Heritage :: PART II

PART II

I continued to feel, as I have said, that there was much in Malory’s story which remained to be satisfactorily explained, for I was convinced in my own mind that his interpretation of Ruth Pennistan’s flight, plausible as it was, was totally misleading, with the dangerous verisimilitude of a theory which will fit all, or nearly all, the facts, and yet more entirely miss the truth, by a mere accident, than would a frank perplexity. I think that he himself secretly agreed with me, a conviction I arrived at less by his own doubting words after the reading of the letter, than by his manner towards me when he had finished the story, and his mute, but none the less absolute, refusal to discuss, as I in my interest would willingly have discussed, certain points in his narration. I received the impression that he had chosen me as his audience merely because we knew nothing of one another beyond our names, from a craving to pour out that long dammed-up flood of emotion and meditation. I had—a somewhat galling reflection—played the part of the ground to Malory’s King Midas. I think that his indifference towards me turned to positive dislike after our week of intimacy, and this belief was strengthened when, with scarcely a farewell, he took an abrupt departure.

I will confess that I was hurt at the time, but an unaccountable instinct buoyed me up that some day, it might be after the passage of years, I should again be thrown in contact either with him or with his dramatis personÆ. How this came about I will now tell, though I do not pretend that any more mysterious purpose than my own desire intervened in the accomplishment of my hopes. Perhaps Malory would say that War was my fate, my god in the machine; perhaps it was; I do not know. The definition of fate is a vicious circle; like a little animal, say a mouse, turning after its tail.

I left Sampiero in 1914, a year after I had parted there from Malory, and my earlier prophecy justified itself, that our acquaintance would not be continued in our own country. In fact, amid the excitement of the war, I had almost forgotten the man, his habitual reticence, his sudden outburst into narrative, and the unknown, unseen people with whom that narrative had been concerned. But now as I idled disconsolately in London, discharged from hospital but indefinitely unfit for service, there stirred in my memory a recollection of the Pennistans, who were to me so strangely familiar, and I resolved that I would go for myself to pick up the thread where Malory had dropped it, to work on the fields where he had worked, and to probe into the lives he had tried to probe.

Hearing that the small help I could give would be welcome, I started out, much, I suppose, as Malory had started, with my bag in my hand, and reached the tiny station one evening in early April. The stationmaster directed me across the fields, by a way which I felt I already knew, and as I walked I wondered what had become of Malory; presumably he had turned his hand to a fighting trade, or had he sought some bizarre occupation congenial to him, in the bazaars of Bagdad, or in a North Sea drifter, or had the air called to him? I could not decide; perhaps the Pennistans would have news of his whereabouts.

But they had none. He had sent them a field post card from Gallipoli, and since then he had again disappeared; they did not seem very much surprised, and I guessed that in their slow instinctive way they had felt him to be a transitory, elusive man, who might be expected to turn up in his own time from some unanticipated corner. They suggested, however, that I should walk over to Westmacotts’ on a Sunday, and inquire from their daughter Ruth about Mr. Malory.

I cannot say that I was unhappy at the Pennistans’, for, though I fretted a good deal at my comparative inactivity, the peace and stability of the place, of which Malory had so often spoken, stole over me with gradual enchantment of my spirit, like the incoming tide steals gradually over the sands. During the first days I took a curious delight in discovering the spots that had figured in his story, the fields, the dairy, and the cowshed, in recognising the pungent farm smells which had pleased his alert senses. These things were the same, but in other respects much was changed. The three bullock-like sons were gone, and few men remained to work the land. Rawdon Westmacott, they told me, was at the war, so was Nancy’s husband. And on sunny days I used to watch the aeroplanes come sailing up out of the blue, the sun catching their wings, and tumble, for sheer joy it seemed, in the air, while the hum of their engines filled the whole sky as with a gigantic beehive.

One detail I noticed after several days. The cage of mice which Malory had given to Ruth was no longer in the place I expected to see it, on the kitchen window-sill.

The unexpected had favoured me in one particular. Malory had mentioned that the old woman was ninety-six in the year he had gone to Pennistans’, and although he had never, so far as I remembered, given a date to that year, I reckoned that she must, if alive now, have passed her century. I was certain I should find her gone. Yet the first thing I saw as I entered the house was that little old huddled figure by the fire, head nodding, hands trembling, alive enough to feed and breathe, but not alive enough for anything else; she spent all her days in a wheeled chair, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in her own room, the quondam parlour, on the ground-floor across the passage; sometimes, when it was very warm, beside the garden-door out in the sun. She must always have been tiny, but now the frailty of her shrunken form was pitiable. Her wrists were like the legs of a chicken. Her jaws were fallen in, thin and flabby; her eyes never seemed to blink, but stared straight in front of her, at nothing, through everything....

I had Malory’s bedroom. It was bare, whitewashed, monastic, and appeared to me peculiarly suitable as a shrine to his personality. I wondered whether he had spent any part of his wandering life in the seclusion of a cloister, and as I wondered the realisation came over me that Malory was in spirit nearly allied to those mediÆval scholars, so unassuming, so far removed from the desire of fame, as to dedicate their anonymous lives to a single script, finding in their own inward satisfaction the fulfilment of personal ambition. And as I thought on Malory, in that clean, bare room, I came to a closer understanding of his kinship with many conditions of men, of his sympathy with life, nature, and craft—Malory, the man who had not been my friend.

As the week passed, I found myself greatly moved by the prospect of seeing, of speaking with Ruth. As I drew near to Westmacotts’, I felt the physical tingling of intense excitement run over me. I was about to meet a dear companion, to hear the sound of her voice, and to look into the familiarity of her eyes. Another picture swam up out of the mist to dim my vision, a babbling music filled my ears like the sound of waves in a shell, and the faintest scent quivered under my nostrils; gradually as these ghosts emerged from the confusion I defined the Italian hill-side, the rushing stream, and the dry, aromatic scent of the ground. Was this, then, the setting in which Ruth walked and spoke for me? I was startled at the vividness of the impression, and at the incredibly subtle complexity of the ordinary brain.

Although Malory had never, so far as I could remember, given me any description of Westmacott’s farm, whether of impression or detail, I recognised the place as soon as I had emerged from a little wood and had seen it lying in a hollow across the ploughed field, a connecting road which was little more than a cart-track running from it at right angles into the neat lane beyond. I recognised the farm-house, of creamy plaster heavily striped by gray oak beams, its upper story slightly overhanging, and supported on rounded corbels of the same bleached oak, rough-hewn. I was prepared to see, as I actually saw, the large barn of black, tarred weather-boarding, terminated by the two rounded oast-houses, and should have missed it had I not found it there.

And I knocked, and the sense of reality still failed to return to me. Some one opened the door. I saw a young woman in a blue linen dress, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts. My first impression was of astonishment at her beauty; Malory had led me to expect a subtle and languorous seduction, but I was not prepared for such actual beauty as I now found in her face.

“Are you Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said, “are you the gentleman that’s stopping with father?”

“I see you know about me.”

“Yes, sir; mother was over yesterday, and said you’d likely be coming. Won’t you come in, sir? if you’ll excuse the children. There’s only me to look after them to-day.”

I went into a clean and commonplace kitchen, and Ruth wiped a chair for me with her skirt, and put the baby into its cradle. She then sat down beside it, and with her foot kept the cradle moving on its rockers. I glanced round, and on the window-sill, among the pots of red geranium, I espied a wire cage with some little mice huddled in a corner.

“Mrs. Westmacott,” I said, feeling that the beginning of the conversation rested with me, “you and I are quite old friends though you may not know it.” I hated myself for my jocularity. “You remember Mr. Malory? He has spoken to me about his life here, and about you.”

I was looking at her; I saw that marvellous, that red rose blush of which Malory had spoken, come up under her skin till her cheek was like the rounded beauty of a nectarine. And I wondered, as I had wondered before; I wondered....

“And what news have you of Mr. Malory?” she asked.

“None,” I said. “I thought perhaps you might have heard.”

“I? If Mr. Malory was to write at all, would he not have written to you? Why should he write to me?”

“I hope,” I said, “that nothing has happened to him.”

She had answered me before I had finished speaking.

“Nothing has happened to him.”

“Why,” I said surprised, “how are you so certain?”

She looked suddenly trapped and angry.

“It’s an odd name,” she said at last, “one would notice it in a casualty list.” She rushed on. “We poor women, you know, have to keep our eye on the lists; there’s few officers, but many men, a mistake’s soon made, and my husband is there in France. This is my husband.” She lifted a photograph and showed me the keen, Arab face I had expected.

“Mr. Malory always told me your husband was a very handsome man. Are any of your children like him?”

I wished that Malory could have seen the softening of her face when I spoke of her children.

“No, sir,” she said, and I could have sworn I heard an exultant note in her voice. “They mostly take after their grandmother, I think,” and indeed I could see in the sleeping baby an absurd resemblance to Mrs. Pennistan. “Now my sister’s children, she has two, and one is fair like her, and one is as dark as my husband.”

I do not know what impulse moved me to rise and go over to the cage of mice.

“I have heard of these, too, from Mr. Malory,” I said. “You have had them six, seven, eight years now?”

“Oh, sir,” she cried amused, “those are not the pair Mr. Malory gave me. Those are their great-great-great-great, I don’t know how many greats, grandchildren. I’ve bred from them and bred from them; they’re friendly little things, and the children like them.”

“How do they breed now?” I asked.

“Well,” she replied, “they mostly come brown, I notice; I fancy the strain’s wearing out. From time to time I’ll get a black and white that doesn’t waltz—waltzing mice Mr. Malory used to call them—and from time to time I’ll get a waltzer; there was a lot of them at first, one or two in a litter, but they’re getting rare. That little fellow,” she said, pointing—and as she stood beside me I was conscious of her softness and warmth, and felt myself faintly troubled—“I’ve known him waltz once only since I’ve had him, which is since he was born. I look at them,” she added unexpectedly, “when they’re blind and pink in the nest, and wonder which’ll grow up brown and which’ll waltz and which be just piebald.”

“You speak like Mr. Malory,” I said.

She laughed as she turned away.

“Is that so, sir? Well, Mr. Malory always liked the mice, I don’t know why. He lived with us over a year, and maybe one takes on a manner of thinking in a year, I don’t know.”

Somehow I felt that the section of our conversation dealing with Malory was closed by that remark. We hung fire for a little. Then I asked her to show me over the place, which she did, and after that we had tea in the kitchen, brown bread cut from the big loaf, honey from her own hives, and jam of her own making. I watched her as she laid the cloth, noted her quick efficiency, was conscious of her quiet reserve and her strength, saw her beauty foiled and trebled by the presence of her children. After tea she made me smoke a pipe, sent the children out to play, and sat opposite me in a rocking chair with sewing in her hands and more sewing heaped near her on the floor. It was very pleasant in that warm interior, the fire crackled, the big clock ticked. I thought what a fool Malory had been.

I walked home in the dusk, hearing what he had never heard from those meadows: the thudding and bruising of the distant guns.

II

Little by little I learnt the details which linked the end of Malory’s story to the point where I was to take it up. Rawdon Westmacott, in spite of his wife’s entreaties to settle in another part of the country, had insisted on returning almost directly after their marriage to his farm, and there, ignored by her own family and by the whole horrified, scandalised countryside, Ruth had dwelt in a companionship more terrible than solitude. For Westmacott had followed unbridled his habitual paths of drunkenness and violence. How grim and disquieting must have been that situation: not two miles separated Pennistans’ from Westmacotts’, not two miles lay between the parents and the daughter, yet they were divided by league upon league of pride, across which their mutual longing quivered as heat-waves upon the surface of the desert. The mother, I think, would have gone, but Amos, with that Biblical austerity which Malory had noted in him, forbade any advance towards, any mention of, the prodigal. The ideal of decency, which is the main ideal of the country people, had been outraged, and this Amos, the heir of tradition, could not forgive. During the greater part of the first year, neither Ruth nor her mother can willingly have stirred far from their own garden door. The torment, the gnawing of that self-consciousness! The apprehension of that first Sunday, when Amos with set jaw forced his wife to church! with what tremulousness she must have entered the little nave, casting round her eyes in secret, dreading yet hoping, relieved yet disappointed. She bore traces of the strain, the buxom woman, in the covert glance of her eyes and the listening, searching expression of her face. I have seen her start at the sound of the door-latch, and look up expectantly as she must have looked in those days, afraid and longing to see the beloved figure in the door.

The tension came to an end at last, for Nancy, whose will might not be crossed, burst out with indignation at the treatment of her sister and set off angrily for Westmacotts’. She returned within an hour with the information that Rawdon was dead drunk in the kitchen and that Ruth’s child would surely be born before morning. Mrs. Pennistan had not known of the child; she leapt to her feet saying that she must go at once, and upbraided Amos for having withheld her so long from her own flesh and blood. Amos rose, and saying gloomily, “Do what you will, but don’t let me know of it,” he left the room.

I know nothing of the meeting between mother and daughter, but I imagine that the sheer urgency of the situation mercifully did much to smooth the difficulty of the moment. The crisis over, a new order of things replaced the old: relations were re-established, and Ruth henceforward came and went between her present and her former home. Only, the Pennistans’ door was barred to the son-in-law, as their lips were barred to his name. At the most, his phantasm hovered between them.

Now I have told all that I could reconstruct, and most of this I heard from Nancy, who was a frank, outspoken girl; common, I thought her, and ordinary, but good-hearted underneath her exuberance. She had lived at home since her husband had gone to fight. She was very different from her quiet sister, as different as a babbling brook from a wide, calm pool of water. I heard a great deal of abuse of Westmacott from her, even to tales of how he ill-treated his wife; and I also heard of her own happiness, confidences unrestrainedly poured out, for she was innocent of reserve. To this I preferred to listen, though, truthfully, she often bored and sometimes embarrassed me. I soon discovered that for all her fiery temper she was a woman of no moral stamina, and I didn’t like to dwell in my own mind upon her utter annihilation under the too probable blow of war.

The blow fell, and by the curse of Heaven I was there to see it; the reality of the danger had always seemed remote, even in the midst of its nearness, for such nightmares crawl closer and closer only to be flung back repeatedly by the force of human optimism. I had never before realised the depths of such optimism. Her first cry was “It cannot be true!” her first instinct the instinct of disbelief. In the same way she had always clung to an encouraging word, however futile, and had been cast down to an equal degree by an expression of pessimism. I suppose that when the strings of the human mind are drawn so taut, the slightest touch will call forth their pathetic music.... Poor Nancy! I had seen her husband on leave for ten days during which her eyes were radiant and her voice busy with song; he went; and was killed the day after his return to France.

Not very long afterwards I got a letter from Malory, forwarded and re-forwarded, which, coming out of the, so far as he was concerned, silence of years, reminded me forcibly of the day he had broken silence at Sampiero. It gave me a queer turn of the heart to see that the envelope I held in my hand had gone first of all to Sampiero, to our little lodging house, had been handled, no doubt, by the hunch-backed postman I had known so well. I could see him, going down the street, with his bag over his shoulder, and my letter in his bag. I could see my old landlady with the letter in her hand, turning it over and over, till light broke on her, and she remembered the Englishman, and hunted up his unfamiliar address, and wondered, perhaps, whether he, too, had fallen in the war.

I give Malory’s letter here.

“... I read his name in the official list, and can only suppose that it is my Daphnis, as I know he was in a Kentish regiment. Oh, these yeomen of England, of whom I always thought as indigenous to the soil, born there, living there, dying there, buried there, with no knowledge beyond their counted acres, but knowing those so well and thoroughly, tree by tree, crop by crop, path by path through the woodland! They have been uprooted and borne to foreign shores, but they are England, and it is for their own bit of England, weald, marsh, or fell, that they die.

“They have lived all their lives in security, and the security of centuries lies behind them, as the volume of ocean lies behind each wave that laps the shore. Now the mammoth of danger and unrest prowls round their homesteads, and a hand whose presence they did not suspect moves and removes them, pawns in the game. How can they understand? They do not. They only cling, for the sake of sanity, to what they know: their corner of England and their own individuality, rocks which have been with them since they were born, and which in the thunderstorm about their ears they can retain unaltered.

“I live amongst them now, and I know.

“I have been once in a great earthquake, and I know that the secret of its terror is that the earth, the steady immutable earth, betrays the confident footstep. So in this earthquake men cling to themselves and to their land, as they know it, as immutable things.

“I am living now in a great peace; I do not hear the din around me; I am as one in the centre of those tropical winds, where all that is in the path of the hurricane is destroyed, but in the still and silent centre birds sing and leaves do not stir. Or I am as a totally deaf man, the drums of whose ears are burst. I am happy.

“But the others, who are in the path of the wind, they are clouted and pushed and beaten, blinded and deafened by the cyclone. They are made to gyrate as the little mice were made to gyrate. What is it, oh God, that drives us, poor creatures?

“I am not one of those who, at this moment, hold that the war is supreme and all-eclipsing. The war is not eternal, and its proportions are relative; only life is eternal, and fate is eternal. Fate! Do you remember the Pennistans, and how fate, the freaky humorist, played her tricks upon them? There was no escape for them then, there is no escape for us now.

“If all mankind were resigned to fate, sorrow would take wing and fly from the world.

“I think of this present stirring of nations as the stirring of huge antediluvian beasts, kicked up out of their slumber by a giant’s foot, and fighting amongst themselves like the soldiers of Jason. No human eye can follow the drift of war, as no human mind can encircle the entirety of modern knowledge. We are as men in the valley, with mountains rising around, and, beyond each ridge that we climb, a farther ridge. It is for the geographers of the future to come with their maps and measure peak after peak to their correctness of altitude. And it is for us to remember that as the highest peak is as nothing upon the perfect roundness of the globe, so is our present calamity as nothing upon the perfect roundness of the scheme of destiny.”

Again that strange impulse to confide in me! in me the stranger whom he, if anything, disliked. I wondered whether our whole lives were to be punctuated by these spasmodic confidences, and whether the forging of a number of such links would finally weave together a chain of friendship? I reflected that he, the analyst, could probably explain the kink in men’s brains by which confidential expansion is not necessarily based on sympathy, but I admitted to myself that I was routed by the problem.

I liked his letter; it produced in me a sensation of peace and light, and of a great broadening. I envied him his balance and his sanity. I envy him still more now that peace has come, and that the rapid perspective of history already shows me the precision of his judgment.

I showed part of the letter to Ruth, curious to observe the impression which Malory’s reflections would produce on a primitive and uncultivated brain. I knew that that letter was not the outcome of a transitory or accidental frame of mind, but that, like a rock gathering speed as it bowls down the side of a hill, the swell and rush of his considered thought had borne him along until his fingers, galloping to the dictation of his mind, had covered the sheets I now held in my hand. Ruth frankly understood no word of his letter. She merely asked me in her direct way whether I thought Mr. Malory was sorry her brother-in-law had been killed. Privately I thought that some devilish cynicism in the man, some revolting sense of artistic fitness, would rejoice in a detached, inhuman fashion, at the pertinence of the tragedy.

He said in his next letter to me—a reply to a letter of mine:—

“... Destiny and nature are, after all, the only artists of any courage, of any humour. Do they take Rawdon Westmacott? for whose disappearance all concerned must pray; no, they take Daphnis, who, of the thirty or forty million fighting men, is in the minority that should be spared.

“From the beginning they have exercised their wit on these innocent country people. How can we escape from their humour, when it gambols around us in the unseen? we cannot escape it, we can only hope to cap it with the superlative humour of our indifference.

“Around how many homes must it be gambolling now! from the little centre in the Weald of Kent, which is known to both you and me, to the little unknown centres of human life in the heart of Asia, where anxiety dwells, and where no news will ever come, but where hope will flag and droop day by day, till at last it expires in hopeless certainty.

“If you do not hear of me again, you may conclude that the arch-joker has taken me also, but remember that I shall have had the laugh on him after all, for I shall not care. However, I shall probably be spared, for no man or woman would weep for me.

“One’s chief need, one’s principal craving, I find, is to get Death into his true proportion. We have always been accustomed to think of Death as a suitable and even dignified ending to life in old age, but to regard the overtaking of youth by Death in quite a different light, as an unspeakable calamity. Here, of course, such an overtaking is of everyday occurrence. This, you will say, is a truism. I answer, that there is no such thing as truism in war; there is only Truth.

“If I take all my reflections about Death, slender as is their worth, and pass them through a sieve of analysis, what do I get? I get, as a dominant factor, Pity. Pity, yes, pity that these young men should have missed the good things life would have given them; not horror so much that they should be in the blackness below the ground, as pity that they should not be above it in the light....”

An intense anger and irritation rose in me at his passive acceptance of what he termed fate. If man must struggle against his fellow-men in order to survive in the life-battle, then why not against fate also? He who does not resist must inevitably be crushed. It was at this stage that my great scheme began to formulate in my mind, by which I should defeat fate for the sake of Malory and Ruth; partly, largely, for the sake of their happiness, but partly also, I must admit, for the triumph of taking Malory by the hand and showing him how with the help of a little energy I had overcome the destiny he had been passively prepared to accept as inevitable. I would pit my philosophy against his philosophy, and incidentally bring two muddled lives to a satisfactory conclusion.

I hugged my scheme to myself in the succeeding months as a lunatic hugs an obsession.

III

I was a little disturbed by the thought that even I could not make myself wholly independent of what, for want of a better word, I had to call fate; independent of a certain Providence whose concurrence I daily implored, but on whose nature I deliberately tried to set a more religious complexion than did Malory, who was frankly, in every instinct, a pagan. Wriggle as I might, I could not wriggle away from the fact that as prime essentials to the success of my scheme stood the survival of Malory and the non-survival of Westmacott. If the unknown chose to thwart me in these two particulars, my cherished plan must come to naught, but a conviction, whose very intensity persuaded me of its truth, entered into my spirit that in this respect at all events all would be well.

As the war progressed I fell into one of the inconsistencies of our nature, for as the news of Malory continued good I came gradually to feel that his safety up to this point was growing into a kind of earnest for his safety in the future—a conclusion in itself totally illogical—whereas the equally continued safety of Westmacott, whom I so ardently desired out of the way, distressed me not at all.

Was I presumptuous in thus constituting myself the guardian angel of two lives? I was only a poor wreck, flotsam of the war, cheated of the man’s part I had hoped to play, and nursing my scheme like an old maid cheated of the woman’s part she, on her side, should have played on earth.

I shall not dwell longer than I need upon the days of the war, considering them rather as an incident, a protracted incident, than as a central point in my story, for we have no need or desire to revive artificially the realities we have lived through. I quote, however, Malory on this subject:—

“... Our sons will scarcely be our children, for the war will have fathered them and mothered them both. The children of the war! growing up with the shadow of that great parent in the background of their lives, a progenitor dark as the night, yet radiant as the sun; torn with misery, yet splendid and entire with glory; poor and bereft by ruin, yet rich with gold-mines as the earth; a race of men sprung from loins broad and magnificent. They will stand like the survivors of the Flood when the waters had retreated from the clean-washed world. What will they make of their opportunity? They will not, I trust, hold up a mirror to reflect the familiar daily tragedy, but out of the depths of their own enfranchised hearts will call up a store of little, lovely, sincere, human, and simple things wherewith to make life sweet. They must be as children in a meadow. Let us have done with pretence and gloom. There is no room now in the world for the introspective melancholy of the idler. We hope for a world of active sanity.”

He reverted several times to the men who had been torn from their homes, the men who, but for war, would never have gone beyond the limit of their parish. He compared himself angrily with them, and I perceived that his theory, in embryo at Sampiero, had struck deep roots under the rain of present day realities.

“... I want to shout it aloud: objectivity! objectivity! action, the parent of thought. We had worn thought to a shadow, with hunting him over hill, plain, and valley. We were miners who had exhausted the drift of gold. Thank God, we are daily burying fresh gold for our successors. We were sick with the sugar of introspection; introspection, subtlest of vanities; introspection, the damnable disease. We were old and outworn in spirit. The soil bore weakly crops, and cried out for nourishment. We are giving it blood to drink, and it grows fertile in the drinking.

“I am aware of the coarsening of my fibres; I grow more conscious of my body, less conscious of my mind. I am very humble. I know that the meanest hind who turned the ridges under the ploughshare had a truer value than I, the critic, the analyst—I use the words disparagingly—the commentator. He silently constructed while I noisily destroyed.”

Malory continued at great length in this strain, and I read between the lines of his letter that he had devoted much of the intolerable leisure of his soldier’s life to the evolution of a new creed, not really new to him, for its precepts were and must always have been in his blood, but now for perhaps the first time formulated and taken close to his heart. He wrote to me more and more openly, and I knew that I was getting the expression of his inmost thoughts. I have all his letters—for they came now in numbers though with great irregularity—and have sometimes thought that I have not the right, nor he the right to compel me, to keep them to myself. As he said:—

“... All men have creeds, and I behold myself a faddist in a universe of faddists. I cannot be wholly right, nor they wholly wrong. But I argue in my own defence, that a creed such as mine, resting on many pillars, the most mighty of which is the pillar of tolerance, is at least inoffensive in a world it does not even seek to convert. I offer my little gift—and if it is rejected I withdraw my hand, and tender it elsewhere.

“I am not concerned with practical matters, nor with controversial subjects; I am not a political or a social reformer, nor a nut-eater, nor a prophet of the Pit. I am not, I fear, a very practical preacher even in my own region, for my words, were I ever to spread them abroad, could germinate only in the ready tilled field of a contented soul, and will put no bread into the mouth of the hungry. So I desist, for mere reflection is of no value in our times, and he alone has justified his existence who has relieved the poor, benefited the sickly, or fed the starving.”

I do not wholly agree with him.

At least in one particular I will take his advice, and will not dwell further upon those years. We know now that, interminable as they seemed at the time, they passed, and in a golden autumn peace came to the earth like sleep returning after night upon night of insomnia. Malory wrote to me on that occasion also, a letter more full of sarcasm, bitterness, and sorrow than any I had yet received.

“... So here we are at last at the end of this long, long road, more like straight railway-lines than like a road, which is a poetical thing. I look back, and I see iron everywhere: iron hurtling through the air and smashing against the soft flesh of men and the softer hearts of women; iron thundering in the sea; masonry toppling; careful labour destroyed; skies full of black smoke; giant machines. Impressionism is the only medium to express the war. In this chaos little men have laboured, trying to put their brains round the war like putting a string round the globe; and pitting their little bodies against the moving tons of iron, like a new-born baby trying to push against a Titan. What has emerged? a new, a great tradition, greater than the Trojan or the Elizabethan; a new legend for the ornament of art. For it all comes down to art in the end; the legend is greater than the fact; the mind survives the perishing matter. We are the heirs of the past. The man of action is the progenitor of the dreamer. What am I saying? The progenitor? he is the manure, merely the manure dug into the soil on which the dreamer will presently grow. Poor, inarticulate, uncomprehending men have died in their anonymous millions to furnish a song for the future singer, a vicious, invertebrate effete, no doubt; a moral hermaphrodite of a worthless generation.

“How many before me have asked, What is Truth? is it indeed a flower which blooms only on a dung-heap?

“... I have seen so many men here die in their prime, who were precious to mankind or all in all to their individual loves, yet they have been taken, and I, the valueless, the solitary, am left. Is there a purpose behind these things? or am I to believe that fate is, after all, the haphazard of chance?”

We held no peace rejoicings at Pennistans’, for Nancy’s sake; peace was to her an additional sorrow. During the war she had had the feverish interest of having given her greatest sacrifice to the ideal of the moment, but as the horror faded away so the memory of those who had died faded also. Nancy and her kindred ceased to shine as the heroic, and became merely the unfortunate, a sad and scattered population to whom the war would last, not a few years, but all their lives. Shattered women and shattered men; but to us the war appeared already as a nightmare interlude from which we had wakened.

I was now confronted with my own particular purpose, the one I had bargained with myself to carry out; I turned it over and over in my mind, and though by the light of reason I could perceive no solution to the obvious difficulty presented, yet my curious instinct persisted, that all would be well. I was certain that my purpose was a good one. I contemplated a Malory changed, softened, hardened, sobered, steadied, by the red-hot furnace of war; he had called himself an inconstant man; I felt that he would be now no longer inconstant. I contemplated a Ruth intolerant, after her four years lived in liberty, of her former bondage. I saw them fuse, in my own mind, in mutual completion.

In the meantime, Westmacott stood ominously in the centre of the road.

I heard first of his return from Amos, as I stood with Mrs. Pennistan watching the folding of the sheep. Amos had brought the sheep with him in a cart from Tonbridge market; he was taciturn while he turned them out from under the net into the hurdled fold, but when the hired man had driven away the lumbering cart, he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder,—

“Wife, who d’you think I met on the road yonder?”

She stared at him, and he added, in his laconic way,—

“Rawdon.”

“He’s back?” she said, dismayed.

Amos expanded.

“Ay. They’ve a system for bringing them home, it seems, according to their employ: farmers and food producers come first.”

“Then Malory,” I said involuntarily, “will come among the last lot as a man of no occupation.”

“That’ll be it. We’ll be looking soon for those boys of ourn,” he said to his wife.

She smiled gladly at him, but remained pensive. Then she asked,—

“Was he alone, Amos?”

“Ay. He’d his pack on his back, too, so I doubt he’d come from the station. He’d his back to Penshurst and his face towards home. He touched his cap at me, friendly, and I twirled my whip to him, friendly, too.”

“I’m glad of that,” his wife murmured.

Amos shrugged.

“A man’s glad to welcome his son-in-law back from the wars,” he said ironically as he turned to go.

Mrs. Pennistan and I strolled out towards the road.

“He’s dead against Rawdon; always was,” she said in a distressed tone. “I was for making up, and making the best of it, but Pennistan isn’t that sort. He’d sooner have life unbearable than go a tittle against his prejudices. After all, Rawdon’s married to Ruth, and the father of our grandchildren, and there’s no going against that. He’s an unaccountable hard man, my man, when he chooses. I couldn’t never do nothing with him, and Nancy she’s the same.”

“And Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.

The distress in her tone deepened.

“I used to think Ruth a good quiet girl, but since the trick she played me over her marriage I haven’t known what to think. I’ve lain awake o’ nights worrying over it. You’ve heard the whole tale from Mr. Malory. Gentle she was until then, and a good daughter to me, I must say, and then ... gone in a night withouten a sign, and never a word to me in explanation since. What’s a mother to make of that?”

I could have laughed at the poor woman’s perplexity. I thought of the hen whose brood of ducklings takes suddenly to the water.

“But has she never alluded to her ... her elopement?”

“Never a word, I tell you. I asked her once, and she put on a look as black as night, and I never asked her again. I’ve sometimes wished Mr. Malory could speak to her, I’ve a fancy she might answer him freer; and yet I don’t know.”

“I’ve never fully understood,” I said, wishing to make the most of my opportunity, “whether she cares at all for her husband or not?”

“Small wonder that you haven’t understood,” said Mrs. Pennistan tartly, “when her own mother is kept out in the dark. It’s my belief she hates him, and it’s my knowledge that he ill-treats her, but at the same time it’s my instinct she loves him in a way. It sounds a hard thing to say of one’s child, but I’ve always held Ruth was a coarse, rough creature at times under her smoothness.”

She instantly repented of her words.

“There, what am I saying of my own kith and kin? I get mad when I get thinking of my girl, so you mustn’t lay too much store by my talk. Pennistan’d give it me if he heard me.”

I persisted.

“Then you think that, when she ran away with him, she hated him and loved him both together?”

Mrs. Pennistan paused for a long time.

“Well,” she said at last, “if you ask me what I think, it’s this. There was a deal more in that running away than any of us knew at the time. What it exactly was I don’t know even now. I doubt Ruth doesn’t know either, or if she does know, she doesn’t own to it, not to herself even. I doubt Rawdon knows most about it.”

I saw another man becoming inevitable.

“And Mr. Malory?”

She shot at me a quick suspicious look.

“You’re Mr. Malory’s friend, what do you know?”

“I know nothing,” I said. “He didn’t know himself.”

“No,” said Mrs. Pennistan suddenly, “that’s the truth. He didn’t know himself. He wasn’t a man to fancy those things. To me it was as plain as daylight, but Pennistan he always scoffed at me, and I daren’t speak it to Ruth, and I’ve thought since that maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe she went with Rawdon because she loved Rawdon: maybe she didn’t go, as I’ve sometimes thought, because she was afraid.... It’s hard, isn’t it, to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with them? Day in, day out, and you know little more of them than the clothes they wear and what they like to get to eat.”

I was sorry for her. She went on,—

“Your children, they seem so close to you when they’re little; they come to you when they’re hungry, and they come to you when they tumble, and you cosset them; and then when they’re big you find you’re the last person they want to come to. It’s cruel hard sometimes on a woman. But they don’t mean it,” she added, brightening, “and my children have been good children to me, even Ruth.”

I met Westmacott, the formidable man, the day after his return, a Sunday, walking on the village green with his wife and the two eldest children. As I looked at him I felt a little pang of horror on realising how ardently I had desired this man to die in the trenches, and now, as he materialised for me out of a mere name into a creature of flesh and blood, I grew dismayed, and was overcome by the reality of the obstacle. Perhaps I had always unconsciously thought of him as a myth. And now here he was, and Ruth shyly introduced me.

I fancied I caught a sullen look on her face, a look of suffering, long lulled to sleep, and suddenly returned. Perhaps for the last four years he had been a myth to her also.

By his home-coming he soon waked the echoes of scandal; his way of life, they said, had not been mended by the war, and after the long restraint of discipline he broke loose into his old debauches. I noted the growing of that sullen look on Ruth’s features; she made no comment, but I divined the piling-up of the thunderstorm. So, I thought, she must have looked during the month of her engagement to Leslie Dymock, when Malory in his error had considered her as a nun in her novitiate. The kettle, she had said, is long on the hob before it boils over.

She spent less time at Pennistans’ than formerly, pride and obstinacy withholding all confession from her lips or from her actions. Amos was gloomy, and Mrs. Pennistan oppressed. As for me, I lived dreamily, content to let the river of events carry my boat onwards. I made no prophecies to myself, I experienced no impatience; Malory was not yet home, and I believed that by the time he got home my problem would have resolved itself automatically.

How? I never formulated, but I suppose now, looking back, that the prosaic solution of divorce lay behind my evasions. I did not take into account the dreary conventionality of the English side to Ruth’s nature. People like the Pennistans do not divorce; they endure. Nor do they run away; yet Ruth had run away. Which would prove the stronger, her life-long training, or the flash of her latent blood?

There came a day—for I have dallied a long time over Malory’s letters and my own reflections—when Ruth came into Pennistans’ kitchen, hatless, with her three children clinging round her skirts. Her father and mother stared at her; she gave no explanation, and Amos, who was a great gentleman in his way, asked for none, and moreover checked the doleful inquiries of his wife, to whom the prompt and vulgar tear was always ready. I saw then a certain likeness between the father and the daughter; that apostolic beard of his gave him a southern dignity, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt with a blood-red slash, as red as her lips over her little teeth white as nuts. She could remain at the farm as long as she chose, he said. She had, he did not add, but his eyes added it, a refuge from all mankind in her father.

No reproaches, no recriminations, and when Mrs. Pennistan, after Ruth had gone out with all apparent calm to put her children to bed, began anew to wonder tearfully what had happened, and to suggest lugubriously that as Ruth had made her bed, so she must lie in it, he checked her again and frightened her into silence by his sternness. She went out weeping, and Amos and I were left together.

I offered to go, but he assured me that my presence in the house would be a help, adding that he supposed I had heard something of his daughter’s story, and that her marriage was not a happy one. It probably cost him a great effort to say this. I tried to make it as easy as I could for him. He then asked me to remain with Ruth should her husband follow her, and should he, Amos, or one of her brothers, not be in the house.

I could see that he thought it likely Westmacott would come over sooner or later.

I was greatly elated at the turn things had taken, and felt that my belief in the lucky star of my scheme had been justified. I had no doubt now that Ruth would rid herself of Westmacott, and do for herself what the war had not done for her. I hung about the farm all day, partly to oblige Amos, who had his usual work to attend to, but principally to satisfy the tense spirit of expectation which had risen in me since the morning. As the player sees an imaginary line running between his ball and the objective, so I imagined a string running between the moment at Sampiero when Malory had said, “Do you know the Weald of Kent?” and this moment when I, a tardy, but, I flattered myself, an essential actor, waited about Pennistans’ threshold for the advent of Rawdon Westmacott. All the beads but one were now threaded on that string; I must watch the last and final threading, before I could put on the clasp.

Towards evening I espied Westmacott entering a distant field, and something in me gave a fierce leap of exultation. I then realised the practical difficulties of the position. Here was I, left on guard, but physically quite unable to grapple with the wiry man should he lay hands on me, or on his wife. I thought for an instant of summoning Amos, but as instantly rejected the idea: the final act must lie between Westmacott, Ruth, and myself. Had I been alone, I would have chanced his violence; as it was, I must consider the woman. I ran quickly into the house, up to my room, and brought down my service revolver.

When I came into the kitchen carrying this weapon, Ruth, who was sitting there sewing, as placidly, I swear, as she had sat sewing in her own kitchen the first time I had seen her, looked at my loaded hand and up into my face with a grave, inquiring surprise. I reassured her. Her husband, I told her, was coming across the fields and would doubtless insist on seeing her, and considering the nature of the man I had thought it best to have an unanswerable threat ready to hand. With that muzzle we would keep him at bay.

Ruth rose very quietly and took the weapon from me. I had no idea of resistance. Malory himself could not have felt more definitely than I that the words we were to speak, the actions we were to perform, were already written out on a slowly unwinding scroll.

She asked me to leave her alone with her husband; to my feeble protest, made by my tongue, but barely seconded by the vital part of my being, the part so intensely conscious, yet at the same time so pervaded by a sense of trance and unreality,—to that feeble protest she replied, bitterly enough that she had faced him many times before and with my weapon on the table beside her would face him with additional confidence and security. She had already taken it from me, and now laid it on the table, speaking as one does to a child from whom one has just taken a dangerous toy. She smiled as she spoke, so serenely that I felt sure she had accepted the revolver merely for the sake of my peace of mind. She charged me to keep the children away, should I see them drawing near to the house, and with that injunction she took me kindly by the shoulders and turned me out into the garden.

Westmacott entered it at the same moment by the swing-gate. His looks were black as he passed me and strode into the house he had not darkened since his marriage. I stood out in the garden alone in the dusk. I looked in through the latticed window of the kitchen, seeing every detail as the detail of a Dutch picture, lit by the fire; the window was very largely blocked by the red geraniums, but I could see the deal table, the swinging lamp, the brass ornaments gleaming by the fireplace, the pictures on the walls, the thin ribbon of steam coming from the spout of the singing kettle; I could even see the brown grain in the wood of which the table-top was made. I saw Ruth standing, and Westmacott looking at her; then he caught sight of me, and with an angry gesture dragged the curtain across the window.

I was now shut out from all participation in this act of the drama, but I did not care; I felt that what must be, must be, that the inevitable was right, and, above all, ordained. Come what might, no human agency could interfere. I smiled to myself as I thought of Malory’s triumph could he behold my resignation, and as I smiled I felt Malory’s presence in the garden, waiting like me, and, like me, entirely passive. I saw his face; his iron gray hair where it grew back from his temples; I saw the tiny hairs in his nostrils, and the minute pores of his skin. My head was swimming, and the vividness of my perception stabbed me.

Then a little scent floated out to me, and I wondered vaguely what it was, and what were the memories it awakened, and in some dim, extremely complicated way I knew those memories were awakened by a mental rather than a physical process, and that they were, at best, only second-hand. A narrow street, yoked bullocks, and the clamour of a Latin city.... These meaningless and irrelevant words shaped themselves out of the mist of my sensitiveness. I linked them and the picture they created to the violence of feeling within the little room behind the drawn curtain, and as I did so they fell away together from the twilit English garden, the English country; fell away to their own place, as a thing apart; or shall I say, they stood behind the English country as a ghostly stranger behind a familiar form? This was the ghost of which Malory had always been conscious. Then I knew that my troubled perplexity was but the echo of Malory’s first perplexity, and I narrowed it down with an effort of will to the scent of roasting chestnuts. The ancient woman in her bedroom was at her usual occupation.

I folded my arms and leant my back against the house wall; I heard the rise and fall of angry voices within the room; I found that I could look only at little things, such as the cracks in the stone paving of the garden path, or the latch on the gate, and that the horizon, when I raised my eyes towards it, swam. I tried to drag back my failing sense of proportions. As I did this, clinging on to and deliberately ranging my thoughts in ordered formation, there emerged the dearness and all-eclipsing importance of my scheme to me in the past; I realised that never for a moment had it been absent from my conscious or my sub-conscious thought. So, I said to myself, this is the phenomenon of poets, and are they, I wonder, as passive as I am when after months of carrying their purpose in their brain, the moment comes of its fruition? Have they, like me, no feeling of control? I remembered what Malory had said of the corelation of human effort.

I looked towards the darkened window and, hearing the drone of voices, beheld myself again as the brother of the poet whose puppets, brought by him to a certain point, continue to work along the lines he has laid down, as though independent of his agency. I would resume control, I thought, when this so terribly inevitable act had played itself out. Then I would step in, lead Malory to Ruth, and again step out, leaving them to the joy of their bewilderment.

Why should I have cherished this scheme so passionately? so passionately that my desire had risen above my reason, carrying with it that strange conviction that by the sheer force of my will events would shape themselves—as indeed they were shaping—under my inactive hand? Why? I could not explain, but as the twilight deepened rapidly in the garden I saw again Malory’s grave, lean face, heard his half-sad, half-happy comments, was pierced by the pitiable and unnecessary tragedy of his loneliness—Malory away in France, unconscious of the intensity of the situation created around him, without his knowledge and without his consent, by a woman who loved him and a man who, I suppose, loved him too.

It was at that moment, when I had worked myself up into a positive exaltation, that I heard a sudden angry shout and a shot from a revolver.

I awoke, and I confess that before rushing into the house I stood for a dizzy second while a thousand impressions wheeled like a flock of startled birds in my brain. It was over, then? Westmacott was dead, I was sure of that. Would the mice, two miles away, be waltzing? I had an insane desire to run over and look. Westmacott was dead; then I had killed him, I was his murderer as much as if I stood in Ruth’s place with the smoking revolver in my hand. It was over; the recent tradition of war, where life was cheap, had joined with Concha’s legacy for the fulfilment of my purpose. What a heritage! for that double heritage, not fate, had helped me out. Blood, war, and I were fellow conspirators.

I stood for a second only before I burst open the door, but the strength of my impression was already so powerfully upon me that when I saw Westmacott by the fire holding the revolver I did not believe my eyes. When I say I did not believe my eyes I mean that I was quite soberly, deliberately persuaded that my eyes were telling an actual falsehood to my brain. Westmacott could not be standing by the fire; he must be lying somewhere on the ground, huddled and lifeless. I removed my eyes from the false Westmacott standing by the fire, and sent them roving over the floor in search of that other Westmacott from whom life had flown.

I ran my eyes up and down the cracks between the tiles until they came to a darkness, and then, running them upwards, I reached the face of Ruth. She was there, shrinking as she must suddenly have shrunk when he snatched the revolver from her. In her face I read defeat, reaction, submission. She had struck her blow, and it had failed; and she and I were together beaten and vanquished.

I knew that my attempt would be hopeless, but a great desperation seized hold of me, and I cried out, absurdly, miserably,—

“There are other methods.”

She only shook her head, and, pointing at the revolver, said,—

“It kicked in my hand.”

I looked across the room, and running to the fire I picked up some bits of china which had fallen in the grate; I tried to fit them together, repeating sorrowfully,—

“Look, you have broken a plate, you have broken a plate to pieces.”

V

For how long we stood gazing at those ironical shards I do not know. There are moments of suspension in life when the whirling mind travels at so great a rate that everything else seems stationary; so, now, we were touched into immobility while our minds flew forward into space and time. I cannot say what the others found in that fourth dimension of thought; I, personally, returned to earth utterly inarticulate, with these two words shaping themselves and singing over and over in my brain: Futile creatures! futile creatures! It was as though some little mocking demon sat astride my nerve cords, drumming his heels, and chanting his refrain. I could have shaken myself like a dog coming out of water to shake him off. Then I became aware of Westmacott’s voice speaking at an immense distance.

He must have been speaking for some time before the sound pierced through to my ears, for I saw Ruth moving in obedience to his voice before I had grasped what he was saying. Her movement made the same impression upon me as his voice: muffled, slow, and infinitely remote; she crept, rather than she walked, and when she raised her hand she raised it with such torpid and deliberate effort that she seemed to be dragging it upwards with some heavy weight attached. As for her feet, they positively stuck to the ground. Westmacott said something more; he pointed. She turned, still with that slow laborious deliberation, and moved like a shackled ghost from the room.

Westmacott and I were left, and we were silent, he perhaps from choice, I certainly from inability to speak. I think now that he was less shattered than Ruth or me, having played a more negative rÔle; he had merely stood there to be shot at, while Ruth and I had flung, she direct, I indirect passion into the shooting. We were worn, spent, exhausted, he had his forces still intact. An absurd phrase came into my mind, so childish that I hesitate to write it down: Which would you rather be, the shooter or the shootee? and presently I hit on the rhyme, so that a sing-song began in my head:—

“Which would you rather be,

The shooter or the shootee?”

and still Westmacott stood there holding the revolver, and I stood there holding the pieces of the broken plate, and all the while I seemed to hear the corner-stones of my cherished schemes dropping to earth like pieces of masonry after an explosion. We stood quite motionless. Overhead somebody was moving about. Outside it was nearly dark.

Perception was beginning to return to me, bringing in its train a sense of defeat. I had often wondered how the people in a play or in a story continued to live their lives after the climax which parted spectator and actor for ever, I had often followed them in spirit, come down to breakfast with them next morning, so to speak, producing the situation into the region of inevitable anticlimax. Here I was, then, at the old game, an actor myself. I supposed that the play was at an end, and that this was the return to life. That the play should end happily or unhappily, was an accident proper to the play only; all that was certain, all that was inevitable, was that life must be gone on with after the play was over. You couldn’t stop; you were like a man tied on to the back of a traction-engine, willy-nilly you had to go on walking, walking, walking. The dreariness of it! I looked at the pieces of broken plate in my hand, the sum total of all that passion, all that great outburst of pent emotion. I threw back my head, and laughed long, loud, and bitterly.

Westmacott regarded me without surprise, scarcely with interest. He appeared cold and quite indifferent, entirely in possession of his faculties. I grew ashamed under his dispassionate gaze, my laughter ceased, and I laid the pieces of plate on the table. Then it occurred to me we were waiting for something. The movement overhead had died away, but as I listened I heard steps upon the stair, several sets of steps, light pattering steps as of children, and heavier steps, as of a grown person.

Then Westmacott stirred; he went across the room and opened the door. I saw Ruth standing in the passage with her children. She was hatless as she had arrived, but the glow of the lamp, hanging suspended from the ceiling, where it fell upon the curve of her little head, drew a line of light as upon a chestnut. Westmacott nodded curtly, passed out, and his family followed him in a passive and mournful procession.

I watched them go, across the little garden, through the swing-gate, and into the dusky fields beyond. They seemed to me infinitely gray, infinitely dreary, infinitely broken, the personages of a flat and faded fresco. All that pulsating passion had passed, like an allegory of life, leaving only death behind. Gone was the vital flame from the human clay. And nothing had come of it, nothing but a broken plate. What ever comes of men’s efforts, I thought bitterly? so little, that we ought to take for our criterion of success, not the tangible result, but the intangible ardour by which the attempt is prompted. So rarely is the one the gauge of the other! I looked again at the little train rapidly disappearing into the darkness, a funeral cortÈge, carrying with it the corpse of slain rebellion. I saw the years of their future, a vista so stark, so arid, that I physically recoiled from its contemplation. How hideous would be the existence of those children, suffering perpetually from a constraint they could not explain, a constraint which lacked even to the elements of terror, so dead a thing was it, in which terror, a lively, vivid reality, could find no place. Death and stagnation would be their lot.

The darkness of the fields had now completely swallowed them up, but I still stood looking at the spot where I had last seen them, and saying a final good-bye to the tale that place had unfolded to me. This time, I was certain, no sequel was still to come. On the morrow I should leave the Pennistans’ roof, with no hope that an echo of the strangely cursed, ill-fated, unconscious family would ever reach me again in the outer world.

A peace so profound as to be almost unnatural had settled over the land, one or two stars had come out, and I wondered vaguely why Amos and his people had not yet returned home from work. I supposed that they were making the most of a fine evening. The Pennistans would accept their daughter’s defeat, I was sure, with the usual stoic indifference of the poor. At last I turned slowly in the doorway, a great melancholy soaking like dew into my bones, so that I fancied I felt the physical ache.

Now I have but the one concluding incident to tell, before I have done with this portion of my cumbersome, disjointed story, an incident which has since appeared to me frightening in its appositeness, as though deliberately planned by some diabolically finished artist as a rounding of the whole. Malory had spoken of destiny and nature as being the only artists of any humour or courage, and upon my soul I am tempted to agree with him when I think over the events of that packed evening, of which I was the sole and baffled spectator. I said this incident appeared to me frightening; I repeat that statement, for I can conceive of no situation more frightening than for a man to find himself and other human beings shoved hither and thither by events over which he has no control whatsoever, the conduct of life taken entirely out of his hands, especially a man, like me, had always struggled resentfully against the imposition of fate on free-will, but never more so than in the past few weeks. Wherever I turned that night, mockery was there ready to greet me.

I went again, as I have said, into the house with the intention of waiting in the kitchen on Amos’s return. In this small plan as in my larger ones I was, it appeared, to be thwarted, for as I passed down the narrow passage I noticed that the door of old Mrs. Pennistan’s room was open. I paused at first with no thought of alarm. I longed to go in, and to tell the ancient woman of the futile suffering she had brought upon her hapless descendants. I longed insanely to shout it into her brain and to see remorse wake to life in her faded eyes. As I stood near her door she grew for me into a huge, portentous figure, she and her love for Oliver Pennistan, and I saw her, the tiny woman I had all but forgotten, as a consciously evil spirit, a malign influence, the spring from which all this river of sorrow had flowed. Then my steps were drawn nearer and nearer to the door, till I stood at last on the threshold, looking for the first time into the room. Some one, presumably the now invisible servant, had lit the two candles on the dressing-table, and these with the glow of the fire between the bars threw over the room a fitful light. I had, curiously enough, no sense of intrusion; I might have been looking at a mummy. Yet I should have remembered that the occupant was not a mummy, for the familiar smell of the chestnuts had greeted me even in the passage.

She was sitting in her usual place over the fire, her back turned to me, and a black shawl tightly drawn round her shrunken shoulders. Again I was struck by her look of fragility. I had a sudden impulse that I would speak to her, and would try to draw some kind of farewell from her, explaining that I was leaving the house the next day—though whether she had ever realised my presence there at all I very much doubted.

As I went forward the crackle of a chestnut broke the utter stillness of the room. I waited for her to pick it out of the grate with the tongs, but she did not stir. I came softly round her chair and stood there, waiting for her to notice me, as I had seen the Pennistans do when they did not wish to startle her. Indeed, so tiny and frail was she, that I thought a sudden fright might shatter her, as too loud a noise will kill a lark.

I looked down at the chestnuts on the bar, and then I saw that they were quite black. I bent down. They were burnt black and friable as cinders. Sudden panic rushed over me. I dropped on to my knees and stared up into the old woman’s fallen face. She was dead.

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