The books stood piled on the table by her window, the books Miss Wray of Clevehead had procured for her, had given and lent her. Now Roddy had gone she had time enough to read them: Hume's Essays, the fat maroon Schwegler, the two volumes of Kant in the hedgesparrow-green paper covers.

"Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kritik der reinen Vernunft." She said it over and over to herself. It sounded nicer than "The Critique of Pure Reason." At the sight of the thick black letters on the hedgesparrow-green ground her heart jumped up and down with excitement. Lucky it was in German, so that Mamma couldn't find out what Kant was driving at. The secret was hidden behind the thick black bars of the letters.

In Schwegler, as you went on you went deeper. You saw thought folding and unfolding, thought moving on and on, thought drawing the universe to itself, pushing the universe away from itself to draw it back again, closer than close.

Space and Time were forms of thought. They were infinite. So thought was infinite; it went on and on for ever, carrying Space, carrying Time.

If only you knew what the Thing-in-itself was.

II.

"Mamma—"

The letter lay between them on the hall table by the study door. Her mother put her hand over it, quick. A black, long-tailed M showed between her forefinger and her thumb.

They looked at each other, and her mother's mouth began to pout and smile as it used to when Papa said something improper. She took the letter and went, with soft feet and swinging haunches like a cat carrying a mouse, into the study. Mary stared at the shut door.

Maurice Jourdain. Maurice Jourdain. What on earth was he writing to Mamma for?

Five minutes ago she had been quiet and happy, reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Now her heart beat like a hammer, staggering with its own blows. The blood raced in her brain.

III.

"Mamma, if you don't tell me I shall write and ask him." Her mother looked up, frightened.

"You wouldn't do that, Mary?"

"Oh, wouldn't I though! I'd do it like a shot."

She wondered why she hadn't thought of it an hour ago.

"Well—If there's no other way to stop you—"

Her mother gave her the letter, picking it up by one corner, as though it had been a dirty pocket-handkerchief.

"It'll show you," she said, "the sort of man he is."

Mary held the letter in both her hands, gently. Her heart beat gently now with a quiet feeling of happiness and satisfaction. She looked a long time at the characters, the long-tailed M's, the close, sharp v's, the t's crossed with a savage, downward stab. She was quiet as long as she only looked. When she read the blood in her brain raced faster and confused her. She stopped at the bottom of the first page.

"I can't think what he means."

"It's pretty plain what he means," her mother said.

"About all those letters. What letters?"

"Letters he's been writing to your father and me and your Uncle Victor."

"When?"

"Ever since you left school. You were sent to school to keep you out of his way; and you weren't back before he began his persecuting. If you want to know why we left Ilford, that's why. He persecuted your poor father. He persecuted your Uncle Victor. And now he's persecuting me."

"Persecuting?"

"What is it but persecuting? Threatening that he won't answer for the consequences if he doesn't get what he wants. He's mistaken if he thinks that's the way to get it."

"What—does he want?"

"I suppose," her mother said, "he thinks he wants to marry you."

"Me? He doesn't say that. He only says he wants to come and see me. Why shouldn't he?"

"Because your father didn't wish it, and your uncle and I don't wish it."

"You don't like him."

"Do you?"

"I—love him."

"Nonsense. You don't know what you're talking about. You'd have forgotten all about him if you hadn't seen that letter."

"I thought he'd forgotten me. You ought to have told me. It was cruel not to tell me. He must have loved me all the time. He said I was to wait three years and I didn't know what he meant. He must have loved me then and I didn't know it."

The sound of her voice surprised her. It came from her whole body; it vibrated like a violin.

"How could he love you? You were a child then."

"I'm not a child now. You'll have to let him marry me."

"I'd rather see you in your coffin. I'd rather see you married to poor
Norman Waugh. And goodness knows I wouldn't like that."

"Your mother didn't like your marrying Papa."

"You surely don't compare Maurice Jourdain with your father?"

"He's faithful. Papa was faithful. I'm faithful too."

"Faithful! To a horrid man like that!"

"He isn't horrid. He's kind and clever and good. He's brave, like Mark. He'd have been a soldier if he hadn't had to help his mother. And he's honourable. He said he wouldn't see me or write to me unless you let him. And he hasn't seen me and he hasn't written. You can't say he isn't honourable."

"I suppose," her mother said, "he's honourable enough."

"You'll have to let him come. If you don't, I shall go to him."

"I declare if you're not as bad as your Aunt Charlotte."

IV.

Incredible; impossible; but it had happened.

And it was as if she had known it—all the time, known that she would come downstairs that morning and see Maurice Jourdain's letter lying on the table. She always had known that something, some wonderful, beautiful, tremendous thing would happen to her. This was it.

It had been hidden in all her happiness. Her happiness was it. Maurice
Jourdain.

When she said "Maurice Jourdain" she could feel her voice throb in her body like the string of a violin. When she thought of Maurice Jourdain the stir renewed itself in a vague, exquisite vibration. The edges of her mouth curled out with faint throbbing movements, suddenly sensitive, like eyelids, like finger-tips.

Odd memories darted out at her. The plantation at Ilford. Jimmy's mouth crushing her face. Jimmy's arms crushing her chest. A scarlet frock. The white bridge-rail by the ford. Bertha Mitchison, saying things, things you wouldn't think of if you could help it. But she was mainly aware of a surpassing tenderness and a desire to immolate herself, in some remarkable and noble fashion, for Maurice Jourdain. If only she could see him, for ten minutes, five minutes, and tell him that she hadn't forgotten him. He belonged to her real life. Her self had a secret place where people couldn't get at it, where its real life went on. He was the only person she could think of as having a real life at all like her own. She had thought of him as mixed up for ever with her real life, so that whether she saw him or not, whether she remembered him or not, he would be there. He was in the songs she made, he was in the Sonata Appassionata; he was in the solemn beauty of Karva under the moon. In the Critique of Pure Reason she caught the bright passing of his mind.

Perhaps she had forgotten a little what he looked like. Smoky black eyes. Tired eyelids. A crystal mind, shining and flashing. A mind like a big room, filled from end to end with light. Maurice Jourdain.

V.

"I don't think I should have known you, Mary."

Maurice Jourdain had come. In the end Uncle Victor had let him. He was sitting there, all by himself, on the sofa in the middle of the room.

It was his third evening. She had thought it was going to pass exactly like the other two, and then her mother had got up, with an incredible suddenness, and left them.

Through the open window you could hear the rain falling in the garden; you could see the garden grey and wet with rain.

She sat on the edge of the fender, and without looking up she knew that he was watching her from under half-shut eyelids.

His eyelids were so old, so tired, so very tired and old.

"What did you cut it all off for?"

"Oh, just for fun."

Without looking at him she knew that he had moved, that his chin had dropped to his chest; there would be a sort of puffiness in his cheeks and about his jaw under the black, close-clipped beard. When she saw it she felt a little creeping chill at her heart.

But that was unfaithfulness, that was cruelty. If he knew it—poor thing—how it would hurt him! But he never would know. She would behave as though she hadn't seen any difference in him at all.

If only she could set his mind moving; turn the crystal about; make it flash and shine.

"What have they been doing to you?" he said. "You used to be clever. I wonder if you're clever still."

"I don't think I am, very."

She thought: "I'm stupid. I'm as stupid as an owl. I never felt so stupid in all my life. If only I could think of something to say to him."

"Did they tell you what I've come for?"

"Yes."

"Are you glad?"

"Very glad."

"Why do you sit on the fender?"

"I'm cold."

"Cold and glad."

A long pause.

"Do you know why your mother hates me, Mary?"

"She doesn't. She only thought you'd killed Papa."

"I didn't kill him. It wasn't my fault if he couldn't control his temper…. That isn't what she hates me for…. Do you know why you were sent to school—the school my aunt found for you?"

"Well—to keep me from seeing you."

"Yes. And because I asked your father to let me educate you, since he wasn't doing it himself. I wanted to send you to a school in Paris for two years."

"I didn't know. They never told me. What made you want to do all that for me?"

"It wasn't for you. It was for the little girl who used to go for walks with me…. She was the nicest little girl. She said the jolliest things in the dearest little voice. 'How can a man like you care to talk to a child like me?'"

"Did I say that? I don't remember."

"She said it."

"It sounds rather silly of her."

"She wasn't silly. She was clever as they make them. And she was pretty too. She had lots of hair, hanging down her back. Curling…. And they take her away from me and I wait three years for her. She knew I was waiting. And when I come back to her she won't look at me. She sits on the fender and stares at the fire. She wears horrible black clothes."

"Because Papa's dead."

"She goes and cuts her hair all off. That isn't because your father's dead."

"It'll grow again."

"Not for another three years. And I believe I hear your mother coming back."

His chin dropped to his chest again. He brooded morosely. Presently Catty came in with the coffee.

The next day he was gone.

VI.

"It seems to me," her mother said, "you only care for him when he isn't there."

He had come again, twice, in July, in August. Each time her mother had said, "Are you sure you want him to come again? You know you weren't very happy the last time." And she had answered, "I know I'm going to be this time."

"You see," she said, "when he isn't there you remember, and when he is there he makes you forget."

"Forget what?"

"What it used to feel like."

Mamma had smiled a funny, contented smile. Mamma was different. Her face had left off being reproachful and disapproving. It had got back the tender, adorable look it used to have when you were little. She hated Maurice Jourdain, yet you felt that in some queer way she loved you because of him. You loved her more because of Maurice Jourdain.

The engagement happened suddenly at the end of August. You knew it would happen some day; but you thought of it as happening to-morrow or the day after rather than to-day. At three o'clock you started for a walk, never knowing how you might come back, and at five you found yourself sitting at tea in the orchard, safe. He would slouch along beside you, for miles, morosely. You thought of his mind swinging off by itself, shining where you couldn't see it. You broke loose from him to run tearing along the road, to jump water-courses, to climb trees and grin down at him through the branches. Then he would wake up from his sulking. Sometimes he would be pleased and sometimes he wouldn't. The engagement happened just after he had not been pleased at all.

She could still hear his voice saying "What do you do it for?" and her own answering.

"You must do something."

"You needn't dance jigs on the parapets of bridges."

They slid through the gap into the fields. In the narrow path he stopped suddenly and turned.

"How can a child like you care for a man like me?" Mocking her sing-song.

He stooped and kissed her. She shut her eyes so as not to see the puffiness.

"Will you marry me, Mary?"

VII.

After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the schoolhouse lane.

"I do care for you, I do, really."

"You don't know what you're talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself—what you're feeling and thinking—and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?"

"You used to like it."

"I don't like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn't cut her hair off."

"How was I to know you'd mind so awfully? And how do you know what women do or don't do?"

"Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know men? That I might have women friends?"

"I don't think I've thought about it very much."

"Haven't you? Men don't live to be thirty-seven without getting to know women; they can't go about the world without meeting them…. There's a little girl down in Sussex. A dear little girl. She's everything a man wants a woman to be."

"Lots of hair?"

"Lots of hair. Stacks of it. And she's clever. She can cook and sew and make her own clothes and her sisters'. She's kept her father's house since she was fifteen. Without a servant."

"How awful for her. And you like her?"

"Yes, Mary."

"I'm glad you like her. Who else?"

"A Frenchwoman in Paris. And a German woman in Hamburg. And an
Englishwoman in London; the cleverest woman I know. She's unhappy, Mary.
Her husband behaves to her like a perfect brute."

"Poor thing. I hope you're nice to her."

"She thinks I am."

Silence. He peered into her face.

"Are you jealous of her, Mary?"

"I'm not jealous of any of them. You can marry them all if you want to."

"I was going to marry one of them."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because the little girl in Essex wouldn't let me."

"Little beast!"

"So you're jealous of her, are you? You needn't be. She's gone. She tried to swallow the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and it disagreed with her and she died.

"'Nur einmal doch mÄcht' ich dich sehen,
Und sinken vor dir auf's Knie,
Und sterbend zu dir sprechen,
Madam, ich liebe Sie!'"

"What's that? Oh, what's that?"

"That—Madam—is Heine."

VIII.

"My dearest Maurice—"

It was her turn for writing. She wondered whether he would like to hear about the tennis party at the Vicarage. Mr. Spencer Rollitt's nephew, Harry Craven, had been there, and the two Acroyd girls from Renton Lodge, and Norman Waugh.

Harry Craven's fawn face with pointed chin; dust-white face with black accents. Small fawn's mouth lifting upwards. Narrow nostrils slanting upwards. Two lobes of white forehead. Half-moons of parted, brushed-back hair.

He smiled: a blunt V opening suddenly on white teeth, black eyes fluttering. He laughed: all his features made sudden, upward movements like raised wings.

The Acroyds. Plump girls with pink, blown cheeks and sulky mouths. You thought of sullen, milk-fed babies, of trumpeting cherubs disgusted with their trumpets. They were showing their racquets to Harry Craven, bending their heads. You could see the backs of their privet-white necks, fat, with no groove in the nape, where their hair curled in springy wires, Minna's dark, Sophy's golden. They turned their backs when you spoke and pretended not to hear you.

She thought she would like Maurice to know that Harry Craven and she had beaten Minna Ackroyd and Norman Waugh. A love set.

Afterwards—Harry Craven playing hide-and-seek in the dark. The tennis net, coiled like a grey snake on the black lawn. "Let's hide together." Harry Craven, hiding, crouching beside you under the currant bushes. The scramble together up the water-butt and along the scullery roof. The last rush across the lawn.

"I say, you run like the wind."

He took your hand. You ran faster and faster. You stood together, under the ash tree, panting, and laughing, safe. He still held your hand.

Funny that you should remember it when you hadn't noticed it at the time.
Hands were funny things. His hand had felt like Mark's hand, or Roddy's.
You didn't think of it as belonging to him. It made you want to have Mark
and Roddy back again. To play with them.

Perhaps, after all, it wouldn't be kind to tell Maurice about the tennis party. He couldn't have played like that. He couldn't have scrambled up the water-butt and run with you along the scullery roof.

"My dearest Maurice: Nothing has happened since you left, except that there was a tennis party at the Vicarage yesterday. You know what tennis parties are like. You'll be shocked to hear that I wore my old black jersey—the one you hated so—"

IX.

"'Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder.'"

She shut her eyes. She wanted nothing but his voice. His voice was alive. It remembered. It hadn't grown old and tired. "My child, we once were children, two children happy and small; we crept in the little hen-house and hid ourselves under the straw."

"KikerikÜh! sie glaubten
Es wÄre Hahnen geschrei."

"…It's all very well, Mary, I can't go on reading Heine to you for ever. And—aprÈs?"

He had taken her on his knees. That happened sometimes. She kept one foot on the floor so as not to press on him with her whole weight. And she played with his watch chain. She liked to touch the things he wore. It made her feel that she cared for him; it staved off the creeping, sickening fear that came when their hands and faces touched.

"Do you know," he said, "what it will be like—afterwards?"

She began, slowly, to count the buttons of his waistcoat.

"Have you ever tried to think what it will be like?"

"Yes."

Last night, lying awake in the dark, she had tried to think. She had thought of shoulders heaving over her, of arms holding her, of a face looking into hers, a honey-white, beardless face, blue eyes, black eyebrows drawn close down on to the blue. Jimmy's face, not Maurice Jourdain's.

That was in September. October passed. She began to wonder when he would come again.

He came on the last day of November.

X.

"Maurice, you're keeping something from me. Something's happened.
Something's made you unhappy."

"Yes. Something's made me unhappy."

The Garthdale road. Before them, on the rise, the white highway showed like a sickle curving into the moor. At the horn of the sickle a tall ash tree in the wall of the Aldersons' farm. Where the road dipped they turned.

He slouched slowly, his head hung forward, loosening the fold of flesh about his jaw. His eyes blinked in the soft November sunshine. His eyelids were tight as though they had been tied with string.

"Supposing I asked you to release me from our engagement?"

"For always?"

"Perhaps for always. Perhaps only for a short time. Till I've settled something. Till I've found out something I want to know. Would you, Mary?"

"Of course I would. Like a shot."

"And supposing—I never settled it?"

"That would be all right. I can go on being engaged to you; but you needn't be engaged to me."

"You dear little thing…. I'm afraid, I'm afraid that wouldn't do."

"It would do beautifully. Unless you're really keeping something back from me."

"I am keeping something back from you…. I've no right to worry you with my unpleasant affairs. I was fairly well off when I asked you to marry me, but, the fact is, it looks as if my business was going to bits. I may be able to pull it together again. I may not—"

"Is that all? I'm glad you've told me. If you'd told me before it would have saved a lot of bother."

"What sort of bother?"

"Well, you see, I wasn't quite sure whether I really wanted to marry you—just yet. Sometimes I thought I did, sometimes I thought I didn't. And now I know I do."

"That's it. I may not be in a position to marry you. I can't ask you to share my poverty."

"I shan't mind that. I'm used to it."

"I may not be able to keep a wife at all."

"Of course you will. You're keeping a housekeeper now. And a cook and a housemaid."

"I may have to send two of them away."

"Send them all away. I'll work for you all my life. I shall never want to do anything else. It's what I always wanted. When I was a child I used to imagine myself doing it for you. It was a sort of game I played."

"It's a sort of game you're playing now, my poor Mary…. No. No. It won't do."

"What do you think I'm made of? No woman who cared for a man could give him up for a thing like that."

"There are other things. Complications…. I think I'd better write to your mother. Or your brother."

"Write to them—write to them. They won't care a rap about your business.
We're not like that, Maurice."

XI.

"You'd better let me see what he says, Mamma."

Her mother had called to her to come into the study. She had Maurice
Jourdain's letter in her hand. She looked sad and at the same time happy.

"My darling, he doesn't want you to see it."

"Is it as bad as all that?"

"Yes. If I'd had my way you should never have had anything to do with him. I'd have forbidden him the house if your Uncle Victor hadn't said that was the way to make you mad about him. He seemed to think that seeing him would cure you. And so it ought to have done….

"He says you know he wants to break off the engagement, but he doesn't think he has made you understand why."

"Oh, yes, he did. It's because of his business."

"He doesn't say a word about his business. I'm to break it to you that he doesn't care for you as he thought he cared. As if he wasn't old enough to know what he wanted. He might have made up his mind before he drove your father into his grave."

"Tell me what he says."

"He just says that. He says he's in an awful position, and whatever he does he must behave dishonourably…. I admit he's sorry enough. And he's doing the only honourable thing."

"He would do that."

She fixed her mind on his honour. You could love that. You could love that always.

"He says he asked you to release him. Did he?"

"Yes."

"Then why on earth didn't you?"

"I did. But I couldn't release myself."

"But that's what you ought to have done. Instead of leaving him to do it."

"Oh, no. That would have been dishonourable to myself."

"You'd rather be jilted?"

"Much rather. It's more honourable to be jilted than to jilt."

"That's not the world's idea of honour."

"It's my idea of it…. And, after all, he was Maurice Jourdain."

XII.

The pain hung on to the left side of her head, clawing. When she left off reading she could feel it beat like a hammer, driving in a warm nail.

Aunt Lavvy sat on the parrot chair, with her feet on the fender. Her fingers had left off embroidering brown birds on drab linen.

In the dying light of the room things showed fuzzy, headachy outlines. It made you feel sick to look at them.

Mamma had left her alone with Aunt Lavvy.

"I suppose you think that nobody was ever so unhappy as you are," Aunt
Lavvy said.

"I hope nobody is. I hope nobody ever will be."

"Should you say I was unhappy?"

"You don't look it. I hope you're not."

"Thirty-three years ago I was miserable, because I couldn't have my own way. I couldn't marry the man I cared for."

"Oh—that. Why didn't you?"

"My mother and your father and your Uncle Victor wouldn't let me."

"I suppose he was a Unitarian?"

"Yes. He was a Unitarian. But whatever he'd been I couldn't have married him. I couldn't do anything I liked. I couldn't go where I liked or stay where I liked. I wanted to be a teacher, but I had to give it up."

"Why?"

"Because your Uncle Victor and I had to look after your Aunt Charlotte."

"You could have got somebody else to look after Aunt Charlotte. Somebody else has to look after her now."

"Your Grandmamma made us promise never to send her away as long as it was possible to keep her. That's why your Uncle Victor never married."

"And all the time Aunt Charlotte would have been better and happier with
Dr. Draper. Aunt Lavvy—t's too horrible."

"It wasn't as bad as you think. Your Uncle Victor couldn't have married in any case."

"Didn't he love anybody?"

"Yes, Mary; he loved your mother."

"I see. And she didn't love him."

"He wouldn't have married her if she had loved him. He was afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Afraid of going like your Aunt Charlotte. Afraid of what he might hand on to his children."

"Papa wasn't afraid. He grabbed. It was poor little Victor and you who got nothing."

"Victor has got a great deal."

"And you—you?"

"I've got all I want. I've got all there is. When everything's taken away, then God's there."

"If he's there, he's there anyhow."

"Until everything's taken away there isn't room to see that he's there."

When Catty came in with the lamp Aunt Lavvy went out quickly.

Mary got up and stretched herself. The pain had left off hammering. She could think.

Aunt Lavvy—to live like that for thirty-three years and to be happy at the end. She wondered what happiness there could be in that dull surrender and acquiescence, that cold, meek love of God.

"KikerikÜh! sie glaubten
Es wÄre Hahnen geschrei."