "Have you found that too? Don't you think about the books in most circulating libraries that they are nearly all the wrong way round. Short stories with happy endings and long stories with sad ones. Quite wrong."
"Why that?"
"Ah, surely the short story should end with tragedy, for only sorrow swoops upon you with a sudden blow. But happiness is built up from long years of small delightful things. You can't put them into a short story."
It was true. Muriel looked across at Delia sitting by the tea-table in her red dress. She thought, "This is what he means. Years of sitting by Delia in a firelit room full of books and talking pleasant nonsense. Friends who know what you mean and speak your own language. Rain-washed gardens when the birds call. Work that's fine and hard and reaches somewhere. Marriage, such as theirs will be. Children, perhaps, and laughter that they share. You can't put all those into a short story."
She felt cold and dull, shut out from a world of small delightful things. She made no answer, sitting with her chin on her hand, while the talk flowed round her, talk of books, and socialism, and plays, and people that they knew, and what you ought to take on a walking tour, and whether Sir Rabindranath Tagore should have won the Nobel prize, and school care committees. (They weren't really any use, Mr. Vaughan said.) And all the time she felt herself being drawn to Martin Elliott by surprised delight. She was at home at last, among people who spoke her own language, even though the things of which they spoke were strange. She felt as though after many years she had returned to her own country. But she never spoke.
Then she became aware that her thoughts had slipped away from the conversation altogether, and that Delia was teasing Godfrey, and that he was protesting, half uncomfortable, half amused, because he could never become really angry with the vicar's daughter.
"Now, look here, D—Delia. That's not true."
An impish spirit had seized upon Delia.
"Oh, yes, it is, isn't it, Muriel? Godfrey's never yet proposed to any girl because he knows that he'd be accepted, and if he had to marry that would upset his habits. Godfrey dear, you don't realize how much you hate to be upset."
"You know t—that's untrue."
"No, no, no. You're afraid that you won't be able to afford both a wife and hunters, and you prefer the hunters. Martin, Godfrey is one of those people who pretend to cultivate the earth in order that they may destroy its creatures. He is that odious relic of barbarism, a sporting farmer."
"I—I'm not a farmer," stammered Godfrey.
It was a shame, thought Muriel. Delia had no right to tease him so. How he must hate being chaffed in front of her.
"Then if you aren't a farmer, you are simply a social parasite, and your existence would not be tolerated in any ordinary, sane society. Oh, I don't mean that you aren't very much tolerated to-day, because this society is neither ordinary nor sane. But when Martin and I and the Twentieth Century Reform League have been at work for a score of years or so, say seventy-five . . ."
She rattled on, foolishly, happily, teasing him with the kindest smile in the world on her thin face. But Godfrey was not happy. His sense of humour had become atrophied from want of use. He did not understand Delia's fooling, and to him the incomprehensible was the unpleasant. He passed from boredom to indignation, and yet felt too much his old debt of friendship to show indignation before Delia's lover. He was not going to have the fellow think him jealous.
Muriel watched him and, as she watched, she too grew indignant with Delia. It was unlike the vicar's daughter to go so far, but she had always said that Godfrey needed teasing. All the same, it wasn't fair. She took him at a disadvantage, and he really hated it. Muriel leaned forward, quiet but resourceful.
"Delia," she interposed unexpectedly, "I do wish you'd tell me, for we hear nothing up here, what do they really think in London about the Irish Question?"
Now Godfrey really did know something about the Irish Question. He had once been asked to stand as the Conservative member for the Leame Valley Division, and although he had rejected the offer, as he always rejected the unknown at this time, yet a faintly political flavour still clung to his mental palate.
He drew a deep breath, like a diver emerging from the sea, then, slowly, with solemnity, he began to contradict Delia's picturesque but unorthodox opinion on the Irish Question.
Not, however, until he was seated again in his small covered car driving back to the Weare Grange did he recover his usual composure. Muriel had been tucked in at his side by Delia, to be dropped at the gates of Miller's Rise. The familiar feel of brakes and wheel, and the smooth running of the little car, reminded Godfrey that there was a sane and ordinary world in which to live. He sighed comfortably.
"I don't think that that fellow Elliott has improved Delia much. She tries to show off a bit, I think."
"Oh, no. It isn't that. She's just happy, and when Delia's happy she talks nonsense."
"All very well for her to be happy at other people's expense," Godfrey grumbled. He was enjoying himself now. The car responded to his touch, and the Hammond girl responded to his mood. The world was all right.
"Oh, I know that she teases. But one doesn't mind, because you know all the time what a splendid person she is. I do hope that Mr. Elliott will make her happy. But I think that he will."
Godfrey liked girls who stuck up for one another. She had her wits about her too, the little mouse of a thing. The Irish Question! He had given Delia as good as she gave about the Irish Question. Delia was a clever woman, but when women got on to politics it just showed. Now Muriel Hammond showed her good sense by keeping quiet when there was a subject which she did not understand. On the whole, he liked quiet girls. Besides, there was another reason why he should feel rather tenderly towards Muriel Hammond.
"You've not been to see us for a long time," he said.
"No. It is a long time," said Muriel dreamily, thinking of Martin Elliott, and what life might be like, if one could meet such men as he. "Not since that time Clare stayed with us, and Connie tried to ride your horse, and it ran away with her."
"No." The car jerked forward under Godfrey's hands. He did remember, ah, how he remembered, the turn of her head, the laughter in her eyes, her clear, triumphant voice. "Yes. I remember, of course. Clare Duquesne." He liked to say her name again. "By Jove, what years ago, and what kids we were!" He turned the car carefully in to the winding, elm-shadowed drive of Miller's Rise. "Do you ever hear from her now, at all?"
"No. I haven't heard for years. She married, you know. A Spaniard. They went to live in South America. I have not heard since, but I should think that the life there would suit her. She loved warmth and sunshine and gaiety. He was rich, I believe, and musical too. I don't know much more, but I should think that she would be happy. You somehow can't imagine Clare unhappy."
"No. You can't." He was bringing the car to the circle of gravel before the door. She could not see his face, but something told her that he had been profoundly moved. She became immensely sorry for him and yet glad that he had loved Clare, glad that he had not forgotten. His faithfulness belonged to her romantic dreams of him, when she had been a child, and had worshipped with the rest of Marshington. "If by any chance you should see her again, or be writing," he said very slowly, trying to control his stammer, "you might remember me to her, and say that I—I hope that she's very happy."
The car had stopped before the pillars of the porch. Muriel unwrapped herself from the rugs.
"If I ever am writing, I will," she said. "Thank you for the ride. The car runs beautifully."
"Yes, she's not a bad old perambulator, is she? Are you keen on cars? Would you care to come out for a spin in her in better weather?"
"Thank you. I should like it very much."
It was the first time that a man had asked her to come for a ride in his car. She felt the occasion to be immense.
As they shook hands in the rain, he held her small glove for just the fraction of an inch longer than was necessary. She forgot to ask if he would care to come inside.
"Good-bye, and thank you."
"So long, and we must fix up a day for a run, a fine day."
She passed into the house.
"Well, dear," said Mrs. Hammond, "did you have a nice party?"
"Yes."
"You're back early, aren't you? Did I hear a car just now?"
"Yes. Godfrey Neale brought me back."
"Oh." Mrs. Hammond smiled. She was tired, and the day had been difficult for many reasons. Muriel knew this. She felt the passion of admiring pity for her mother, which was always her strongest emotion over any person.
"He has asked me to go for a ride in his new car, some day soon," she remarked indifferently.
Mrs. Hammond threaded the needle that she was holding.
"Well, dear, that will be nice, won't it?" was all that she said, but as Muriel turned to leave the room she looked at her, and for a moment they waited, smiling a little at each other.
The War came to Marshington with the bewildering irrelevance of all great catastrophes. It came also at a most upsetting time for Mrs. Hammond. Really, it was vexatious when everything was just going so nicely. Connie had settled down with quite good grace to the prospect of calling upon Mrs. McKissack,néeHemmingway. Two visits to old school friends at Buxton and Harrogate had sufficed to cure her wounded vanity. As for Muriel, of course it was too early to say anything definite, but Mrs. Hammond had confided in poor Beatrice that really, you know, Godfrey Neale was showing her an uncommon amount of attention. Ever since April, or was it March? those motor rides, that party at the Weare Grange, all spoke of possibilities.
"After all, he is really quite young yet, only about thirty. And with his temperament and his social position he would naturally go slowly. That was the mistake that Mrs. Marshall Gurney made. She would hurry him, and he grew frightened. By the way, I hear that she is taking Phyllis to Germany to learn music or something. Very wise, I think."
Aunt Beatrice nodded, approving Mrs. Marshall Gurney's double wisdom. Music was a sovereign remedy for broken hearts, and foreign travel would add distinction to an already pretty and taking girl. Her absence, however, would leave the field clear for Mrs. Hammond, by a process of elimination. Well, that did not show that she was stupid, but only that she knew when she had been fairly beaten. Rachel had been wonderful again, but then Rachel always was. It was impossible to believe that in the end she ever could be beaten.
And then the War came, right into the very middle of the tennis tournament.
Of course, as it happened, the tournament was not going to be quite such an event as usual, for Godfrey Neale had gone camping with the Territorials at Kaling Moor, and Connie had sprained her wrist and could not play. But still it was the Annual Tennis Tournament and that was no small thing.
The day after it had opened was the 3rd of August, and people began to feel uneasy. Just as the Hammonds were preparing for supper, Mr. Hammond rang up from Kingsport to say that he was waiting for the last train to pick up any more news that might be coming through. "Particularly trying of him to-night," said his wife, "because I've got such a nice little duck." After all, every one knew that nothing really would happen. There had been scares before.
The evening was close and, even up at Miller's Rise, oppressive.
"Wouldn't it be rather nice to walk down to the village after supper and see if we could buy a paper?"
So, after supper, they went.
Aunt Beatrice said that she never had liked Germans, so stuffy, that sleeping with the feather beds on top of them, and then the way they bought all that cooked meat and sausage stuff at shops.
All the way down to the village, she said that she had always known that the Parkers' German governess had been a spy.
The village street was strangely unfamiliar in the half light of the summer evening. Unexpected shadows and whisperings moved and rustled in the quiet air. Little knots of people stood round the open doorways of shops that should have been shut long ago. Noises, from down the road, the horn of a motor-car, the call of children at their play, broke in upon the stillness. With significant reiteration, a dog in a far-off farm-house barked persistently.
"Go into the Ackroyds', Muriel, and see if you can get an evening paper. I want to talk to Mrs. Cartwright. There's that bazaar on the 4th."
The paper shop was small and very crowded. It smelt of paraffin from the swinging lamp above the counter. Muriel watched two great moths flapping with unbelievable clumsiness against its flyblown globe.
She pushed her way to the counter. The proprietor, a meek little man with a fierce black moustache, stood shaking his head nervously. "The ultimatum expires to-night at midnight," he said hoarsely. "That's a very serious thing. A very serious thing." Then he saw Muriel. "Good evening, Miss Hammond."
"Have you any papers left?"
"I'm sorry, miss, I'm very sorry. I always like to oblige anyone from Miller's Rise. You might get one at the station perhaps."
He bobbed with forlorn little curtsies, pulling at his moustache, apologizing for the inconvenience of a European situation for which he, as the agent through which Marshington must see the world, felt a personal responsibility.
"Oh, well." Muriel turned to go.
An old woman in a man's cap, who for some inexplicable reason had planted herself on a chair by the counter, looked up at her.
"War's bloody hell," she remarked mildly. "Ah'm telling you God's truth. Two o' my lads went i' South Africa. Bloody hell. That's what it is."
She rose and hiccoughed unsteadily from the shop, the little crowd making way for her ungainly figure.
Unaccountably stirred by this brief encounter, Muriel left the shop, her mind wounded and yet quickened by the old woman's words. It was as though in her obscenity, she had been a foretaste of something to come, something sinister and violent.
The village street lay wrapped in the grey twilight of a dream. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. She saw the hell of a child's picture book, gleaming with livid flame. The blood smell faintly nauseating, like a butcher's shop on a hot day. Across the road, Connie and her mother talked to Mrs. Cartwright. "It's all over the village," Mrs. Cartwright was saying. "Mr. Marshall Gurney has telegraphed, and telegraphed, and can't get any answer through. They say that he is nearly mad with anxiety. If the war is declared against us, they're sure to be murdered."
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Hammond. "You don't murder people nowadays, even if there is a war on. The Marshall Gurneys will be all right, though I always did say that it was a mistake to go off abroad like that. It doesn't somehow belong to those kind of people."
Muriel looked at the four of them, and at their eager absorbed faces as they talked about the Marshall Gurneys. Yet somehow she felt as though her mother were not anxious so much as jealous, jealous because it was Mrs. Marshall Gurney and not herself who was enjoying the unique distinction of becoming involved in a European crisis. That Kaiser, whom every one in England was reviling, might turn Mrs. Marshall Gurney's failure into victory.
Mrs. Hammond was right.
The ultimatum expired. Great Britain and Germany assumed a state of war; and the Marshall Gurneys, miraculously unmurdered, returned to Marshington in triumph. The news of their escape through Switzerland outrivalled, at hurried and informal tea-parties, the problem of food shortage, the departure of the Territorials to join the camp near Scarborough, and the possibility of a German invasion. It was even rumoured that Phyllis had received a letter from Godfrey Neale congratulating her upon their escape, and that she, with the glamour of adventure like a bloom upon her youth, might yet warm up the tepid interest that her charms had once inspired.
After a spring and summer of reviving hope, Mrs. Hammond found herself facing the autumn of 1914 from much the same position as she had faced it in 1913.
Oh, when one was young and success was one's own to make or lose, then life was easy! But for a wife and mother whose success depended upon other people, then came the heart-breaking years. Of course the War must be over soon, and things would settle down to their normal condition, but meanwhile it was hard to see Mrs. Marshall Gurney becoming President of the Belgian Refugee Committee, while Phyllis, who had nothing like Muriel's ability for handling figures, was made treasurer of the Junior Red Cross Association, and went daily into Kingsport in her becoming uniform.
At the end of November they stood in the gloom of the unlit station, watching the 5th Yorkshire Guards entrain for Aldershot—well, if it was not Aldershot, it was somewhere in the South and so much nearer to the German guns. There was no particular reason why the Hammonds should have gone to see them. They knew no one besides Dickie Weathergay, Daisy's husband, and the station was cold and draughty. Mr. Hammond had stayed in late at the Kingsport Club as usual, but Mrs. Hammond was determinedly patriotic. In spite of discomfort she stood now with her girls among a crowd of curious, laden figures, distorted by their burdens out of all semblance to the human form. It was the world of a dream, when even the corporeal presence of such everyday people as Dr. and Mrs. Parker and Colonel Cartwright became part of a dim and dreamlike darkness. The crowd shuffled and jolted, appearing unexpectedly from the dense shadows into a circle of faint lamplight that flickered intermittently on bayonets and badges.
Mrs. Hammond was suffering from indigestion, the result of fragmentary and scrambled meals. The meals at Miller's Rise had not been hurried because nobody had time to eat them slowly, but because it hardly seemed to be patriotic in those days to sit down comfortably to enjoy them. Mrs. Hammond, dreading the secret murmurings about her husband, dreading the pity which could destroy more effectively than enmity the position which she had won, determined to kill pity by admiration for her patriotism. She stood in the darkness, while passing soldiers lurched into her, and knocked sideways her fur-trimmed toque. This must all be endured as part of the campaign. She felt her courage, born from her supreme passion, riding triumphantly above fatigue and pain.
"It would be nice if there were somewhere to sit down," she murmured, but without complaint. "Is that Daisy over there?"
Muriel, who had been standing all day in the newly instituted Red Cross Depot, shifted her weight from one aching foot to the other, and remarked:
"I'm so sorry. There are no seats," as though it were her fault. She added, "Yes, that's Daisy, in the blue cloak."
Daisy Weathergay stood just within the circle of lamplight. She was not travelling South with her husband because her baby was expected in December, but she had come to the station to say good-bye to him, and stood beside the 1st class carriage. Her small, flower-like face was upturned. Her close-fitting hat shaded her eyes, but the light fell on her soft little nose, and the sensitive outline of the mouth and chin.
"Isn't she splendid?" murmured little Miss Dale, who had burrowed her way to Muriel's side through the crowd like a small mole. "So brave! Not a tear! Like all these splendid, heroic women, whom one reads about in the papers. I never knew what it was to be so proud of my country before."
The wind uplifted for a moment Daisy's brave, blue cloak. She seemed to float, borne high upon a wave of heroism. Dickie's red, comely face leaned towards her from the carriage window.
"A symbol of Womanhood," murmured Miss Dale tearfully.
The whistle blew. A feeble, fragmentary cheer rose from the watchers on the platform as the train moved slowly, cleaving a line between the moving faces at the windows, and the crowd that stood below. And still Daisy waited, her small figure bent sturdily against the wind, looking at Dickie, while all Marshington looked at her. It was her moment. Then she was no longer Daisy Weathergay of the neat little house in the Avenue. She had become a symbol of womanhood, patient and heroic as the patient heroism of Nature itself.
"And there's dear Phyllis Marshall Gurney," continued Miss Dale. "She does look nice in her uniform, doesn't she? So splendid of her to have taken on this work in Kingsport, isn't it? But of course, after her terrible experiences in Germany——"
The train swept round the corner into the darkness. The tension of the watching crowd snapped suddenly. Muriel became aware of Connie at her side. Connie's eyes were fixed in front of her. Her breath came in low, gasping sobs. Her cheeks had flamed from white to crimson, and the hand that held her handkerchief was quivering.
"Connie," whispered Muriel. "They are only going to Aldershot."
A sudden suspicion seized her lest Connie's mercurial affection should have lighted for the moment upon Dickie Weathergay. But Connie laughed softly.
"Look at the little fool, Daisy! I bet she isn't half enjoying herself. Knows that she makes a pretty picture and that half Marshington is watching her. Thinks she's the only girl interested in this war." Her voice was thick and fierce.
Muriel watched her with wonder. But, then, Connie was always giving way to unaccountable emotions, and to-night Muriel also felt weary and sad, because her heart ached where it had no right to ache, for this was Daisy's war. Daisy to-night was the symbol of those heroic women who all over Europe were giving their men to die for an ideal, and suffering a thousandfold all the possibilities of suffering in war. Muriel, who could dream at night of unimaginable horrors, whose thoughts followed to Belgium the fleeting whispers of atrocity, who heard hammering through her tired brain the old woman's words, "War's bloody hell," Muriel had no right nor claim upon this war. She envied those wives and sisters with that envy of suffering which can burn most potently of all.
But if Connie was absorbed by finding relief in her emotions, and Muriel troubled by physical and mental weariness, Mrs. Hammond was fully alive to the possibilities of the situation. She, too, as both her daughters in their different ways had seen it, realized that Muriel and Connie were out of it in this war. She had seen the admiring group of friends round Daisy Weathergay, and the becoming uniform of Phyllis Marshall Gurney, but they summoned her like a call to arms. She wasted no time on tears nor vague repining. She drew her fur coat closer round her small, plump figure.
"Poor dears," she sighed appropriately. "Poor dears, this awful war!" Then, having disposed of her duty as a patriot, she continued, "Muriel, I've been thinking that since Aunt Rose has been so ill, and keeps on asking for some of us to go and see her, you and I might both go for a week to Scarborough before Christmas. What do you think?"
Muriel did not think anything much. Scarborough or Marshington was all the same to her, in a world where nothing ever happened in peace or war to draw her closer to the fullness of life which other people found and which her youth had promised. She stumbled along the sodden wood steps over the railway lines, having even forgotten that Godfrey Neale with the 1st Yorkshire Rangers was in camp three miles from Scarborough.
"Oh, I don't mind," she said, with the indifference that so much disheartened her poor mother; and splashed on, thinking of the cold, flat ham sandwiches and sugarless coffee awaiting them in the dining-room of Miller's Rise.
Because Aunt Rose was not yet well, breakfast at 199 The Esplanade, Scarborough, was postponed until nine o'clock. Uncle George, of course, kept to his usual punctuality of half-past eight. Muriel at half-past seven that morning could hear him whistling cheerily as he trotted along to the bathroom.
She lay between linen sheets that felt chill and smooth. Her hot-water bottle had grown cold as a dead fish. Drowsily she moved it to the edge of the bed with her feet. She seemed to have lain like this all night, waiting for the maid to bring her water, and thinking sleepily of Godfrey Neale.
It had been such a funny evening. She and her mother and Uncle George had met him at the Princess Royal Hotel, and had dined together. A queer self-possession alien to her nature had seized upon Muriel. She remembered looking at her slim figure in the long glass of the corridor and thinking that she ought all her life to have worn that vivid cherry colour instead of blues and greys. It gave her a strange courage and merriment, so that she had laughed and talked, conscious of the flame of her bright dress, and feeling like a princess in a fairy tale suddenly released from her enchantment.
She had seen things about Godfrey too that she had never seen before. Most dearly she remembered how, when they were sitting in the lounge after dinner, his lean brown fingers had pressed the charred end of his cigarette into the saucer of his coffee-cup, and she had thought, "He is like that. When he has finished with a thing, he crushes it like that without thinking. He is not cruel, nor ungrateful, only a little stupid and lacking in imagination." She remembered the stories that Marshington told of his flirtations with Gladys Seton, and the Honourable Lucy Leyton, and then Phyllis Marshall Gurney. He had meant nothing. He simply had never given a thought to what they might have dreamed to be his meaning. She had felt old and very wise and disillusioned.
Then the orchestra played, and he had looked up suddenly, twisting his head and frowning and beating time against the arm of his chair. He said to Muriel:
"What is this tune? I seem to know it?"
"It's Mignon's song,'Kennst du das Land.'Have you heard Mignon?"
"No," he said. A shadow of discomfort crossed his face. He struggled to remember something. Muriel, knowing what he sought, remembered the day in spring when he had driven her home from the Vicarage. "No. I can't say I have. Yet I heard that tune . . ."
"At our house," said Muriel. "The first time that you ever came. Had you forgotten?"
He looked at her then, and seeing that she offered him simple friendliness he said, speaking deliberately:
"No. I have not forgotten. I think, whatever happens, that I shall never forget."
And she had nodded, understanding him. And for the first time she had been aware that some day he might ask her to marry him simply because she would not ask him to forget.
As they walked home, wrapped in furs, along the Esplanade, Mrs. Hammond had murmured happily:
"Well, dear, did Godfrey suggest meeting us again?"
"Yes, he wants me to go to the Pictures with him on Monday afternoon. We could have tea at the new Pavilion place first."
The wind blew from the darkness against them. It lashed Muriel's hair against her eyes, and rushed against her, as though it were forcing her back along the road to Godfrey.
Mrs. Hammond seemed to be quite sure now. Muriel lay wondering. Until that night, she had never believed it to be possible, but now she saw that it was almost likely, for nobody else would ask from him so little, and he, she realized it at last, had not been proud but humble, aware how little there was for him to give. She had never liked him so well as now when she knew that he had been true to his idea of Clare. He was conceited. He was sure of himself. He was terribly limited and arrogant and complacent, but he was wistful, too, for something quite beyond his comprehension, and just because of that he might ask Muriel to marry him. There were, of course, other reasons, and to Godfrey they would be important, for nine-tenths of him was just the practical country squire, devoted to his estate and his position. The Hammonds had money. In spite of her father's recklessness, he was himself too able, and Old Dickie Hammond had been too cautious, to allow the business once built up to crumble. With the Hammond money Godfrey could keep hunters. He would not upset Mrs. Neale, who wanted to have a grandson, and who cared little for the smart young women from the county families. Arthur Hammond's daughter would present to her no insurmountable obstacle, because Muriel was also Rachel Bennet's daughter, and the Bennets had once been as good a stock as any in the East Riding. Muriel too, was all Bennet and no Hammond. She was not like Connie, with the coarse strain that gave her vitality hardly curbed by Bennet gentleness.
If he asked her to marry him, she would, of course, accept. It would be a splendid triumph, the end of her long years of waiting and feeling that she was a complete failure. It would be the consummation of her duty to her mother, of her success as a woman. She would be the mistress of the Weare Grange, the mother of its heir. She would be mistress then of Marshington, and of her own rich destiny.
Strange, it seemed to her, that her body lay limp and unresponsive between the cold sheets, that the word marriage conveyed to her, not a picture of Godfrey but of the Wears Grange, that she shrank from the thought of further intimacy with his bodily perfection and his limited mind. He was nice, far nicer than she had thought. There was even that little unexpected strain of the romantic in him. She was sure that she could love him. "Ihaveloved him all my life," said Muriel, and lay, waiting to feel the glow of love warming her coldness.
"This is not as it should be," she felt. But nothing ever was as it should be in a world where the best conclusion was a compromise. She turned her face into the pillow and thought of Martin Elliott, and the happiness that glowed about Delia's swift mind. "Well, if Godfrey had been like Martin Elliott," she thought.
Crash!
As though the fury of a thousand thunderbolts had hurled, crashing against the house, the noise shattered the morning and then ceased.
So swiftly the quietness closed in again, it seemed as though the sound were but a jagged rent across the silence, letting into the world for a moment the roaring of the spheres. Yet, though this one blow crashed and then was still, Muriel felt as though such violence must last for ever, and silence became the incredible thing.
She lay quite still, her limbs relaxed in the flat darkness of the bed, her arms lying beside her, heavy with sleep. She did not believe that the sound had really happened. Her thoughts returned to their path. If Godfrey had been a man like Martin Elliott, someone in whom one could seek companionship of mind, with whom one could feel as much at home as with one's own thoughts . . .
Crash! Crash! Crash!
It really had happened then.
It was not an illusion. She drew one hand across her forehead that felt damp and cold.
Of course this was what Uncle George had said would happen. The noise was the noise of guns, big guns firing. This was what the little pamphlets had told them to prepare for. This was the War. Only it had no business to happen so early in the morning before they were properly awake.
Crash! Crash!
Huge sounds, flat and ugly, dropped into the silence of the room. Slowly she turned and sat up in bed. Her curtains were drawn aside, but she could see nothing through her window. The panes looked as though they had been painted grey. Solid and opaque, the fog blotted out the sea.
It seemed absurd that this blinding, shattering immensity of sound should yet convey no impression to the eye.
She lay back in bed, her mind completely calm and rather listless, but she could feel the perspiration from her armpits soaking her nainsook nightgown. That was curious.
"Muriel! Muriel!"
In an interval of silence her mother's voice called to her. The door opened. Mrs. Hammond in her dressing-gown of padded lilac silk stood by the bed.
"Muriel, are you there? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Of course I am all right. What is it?"
She wished that her mother would go away and let her lie there quietly.
"Get up, get up. Come to my room. You mustn't lie there, facing the sea." There was a sharp note of anxiety in her mother's voice.
Facing the sea. Why shouldn't she face the sea? Slowly Muriel thrust her feet out of bed, her toes twitching in the cold air as she felt for her slippers along the carpet.
"Quick, quick, never mind your slippers. Ah!"
Another sound broke about them, sharper than any before, as though the whole world had splintered into fragments round them. Muriel still fumbled below the bed.
"I can't find my slippers," she said stupidly.
"Look!" gasped Mrs. Hammond.
Muriel looked at the window. The shattered edges of the panes still shivered in their wooden frame. On the floor below broken glass lay scattered. The noise had become visible at last.
After that, a series of odd and ridiculous things all happened very quickly. Uncle George appeared in his shirt-sleeves, with one side of his face lathered for shaving.
"I'm going to the Garbutts'. Their car must take Rose. Get her ready."
Mrs. Hammond and Muriel hurried to Aunt Rose's room. Muriel always remembered afterwards kneeling by her aunt's bed and drawing cashmere stockings, two pairs, over those fat legs, where blue veins ran criss-cross below the tight-stretched skin. It seemed to her a fantastic sort of nightmare that could bring her to such close contemplation of her aunt's legs. Then Uncle George returned, and they all bundled Aunt Rose's shawls downstairs into the car, hoping that she was still inside them, for they could see nothing of her.
As the door opened, and Muriel saw the blank wall of fog along the Esplanade, she felt as though she were standing on the world's edge, staring into the din of chaos. All the time the vast noise pounded on above them.
Then they were all running, Uncle George, her mother and herself, down a grey funnel with tall looming sides. They stumbled in a little tripping run as one runs in a dream. Muriel tried to tell herself, "This is an immense adventure. The Germans are landing at Cayton Bay under cover of the fog. Or they are on the foreshore. This noise is a bombardment from battleships to cover the landing, and we are running for our lives to Seamer Valley. This grey funnel is a street leading to Mount Road. I am running for my life and I am not afraid."
The noise crashed above them through the fog, as though a grey curtain of sound had shut out the light. Little knots of people in peculiar attire appeared from the grey mists, and blew like wandering smoke along the alley, only to vanish again into vapour.
"In another moment," Muriel told herself, "we may all be dead." But she could not make herself feel really interested in anything except her stockings, which were sliding to her ankles, and felt most uncomfortable. She would have liked to stop and fasten them, but she felt that it would somehow not be etiquette, to stop to fasten one's stockings in the middle of a race for life. "I was not brought up to adventures," she told herself. "I don't yet know the way to manage them."
Then her mother stopped. "I—I can't—run—any—more," she panted. Her small fat figure in its fur coat had been bouncing along in little hops, like an India-rubber ball. Now she stumbled and clung on to a railing for support. "You—go—on. I'll come."
"Draw a deep breath, Rachel, and count three," said Uncle George solemnly. He performed Sandow's exercises every morning before breakfast and was therefore an athletic authority.
Muriel watched them, while the running figures stumbled past, quiet beneath a canopy of sound.
"You—go—on," Mrs. Hammond repeated.
"Now, Rachel, go steady. Breathe as I count. One, two."
They were not afraid, any of them. They had a strange, courageous dignity, these two comical little people, standing beneath the desolation of deafening clamour and breathing deeply. "Mother," thought Muriel, "is thinking of Father." Uncle George was thinking of Aunt Rose. Muriel was thinking about herself, and the strangeness of it all, and how she was not afraid. For there was something that made each one of them feel stronger than the fear of death.
A woman rushing along the pavement with her perambulator pushed it into Muriel and nearly knocked her over. She sobbed as she ran and the two babies in the perambulator were crying.
"This is real," said Muriel to herself. "This is a really great adventure, and none of us know this minute where we shall be to-morrow and nothing matters like success or failure now, but only courage. This must be why the soldiers sing when they go to the trenches. It's all so beautifully simple." She wanted to die then, when life was simple, rather than face Marshington again and the artificial complications that entangled her life there.
An elation possessed her. She could have sung and shouted. She stumbled down the rough road again, holding her mother's arm and talking to her foolishly about what they would have for breakfast when they awoke from this strange dream. She remembered saying that she would have kippers, although she knew that she really hated them and rarely ate more than toast and marmalade. But then she didn't run for her life every morning before breakfast. She saw Seamer as some goal of human endeavour, very far away in the distance. It did not seem to be an ordinary place at all.
Suddenly from their feet, the Mere stretched, flat and lifeless beyond tall reeds, clouded like a looking-glass on which somebody has breathed. The noise grew louder. Somebody called, "Turn to your right. Your right. They're firing straight in front."
And even then, Muriel was not frightened. They wandered in a vague, irrelevant place among heaps of garbage, and cabbage stalks, and teapot lids, and torn magazine covers. Just to their left rose a little hovel, the crazy sort of shelter that allotment holders erect to hold their tools. She looked at it, blinking through the mist and noise, and then, suddenly, it was not there. It just collapsed and sank quietly down in a little cloud of smoke, hardly denser than the fog. It seemed appropriate to the absurd nightmare of the whole affair that a board on a post should grin to them out of the mist, saying, "Rubbish may be shot here."
"Ha, ha!" laughed Uncle George. "They're shooting rubbish, and no mistake."
And Mrs. Hammond pushed back her hair feebly with one free hand and laughed too.
Then they were all leaning over a gate, unable for the moment to run further. As though for their amusement, a grotesque and unending procession passed before them on the road to Seamer. There was a small child, leading a great collie dog that limped forlornly on three legs; an old man, leading two pretty young girls with greatcoats above their nightgowns, who giggled and shivered as they ran. There were little boys pushing wheelbarrows, and waggons holding school children, and motor-cars, and bicycles, and ladies in fur coats and lacy caps. Then a girls' school came trotting, two and two, in an orderly procession, laughing and chattering as they ran. Then more cars and cycles and donkey carts.
Nothing was quite normal except the girls' school. Every one else was a little fantastic, a little distorted, like people in a dream.
All the time on the other side of the road, the soldiers were passing into Scarborough, some marching, some swinging their legs from the back of motor-lorries, some flashing past on motor-cycles. As they passed, some of them cheered the procession leaving the town and called, "Are we downhearted?" And the refugees shouted "No!" And some cried and sobbed as they ran, and some shouted back and some said nothing, but plodded on silently looking neither to the left nor right.
A cheerful, round-faced man in pyjamas and a woman's flannel dressing-jacket nodded at Uncle George.
"Heard the news?" he shouted. "They've got into the town. That's why the firing has stopped. Our chaps are giving 'em hell. I'll give 'em half an hour until the fleet comes up."
Everybody talked to everybody else. And Scarborough was said to be in flames, and our men were fighting all along the foreshore, where the little cheap booths stood in summer. While they talked, the mist seemed to break, and the steep hills of Seamer shouldered up from the tattered cloaks of fog.
It was just then that a lorry swung by down the road, and stopped for a moment, blocked by the crowd. The officer in charge stood up to see what had happened, and Muriel saw, standing very tall and clear against the hills of Seamer, her lord and master, Godfrey Neale. He had seen Muriel. Their eyes met, and for a moment they became conscious of nothing but each other. He smiled at her and stooped down from the lorry.
"You are all right?"
"Quite. We're going to Seamer. We shall be all right."
She thought that he was going to his death, and then the thought came to her that she loved him. Here at last she had found all that she had been seeking. The fullness of life was hers, here on the threshold of death. She knew that it must always be so; and she lifted her head to meet love, unafraid.
"Good luck to you!" she called, and smiled to him across the road.
"Good luck!" he said.
The words came back to her, "Good luck have thou with thine honour. Ride on because of the word of truth of meekness and righteousness, and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things."
The lorry swept him away along the road.
It seemed to Muriel just part of the futility of things in general that there should have been no invasion after all. The supreme adventure had dwindled into an uncomfortable wandering among the smells and indecencies of a refuse dump on the outskirts of Scarborough. There had been no heroism, no glorious simplicity, nothing but shame and querulous fatigue, and a long walk home.
At three o'clock in the afternoon they stood by the remnants of a strange meal of cold roast beef, celery and boiled eggs, discussing ways and means. The afternoon sun glittered on the sea, the cliffs, the metallic smoothness of the Esplanade. It shone through the windows at the back of the house on to the piled up kitchen table, and on to the small black kitten, the one profiteer of the morning's adventure, who, having disposed of all Uncle George's breakfast haddock, slept serenely now among its ruins.
It was the only member of the household who was not feeling very cross and tired.
However, everything had been arranged by Mrs. Hammond. Arthur, to whom she had telephoned, was to come with a car and fetch her and Aunt Rose away to Marshington. Muriel was to stay at Scarborough for the night to finish packing and to look after Uncle George.
That evening Muriel knelt in the littered bedroom before her mother's trunk. Her head ached, but her heart felt still more cold and heavy. She wanted terribly to go away at once somewhere where nobody could ever find her, and cry, and cry, and cry. But there was no time to cry, for her father had arrived with the car, and Mrs. Hammond was wrapping Aunt Rose again into her shawls, while Mr. Hammond walked along the front to see what damage had been done.
Faintly through the house rang an electric bell. The maids had somehow evaporated into the mist. Muriel went downstairs to answer the bell, smoothing her hair mechanically as she went.
On the door-step stood Godfrey Neale, in mud-splashed overalls. His motor-cycle stood out in the road.
"Oh, you are b—back," he said. "I'm on my way to Cayton. I just looked in to see if you were all right."
He came in and shut the door behind him. The hall was almost dark, but Muriel did not lead him into the sitting-room. She could see his tall figure towering above her, but she never moved.
"I saw you this morning," he said.
"Yes."
"What are you going to do?"
"Mother is taking Aunt Rose back to-night to Marshington. I am staying to pack and to look after Uncle George."
"You don't mind? You won't be nervous?"
"No, I shan't mind."
Her hands hung heavily at her sides. The gloom of the hall oppressed her. Her head ached dully. There was something that she wanted to remember, but could not, for her mind was empty of all thought.
"It's quite safe now," he said, as if to reassure her. "Nothing can happen now. A pity our fellows missed them, though, in the fog."
Dully her mind repeated, "Nothing can happen now." She stood there waiting.
But for Godfrey, whose reactions came more slowly, the golden hour had not yet passed. He lingered still beneath the spell of the morning's high adventure, when Muriel had smiled up at him out of the mist.
"I'm going away," he said. "I've got to report to Aldershot to-morrow. I don't know when I shall see you again."
"Oh, then I expect that this is good-bye."
She felt that she had known this all along, and that it was good-bye indeed. Her hour had come and passed her. She did not honour love the less, but knew herself to be unworthy of it. She stood silently, waiting for him to leave her, though she felt as though he had left her long ago. She held out her hand, but in the darkness she failed to find his. She touched his arm instead, with a touch, light as a flower. He brushed her hand aside and swept her into his arms.
She lay there, limply, unreasoningly, thinking of nothing but that the bitterness of parting had passed over her long ago, like the waters of Mara. His lips brushed the dark smoothness of her hair, the pale oval of her upturned face, and she did not resist. He had already left her. This was a dream.
"Muriel, Muriel!" Her mother's voice called from the landing. Here was something that belonged to her real life, that she could understand. "Muriel, come and help me to bring your aunt downstairs."
She responded to the claim that she had always known, broke from him without a word, and ran upstairs.
When she returned, five minutes later, Godfrey had gone.
Muriel opened the front door wearily and glanced at the brass tray on the hall table. Surely it must come soon, to-day, to-morrow he must write. He could not just go off like that into the silence of an unknown world after what had happened.
There were three letters on the tray for her, one from Janet Holmes, now nursing in Newcastle, one from the vicar's wife at Kepplethorpe about the egg collection, one from a Nursing Club member.
Muriel hated the letters, hated the brass tray, hated sullenly and fiercely the weariness of her ankles and her shoulders. She had been standing nearly all day in the Red Cross Depot, lifting bundles that were too heavy for her. She leaned forward with her hands on the cool marble of the hall table, resting for a moment before she climbed the stairs. The smooth blades of an aspidistra plant confronted her. She hated aspidistras too.
From the dining-room came the flat reiteration of her mother's voice, scolding, scolding with gentle but monotonous persistence. Then followed Connie's shrill defiance, and her father's deep-toned boom. They were quarrelling again, always quarrelling. Connie was too bad, always upsetting everybody like this. As though the war in itself were not enough, lying like a heavy weight upon your heart, day and night, numbing your feelings to all but the bitter things.
She could not bear it much longer. She would have to go away. Why should not she become a proper army nurse like Janet? She liked nursing, that kept her body active and would not let her think. She loved to look after people. It soothed the soreness of her heart. Her daily visits to the Depot, her hours of dusting round carefully disinfected convalescents at the local hospitals were only sops for the unquiet conscience of Marshington. Marshington wanted to feel that it was doing its bit, yet desired the merit without too great discomfort. Muriel was not like that. She had a terror of finding the War over and herself as usual out of it. She saw a triumphal procession marching through the city square of Kingsport, with braying trumpets and flying flags, and herself isolated, sad, standing up a back street because she had no part in the rejoicing. For those who were in it, the War brought suffering, and anxiety and blinding sorrow. But these were glorious. You could make a song of them and sing it through your tears. For those who were not in the War, it was a grinding hunger, an agony of isolation; and of these things you could not make a song. You felt no pride of loss, no glory of sacrifice. There were only shameful tears to shed, and the long ache of pain which had no remedy.
Why was her mother so angry now? Her mother had been splendid. Every one said so. The way in which she had emerged from her terrific experience at Scarborough, shaken but undaunted, to resume her patriotic duties here in Marshington, had been quite admirable. Mrs. Marshall Gurney's escape from Germany paled before her greater heroism. Mrs. Hammond had been rightly elected President of the Local War Services Association.
Why didn't Godfrey write?
The dining-room door opened, and Connie flounced out, hurling defiance over her shoulder as she came.
"Well, I'm jolly well going, so there!"
She banged the door.
"Good Lord, Muriel, how you startled me! What on earth are you doing?"
"I've just come in. I'm going up to change."
"Oh. Then I suppose that you heard."
"No. I didn't hear anything except that you were quarrelling, as usual."
She was not interested. She climbed the stairs wearily, dragging at the handrail, wondering why the last five steps were always so much steeper than the others. Then she told herself that she was only tired, and that she must pull herself together. A hot bath soothed her body and mind. She put out her blue poplin dress on to the bed, and a blue ribbon for her hair. While she was changing, Mrs. Hammond entered the room.
"I suppose that you've seen Connie. Now, isn't it too bad?"
"I don't know. What is it?"
It appeared to be a great many things. Mrs. Hammond had gone into Connie's room at midday, and found the bed unmade, and Connie reading a novel. When she had remonstrated, Connie just threw the counterpane above the chaos left by last night's slumber. And when Mrs. Hammond discovered this, and pointed out very seriously what a bad example it set the maids, Connie had said, "That's all we keep maids here for—to set them examples. Why should we keep a dog and bark ourselves? There's no room for three women in a house. You should have let me go to that chicken farm."
"It's all too bad," sighed her mother. "You don't know how she hurts me." Mrs. Hammond pushed back her tears with a small lacy handkerchief. Connie was her favourite daughter. She had tried to do her best for her. But where Arthur was possible though difficult to manage, Connie was quite beyond her. "Connie's so inconsiderate. I don't know what's happened to her lately. I've done my best. I'm sure that I've done my best for you both. And now she wants to go and work on the land at some horrid place in the North Riding called Thraile."
"Well, why not?" Muriel clasped her necklace and set straight the things upon her dressing-table. She wished that this domestic wrangle had not come just when she was feeling calmer and more sane.