THE speed was glorious. Back flashed field and hill and copse, and the dear “companionable hedgeways.” Back flew iterative telegraph posts with Herculean swing, into the Past, looped together in rhythmic movement, marking the pulses of old Time. On, with rack and roar, into the mysterious Future. One could sit at the window and watch the machinery of Time’s foundry at work; the hammers of his forge beating, beating, the wild sparks flying, the din and chaos whirling round one’s bewildered brain;—Past becoming Present, Present melting into Future, before one’s eyes. To sit and watch the whirring wheels; to think “Now it is thus and thus; presently, another slice of earth and sky awaits me”—ye Gods, it is not to be realized!

The wonder of the flying land—England, England with her gentle homesteads, her people of the gentle voices; and the unknown wonder of that other land, soon to change its exquisite dream-features for the still more thrilling, appealing marvel of reality—could it all be true? Was this the response of the genius of the ring, the magic ring that we call will? And would the complaisant genius always appear and obey one’s behests, in this strange fashion?

Thoughts ran on rhythmically, in the steady, flashing movement through verdant England. The Real! that was the truly exquisite, the truly great, the true realm of the imagination! What imagination was ever born to conceive or compass it?

A rattle under a bridge, a roar through a tunnel, and on again, through Kentish orchards. A time of blossoming. Disjointed, delicious impressions followed one another in swift succession, often superficially incoherent, but threaded deep, in the stirred consciousness, on a silver cord:—the unity of the creation was as obvious as its multiplicity.

Images of the Past joined hands with visions of the Future. In these sweet green meadows, men had toiled, as thralls, but a few lifetimes ago, and they had gathered together, as Englishmen do, first to protest and reasonably demand, and then to buy their freedom with their lives. Their countrywoman sent a message of thanksgiving, backward through the centuries, to these stout champions of the land’s best heritage, and breathed an aspiration to be worthy of the kinship that she claimed.

The rattle and roar grew into a symphony—full, rich, magnificent, and then, with a rush, came a stirring musical conception: it seized the imagination.

Oh, why were they stopping? It was a little country station, but many passengers were on the platform. A careworn looking woman and a little girl entered the carriage, and the little girl fixed her eyes on her fellow-traveller with singular persistence. Then the more practical features of the occasion came into view, and all had an enthralling quality of reality—poetry. The sound of the waiting engine breathing out its white smoke into the brilliant air, the powerful creature quiescent but ready, with the turn of a handle, to put forth its slumbering might; the crunching of footsteps on the gravel, the wallflowers and lilacs in the little station garden, the blue of the sky, and ah! the sweetness of the air when one leant out to look along the interminable straight line of rails, leading—whither? Even the very details of one’s travelling gear: the tweed gown meet for service, the rug and friendly umbrella, added to the feeling of overflowing satisfaction. The little girl stared more fixedly than ever. A smile and the offer of a flower made her look down, for a minute, but the gaze was resumed. Wherefore? Was the inward tumult too evident in the face? Well, no matter. The world was beautiful and wide!

The patient monster began to move again, with a gay whistle, as if he enjoyed this chase across country, on the track of Time. He was soon at full speed again, on his futile race: a hapless idealist in pursuit of lost dreams. The little girl watched the dawn of a smile on the face of the kind, pretty lady who had given her the flower. A locomotive figuring as an idealist! Where would one’s fancy lead one to next?

Ah the sea! heaving busily, and flashing under the morning radiance. Would they have a good crossing? The wind was fresh. How dreamy and bright and windy the country looked, and how salt was the sea-breeze! Very soon they would arrive at Folkestone. Rugs and umbrellas and handbags must be collected. The simple, solid commonplace of it all, touched some wholesome spring of delight. What a speed the train was going at! One could scarcely stand in the jolting carriage. Old Time must not make too sure of his victory. One felt a wistful partisanship for his snorting rival, striving for ever to accomplish the impossible. The labouring visionary was not without significance to aspiring mortals.

The outskirts of the town were coming in sight; grey houses bleakly climbing chalky heights. It would be well to put on a thick overcoat at once. It was certain to be cold in the Channel.

Luckily Hannah had a head on her shoulders, and could be trusted to follow the directions that had been given her.

The last five minutes seemed interminable, but they did come to an end. There was an impression of sweet salt air, of wind and voices, of a hurrying crowd; occasionally a French sentence pronounced by one of the officials, reminiscent of a thousand dreams and sights of foreign lands; and then the breezy quay and waiting steamboat.

The sound of that quiet, purposeful hiss of the steam sent a thrill along the nerves. Hannah and her charge were safely on board; the small luggage followed, and lastly Hadria traversed the narrow bridge, wondering when the moment would arrive for waking up and finding herself in her little bedroom at Craddock Dene? What was she thinking of? Dream? This was no dream, this bold, blue, dancing water, this living sunshine, this salt and savour and movement and brilliancy!

The other was the dream; it seemed to be drifting away already. The picture of the village and the house and the meadows, and the low line of the hills was recalled as through a veil; it would not stand up and face the emphatic present. At the end of a few months, would there be anything left of her connexion with the place where she had passed six—seven years of her life? and such years! They had put scars on her soul, as deep and ghastly as ever red-hot irons had marked on tortured flesh. Perhaps it was because of this rabid agony undergone, that now she seemed to have scarcely any clinging to her home,—for the present at any rate. And she knew that she left only sorrow for conventional disasters behind her. The joy of freedom and its intoxication drowned every other feeling. It was sheer relief to be away, to stretch oneself in mental liberty and leisure, to look round at earth and sky and the hurrying crowds, in quiet enjoyment; to possess one’s days, one’s existence for the first time, in all these long years! It was as the home-coming of a dispossessed heir. This freedom did not strike her as strange, but as obvious, as familiar. It was the first condition of a life that was worth living. And yet never before had she known it. Ernest and Fred and even Austin had enjoyed it from boyhood, and in far greater completeness than she could ever hope to possess it, even now.

Yet even this limited, this comparative freedom, which a man could afford to smile at, was intoxicating. Heavens! under what a leaden cloud of little obligations and restraints, and loneliness and pain, she had been living! And for what purpose? To make obeisance to a phantom public, not because she cared one iota for the phantom or its opinions, but because husband and parents and relations were terrified at the prospect of a few critical and disapproving remarks, that they would not even hear! How mad it all was! It was not true feeling, not affection, that prompted Hubert’s opposition; it was not care for his real happiness that inspired Henriette with such ardour in this cause; they would both be infinitely happier and more harmonious in Hadria’s absence. The whole source of their distress was the fear of what people would say when the separation became known to the world. That was the beginning and the end of the matter. Why could not the stupid old world mind its own business, in heaven’s name? Good people, especially good women of the old type, would all counsel the imbecile sacrifice. They would all condemn this step. Indeed, the sacrifice that Hadria had refused to make, was so common, so much a matter of course, that her refusal appeared startling and preposterous: scarcely less astonishing than if a neighbour at dinner, requesting one to pass the salt, had been met with a rude “I shan’t.”

“A useful phrase at times, of the nature of a tonic, amidst our enervating civilisation,” she reflected.

There was a tramping of passengers up and down the deck. People walked obliquely, with head to windward. Draperies fluttered; complexions verged towards blue. Only two ladies who had abandoned hope from the beginning, suffered from the crossing. The kindly sailors occupied their leisure in bringing tarpaulins to the distressed.

“Well, Hannah, how are you getting on?”

Hannah looked forward ardently to the end of the journey, but her charge seemed delighted with the new scene.

“Have you ever been to France before, ma’am?” Hannah asked, perhaps noticing the sparkle of her employer’s eye and the ring in her voice.

“Yes, once; I spent a week in Paris with Mr. Temperley, and we went on afterwards to the Pyrenees. That was just before we took the Red House.”

“It must have been beautiful,” said Hannah. “And did you take the babies, ma’am?”

“They were neither of them in existence then,” replied Mrs. Temperley. A strange fierce light passed through her eyes for a second, but Hannah did not notice it. Martha’s shawl was blowing straight into her eyes, and the nurse was engaged in arranging it more comfortably.

The coast of France had become clear, some time ago; they were making the passage very quickly to-day. Soon the red roofs of Boulogne were to be distinguished, with the grey dome of the cathedral on the hill-top. Presently, the boat had arrived in the bright old town, and every detail of outline and colour was standing forth brilliantly, as if the whole scene had been just washed over with clear water and all the tints were wet.

The first impression was keen. The innumerable differences from English forms and English tones sprang to the eye. A whiff of foreign smell and a sound of foreign speech reached the passengers at about the same moment. The very houses looked unfamiliarly built, and even the letters of printed names of hotels and shops had a frivolous, spindly appearance—elegant but frail. The air was different from English air. Some bouillon and a slice of fowl were very acceptable at the restaurant at the station, after the business of examining the luggage was over. Hannah, evidently nourishing a sense of injury against the natives for their eccentric jargon, and against the universe for the rush and discomfort of the last quarter of an hour, was disposed to express her feelings by a marked lack of relish for her food. She regarded Hadria’s hearty appetite with a disdainful expression. Martha ate bread and butter and fruit. She was to have some milk that had been brought for her, when they were en route again.

“Tout le monde en voiture!” Within five minutes, the train was puffing across the wastes of blowing sand that ran along the coast, beyond the town. The child, who had become accustomed to the noise and movement, behaved better than had been expected. She seemed to take pleasure in looking out of the window at the passing trees. Hannah was much struck with this sign of awakening intelligence. It was more than the good nurse showed herself. She scarcely condescended to glance at the panorama of French fields, French hills and streams that were rushing by. How pale and ethereal they were, these Gallic coppices and woodlands! And with what a dainty lightness the foliage spread itself to the sun, French to its graceful finger-tips! That grey old house, with high lichen-stained roof and narrow windows—where but in sunny France could one see its like?—and the little farmsteads and villages, full of indescribable charm. One felt oneself in a land of artists. There was no inharmonious, no unfitting thing anywhere. Man had wedded himself to Nature, and his works seemed to receive her seal and benediction. English landscape was beautiful, and it had a particular charm to be found nowhere else in the world; but in revenge, there was something here that England could not boast. Was it fanciful to see in the characteristics of vegetation and scenery, the origin or expression of the difference of the two races at their greatest?

“Ah, if I were only a painter!”

They were passing some fields where, in the slanting rays of the sun, peasants in blue blouses and several women were bending over their toil. It was a subject often chosen by French artists. Hadria understood why. One of the labourers stood watching the train, and she let her eyes rest on the patient figure till she was carried beyond his little world. If she could have painted that scene just as she saw it, all the sadness and mystery of the human lot would have stood forth eloquently in form and colour; these a magic harmony, not without some inner kinship with the spirit of man at its noblest.

What was he thinking, that toil-bent peasant, as the train flashed by? What tragedy or comedy was he playing on his rural stage? Hadria sat down and shut her eyes, dazzled by the complex mystery and miracle of life, and almost horrified at the overwhelming thought of the millions of these obscure human lives burning themselves out, everywhere, at every instant, like so many altar-candles to the unknown God!

“And each one of them takes himself as seriously as I take myself: perhaps more seriously. Ah, if one could but pause to smile at one’s tragic moments, or still better, at one’s sublime ones. But it can’t be done. A remembrancer would have to be engaged, to prevent lapses into the sublime,—and how furious one would be when he nudged one, with his eternal: ‘Beware!’”

It was nearly eight o’clock when the train plunged among the myriad lights of the great city. The brilliant beacon of the Eiffel Tower sat high up in the sky, like an exile star.

Gaunt and grim was the vast station, with its freezing purplish electric light. Yet even here, to Hadria’s stirred imagination, there was a certain quality in the Titanic building, which removed it from the vulgarity of English utilitarian efforts of the same order.

In a fanciful mood, one might imagine a tenth circle of the Inferno, wherein those stern grey arches should loftily rise, in blind and endless sequence, limbing an abode of horror, a place of punishment for those, empty-hearted, who had lived without colour and sunshine, in voluntary abnegation, caring only for gain and success.

The long delay in the examination of the luggage, the fatigue of the journey, tended to increase the disposition to regard the echoing edifice, with its cold hollow reverberations, as a Circle of the Doomed. It was as if they passed from the realm of the Shades through the Gates of Life, when at length the cab rattled out of the courtyard of the station, and turned leftwards into the brilliant streets of Paris. It was hard to realize that all this stir and light and life had been going on night after night, for all these years, during which one had sat in the quiet drawing-room at Craddock Dene, trying wistfully, hopelessly, to grasp the solid fact of an unknown vast reality, through a record here and there. The journey was a long one to the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, but tired as she was, Hadria did not wish it shorter. Even Hannah was interested in the brilliantly lighted shops and cafÉs and the splendour of the boulevards. Now and again, the dark deserted form of a church loomed out, lonely, amidst the gaiety of Parisian street-life. Some electric lamp threw a distant gleam upon calm classic pillars, which seemed to hold aloof, with a quality of reserve rarely to be noticed in things Parisian. Hadria greeted it with a feeling of gratitude.

The great Boulevard was ablaze and swarming with life. The cafÉs were full; the gilt and mirrors and the crowds of consommateurs within, all visible as one passed along the street, while, under the awning outside, crowds were sitting smoking, drinking, reading the papers.

Was it really possible that only this morning, those quiet English fields had been dozing round one, those sleepy villagers spreading their slow words out, in expressing an absence of idea, over the space of time in which a Parisian conveyed a pocket philosophy?

The cabman directed his vehicle down the Rue Royale, passing the stately Madeleine, with its guardian sycamores, and out into the windy spaciousness of the Place de la Concorde.

A wondrous city! Hannah pointed out the electric light of the Eiffel Tower to her charge, and Martha put out her small hands, demanding the toy on the spot.

The festooned lights of the Champs ElysÉes swung themselves up, in narrowing line, till they reached the pompous arch at the summit, and among the rich trees of those Elysian fields gleamed the festive lamps of cafÉs chantants.

“Si Madame dÉsire encore quelque chose?” The neat maid, in picturesque white cap and apron, stood with her hand on the door of the little bedroom, on one of the highest storeys of the pension. Half of one of the long windows had been set open, and the sounds of the rolling of vehicles over the smooth asphalte, mingled with those of voices, were coming up, straight and importunate, into the dainty bedroom. The very sounds seemed nearer and clearer in this keen-edged land. The bed stood in one corner, canopied with white and blue; a thick carpet gave a sense of luxury and deadened the tramp of footsteps; a marble mantel-piece was surmounted by a mirror, and supported a handsome bronze clock and two bronze ornaments. The furniture was of solid mahogany. A nameless French odour pervaded the atmosphere, delicate, subtle, but unmistakeable. And out of the open window, one could see a series of other lighted windows, all of exactly the same tall graceful design, opening in the middle by the same device and the same metal handle that had to be turned in order to open or close the window. Within, the rooms obviously modelled themselves on the one unvarying ideal. A few figures could be seen coming and going, busy at work or play. Above the steep roofs, a blue-black sky was alive with brilliant stars.

“Merci;” Madame required nothing more.