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Title: Goodbye, Stranger
Author: Benson, Stella (1892-1933)
Date of first publication: 1926
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1926 (first edition)
Date first posted: 20 February 2009
Date last updated: 20 February 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #266

This ebook was produced by:
Jon Ingram, Don Perry, Rnald Lvesque (HTML version)
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GOODBYE, STRANGER


BY


STELLA BENSON


MACMILLAN AND CO. LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1926





Five of the verses in this book have
already appeared in the _Nation and
Athenum,_ and I have to thank the
editor of that periodical for permission
to reprint them.




DEMOCRACY


    We who were pointed
    With a lonely joy
    Knew a sharp blessing--
    The blessing of loneliness.

    Never again wild snow
    Or wilder roses
    In our secret places
    Shall astound the day.

    Crushed and levelled now
    By the feet of thousands
    Of marching angels,
    We must be born again;

    Or if, being damned and dead,
    We cast strange shadows,
    Our graves must be trodden
    Down by the armies of God.

    This is our destiny--this
    Is the end of wisdom--
    To be mastered
    By the saints at last.

    And since we yield to them
    They shall not remember
    Their conquering feet are marching
    On our floor of stars.

    Yes, beneath their desert
    We lie with loneliness,
    Raddled and rusted,
    With smooth stones over us.




CHAPTER I

Two women looked in at the door of a long dirty room. The yellow
bright street glared behind them. A sad pig yearned towards some old
bits of cabbage on which their high heels were set. One woman had
orange-coloured shingled hair crimped over a low forehead, and bold
old eyes. Her eyes were like her secret middle age looking out through
the bars of her carefully erected prison of youthfulness. Her gay
dress and light stockings were not quite clean. The other woman was
stout. Though she was rigid she was more natural. She was not
vivacious enough to be a deceiver.

"Oh my dear ... what's this?"

It was a long room divided along its length by a screen on which were
pinned Chinese posters. The posters represented Bible subjects, but to
the strange women this was not obvious. They did not know that the
willowy creature in a long robe and a skull-cap with a little red
button on the top was the prodigal son standing among his lithe pigs.
The fact that the prodigal son and all the pigs were looking at a
distant tiger threw the new-comers off the track. But of course to a
Chinese artist a tiger is far more necessary to art than a knowledge
of the rules of perspective. In the next poster the feast was thinly
spread on a very steep table. The egg-browed father was formally
calling the prodigal's attention to a little bowl of tea that clung to
the slope.

Clifford Cotton, who had been working behind the decorated screen,
appeared before the two women. One of his hands held a hammer and the
other was smeared with blood. "It's a mission," he said.
"_Obviously_." Everything that he saw or knew seemed obvious to him.
"A panel of the harmonium is coming undone. I've been mending it for
two hours but unfortunately it is still broken. And I have cracked my
thumb. I'm a damn bad carpenter."

"Are you a damn good missionary?" asked one of the visitors, pinching
her friend's arm to remind her that they were having a killing
adventure.

Clifford sighed. "It's awfully difficult to keep your vocation
young--don't you find? They've stopped me being a missionary so I'm only
the mission printer now."

"Why, you're quite a character." Both women felt that, having admitted
this, they were at liberty to release their bottled-up laughter
without offence. One of them shrieked as she laughed.

"Perhaps you could give some money to the mission," suggested
Clifford. "Not only the harmonium but the whole place is simply
falling to pieces. Even a ten dollar note----"

"Not on your life," said the gay lady. "In fact, as the old song
says--it's quite the other way. We're calling on all Britishers to ask
them to take tickets for a show we're giving this evening. The
Consul's lent us a room----"

"Is it a good show?" asked Clifford.

A dull voice from outside answered, "Not very."

The orange lady began to giggle irritably. Her forehead turned red.
"If we depended on Lena for our advertising ..."

Clifford pushed rudely out between them and saw a third woman leaning
limply against the outside wall of the mission. "This is Lena, is it?"
he said. But she neither looked at him nor nodded. She was not
interested in what people said. They were all enemies anyway.

"Lena is _obviously_ wise," said Clifford, who was always seeking
wisdom.

The gay lady said, "You certainly are a character. Now _do_ come to
our show. You won't be shocked, I promise you, though you _are_ a
missionary."

Clifford began speaking in an unnaturally polite voice. "Why my dear
lady--of _course_. It's not likely that in a place like this my wife
and I should wish to miss so rare an event...."

"Aren't you a dear! How many tickets can we put you down for?"

"Two, _obviously_. You surely don't imagine Mother will come."

"Edna, we must get home and get into our glad rags. _Home_--just
listen to me ... the doctor's lent us a hospital ward and we've got
the operating theatre for a bathroom.... We'll all dream about
appendicitis all night...." She shrieked with laughter. "Come along,
Lena."

"No, I can't," said Lena.

"Can't? What's the matter _now_?"

"I'm too tired. I'm too ill. I can't walk all that way up the hill and
down again." "Well, my goodnerce me ... and what about the show
to-night, pray?"

"Oh I'll get through that all right if you'll let me be."

"But what about clothes? You can't play the pianner in that old rag."

"Don't bother me."

"Don't bother her," said Clifford. "She can lie down on our sofa and
dine with us. We're just next door from the Consul's where you're
going to have your show. Daley'll have to open the last tin of salmon
at last."

The other women looked annoyed. Lena always managed somehow to move
apart, and no one ought to do that. But they agreed with a thin
sprightliness and walked away. Clifford and Lena went slowly towards
his house.

"Do you know," said Clifford, "I never saw any one with such a wise
face as yours. I've been looking for wisdom for seven years."

"Wisdom's a sad thing to look for," said Lena in her grumbling voice.

"I'm a stranger in the world," said Clifford. "Seven years is not long
enough to find wisdom, is it?"

"No. Nor seventy times seven."

"Ah, don't say that. Wisdom is only a short word for Being At Home in
the World. Mayn't one look forward _ever_ to being at home in the
world?"

"Some people are born so. But they're not necessarily wise. On the
contrary ..."

"My wife, Daley, is at home in the world. So I've always hoped that
she must be wise. Only she can't teach me wisdom. She doesn't hate me
enough. She loves every one. So she doesn't teach anything."

"Good Lord!" said Lena. "Isn't it better to love than to teach?"

"Not if the pupil is a changeling who wants to be a man," replied
Clifford. "I don't want lovers. I want an enemy to take me cruelly and
shake the fairy out of me--and leave me a man--and leave me sad but
wise, like a man."

Lena would not admit that she was surprised and puzzled, so she said
nothing. She scarcely ever replied, which saved her a great deal of
trouble and humiliation. Surprise did not show in her face, which was
set in a mould of sadness and hostility.

"You could teach me wisdom," said Clifford. "You may not be at home in
the world, but you don't look outside it. You are an enemy to fairies.
I wish I could lie in your arms and so learn wisdom."

Lena's heart beat more quickly. But she said nothing at all.

"Oh hell," said Clifford. "I forgot. Two Chinese are having tea with
us. I wish Daley wasn't so damn kind."

In the drawingroom of his house a gaudy paralytic old woman sat
looking in fierce silence at two Chinese men. Clifford walked into the
room saying, "Daley's not here. Oh hell."

Both Chinese stood up and bowed cheerfully, shaking their clasped
hands in front of their stomachs. They had no standards of English
manners. They were therefore not surprised by Clifford's behaviour,
though they made a conscientious mental note of it. They supposed that
Clifford, being an Englishman, knew the conventions of formal English
greeting, and they trusted him to respect the conventions. One Chinese
was the doctor's assistant and the other was Clifford's landlord.
Clifford did not speak to them. "Mother, this is Lena," he said. He
went away to tell Daley, his wife, about Lena.

Old Mrs. Cotton had a head that nodded perpetually. Her lips twitched
and trembled and often made a little humming noise, _Mm-mm-mm_, when
not otherwise engaged. She wore dresses with large ugly patterns; she
was often striped like a wasp or spotted like a wild bird's egg. She
bought gay knots of tinsel or cotton flowers to pin into her
colourless hair. Her eyes were sharp and lashless and showed the inner
rim of the lid like a bloodhound's. She spoke in a very deep shaking
voice with meticulous slowness. When she pronounced the name of her
son Clifford it sounded like Culliffudde, and the sound waved with the
nodding of her head like the waves of a chloroform dream.

She said to Lena, "You evidently have not been acquainted long with my
son Clifford. Between ourselves, neither have I."

Lena looked sad. She never allowed herself to look puzzled or
astonished or excited. That would have seemed to her too friendly. She
found it least humiliating to look sad always and half asleep.

"I have not known him long," continued old Mrs. Cotton. "Only seven
years. You see, he never was born."

"Then he isn't ..." said Lena. She owed the place apart that she held
in the world to broken sentences. People felt that they wouldn't have
been clever enough to understand the whole, even if she had exerted
herself to put it into words. She had a slightly crooked mouth too,
which was additionally impressive.

"He is my son," said old Mrs. Cotton. "Only, I didn't bear him."

Chang Chu-lien, the doctor's assistant, looked smiling from the old
woman to the young one. The talk was about sons, he knew, and it
seemed almost safe to take part in it. "I have three sons," he said to
Lena, trying not to seem doubtful. "My eldest son is five and a half
years old. My second son is three years and two months old. My
youngest son is an infant; he still sucks his mother." He smiled
questioningly at Lena. It was her turn now, he evidently thought. But
she made no reply. Perhaps some point of etiquette controlling the
speech of English females prevented her from speaking. He sought for
something else to say that might be suitable to the understanding of
foreign women. "I am a Christian," he said. "My wife is also a
Christian. We worship China Inland Mission. Mr. Liu Sao-shing is not
Christian. He has two daughters."

Liu Sao-shing stood up and walked indifferently across the room to
look at a comic calendar.

"Hak--hak--hak--." Old Mrs. Cotton's laugh was like a dog's bark. "Mr.
Liu has kept out of the net so far."

Liu Sao-shing took care not to seem interested or anxious to please.
"You mean I have avoided becoming Christian. Christian is not suitable
religion for Chinese."

"Yet you rent your land to a Christian mission," sneered old Mrs.
Cotton. "Which is there to seduce your native town."

"I make best use of my property," said Liu Sao-shing, "for my family
sake. I make use of foreigners. Foreigners make use of Chinese." He
gave a loud snuffle and, sitting down, looked contemptuously at the
door by which, he hoped, Clifford would soon reappear. Clifford was at
least a man, thought Liu Sao-shing.

Clifford had found his wife Daley trying on a new dress, singing in a
loud happy voice. "Poopsi-poopsi-poop," she sang, blowing her lips,
which had pins between them. Had it not been for the pins she would
have been understood to be singing 'Jack's the Boy for Work.'

"I've brought home Lena," said Clifford.

"Foo-fee?" asked Daley through the pins.

"Oh Daley, she's a wonderful woman. A wonderful woman. A wonderful
woman."

He nodded his head on each _woman_ as though to emphasise the fact
that Lena was a woman. He wasn't somehow quite sure of that, but he
was sure that she was wonderful.

Daley took the pins out hurriedly. "Oh please, Clifford, please. Not
wunnerful three times over like that, surely? Not more wunnerful than
me?"

"Oh much more wonderful. Probably not so nice, but _much_ more
wonderful."

"Dash it all. Is she really? Well, I'll have to put on my new
three-piece suit and then I shall outshine her."

She began to sing again as Clifford went away but she sang a little
more doubtfully than before. "Poo-_poo_-per-_poo_ ..." stood for 'Oh
Genevieve,' a much soberer song. She dressed slowly and examined
herself so closely in the glass that she could not see herself as
Daley Cotton at all, but only as a pliable structure on the surface of
which the powder was perhaps a leetle too thick--at the base of which
a tenth of an inch of lace petticoat was execrably visible. However,
after a few moments of concentration these defects would vanish and
Daley, perfect, would be able to see in the mirror the nice
clean-looking radiant friend that was herself. Before the mirror she
practised a little pleasant but don't-careish smile for Lena, but she
would of course forget to smile that smile when the time came. She
would walk out of her bedroom door and never think of herself again.
She would leave her friend, the only self she knew, behind her in the
mirror. One might imagine that friend, that self, left behind but not
disconsolate, living a happy life in the mirror, a life of gigglings
and songs, of arms thrown round the necks of nice romping other
Daleys, a life of little dance-steps suddenly bursting the bounds of
common motion--a life that Daley, outside her bedroom door, was not
allowed to live.

She did not know Lena yet but she already disliked her very much. For
this reason she took great trouble with her dress. That little line of
petticoat might have damned her entirely, she felt vaguely, and
justified Lena. But fortunately it had been caught in time.

She went into the drawingroom, her thoughts running in front of her
towards the unknown Lena. She went in swaying her hands a little in
front of her, beating time to the song she had been singing on the
way. It was really not perceptible that her smiling lips were a little
more rigid than usual. The Heart-to-heart Column of Daley's favourite
magazine, the _Woman's Helpful Friend_, advised wives always to
welcome cordially their husbands' women acquaintances. So Daley
hurried forward very kindly.

"How lucky that my husband found you," said Daley. "We do simply
_love_ having visitors. There, Mr. Chang, you said you'd like to meet
a European artist--we've taken you at your word."

Nobody said anything. Daley hummed a few bars because she was nervous.
Then she began again, "I suppose it would be rather rude of me to say
how wunnerful I think Mr. Liu's brocade robe. That kind of grey is
like a powder-green, isn't it? I always think Chinese men _are_ so
lucky. To be able to dress in lovely colours removes the only
draw-back of being a man."

Every one began to talk, with only a little shy feeling of adjustment.
Daley liked Lena no better now than when Clifford had called her a
wonderful woman. But she could never temper the friendliness of her
smile or suppress the lively interest she felt in everything that any
one said. She was less interested in women, of course, than in men,
but hearing any voice pleased her. She had a habit of saying, "Oh
_n-n-n-no"_ in an excited incredulous voice, wrinkling her eyes and
rounding her mouth into an O. She did it now and looked at Lena
eagerly. It did not mean that she did not believe Lena; it simply
meant that she would not have believed such a marvellous thing unless
Lena had told her of it.

"Daley is excessively easy to surprise," said old Mrs. Cotton
contemptuously to Lena.

"There are such lots and lots of things I never heard before," said
Daley a little apologetically. "Although I've bin all around the world
and bin married seven years."

"Have you been to Canton?" asked Mr. Chang, who was sweating a good
deal in his efforts to adapt himself to this Christian conversation.

It was characteristic of Lena that she did not ask after the world
round which Daley had travelled. Lena, looking at Daley, only thought,
"I wish I needn't be hiding my life from her. I wish I were eighteen
again and a virgin, with all my romance reserved for midshipmen at
Portsmouth dances." A thin dream that her life was only a dream
stabbed her with its pointed futility. She wished that Daley would die
this minute and so smile at Lena, as it were, for ever. Or she wished
that Daley would say, "It's all right, dear Lena, I know all about
people like you.... I know that my husband will probably make you his
mistress. But you and I will not be prevented from understanding each
other...." Lena's wishes were like sores in her mind.

"Daley has been all round the world," said old Mrs. Cotton. "But she
has only met Americans. So of course the fantastic is a perpetual
surprise to her."

"Americans travel greatly, I believe," said Chang Chu-lien, loud with
confidence.

"Indeed they do," replied Daley. "I suppose Mother Cotton is right in
saying that they travel among common things and take their own air
with them. But even outside the air of my dear United States, you
don't find many people so fantastic as this funny old Mother Cotton
here." Daley patted one of her dogs, since it was inconceivable that
she should presume to pat old Mrs. Cotton's hard floral arm.

There were three dogs lying within patting distance of Daley. There
almost always were. Daley thought of dogs a great deal and filled
their minds with thoughts. At this moment the dogs, in Daley's mind,
were all thinking of Lena spitefully. "Wouldn't take her at a gift,
mum, not with a pound of Spratt's biscuits. Say mum, her shoes have
never been for a walk."

However, one must entertain Lena. "Do you think fantasticness is a
virtue?" Daley asked her. "I think it's a bit risky myself."

Old Mrs. Cotton preferred talking _of_ Daley to talking _to_ her.
"Daley finds it very risky being the wife of Clifford, who is a
changeling, as you may have noticed. But the risk is good for her.
It's go-hood for her. An antidote to the American poison."

"Poor Mother Cotton," retorted Daley cheerfully. "Thinks of the United
States as a big disease spot spreading over the whole world. And yet
when I think of where I lived--the mountains and the big orchards in
blossom and camping under the sequoias and the ice-man calling by day
at houses which heard the coyotes by night--I just can't think there's
any poison in a germ like my America."

"You think too small," said old Mrs. Cotton. "Holy ground becomes
camping ground in America." Her jerking head seemed to shake the gouts
of sound from her lips as a shaken fountain pen jerks out ink.

"Well--can't ground be both holy and camped on?" asked Daley lightly.

"Not in America," said old Mrs. Cotton fiercely. "If people pa-hark
Fords on holy ground and prattle about God's Great Out of
Doors--naturally God leaves the place at once. The holy ground is thus
disinfected of holiness and becomes a perfectly safe Ca-hamping Park."

"To be a little selfconscious about being happy or good doesn't
destroy the real happiness and goodness," said Daley. "It's only that
Americans mean well and _know_ they mean well--and Europeans may mean
well or ill, but anyway they don't know what they mean."

"National selfconsciousness _is_ destructive. It _is_. It _is_,"
shouted the old woman, speaking past Daley to the surprised Chang
Chu-lien. "To be nationally selfconscious makes a kind of su-huffocating
shell round reality--and fi-hinally withers reality away. Americans
don't know how to _be_ American--(whatever that may be)--they only
know how to Americanise other people and to say Look At Us Being
American. They don't decide se-hecretly to think a good thing or to
make a good thing--they decide to advertise a good thing. They don't
determine--with a breaking heart--to rid the world of suffering--they
say, I'll--Tell--the World.... Benefactor Is--My--Mi-hiddle--Name...."

"Well--that's better than causing suffering," said Daley.

"I think not," said old Mrs. Cotton. "Tyranny is at least real.
Ki-hindness has become simply another of those American synthetic
products."

"We see no difference," said Liu Sao-shing, "between American culture
and English culture. Both are very bad--in China."

"No-honsense--hok," shouted old Mrs. Cotton. "English culture never
intrudes, never goes abroad where it isn't wanted. America is the
Philistine invader."

Old Mrs. Cotton nearly always talked of one of two things, America or
her changeling son, Clifford. She enjoyed being thought unreasonable,
queer and heartless. She was one of those fortunate people who retain
to a great age their power to offend. It made no difference to her
that Lena did not say anything or seem at all pleased.

But to Daley it made a great difference. Daley liked to hear a light
kind noise of talk on all sides, she liked to hear people saying--"My
dear, did you know.... Oh Daley, I _must_ tell you.... Why listen,
people, I heard something great to-day..." and other people answering,
"Oh _n-n-n-no_, not really.... Oh yes isn't it ... how funny, that's
just what I always say...." But in the Cotton family there never had
been heard a noise like that--except an inaudible noise, the noise of
Daley's three dogs talking in her mind.

Lena would not speak and after a while Daley began to feel most
uneasy. Daley had shown Lena everything possible, almost: her
garden--("It attracts butterflies," she said, disarming
criticism)--her illustrated copy of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_--her
name printed in the _Woman's Helpful Friend_ as Honorable Mention in an
anecdote competition about pets--her pale brooding Kwan-yin in mottled
porcelain--her Indian necklace from New Mexico--the Queen Charlotte's
Lying-in Kennel for her dog Josephine, who would very soon-qualify for
such an institution--finally, her Victrola. Daley loved her
possessions very much indeed; she had not very many. Often she thought
of them at night with wriggles of pleasure; often at night she
imagined and mouthed conversations with smiling people, boasting
mildly, saying in an eager whisper which could not wake up Clifford,
"My dear, I have the darlingest Kwan-yin, a little like a
tortoiseshell cat." "Oh Daley, you do say killing things; what is a
gwonn-yin, anyway?"

"Oh, she's the Goddess of Mercy. All the gentle-hearted people in the
world ought to kow-tow to her." But the Victrola was the thing Daley
loved best. With a proud look of expectation she turned it on for
Lena.

"This is Edward German's Shepherds' Dance but if you don't care for
classical music we'll have some Harry Lauder in a minute."

"American music-machine is extremely classical, I think," said Chang
Chu-lien, leaning forward and almost bowing to the Victrola. Even Liu
Sao-shing looked a little reluctantly eager. Clifford buried his face
in his hands.

Daley came to the Victrola as to a refuge. _Surely_ this must please
Lena. She was so sure of the delightfulness of the Victrola that she
did not even realise that Lena was not delighted. Lena was tired after
so much looking at things. She detested mechanical music. While disc
after disc span husky sounds upon the air, Lena sat frowning, turning
over the pages of the _Woman's Helpful Friend_ with a sour look. Many
of the pages of the magazine were serrated near the words, "Sign below
and cut along the dotted line." Daley had a passion for coupons and
somewhere she had a great treasure of ten-day-tubes and sample cakes.

"The old woman's right," thought Lena. "Daley's only an American after
all."

Daley was listening to the Victrola with great happiness. She was like
a devoted person married to an asthmatic subject; she did not hear the
imperfection of her treasure's voice. Harry Lauder's time was not yet.
He would do, if all else failed, to make Lena smile. For the moment
Daley enjoyed her unalterable cycle of tunes. Yet she hardly heard the
tunes. She only saw the story that ran with the tunes. It ran through
Daley's unblinking mind like a wan stream through a wood. It was a
very childish story, but it seemed an epic to Daley. The Shepherds'
Dance introduced the audience--all the gentle-hearted people Daley
knew, grouped in the verandah of an hotel--Lion, Mr. Diamond, Dr.
Bisket, Mrs. Ridley with the Ridley children, Ward, Edie and May--all
with their elbows on a balustrade against which bougainvillea reared,
as though the pale-green sea beyond were breaking in wine-coloured
foam. The orchestra in the great room behind them played the
Shepherds' Dance; the little Ridley children lifted up their
petticoats, and danced, swinging their short-socked legs awkwardly to
the swinging rhythm and showing their little drawers. March, 'Pomp and
Circumstance.' The heroes came clattering on, beautiful men in
beautiful uniforms--Russian Grand Dukes or Princes every one.
Everybody looked at them with warm admiring hearts; Mrs. Ridley knew
who they were. "The one with a dark moustache is the natural son of a
king ... the one with the medals is the leader of the Imperial
Guard ... the one who is smiling now was banished from his homeland for
excessive duelling ... and that tall one, that tall noble one is
Clifford Cotton, who held a fortress singlehanded against a thousand
of the enemy...." Songs came next. Chaliapin in a song from _Prince
Igor_ ... Nigger Medley--'My Old Kentucky Home,' 'Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot,' 'Let My People Go,' 'Careless Love' ... all the heroes were
singing. Grand Dukes are so cosmopolitan that they sing nigger songs
with a strong American accent. The noble Clifford sang tenor in the
part-songs, and to him was given the solo voice of Chaliapin. Lion and
Mrs. Ridley and Mr. Diamond sat enraptured, gazing in at the open
doors, gazing at the heroes who glittered in a group round the
orchestra piano. 'Poppies,' xylophone solo, by Harry Spinneker. Harry
Spinneker indeed!--it was played by Clifford Cotton. The orchestra
xylophonist smiled tolerantly as he lent his instrument; he evidently
did not think a European Grand Duke could play the xylophone, but he
was wrong. It was wunnerful, note perfect, 'Poppies'--a most difficult
thing to play, with that quick rattle of strokes on the long notes and
those cute little variations--never a mistake. Every one was paralysed
with admiration. Daley felt almost unbearably proud of her creation in
the light of Mrs. Ridley's awe. Immediately afterwards came the
Humoreske labelled Played By Honoria Rock the Celebrated Lady
Violinist, but of course--Clifford again. The violin was like a voice
singing. Pianoforte solo, Percy Grainger's 'Shepherd's Hay.' Clifford
again. The others all danced, stamping their big Russian boots,
kicking high and squatting low. Alas, Clifford could not both dance
and play. He played nimbly, smiling aside at the dancers with a
whimsical wistfulness. Well, one couldn't keep the orchestra out for
ever, though the poor thing was hopelessly outshone. After all it was
paid to play. It played Sibelius' 'Valse Triste.' And at the
breathless check in that tune--that pause which all devotees of
popular concerts anticipate with a lump in the throat--a most dreadful
thing happened. Deliciously dreadful. The heroes were on the verandah
now, laughing, looking out across the crest of the bougainvillea wave.
And--crack--a shot rang out. A Bolshevik hidden on the beach. Clifford
threw up his arms and pitched forward. He lay as though wildly kissing
the ground. Lion and Mr. Diamond said "My God" and sprang to their
feet in movie attitudes. Mrs. Ridley clasped the children. Daley
herself, in her peacock-blue three-piece suit, rushed in and threw
herself across the body of Clifford. Was there a flicker of those
noble eyelids? People said, "Who's that woman? His wife? Ah, poor
soul!" Within the ballroom the orchestra, unaware of the tragedy,
finished playing the 'Valse Triste.' Daley simply could not understand
people who tolerated Bolsheviks. She turned the Victrola off, feeling
giddy with rapture. The scene shrank to a little make-shift room in
China with five unkind people in it. Lena's face was very dull.

"Shall we have Harry Lauder now?" asked Daley.

"I like to hear your voice best," said Lena wearily. She was looking
at Clifford, but she hoped that Daley would go on talking in her
golden voice.

Clifford looked very large, towering above Liu Saoshing on the other
side of the room. His size, which was considerable, was exaggerated by
the clumsiness of his clothes. Almost every detail of his clothes was
unsuccessful, though nothing was careless. He had a large drawn face
under dark thick damp hair. He wore spectacles with cheap metal rims.
He looked alert, remote and uncertain, like a big wild animal in a
cage. He looked over Liu's head at Lena and said, "Daley, what d'you
think of my Lena?"

His talk seemed like a deliberate imitation of a child's, even to the
gasps for breath between certain words. Lena thought that he might
almost be taken for a "natural." He irritated, puzzled and excited
her. She wished she had vitality enough to understand him, or even to
love him. He looked as if he was never tired, never gentle, as if he
loved food and did not occupy himself with what other people loved. As
if he could hurt feelings gaily and never know of it. To Lena who, at
thirty-seven, felt often ashen, he was like a roaring reviving fire.
Lena's parents, a faded, pedantic, irritable father and a mother
gently devoted to patriotic leagues and patent medicines, had bleached
and sterilised her youth. She thought Clifford looked as if he could
talk loudly and rather indecently at a bar, over one gin-and-bitters
too many. He was far removed from the thin Fulham poet she had loved
so long, whose only dissipation was a refined use of a mild drug, and
whose obscenities were so excessively psychological. To Lena, manly
humour, bar-humour, consisting largely of jokes dealing with
water-closets, double beds and the accidental disclosing of undressed
ladies, seemed, though disconcerting, very vital and exciting.

Daley was a little sobered as she said goodbye to Chang and Liu.
Chang, though he had stayed nearly three hours, excused himself again
and again for his departure as he bowed and bowed. Daley's smile was
dimmed. She was secretly hurt by hearing Clifford claim Lena as his
Lena. Daley was not a vain person though she often said--and quite
truly--that she really looked wunnerful in the three-piece suit. Yet,
though not complacent, she could not help feeling that she was a finer
specimen of woman than Lena was. She had somehow always pictured "the
woman who stole my husband's love," so often mentioned in the
Heart-to-heart Column of the _Woman's Helpful Friend,_ as much more like
herself--in the three-piece suit--than Lena. She looked at Lena's pale
sullen face, her straight unshining hair, her still sad eyes, her
fidgeting hands, her waistless eccentric dress of imitation batik--and
she thought, "The Ridleys would think her _queer_." And this was
Daley's way of saying a good deal. The Ridleys, who lived in
California, were Daley's touchstone. She did not consciously admire
them very much, but she referred all social doubts to her memory of
them, because they were so happy. When she was lonely or obsessed with
the queerness of her life, her heart retired into an imaginary Ridley
reunion. The conventional pretty hygienic living-room of the Ridleys
materialised around her; she could hear Mrs. Ridley's "Well, I don't
like it--it's _queer_." She could see Mr. Ridley, stout, bald,
shrugging his eyebrows as he took off his eye-glasses so that he might
express his opinion of "freaks" unhampered. "If he was _my_ boy" and
"if she was _my_ girl" were Mr. Ridley's most frequent contributions
to a discussion of "freaks." It seemed that nearly every
representative of the modern world had only been saved by an accident
of birth from being put across Mr. Ridley's knee and well spanked.
Daley laughed at Mr. Ridley, sometimes secretly and sometimes to his
face--yet to remember him made her feel very safe. When her
mother-in-law forbade her the solace of the Victrola, she found an
alternative drug in the thought of herself at a Ridley party--every one
talking at once--every one saying cordial and loving things--young Ward
Ridley, with a front tooth knocked out by a boy at school, giggling over
the bad jokes in _The American Boy_, little Edie handing round the
chocolate fudge, Mrs. Ridley saying again and again, "I'n't it just
_great_ to see Daley home ... i'n't that a dandy suit she's wearing,
Dad, i'n't it just _great_ to have her home...." The Ridleys did not
know that Clifford suffered from a tinge of queerness, and their
ignorance helped Daley to ignore her danger. The Ridleys had only met
Clifford during one week-end. Mr. Ridley had said that he was a "fine
feller--thoroughly red-blooded chap." Mrs. Ridley had said, "he's a
lovely man, Daley, I just love a big manly he-man." Clifford had
fortunately been very careful during that week-end. He and Daley and
Mr. Ridley had travelled to San Francisco together on the Monday and
Clifford had had a real triumph. He had put on the commuter's manner
complete with the smallest detail. Daley would not allow herself to
remember noticing how proud Clifford had been to be able to say,
"That's a good yarn. ... We're three minutes behind time.... Care for
a look at the _Examiner_? ... Now you can't tell me you always
remember to mail yer wife's letters...." A stranger had uttered a new
catchword and Clifford's lips could be seen to move as he committed it
to memory. But Daley refused to admit the triumph to herself. She
simply tried to look at Clifford through Mr. Ridley's eyes and not so
much to approve as simply to take for granted.

Daley thought that Clifford was intensely real and impressive. His
heart, she thought, was as hard as his fine body, but that did not
matter much for she could imagine a soft heart into his body. She
loved his effortless frankness, his courage, his contentment and the
fact that he did not enquire into the workings of minds. She had a
horror of strangeness which she believed that he shared. Mrs. Ridley
had once, in ardent confidence, referred to Mr. Ridley as "My _Mate_"
and this seemed to Daley to imply an ideal which she and Clifford
almost achieved. She knew that he also distrusted the something
fantastic which haunted the house. She nearly succeeded in exorcising
the ghost by calling the house "Our Home" and filling it as full as
she dared of the kindly sentimental atmosphere of the _Woman's Helpful
Friend_. Little home-made "cute notions" appeared stealthily in the
drawingroom from time to time and stayed there till old Mrs. Cotton
noticed them--things copied from photographs or cut out along dotted
diagrams in the Making Home Homelike Column.

Daley was hurt by Clifford's reception of Lena, but she looked forward
to the healing of the hurt by means of a good-tempered Mate-to-mate
explanation later on in bed. Clifford often talked in Daley's mind,
just as the dogs did. In Daley's mind he said all the things that
unfortunately he never said with his own lips and never thought of
with his own brain. She imagined herself in one of her new
crpe-dechine nighties, stroking his face and saying, "Dearest, I'm not
sure that I care for your Lena." And she imagined his reply--"Well, I'm
sure that I don't--now that I've seen her side by side with you, my
Daley ... my mate...."

But as the late afternoon wore on, it seemed that this delightful talk
became less and less probable. Clifford was quite obviously delighted
with Lena. No topic arose in which poor Daley could distinguish
herself, but Lena could be vaguely clever on every topic. Daley liked
to talk of dogs and gardens, of ghosts, of the Prince of Wales, of her
travels round the world, of her neighbours, of funny small
misunderstandings showing herself in a ridiculous light. She liked to
say things beginning with, "I wonder ..."--things that had no possible
answer except, "Yes, I wonder ..." She did a lot of very unimportant
wondering. "I wonder if those two spiders are related--they look so
very much alike...." "I wonder why a girl could be called Veronica but
never Nemophila...." "I wonder if, when a dog lies in a round like a
whiting with its tail to its nose, it's the same as us soothing
ourselves by looking in the glass.... 'That's the nice face that other
people see,' we say, and dogs say, 'That's the nice smell that other
dogs smell....'" "I wonder what it'd be like to get back of each
other's eyes--just jump quickly in and out again. Some people's eyes'd
be like a curtain falling and other people's would be like a great
fire..."

In reply to this kind of thing old Mrs. Cotton would often snort and
say, "Good God!" displaying an attitude very disruptive to a wonderer.
She never wondered, she was always bitterly sure. The gaunt old ship
of her mind never set sail on little happy excursions; it travelled
far over bleak seas, pressing against storms towards no port; it
returned carrying no treasure, but barnacled and encrusted with the
little fantastic ugly mysteries that belong to shoreless seas.

As for Clifford, he did not dare to wonder, just as a growing boy
dares not play with the toy soldiers that delight his father and
little brother. He was not yet far enough removed from the
contemptible practice of wondering. He only allowed himself to be
interested in things that existed, things that could be definitely
known and learnt by heart, things that had actually been seen to
happen. If he was a changeling, he had set himself conscientiously to
be a man at last; he could not afford to admit fellowship with
fancies.

He listened to Lena, however, because, though he did not understand
much that she said, he was sure that all her knowledge was far removed
from fancy. From her he hoped to learn bitterness and wisdom.

Lena spoke of most of the minor musicians of the day as her
acquaintances, and half-heartedly analysed their work. "With Spencer
Foakes you have a feeling ... his work's very like himself ... a kind
of serene distortion. ... Billy Mitten knows means so much better than
ends ... Anne Sorrel----"

"I've got her on the Victrola," cried Daley triumphantly. Lena looked
at her coldly and ignored what she said.

"Anne Sorrel--poor thing--you can hear her hungry family
through ... two ... and nobody's ever found out from her who the father
was.... Her work's on the edge of understanding; I think, when she forgets
to think, she _almost_ knows ... but not quite. If you've heard her play
Dart's 'Ballad in F' you probably know what I mean...."

Daley knew that Clifford scarcely understood one word of what Lena was
saying. Yet she could see that he was fascinated. He sat with his
mouth intently a little open, touching his lips with the tip of his
tongue, moving his head and saying _Ah_ now and then. Lena did not
talk very much. She was a very unlucky person and to-night she had
quite a sharp pain in the muscles of her ribs. She was scarcely ever
without some little pain, doubt or discomfort.

"Oh Lena," said Clifford. "I think you know everything."

"Except how to be alive," said Lena in a flat voice.

"That's the only thing I know," said Daley eagerly, but Clifford did
not look at her.

"I should like to know enough," cried Clifford, "to be not interested
in the obvious. I should like to be able to be haughty. But you have
to _know_ the obvious before you can be haughty about it. I should
like it to seem as if I had thought the things I say--not simply seen
them. But every one always gets ahead of me in thinking."

"Naturally," said old Mrs. Cotton. "Every one had the start of you."

"Dear Mother Cotton makes believe she has a kind of a joke on
Clifford," said Daley to Lena, trying to save fragments of the desired
Ridley atmosphere. "It really explains Clifford--and jokes don't often
do that. She says--in fun, you know,--that he never was born. He was
just found. And it's true that Clifford's got everything that belongs
to grown-upness except practice. I dessay you've noticed that already.
He simply doesn't know how to behave, unless he's copying somebody or
doing it out of a book--do you, honey?--he doesn't know what to say
nor what clothes to wear----"

"Hak--hak--hak--" suddenly yelped old Mrs. Cotton. "I heard him once
asking Mrs. Lorne, the missionary, about her marriage night. He asked
her----"

It was Daley's turn to convey rebuke. "Lena doesn't know Mrs. Lorne,
Mother, so I'm sure that wouldn't amuse her."

"I do know her," said Lena. "Curiously enough, she's my aunt. That's
why Milady decided to bring the show here--she thought we'd get fed
and lodged free. But there's no room in the Mission ... and anyway it
wouldn't have been very ... There's no harm in my poor dear
aunt...That being so, how does she know enough about people like Edna
and Milady and me to think us wicked. She seemed to know at a glance
where Milady belongs. How does she know?"

"She doesn't really," said Daley. "She'd think the Bishop of London
worldly if he opened a whist drive. She just jumbles all worldliness
up together in the same world. She'd think it was just as worldly to
wear silk stockings as to elope with a father of ten."

"As a matter of fact, so it would be," sighed Lena. "It's funny to
think of me and Milady being worldly in the same world. It was funny
that I ever started round the world with Milady and Edna. I was
playing in a movie palace orchestra at Richmond and Milady sang a
musical feature there and happened to fix on me... It wasn't a good
plan, this coming round the world. I thought it sounded all right--but
we're not good enough. And I didn't realise it meant living in an
atmosphere of other people's torn grey lace underclothes. Edna's all
right--too stupid to be otherwise. But Milady--well ... as I say ...
even my aunt bridled...."

"What did the Lornes say about taking tickets for your show?" asked
Daley.

"Said at first they'd derive no benefit ... didn't care to set a
doubtful example to the Chinese. Edna swore we wouldn't shock
them ... called it a concert ... clean fun ... God knows it's harmless
enough, though as for _fun_ ... Mr. Lorne said, 'For us, you know, there
is only one kind of pleasure.... We find it when we kneel down ... in a
quiet room....' But Edna persisted and--well--they said they'd 'look
in.' Sounded safer than saying baldly they'd come." She laughed
faintly. "_Clean fun_ as a successful rival to ... But of course he
didn't mean _pleasure_--he meant _glory_. Happy Lornes who can refuse
_Clean Fun_ on the pretext of a prior engagement with _glory_. Pity
there are so few ways of being intimate with glory--only
prayer--love--or alcohol...."

"When I want my glory," said Daley, "I take the Victrola into the
garden, turn it on, and lie down on my back, with foxgloves leaning
over my eyes and a puppy licking my chin. When Clifford wants his, he
goes and gloats over his socks and ties."

Clifford had been shuffling impatient feet on the carpet. He was
anxious to reveal himself to the wise Lena. He could not bear this
talk of aunts and Ednas for a second longer.

"I don't want glory," he shouted. "I want wisdom. I'm a changeling. To
be a changeling sounds much more charming than it feels."

"How does it feel?" asked Lena without looking at him.

"Well, for instance, I have a perfect memory," said Clifford. Now he
was safely started. His broad face glowed with pleasure. "I remember
everything that ever happened in my life--back to a certain day seven
years ago. And that must be the day I was changed."

"What were you changed from--and what into?" sighed Lena.

"Why, I was changed from something that had no home into me--an
English Esquire in an English garden. A butterfly wouldn't leave my
face; it shimmered against my eyelashes so that I could hardly see the
snapdragons. Then it went away and I saw everything. Everything. There
is nothing about that day or any day since that I can't remember.
There was nothing in sight that I didn't see. Some snapdragons were
red and some pink and some white, but there was only one yellow one.
The path was made of cinders and there were upside-down bottles
bordering it."

Daley shuddered and laughed. "Poor garden. It's like imagining a
beautiful woman in the leg-of-mutton sleeves of thirty years ago."

"It had been raining," continued Clifford. "And all the upside-down
bottles had water in them--in that hollow, you know, that the bottoms
of upside-down bottles have."

Lena nearly groaned. All that Clifford was now saying seemed
insanely uninteresting. Bottles and butterflies--cinders and
snapdragons.... Why not a washing list? She neither liked fancies nor
facts. But Clifford did not know that she was bored. He did not know
anything except the things he had seen or the things he had been told.
He continued to describe the details of that day with uninspired
accuracy--the hen behind the sunken fence scratching cabbage stalks
and examining them first with one eye and then with the other--the
worms growing alternately long and thin or short and fat as they
blundered between the lumps of wet earth--the little beards of
raindrops under the chins of the roses--the cloud that was shaped like
a white cat until its neck got too thin and its nose crumbled--the
climp-climp of water falling from the eaves into the water-butt--and
the sight of his old mother hobbling round the garden, her muddled
crest of grey hair seen first above the box hedge, and then the whole
of her, dressed in black and yellow.

"Of course he didn't know that I was his mother," said old Mrs.
Cotton. "No more I was. I was the mother of the lost Culliffudde. I
could see at once that this wasn't the son I bo-hore."

Daley looked a little nervously at Lena to see if this ridiculous
story--which was one of the most serious flaws in her carefully
constructed shell of "home atmosphere"--was making Lena despise the
Cotton family. "Dear Mother Cotton, you're confusing poor Lena. It's
just a joke, you know, Lena, an ingenious fancy. I remember the day
quite well. We'd just come back to England from our honeymoon in
Dieppe. We were staying with Mother Cotton. I remember the day _so_
well. Clifford had gone out to see if a snapdragon had any
teeth ... we'd bin arguing all breakfast-time about whether snapdragons
had any teeth ... just in fun, you know.... It was so sunny and sort of
humming-warm--do you remember, Mother Cotton?--you thought you heard
music passing by and went out to look? And while she was gone,
Clifford came running in shouting, 'Which way--which way?'... I said,
'Well--what about the snapdragons?' and he shouted in a comic voice,
'Dragons--I've left the dragons all behind.... I'm a man now....'Of
course it was just a game; it was then that I began to realise what
great babies men are.... But he must have got a touch of the sun, for
after that he was ill for several days ... and for a long time he was
very ... nervy. And he never remembered anything before that day or
forgot anything since. So he likes to pretend he was a fairy turned
into a man"--she giggled nervously--"it sounds like the directions in
my English cook-book--'Turn into a buttered walnut'--or something like
that...."

Old Mrs. Cotton snorted loudly. Lena laughed a little. She laughed in
a whisper, biting in the laugh, as it were. It sounded like _ff-ff-ff_
"One wonders what happened to the son you bore ..." she said
contemptuously to old Mrs. Cotton.

"Of course he was spirited awa-hay."

"Anyway," said Daley hurriedly, "it's a cute fancy. And there
certainly is something unnatural about Clifford's marvellous memory."

"Yes, I have a marvellous memory," said Clifford. "That's why I have
such short sight. If I didn't have such short sight my memory would
burst. I became a missionary, you know," he added after a pause,
"because it seemed at the time that that was the only thing for a
changeling to be. Of course I couldn't go on being the plain English
Esquire I seemed. I didn't know how. So I thought I would become a
sort of saint, as other fairies have before me. But somehow in my case
it didn't seem to work. Missionaries in these days have heavier feet
than they used to have--heavier feet than saints and fairies. Mission
work isn't saints' work any more--it's practically a 'gentleman's
profession' now. However, I had to be a missionary, because magic was
the only thing I knew. But I didn't _want_ to know it. I wanted to
know about wheels and England and how to tie a white tie and what to
say when people asked me what I thought of the situation in China. I
wanted, and still want, to accept quite calmly everything that men
accept. That's another way of saying I want to be wise. It is easy for
me to accept gods and fairies because nothing _outside_ the range of
human wisdom can surprise me. But the kind of wisdom I want is
understanding of the things I see. Men, for instance.... Nobody will
explain men to me. I can see their eyes and noses and thick hands, but
I can't see their thoughts and nobody will tell me about men's
thoughts. However the fact that I was a changeling and was familiar
with gods and fairies clearly indicated the career of a
missionary--and I still am a missionary, though they said I mustn't
preach after they heard me once. They said they would rather I learned
printing--they said that was a more suitable sphere of endeavour for me.
It seems it doesn't do to take magic so much for granted as I do. You
see I want to learn about men so much more than men want to learn about
gods. The business of a missionary is to make magic mysterious to
men--to men who are too wise for magic really. It is apparently wrong
for a changeling to preach common obvious magic to wise men. It ought
to be the other way round--and it will be some day. Some day I shall
be wise enough to teach wise men a magic wiser than they. Lena could
make me wise, if she would. Lena has such a _very_ wise face. She
could make me see men's thoughts, perhaps. I have _such_ short sight."

Daley felt more and more uncomfortable as this explanation went on.
She watched for a loophole that might allow a new subject to fly into
this dangerous enclosed air of strangeness. She watched for a
suggestive word, a path back into the commonplace. _Short sight_. That
would do. Short sight was thoroughly Ridleyesque.

"Oh Clifford, tell about Gregory," said Daley, beginning to laugh.
When once she began to laugh she never could stop. She often had the
greatest difficulty in making her face look polite and quiet again
after something had amused her.

"Haw-haw!" roared Clifford. "Yes, Gregory's our ex-puppy, you
know,--Josephine's last litter. And yesterday, before I put my
spectacles on, I saw something on the floor. I thought Gregory had
forgotten himself again, so I beat him and beat him. And when I put my
spectacles on, I saw what it was on the floor and it was only an old
glove--an innocent old glove--haw-haw!"

"Ha-ha!" sobbed Daley. "Poor Gregory must have thought, 'What have we
here--a completely new sin ... what _ought_ I to have done about that
glove?' and next time he sees a glove anywhere, his jaw'll drop and
he'll say 'Lord--if I haven't laid another glove without knowing
it....' Darling Gregory, but we're going to allow him to commit one
sin free, so as to catch up with that whipping. Ha-ha--!"

"Haw-haw--!"

Lena laughed, "Ff-ff-ff!"

"What a stopper of a laugh," Daley thought. She imagined the thumb of
a waiter stopping the mouth of a foaming bottle. "Ff-ff-ff, indeed!"
Yet she couldn't stop laughing. She felt her face to be absurdly
convulsed. She could have laughed for twenty minutes at that one funny
thing. New aspects crowded to her mind, new glimpses of the confusion
among Gregory's laboriously acquired standards of canine virtue, a new
vision of Clifford with pink unspectacled eyes righteously pursuing
the shrieking Gregory round an old glove.... Ha-ha-ha....




CHAPTER II

    Every tree in the grove
    Is a miser of light,
    Crying over and over,
    _Give me my rights_.
    And each tree asks of his kindred
    That their leaves be withdrawn
    From his sky, and their hindering
    Shade from his bright lawn.


It had begun to rain as Lena, Daley and Clifford walked behind a
coolie with a lantern towards the consul's compound. Gigantic shadows
of the coolie's hurrying legs, so close to the lantern, snapped like
great scissors along the wet whitewashed wall. Across the glow
immediately around the lantern the rain seemed to fall slowly like
snow. There was a restless murmuring of rain among the eucalyptus
trees.

Mr. Diamond, the consul, always kind, had had his piano carried into
the shed. Rows of assorted chairs looked rather hopelessly at the
piano and listened to the high smooth stir of the rain outside.
Daley's three dogs, their fur pommaded by the rain, bustled in and
smelt the piano. One by one they set their seal of approval upon the
piano in their own frank but rather regrettable way. Every one
pretended not to notice this.

"You brave people. You brave people," said Mr. Diamond, coming forward
to take Daley's hand and to hang up her wet coat. "Heaven doesn't seem
to have blessed our venture, but our Daley can always be trusted to
defy Heaven."

Mr. Diamond was always rather sprightly, but to-night the
sprightliness seemed to have gone deeper than usual and he was
sprightly all through. The chair from which he had risen as Daley came
in was cheek by jowl with the chair on which the orange-haired Milady
still sat. Edna was sorting music soberly at a little distance.

"Well Lena, we're all in clover!" shouted Milady. "You're not the only
one, you needn't think. Mr. Diamond's stood me an' Edna a terrific
feed and fizz to beat the band."

She leaned over the arm of her chair and shook her finger roguishly at
Mr. Diamond. Her fat knees were wide apart in her tight sky-blue satin
skirt; her manner of brawling triumph spoke rather pathetically of
anxieties for the moment forgotten.

Mr. Diamond looked pleased but at the same time gentlemanly. "There is
something of the knight-errant in me," he said. "I couldn't think of
leaving two fair ladies at the mercy of whatever dinner the doctor's
poor old cook might provide. And again, apart from all unselfish
considerations, I thought we should all prefer music that wasn't
inspired by indigestion."

"Aren't you a scream," said Milady. And in the silence that followed
her loud giggle, Clifford could be clearly heard at the door saying to
Lena, "I shall watch your face the whole time."

"Just listen to Clifford!" exclaimed Daley. "I warn everybody that
he's been married seven years. You can see that for yourselves by the
fact that he doesn't offer to help the lady off with her wet coat."

"The Apache method," murmured Mr. Diamond. Every one was beginning to
get a little tired of trying to be amusing when Lion came in and the
whole effort had to be renewed.

"Rain, rain, rain," said Lion. He and Mr. Diamond disliked each other
and always met in an explosion of heartiness.

"Rain, rain, rain and yet more rain," echoed Mr. Diamond helpfully. "I
foresee a flood and these ladies obliged to stay with us Noahs in the
Ark. We shall have music every night."

"And fizz," suggested Milady.

"I've only got one case," said Mr. Diamond. "Noah, I suppose, had at
least a pair. But such as it is, it is yours. A poor thing but your
own."

Lion, after the preliminary jocosity which was his tribute to the
presence of Mr. Diamond, went to Daley. Lion represented a tobacco
company in Kan Lu Pa and would continue to represent it until he
arrived at a pensioned old age in Tunbridge Wells. Yet whenever he saw
Daley he began to talk of Canada. Daley was never cruel to him, yet
this constant talk of Canada--a euphemism for despair which hardly
does justice to the Dominion--was a protest against her cruelty in
being married to a man she loved. Canada was a phantom sword uplifted
over the head of Lion's love. But if the sword had fallen it would
have bounced harmlessly off. For Daley, though kind to all men, did
not very much like them with small noses.

"What a dismal way of enjoying ourselves," said Lion to Daley, looking
irritably at the piano. "I'd rather be at home over the stove with a
good book, wouldn't you?"

"Certainly not," replied Daley. "Good books can wait. In fact, as far
as I'm concerned, they can wait till Hell freezes over--as those
_dreadful_ Yankees say. Music's what I'm crazy for, Lion. Not
classical music like Mendelssohn and so forth but _home_ music--the
take-me-back-to-Dixie kind of music...."

With other young men Lion was dictatorial and liked to make it quite
clear that he was the most intellectual person present. But Daley,
with the friendliest intentions, always made him feel a little
pompous. It was safer, as well as more delightful, to listen to her
than to talk to her. Occasionally he treasured up intelligent
observations to declaim to her. Sometimes she seemed to be impressed
by these treasures of his mind, even saying, "Oh Lion, you're a
wonder. How_ever_ do you think of such things." Sometimes she made the
unfortunate but innocent mistake of saying, "Oh that's _fine_, Lion, I
haven't heard that one before." Sometimes she looked round at all the
listeners and said, "Do listen to our Lion, isn't he _cunning_." And
sometimes she only said, "Oh Lion dear, don't prose." He was a very
serious sensitive young man. He had narrow upright shoulders, large
brown eyes, hollow cheeks and a too long upper lip. He was perhaps
twenty-two years old.

Lion and Lena met. The glow that was meant for the miraculous Clifford
was still on Lena's face. She looked, as the cultured Lion noticed at
once, like a picture by Mr. Augustus John. She had a flowered Chinese
shawl about her shoulders and the white wall behind her was
shadowless. "I'd be absolutely terrified of her," thought Lion. He
almost added "in life," as though Lena were dead. Though cultured, he
was a simple young man.

Daley introduced him to Lena. "You're both so wunnerfully
clever--you'll love each other."

Mr. Diamond's boy was handing round liqueurs. Lena's hand shook
slightly with a glass of Dom in it. Clifford was watching her and she
was making a real effort to be womanly and affable. Her manner was
secretly meant to be a copy of Daley's, but the secret was well-kept.
No one would ever have suspected the two manners of being related.
Lena talked to Lion in her small husky voice, bending every twig of
conversation to an abstract curve. Lena's most characteristic reply to
a piece of gossip about a neighbour was, "But don't you think people
always do ..." She was never content to say, "Oh really, did he?" and
so add a little humble buttress to the existing edifice of talk. She
always must build a conversational annex of her own, much more austere
and academic in style than the original structure.

The effect of Lena upon Lion was curious. With Lena he could in no way
feel manly. She repelled him physically so that he almost shuddered as
he looked at her thin neck, her soft lifeless hair and the too evident
bones of her haggard face. And he found at once that he could not
impress her intellectually as a man should impress a woman. Whenever
he spoke in an effort to assert his intelligence, she slid her sleepy
eyes round upon him, forced a smile which looked to him like a sneer
and uttered a half sentence--the half, as it seemed to him, of a
tiresomely suggestive sentence, which made his own assertion seem
crude. She was a No instead of a Yes. She was a valley where a
mountain ought to be. Yet by her negative methods she most unfairly
succeeded. But he went on trying. He was determined not to be
silenced; he was set on achieving an eventual success with her, on
proving himself to be dignified, as every man should, in the presence
of women. Was he, a man getting on for twenty-three, a Fabian and a
reader of no less than three Radical weeklies, to take second place to
a sickly unmarried woman of the despicable age that lies between
thirty and forty, a woman with no constructive solution of the world's
difficulties at all, a woman who made no remarks complete enough to be
either approved or refuted? He went on trying.

Even when Lena said, "Well, I never thought of it in _quite_ that
light ..." it was evident that she had no opinion of that light at all
and Lion could not help feeling disconcerted. He could not help trying
to justify "that light" with words that made the poor light shine more
and more crudely, even in his own sight. Lena's replies were not
aggressive. "Well, I must say ... well of course you may have studied
the question more deeply than I have.... I dare say that might be said
but ..." He could not leave her alone. He could not allow her to
triumph by this cold non-co-operation--especially while Daley was
watching.

How different was a discussion with Daley. Daley never argued, though
she often defeated argument by accident. She often laughed at Lion,
though her laugh--Ha-ha--was like applause compared with Lena's
Ff-ff-ff. Of course even Daley's method was rather unsatisfactory to a
well-informed young man who had once shaken the hand of Mr. Sidney Webb.
Yet with Daley Lion could always maintain a reserve of manly
tenderness. He could always think, "Yes, my dear, I concede you the
last word. You certainly take the wind out of the sails of my fine
logic. Nevertheless logic remains logical, and truth is truth...."

With Lena Lion's truths might be truths but they seemed uncomfortably
immature. All Lena's truths were too old and cynical to join battle
with his fresh edifying young truths.

If she had had a body worth looking at he felt as if it would have
been more easy either to agree with her or to disagree with her
generously.

Poor Lena was enjoying a triumph. Fortunately she did not know that to
any normally charming woman in the world her triumph would have been a
thing to laugh at, or cry over.

Daley could take no part in the discussion. She sat beside Mr. Diamond
who was talking to Milady. She looked at Lena and Lion and Mr. Diamond
with round reproachful eyes. "These are all people who said they liked
to hear my voice," she thought with a feeling of innocent annoyance.
She could not assume the look of detached indifference that dignified
the face of Edna, who also watched the disputants. Daley was not
accustomed to breathing this outer air. She was not accustomed to
seeing Lion and Mr. Diamond thus in profile. She occupied herself
unwisely in drinking a glass of port wine, having just emptied a glass
of crme-de-menthe. She was not used to drinking wines or spirits.
Drinking was a risk one took on great occasions; one then had to
pretend to be delighted with rather nasty stinging tastes. It was also
necessary to pretend to feel blase and normal as one put one's glass
down. This evening, after the port wine and the crme-de-menthe, her
patience was marked but precarious for a long time. Everything in the
room looked impersonally beautiful. Things mattered--but not closely.
It mattered, but not closely, that Clifford's eyes were unwinkingly
fixed upon Lena. Daley's own hand on her lap was as impersonally
satisfying to her as a flower. The diamond ring on her finger looked
so right that it might have been placed there by God or by a relation
of the Ridleys. It had, of course, been placed there by Clifford, but
he had not chosen it. A jeweller's assistant had chosen it in
compliance with Clifford's request to be shown the kind of ring most
men buy for their wives. It seemed to Daley most subtly and
excellently chosen. She felt like a diamond herself at this
moment--sleek and shining, with a warm sparkle of crme-de-menthe and
port wine at the core.

It was extremely puzzling to find herself glowing unseen. She was
never selfconscious unless she felt that she was neglected, which was
very seldom. She had no theory of charm. She read, of course,
regularly and with awe, the Beauty Secret Column of the _Woman's
Helpful Friend_. She often planned to follow the advice given. She was
duly impressed by the advertisements and made confused mental notes in
the hope of Keeping her Schoolgirl Complexion, of Getting Rid of That
Film, and of avoiding the dreadful fate of those who do not use
Listerine. But she made use of no wiles when it came to the point. In
the presence of Clifford wiles would have been wasted, and in the
presence of other men they somehow never seemed to be needed. She was
scarcely ever made aware of the dangerous charm of other women, and
the word _competition_ would never have occurred to her--as it would
have occurred to Lena. Even now, in this short twilight of neglect,
Daley did not recognise any such thought as, "I've slipped out of the
middle of the picture--where I belong." She simply looked from Lion to
Mr. Diamond with a rankling instinct that things were far from being
satisfactory just now. She tried several openings on both sides. To
Lion--"Well, if I'd bin Viceroy of India I'd of----" To Mr.
Diamond--"But they say Whiteaway and Laidlaw has the cutest
little----" Back again to Lion, "But that's Bolshevism pure and
simp----" And again, "Oh Lion _darling_, how _can_ you talk such
nonsense? If the miners' wives can afford to buy fur coats and
diam----" But not one of these attempts was successful. Lion and Lena,
Mr. Diamond and Milady broke through as though Daley's words had been
blank air. It was like the mild beginning of a nightmare to Daley--the
kind of nightmare in which you gradually realise that you have ceased
to exist. Her mouth tightened.

"The fact remains," said Lion, "that, out of a thousand munition
workers in nineteen seventeen, seven hundred and eighty voted
against ..."

"That's just the kind of fact," replied Lena, "that doesn't."

"Doesn't what?"

"Doesn't remain."

"Too-too-tootle-oo ..." sang Daley suddenly in a loud flutelike voice.
"Nobody's talking to me-e-e." It was a little out of tune, and this
was the only sign of her anger. It was a successful interruption. Lion
and Mr. Diamond looked at her with indulgent smiles. Even Lena smiled
at her with, Daley thought, a boy's smile. "I wouldn't like to undress
in front of her, somehow," thought Daley. "She's not a woman at all.
No harm in that. Clifford can't go on for ever looking at an imitation
boy."

Milady said, "Well gurls, what about getting a move on?"

The doctor arrived, wet and puffing. "Rain, rain, rain," he shouted,
but nobody dared to acknowledge this password except by merry nods,
for Milady, Edna and Lena were converging purposefully upon the piano.
Lena, whose mood had instantly changed when talk had ceased, sat
limply down on the music-stool. She looked with sombre martyred
patience at two heavy-booted French railwaymen who were snorting
"Tchoh--quelle pluie!" as they came in, trying to hook raindrops out
of the backs of their collars with their fingers. Lena began
scornfully to play Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song' and this comforted the
missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Lorne, a good deal as they came in. "The
fun is perfectly clean so far," they obviously thought as they sat
down. They fixed their eyes bravely on the stout naked arms and gaudy
hair of Milady. Mrs. Lorne's mouth twitched incessantly into a gentle
one-sided snarl. There was a mole in the crease between her nostril
and her cheek, and it seemed as if her lip were hitched on to the mole
by an invisible wire, as a toy might be jerked on a thread round a
pin. Mr. Lorne, a very small firm-looking man, sat down three chairs
away from Lion, so as to mark his disapproval of the tobacco trade in
China. Daley, sitting between Lion and Mr. Diamond, leaned forward to
wave her fingers encouragingly at Mrs. Lorne. But every one was hushed
to a sacred silence by Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song.' When it was over
Mr. Diamond said loudly, "I _like_ that. Perfectly delightful. I
_like_ that," and slapped his knee. But Daley was the only real
clapper. She was clapping for the absent Ridleys. They always clapped
specially hard after tunes that they had on their Victrola at home.

The audience gathered courage as the show proceeded. The two Frenchmen
began arguing about the theoretical wisdom of an _impasse russie_ in
the bridge hand they had just left. Mr. Diamond, who was rather
excited by champagne, flattery, and the presence of such an unusual
number of women, repeated himself into Daley's ear.

"They're really quite agreeable women," he said emphatically. "Not
ladies of course--in fact quite vulgar. But agreeable of their class.
It's no good being too fastidious in China, Daley. You have to keep a
sense of proportion. It's essential. A sense of proportion is
essential. And a sense of humour. That's essential. A sense of humour
and a sense of proportion are essential. Not a doubt of that. You
can't afford to pick and choose in the Far East. Of course at
home ..." etc., etc.

Daley wrinkled her forehead. "He's quite het up by that champagne,"
she thought. "The darling thing. If one met him to-night for the first
and last time one would never know what a darling thing he is. Nor how
safe and wise he'd be in an emergency."

"I love yew deurr ..." sang Edna in a deep trumpet-like voice. She
stood rigidly with a lot of spare breath stored up in her large chest
as she sang. Her eyes, however, wandered about the room, counting
heads. Fifteen at four dollars each. That is if Milady persuaded the
Chinese to pay at the same rate. "Love is a rowse that has no thorns
fur me.... Love is a sahn that has no setting deurr...." Lena at the
piano sat with her head thrown back and her jaw dropped, looking under
heavy lids at the score. Her hands flopped loosely about the keys. She
was not earning her money conscientiously. While Edna sustained a long
lonely note of final love, Lena, relieved for half a dozen seconds
from duty, looked impassively at the watching Clifford. She was hoping
that he would never find her out.

Poor Milady, who was really a very brave woman, filled the part of
comedienne in the troupe. She began to sing a very sprightly song
about dancing. She shuffled her feet slightly as she sang, shrugged
her shoulders and her hips rhythmically and played an invisible piano
in the air in front of her, as though she were pretending that the
noses of the audience were the keys.

    Some people like the Lancers,
    And some the Minuet.
    The old Victorians
    Weren't terpsichoreans,
    That's a fact--and yet--

"Catchy tune," whispered Mr. Diamond, determined to be entertained.
"She's really a good soul, that woman. Of her class, of course.
Clever. And plenty of _grit_. I like _grit_."

"But gimme--the shimmee--ow gimme--the shimmy-yimmy-yimmy...."
Milady's voice became more wholehearted as she howled for the shimmy.
She curled her lips, showed a row of large teeth, and seemed quite
sure that the whole audience was with her in her preference. She held
out her rocking arms to the audience as though the shimmy were a
long-clothes infant which she hoped would be handed to her. She threw
her arms round an invisible man and shimmied up and down, singing the
chorus over her shoulder to a tune that made all feet dance except Mr.
and Mrs. Lorne's. The two French railwaymen began to stamp quite
enthusiastically. Instead of singing the second verse, Milady left it
to the piano while she invited some one to come up and shimmy with
her.

"Ow come on do, one of you gentlemen.... Ah'm lonely.... This lil old
song gives me feet the fair itch--worse than corns ... come along up
and have a turn, do, ... nothing like the shimmy for the
rheumatics ... now which of you's going to be a good sport? ... don't
all speak at once.... What you all so shy for? Nobody's going to tell
tales. ... Now, which of you boys is it going to be?"

All the men laughed uneasily, examining the knees of their trousers.
Only Mr. Lorne, strong in righteousness, dared to meet Milady's
roguish eye with a direct glance of disapproval. This noble gaze
roused the devil in Milady.

"I spy the boy that loves to shimmee-ee-ee," she sang and tittuped
down the floor, holding her arms out towards Mr. Lorne. "Once more,
Lena, on the old tin can, and he'll be another fallen angel.... Ow
gimme--the shimmee--ow gimme--the shimmy-yimmy-yimmy----"

"Go away please," the calm bass voice of Mr. Lorne could be heard
above the relieved gigglings of the other men. Milady's yearning hands
were not far from the red ears of her victim, but he bowed his head
under her arm and picked up his hat and stick. This gesture quenched
the ardour of Milady. "Ow all right--no call to get ratty, laddie,"
she said and tittuped away backwards, the sky-blue satin quivering
like an irritated horse's skin. "For there's nothing to beat the
shimmy-yimmy-yimmy for gurls--and--boys." She struck a final attitude,
trying to bite her petulance in behind her grinning teeth.

"A very catchy tune. Very catchy indeed. Quite delightfully catchy,"
murmured Mr. Diamond tactfully.

Mr. Lorne stood patiently and sternly over his wife who, in stooping
to pick up her umbrella, dropped her bag, and, in stooping to pick up
her bag, dropped her umbrella. Her hands were accustomed to holding
babies and saucepans and family bibles--not society things like
umbrellas and beaded bags. This delay enabled Edna to step hastily
forward and sing about beauty, duty, God and the sod. Mr. Lorne hardly
cared to dissociate himself from these ennobling substances and
abstractions by walking out of the room. He sat down in a deliberately
temporary attitude on the edge of his chair. As Milady again came
forward, he sprang up like a startled hare, but she said, "Now people
dear, I've bin naughty, 'aven't I, and I'm not going to do it no more.
I'm going to sing a song that couldn't give offence to an unborn babe.
It's called--'My Daddy.'"

"Oh my God!" said Lion, covering his face with his hands.

She turned her toes in to give an impression of innocent childishness,
put her head on one side and plucked at the side-seams of the blue
satin with her fingers.

"He's such a vewy gweat big man--an' I'se so vewy small," she began
through round puckered lips, fixing an innocent wide-eyed stare on
little Mr. Lorne. "An' when I is a naughty gel--he don't love me at
all. I'll twy to be a good li'I gel--the goodest gel I can--an' then
he'll smile his gweat big smile--my gweat big Daddy-man."

Mr. Lorne felt most uncomfortable. He could not escape the blank
ambiguous beam of her eye. His cloak of dignified wrath seemed
stripped from him. The grounds for protest were cut from under his
feet.

"I'll give my Daddy one big kiss--and climb upon his knee--so's he
won't never fwown again--at naughty littol me----"

There was a crash of discords. Lena fell suddenly forward, her
forehead on the keys. "Oh, I can't--I can't ..."

Milady's eyes seemed suddenly to shrink from wide innocence to narrow
coldness. "Whatever's the matter _now_?" she asked over her shoulder.
She forgot to turn her toes out again.

"I'm ill--I can't breathe ..." gasped Lena. They all stood round the
piano, looking at Lena with embarrassment and excitement. Mr. Diamond,
his helpful mind upon brandy, shouted, "Boy!"

"She must get to bed," said the doctor. "How'll I get her all the way
up that hill to the hospital in this downpour...?"

"Oh of course she must come to us," said Daley. "It's only a few
steps. Clifford and Lion could easily carry her there."

Clifford and Lion plaited their fingers together and lifted her
between them, one glad it was Lena and the other sorry it was not
Daley. Lena's arms were round their necks. She was crying and could
not reach her handkerchief.

"Well I never," said Milady irritably. Edna was putting the music
together. Mr. Diamond mingled sympathy with praise. "Such a breezy
entertainment," he said. "Perfectly delightful. Perf--fect--tly
delight--tful.... How sad it should end like this. Never mind. Let's
hope it's just a slight feverish attack induced by the rain. That's
what it is no doubt. Not a doubt of that."

The doctor followed the invalid hopefully. The white inhabitants of
Kan Lu Pa were monotonously healthy. Even a mild case of congestion of
the lungs--under Blond Nordic ribs--would be a change from these
eternal tumorous Chinks.

The open relentless sound of the rain made the bedroom wretched as
Daley and Mrs. Lorne helped Lena to take off her clothes. "I can
manage--I can manage," said Lena huskily, not wishing Daley to see her
thin body. But when at last she lay between the sheets, she let her
anxious muscles go and said, "Oh, how glorious--to be still.... It's
like a throne. I'm strong again now...." She never expressed
enthusiasm except when she had been in pain. The ceasing of pain, she
often thought, was her only real physical joy.




CHAPTER III

    Ah, nobody knows
    The thing I would learn
    But the star of the frost
    That is still in the night for a while
    And is burned in the morning and lost.

    So would I be frozen,
    So would I be burned
    Into silence
    And lost;
    So would I return--
    Not I--not I--
    But a wind from the wild,
    Besieging the blossoming
    Towers of the roses.


"I have get home," said Mrs. Lorne, "because of painting Aggie's
throat."

"Clifford'll see you home," said Daley. "Your niece will be all right
here. I'll put a little bell...."

Clifford looked rather wildly at his wife. "Offering me," he thought,
"as though I were a pony. Married to an American, as Mother says, a
man can't call his soul his own."

But few men called their souls their own so literally as did Clifford.
He had his initials stamped on his soul, as he had them stamped on his
notepaper and his pocketbook, painted on his diningroom chairbacks,
engraved on his front door plate, appliqud on the backs of his
coolies' tunics, embossed upon his penwipers, embroidered on his
sweaters and handkerchiefs. His whole house was spotted with C.C.C.s.
C.C.C. expressed something that he felt a very urgent craving to
express. It sealed him, somehow, as a man. He would always be in
danger of losing his consciousness of existence, if he should forget
C.C.C.

He found himself walking under the dripping trees with Mrs. Lorne, in
the shaft of light from the coolie's lantern. At any rate, he thought,
he would be able to say the word _Lena_ several times during the
walk. How valuable names are! It is no wonder that the Holy Name can
reverse magic. Every name is a little holy; every name is a sanctuary
from encroaching magic. His own name--Christopher Clifford Cotton--how
solid--how safe!

Mrs. Lorne, who spent every minute regretting the last minute, was
ashamed to have referred selfishly to her own family affairs in
leaving her niece's sickroom. She had become accustomed to the
concealment of her family affairs because she thought so incessantly
of her dead baby, Bertie, and naturally she could not speak aloud the
thought, "Bertie, Bertie, Bertie," ... which, for hours together,
would be the only thought in her mind.

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Lorne through trembling lips, "I ought to have
sat up with Lena and left Aggie's throat in God's hands."

"Oh Lena ... Lena won't be alone," said Clifford, and as he spoke he
thought, "Perhaps I shall be with her." He stammered as he added,
"Don't worry about Lena, Mrs. Lorne. You ought to go back to your
baby. Don't babies have to be given their mothers' milk, or something,
every few hours?"

Mrs. Lorne was so much hurt by this remark that her mind rebounded
from it and she began to worry confusedly over the fact that she was
wearing her best frock with the V and the black sequins, and that the
mud was very deep and the drippings from the trees very penetrating.
She hitched up her skirt a little higher and then remembered
forgivingly what Clifford had said. "I have no baby now, Mr. Cotton,"
she replied mildly.

"Oh no--I forgot. It is dead, isn't it. I suppose you cried over that
a good deal, didn't you?"

"I tried not to--being God's will I did not wish to seem to repine."

"But why not, if you _did_ repine? Why should you hide things like
that from God? Can't He stand a little criticism?"

"God knows best," said Mrs. Lorne, brushing blasphemy away as though
it were a fly near her nose. God knew best, she was sure. Evidently
the best for Bertie had been a Christian burial. Certainly no wisdom
less than God's would have found a reason for thrusting a body of such
loveliness as the body of Mrs. Lorne's little baby under the wormy
earth. The coarse short-sighted human view would certainly have been
that the baby deserved to live--if only for the extraordinarily
beautiful dimples in his little behind. This was simply another proof
that God knew best. God had seen fit in His infinite wisdom to remind
Mrs. Lorne that the apparently perfect body of Bertie was but dust and
to dust must return. And to dust it had indeed returned, a thing that
Mrs. Lorne, who had given that perfect body its bath every night,
would never have thought possible.

"God's best," said Clifford, "seems to be rather a dangerous thing
from man's point of view. If any one else invented it, you'd almost
call it the worst."

"Please don't talk like that, Mr. Cotton, though only a faulty woman
and no education to speak of--man can only take such a very small view
and learning through sorrow to trust in a wisdom so infinitely
superior to one's own."

"Well of course you haven't much wisdom, have you?" agreed Clifford
frankly. "Not like your niece Lena who is so wonderfully wise. I could
easily trust in her. Trust in human wisdom seems so much safer to me
than trust in the other kind. That other kind seems to be so often
abused by the Trustee. But that of course, I suppose you would say, is
what makes it so very creditable to trust. You never know what may
come of it--and that is called Faith, isn't it? A little more trust,
Mrs. Lorne, and you may be left a penniless and childless widow. Why
not try putting your trust in princes for a change?"

"I cannot bear to hear you speak in this way, Mr. Cotton," said Mrs.
Lorne in an unusually strong voice. "How small--how ridiculously small
such chatter seems to me--how little and puffed up with pride----"

"How little--how little!" chanted Clifford. "Yes, that's what is so
safe--littleness. Magic is so calamitously big--gods live in such a
big world. Littleness is man's triumph and--oh, he doesn't know how
lucky he is--to live in a little tight world that he can't get lost
in...."

He stopped and laid a heavy hand on Mrs. Lorne's trembling arm. "This
bamboo grove belongs to God, Mrs. Lorne. This enormous snare of
haunted air and brushing leaves belongs to God--to magic--to the
fairies. But how much safer you'd be at home, suckling your
baby--alone with bodies under a man-built roof. And how much safer I'd
be with my arms about the wise body of----"

"You have been drinking, Mr. Cotton," said Mrs. Lorne, tossing his
hand away. "I do not wish for your company, though very good of Mrs.
Cotton to suggest it and I can see the light on my own verandah from
here, the coolie being quite sufficient protection, thank you. I will
try to forget your very strange behaviour owing no doubt to strong
drink, and I think Mr. Cotton if you will forgive me saying so you
would do well to pray to God to overlook it too. Who are you that you
should set yourself up----"

"Who am I? I am Christopher Clifford Cotton. Christopher Clifford
Cotton..."

But she was gone. She dwindled down the path, and the dancing light of
the lantern made her seem to dance along on her thin legs and large
goloshes.

Clifford looked about him in the darkness. "Christopher Clifford
Cotton," he whispered, as though it were a spell. "A man--a printer--a
husband--perhaps to be a lover.... I'm quite safe. I'm not a
changeling now. I'm a man--only half a mile from home...."

But all the grove was prickly with sound. All the dim dark sky was
slashed with the sharp leaves of the bamboos. He began to run
homeward, his big clumsy feet slipping in the mud. Something essential
was escaping from him. His brain was like a cage with an open door;
the winged prisoner within was aware of the path to freedom--the
prisoner was poised to fly.

Desperately Clifford clutched at all that he knew of himself. "I'm a
man--a man--a man--going home through a common wet forest.... I'm
Christopher Clifford Cotton--going home...."

The gaze of his mind's eye was concentrated on the memory of the
monogram, C.C.C., embroidered on his handkerchiefs, surrounded by a
little embroidered ring. "The ring is round me, if I can only remember
it.... I am safe in my ring--I am safe in my body--I am a man--a
man--a man--safe in my hard body...."

But his identity was slipping away from him--escaping like water
running out of a pool. He could not regain familiarity with his man's
body. He saw that body ridiculously--a puffed-up pillar of matter
enclosed in a bladder of skin--re-inforced by coarse complicated bones
that moved on pulleys of elastic--a pillar topped by a knob of flesh
and bone and marrow. He lost sight of the dignity and beauty of human
faces; eyes were but glazed holes--lips but the ingenious trimming of
a necessary slit--noses but the outleaning nozzles of inner tubes....
Where was the loveliness of man?

A little square light suddenly looked between the trunks of two trees.
A window--a window, squared by the clever hands of men. And behind the
window--a lamp, lighted by the wise prosaic thoughts of men. The
fairies, like moths, were drawn into that flame to destruction; all
the fairies and terror of the night were drawn in and burned to
nothing by the wise flames of man. The forest broke, like an
unsuccessful spell. He was nearly home. The spiders' webs and the
leaves might lash like little whips across his face--he was nearly
home. There was the roof of his home against the sky--thwarting the
rapacious sky. There was the man-made peak to which the endangered
changeling must lift up his eyes for help....

And as he reached the abrupt edge of the grove, he realised that the
sky had cleared and that the moonlight was bright. His shadow rose up
by his side on the bank as he came out of the grove. "A good shadow,"
he thought gloriously. "As good as a bishop's.... In a minute I shall
be safe--as safe as a bishop...." He held his body erect; it tingled
with returning safety. He kept unwinking eyes fixed upon the shadow as
it bowed and bounded along the tufts of the herbaceous border.

And his shadow stood still against the creepers outside Lena's low,
dimly-lighted window.

Safe ... safe ... safe....




CHAPTER IV

    Puppies see low.
    No higher
    Do their dreams go
    Than the toes of trees,
    Than the ankles of men,
    Than the knees
    Of nettles.
    They aspire
    To attune their tongues
    To the taste of boots,
    Their noses
    To the smell of spiders,
    Their lungs
    To a kitchen breeze.
    They know why
    The worms coil.
    They know when
    The ants pause.
    For them the cricket's prose is
    A sonnet of fire.
    For them the snails write
    Sufficient laws
    Across the seamed
    And crumpled soil.
    But they tire
    Of their knowledge soon.
    Their wisdom settles
    At the world's roots.
    Their eyes toil
    Not up the rungs
    Of light.
    For them the hanging fruit's
    Frail globe encloses
    No jewelled spoil.
    For them the late bird's tune
    Is the song of a liar.
    And of the flowery sky
    The puppies know
    Only the petals
    Of fallen roses
    That in the dung's
    Foul quicksand lie--
    Unseated riders
    Of steeds undreamed,
    Of winged steeds that fly
    About the oblivious moon.

Daley put everything helpful that she could think of within reach of
Lena's hand, sent one coolie to fetch Lena's possessions from the
hospital and another to light the path of Mrs. Lorne and Clifford, and
then went to her own room. She read the _Woman's Helpful Friend_ for
an hour, enjoying a mild love--story. America was built round her like
a wall. The possible tinkling of a bell that she had placed by the
queer Lena's bedside was the only thread that might jerk her back to
China. No ghosts of China haunted her walled fortress--not even her
changeling husband. One never knew where Clifford was unless he was
here. Perhaps he was walking in the bamboo grove in the rain. He never
would be long away from trees. He would come in soon and they would
talk of Lena's illness. Clifford loathed illness. He would never again
credit Lena with wisdom now, Daley thought.

She sighed and her attention wandered from the love-story to the
husbands in the advertisements. Husbands certainly haunted the
advertisement columns of the _Woman's Helpful Friend;_ the acquiring
of husbands--the feeding of husbands--the home education of
husbands--the deodorising of husbands--the amusement of husbands--the
insurance of husbands--the burying of husbands.... The advertisements
did not offend her. She could never understand why old Mrs. Cotton
snorted so angrily over them. They were just advertisements, anyway. She
would have admitted that the advertisement--husband, though excellent as
far as he went, had never "come into her life." But that might be because
she had married an Englishman. English husbands, one had to take for
granted, were different. English husbands, it seemed, were not made of
the stuff that takes Home Correspondence Courses in Salesmanship and
comes home saying, "Look Betty--a 75 per cent increase in salary!" An
English husband whose wife said, "Isn't it sup_er_fluous, old man, not
superfl_oo_us?" would not, Daley felt instinctively, allow the
experiment to be repeated--even if the object of the correction were
the laudable one of persuading him to read a book called _Talking
Right_ and so become Welcome in the Homes of Men Who Have Made Good.
It was with a certain wistfulness that Daley studied the sketch of a
husband surveying his wife who had proved her worth by buying a Home
Vacuum Cleaner out of her savings. "Isn't he just _proud_ of her!" "If
he is, he's certainly nothing like Clifford." No vacuum cleaner could
bring that radiance to the eye of an English husband. But what about
American husbands? Somehow advertisers assumed that the last word
about American husbands was said by them--but was it? Mr. Ridley, for
instance, detested Krusty-Chumps the Ideal Breakfast Food, though the
advertisement said, "Just feed it to him once--and you'll see." Mrs.
Ridley _had_ fed it to him once, and she _had_ seen. Mr. Ridley did
not allow Mrs. Ridley to use rouge--though the advertiser of
Butiz-Gleem said, "Twenty Years Married--and He still has Eyes Only For
Her." Mrs. Ridley had once followed the example of the wife in the
picture called, "Now that He's Getting On in the World--are you Sure
Your Home is Fit to Receive Important Guests? Buy a Hyjeenik-Pivot
Toilet Seat." But Mr. Ridley had called the thing one of these crazy
newfangled notions and had had the man call and fetch it away again
that very day. Yet Mr. Ridley was certainly a Hundred Per Cent
American Husband. It was a pity, if the American advertisement--husband
was a false picture, that it should be the one most persistently
displayed before the sneering eyes of old Mrs. Cotton and other
foreigners. The thing was, of course, that they were sneering at the
_ideal_ of domestic goodness; it didn't matter whether the _picture_
was a true one or not--it was what lay behind the picture that they
sneered at. The _ideal_ certainly was American--whether the
advertiser's expression was accurate or not. Mr. Ridley certainly
fulfilled the spirit of the advertisement-husband if not the letter.
And what was there to sneer at in the _ideal_--in kindness--in
domestic enthusiasm--in a busy man's wish for Five Minutes a Day with
the Great--in Daddy's Heart-hunger for his Home-nest? Surely these
things in themselves were good--even if the words seemed silly. How
did foreigners get on without them? "I'm a foreigner now," thought
Daley. "So I ought to know. I have to get on without them." The
advertisement of Daddy and Junior sailing boats in the Ideal Bathroom
glowed before her wistful eyes. "What's wrong with it, anyway? What is
there to sneer at in being good and loving and hygienic? Why did Lion
say 'My God' about that song' My Daddy'? A cunning little kiddie
coaxing her Daddy is a cuter notion anyday than a bunch of great husky
English-men killing a fox, like in Lion's silly old prints...."

After an hour or so she heard her dog Josephine whining. She went out
on the verandah and found Josephine panting, wheezing, moaning,
twitching, trying to make a nest for herself under a wet canvas chair.

"My One, have you forgotten Queen Charlotte's Lying-in-Kennel?" They
went to the kennel but Josephine did not like the look of it. It was
too public and too hygienic. Daley went to fetch a bowl of water and
while she was away Josephine decided that she had found the Ideal Home
under the water-butt. Josephine intended to keep this new home a
secret even from Daley, but in spite of herself she yelped. So Daley
found her and was rather hurt.

"But dearest, we agreed weeks ago that the kennel was just wunnerful."

She murmured both sides of the argument as she bent over the
protesting Josephine. "Oh mum, let me stay where I am.... No, my One,
it's for your good...." She pulled Josephine out, while the rain
splashed on her hair. "My Lawd--did I scrape her against that pipe?
Have I hurt the puppies?" She carried the heavy Josephine to the
Perfect Kennel and laid her on the straw. Josephine lay gasping and
wheezing, moving her head unhappily and her legs spasmodically. "Do
dogs ever die in puppy-birth?"

"Don't you worry, mum, just keep calm and don't look. I'll be all
right," said Josephine in Daley's mind.

Josephine raised her head. Her body was bent like a bow and released.
She gave a high cry. There was suddenly a black puppy lying on the
straw and in a moment it began moving like a worm, making a little
sniggering noise. It seemed to Daley that the puppy had been blown
like a bubble or launched like a ship. "How easy and how glorious,"
she thought. "I simply _must_ have a baby. I won't die without having
a baby." The next puppy was black and white with a very red nose and
very pink palms to its paws. The third was black again. "Good
Josie--good clever Josie," said Daley; the success of the affair seemed
so wonderful to her. Josephine licked the three puppies rather roughly
for several minutes before the fourth was born. It was sand-coloured
with a black face. Josephine was exhausted but excited. Daley imagined
that her dog was laughing and crying and that the world was going
round before her eyes. The puppies all fastened themselves to
Josephine's teats in an absurd row.

"Now be very still and calm, my One. And if you want me, whine and
I'll come in a minute...."

She gave her dog some milk in a saucer and when the saucer was empty
she took it indoors to the pantry. As she went to her bedroom door
from the pantry, the door of Lena's room opened and Clifford came out.
They looked at each other for a few seconds and then Daley walked past
him, in a strange calm silence, to her room. She was so very much
astonished that she could not believe that anything remarkable had
happened. The abruptness and the simplicity of the encounter made it
seem like a thing that could be explained in one minute and forgotten
in two. Homes are not broken so quietly and so quickly. Perhaps Lena
had been seized with pain again and had cried out for help. Or perhaps
Clifford had just gone in to say goodnight--not knowing that other
women's husbands don't seek wisdom like that at half past twelve at
night. Or perhaps her doorhandle had come off on the inside as it did
once before, and she had wanted it fixed. But why had Clifford said
nothing to Daley in the passage? There was no use in asking why. She
knew quite certainly what had happened. There seemed to be a tight
band across her breast and she could hear her pulse beating in her
ears with a soft crushing sound. "_That_ must have been it--no, not
_that_ not _that_... Lena was in pain and cried out for help."

She went into Clifford's dressingroom. There was a bed in it and on
the bed Clifford now lay.

"Clifford," cried Daley on a strangled note quite different from the
note she had aimed at. Clifford did not answer. He was apparently
asleep. He lay on his side and the loose flesh of his face drooped a
little towards the pillow.

"Clifford--Clifford--Clifford!" Daley shook his shoulder. He made no
answering movement. He would not open his eyes though his expression
became conscious and stubborn.

Daley went back to her room. Her mind was frozen with astonishment.
"This can't be the end of happiness--this--without a sound!" There was
no feeling of end in the air. On the contrary, four new puppies were
in the kennel outside. "The second black one looked a little feeble,"
thought Daley, and then--"Why, if I can think of puppies, that shows I
don't care one way or the other. The horrible thing is that nothing's
changed. The horrible thing is that the puppies _are_ there--that
nothing has died or fallen to pieces ... there's no break between
happy life and being forsaken. What shall I do? What does one do when
one's home is broken? What would Mrs. Ridley do? What do the people
who write for advice to the Heart-to-heart Column do? At any rate for
the first hour or two? Cry? Laugh? Rage? Turn on the Victrola?
Christen puppies?"

"Boniface, Innocent, Clement and Pius," said Daley aloud. "I'll name
them like that--it would continue the papal tradition that darling
Gregory started." It was as if she could hear the light gushing voice
of her own mind throwing words into a dangerous silence.

"Oh my dear--four of the cutest little pups. I'll name the black and
white one Boniface and the yellow one--the girl--Innocent.... Funny
they're not born in spring like lambs. Dogs are like us--no special
baby-season. But you'd say it must be easiest to have babies in the
spring. Ah--Clifford--Clifford--I shall never have your baby now...."

She was not one of those women who face trouble dry-eyed. As soon as
she was sorry for herself she cried, and now, as the dreadful word
_forsaken_ occurred to her again, she threw herself on her bed and
cried violently aloud. She wounded herself afresh every moment by
remembering the word _forsaken_ and by recalling incidents from the
time when she was safe. She cried almost with a deliberate feeling of
washing a hurt in a satisfactory stream of tears. For, all the time,
she secretly expected to wake in the morning to find her love, like
her garden, still flowering safely in a new sun.

She could no more easily stop crying than she could have stopped
laughing a few hours before. "It's so unfair. It's so unfair. I who am
so anxious not to hurt people and so anxious to be pleasing. Lion
loves me and Mr. Diamond likes me and the doctor laughs at what I say
and that darling kind solicitor who managed my legacy said there ought
to be more like me and the man who fixed my passport said he wished he
could see me again--and I so faithful all the time to these Cottons
with hard hearts...."

She spent minutes in hating Lena. She imagined Lena's mean voice stung
at last to life, asking for something, pleading for a gift.... "No
_never_," sobbed Daley, "_Never, never, never, never_." Or perhaps
contemptuous consent would hurt her most. "Very well then--take
it--you bitch--I'd despise to have among my possessions anything that
_you_ could want.... Yes--yes--I despise to grieve for a man that has
lain in _your_ thin arms...."

She slept very heavily and stormily and awoke now and then with a
feeling that she must hunt for something that she was afraid to find.
But each time, when she remembered what was the trouble that she must
seek, she cried because she would never again know peace. Peace, which
had hidden under the cool green things of her garden, and in the kind
eyes and imagined voices of her dogs, and in the wiry romantic sound
of the Victrola--the only art she knew--peace was gone out into the
fields, wheeling like a bird through the wild empty air; no trap could
catch peace again now.

But in the morning she awoke on fire with astonished relief.
"Why--what a fool I've bin--and Lena so sick.... Clifford heard her
call--of course--while I was out midwifing the puppies.... She wanted
hot water or something. I'm sure of it. I'm sure. Clifford'll think
nothing of her now--he hates sickness, he'll hate her now. Why--look
at the tears I've wasted.... The night is such a dangerous time to
worry in. How lucky that nobody knows what a fool I was!"

But all the same, the Daley who looked out of the mirror as she
dressed had a new look--a stealthy look. Daley and her reflection
looked at each other with a look that should not pass between friends.
That new Daley would not have been quite at home on the Ridleys'
porch.

In the diningroom old Mrs. Cotton was alone, jerking our _mm-mm-mm_,
as she always did during moments of effort. She was settling herself
in a chair at the table. She held her twitching old body poised over
the chair for a moment and then took her weight off her sticks and let
herself go. It looked very dangerous, but she always refused help. She
was always rather feeble in the mornings. In her deep voice there was
a flat scraping sound, which cleared away towards warm midday, like a
fog.

Daley had with difficulty formed a habit of never saying good morning.
Good morning, goodnight, little quick kisses and a good deal of
laughter had been left behind in California, when Daley married
Clifford. But as she came into the diningroom she very nearly said,
"Good morning, darling mother...." For in the night she had been
imagining old Mother Cotton kind at last. She had heard the old
woman's uneven voice in her mind saying, "Poor little Daley--poor
little woman--poor little forsaken love...." That was the way old
women over eighty should talk in times of sorrow. Daley's eyes filled
with tears of sentiment. She would never learn control. Any other
woman would have learned to control love, she thought, not to mention
laughter and tears. It is safer to be unkind. Tears rolled down her
bright cheeks and one tear was shaken into her scrambled eggs. "What a
fool I am!" she thought. "Nothing new has happened to cry
about...." She said aloud, "Lena's quite bad, Mother ... I'd better go
and see whether she wants anything."

"A sto-homach-ache," shouted old Mrs. Cotton. "Induced by your
American tinned poisons last night."

Outside the diningroom door Daley thought of Josephine and, for the
moment, deliberately turned her back on Lena.

Josephine was still lying on her side and the four puppies, just as
though they had never stopped drinking all night, were closely sucked
on to her teats in a row. Josephine's tail made a commotion in the
straw as she signalled maternal pride and relief to Daley.

"They're perfectly wunnerful. Perfectly wunnerful.... Aren't you the
smart dog to have such wunnerful puppies...."

"They're not too bad, are they, mum?" breathed Josephine, hiding her
blushes in a vehement licking of her family. She threw them roughly
over on to their backs and licked their stomachs, but still their
mouths remained impassively fixed to her teats. They did not mind
which way up they sucked. "Say mum, you haven't got such a thing as an
ox roasted whole on you, have you? I feel like a sucked orange...."

She ate biscuits and milk while the puppies sucked. Like Baron
Munchausen's horse after the portcullis came down, thought Daley.
Daley had to stay with her while she ate, for Gregory and Cowslip
_were_ so interfering. "A Lying-in Kennel is no place for you
men-dogs," said Daley, smacking Gregory as he leaned in to sniff
sardonically at his young step-brothers and step-sister. Josephine
growled in a high thin weak voice. Cowslip, the yellow dog, bowed and
shuffled in inquisitive embarrassment at a distance of a few yards.
Cowslip, having had an unhappy puppyhood, was a dog full of
repressions and inhibitions. Anything unexpected was terrifying and
shocking to him. He wore his tail tremulously and, if not constantly
praised, always imagined blame. One could never joke with Cowslip.

"Has Cowslip noticed that there is only one yellow puppy in his
family?" Daley asked Josephine. "The colour question in the dog world
really almost does away with the problem--Should a Wife Tell...?"

"It's a dam-silly puppy that knows its own father," said Josephine
with her mouth full, licking the plate.

Daley knocked at Lena's door feeling as if she were at the door of
another world. The room smelt of creosote. Lena was crying. Her eyes
were swollen and she held two soaked handkerchiefs. The hollowness and
pallor of her face gave Daley's heart a quick surface thrill of pity.
Daley could not bear that Lena should cry and be in pain--even though
last night she had prayed that grief might tear Lena in pieces. But
that desire had left a kind of unacknowledged triumph underlying
Daley's pity, a feeling of secret glory which would have shocked not
only the Heart-to-heart Column expert, but also Daley herself, had it
been recognised.

Daley noticed that, above the exiguous silk nightdress that barely
concealed Lena's thin drooping breasts, there were bones
showing--bones leaning away on either side from the breast-bone like
feathers from an arrow. "I didn't even know one had ribs up there,"
thought Daley.

"Darling Lena," said Daley, and her _darling_, like all her darlings,
was really spontaneous. "It's perfectly dreadful you should be ill,
you poor sad little thing. The doctor'll be here soon. Tell me now
just how you feel and what I can do to make you feel more
comfortable."

"Oh I'm a wreck," said Lena in a hoarse broken voice. "It's the old
pleurisy again, I suppose. I wish it would kill me once and for
all...." She covered her face with a handkerchief and turned
impatiently over in bed. "Oh, I've got a sword in my side."

Daley was awkward with her hands and entirely at a loss in the matter
of touching a body in pain. But she soaked some flannels in boiling
water and laid them on the furrowed ribs of the weakly lamenting Lena.
Her dislike and distrust became quite clear to her suddenly as she
touched Lena's skin. She was quite sure now that within this prostrate
and contemptible cage of bones and skin there was a menace for her and
a destructive secret.

"I give trouble wherever I go," mourned Lena into the pillow.

"Now--now--now--" said Daley briskly. "Don't talk nonsense." As she
went out she could feel strength thrilling through her own fine body
and she thought, "Oh poor thing--after all, she was drawing on her
little treasure last night, with her wheezy talk about music and
freaks and the Labour Party. The little wisdom Clifford thought she
had. She was trying to get her share of being flattered--her share of
being pleased with herself. She hasn't any other treasure than that
silly smart talk to draw on. No body ... no glory...."

"Lena's worse, Clifford. We must send for the doctor again. She was
bad last night, wasn't she? You heard her scream. I didn't."

"Yes, I heard her scream last night." And when Daley saw that he would
say much more if he were asked, she was timidly silent.

The doctor thought Daley one of the most charming women he had ever
met. The moment he came into a room where she was he began looking at
her expectantly, beaming, knowing that she would soon say something
that would make him chuckle deliciously.

"Been pinching the precious fingernail again, Mrs. Cliff," asked the
doctor. This joke, referring to the fact that Daley had twice pinched
the same finger in the same door, was a kind of permanent bridge to
conversation between the doctor and Daley. Daley laughed
automatically.

"Not again, Doctor dear. Three times would be unlucky. We've got a
real honest-to-goodness invalid in the house this time, haven't we?"

All the way along the passage the doctor, as he followed Daley, was
watching with an almost silly pleasure her way of walking. For she
walked always as though she were just refraining from dancing to an
inward tune. Daley filled a niche of tragic romance in the doctor's
mind, partly because she was beautiful and partly because he was
almost sure that her husband was mad. He was, like many doctors, a
materialistic romantic--or a romantic materialist. His prosaic
imagination showed him hateful pictures of the married life of Daley
and Clifford Cotton.

Lena had been examined by so many doctors in the course of her life
that she had a special doctor's manner--the complement to a bedside
manner. She described her sensations in a choked and hopeless voice
and her manner had a kind of restrained excitement, assumed in order
to let the doctor know that her temperature was rather high. Her
illness did not interest the doctor. Lena seemed repellent to him. But
he used his stethoscope conscientiously, confirmed his first
diagnosis--bronchitis and a touch of dry pleurisy--and, while
reflecting what a wonderfully good friend Daley was to this friendless
puny sniffing creature, added the usual hopeful prophecies of a quick
recovery.

"Well, young lady, you've got Mrs. Lorne for a nurse and our Mrs.
Cliff for a hostess, and nobody could ask more than that. You're in
luck, and that's a fact. Mustn't think of getting about for a week at
least...."

After saying goodbye to the doctor on the verandah, Daley came back
rather shyly to Lena's room and sat beside the bed. Lena was now much
calmer. She was not very ill. She could never attain to a serious
illness--could never flatter herself that her life was despaired of,
and while she secretly deplored this inadequacy, she laughed at
herself for deploring it.

"How odd it must feel," she said to Daley, "to have every man half in
love with you. That doctor, for instance ..." She felt more at ease
with women than with men and rather liked saying flattering--even
sometimes almost loverlike--things to women.

"Oo well," said Daley, pleased, "he makes me want to pat him on the
head and say, 'Never mind, my lambie.' Men are like babies, you
know ... they're not a bit wily, as women are...."

Triumphantly she spoke to Lena as though instructing some one who had
certainly had no experience. For the moment she was glad to persuade
herself that Lena had lacked opportunities to study at first hand the
nature of men in love. She erased from her mind her suspicions of Lena
as a Homebreaker. She was impelled to show this puny plain woman what
it was to be lovely and full of life.

"Do you know," she began again in a rather excited voice, "before I
married, I didn't know that men had many different kinds of
being-in-love. I used to think that every man who met a girl's eyes again
and again across a hotel lobby, for instance, or held her hand in a corner
of the porch and said--'Say, how d'you make your eyes sparkle that
way?' or asked her for just one little kiss coming home from a
social--would like to marry that girl. But now I know men more, the
surprising thing is that any one ever gets married at all--since
nearly all men's ways of being-in-love have nothing to do with
marriage at all. Men can love without liking--that's what it
is.... Girls can't. If a girl sees a boy that's got a face that makes her
want to kiss him, she thinks, 'Gee, but I'd like to marry that boy.'
Girls, poor things, can't afford more than one way of being-in-love.
It used always to be a great puzzle to me that I always had six boys
that wanted to kiss me to one that wanted to marry me. And after you
get married, to sixty men that want to hold your hand, maybe there's
only one that wants to be your lover and take you away from your
husband. Things are different from the movies or the magazine stories,
where every kiss and every glowing look means a proposal of marriage
around the corner. But that's rather a good thing--if you love your
man.... You feel that holding the hands of the others isn't a bit
wrong or dangerous...."

"Nobody ever wants to hold my hand," said Lena, looking at her hand
gloomily. She instinctively wished to emphasise the fact that she was
feeble and unfortunate. She felt cheated because her own experiences
had never been of the handholding type--had never created an
atmosphere in which "Never mind, my lambie," or "How d'you make your
eyes sparkle that way?" had been possible.

"Now kissing's different," continued the infatuated Daley. "I don't
believe kissing's right. Not playing the game, as my friend Mr. Ridley
says. Kissing's not the right result of a mild kind of being-in-love.
It exaggerates a little feeling beyond what the little feeling
deserves. I don't allow it. Do you know--that doctor tried to kiss me
once.... I was quite upset. He was a little tiny bit stooed, of
course. It was Christmas night, after dinner ... the stars were so
bright. I was quite worried about it for several days. Of course I
told Clifford...."

Lena looked at her astounded. She had not known that such
ingenuousness existed, except in schoolrooms at Eastbourne. What
pretty puzzled lives some women must lead--and never know wildness or
darkness or danger. "I suppose you're too spontaneous ever to fear or
suffer very dreadfully," she said. "Spontaneity makes life very safe.
Men aren't dragons to you--they're just boys. Emotion never tears you
to pieces--it just excites you a little. With me, just arranging my
attitude is a painful task. I am terrified of failure--and yet I
always fail because I'm not spontaneous. I think beforehand.... I
think at the time.... I think afterwards.... I think: 'What must I be
now--sisterly? Inscrutable? Intelligent? _Enfant terrible_?' But
whichever I choose, it doesn't come off. Even to be the most terrible
of _enfants terribles_ needs something that I haven't got. I suppose
it needs charm. You can't have that by planning beforehand."

"But why bother to plan beforehand?" asked Daley. "Men aren't
dragons at all--they're just the simplest things ... and so
defenceless.... Any woman could have a little love affair with any man
she chose...." Thus she gave voice to a flattering mistake common among
not very wise but attractive women, and encouraged by men novelists who
write for a feminine public.

"It's not so," said Lena. "For some women all adventures are terrible.
For women like me there are no handholdings and chaste kissings on
starry porches. Some people can't be lightly alive at all. Strangers
are automatically cruel to people like me. One has only to show that
one is vulnerable, and ordinary kind men or women will seize the
opportunity to wound.... I'm nearly thirty-seven, Daley, and I'm puny
and have a haggard face and weak lungs--I've never known any happiness
at all in my life and I've never met gentleness--but I've been brave
and I've taken more than life offered me. I've known love--but I've
never known it without hatred and suffering as well...."

She looked at Daley's bright eyes and soft eager expression and craved
painfully for Daley's interest and comprehension. She must, somehow,
pin Daley's interest to herself.

"Charm and little kisses and giggles and fondlings--those are bridges
for men to cross by. When they have crossed, you laugh and send them
back--knowing they won't mind the walk. But when they cross without a
bridge--that's a different matter. They have suffered and sweated in
the crossing and they've come for a purpose.... Very few men will
cross without a bridge...."

She watched Daley. She wanted to say: "You have had your little gay
loves--you have kissed your boys--but you can't keep your man from
me...."

"They say," she went on aloud, "that there's a chance for every woman
to be loved. For half-women, then, there's a half-chance. I've had all
I wanted of love, Daley, though I've never had happy love.... Very few
men ask for such a sad thing as wisdom ... very few men want to be
lovers of wisdom, but when they do seek wisdom--they don't need stars.
Perhaps they escape from stars when they come to me...."

Daley began to say something. "Ah----" she began in a high voice. Then she
stood up suddenly and went out of the room.




CHAPTER V

    A child among children,
    You fled from our chorus,
    Your chalice was filled
    At the uttermost shore.
    Now flee us no more
    For your chalice is spilled,
    And your altar of glory
    Shall never be builded.


"Coo-coo," said Milady archly, looking round the door of Lena's room.
"May the gang come in?"

Lena did not reply. She was very much wounded by her own folly in
speaking so baldly to Daley. Her consciousness of subtlety was
pierced. She had been nave, which was disgusting to her. Her craving
to make an impression on Daley at all costs had passed. She thought,
"I was only being confidential. Other women are confidential ... while
they are brushing their hair--so men say.... I always hurt myself when
I open doors. People don't want to hear about my griefs and
raptures.... Every one is stupid and unkind.... What made Daley fit
the cap like that ...?" But she could never really deceive herself.
The school of self-deceit is too happy a school for such as Lena. She
knew now that, for some reason she had strangely forgotten, she had
wished Daley to guess that she--poor sickly Lena--had stolen Clifford
away. "How wrong I was ..." she thought. She often thought herself
wrong--superior, but wrong.

"Well, aren't you an old stick-in-the-mud!" said Milady, sitting on
the bed. Edna, who had followed Milady, sat on a chair wiping her hot
calm face. "I don't know whyever we're here," continued Milady. "You
don't want to see us and we don't want to see you--but Edna made me
come. It's the proper thing, I suppose--trust Edna to do the proper
thing. Tend the sick'n everything. I never was one to hold the basin
meself. It isn't the touch of a woman's hand that makes the world go
round, not for us gurls, is it? I say, gurls, isn't Diamond a dear?
You can always tell a gentleman anywhere--that's what I always say."

She was a brave woman, but she always found it difficult to talk to
Lena and Edna. They never made the necessary replies. It felt like
filling up an accidental gap on the stage with patter--only life with
Lena and Edna was all gap--never a cue.

"But when you get 'im alone ... You'd be surprised ..." sang Milady, a
little at a loss in the silence. She jumped off the bed with a babyish
spring and began walking round the room, her high heels clicking
desultorily on the polished floor as she stopped in front of first one
thing and then another. "Art-paintings in gilt frames," she said.
"Done by hand, too, just fancy! Golly, gurls, printing the Holy Word
seems to be a paying job. Those rugs come from Tientsin. A boy I met
in Shanghai's got a big one; they cost money.... Look at these towels,
too--finest Turkish.... Some people have all the luck." The only thing
that moved Milady to abstract questioning was the matter of money. She
felt that she deserved money, and indeed she did. The vitality in her
was certainly worthy of support. She saw no reason why Daley should
have gilt-framed art-paintings done by hand and herself none. As a
rule Milady lived under the influence of a kind of spiritual delirium,
but the thought of the unfair distribution of comforts always recalled
her to a pained sobriety for a few moments. It was her only reflection
and, as a rule, the only comment she made on it was, "Well, gurls--(or
boys)--it's a queer world...."

To Edna the world was not in the least queer. It was made entirely of
substances--hard earth--rain that made you wet and sun that made you
sweat--food--foreign countries--cinema palaces--people who talked
umpteen to the dozen. Nearly everything that people said was just
talk, but sometimes they said that they had a married sister in
Brixton too--now wasn't that a coincidence!--or that Mary Pickford was
simply too sweet as Little Lord Fauntleroy--or that they found
So-and-so Cream wonderful for a greasy skin--or that you never knew
where you were with these airyoplanes ... and then Edna's soul awoke
within her. She was, however, perfectly patient with people who did not
say these things but talked high-brow or finance or politics--in a word,
umpteen to the dozen. "Live and let live," said Edna, and she was better
at letting live than she was at living.

Mrs. Lorne, coming in to nurse her niece Lena, hopped on one foot
noisily into the room. She did not, of course, mean to hop or to make
any noise, but her heel was caught in a concealed hole in her
petticoat. There was only one slightly sinful thing about Mrs. Lorne,
and that was that she was apt to neglect mending where it didn't show.

"Upsi-daisy!" said Milady, holding her up.

With the opening of the door came in the sound of Daley's Victrola
playing in the garden. The sound made Lena hope for a minute. "Was I
mistaken? Did I not hurt her after all?" Then she remembered, "After
all, to Americans, gramophones don't necessarily mean jollity. Perhaps
she's comforting herself by listening to America...."

"Mrs. Cotton said to walk right in," said Mrs. Lorne, snarling her
humble snarl at Milady as she recovered from her stumble. "I couldn't
come before, what with Lettie cutting her hand on the butter tin, but
so glad to have this chance of doing something for my sister's girl.
And Mrs. Cotton said to come right in and would it worry you dearie if
she played a little on the Kreisler, and I said no of course not, dear
Mrs. Cotton, a pleasure."

"To her that really is Kreisler playing," said Lena fretfully. "The
day of real Kreislers is over."

"Of course, dear, of course," said Mrs. Lorne. "Why surely, isn't
that a talking machine that I hear in the distance? Does _that_ noise
bother you, dear girlie?"

"Only morally," replied Lena.

Mrs. Lorne was pleased to feel that she and her niece found unexpected
agreement here. To her there was something definitely immoral in
gramophones, aeroplanes, telephones, and the wonders of the radio.
These things could not be understood by the normal mind; they could
not be fitted into that changeless order of things that was called
Right Living. To her the gramophone seemed such a good imitation of
music that it was shocking. "How they can think of such things I can't
imagine...." Really, modern people had no right to be so clever. In
Mrs. Lorne's young days, people recognised that only God worked
miracles. Nobody was so godless as to say or do things that a person
couldn't understand. Of course there was Mr. Darwin and there were
also well-countenanced marvels like the steam-engine. But Mr. Darwin
was simply an atheist and could be dismissed from a Christian mind.
While as for the steam-engine, one could explain it in a minute by
referring to the lid of a tea-kettle--or was it an apple falling off a
tree?

She turned to Lena and spoke in her brightest and most minimising
voice. She had about five different voices which she deliberately
assumed at different times for various altruistic or moral purposes.
"Now you mustn't think your illness is serious, dearie, me being sent
for to nurse you, the doctor simply thinking it would help Mrs.
Cotton. But you're not really ill at all. Oh no no no no no...."

"I wouldn't care a damn if I were," said Lena.

"This bronchial catarrh always affects the spirits," said Mrs. Lorne
in bright apology to Milady, who, she thought, might perhaps not have
heard the word damn before. Having taken off her hat with hurried,
desperate movements, she sought a suitable piece of furniture to put
it on. It did not look right anywhere, and she walked about the room,
snarling patiently, offering it to various tables and pegs.

"I don't suppose you're overjoyed to find me and Edna here, Missis
Missionary," said Milady. "You an' your family's merry laughter didn't
exactly take the roof off at our show last night, did it? I got the
cold shivers every time I looked at your good man. He didn't ought to
have sat in the front row with a face like that on him. He looked
about as gay as a seasick rabbit. No offence meant."

"And none taken I'm sure," said Mrs. Lorne automatically, though a
little dubiously. "My husband has a very strong sense of the
ludicrous and often keeps the whole table in a roar at home, but
misunderstanding in advance the kind of entertainment you had in mind
he said frankly it was a mistake to take tickets, and thank God he
didn't take the children too. That was what he said, if you'll forgive
me speaking bluntly, he being the last man in the world to judge his
fellow-sinners harshly, and every one must live, of course."

"That's what I say, live and let live," said Edna eagerly, and Milady
added, "I don't come and laugh at your psalm-singing beanos, so what
call have you to come and cry at my show? Fair's fair all the world
over."

"Well I'm sure----" began Mrs. Lorne, but was stopped by the discovery
that she was sure of nothing. "I think you ought to leave my patient
now, ladies, though a kindly meant visit and no doubt cheered her up."

"Come on, Tubby," said Milady to Edna. "Never stay when you're asked
to go--that's my motto. Bye-bye, Lena, pull yourself together. The
gang's got to get a move on to-morrow ... funds are down at zero, let
me tell you, and nobody ever screwed a living out of this Consumptive
Carrie act."

"Camphorated oil ..." murmured Mrs. Lorne when she was alone with her
patient. "Camphorated oil ..." She bowed short-sightedly over tables
calling softly, "Camphorated oil ..." and once, by mistake,
"Consumptivated oil," but there was no reply.

She went to seek Daley. She entered the drawingroom so tentatively
that you would have thought that she expected to find Clifford having
a bath there. Actually she found old Mrs. Cotton saying,
"Hok--hak--rum--gruh--hok" to herself and levering the fire-irons with
her two canes, like a switchman in a signal box.

"Oh excuse me--excuse me," said Mrs. Lorne, making a kind of dancing
step backwards. "Nursing my niece and a brisk rubbing with camphorated
oil, the breathing so much obstructed."

"She's in love--hok," shouted old Mrs. Cotton. The snarl was frozen on
Mrs. Lorne's lip.

"Ah, of course--of course--I mean, I was not aware of any such thing,
but of course liable to increase catarrhal congestion if so. But a
brisk rubbing----"

"Love and cat-a-harrh," said old Mrs. Cotton. "Ask Daley for the
American psychological connection."

"Certainly. Certainly I will," said Mrs. Lorne, flustered.

"She'll explain it in a slo-hogan."

"No doubt--no doubt. She is always so kind. But do you think she would
lend me the tiniest drop of camph----"

"Kindness. Don't speak of her kindness. It's all part of the disease."

Mrs. Lorne gulped. She breathed a little prayer for patience, but her
impatience would never have been dangerous--or even perceptible. Old
Mrs. Cotton played a kind of spellicans with the fire-irons, trying to
restore them to their places with her two canes. But her hand was not
steady enough; she played the game too fiercely. It was a shockingly
noisy game for one so old and so infirm.

"I am nursing my niece," began Mrs. Lorne again. "She wants----"

"My son has what she wants."

"Oh indeed! And is your son----"

"He is no-hot my son."

"Really? Excuse me.... I thought...."

"He belongs to the fairies."

Mrs. Lorne sighed. "I am not clever enough for these people," she
thought. She longed to be back in the mission living-room, reading to
Lettie and Aggie about the Good Sower. But duty turned her steadfast
face towards camphorated oil.

"My niece is in bed with----"

"Hak--hak--hak!" laughed old Mrs. Cotton in a dreadful cracked voice.
"Yes ... and last night too...."

Mrs. Lorne sat up and breathed quickly as a mother bird might breathe
as the harrow approaches her nest. A patient of Mrs. Lorne's
automatically became, as it were, an egg under Mrs. Lorne's wing.
"Woman, what are you saying?" she exclaimed in a pinched undignified
voice.

"What _is_ she saying?" asked Daley at the door. But it was obvious to
Daley, after a moment's glance at the two old women, that Mrs. Cotton
had been behaving in a way that justified the strong term _Woman_.
Mrs. Cotton's head, never still, was jerking backwards now rather than
forwards--a sure sign that she intended to annoy. The eyes of Mrs.
Lorne bulged with shock and were wet round the rims. The lip of Mrs.
Lorne was caught up by distress; it shewed her chattering teeth, as a
rising theatre curtain discloses the feet of dancers.

"I am very sorry," began Mrs. Lorne. Apology was her instinctive
medium, but she was so much affronted that she actually gave a kind of
edge to her apology. "I'm so sorry that my sister's only child should
be where she is not welcome; not having met my niece since she was
born I cannot say, but my sister often wrote such a fine spirit though
a martyr to chronic bronchitis and usually appreciated wherever she
goes...."

"Why Mrs. Lorne ..." began Daley, prompted by the Ridley instinct. The
Ridleys never allowed tears to fall uncomforted. But the long hours of
grievous doubt that Lena's presence had caused her quickened to a
sudden pang that interrupted her. She stood, with her lips apart, not
knowing what to say, and looked at Lena's aunt. "People would never
have nieces," thought Daley, "if they knew what grief their nieces
would give to other people's daughters." Mrs. Lorne's damp eyes, her
quivering chin, her pale confused words like sheep huddling out of a
narrow gate, all shewed her pain. But it was not the direct
appreciation of pain that caught Daley's tenderness; there was no
reason in her compassion. Simply Daley was dazzled by a vision of the
gentle Mrs. Lorne's days--a vision of Mrs. Lorne combing her sleek
thin hair over those pads in the morning, anxiously and humbly seeking
encouragement from her reflection in the mirror, hairpins between
those trembling lips; a vision of Mrs. Lorne kneeling to a horsehair
chair, praying for a pure heart, of Mrs. Lorne nibbling mutton hash to
keep life in her chaste tired body--eating the fat and the gristle
because of her careful early training--, of Mrs. Lorne in bed at
night, bent into a kangaroo attitude, wondering if she had offended
any one during the day.... Humiliation can sometimes leave pity cold.
The fall of a feather of vanity can be too light to assail our ears,
but, to the tender-hearted, the perilous uneven flight of the feather
is sometimes illogically appealing, and we, who might almost have
rejoiced to see it fallen, are constrained to lend our breath to set
it bounding to the sun.

Somehow the vision of Mrs. Lorne in bed conquered Daley. "Her heart,"
she thought, "could very easily be broken...."

"Why, Mrs. Lorne _dear_," she began again aloud. "What in the world
has that bad old Mother Cotton bin saying to you? Now I'll tell
you.... Your niece Lena is a wunnerful woman--we all think so--I think
so--Mother Cotton thinks so--my husband thinks so. I certainly do feel
a boob beside her--I couldn't talk so smart as she does--not in a
hundred years. And the trouble was that my husband thought the same
way and--well--I didn't like that much.... You can't tell me I'm the
first wife that's lost her temper over a little thing like that.... It
doesn't amount to a row of beans, anyway, and it doesn't make a scrap
of difference to our appreciating your niece for what she is--a
wunnerful woman. And now there's Clifford flouncing off to the Press
to work his bad temper out of his system, and there's your niece going
to get perfectly well in a few days in this fine sunny weather--and,
believe me, the whole business isn't worth another word--certainly not
another tear."

Mrs. Lorne snarled hopefully at her comforter. "Well I'm sure," she
began but her face fell. A glance at old Mother Cotton reminded her of
outrageous things.

"You mustn't listen to Mother Cotton," said Daley, inflexibly
sprightly. "She broods over things and gets ideas in her head."

To get ideas in the head at once appealed to Mrs. Lorne as dangerous.
Mr. Lorne got them sometimes. And Lena certainly shewed a
tendency.... Mrs. Lorne felt undeniably comforted. Evidently the whole
trouble was simply a matter of this immoral old woman getting ideas in
her head. Mrs. Lorne even began to anticipate with a vague pleasure
breaking her rule about the concealment of family affairs, and writing a
confidential letter to Dorothea Willie, her intimate friend in
Cardiff, about the interesting offshoots and relations of the Lorne
family--perhaps just making casual reference to Lettie's clever
enquiries about whether angels lived behind the moon, but chiefly
dwelling on irresistible Lena, Mrs. Lorne's own sister's child. "Lena
is very reserved," she would write--and she visualised _reserved_ with
a double s--"I remember her mother--my sister--used to say she took
after the Tomkinses in that. But from little things her mother let
slip, I know that Lena is very much admired by the gentlemen--what
dear Aunt Rhoda used to call the fatal gift of charm--and the
impression she has made in this community of lonely exiles--mostly
gentlemen--is really sometimes quite embarrassing...." Dear Dorothea
Willie, how she would envy Mrs. Lorne the possession of such
interesting relations ... such affiliations with the dashing
young.... She herself had no children--well--what a thing to say!--of
course she had none ... dear Dorothea was not married....

"Hak-hak-hak!" suddenly shouted old Mrs. Cotton. Her hand, the
movements of which she could only spasmodically control, moved so
slowly and with so much difficulty towards her face that the eyes of
Daley and of Mrs. Lorne were obliged to follow it. But when her hand
reached her face it curved like a claw over her mouth to cover a
leering smile. The smile shewed between the crooked fingers like a
little savage thing in a cage. "Hak-hak-hak!" laughed old Mrs. Cotton.

"Don't take any notice of her," said Daley uneasily. "She's a bad old
lady. Now Mrs. Lorne, is there anything you want for your patient?"

Mrs. Lorne, once more by the sickbed, rubbed her niece's chest with
camphorated oil. "Such a good woman, young Mrs. Cotton," she said in a
rhythmic voice with the rubs, "such a good Christian ... and the soul
of kindness to you, Lena girlie."

"Not very kind to me," said Lena, looking coldly at the ceiling.

"Now now now ... we must pick up heart a wee bittie.... I know you've
been worrying over something and your mother always said how worry
flew to your tubes...."

"Ff-ff-ff ..." laughed Lena faintly. She scarcely ever laughed except
at herself. Her own indignities and humiliations were morbidly amusing
to her.

"That's better," said Mrs. Lorne, snarling with pleased surprise. "If
my girlie feels like it won't you tell auntie all about it ... two
heads being better than one and whether or no, your dear mother and me
never had a secret from each other when a girl...."

"Exactly like the old days at home," thought Lena. She had been
quarrelsome and unfilial in her teens. It had been understood between
mother and daughter that Lena had strong feelings but was
undemonstrative. This fiction had been her lonely mother's rock. It
had also kept open for Lena a path to unfailing kindness and comfort.
Lena's confidences in her mother were like the reconstructions of
prehistoric animals which scientists build up from a handful of bones
and teeth. They were clever, logical and accurate, but were not
informed by that subtle caricature of life and spirit that is the
truth. Yet the gate to comfort was always open to Lena's fantastic
appeals until her mother's death. And here was the gate opening
again--a ghostly lifting of the latch....

Sardonically aware of her folly, Lena began Telling Auntie All About
It.

"No, she's not kind to me. She hates me because she thinks her husband
prefers the sense I talk to her own sweetly feminine prattle. She's a
typical man's woman--the eternal feminine and all that ... they're
always the jealous sort ... that kind of woman can't conceive of
equality and friendship between man and woman.... They have nothing
but their bodies to offer, poor things.... But it is a fact----"

"What is a fact, my girlie?"

"That he _does_ care--it's extraordinary, for I only met him
yesterday. There are such cases.... The man is starved of
wisdom ... weary of being tied to a creature who's all paint and powder
and conscious physical appeal.... She doesn't know what intellectual
honesty is."

As she spoke she thought, "How extraordinary--that's almost true.
However dishonestly I may speak, I have a core of quite disastrous
honesty. Honesty's my secret vice--knowing myself's my vice. Daley
doesn't know herself--she never could mock at herself or punish
herself or tear herself in pieces. Things are so easy for her--she's
not alone--she's a universal--she fits in."

Mrs. Lorne's hand rather tremulously fidgeted with the hand of her
niece. She wanted to be kind and understanding at all costs, even
though she did not understand what there was to be understanding
about.

"I wish to God I was dying," said Lena.

Mrs. Lorne recognised this as a thing she had thought herself after
Bertie's death, so she realised that it was wrong and must be
suppressed at once, though due no doubt to a touch of fever.

"Ssh-ssh, dearie," she hissed, getting up to look helplessly about for
the thermometer. "Auntie's girlie mustn't let herself think like
that--it's naughty. We must think of Mr. Cotton as a heavy cross to
bear though in many respects an excellent man, pain being sent to test
us and men suffering from a stronger animal nature. Ah here it is--in
a black case too.... I thought it was a fountain pen."

She pressed the thermometer into Lena's mouth and stood for a few
minutes waiting for Lena's reply. Then she added, "Oh how silly auntie
is--you mustn't talk, girlie, while you're sucking the thermometer--oh
no no no no." Suffering from an aberration curiously common even among
competent amateur nurses, she forgot that it was not her speech but
the patient's that was impeded by the thermometer. For three minutes
she uttered only, "Mm-mm-mm" in various hopeful tones and waved her
finger archly towards the clock. But all the time, while Lena was
thinking how ridiculous she looked, Mrs. Lorne, reminded by the
thermometer of her dead baby, was crying out in her heart for the
dreadful hopeful hours of his illness to come back. Thermometers and
hot-water bottles and saving movements of the hands were things that
gave news. When thermometers were put away, hands might be still--for
there was no more news to wait for. An excuse for waiting, a little
excuse to hope and strain, a breathing baby still in her arms--simply
the sound of breathing, even of difficult breathing--she was humble
and would have asked for nothing surer than these. If she could only
go on holding him, she had thought, he would be safe from death. She
had strong hands; nothing really important had ever slipped out of
them before. Surely a baby is not strong enough to defeat his mother
in a battle. But Mrs. Lorne's baby had been strong enough. He had
given her invincibility the lie. His life had slipped away between her
strong hands. Eccentric low sounds that meant death had come from the
baby's throat. It was as if the baby, who had never learnt men's
words, spoke suddenly the speech of death. Edgar had said, "I can't
bear it, Constance, I must go out for a while where I can't hear it."
But Mrs. Lorne had stayed, and she had absolutely forbidden death to
shut the baby's throat. She had forbidden silence to take the place of
that roaring breath. She had guarded the threshold of his lips that
life might not fly out. And when his life slipped past her, she had
called him--Bertie, Bertie, Bertie--in a cracked inviting voice, to
remind him that he was a prisoner under the lock and key of her strong
hands.

She could always hear silence now. Through any sound, and especially
through Lena's laboured reminding breathing, she could hear the
silence of the baby with the unstirring earth over his mouth.

When she had finally drawn the thermometer out and looked at it
closely, she said, "Just as I thought; we shall have our girlie
perfectly well in a day or two if she will only hope for the best,
breathe through her nose and leave it all to God." She said this in a
brave sure voice in order to conceal the fact that Lena's temperature
was rather high. "Now my girlie must turn over and go to
dreamland--just to please Auntie...."

"I can't sleep," said Lena. "The mountains make such a noise."

Mrs. Lorne stood for a moment at the window and snarled reproachfully
at the mountains. "Well, I'm sure," she said. "It is a very still
morning, and you mustn't get ideas in your head about the mountains,
dearie, because God made them and I like to think of His angels
walking on them this minute just as in city streets and the meanest of
His creatures." She could think of no better way to defeat the
mountains than the drawing together of the curtains. She patted Lena's
shoulder very tenderly and went away. She sat in the garden with tears
in her eyes and asked God to lift the burdens of all sufferers.

Lena, left alone, gave a deep sigh and began to whisper to herself,
"My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense," which always
made her feel emotional when she was ill. She had nothing beautiful to
imagine, so she had to remember. But the thought of Daley, wounded,
checked her whispering.

"Oh what a beautiful creature--what a beautiful creature," thought
Lena, crying bitterly. "And now I've spoilt the kind look in her
eyes."




CHAPTER VI

    One who aspired to madness
      Built a wall
        To prison his singing, strange
          And wanton joy.
    But wings that wanton had,
      And at her will
        Afar she ranged,
          And her cry was a dwindling cry.
    So in the end he is sad
      To know, being sane,
        That no fine danger
          Follows his menacing,
    That he, throwing no new shadow
      Before the sun,
        Must die without changing
          Even a bird's song.


Mr. Diamond, who came to luncheon that day, was an extremely kind man.
He noticed at once that Daley was looking sad and, unfortunately, not
quite so pretty as usual. But he was above all things a gentleman, so
he made no remark even remotely hinting that he had noticed anything
at all. He was an expert in not noticing. He was a man of ffity-four,
and nobody had ever heard him say anything impolite or really
friendly.

"Oh that impossible Daley woman," said Daley, coming in with a soft
bustle. "Always late, even when rows of the nicest people in the world
are waiting for her, starving for their tiffins." The horrid echo of
Lena's remarks was still in Daley's ears, but she could not help
smiling eagerly at Mr. Diamond.

She had been looking forward to his coming. She had been counting on
his comforting sanity. She had imagined his face--a short handsome
face with keen reticent eyes under rough eyebrows. She had been
hearing his voice in her mind, his curious careful way of pronouncing
characteristically short and assured sentences. "Oh but that's
de-litt-ful--perf-fectly delitt-full." He always opened his large mouth
wide for vowels and snapped his consonants shut, dwelling on them a
little.

She had imagined him arriving at her house in a bustle of pleasant
ordinariness. He would walk through her garden with his jaunty gait.
He would bend to chuck a snapdragon under the chin, humming with a
cheerful tunelessness. Then he would see her and say, "This is the
stuff to give the army." He always used slang clichs with a refined
inaccuracy.

And here he was. It was all very nearly coming true.

"I'm sure, dear Mr. Diamond, lateness to you is the worst sin in the
world. In fact I dare say you never heard of the other sins."

"Oh I know a frightful lot about sin," said Mr. Diamond in his short
sprightly voice. "But lateness isn't a sin. Only brave and beautiful
people dare to be late. I myself am always punctual to the tick. How
is our invalid? Better. Better I am sure." While he talked he was busy
doing polite things for Daley--shutting the door behind her, pushing
up a chair for her, standing up till she had seated herself, putting
on the arm of her chair a little wet tearose that he had brought from
his garden. Clifford looked on in surprise.

Mrs. Lorne said, "Oh how very kind, how very good--I gave her a brisk
rubbing with camphorated oil but of course bound to take its course
and every one being so extremely kind."

"Isn't it extraordinary," began Daley, "how _clean_ Mr. Diamond always
looks ... like the baby who wouldn't be happy till he got it--after he
got it...." But seeing at once that he was not very much pleased by
this, though he laughed merrily, she went on, "And I've got a new
record to play to you. Kreisler in a composition of his own. It's
wunnerful. I'll play it to you after tiffin."

"I'd _love_ that. I'd _love_ that," said Mr. Diamond briskly. It was
curious that, when Daley's Victrola ceased to play, Mr. Diamond was
always found to have drifted unobtrusively out through the French
window to the most distant corner of the verandah. But Daley believed
everything that her friends said, so she believed that he loved her
tame music and she believed him when he said that he could hear it
best from a long way off.

"It makes me feel _so_ unhappy to know that Lena is ill," said
Clifford, as he sat down to luncheon. "You see, I'm hopelessly in love
with Lena."

"Just as I am with Daley," said Mr. Diamond brightly. "It makes me
feel _so_ unhappy to see Daley looking so extremely well. It almost
makes me begin to think she doesn't return my passion."

"No but I'm serious about Lena. Really, Mr. Diamond, you ought to know
Lena better. I think her thin face is rather like a queer snake's
face. And by Golly, such a marvellous mind! Living with Lena one
wouldn't have to worry about not knowing enough ... she knows
everything. She never says anything that hasn't a little twist of
wisdom in it. Sometimes you only notice it afterwards. Oh, I _do_
love her."

Mrs. Lorne, swelling with confused pride in her sister's child,
thought, "Oh dear, oh dear, what a wicked way to talk. Well--I
certainly am seeing life."

"This is delightful. Absolutely delightful," said Mr. Diamond. "I
_love_ Clifford in this mood. You are a priceless family, you know.
Abb-solutely price-lesss."

"Oh no. We all have our price," quavered old Mrs. Cotton, and nobody
knew whether she was being clever or only senile.

"Oh but you see, Clifford's serious," said Daley quietly and coldly.

"So am I," insisted Mr. Diamond. "Clifford hasn't got a monopoly of
seriousness, has he? Daley, will you fly with me, and we'll leave
Clifford to run off with his serpent into the garden of Eden?"

Mrs. Lorne coughed shyly to remind the Divine Author of the Book of
Genesis that she was not a party to this coarse introduction of the
Word into an immoral discussion, making a jest of right and wrong,
though as a consul so hardworking and always willing to do his best
for the Workers in Isolated Fields when the brigands got tiresome.

Daley laughed automatically.

After that Mr. Diamond talked for some time alone. He asked if they
had seen the last _Punch_, and, finding that they had, reminded them
of a few of the jokes that had seemed to him outstanding. He then
talked rather well about a tour that he had once made in the lowlands
of Scotland. He spoke with sincerity and sense of his regret that his
duties in China prevented him from leading the life of travel and
adventchah that he would have preferred. He claimed that he suffered
from Wanderlust and a desire for the great uncrowded spaces of the
earth, and, though he spoke in trivial and commonplace words, he was
really not posing. He spoke of golf as a quack cure for Wanderlust,
and added that actually it was nothing better than an anaesthetic. He
talked pleasantly and with some ability for ten minutes, encouraged by
the fact that Daley's eyes were fixed on his with an unusual
intensity, and by the delusion that the ceaseless nodding of old Mrs.
Cotton's head meant that the old lady was interested.

But in the middle of Mr. Diamond's rather amusing remarks on the
feudal manners of headwaiters, Clifford said, "Have we sent champagne
to Lena--our last bottle of champagne? That would make me awfully
happy--to give her something that we couldn't spare."

And all at once Daley began to cry. She cried without a sound and
shaded her eyes unobtrusively with her hand. She had never in all her
five and twenty years discovered how to prevent herself from crying or
laughing.

Mrs. Lorne, leaning over her stewed apricots, prayed for light. Yet it
was extraordinary that light should be needed in a matter of sheer
immorality like this. Lena and Mr. Cotton, it was evident, were
harbouring wicked thoughts--and yet, at the same time, Lena was in
distress and pain and must be loved and comforted. Wickedness seemed
to be playing righteousness false. Lena seemed to need her aunt's love
rather than her Maker's chastening hand.

Mr. Diamond began so hurriedly to talk again that he only just missed
losing his head and telling a rather silly anecdote with which his
nephew had once tried to entertain him. He rightly considered the
anecdote to be but a spurious brass link in the social chain of silver
speech and golden silence. He therefore ingeniously changed the
inadvertent beginning of a funny story about a doctor and a female
_malade imaginaire_ into a series of abstract remarks about the
evolution of doctors. How curious that medical students should be such
an anti-social and--well, one might almost say _vulgar_ group, and
Harley Street doctors so eminently frockcoated. Mr. Diamond addressed
himself carefully to old Mrs. Cotton. But all she said was, "Don't be
such a fool, Daley. Do you think you're the fir-hirst that ever was
married to a fairy with a cold heart?"

Mr. Diamond would have given up saving the situation then, had not
Daley, in a very thin precarious voice that sounded as if it were
balanced on a tightrope, remarked, "It's only because they learn to
brush their hair when they grow up and go to Harley Street...." There
was almost a sob at the end of the sentence.

"That's it," said Mr. Diamond. "That's it. Thatt'ss itt. You've hit it
exactly. Hair in Harley Street is brushed to excess."

A servant gave Daley a note after luncheon. _Come and see me, please.
I have offended you. Do let's understand each other. Lena_. Daley
meditatively drew dogs on the note. Dog after dog obscured Lena's
faint neat writing. "I'll never have anything to do with women again,"
thought Daley. "Dogs and men, left to themselves, would make a
wunnerful world for me."

"Shall I take you to pay your respects to Josephine and her little new
puppies, Mr. Diamond?"

"I'd _love_ that. I'd _love_ that."

"They're really too young to be handled, mum, even by you." Daley
could hear Josephine's weak voice in her mind as she bent down at the
door of the kennel. She said aloud, "I won't take them out. I guess I
hold them wrong according to dog standards. Though the skin behind
their necks seems to be provided by God for a handle. But Josephine
herself always carried her puppies by their fat behinds. Bend double,
Mr. Diamond, and you can see...."

The puppies enchanted her completely and she had forgotten her
trouble. "That's Boniface--with spots. Pius and Clement you can just
tell apart because Clement's tail curls a little. And Innocent's the
girl. Like coffee ice-cream you are, my lovely one. All Josephine's
babies always have these ingrowing noses when they're young. Josephine
of course calls them _aquiline_. But anyway, life irons out their
noses straight after a week or so."

She was surprised, on looking round at Mr. Diamond, to see that his
face was not really rapturous, though he was smiling pleasantly. His
merely polite response checked her delight, and she remembered that
the world held pain as well as puppies.

"What did you think of what Clifford said at tiffin, Mr. Diamond?" she
asked, trying to hold her voice that it might not tremble.

"I thought it perfectly delightful. Perfectly delightful," said Mr.
Diamond at once. "You are a lucky lady to have a husband like
Clifford.... You must feel so safe.... He simply doesn't know how to
hide his lightest passing thought. You couldn't be deceived by
Clifford any more than you could be run over by the old motor cars
that I remember, that had to be preceded by a man with a red flag."

"But I'm not sure I wouldn't rather be deceived," said Daley in a
breaking voice. "Knowing everything doesn't save me. Telling us about
loving Lena doesn't make it any better that he should love her."

"Oh nonsense. Oh nonsense," said Mr. Diamond. "You're a little out of
sorts today, Daley. I noticed it at once. At once. When one feels like
that one is apt to make a fuss about nothing. I do it myself. Often.
Often. Now tell me, dear, how d'you manage to make your snapdragons
all grow one height? Mine shoot up all giants and dwarfs. They look so
freakish."

"They're a freakish flower," said Daley, looking at him thoughtfully.
"Oh Mr. Diamond--do you know, Clifford and I once argued the whole of
one breakfast time about whether snapdragons had teeth...."

"And have they?" asked Mr. Diamond, pleased with this safe subject.

"I never looked. I kind of didn't want to...."

"Then I'll look now.... No they haven't--unless you could call these
speckles teeth. They look more like the first symptoms of laryngitis
to me...."

Just before Mr. Diamond went away, he took Daley's hand and held it
for a moment. "And if there's anything I can do for you,
Daley--anything in the world I can do--you must promise to let me know.
I want you to consider me as a friend. Really. I want that very much.
Promise now."

"And he can't say fairer than that," said Daley to herself briskly.
"He can't say fairer than that."

When he had gone, Daley went reluctantly towards Lena's room. Mrs.
Lorne, snarling violently, was waiting for her in the passage. "Just
going back to see to the children's dinner," she said. "I don't know
what to say about my niece's presence in your house.... By something
Mr. Cotton said just now, I'm afraid she is not convenient, being ill
just now here, but I don't know what to say...."

"No need to say anything," said Daley. "I'm feeling a bit peeved just
now--that's all. Don't think of it again."

"Two bedrooms only at the Mission, otherwise the way would be clear,
blood being thicker than water of course--but I don't know where I
should put Lettie and Aggie. And gentlemen often say so much more than
they mean ... I really don't know _what_ to say."

"Dear Mrs. Lorne, how kind you always are," said Daley patting her
arm. Mrs. Lorne hurried home to her children, thinking what a Strange
Thing Life Was. She felt suddenly years older than her husband, who
was at home innocently translating "Onward Christian Soldiers" into
the local dialect. A Glimpse of Life in the Raw had been vouchsafed
her, thought Mrs. Lorne, as she cut bread and butter.

In Lena's room Daley found Clifford kneeling by the bed, his arms
sprawling over the prostrate form of the invalid. Lena lay in an
awkward rigid attitude, as though she knew no spontaneous caresses and
had forgotten to learn any by heart. Lena looked at Daley, but
Clifford did not raise his head.

"Yes, you were right," said Daley. "We need to come to an
understanding."

Usually nearly everything that Daley said had _dear_ in it or
_dearest_ or a name like a caress. And when these things were missing,
her speech sounded as though it had holes burned in its texture.

"We have come to an understanding, haven't we?" said Clifford. "Surely
we all understand by now that I love Lena."

Lena flushed and moved her head on the pillow. "How brutal you are,"
she said to Clifford. "Daley, I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I
told you that I never for a moment meant this to happen--that I'm
sorry it happened...."

"No one could possibly believe that," said Clifford, straightening
himself in surprise. He was so literal that a challenge to his
credulity never failed to shock him. "Not even Daley could believe
that. You told me last night that even death would never make you
regret what we've done."

Daley felt no impulse to cry now. She was half stifled with anger and
pain. "Stop talking to her. Stop talking to her. You must talk to me
now--even if it's for the last time. What do you propose to do about
this--discovery?"

"Why do anything?" said Clifford. "We're quite happy as we are. In
fact this house is particularly convenient for such a _mnage_. We
shouldn't have to change our lives at all--except at night...."

"Clifford--Clifford--what has happened to you? Have you forgotten me
quite?" Memory seized Daley by the throat. She thought of her first
sight of this convenient house--the curling eaves--the little shiny
lions on the roof ridge--the pillars of the verandah painted with blue
and red and yellow flowers and birds--the sinuous pale eucalyptus
trees--the crowned starred poinsettia--the birds' songs in the
bamboos, like flutes and bells--the anticipation of unpacking all the
new linen and of soon having visitors singing in the bathrooms,
rubbing their faces on the really wunnerful best guest face-towels.
"Just fancy being comfortable at home--in _China_!" she had said. It
had seemed so odd that they should still be the same old Daley and
Clifford--in a wild land like China. It seemed so odd that the silver
inkstand--the Ridleys' wedding present--should have started from
California--got out to be admired in Surrey--and finally shaken off
its travelling kit in China--wild China.... Clifford had stumbled on
the threshold as he and she entered the house. He often stumbled in
houses; the roots of forests could not catch his feet as did steps and
doormats and stair-rails. But that first time he stumbled because he
had his arm so tightly and clumsily round Daley that it was almost
like a three-legged race. "I'm so glad I've got a wife," he had said.
"I'm so glad I've got a wife. People who come in from outside like me
aren't generally so lucky as to find a wife and a home all readymade.
I hope my life here will be very dull, like a real man's. I hope I'll
see you coming in and out of this door a million times before I die."
"Nothing ever happens a million times the same," Daley had said. "Not
even the coming up and going down of the sun." But for a long time
after that she was always happy coming in and out of that door,
feeling herself watched by a lover--even when Clifford was not there
waiting for her.

"Clifford--Clifford--can't you remember ...?" But his back was towards
her now. He was watching Lena's face now.

"It would be a fantastic household," said Lena wearily. "But then
everything's fantastic here."

"No," said Daley. "Not everything. I'm not fantastic. That's the worst
of it. I'm from America. I'm not a bit fantastic...."

She went slowly to the door but she felt as if she were rushing madly,
as if her heart were bursting after a violent physical effort. She
stood alone on the verandah, clapping the palm of her hand senselessly
against the wall.

"What shall I do now? What shall I do? What shall I do? I _must_ be
comforted."

The Ridleys were on the other side of the world.

There came into her mind the plain admiring face of Lion.

"Lion--what is Lion? Is that all the lover I have now? Lion--poor
little Lion.... But I must find comfort somehow.... I must find some
one who thinks well of me...."

As she ran through the garden, stumbling a little on her high heels,
Josephine joined her. Josephine looked very thin and her whole body
wagged like whalebone as she ran. It was as though she were
triumphantly exaggerating her pliability after her long weeks of
unwieldy rigidity.

Daley's heart was lighted up by the fact that Josephine had forsaken
child-bed to run with her in search of comfort. "Yes, I know it's not
awfully wise, mum," Daley murmured for Josephine, "but I just hated to
see you galloping off into the world alone, and Innocent said she'd be
a little mother to the boys while I was out."

The hills were folded round the valley like the petals of a great
flower. The young gay bamboos seemed to shed, rather than to
intercept, green sunlight. The history of the road, preserved up till
yesterday in hard ruts, had been washed away by the sudden rain of
last night. Only yesterday one had known by heart the hoof-prints of
caravan ponies that by now cropped the flowery ditches half-way to
Burma. Only yesterday thin twin grooves had recorded the old
impression of Mrs. Lorne's baby's perambulator--that baby whose only
mark on the earth now was a short neat grave in the mission church
garden. Now the vandal rain had washed away intimate records that no
one would ever trouble to remember.

A big beetle, unaccustomed to a seafaring life, wallowed across the
red lumpy mud like a tramp steamer in the Channel. For a second Daley
automatically imagined the beetle grumbling and cursing: "What's come
to this bloody road to-day I can't imagine; it was perfectly
respectable dust and dung yesterday and now it's like swimming in
glue...." Daley jumped, as she ran, to make certain of not hurting or
alarming the beetle, and was glad to notice that her dog did the same.
"Live and let live," said Josephine. "And anyway, beetles taste like
decayed walnuts...." Josephine whipped herself across the watery ditch
and plunged into young barley as though into a lake. "It'll brush
against her teats and the scent of it'll cool the puppies' noses,"
thought Daley. The effort of running was shaking up her thoughts. At
every second she forgot what she had been thinking of before. She only
knew vaguely that she must not think of Clifford just now. She must
keep her mind skimming the very cream of feeling.

Presently she was on Lion's verandah. She looked desperately round for
instant comfort. He was not there. An acute irritation seized her as
she thought how easily he might have been there. She created his voice
in her ears: "Daley--Daley--you've been crying...." She made for
herself a vision of his pale ugly young face under the shadow of that
dreadful old hat. On the wicker table on the verandah there was a book
he had been reading--a rather manly novel by a Captain Something. Lion
wanted to be manly--but not as Clifford wanted it. Lion wanted it
conscientiously and in its proper place; he talked of a rounded
balanced life--a sane mind in a sound body--he did exercises in the
morning and read the works of English field-marshals as well as those
of German philosophers.

"Oh it would be so _easy_ to live with Lion," thought Daley. "So
wunnerful not to have to be ashamed of being good...."

She thought: "It would have been so easy for God to have arranged that
Lion should be here to comfort me. Why even _I_ can nearly create
him--can nearly make him exist on this verandah, close to me,
comforting me--but God didn't think it worth while."

Then she realised that, even if she had found him, there would have
been no hope of comfort. Lion's hand could never have pinned the happy
sun again to the sky. She remembered the look of the gold and green
bland ranks of the bamboos. She imagined now that they had assured her
that they had been watching that path for years and years and had
never yet seen comfort pass by. "Stonyhearted forests," thought Daley.
"Clifford's mother said that Clifford was born of the stonyhearted
fairies of the forest."

She stood in the road again, looking from side to side, clapping her
hands quietly together. Young barley was on the right and the young
plumed grove on her left. "Well--now--what shall I do? What shall I
do? I can't go home. I haven't any home now...." Her jaws ached and
she realised that she had been clicking and grinding her teeth
rhythmically all this time. She could not get rid of the tiresome
persuasion of rhythm.

Where the short cut across the rice-fields and barley-fields joined
the main road, there was an open pavilion, an old shrine with a broken
plaster god in it. The god's face was pursed and amused and very
secret. Once he had pointed two fingers at the sky. The sky was the
point of his secret joke, it seemed, but now his fingers were broken.
Daley sat down on a squared stone at the foot of the altar, beside a
sheaf of joss-sticks that stitched the air with thin embroideries of
smoke. Her mind was misty. She could not touch the place where her
sorrow was. She felt her breast instinctively and then snatched her
hand away, remembering Clifford's hands there.

She sat listening intently to the singing of the birds. Something, it
was evident, must happen now. It was the gods' turn. Nothing less than
comfort should lure Daley from her throne at a god's feet. Final
comfort or final catastrophe must declare itself as a motive to that
senseless pattern of birds' songs and young barley--of bamboo shade
and the smell of joss-smoke.

There was no sound of coming comfort on the air. Even Josephine had
gone home to feed her puppies. "A mother's first duty, you know, mum,"
Daley had drearily murmured for her. There was the noise of distant
Chinese music, growing and fading. But that music had no voice for the
heart. Very well then, Daley's retort to the silence was simple; she
would stay there with her fingers stroking her forsaken breast till
she died.

She had never had time before to know that she was alive. Now she had
a long time in which to wish that she were dead.




CHAPTER VII

    This is the feast,
    The guests assemble,
    These are the goblets--these
    Are the fluted stems
    Of the goblets, even these trees
    That hold the dark sky trembling.

    And must poor man,
    Who has so little daring,
    With such companions
    Such a banquet share--
    With dead lovers--with phantoms--
    With cold fairies----?


When Daley had gone, Clifford left Lena's bedside and went to look out
of the window. His interest in the actions of people, and his
inability to imagine their proceedings without the evidence of his
eyes, pulled him often out of his path to watch them for as long as
possible. Once they were gone they were gone, for him; his mind had no
wings to follow them; so his eyes and ears had to do what they could.

He saw the polished bright hair of Daley move quickly along the top of
the sweet-pea hedge with a jumping movement. The gap between the
sweet-peas and the gate gave him a photographic glimpse of her,
hurrying, bent forward in her grass-green smock like a rich flower in
a wind. Josephine followed her in a black flash. After that, as far as
Clifford was concerned, his wife slipped off the world. But he did not
at once turn back into the bedroom. His eyes were fixed upon the high
upper leaves of the grove. Like the waves in a swell after a storm,
the tips of the trees moved heavily and deliberately in a lazy wind.
The wind, it seemed, was tethered high to the clouds, for the flowers
low down in the garden were looking one at another quietly, having
heard no rumour of a wind. The only things that Clifford really
understood were the soil, the grass, the weeds and the trees. He had
no poetic knowledge and no words of understanding--only a flat prosaic
intimacy. The things that were rooted in the soil were his only
kindred; he was as senseless as an animal in his familiarity with
them. He was afraid of anything natural that he could not account
for--of thunder--of a great wind--of the darkness of night. He was in
constant fear of magic experience. The danger humiliated him. If he
had known how, he would have slain this lurking dragon of magic; such
a victory would have brought him into line with stockbrokers, golfers,
housemaids, bishops ... all of whom, he knew very well, possessed
something that he himself lacked--something that gave them their mild
confidence and enabled them to read their _Daily Mirror_ without
anguish or wonder.

"Oh Lena, tell me what it is that I've been looking for, for the last
seven years."

"I thought you said you never forgot anything."

"I don't. But I can't remember what I never knew."

"Perhaps you're looking for a soul," said Lena dully. "Any one can see
you haven't a soul--only a body."

"What do you mean? Are you blaming me? Don't you love me?" He had come
away from the window now and was leaning urgently towards her.

"Love's nothing to do with it. Since I haven't a body myself, I only
need a body to love...."

"What have you then, if you haven't a body? Are you soul through and
through?"

"Oh my God, no. I'm nothing through and through. I'm nothing at all."

"That can't be so," said Clifford, rubbing his nose. "I couldn't love
nothing at all."

"You might love the difference between yourself and me--but not for
long."

"I couldn't lie by night side by side with just a difference, could I,
Lena?"

"Many people do."

"I don't understand you. But you make me see what I love in you now. I
love you because I don't understand what you say--and yet I feel if I
listen I shall understand, some day. You don't say things that I might
just as well have said myself, as Daley always does."

"Oh take your hand from my breast, Clifford. I can hardly breathe.
Your hands are so heavy--and so are my bones."

Clifford moved away, surprised but not offended. He went to the window
again. He was vaguely proud of being spoken to fretfully by the
inexplicable yet mysteriously accessible Lena. It was a kind of
preliminary initiation into wisdom. Every moment spent with her would
be informing, he thought. What had Daley ever said that gave a man
that corrected wise feeling? Clifford could hear in his head a sort of
soft clamour of Daley's silly talk; he could hear her voice--her clear
golden throaty speech like a little far bugle.... "Oh Clifford
_darling_--do look at the expression of that puppy's tail.... Oh
Clifford--don't you sometimes wonder if people're alive when we're not
there? ... Dearest, I dreamt you were so sweet to me ... we were riding
on an elephant across Siberia ..." Daley was easy and kind. She would
never have dismissed his hand from her breast. One could live for
years with Daley and never really be obliged to listen to anything she
said.

Lena watched him as he stood by the window. The sunlight, reflected by
the bleached stone terrace and the big bronze goldfish tank outside,
made a sort of blur of light on his face. His face, with this low
upward light upon it, looked theatrical and, to her, wonderful. She
thought of the Fulham poet on whom she had wasted years of painful
emotion. She saw him as a small rather dirty man with a wan wild
triangular face under studiously unkempt hair. He carried hysteria
almost too far; his hands, too, erred on the side of beauty. The sight
of Clifford made foolish the thought of that highly articulate young
man. For Clifford was very tall; his shoulders were broad and his
body, though not fat, was heavy. His thick layer of straight hair was
brushed and damped on either side of a onesided parting, in careful
imitation of the hair of a bank manager in Shanghai whom Clifford
considered to be the finest possible flower of ideal common-placeness.
Everything about Clifford's clothes suggested the Sunday clothes of a
respectable working man, but everything was inspired by some
unsuspected example. It was his desire, as Lena knew, to look like the
most ordinary man in the world; his illusion was that he was cursed
with the body of a fairy, as well as with a fairy's heart.

Lena looked at him and laughed--"Ff-ff-ff----" to herself at the
glorious Clifford's childishness. She was most intensely grown-up
herself.

Her side was still giving her pain. Pain clipped off the end of each
careless breath. But she was almost a match for the pain. She was
skilled in cautious breathing by now. She was terribly tired, and now
and then a kind of haze of half-sleep came over her. Little tender
illusions played round her humming consciousness; she thought that
there was a robin in her room, that she had a telegram in her hand
announcing that her dead mother was on her way to visit her and take
care of her, that her pillow was a white cloud smelling of violets....

The stillness was compounded of the ticking of the clock and the silly
sprightly doggerel of the sparrows outside. This insistent small
clamour, like farthings clinking on a plate, accumulated upon her
sleepy hearing, and every few minutes awoke her. But once a new noise
pushed aside a little dream, and she looked around and saw Clifford
stepping out of the low window. He had thrown his head back as though
he had seen an aeroplane or an angel. One robust hand gripped the
window-frame. In a minute he was gone. Lena thought perhaps she had
offended him by her dismissal of his heavy hand. But she was not
gentle enough to feel troubled by this thought. She often offended
people and did not mind doing so. So many people made mistakes that
ought not to be allowed to pass, she thought.

Lena slept for a time, but now, while she slept, she was conscious of
the dry cracked feeling of her lips, and of the burning dint in the
pillow, in which her head, she thought, was laid like a phoenix's egg.
She could no longer dream pleasantly; senseless puppets seemed to be
jerked clumsily across the stage of her dreaming consciousness. The
background of all that she saw seemed shattered. The words in her mind
would form no pattern. "Dunville ... shards ... minstrel ... poker ...
phosphates...." It seemed vitally necessary that she should recall
some phrase she had forgotten.

And presently a great ugly jangling came into her ears. It grew
quickly from a little seed of sound and soon blotted out the sunny
chinking silence. In a moment it filled the whole world and Lena awoke
with a shout. As she jolted herself awake the sound ceased. It was
incredible that she should have dreamt such a monstrous and boundless
clamour. The various discordant notes of it were still remembered by
her ears. Yet here, in the common world, there was only silence--a
silence from which, she realised, the singing of the birds had been
strangely withdrawn.

Old Mrs. Cotton pushed the door noisily open with one of her sticks
and hobbled into the room.

"Did you hear the music?" she asked urgently in her deep cracked
voice.

Lena did not answer. She never helped talk to continue. Daley would
have said, "Why I _thought_ I heard _something_.... I was just
_wondering_.... What _was_ it?" Perhaps old Mrs. Cotton thought of
this. She looked at Lena as though interested to meet a rival expert
in disagreeable manners. Her monopoly of insolence was broken. She was
obliged to say, "There was music.... I heard it before, seven years
ago...."

"I was trying to sleep," said Lena fretfully. "I'm feeling pretty
bad...."

Old Mrs. Cotton sat down by the bed. She could not resist the impulse
to do this, even though, by giving way, she risked making an apparent
gesture of friendliness. She was excited. She hissed in and out
through her teeth and chafed the knobs of her sticks with her ugly old
hands. She had a little tinsel flower pinned in her sand-grey hair,
but it might just as well have been a straw for all the graciousness
it gave her nodding head. The flower seemed to wince weakly with every
nod.

Lena looked at the old woman without very much contempt. She felt more
at home with eccentric incalculable people than she did with the
courteous and gentle. This old woman, for instance, might have been
met without surprise coming out of a slovenly studio in London to
scold the milk boy. She looked like some one with thirty spicy novels
to her name, or like some one who had been loved by one of the
Mid-Victorian poets in the sixties.

One could imagine young reporters, trying not to smile, collecting her
reminiscences. She looked so extraordinary that only utter provincials
would turn to look at her.

"Eh ... yes ... seven years ago-ho ... before we left the beechwoods,"
said the old woman harshly. "That music robbed our American Home of
its Daddy.... And when we got there--the cupboard was bare--except for
the American skeleton in it...."

"If you mean Daley, she isn't too obviously American," said Lena. "She
speaks with the whole of her voice...."

"She's lost her accent, but she's kept her soul ... her American
imitation soul.... My son is married to a five-foot shelf...."

"Mrs. Cotton--you're insular."

"If more of us were insular," said Mrs. Cotton, turning upon Lena with
a savage gesture that was of necessity tamed by her dragging
affliction. "If more of us were insular, there wouldn't be
so--much--_danger_." She smacked the head of one cane with a cupped
palm, and sniffed and clicked her teeth as though she had said
something very telling.

"Danger of what?"

"Of the growth of a--substitute--American world...."

"Oh well ..." grumbled Lena. "Time's up for the old world anyway. It's
America's turn now. And the deterioration of civilisation hasn't been
all America's fault. We've all had a hand in making the world
secondrate."

"No. No. No-ho. We all fell away from high standards, but America's
teaching us how to live up to low ones. There never was a secondrate
thing where a firstrate thing ought to be till America put it there.
Curse America. Curse America. Curse America," she shouted, shuddering
violently. "People who are young now are damned ... they can never
again hope to hear any voice but America's...."

"Well--why do we listen?" asked Lena. "Nobody need ever listen to
anything they don't want to hear."

"It's such a--loud--voice ..." quavered old Mrs. Cotton. "The voices
of deaf and dumb imbeciles, when they are taught to speak, are much
louder than the voices--of--the--wise. It's a mechanical
voice ... speaking cheap and easy substitutes for truth ... _so_
irresistible ... in a world in which truth has been so hard.... Oh the
corrupted young ... it's not at all dreadful, Lena, to be old--now...."

Lena did not speak. The words _old_ and _young_ meant very little to
her. She was held in a kind of bleak immortality.

"To be old," said old Mrs. Cotton, "doesn't mean fear of death
now ... it means hope--of--escape...."

She hummed like a wasp for a moment before she spoke again. Tears were
rolling down the grooves of her cheeks.

"It was such a shy difficult world.... It was such a wonderful
world.... Anything might happen in that world--it was so gloriously
unfair. Fools were not heard. Anyone who knew that world should make
haste to die before the last drooping beautiful difficulties of that
world fade...."

"The difficulties weren't beautiful at all," said Lena fretfully.
"They included slavery and bad sanitation and rotten boroughs and
insolent charity and corrupt government.... They didn't include birth
control or trade unions or garden cities or Fresh Air Funds or
chloroform or----"

"Oh yes--you have plenty of ki-hindness now.... Oh yes, America's
treacled the world over with ki-hindness. Daley's kind--democracy's
always dreadfully kind. Kindness is a symptom of vulgarity. Can't you
feel the breath of death in your Fresh Air Funds ... in your classes
in Egyptology for the children of the half-witted? ... Would you
rather have all that American ki-hindness than the glory of the
unequal world--than wit--than learning--than loneliness--than
strangeness--than the music of the fairies? ..."

"You needn't go on telling me that democracy means government of the
wise by fools," said Lena. "But damn it all--we were in a
minority--the wise and the odd were in a minority. Does a world spoilt
for us matter so awfully?"

"What else matters? What else matters?" cried the old woman in a loud
breaking voice. "It was the only world we had--and it stinks now like
a ro--hotten fruit--stinks with American ki-hindness....
Blighted--blighted--blighted with imitations--with substitute
intelligence--substitute ethics--substitute art.... The true-born bodies
of the young are nourished on substitute foods ... their habits and
desires are taught them by American magazine advertisements ... a
substitute soul, readymade out of the pages of the Atlantic Mo-honthly,
is all the young may pray for.... And even that they send to sleep with
radio be-hedtime stories...."

"But what did you send your soul to sleep with when you were young?"

"You ask me that--_you_, who have a fairy for lover?"

Lena looked at the old witch's wild parched face, her bent subsiding
figure, the lifeless strands of hair that grew on her yellow nape. The
spoilt tawdry body of the old woman was a completely baffling
fortress. Nothing within the fortress could be imagined. Nothing
escaped from the fortress but an old quavering voice, beating like a
lame bird out of a darkness beyond understanding. Lena sighed
bitterly.

"Oh, your fairies ... your music...."

"There's so little--music--now ..." whispered old Mrs. Cotton.
"Only the sound of wheels going round.... Only very rarely
now--magic--puts--a--finger--in the--wheel ... To-day the music
passed.... Perhaps--never--again...."

Lena felt crushed with weariness. She closed her eyes. The echo of
music seemed to remain upon the deep jerking voice of the old woman,
as the scent of lavender clings to old silks and velvets. Lena
wandered into a comfortless humming sleep. And all through her
throbbing dreams the old voice seemed to sound, speaking of music--of
music that was played on the tuned strings of the trees--of music like
the breath of God that was only breathed to give life or to steal away
men's souls--of the music of the stonyhearted fairies.... It seemed to
Lena that she was being forced to an unwilling understanding--forced
into fellowship with something from which her sour cleverness had
always defended her. She felt herself cowering under a rushing
advancing wave--an enormous breaking wave of music--the fierce
shadowed edge of a wave of forest plumed with the tall lances of the
fairies....

She heard a man's voice outside shouting, "Oh--look--look!" And she
heard her own voice screaming, "Never--never--never----"

She opened her eyes. She was alone. She had slept a long time. The
silken light of late afternoon was hung upon the walls.

"Never--never--never ..." she found herself crying as she covered her
streaming eyes. "Never again music ... never again to lie in the arms
of a fairy...."




CHAPTER VIII

    Words--though in words we may speak
    The wisdom of God--yet a bird's
    Tongue would disdain them. Sing, cynic
    Lark, and our God seems young.

    Old are the flowers in the grass,
    Yes, though their petals be golden,
    Hoary they are, and possess
    All time for a story.

    Bowed are men's bodies with hidden
    Age--though the young are so proud--Youth
    cannot lie to men's bodies,
    For they know all truth.

    Forgive then, old world, my new heart,
    Born in an old body, to live
    Burning with wonder--and at last
    To die without learning.


Milady and Edna had quarrelled on their return from Lena's bedside.
Constant travel and frequent weariness had more or less kept the peace
between them till now. But a long noon spent together in an adapted
hospital ward among Chinese foothills had satisfied them that their
suspicions as to each other's inferior natures were well-founded.

Edna perhaps need not have washed her hair. But surely she could
hardly know that the sight of her heavy bush of dull brown hair was
annoying to her companion. Milady, in _dshabill_, had to wear a lace
boudoir cap trimmed with pink silk rosebuds to conceal the fact that
her masculine hair-cut had brought with it the masculine curse of
"thinness on the top." By wily brushing she concealed this affliction
during the daytime. Lena said once that she had to do this "because of
the angels."

"My--you'll have a job getting a comb through that tangle," said
Milady, darning a pink silk vest.

"Nothing to matter," said Edna placidly.

"I've always wished I had coarse hair like you," said Milady. "Mine's
like silk. I've always had a job with it. Plenty of it but as fine as
silk...."

Edna sniffed, simply because the soap in her eyes made her nose run a
little, but Milady attached meaning to the sniff.

"Not but what people don't generally admire fine hair," said Milady
sharply. "That boy on the ship said the great desire of his life was
to stroke my hair. 'Must feel like silk,' he said. But I said, 'That's
all very well, laddie, you can't make anything of a show with fine
hair. Give me coarse hair like Edna's,' I said."

"You and your boys ..." said Edna.

"Yes--me and my boys ..." said Milady, biting a thread savagely.
"Where would you be without me and my boys, I should like to know? You
don't imagine it's you that brings the boys to our show--do
you--_you_, mooing like a lovesick cow? Or Lena, playing highbrow
stuff with no more figure than a match?"

"Oh get on with you, Milady. What's the matter with you?"

"Matter? What's the matter with _you?_ Perhaps _you'd_ like to take a
turn at running this damn menagerie and see what _you_ make of it.
Perhaps you think it was _your_ goo-goo eyes got us that feed at
Diamond's last night and the fizz and all...."

"Oh _you_ got it all right, trust _you. You_ do all the asking,
my dear.... You'd ask for the shirt off a man's back...."

"Yes, I got it, but you was quite ready to eat an' drink it when got,
I noticed, miss."

"Well, I didn't eat an' drink so much of it as you did, anyway."

"Oh go on, do. Say I was tight. Don't mind me...."

Edna stood up, twisting her wet hair into a rough knot with slow
irritated gestures. She did not like quarrelling. Her mind was not
alert enough to allow her to quarrel joyfully. She liked to sit silent
with nothing to do, and to feel drowned in placidity. Hers was an
entirely stationary mind; she did not so much think as make small
statements to herself. Her only conscious thoughts were
memories--neither happy memories nor unhappy ones. She simply groped for
details in her dull past life and, though she had always been too
unobservant to collect enough details to satiate her rapacious memory,
the effort of groping was not at all tiresome to her. "What _was_ the
name of the Elliott's servant, now?" she would think. "Something
beginning with M.... It wasn't Lily, was it? Their number was
seven--seven Kenilworth Villas ... it was the people next door that had
the tennis court ... _my_, how he used to perspire, much worse than
Walter, though he must have weighed two stone less.... What _is_ the
name of that stuff Maudie said to put under your arms? ... A Latin
name ... Kum-Kloca-Kream--K-K-K--yes that was it ... poor old
Maudie, she did used to say comic things ... and now she's got five
kiddies.... What _was_ that riddle of hers about Two-lips
Four-lips? ... My, she was a mad girl ... pity she married Ted
Wilson--he'll never get on in the Insurance...."

Edna was very tolerant. Of course Milady was "fast," and Lena said
"awful atheistical things." Edna did not hold with impropriety or with
atheism--but neither was any affair of hers. Everything outside the
quiet tower of her placidity was no affair of hers. Without being
influenced by the surroundings of her life at all, she had become
entirely accustomed to them. Milady's frail loves and Lena's irascible
blasphemies did not really disturb Edna at all. Not holding with them
kept her safe from them.

As she stood before the mirror pushing her hair into a specious
neatness under her hat, the doctor appeared at the French window.
Milady gave a little coy scream but Edna was mildly shocked. "Well, he
might knock or cough or something. One of these days he'll be catching
us in our skins," she thought.

"Excuse the liberty," said the doctor brightly to Milady. The doctor
caught romance coming and going; he admired Daley because he thought
her so good and Milady because he thought her so naughty.

"This is Liberty Hall, laddie," said Milady, sitting deftly on the
dirty vest she had been darning. "As who should know better than
yourself?"

"Oh girls, I'm so blue," cried the doctor, rubbing his hands together
in brilliant expectation. "I've been listening to Chinese insides all
the morning, and now I want some one to hold my hand and love me...."

He was a most innocent creature. Any woman could please him by simply
pretending that he seemed to her worth pleasing. Milady flattered him
much more than she knew by producing and using her vanity bag.

"Well, you don't need a stethoscope to listen to love with," said
Milady with her wild laugh. "Why, Edna darling--don't go away and
leave poor little me all alone with this dangerous man...."

"Two's company," replied Edna mildly. "Bye-bye all. See you later."

She wanted to go as far as the Mission and see Mr. and Mrs. Lorne, who
had struck her as being reely nice people.

Mr. Lorne was bent double over a box of pamphlets on the Mission
verandah. He looked at Edna coldly without straightening himself,
getting an almost upside-down view of her.

"Hope you don't object to me smelling your roses," said Edna. "I'm
partial to roses. They remind me of my home in Brixton."

Mr. Lorne made no reply. He stacked the pamphlets in little piles of
equal size. They were _Finger-posts in Foreign Fields, Compiled by
Edgar Lorne and printed by Clifford Cotton_.

"You're busy," said Edna, a little disappointed. "Don't let me disturb
you."

"No I won't," said Mr. Lorne. "I am busy." He was a small man of about
forty-five. He looked like a large man in miniature. Bones seemed to
claim undue attention in his body; his high shiny ungracious forehead
looked like naked bone; the ridges of his cheeks were marked with red
patches; his shoulders were broad and angular beneath his hot brown
suit, and his knuckles looked like round nuts inside the taut skin.

Edna liked his face. She did not want to leave him. She wanted to talk
to him, to ask him where he lived when he was in England, what was his
nearest station, whether the cinema palace in his neighbourhood had a
piano or a reel orchestra, if his sister rode a bike....

"D'you mind if I sit down here and watch you while you work? I won't
say a word. This garden is so lovely and quiet."

Only as she sat down did she realise that Clifford was sprawling on
the verandah in the shadow of a high trellis of roses, opening and
shutting one of the little pamphlets.

"This garden is God's garden," said Mr. Lorne, standing upright and
opening his pale eyes very widely. "It is kept quiet so that God's
voice may be heard."

"The result is," said Clifford, "that you can't hear anything else.
Human voices are so little compared with God's. They are drowned."

"I must say, you're neither of you shy about talking about--religion
and all that," said Edna. "Most people feel silly, somehow--but of
course it's silly to feel that way."

"I have no other talk," said Mr. Lorne.

"Oh don't apologise--I'm not crabbing you," said Edna hastily. "I'm
all for people doing what they please and thinking what they please
and saying what they please."

"I'm not," said Mr. Lorne. "I'm all for people doing and thinking and
saying what pleases God."

"Oh that's shirking difficulties," said Clifford. "It's being human
that's difficult. You get stolen away from your valuable difficult
self by pleasing God."

"Yes. Why not?"

"Why not? Oh you make me shudder. You make me shudder with your 'Why
not?' Isn't it a terrible enough ordeal to find a self--and must one
lose it at last when found?"

"Mr. Lorne's quite right," said Edna. "It's wicked to be selfish.
Selfishness never did any one any good." But she was not paying much
attention to the talk. She was absorbing the details of Clifford's
appearance. He looked like a country squire, she thought, remembering
British country squires in Californian moving pictures. She looked at
his clumsy tweed suit--"Harris tweed costs a nawful lot these
days,"--at his navy blue dotted tie--at his thick straight hair--at his
spectacles--"A reel gentleman ought to wear gold rims or
tortoiseshells or invisibles--not those tin things.... Why, even Mr.
Marshall, the grocer at the corner of the High Street, wore gold rims
to his nose-pinchers.... His stockings'll be knitted by his wife--or
perhaps his mother; that's the khaki wool we used to knit for the boys
in the Great War; you can buy it cheap now, left-over lots.... My, his
shoes are scratched--he must be forever walking among brambles...."

"Of course other people's selves are beyond me," said Clifford. "My
self is all I have to go on--and I know hardly anything about that.
But having a self at all is very precious to me--not every changeling
gets such a chance.... Being real and human is such fun.... For
instance, it's wonderful to me to think I knew how to print this
book--to think I was real enough to put all these senseless little
black letters together with my hands and with my eyes and with my
unknown heart--just like a real man. How did my heart know all that?
Have I stopped being a poor changeling at last? Mayn't I value this
clever self of mine that has come safely through a dangerous world?
Mayn't I sit safe in my body now, and not go out and look for a soul?
Being me is like coming out of a forest on to a trodden path. To look
for a soul I should have to leave the path again and go on into the
forest on the other side. It's so dangerous being outside yourself for
a second. It's putting yourself into the power of magic again. Magic
is what I've fled from. And you know, Mr. Lorne, real men don't have
souls. They have bodies, and they know about stocks and shares and how
to offer another fellow a gin-and-bitters and how to tie a bow
tie--but they haven't got souls. It's _real men_ I want to be like--not
dangerous evangelists of magic like yourself...."

"You're more heathen," said Mr. Lorne sombrely, "than all the four
hundred million Chinese put together."

"Oh I'm glad you think that," cried Clifford. "I'm glad I strike you
as being heathen. Looking for wisdom has made a heathen out of me--and
that's a step towards reality. I have not been corrupted after all,
then, by having you for a neighbour. Some day I shall be wise. But you
will never be wise--you are locked away in your magic soul--locked
away from human wisdom. Even your face is big and flat, like the
locked door of a safe."

"Oh come now--that's rude," said Edna. "I think Mr. Lorne has got a
very nice face. Don't you pay any attention to what he says, Mr.
Lorne."

Clifford lost interest suddenly. He had just noticed Edna's flat
didactic voice for the first time. He slammed the little book with
finality, as though it were a door, and stepped off the verandah into
the fine plaited shadows of the bamboos.

He walked away to the echo of his own voice. He was proud of talking
as a man with a man. He thought that that was how stockbrokers talked
in the Shanghai Club. "No fairy could talk like that," he thought. But
the talk was over. There was silence in the grove. He stood still and
realised nervously the silence of himself. "Am I still here--in my
body?" he asked aloud. He listened to the ticking of the watch on his
wrist. He looked behind him. Framed in a little starry frame of bamboo
leaves, he could see Mr. Lorne's distant flat grave face turned
towards him. "He's putting a spell on me. He can see me. He's wishing
a soul into me. His God is reaching out for me...." He was full of
strange fear, and he could hear quite clearly Mr. Lorne's voice saying
to Edna, "He who would save his soul must lose it." ... "That means
losing yourself," whispered Clifford. "I am losing my dear
self...." He felt himself melting away in the spreading scent of the
roses. He could hear the air all singing with comfortable busy voices.
In front of him, in a little clearing, a bee spurned the head of a
columbine and set the flower swinging. The columbine swayed and swayed,
and above it all the leaves of the bamboos began swinging and swaying as
though the springing bee had released a million pendulums. Clifford's
eyes followed the swinging. The inexorable rhythm of the world
suddenly caught him and made him swing and sway on his feet. He could
hear the bees' music. His thoughts sank in greenness and in humming.
"I knew it would come," he said, but he could not hear his own voice.
He was deaf and yet he could hear all the songs of the world. He was
blind and yet saw with a million eyes all the splinters of bright sky
between the bamboo leaves. He was dumb and yet had a million
voices--all the voices of the crackling growing grasses. He, who had never
taught his great body to dance, was one with a horde of dancers; all
his thoughts danced separately, bowing to the blades of the grasses,
hand in hand with the columbines. All his thoughts were bees, humming
and dancing, all his thoughts were green stars and crackling air. He
was a cloud in the sky, a leaf in the grove; he was a note of music.
For a second all the wind was music and all the grasses bowed under
the advancing feet of an army of the changeling's kinsmen.

"Listen," said Mr. Lorne to Edna in the Mission garden.

"What to?" asked Edna.

Mr. Lorne started and looked at her a little wildly. "There was a
strange hush then," he said in his dull voice. "It was almost as if
God spoke."

Edna sighed--not because she felt puzzled, but simply because of the
feeling of rest in the garden. She tried to find an opening for more
interesting talk. "How many brothers and sisters have you got, Mr.
Lorne?" she began, when she felt that a sufficient pause had followed
the name of God.

Mr. Lorne only answered with an ambiguous murmur. His mind was like a
bird flying over a shoreless sea. He was sustained forever between
cloud and cloud; he had no knowledge of weariness or of rest or of the
dull soil. He was unknown to himself; he was a lost explorer in the
airy continent of God. Everything that he did was done in ecstasy, in
effort and in humility. He had nothing to compare himself with except
God, no mirror but the high lonely sky.

"Well, I must be moving along," said Edna at last. "I wish I didn't
have to. I'm bound to say you're the only person that ever made me
want to be religious. Of course I'm Church of England and all that.
St. Mary's, we used to go to ... Reverend Stevens. But you're
somethink different. I wish every one was more like you. But a
person's got to earn her bread, hasn't she?"

"That depends," said Mr. Lorne.

"What d'you mean--_that defends_? One's got to live...."

"That depends," said Mr. Lorne.

"Now that's carrying things a bit too far. It doesn't depend at all,"
said Edna, a little affronted. "If you mean to cast aspersions, I can
tell you, I've always kept straight."

"Only God can make paths straight," said Mr. Lorne. "If you haven't
found God, you don't know what straightness is."

"I tell you----" began Edna, but Mr. Lorne suddenly went into the
house.

Edna walked along the track under the young bamboos. A shimmer of thin
green trunks was on her right and on her left. There was a sound of
music from behind the screened turn of the path. A coolie with a
banner came round the corner. He was dressed in torn and humble blue
cotton and had a hungry and senseless face. He carried the dirty
triangular banner awry in the crook of his arm. Behind him came
another coolie, tapping a gong desultorily, and after him three more
men playing a recurring succession of six notes on thin pipes. There
were more banners, carried before a village palanquin that was borne
by four men. Within the palanquin was the bridegroom, a boy of perhaps
fifteen years old. His invisible bride was carried behind him,
imprisoned in a closed scarlet chair, and her chair was made foolish
and glorious with tassels, paper roses, festoons, spangles and crudely
painted panels.

"Well I never ... how these Chinks do carry on!"

A buffalo, ridden by a very little boy, plodded slowly in the wake of
the procession. The buffalo's great ugly barrel of a body was all
jewelled with the grains of sunlight that sifted through the woven
fine leaves. Edna did not trust buffaloes, but she trusted to the
wisdom and authority of the little boy. The buffalo lifted up and put
down its great splay hoofs very deliberately. It had large oily eyes
and a large oily nose. The tuft of hair on its brow was neatly parted
by Providence; its enormous horns were measured off in ridges, as were
the bamboo stems. The horns were wider than the path and Edna saw
that, however skilful a steersman the little boy might be, there would
be no room for herself and the buffalo on the path. She could hardly
expect a creature with a six-foot yoke of solid horn across its head
to turn aside into the thick springing grove. So Edna herself turned
aside. The damp tangled grass whipped her ankles through her thin silk
stockings. She stroked the glazed green skin of the straight
tree-stems with her hands, as though coaxing them to make way for her.

A green aisle in the grove seemed to open before her, beckoning her
attention to something. At the end of a fortuitous perspective she saw
something. She combed the grass with her feet as she pressed forward
to examine something unexpected.

Here was, it seemed, the scene of a battle. A khaki sock, bent double
over a high twig, a tweed coat, looking broken-backed across a stump,
a white shirt all spotted with the vague marks of small feet, crumpled
aertex underclothes stained with grass, a dotted tie and a pair of
steelrimmed spectacles mixed up with a group of columbines.

"Well I never!" said Edna aloud.

She stared for a moment and then thought, "Well ... if Mr. Cotton
hasn't gone in bathing somewhere."  She looked about guiltily, ready
to avert chaste eyes at a second's notice. The grove gleamed on all
sides, straight green cords strung between flat green grass and a
tufted green ceiling. She could see no dell that might conceal a pool
of water and a naked printer. The grove had almost the transparency of
green rain--it could surely hide nothing more substantial than a
fairy. A hole in the ground, which in England would have been a rabbit
hole, allowed one leg of a limp pair of tweed trousers to be seen.

"Well I never!" said Edna again. In some confusion she decided that
perhaps the mystery was best not enquired into by a lady. Yet she
could not help feeling intensely curious. She turned her face towards
the hospital and Milady. But as she walked her mind was teased by
surmises. "What_ever_ can it mean?" she asked herself again and again.
Her face wore a more deeply thoughtful look than it had worn when she
had expressed a craving for religion. "He couldn't have gone in
bathing--there wasn't any water.... Why_ever_ should he take off
every stitch and go right away? Even his aertexes were there ... and
he wasn't hiding--there wasn't anything big enough to hide
behind.... Some funny doings at the crossroads tonight, as the saying
goes.... It's downright vulgar of me to bother ... no affair of
mine ... live and let live ... but why_ever_ ..." etc. etc.

At the edge of the grove Chang Chu-lien was trying to learn to ride a
bicycle. His robe was hitched precariously up to his waist, showing
striped blue and white cotton trousers which trembled with endeavour
and discouragement. His black skull cap was pushed across his shaven
skull towards one ear. When he saw Edna, he fell off rather neatly on
one leg and, after disentangling the other from the bicycle, bowed to
her.

"So you've got cycles in China!" said Edna. "Just fancy! Getting quite
up to date, aren't you ..."

Chang Chu-lien bowed in a gratified way. "I have not yet learnt very
thoroughly to ride bicycle. I fall upon road frequently but not so
frequently as formerly."

"If you don't succeed at first," said Edna, "Try, try, try again."

Chang Chu-lien joined in the Try, try, try again. It was one of the
texts he had committed to memory at mission school. He was always glad
when he could put his education to a social use. "Are you bicycle
expert?" he asked happily.

"Well, I've done a goodish bit of cycling," answered Edna, but she did
not tell him about her ride from Croydon to Rochester, because she was
thinking of her discovery in the grove. "Mr. Julian, I've found such a
funny thing..."

Chang Chu-lien cautiously prepared himself to laugh. One never knew
what foreigners would call funny. But one could always watch their
faces and be ready.

"Well now ... I hardly like to tell you ... I've found a heap of
things.... Do you know where Mr. Cotton is?"

"I think he has gone dancing," said Chang Chu-lien. "A short time ago
I heard him leaping here and there amidst the trees with loud songs."

"Leaping? Dancing?" echoed Edna in a loud desperate voice.

"Perhaps I mistake," added Chang Chulien. "I have not had opportunity
to become familiar with many of the games of English gentlemen.
Bicycle I know and golf I have seen, but there are numberless British
methods to take exercise and skill which I do not understand. The
foxtrot ... the cricket ... the steeplechasing...."

"Singing and leaping!" interrupted Edna. "Well I never!  The plot
thickens, as they say. Do you think Mr. Cotton is cracked?"

"Who should crack him?" asked Chang Chu-lien anxiously. "It is certain
there are no robbers in Kan Lu Pa...."

"Nothing is certain in this wicked world," said Edna. "It's my belief
that that's what's happened, but I didn't like to mention it until you
suggested it. He's been attacked and robbed. All his clothes are torn
and thrown about there in the wood. He's been kidnapped. That was his
shouts for help that you heard. I'll hop across to his wife and see if
they know anything there. And if there's anything wrong, I'd better go
and tell Mr. Diamond all I know."

Chang Chu-lien watched her go with a confused look on his amiable
face. Then he thoughtfully seated himself on his machine and steered
it in wild curves towards the police station.

The curves became wilder as he found himself approaching the doctor
and Milady.

"Whither away, sonny?" screamed Milady as she and the doctor sprang
apart to avoid being run over. "You look like a cat running after its
own tail."

"I am going to the police," replied Chang Chu-lien, as he fell off
once more on one leg. "It is probable that murder has been committed.
Or at least kidnapping outrage."

"Murder!" shouted the doctor and Milady in enlivened voices.

"Or possibly suicide," added Chang Chulien. "Mr. Cotton is the
misfortunate victim."




CHAPTER IX

    Who now is her host?
    Who now is her king?
    She is drowned,
    She is drowned in a ring
    Of green stars. A round
    Ripple of stars crowns her brow.
          But oh--be forgotten now--
          Ghost--ghost--
          Be forgotten now--


Daley, sitting crying in her pavilion, had watched the Chinese wedding
go by. She had seen the little bridegroom's face, tense with the
consciousness of pomp, propped above stiff silk robes. And in all her
confusion and sorrow, Daley had time to regret the fact that the
procession was so inadequately pompous, that the banners were carried
askew, that the music brayed like asses, and that a mud-encrusted
buffalo, slobbering sadly, made the bright palanquin of the hidden
bride ridiculous by its close pursuit. These things were real
blasphemies, offences against rare secret glory.

Daley welcomed the procession because it saved her from tears for a
few moments. She sought other saviours. How many beads were there on
the chain round her neck? Seventy-three. How many joss-sticks were
smoking in the cindery bowl beside her? Eighteen. How many different
sounds were to be heard in the humming afternoon air? Flies--a dog
barking--the wind in the barley--the chuckling voice of water running
from one rice-field into another--the fading sound of the wedding
music--the coming sound of footsteps....

Liu Sao-shing, the Chinese landlord, almost passed the pavilion
without looking into it. It was not his habit to look at
gods--certainly not at broken gods. But the bright colour of Daley's
smock caught his averted eye. He looked round.

"Mrs. Cotton," he said. "I went to see Mr. Cotton, but he is not at
his house."

He looked at her tearworn face much more fixedly than he ever looked
at it when it was calm and ready to be looked at. "You have some
illness of the eye?" he asked coldly.

"No," said Daley. "I have been crying."

Liu Sao-shing snuffled loudly and then said, "I wished to tell Mr.
Cotton that in my opinions I am not called upon to mend the roof over
his printing press. The shaking of his machine has destroyed the
plaster. It is not I who destroy plasters on my own properties."

"No," said Daley.

"Chinese houses," continued Liu Sao-shing, "are made of light
materials; for Chinese persons this is strong enough. My properties is
Chinese properties, and if foreigners put foreign machines in my
properties, the responsibility of damages is not mine."

"No," said Daley. She looked at his quiet pale face. She thought she
could not bear it if he spoke again. His mind seemed as far off as a
fairy's mind.

"A framework of bamboo----" began Liu Sao-shing, but Daley interrupted
him.

"Please, Mr. Liu, don't talk of these hard things to me now.... Dear
Mr. Liu, can't you see I'm distracted--can't you see I'm in tears?"

How humiliating, to knock with grief upon the door of that calm
far-away heart. She was shocked at herself. The broken god behind her
had gentler eyes than Liu Sao-shing. The god's eyes had the saving
grace of slight hysteria. It was not humiliating to grieve before
him--though he was a kind of fairy too.

"I regret that you have troubles," said Liu Sao-shing, but he did not
go away because he wanted to make his point about the plaster really
clear.

"Why are you Chinese so far away from us?" asked Daley. "Haven't you
tears like we have? Aren't there things you can't bear?"

"We do not know the hearts of foreigners," said Liu Sao-shing. "We do
not wish to know. I went to mission school, not to learn foreign
hearts but to learn foreign language. I learnt foreign language not to
be friend of foreigners but to be business equal of foreigners.
Chinese and foreign should not have sympathy to each other. Foreigners
brought business thoughts to China--not friendship thoughts. Patriotic
Chinese shall give business back--never friendship."

"Everything seems unknown," said Daley in a low broken voice. "What
have I done that I should be lost in unknown things? America's the
only country where people truly love each other and understand each
other, Mr. Liu."

"Americans should stay in America," said Liu Sao-shing.

He stood quietly without fidgeting, without taking his eyes from her
sad face, until he felt that he might, without offending etiquette,
return to the subject of the plaster.

"If you will tell Mr. Cotton that in my opinions the plaster over his
machine must be mended by the Mission," he said, "I shall be oblige.
Then, if rain comes in to wet machine, I shall not have
responsibilities for damages."

Daley made no reply. Liu Sao-shing snuffled and then, saying goodbye
politely, he walked away.

Daley thought, "Comfort can't come out of the horrible old air of this
side of the world." She thought of San Francisco, of the Ferry
Building, the peanut and popcorn stalls, the gay billboards, people
calling one another Sister and Mother and Dearie and Honey.... "People
from these dangerous worlds couldn't know America," she thought.
"Crooked subtle people couldn't find their way along such wunnerful
straight streets as ours."

There are few colours and textures so delicious as those of a
horse-chestnut fresh from its green casket. This was the colour and
texture of an ox which drew a waggon slowly past Daley's shrine. And,
though she was waiting for a comfort more tangible than loveliness, she
looked through her tears at the ox's beautiful skin and happy pensive
auburn face, and felt glad that there was room in cruel China for an
animal so well-to-do. Then she saw that behind the Chinese waggoner
walked Lion.

"Lion--Lion!"

Lion looked round with an almost gasping look of pleasure. It was
plain that this meeting was of the kind that one imagines on happy
sleepless nights but never expects.

"You angel," said Lion. "But you're crying."

"Well, don't let's talk of that now, Lion darling," said Daley. "Is
that your ox? Where were you going with him?"

"I was coming to ask after the invalid, and to bring you a little
present. It's a bit of a tree that I cut down in my compound, and by
accident I found that it burns orange and blue. I don't know why.
Anyway I thought you'd like some for your big fireplace."

"That's lovely of you, kindest of Lions. I simply adore fireworks. How
wunnerful of the tree to have a secret gift like that--that people
only knew of after it was dead."

She had risen without thinking from the stony throne of sorrow which
she had vowed never to leave again. She whistled for Josephine, who
had now returned from her maternal duties. Daley whistled like a boy.
Lion's look of rapture made her feel a little drunk. So much of her
life had been spent in simple delight that she could not all at once
lose her habit of unthinking joy.

The waggon crushed and squelched in front of them over the drowned
ridges and ruts. Freckles of sunlight and shadow slipped across Lion's
face and gave a tremulousness to his expression of triumph. Daley
meant to seek comfort from him, but somehow the fact that he was not
quite so tall as she had remembered made her hesitate. Clifford's
desertion would tear a rent in the warm cloak of approval in which
Lion's eyes enwrapped her. And Lion had nothing more savage than his
love with which to defend her from the cruel world. Her mind sprang
away to something easy to think of and talk of.

"Josephine had four puppies last night. You wouldn't think it to look
at her. Boniface, Pius, Clement and Innocent. Innocent's the girl.
Josephine says--and I think so too--that Innocent's going to be a
really remarkable dog. She has the most original way of sucking--and
she always sleeps in a corner by herself.... How funny to think of an
_always_ that's only fifteen hours long...."

Lion was the only person among Daley's friends in Kan Lu Pa who really
accepted the voices of dogs. He was so appreciative that often
Josephine, Gregory and Cowslip actually spoke aloud in his presence,
in Daley's smallest voice. Daley allowed this, not in a facetious
mood, but simply to express the thoughts which she could so clearly
read in her dogs' eyes. Sometimes the dogs spoke by mistake in the
presence of Clifford or his mother or Mr. Lorne. But Daley always
regretted such aberrations. In the light of the blank surprise of
strangers, the transmitted squeakings of dogs seemed not dignified on
the lips of an American housewife.

"I'll find it very hard to leave those puppies now," said Daley.

"Why--you're not thinking of leaving, are you?" This was unfair. This
was Canada reversed.

"Oh, I must, I must.... Oh Lion, I'm in such trouble. Clifford doesn't
love me any more. He's fallen in love with Lena and--oh Lion--she
isn't half as nice as me...." She was crying again, thinking naively
how nice she was.

"The scoundrel," said Lion in the traditional cramped bass voice. "But
surely it's a mistake. _Clifford_! ... What makes you think so, Daley?"

With tears hanging in her eyes, Daley suddenly almost laughed. "What
makes me think so?" Evidently there never had been another husband
like Clifford. With ordinary husbands, thinkings and hopings and
doubtings were to be presumed--shadowings and spyings and excuses.
Real husbands lied, and deserved to be put across Mr. Ridley's knee
and well spanked. But Clifford never lied; he made everything very
clear and crude and turned his spectacles towards you to see if you
completely understood. "What makes you think so?" That was what the
wise motherly Mentor of the Heart-to-heart Column of the _Woman's
Helpful Friend_ would have asked. How bald would a true answer look in
the Heart-to-heart Column. The Love Mentor would probably go out of
business. Wise tenderness and Ridley sanity alike were out of place in
this bewitched Cotton family. This was what happened if one left the
land of Helpful Friends and came to live among the fantastic and
stonyhearted.

"Why," said Daley, "he told me so."

"But ... it's fantastic...."

"It is. It is. That's just what's so dreadful about it." She added
after a moment, "It's so fantastic that perhaps it'll over-reach
itself. Perhaps he'll be so fantastic as to love me soon again."

"There's always a chance that Lena will die," said Lion, and ground
his teeth. This shocked Daley a good deal, because the possibility had
crossed her own mind several times.

"Oh Lion, don't talk like that."

"Why not? We have to hope for the downfall of enemies if we are human.
And if we are honest we ought to admit it. I know I've often wanted
every man who looked kindly at you to die the next minute."

"Oh don't, Lion. I'd be absolutely miserable with no one looking at
me," said Daley, as she skipped along thinking of kind looks. Her
tears were almost dry.

"If I could put an end to Lena without being legally guilty of
murder," said Lion judicially, "I'd do it without thinking twice about
it." If he had been in the company of unloved friends he would have
talked for some time like a little Nietzsche. But somehow he could not
feel himself quite interesting enough to talk like that in the
presence of Daley. "In fact," he added pensively, "I don't suppose I'd
have to think more than about four times before I'd commit real
murder--for you, Daley...."

"Oh surely you'd feel a little prick of pity...."

"Not a prick," he said firmly and proudly. For a moment they were both
fancying the heroic murder done. Lion--manly fellow--sought no
applause. Daley felt illogical womanly regrets. "Poor Lena--her head
has lain on my best guest-pillows--the ones Mrs. Ridley embroidered
daisies on the corners of...."

"I couldn't get away from pity," she said aloud. "I'm eaten up with
pity, nearly always ... even for beetles ... and the ricksha men you
don't hire ... and tyrants and things.... It's a sort of
tenderheartedness that lives quite apart from love. If Lena was in
terror of death, I'd put my own terrors into her.... I couldn't help
it.... Exactly like spiders.... Of course a spider when it falls into
the bath doesn't really say to itself--'My God--is there no hope then,
does my nice warm life end here? Shall I never spin a web or eat a fly
again?' But my thoughts are thinking for it--my words are in its
mouth--can't keep my thoughts and my words where they belong. In my
mind the spider is praying in agony.... And so, though I hate spiders,
I have to put in my shrinking finger and let it crawl out of the
water. And it says in my thoughts,--'So God _does_ answer prayer,
after all. Mother was right.'"

Lion said, "And I dare say that _is_ how God answers prayer--just if
He happens to notice. I dare say His finger shrinks just as yours
does, as we crawl wetly out of our dangers. But we puff ourselves out
and get dry and proud and flatter ourselves He loves us and has
preserved us for a special purpose, as we begin to spin our webs
again. And then perhaps the next minute the feather broom sweeps
everything away. God's hand is not outstretched to us that time, so we
curse Him and die...."

"Oh that's cynicism, Lion," said Daley with distaste and awe. "You
mustn't start being cynical or, as a good American, I'll not have
anything to do with you. Queer, about cynicism.... Every one except
Americans seems to be content to have the world sad and bad and not do
anything about it. Americans don't waste time being cynical--they
start to make the world better. Think of all the inspiring messages
flying about in the air of America--all the deep helpful thoughts
about theosophy and the message of the Great War to future generations
and psycho-analysis and Rabindranath Tagore and how one can bring the
spirit of Jesus into business. I think it's just fine that deep
constructive thinking should be so popular--the favourite indoor sport
of a great country like America.... Your European way of just sitting
back and registering cynicism is such an _easy_ way; Americans are
strenuous people and they despise easy ways. Not _me_, of
course.... I've lost the knack of high helpful thinking. I think about
insects and dogs and what it would feel like to be a queen ... or a
dipsomaniac ... or a sea-anemone when a big wave's coming.... Nobody
ever expects high thinking of me in England or China, so I've grown
rather silly, like a real English wife...."

"But Daley darling, American popular high thinking so often _is_ the
easy way, the short cut. These inspiring messages are really short
cuts to an appearance of thinking for the busy house-wife--not to real
thinking. Like the advertisements in your magazines about a man who
wanted to seem as if he had read widely in order to be a success at
dinner-parties, so--instead of actually reading widely--he swotted up
Somebody or Other's Mammoth Hotch-potch of the world's masterpieces
and was a great social success.... People who think for themselves get
cynical, because they have to take the rough thinking with the smooth,
so to speak. Your kind of high thinking is like a patent food
sweetened and prepared for the weakest digestion. Far better to think
about queens and sea-anemones as you do, bless you.... I'm so glad
you've lost the knack of high helpful thinking...."

"Oh I've lost everything good and American," said Daley bitterly,
"since I married a fairy. And now ... if he's left me ... I've lost
both my old soul and my new...."

Lion took her hand in his and they walked thus, linked together, in
the light shade of the bamboos.

Josephine fitted her nose like a cork into a mousehole. She blew down
the hole, perhaps to asphyxiate the mouse, and then inhaled deeply.
She wagged her tail, showing that she was confident that the mouse
would be caught by this method, would swoon and be sucked by her
strong upward snuffling to the mouth of the hole, as lemonade is
sucked up a straw. "If only dogs knew a little more natural
science ..." thought Daley vaguely with half her mind. "But then the
world would be impossible for mice."

There was a long silence. Lion could not quite understand it, but he
felt it to be tragic and--not, of course, connecting it with
mice--acquiesced in it with a sore heart.

As they passed the gate of Mr. Diamond's compound, Daley shook her
head, gave a quick sigh and stood still. "I want to go and tell Mr.
Diamond...."

"Tell him what?" asked Lion, stung.

"I can't rest," said Daley slowly, "till I feel a little more
comforted. I----"

"Oh Daley--don't I comfort you? Don't you feel how much I love you and
sorrow for you? What could old Diamond say that I can't say? He'd use
smoother words perhaps--he'd pat your hand and talk about your
beautiful eyes...."

"But that's what I want. That's what I want. I don't want to be
loved--I want to be comforted. I want to be told my eyes are
beautiful. I want to be told it isn't my fault that Clifford----" her
voice broke. In a moment she added, "And I want him to help me to
go home.... It's a consul's business--isn't it?--to help
travellers who are lost to go home. I must--I must go back to
America--quickly--before my heart breaks.... I want to be safe again,
and good again, and to understand the things that happen to me. I want
to be where people never sneer. Oh Lion, all the time there's a picture
in my mind of a straight boulevard, all gay with billboards on both
sides--billboards that screen it from the horrible unknown mountains--a
boulevard so straight you can see to the end of it--and there are
darling vulgar movie palaces at the end...."

And in that instant, the whole aspect of Canada changed in Lion's
secret sight. Canada, the sanctuary from the cruel beloved, the refuge
where the pain of a broken heart was deadened by a drug distilled from
the sweat of an honest brow--Canada was transformed. Here in its place
was a Canada spread out like a magic carpet for the feet of lovers, a
scene set for a great romance. The leaden sun of Canada was turned to
gold. The garment of Canada was changed, as the garment of a room is
changed when the lights are lit.

"But come with me, Daley darling.... I'll take you where you want to
go.... I'll take you to a happy country--movies or mountains--you
shall choose. I've got my savings. I'll work for you. I'll love
you----"

"But I don't want love," insisted Daley. "I've got love. I'm nearly
dead of love. I want friends--hundreds and hundreds of friends--the
kind that laugh and send each other flowers and read nice magazines
and help wash up the plates after supper and know each other's hearts.
I was happy in America where I was allowed to understand things and
feel good--and if I can get back to America I'll understand again and
love goodness again--and then I shall be comforted. I want all this
horror explained away. I want some one to say--'It was this way--it
was that way--it was a joke--it was quite a normal thing that might
have happened even in America--do this or do that, Daley, and you can
easily be happy again....' Mr. Diamond'll help me to get
comforted--once he knows my pain. He's so wise. I must see him. D'you
want to wait for me a little while, Lion darling, or d'you think I'm
not worth waiting for?"

"I could never think that," said Lion in a low voice. "Wherever you
go, you can be sure always that I shall be waiting for you."

As Daley ran up Mr. Diamond's path, Lion stood outside the gate
soundlessly rehearsing a few tense and devoted phrases. His heart
swelled with love. His eyes were surveying his new kingdom of Canada.
The new Canada in his mild imagination still showed the same fixtures
as the old, still disclosed that scene furnished with a long trail
laid towards snowy mountains, with high dark pine forests to the right
and long pale prairies to the left. The scene had long been haunted by
a ghost of his sad lone self, a ghost crushed with unattainable love,
a brave celibate ghost, who should be the champion of all lost
causes.... But now along that track between forest and prairie, he and
Daley rode towards the mountains, home from the movies in the gay
little lighted town that Daley had added to Canada in a breath--home
to a log cabin--home to a bright fire and glinting rustic furnishings,
enclosed by rough but airtight walls built by Lion's strong arm--home
to a supper of wild venison eaten on a gate-legged table with a bowl
of wild flowers in the middle--home to endless intimate improving
talks on modern politics. And then--the thought of Canadian bedtime
one reserved till bedtime. It was too ecstatic a thought to be
entertained under the silly sun.

Lion's ear, attuned to the low sounds of a dream, was brought back
suddenly to China by the sound of some large body moving clumsily
about in the bamboo grove at a little distance. The noise made him
vaguely uneasy. Somehow the blundering haste of the tread suggested
the haste of a fugitive. But he could hear no pursuer.

As he listened he heard Daley's quick step in Mr. Diamond's garden,
and she came out looking a little crestfallen.

"He's not there," she said.

The sunlight over Daley's home seemed to be coloured by misery as she
saw again the familiar curved roof. The roof seemed to sag a little
and was the colour of a dead leaf--a forgotten leaf with winter
hanging over it.

"What is Lion, after all? What is Mr. Diamond, after all? What is
America, after all? There is no comfort anywhere in the world." She
wanted nothing but the large hard glorious Clifford. She remembered
his strong hair, his love of oatmeal porridge, his meditative way of
looking at himself in the mirror in the morning, as he put on his
unsuccessful clothes. She remembered his loud exaggerated yawns in the
evening--"Hee--ha--haw--ya," deliberately loud, intended as a
blusterous hint, as a happy introduction of the happy night. "He'd be
very gentle with Lena in everything," thought Daley. "Always
careful--never easy. In all that he says and does now, he must never be
rough or vulgar or coarse or natural.... He was never careful with
me"--she flushed with pride--"I was his kind--I was strong and rather
vulgar ... he could never hurt me while he still loved me. Yes--there
was only one way he could hurt me, and that's the way he's chosen...." The
thought of his gross strength wrung her heart; she remembered his
great leather bedroom slippers beside her bed, his discordant
rapturous snorting in his bath, his hairy arms and breast.... Every
other man was after all an enemy--because he was not Clifford.

She was startled by Lion's loud voice beside her. "Oh, look--oh
look ..."

She looked first at Lion and was held for a second by his shocked
astonished face. "Lion would be a terribly careful lover," she
thought. Then she said, "Look what at?" She turned her face this way
and that way, but she could see nothing except the erratic aisles of
the grove. Sometimes those aisles seemed to lead the whole world to
her home, as though to a universal centre. But to-day all the crooked
avenues seemed to lead away from the house, drawing out of it all
familiar spirits. "What did you see, Lion?"

After a moment's pause Lion replied, "Oh nothing. I thought--but I was
mistaken."

"One of old Mother Cotton's fairies, maybe," said Daley bitterly.

"Probably," said Lion with a careful smile.

He had seen Clifford Cotton running naked through the grove.




CHAPTER X

    With safe shod feet you touch
    The world whereon you pass,
    But to forget the grass
    Is to forget too much.

    Behind your brow your brittle
    And bubble thoughts are blown,
    But to know thoughts alone
    Is to know too little.


Lion was chopping wood. To do so was to-day's interpretation of his
passion for Daley. He would allow no coolie to touch that sacred log.
A Chinese gardener, bare to the waist under a huge varnished straw
hat, hopefully watched the increasing mess of chips from a distance.
To-morrow's rice would be cooked for the gardener's family over those
chips.

The sunlight had become very red. Within the mansion of a pomegranate
tree, bird lodgers were sharing confidential chuckles as they prepared
to sleep. The pale dog Cowslip sat looking rather theatrically pink in
a red ray, watching the wood-chopping with frozen alarm. Anything
unusual appalled Cowslip. On seeing any one walk backwards or sit on a
hat or try to fold up a deck chair, Cowslip would run for miles. Once
when old Mrs. Cotton had had new false teeth and was unable to speak
without whistling, Cowslip had been lost for two days. Mr. Diamond
said that Cowslip's psychology explained the Diehard party.

Lion's arms, as he chopped, were nerved by anger against Clifford. He
felt angry, incredulous and confused. Everything seemed to have
happened suddenly and insanely. Only yesterday, when Lion last came to
remind the Cottons that he had decided to chuck everything and go to
Canada, the family had been perfectly normal. Not that Lion had ever
approved of the tenour that passed for normal in Daley's family. Daley
had never been enough loved; the old mother-in-law was malicious or
mad, Clifford was consistently outrageously rude. All Daley's remarks
were left drowning in pools of cold silence. To Lion she always seemed
to enter rooms with a bright light in her eyes and a song on her
lips--and always, after a moment in the presence of her husband and
his mother, the light was veiled and the song was stilled. She had
become used to expecting nothing. Even to be answered seemed to
delight her. Still, though it was heartrending, it was certainly
normal. It is perfectly normal for husbands to be unworthy of lovely
wives. Lion always believed that some day Clifford would die
painlessly and leave Daley free, after a short but picturesque
widowhood, to marry Lion. Short of this consummation, Lion had
hitherto harboured no hopes. His Respect for Womanhood was too strong.
And he had really been very happy politely wishing that Clifford were
dead and dreaming of Daley at night. But now all kinds of rebellions
and rude hopes were in his mind. He had a pain of bewilderment in his
throat. Daley deserted and in tears.... Clifford prancing naked about
the grove ... consular funds to transport the beloved to
America--these dangerous symptoms seemed to elude diagnosis by Lion's
tragic optimism. As he chopped, he reconstructed in his memory his
outrageous glimpse of Clifford. No reason for Clifford's behaviour
suggested itself to Lion, but at least, whatever the reason was, one
could be sure that it was an exceedingly ungentlemanly one. Probably
some nameless decadent orgy. And yet decadent orgies did not seem to fit
into the same thought as Clifford. Clifford's appetites were so
obviously healthy. Nothing nameless could appeal to Clifford--he liked
names so much. And besides, he was so proud of his clothes. He was
always showing people how all the buttons at the wrists of his
coatsleeves really undid. "Some people's are fakes," Clifford had once
told Lion. "I know, because I once asked a man in the Peak Tram in
Hongkong if his undid too, and they didn't." It was indeed just
conceivable that Clifford had simply taken off his clothes in the
grove for the pleasure of putting them on again. And yet it was
unlikely, since, to Clifford, the conventions were so very important.
His friends were never allowed to forget his hero and model, the
Shanghai bank manager. Perhaps, thought Lion, Clifford had actually
gone mad. The doctor had several times hinted to Lion--as one admirer
of Daley's to another--that he didn't like the look of things in the
Cotton family--that there was latent insanity somewhere. But Lion,
though he disliked Clifford, could never really believe that he was
mad. Mad people believed that they were the King of Israel or a
hardboiled egg or the victim of a gunpowder plot. But Clifford's one
obsession was ordinariness. This seemed to Lion to point to an almost
excessive sanity.

But--naked in the forest.... Where was the Shanghai bank manager now?

The dog Cowslip gave a little squeak and sprang aside as though he had
sat upon a thorn. Lion, looking up, saw Lena huddled in the
window-seat of her room, quite close to him, looking sombrely out.

"Was it your voice that cried, 'Oh look--oh look'--half an hour ago?"

"May have been," mumbled Lion. He looked at his chopper and felt
rather foolish as he remembered his homicidal boastings. Funny how
inconceivable killing was.... Yet sinners are so soft and choppers so
hard. Something beside morality, chivalry and fear protected the soft
skins of men and women from the blades of choppers. He felt more at
ease with Lena now he knew that she was frail, that she could make
Daley cry and that she deserved death. But unluckily Lena could not
take advantage of this increased ease. She felt no need to be
promiscuously womanly now. Yet she looked at him with some pleasure.
He was stroking his little moustache and looking at her with a wan
earnest look. She thought that his face was full of goodness and high
principles. He was bravely judging the world, yet he would be too
polite to punish wickedness with that chopper of his. The
high-principled, she thought, were really in an awkward position.
Goodness restrained them from logically justifying their goodness.

"What were you Oh-look-oh-looking at?" she asked.

"I forget.... Some little unexpected thing I saw beneath the trees."

"Your cry woke me up--and seemed terribly urgent to me," said Lena.
"If you don't tell me what you saw, I shall imagine worse and worse."
Her dreams were still humming in her head.

Lion plaited blades of grass most carefully between his fingers. "You
see," he said with a little difficulty, "I don't much care what you
imagine."

He was not used to being rude. He felt that he was somehow protecting
Daley, yet a pulse of nervousness beat in his throat. It was no use
pretending to be a little Nietzsche when it came to the point.

Lena flushed. As a rule her obvious fragility and sadness protected
her from brutality as it protected her from tenderness. For a moment
she almost said something spontaneously appealing, but she checked
herself. "I suppose Daley has been enlisting your chivalrous
sympathies," she said. "And I am sure they were willing recruits."

Lion bent his face lower towards his fidgeting fingers and the blades
of grass. "Oh I know you think me a sentimental kind of an ass," he
said. "Perhaps I am." He thought, "Why am I so damn humble?" He
reminded himself of his triumphs in the world of men. He remembered
Rollo Fane, the "Greatest Economic Expert of Our Generation," hitting
him robustly on the shoulder-blade and saying, "By Jove, young man, if
there were more like you ...!" He remembered a young woman who took a
minor part in a repertory company in Leeds. She said once, "You're the
kind of man whom women'll always listen to, whatever you
say.... Something _strong_ and _compelling_...." He drew himself up and
put on an independent magnetic look, as he said to Lena, "But one thing is
very clear to me, and that is that Daley needs protection just now.
She is suffering from a kind of invasion of malice and queerness."

"She doesn't need protection from me," said Lena, thinking a glowing
thought of Daley's face. "It's my being queer that protects her from
me. If I was an everyday tart, she'd have no chance at all."

Lion felt embarrassed and full of hatred. "After all," he thought,
"she can't establish any actual superiority, she has no right to say
things one can't answer." Aloud he said, "It seems to me a damn shame
that queer things should be able to break the heart of a sweet normal
thing like Daley." There were tears somewhere behind his eyes, but
luckily, he thought, Lena could not see them.

"Oh don't worry, she'll score in the end," said Lena. "No sweet and
normal thing ever really suffers more than it can bear. Rings on her
fingers and bells on her toes--she shall have music wherever she
goes.... No, Lion, rather pity the queer. They must wake to another
kind of music."

Lion stiffened. Appeals for sympathy from women who were not Daley
seemed to him fatiguing and even disgusting, at the moment. "I dare
say you're right," he said vaguely and his eyes wandered about. He was
all tense, all ready to answer one appeal--and one only. He had always
dreamed that some day Daley would cry to him with tears, "Oh save me,
Lion, save me." And he would call, "I'm here, Daley...." The thought
of tears in her eyes intoxicated him with a sort of glorious poison.
His throat became rigid with delight at the thought. "Oh save me,
Lion, save me...." It was a thing he would die to hear her say. His
ecstasy was checked as he remembered that unfortunately she said it
quite often. It was one of her expressions. When the lamp smoked
badly, or when her hair was caught in a bramble, or when Gregory the
puppy relieved nature on the drawingroom floor just as the Chinese
Magistrate was announced--again it was, "Oh save me, Lion, save
me...." She took in vain the darling cry that he had consecrated to
her. Such sweet blasphemies were part of her, he knew; nevertheless
they did prick his precarious and essential dignity as a lover.

Lena did not know how tiresome to him was the sound of her sad voice.
"Oh," she said, "how delightful it must be to be sweet and normal, and
be under the protection of God and man."

"You see," said Lion with another effort, "I love Daley. She's a
creature made to be loved. And love--er--gives a man wisdom and all
that.... I'm convinced that, whatever may have happened within the
last twenty-four hours, Clifford Cotton loves her too. The _man_ in
him must love her----"

"Certainly the _man_ in a man couldn't love me," admitted Lena. "Only
the queerness--the fairy--in a man could love me."

"I'm not talking about you," persisted Lion. "I don't know about your
affairs and--excuse me--I don't very much want to. Except in so far as
they affect Daley's happiness."

"Well, if you are right," said Lena slowly, "I have reason to believe
there is more fairy than man in Clifford Cotton...."

"It seems there is--for the moment," said Lion bitterly. "If it's any
satisfaction to you to know that you've seduced a beastly
will-o'-the-wisp from his marriage vows--you're welcome to it."

"It is," said Lena. "Quite a lot of satisfaction. Even a
will-o'-the-wisp is something...."

"Then go and catch him and take him to the devil where he belongs,"
shouted Lion. "You'll find him in the wood. I wish you joy of him.
It's more than any decent woman could expect of him...."

Lena put her face on her arms and began to cry. "Oh what a cruel
thing," she cried amid hoarse dry sobs. "What a cruel thing love
is...."

Lion was so suddenly repentant that he was almost giddy. He knelt
outside her low window, stroking her arm, stroking her hair. "I'm a
brute--I'm a brute," he stammered. "It's because I'm so unhappy myself
that I'm a brute. I wish love hadn't been cruel to you...." He felt
almost joyful when she sobbed no more. "I really am sorry," he said
again and again. "I really am sorry for you, Lena. I'd help you if I
could. But please, please keep away from Clifford Cotton. He's such
easy game because he's so queer--but you'll get nothing out of him but
queerness. Get away from here and find a real love. Take the advice of
a pal, Lena, and get away from here...."

Lena lifted up her face. Her eyes were dry. She was
laughing--"Fff-ff...." And as Lion stood up outraged, they heard steps
outside the garden gate. Lena drew herself up and went back from the
window. Lion chopped wood with renewed savagery. He felt sick with
anger and unhappiness.

"Women really are either Daley or else they're devils," he thought. He
felt obliged to picture again the pleasing scene with Rollo Fane, the
Great Economic Expert. "By Jove, young man, if there were more like
you...." Lion chopped wood more manfully.

Mr. Diamond's voice interrupted him. "Splendid, splendid, splendid,"
said Mr. Diamond looking at him thoughtfully. "I _love_ energy. You're
always full of beans, old man. I _love_ bea--I mean I _love_ energy."
He was rubbing the back of his neck with a look of uncertainty
unnatural to him. Behind him, like secretly rebellious sheep behind a
sheepdog, stood Milady, Edna, the doctor and Chang Chu-lien.

"Shall I find Daley here?" asked Mr. Diamond. "I want to ask her if
she knows anything about the truth of these extraordinary rumours. But
I don't want her frightened. Certainly not. Certtainly nott. I want
you all to promise me to say nothing whatever about the matter, if you
see her."

"She's on the terrace," said Lion. "I know she wants to speak to you.
She's been looking for you."

Mr. Diamond stepped quickly away saying, "Give me a few minutes alone
with her, will you." The dog Cowslip followed him, wrinkling his nose
snobbishly at Chang Chu-lien. Cowslip was an imperialist and thought
that natives of any Asiatic state should not be admitted to Nordic
circles on terms of social equality. To him all Chinese were equally
toothworthy.

"Oh my dear, such goings on!" said Milady. "How much does the poor
soul know, I wonder...."

"What goings on? What poor soul?" asked Lion.

"Why, the widow."

"Oh get along, Milady, do," said Edna. "You do run on so."

"Better run on than never get a move on at all," retorted Milady.

"But whose widow? What are you talking about?" asked Lion.

"Clifford Cotton's widow," said Milady, Edna and Chang Chu-lien all
together.

"Haven't you heard?" continued Milady. "He's committed suicide. We've
just taken Mr. Diamond to look at the scene of the crime. The
bloodstained clothes are all over the place----"

"Not bloodstained," said the doctor, who carried the clothes in a neat
pile on his arm. "But all trampled over with muddy little
foot-marks--like rabbits or monkeys, only there are no rabbits or monkeys
here."

"Well, it's not likely your rabbits and monkeys have cut his throat
for him, is it?" exclaimed Milady, embittered by this tiresome
exactness. "And Julian here heard him howling and moaning--"

"I heard him call in loud voice--'Oh death--Oh horror--Oh let me
decease'--" said Chang Chu-lien vivaciously. "At least, I _think_ this
was his very words. At the time I thought it was English song he sang,
but I did not then know seriousness of situation. However, I think no
cause to despair until we find corpse."

Lion suddenly noticed Lena's open window. "Come further away," he
said, waving the chopper in a bewildered way. Thoughts raced like
panicstricken children across his mind and the foremost thought was,
"Have I seen a ghost?" Then he thought. "Anyway, I won't tell these
silly women anything. I'll manoeuvre to get old Diamond and the doctor
alone."

"I think he was kidnapped," said Edna. "A ruffian went by me in a
carrying chair as quick as the coolies could run. And behind him some
more coolies carried another chair that was closed up every chink--and
I thought I heard a moan----"

"Oh that was the wedding of Liu's little cousin," said the doctor. "He
was to be married today. I fixed the little chap's tonsils last year,
so I know."

"Well ..." said Edna doubtfully. "That's as may be. Anyway I can tell
you one thing--Mr. Cotton's old mother knows something, but she's a
close old party, she won't let on. I saw her standing by her gate. She
was mumbling something about music and I said to her: 'D'you know
where Mr. Cotton is, Mrs. Cotton?' And she said: 'He has been stolen
away.' I said, 'Whatever do you mean, Mrs. Cotton? Has somethink
happened to him?' And she said, 'Oh nothink much,' she said, 'nothing
worse than death. Nothing half so bad as America.' Well, as you may
suppose, I said, 'Well my goodnerce me, Mrs. Cotton, don't talk like
that. Whatever makes you think about death?' But she wouldn't give a
straight answer, she just stammered out something about a
changeling--'The changeling's gone home,' she said."

Mr. Diamond, arriving on Daley's terrace, had found her sitting on a
cushion on the grass in front of the kennel in the attitude of a
child. Her eyes were fixed on the puppies in the kennel and her lips
were moving. The puppies were groping about in an intruding ray of low
light, wimming on their stomachs, wagging their heavy heads. Daley did
not smile, she silently shaped her lips to the futile grumblings and
bewilderments of puppies in a new world. She was the chorus of the
enrapturing drama. Mr. Diamond heard her say, "In a jelly of warmth,
like quails in aspic...."

"Directly I got in," said Mr. Diamond, "I knew you'd been to see me.
Two of my hollyhocks were broken. 'The usual squad of Cotton dogs,' I
said, and my heart was almost as broken as a hollyhock to think
perhaps you'd wanted me and I wasn't there."

"Don't be irreverent, dear Mr. Diamond," said Daley in a restrained
voice. "My dogs aren't talked of in squads. You don't talk of gods in
squads, do you, or of squads of ladies you have loved?"

"There is only one God," said Mr. Diamond, "And only one beloved lady.
And they don't break my hollyhocks."

"You don't understand dogs or gods or ladies either," said Daley.

Mr. Diamond perceived that the necessary smile was not such a broad
one as usual. "She has some suspicion of this affair," he thought, and
he said, "I know a lady who's got trouble on her mind. And I hope
she'll honour the humblest of her admirers by telling him all about it
and letting him do what he can."

He could see that she had been crying, but his sympathy was hampered
by the fact that there was nowhere for him to sit. There was, of
course, the great round world on which Daley was seated, but the world
is no seat for a British Consul. He could not very well sit on the
verandah and shout serene consolation across fifteen yards. Daley
seemed to have no intention of rising and exchanging puppies for
sympathy. Mr. Diamond, after stroking the seat of his white riding
breeches in regretful anticipation, sat down beside her.

Daley was silent for a minute and Mr. Diamond added, "It wouldn't be
friendly not to tell me, Daley. More than anything in the world I
should like to consider myself your trusted friend. That's what I'd
value. Yes, I'd value that."

Daley thought, "Curious--that doesn't really comfort me a bit." She
wanted to cry wildly on his shoulder, but she remembered how tears had
obscurely repelled him this morning and she knew that she must behave
like a perfect lady. "The trouble with my trouble," she said, "is that
there's nothing to be done about it. Clifford doesn't love me any
more. The only thing I can do now is to go back home to America...."

"It would take a lot to make me believe that," said Mr. Diamond.
"Nobody who'd known you and Clifford for the last three years and been
fond of you both could believe that."

"But he says he loves Lena now. He _says_ so, dear Mr. Diamond, and
he--_does_ so...."

Mr. Diamond for about a minute sought for a wise grave elderly thing
to say. To gain time he began, "Now I'm going to talk to you as an old
friend, Daley, as a man about twice your age and a hundred times more
experienced. I think that no women--not even women who have known men
all their lives--not even the most perfect of wives--ever really know
anything about men. Now men, my dear, are very imperfect animals--you
must have noticed it, kind though you are. A man can't live on
perfection--he's essentially imperfect, and he can't. Women are
different. The only imperfect thing about women is that their goodness
blinds them to the imperfections of men. Perhaps we ought to thank God
that it is so. You wouldn't love us if you knew us, my dear. Now
Daley, if you had a doggie that you loved and that loved you, and if
that doggie ran away from you for a day or two and gave itself up to
doggie ways--would you turn it away when it came back? ... Granted that
you'd been a perfect mistress to your doggie--couldn't you forgive him
for not being able to be a perfect doggie to you? Men are animals--you
can't get away from that--you must allow them their share of original
sin. I don't believe there's a man alive--a real man, I mean, a manly
man, with red blood in his veins--who can be faithful in thought all
his life to one woman--even if she's a perfect woman as so many women
are. Men must have their little escapades, if only to prove to
themselves how lucky they are in their wives. Now I'll tell you what I
think. You and Clifford have had some little tiff, and just at the
height of the tiff the name of this dangerous Miss What's-er-name
comes up. And Clifford, being a mere man, says all kinds of things
that he doesn't mean, and you take it all seriously, being what you
are--bless you--as straight as a die and as frank as the day."

"Oh Mr. Diamond," exclaimed Daley; "you're a wunnerful man for making
things sound good. But my trouble won't fit--truly it won't. You see,
Clifford's really been unfaithful to me. We've had no tiff, we've had
a real parting. He's forsaken me."

"Forsaken you!" cried Mr. Diamond, thinking unhappily of the
battle-scene in the grove.

But the word _forsaken_ again seemed to Daley too fatal to leave
unmodified. It sounded too real. _Forsaken_. That would mean that she
was lost indeed, that this drug of comfort that she sought must be but
a temporary ansthetic at the best. _Forsaken_. The word was like the
tolling of a funeral bell in the ears of one who had loved chimes and
peals.

"Well--he's hurt me--he's hurt me--he's hurt me ..." she cried in a
cracked voice. "And he's not come back to comfort me. He isn't sorry.
He doesn't want to comfort me. He said he didn't love me any more and
then he went away."

"He's sulking," said Mr. Diamond bravely. "He's sulking. No, he's
facing it out alone. He has that animal craving to be alone in his
time of weakness. He's ashamed of himself and he's got to get away and
have it out with himself. By God, it's a difficult thing for a man to
come back to his wife and say he's been a cad--but that's what
Clifford's going to do--if I know him--that's what he's nerving
himself to do before he's many hours older. I know men, you see, my
dear; we're all cads, more or less, and every time we realise that, it
hits us pretty hard. But this Miss Thingummy-bob, she's the invalid
pianist, isn't she? What does she say about it all? You've got her
right under your thumb at home, I suppose?"

"Yes, she's too sick to leave my home--but she's not too sick to break
up my happiness...."

"There--you see!" said Mr. Diamond triumphantly. "She's nothing to
him. He's turned his back on her. He's facing it out alone, like the
fine fellow he is. And it's to you that he'll come back, my dear."

"No, he won't come back--to me," said Daley.

Mr. Diamond took no notice of this. "And again," he said. "The whole
thing may be some freak of Clifford's. He can't--come to think of
it--possibly have any serious feeling for a woman he only met last night.
He's a freakish blighter. Always was. Probably wanted to frighten you
as he did once before when he set the wash-house on fire. That _was_ a
foolish freak, if you like. He overdoes his freakishness. Not a doubt
of that. Not a doubt. Nott a doubtt. Nottt----"

"He won't come back," interrupted Daley, "And oh--what is to become of
me--what is to become of me?"

"Now Daley dear--don't become hysterical. Don't lose your sense of
proportion. Think. Thinkk. Even if the worst came to the worst--which
it won't, remember--you must keep your sense of proportion. I don't
know a woman with more resilience--with more independence than you--a
woman more full of vitality and courage and gaiety--a woman with a
life fuller of interests and resources. Look at all your friends who
love you--and I hope you'll let me count myself as one of them, my
dear--look how happy you are with your flowers--your doggies--your
music--your books.... Whatever happened, life for you, Daley, would be
always well worth living. You're not one of those weak clinging----"

"Oh but I _am_--I _am_ ..." cried Daley. She seized one of the puppies
and held it up to her face. "Oh--what a tiny tiny tree for me to cling
to...."

"Daley dear, control yourself. There are people coming. Tell me one
thing. Do you know where Clifford is at this moment?"

"I don't _want_ to know," sobbed Daley. "I don't _want_ to know. Oh
Mr. Diamond, don't make me know--let me not know."

She hid her wet eyes in the puppy's fur as Lion, the doctor, Milady
and Edna came up.

"We want beer," said the doctor, rather overdoing the necessary
heartiness. Lion caught the infection. "Beer, beer, beer!" he cried.

"Beer, beer, beer, splendid, splendid, splendid!" said Mr. Diamond who
was a little afraid of Lion. They all smiled broadly and cautiously
upon one another.

In a few minutes the doctor, holding a glass of beer in one hand and
Daley's elbow in the other, drew her into the drawingroom. This he did
in response to Lion's expressed wish for a few moments in which to
give further information about Clifford to Mr. Diamond.

"About this bronchially inclined lady visitor of yours, Mrs. Cliff,"
he said, "I've been talking things over with her friends, but I didn't
like to say anything definite until I'd seen you. Her friends say they
have to leave tomorrow. It seems to me out of the question that she
should go with them. She's pretty sick and that's a fact. Question
is--shall she be brought over to the hospital? You know what the
hospital's like--full of howling Chinks--no nurses--just the Chink
orderlies. How d'you feel about keeping her here? Mrs. Lorne could
look after her most of the day, though she has to get back at night to
her own kiddies. I don't think our patient really needs attention at
night--though perhaps tonight if she still has fever----"

"She must stay--of course she must stay," said Daley--giving voice to
the Ridley spirit without a minute's hesitation. "And I'm quite ready
to sit up with her tonight. I'm a wunnerful sitter-up." She faltered a
little at the end of the sentence, but that was only because the
thought had crossed her mind, "If I sleep in her room, at least it
prevents Clifford from doing the same."

"I knew you'd say that," said the doctor, delighted with her
goodnature, which seemed somehow to flatter his own perspicacity. "No,
no, Mrs. Cliff, I'm not going to let you go yet. I want to see the
patient.... I want to give you a few instructions about
cupping.... Here's Mrs. Lorne coming back from her family duties. We'll
have a consultation...."

He smiled into the face of his watch all the time he was counting the
beats of Lena's pulse, and Mrs. Lorne was much gratified by the smile.
"Not very much wrong with her, is there Doctor?" said Mrs. Lorne, her
smile unconsciously copying his, but her carefully bright voice giving
him a cue of brightness to follow in reply.

"There's congestion, of course," said the doctor buoyantly. "And a
little fever--but that's only to be expected. I'll tell you what,
young lady, you're not to think of moving from your bed until I give
you the word. Keep warm. Keep warm. Keep warm. That's all you've got
to remember."

"Oh indeed yes," said Mrs. Lorne. "The hot-water-bottle leaks. But
easily borrowed." She was delighted to hear him call her sister's
child 'young lady.' "Minnie was right about her effect on the
gentlemen and besides he's not married." She said, "Lena feels the
wee-est bittie better this afternoon, don't you girlie?"

But Lena would not answer. She looked fixedly across at the paling
open window, as if waiting for more dreadful news to come in upon the
light warm wind. "Suicide ... suicide.... Clifford Cotton and
suicide...." Her ears still seemed to ring with the word _suicide_.
Milady's voice had sent the word like a sharp dagger twanging through
the air.

"It doesn't matter," she thought painfully. "It doesn't really matter
to a cold heart like mine. Perhaps to my poor body it matters--that
his strong firelike body should die. But I had no right to him, I have
no right to mind that he is dead. I have given reluctant ghosts of
myself to all passers-by, to all lovers and haters ... and every time
death makes a passer-by forget--there is one more ghost of me called
home ... one more traitor who will never again betray me. What a
safeguard for the living is death. But oh--his body--his body that was
a safeguard against death--his living body is dead...."

"This woman is a sulky devil," thought the doctor, looking at Lena's
grim face. But he still wore his smile, ready for Daley. "I'll call my
assistant in. I want him to show you two ladies how to cup the
patient's chest. Hey, Julian."

He whispered to Chang Chu-lien at the door, "And mind, not a word
about her husband. She'll know all in good time."

"Whose husband?" asked Chang Chu-lien in a loud anxious voice.
"Ah--you refer to this before-mentioned mystery? I am entirely discreet."
He put down a little jingling box and bowed to Daley, bowed to Lena,
bowed to Mrs. Lorne. As he bowed to Daley he said, "Cheery-ho, Mrs.
Cotton, you have exceedingly lovely garden. I enjoy my little
promenade in it while I wait for doctor's summons."

He was strangely divided from them. Half-concealed uncertainty held
him aloof from them, though he tried to say only safe English things.
"You wish me to cup patient, Doctor?" he asked with gentle cheekiness.
"By all means. I have the cups in this box. But I require cotton wool.
The lady must not be anxious. The affair shall be exceedingly
painless."

"How lonesome we all are," thought Daley, watching his cautious grin.
"How far away we all are from friends. Something's scared him, same as
something's scared me. He's scared of our magic, same as I'm scared of
his. Every one's unknown. Everyone's dangerous."

Chang Chu-lien deftly lighted wool in the glasses and pressed the rims
down with his thin clever hands upon Lena's upper chest. The skin was
drawn up into little domes under the glasses as the flames were
stifled. "It does not do the lady even the smallest damage," said
Chang Chu-lien with modest triumph. "Modern science is exceedingly
marvellous, is it not, Mrs. Cotton?"

"It may be," said the doctor cheerfully, "But it hasn't got to Kan Lu
Pa. Cupping is a remedy that was old-fashioned when I was a boy--and
none the worse for that."

Chang Chu-lien looked nervous whenever the doctor spoke, afraid that
he might somehow be made ridiculous.

"Medicine's a little like magic, isn't it?" Daley said, looking at the
strange spell of glittering glass and circles on Lena's chest.

"Should we not think of it as a science always, in order to avoid
superstitions?" suggested Chang Chu-lien.

Daley thought that he said that to reassure himself. "He's so far away
from understanding. He has to work all day at unknown enchantments,
like a magician's slave in a fairy tale...."

When the cupping was over, they left Lena still looking quietly and
intently at the window.

Daley went first from the room and greeted the doctor with a cry as he
came out after her. "Oh Doctor darling--look at your hat--how shall I
break it to you?--look what Gregory's done...." The dog Gregory
accompanied this utterance by beating a hard piebald tail upon the
floor, as he lay on his stomach clasping a bitten hat between
affectionate forepaws. "It's only a little hole--only three teeth
wide," said Daley, rescuing the hat. "But it's no use pretending the
hat will ever be quite the same again." She was bright red with
laughter. "Oh Doctor, Doctor, how can I ever make up for this....?"

Chang Chu-lien giggled, sniffed, giggled, keeping his eyes on the
doctor, ready to stop giggling at a second's notice if the doctor's
face should show annoyance. Mrs. Lorne was very much distressed. Men's
clothes, she reflected, were _so_ expensive, and they never could be
persuaded to buy them in the sales like any one else. Ought Lena to
offer to make good the loss, since, if it hadn't been for her
illness...?

"It's evident you're broken-hearted, Mrs. Cliff," said the doctor,
smiling as he twiddled the wounded hat upon his finger. "So I won't
press the matter as far as you're concerned. But I won't answer for
Gregory, next time I catch him bending." He sniffed and hissed and
rubbed his nose. Her laughter moved him, as he imagined "tragedy
hanging over her."

Daley could not stop laughing. Only little things could make her laugh
like that. She corked the hole in the hat with a full-blown red rose.
"There's something about hats ..." she murmured brokenly. "Like when
Clifford hung his hat on a spider."

"On a spider!" echoed Mrs. Lorne in a shocked voice.

"Yes, it was a big spider on the wall--looking like a nail.... He's
_so_ shortsighted...." She laughed immoderately and, all the time, was
embarrassed to be so helpless, to feel her face so absurdly stretched.
"Oh how silly I am.... It took me a long time to get over that
spider...." She tried by means of a forced note of sober finality to
deceive the little strong demon that possessed her into the belief
that the joke was over. But speaking of Clifford and the charming
disability of his eyes tossed her emotions about. "He makes _such_
mistakes...." She remembered his wide bewildered eyes and burst into
tears. She covered her face with her hands and rushed out into the
garden. Neither Mrs. Lorne nor the doctor realised that the joke was
over.

Mrs. Lorne was a little pained as she went back into Lena's room.
Perhaps Lena was right, she thought; Daley must be rather heartless to
laugh so hysterically at what was, after all, a real loss to the poor
doctor and all came of her not controlling her pets. She sat beside
Lena and presently they heard in the garden the curiously broken voice
of Daley saying in surprise, "Why--Mr. Diamond's gone! Why--every
one's gone!"

"I've not gone," said Lion's voice.




CHAPTER XI

    Secure are the feet of the blessd,
    And well may the blessd be brave,
    With never a mountain but danger,
    And never a chasm but the grave.
    But the way of the sinner is strange--
    To stray in the dark--to go poised
    Along the thin brink of distress,
    And to step, unaware, into joy.


Lion was surprised to hear Daley coming towards dinner singing in a
small voice. He did not yet know that singing was, on the lips of
Daley, not an expression of a mood at all. It was a sound as natural
to her as breath, and she was only conscious of song when it was
denied her. Her singing was like an indestructible glow on the surface
of her presence, it was like the persisting enthusiasm on her vivid
face. But Lion, as he heard her sing, was somehow dimly disappointed.
Of course he said to himself, "By God--she's got pluck." Everything
that Daley did or said seemed to him praiseworthy. If she listened to
gay tunes on her Victrola he called her plucky; if she wept face
downward on her bed, he thought of her as sensitive and tender. He
fitted all her moods with tolerance and love. Even the fact that she
often hurt and puzzled him did not wring a thought of blame from him.
He simply called her 'whimsical' then. Yet he wished she would show
some sign of knowing how immense--how selfless--how grown-up was his
love for her. Her singing and her laughter seemed to underrate the
solemnity of his love. She underrated her own glory, he thought, when
she sang in the face of sorrow, or wept with unworthy friends, or when
her great heart accepted petty consolations. Only this evening she had
offered tears on the Victrola's altar--wasted tears in a puppy's fur.

There were about five chicken rissoles and six tartlets wasted because
Clifford did not come in to dinner. Clifford always ate everything by
fives and sixes, and his presence or absence at a meal could in no
sense be imperceptible to a housewife.

Daley said, "Where _can_ he be?" about seven times during dinner. Lion
said patiently at intervals, "No doubt we shall hear presently."

Old Mrs. Cotton, Daley and Lion wandered among their thoughts as they
ate. Each was in a castle of isolation. The differing ghost of
Clifford was in all three castles. Daley's was the only castle that
occasionally flew a little flag of talk.

"What _can_ have kept Clifford from his dinner? Mother Cotton dear,
when did you see him last?"

Old Mrs. Cotton was still thinking of the music. Seven years ago it
had drawn her out into an English garden to find a changeling--an
unknown son, in her known son's body. And today it had called her
again, and she had started in pursuit. But her seven added years had
made leaden her feet; she had fumbled and stumbled on one of her
sticks; bending to grasp it again had been hard slow work. How
dreadful to be too old to run after the fairies! ... Reaching the
garden at last, she had found that the music had dwindled to a
thrilled silence, as laughter fades to a smile.

"Culliffudde?" she said harshly. "Culliffudde will never come back."

"What do you mean, darling? Now don't go getting ideas into your head
about Clifford."

"He's gone ... he's gone.... He's gone with the music.... No one knows
where mu-husic goes. No one will ever know where Culliffudde's
gone...."

"Nonsense, dear Mother Cotton. Where could he go? There's no bad men
in Kan Lu Pa."

"Eh no--but there's music...." Malice awoke in her old distressed
face. "You ought to be glad of one thing, Daley. You'll be the heroine
of a newspaper co-holumn at last. A rippowater will come----"

"A what?" cried Lion, whose nerves were taut for new mysteries.

"A reporter will come," said old Mrs. Cotton, keeping the destructive
shake out of her voice with a great effort, "from America--where all
reporters come from ... and I shall say, 'Culliffudde was my
o-ho-honly son--the yapple of my yeye-yeye.' I shall say, 'Culliffudde
and his wife were soul-mates--hok--but unhappily cheildless....' I shall
say, 'I longed to hold my son's ch-hubby cheild with sunny cyurls
complete on my knee before I di-hied--but God knows be-hest....' I
shall talk of being a curipple and of missing my son's strong
arm.... I shall give the reporter Daley's photograph--the one with the
do-hoggie----"

"In my blue three-piece suit," murmured Daley, vaguely pleased. "It's
a wunnerfully becoming one, that. Too bad it makes my feet look so
big."

"--which I shall say is her fa-haithfull little chum. And if
I leave out a few of the literary expressions you admire,
Daley--heart-emptiness--or child-bride from across the seas ... the
excellent young man will no doubt supply them all...." She leaned
further and further forward and stuck out her chin, grinning rigidly at
Daley and Lion. "Hak--hak--hak--" she laughed. "You'll like that,
Daley.... Even if Culliffudde never comes back, you'll enjoy being the
wife of a missing ge-hentleman in the newspapers. I shall like it too. I
shall laugh ... and laugh...."

"Well well, I'm glad it amuses you," murmured Lion, shocked. "But I
must say I don't see the joke myself."

Daley was thinking of "missing gentleman." "Actually he would be
tickled to death," she thought, "to be called that." She heard his
unforgotten voice in her heart--"You know, Daley, it's _too_
tiresome--I find I haven't the instincts of a gentleman--I really
haven't. I honestly liked that yellow tie with the green crosses on
it, but Baker said, 'My God, Cotton, that tie gives me a pain in the
pit of my stomach'--so of course I said I was wearing it for a bet.
But what makes me nervous is that I might do it again any
minute ... tomorrow it might be my shoelaces that give people
stomachache, and the next day my way of eating Worcester Sauce ... and
the bet excuse'll soon wear thin. Oh, I do wish I could look like a
gentleman...." Daley, in the Ridley tradition, had said, "You look
like a _man_, dearest, and that's ever so much better than looking
like a gentleman." "Oh anybody can look like a man." Clifford had
sighed.

"Mother Cotton dear," said Daley, "if you know anything I don't know
about where Clifford is--I beg of you to tell me."

"Culliffudde was a changeling," said old Mrs. Cotton with unusual
strength and rapidity. "How could a changeling go on living--in this
_American_ air? How could any ear tuned to the music of the fairies
listen for ever to the creaking of _American_ machi-hines? Oh you
_American_--how many songs of fairies and birds--how many sounds of
coming and go-hoing--how many lovely silences--have been drowned by
the voice of your wax and tin consoler? You sit inside your cheap
walls of noise and never hear the music outside.... You nearly drew
the changeling in--_American_--but he fled in time...."

Daley stood up. "Oh, be done, Mother Cotton, with your railing at my
America. You can't change me--you can't bewitch me. I'm American and I
don't want to be changed. I may be a part of a machine--that's what I
want to be--part of a machine called America. That's what makes
Americans different--that's what we value--being a part of something
great and good--not each a little separate despairing queer thing,
like you miserable creatures of the old world. I _want_ to think the
same thoughts as millions of Americans--because their thoughts are
safe and good. I don't _want_ to sit apart and sneer. If a machine's
working for good, it doesn't matter if some of the parts are
ridiculous--they're part of a good whole.... Away from my America I'm
only a broken part and mebbe only the ridiculousness shows--but let me
go home--let me join the rest--and I'm strong--I'm safe--I'm a little
bit of God...."

"Hak--hak--hak--" croaked old Mrs. Cotton.

Daley's eyes filled with tears. She went to the window. The evening
still held a kind of secret thought of daylight.

"I'm glad of that, at least," she thought. "I just can't bear for
today to go without comfort coming." Her eyes were precariously
comforted by a streak of lemon-coloured light above the dark
mountains. Her eyes treasured that record of surviving day. "I can
hear the puppies whining," she said to Lion without turning her head.
"Shall we go and make Josephine feed them? She forgets. She's such a
wunnerfully modern mother." Her voice broke into a small nervous
laugh.

Lion followed her as she went along the terrace whistling for
Josephine. With a scattering noise Josephine shot towards them out of
the shadows, but she refused to go into the kennel. "They don't need
it, mum," Daley murmured for her. "They're full up. They're tight.
They'll burst."

"But they're crying for it, my One," said Daley. "There's direct
perjury on one side or the other...." She pushed the resisting
Josephine into the kennel and bent down to look in. The puppies
clustered about their mother like four fat bees round a flower that
has opened tardily. Each puppy imagined that its neighbour had secured
a more delicious or fruitful teat. There was a constant restless
exchange, accompanied by mewings, and by corklike poppings of hungry
lips being forcibly detached from the source of supply. Josephine did
not interfere. She tacitly admitted now that she had been lying--that
she had been disgracefully late for her appointment with her puppies.
She lay on her side, smelling a dead leaf dreamily, and only sighed
when the sharp grasping claws of the puppies scratched her teats.

Lion looked on, feeling most tender. The sight seemed to him
mystically Canadian....

When it was over, Lion said, "Let's go in and talk by the fire. It's
just chilly enough now for a fire."

Daley sat rather rigidly before the fire. Her knuckles were pressed to
her lips, as though to keep her mouth steady, and it was evident that
her little dispute with Josephine had had only a surface
importance--had been, indeed, almost automatic.

Old Mrs. Cotton, humming and croaking in an undertone, sat in the far
corner, absorbed in tracing the pattern of the wallpaper with a futile
shaking finger.

Daley said to Lion in a low voice, "I always used to feel so
harmless.... I didn't know what it was--to feel offensive--before I
came into this family. You know, when I was young, _American_ was
another word for good and glorious to me.... I used to think--" she
giggled a little hysterically--"that every one would like to be
American if they could. But everything that I thought was good and
serious can be sneered at, it seems...."

She knew as she spoke that Lion would assure her that she could never
offend--never seem foolish. He did not fail her, though he did not say
much. He said, "Oh Daley, my dear, my dear..." and, sitting at her
feet, leaned his head against her knee. Whatever had happened and
whatever was going to happen, he felt himself a man at last, and
nearer to Daley at this moment than he had ever been before. He was
drugged by the warm stationary moment. He half shut his eyes; his
thoughts stood quite still. Two dogs, Cowslip and Gregory, were asleep
on the hearthrug, and it seemed that their unknown dreams and quiet
breathing induced a kind of humming dream in the air of the room. Lion
could hear the tense light surrenders of the burning log, and
occasionally the sudden drowsy volubility of a half-aroused bird in
the pomegranate outside. And presently Daley began to talk. She could
not resist the luxury of talking about her sadness to a young man who
loved her. This is a luxury reserved for childlike women loved by
childlike men. It is the sunny side of sorrow. Unsatisfied love
between cynics is a much more difficult and stark affair.

Both Daley and Lion had an hour of real melancholy enjoyment. Daley,
satisfying her craving for compensating appreciation, found at first
no need for tears. And Lion paid to her calmness his obtuse masculine
tribute. "She's too plucky; it would be better for her if she could
cry...." "But even now," said Daley quietly, "I love him as much as
ever. All that's happened doesn't somehow make any difference to
that." Lion thought, "She's loyal, she's as loyal as a--man." And
somehow he did not change his mind when she went on to talk of the
disappointments of life with Clifford. She was groping for a means to
heal herself of her humiliation; recovery and admiration were as
necessary as air to her for the moment. Lion's devotion was like a
window opened before one suffocating for air. But she had to shut her
eyes so that she might not see that it was "only poor darling Lion."

"He wasn't ever pleased with anything little.... He didn't know how to
clap his hands and say--'Oh splendid--let's do that'!--He was
enthusiastic in his way, but he didn't ever accept or share other
people's little offerings of enthusiasm--especially mine. When I was
happy, he told me to 'stop prattling,' Yet Mr. Diamond once said that
when I was gay I was 'a wit by mistake.' Clifford generally
interrupted me when I began to speak, to show that he didn't think
anything I could say worth leaving a silence for----" (Lion thought,
"The damn cad--the damn cad----") "He was always impatient of my--way
of being nice to people; his impatience made me feel quite awkward
about it sometimes, made me feel like I was showing off.... But I
could forgive him a million snubs because he seems to me so grand, so
clear, so real.... There never was any doubt in my real mind that it
is better to have a few large natural reasonable thoughts than to have
thousands of little wonderings jumping about in your mind. All the
prattle he snubbed to death wasn't really worth saying--like treading
out round a camp fire the little pretty flames that wouldn't really
help to cook anything." She could see the picture in her words--the
big foot crushing the small gay flames, the darkening of the air, the
knots and threads of fading smoke like wreaths on the graves of the
little flames. "He's too big to understand womanliness, or the frills
of love. Love only means one thing to him, really; it never before now
meant anything so silly as wisdom. That's what breaks my heart about
his love for Lena--what is her wisdom to him, if she has any? She's so
thin and sneering and worried--not fit for love at all. There's no
nature in her at all--and he doesn't allow anything in love but
nature... It must be a madness in him. It can't last--it can't last.
He must want me again soon.... He wanted me so much at first. Truly,
Lion, before we were married--and at Dieppe, on our honeymoon--he
wasn't a bit scornful of me. Sometimes it seems to me, looking back,
as if I married a different man from the man I fell in love with. In
the early days he was interested in what I said--even if it was only
nonsense. He never told me to stop that row, when I hummed a song. He
changed quite suddenly, the day after we came back from our honeymoon.
I expect one of us has told you about that crazy argument about
whether snapdragons have teeth... It was the last nonsense we ever
shared, so I can't help remembering it. All later nonsenses were
nonsenses for _one_.... All that breakfast-time we argued, and after
breakfast he went out to look into the mouth of a snapdragon. And now
sometimes I think perhaps his mother was right--perhaps he never came
back--the Clifford I married never came back. For when he came in from
the garden--oh, it was as if he was a stranger.... Sometimes I think
he had a touch of the sun--sometimes I think, no, it was his mother's
queer influence--(we only arrived at her house the evening before
that. We've never got away from her since.) A doctor once told me that
the effects of a shock might be deferred and some little unconscious
reminder might give a twist to the mind.... Perhaps it was that. But
oh, perhaps it's true he was a changeling ... perhaps his heart was
spirited away out of his body that day.... I don't know.... I don't
know.... We don't have such things in America. That's why I want to go
back to America and not know of such things any more...."

Of course it's wrong of me to say we never shared things again--we
did--we often laughed--we often loved each other. I couldn't have
lived without. I just _have_ to laugh.... And I've loved him
faithfully and--though he never truly loved me after that day, I
think--he never loved another woman. I oughtn't to have expected any
more, I guess. All husbands have to get a little scornful, after their
honeymoons are over.... Do you know, I once wrote to the Love
Mentor in the _Woman's Helpful Friend_. I wrote over the
name _Lonesome_ ... and I asked how it was that men changed from lovers
into husbands--quite suddenly--just in an hour.... The answer was very
comforting. It began, _Poor little lonesome bride_--but it was very
cheering after that--said that first love, if genuine, did not die but
was changed into a deeper less passionate feeling which was just as
wunnerful and God-given as the other--only not so showy.... So I
believed that and didn't mind snubs and just went on loving him--and
now--look what's happened--he's left me--he's left me....

And at once she longed for him so unbearably that she was able to
paint his presence on the air. Even the broken chequered pattern of
his tweed coat was there to wound her; she saw his thick ankles in
khaki woollen socks, his tie which always looked as if it had been too
much fingered in the tying, his big head and the dappled look of his
neck, his eager mouth, slightly open, waiting for a chance to
interrupt some one else's talk. She saw the creases of surprise above
his eyes and the thick dark eyelashes that, alone in that prosaic
face, even though they were behind glasses, gave to his expression the
faint hint of a dream. "He lives in my eyes," thought Daley. "He
can't--he can't die from behind my eyes...."

She had a picture in her eyes--not a prophecy--not a hope--not even a
thought--but an indelible and foolish picture of herself in the arms
of a duplicate Clifford--an authentic and exact Clifford, but one who
had never forsaken her. "Oh, Clifford," she heard herself crying on
this other Clifford's breast. "Wasn't it cruel of him? Wasn't it
unfair? Did I ever deserve it? Oh Clifford--I was so terribly
unhappy--comfort me--comfort me--let me forget it now." With a feeling
of shock she remembered again that there was only one Clifford--and
that he had forsaken her. Must she then wring comfort from the vision
of an imperfect but repentant Clifford? This old world was so
dangerous--was it possible that his desertion had been a fantastic
accident? Had he broken her heart, as he might have broken her arm, by
mistake, not realising his own rough strength? Her broken heart, in
that case, would be healed tonight. He would surely come home. She
imagined him far away, thinking frantically of her. She lighted a
flare of illuminating thoughts in his mind, she put bewildered words
between his lips--"Oh what have I done to my mate ... my little
lonesome bride? What possessed me--what possessed me--to break my
Daley's heart?" She saw him aghast, turning suddenly on a remote
moonlit trail, running on stumbling feet--running home....

She looked quickly out of the window. The moonlight was clear, and the
uneven paving-stones of the garden path lay like sheets of satin
between dark velvet cushions. A sort of democracy of pallor had
overtaken the flowers. Varied snapdragons, roses washed with wine, the
bright rigid irises and the open young leaves of the violets shared a
common ghostly neutrality of colour. The continuous humble murmur of
the cicadas and the frogs was like a grass of sound.

And suddenly Daley realised that the night had come now. Suddenly she
was terrified because she had lost the safe day. "While the day lasted
I could keep on forgetting and hoping," she thought. "Every little
beetle and blowing leaf was a comfort. Things were real by day--nearly
American by day...." The day that should have stayed, that should have
waited to redeem its extravagances--was gone, unshriven of its sins.
Nobody but a fairy could come home by night....

It seemed to her suddenly as if there had been no daylight--no
innocent American day-light--for seven years--that the sun had been
blind, since it had never seen the real Clifford come home out of that
bright humming garden seven years ago. This false alien China sun had
been haunted always by the sliding secret moon. It seemed to Daley
that she was the widow of a man who died seven years ago--that she had
been living in sin with a fairy.

She watched the night in horror. The moon was behind the house. The
shadow of the house cut the garden in two. The garden chairs, the
kennel and the little clipped bushes on the terrace were like the
audience holding its breath in the dark--watching in the dark for
something queer to happen on the bright stage of moonlight beyond.
Daley heard the puppies mewing like frightened babies in the silence,
and automatically she murmured, "My nimbles--be calm, my
nimbles...." The moonlight shone full on the dewy grey turf beyond the
shadow of the house, on the little minarets of the snapdragons and
hollyhocks, on the close abrupt edge of the bamboo grove. But it could
not light the grove. A few stems of bamboos were singled out by the
defeated moon, and shone against the shadow, like the stripes of a tiger.

In the corner by the window, old Mrs. Cotton, huddled and leering,
drew shaky designs in the air with a crooked finger.

"Oh why is tonight so terrible?" cried Daley. "So unanswering....
That's what it is--that's what's so cruel about these old worlds,
about these old fairies--you call and they don't answer.... In my
America we all think alike--we know the answers to each other's
calls--we don't let people cry out into stony silences.... When
people call for help, my America's air is full of kind voices
answering ... coming nearer ... coming to help. But here--oh, what is
it--hidden behind that sky, among those trees, under those flowers,
in the cold hearts of people one loved? You can call and call--and
no one answers."

"Call me and I'll answer," said Lion, kneeling upright to face her
ardently.

"But it isn't you I want, Lion, it isn't you I want. It isn't you who
can save me. It's Clifford I want--oh Clifford, Clifford,
Clifford--save me--save me from tonight...."

Lion stood up violently as she thus blasphemed against his devotion,
turning his sharp beautiful dream against his own breast, profaning
the sacred appeal with a worthless name. He opened his mouth to speak
in a loud voice of agony. He wanted to fill the air with a great
desperate protest--to call down immortal curses on his wasted
sacrifice--to be impressive at last, to be immense and terrible at
last. But his tameness stopped his mouth. Even despair could not loose
him from his bonds of tameness. He went out of the room and shut the
door quite gently.

Daley did not call him back. She listened for the answering call of
Clifford--of that Clifford, who, long ago, had run out into the garden
and never come back. She listened for the faint far-off answer of
Clifford coming back now, across seven years.

There was no sound.

"Look how I'm spoilt," she said in a low voice. "Look how far I am
from America. No answer. No answer. I'm at the mercy of things that
have no voice."

She remembered vaguely her old safety. She had never known herself,
but at least she had always felt safe. She had been full of life,
healthy, ignorant and humble. Her brains had scarcely furnished her
mind at all--and yet she had a vividly lighted mind. A springtime
breeze had blown innocent visions through the bright rooms of her
mind. She had been hostess in her own halls, she had smiled on guests
and visions alike. Nothing inside the house of her mind had ever
seemed to her very seriously wrong--not because she had searched and
found everything perfect, but because she had never searched at all.
Home had been home--familiar but never criticised, imperfect but safe;
cold winds might blow outside, might even whistle through doors left
ajar, but the house of her mind had remained home still, a place where
she had never been puzzled or lost. Until now she had never guessed
that the possessing soul might lose its way in its own domain.

She sat down by the table. The silver inkstand, the Ridleys' wedding
present, stood on the table, and across its fortifying glitter she
looked with fear at the bent trembling shoulders of old Mrs. Cotton in
the far corner. She could hear the old woman's stuttering and croaking
going on like a satanic spell. "I must drown spells," thought Daley.
And she turned to her Victrola. With the first note of the 'Shepherds'
Dance' a new vision entered her sight. She saw a great ship, at night,
noisy with the agitation of departure. _Going home.... Going home....
Americans going home._ ... It was like a song in the living air that
blew through the rigging of the ship. The mountains beyond the ship
were grey with dawn. Hard iron on the wharf clanked against hard iron;
iron noises were thrown like rebounding balls against the echoing
mountains. On the ship's decks, men swinging lanterns crossed and
recrossed the square shadows that were so unlike the feathered and
shifting shadows of the grove. Men with lanterns always look like
rescuers. Behind the sea the little beginning of day, strong with
future, fought against the dangerous old night. "This ship sails into
the day. It's a very short journey after all--from the dark into the
day...." The dream dawn devoured the dream sky. The sky was suddenly
striped with sunlight. The unseen sun was throwing spears before it.
The grey sea was green now. There were birds on the mountains instead
of fairies. A splinter of sun showed above the sea. A ray ran from it
through the spidery rigging of the ship. The ship moved. Going
home ... going home.




CHAPTER XII

    I am so near to seeing--and yet I am blind.
    So near, so near to dreaming--and yet must wake.
    To be locked from the light of the stars is peace, and kinder
    It is to be saved from dreams than to be forsaken.

    Let not the night bring love, for the night's a traitor,
    Let me not hear love's far and hesitant crying,
    For, though he cry no more, I wait ... I wait....
    I am so near to living--and I must die.


Mrs. Lorne had left Lena two hours before. She had found great
difficulty in getting away. "And I'll put the barley water quite close
to you here, dearie. Look where it is ... on this little wee table.
You've only to stretch out your little handie to take it and you won't
be lonely kind Mrs. Cotton bringing her camp bed in here later though
I'm sure my girlie's going to sleep snug and restfully all of a gentle
perspiration and dream of pretty flowers and sheep jumping over a
stile, and the barley water--look, dearie, look where I've put the
barley water."

"I've looked."

"Yes, that's it. That's the barley water. You've only to stretch out
your little handie and take it if you feel the wee-est bittie thirsty.
Now tell me, dearie, d'you think you'll feel the window like
that?--air but not too much air as dear old Doctor Wilson used to say
and what about the blinds--up or down?"

"Up," said Lena. "Down. It doesn't matter a damn. You can't keep the
mountains out either way."

Mrs. Lorne sighed. But after a moment she said, "May auntie kiss her
girlie...? Lena dearie ... couldn't you soften your heart a
little--think it's mother kissing you ... oh my dearie--couldn't you
soften your heart a little and let gentleness and love come in ...?"

Lena allowed her hard unhappy face to be kissed. One of her aunt's
tears remained on Lena's cheek.

"Well," she thought, when she was alone, "Clifford has run away too.
Clifford has run away from me too. Death was kinder to him than Lena.
It isn't natural to love Lena. Death is more natural than to love
Lena. Lena ... Lena ... Lena...." She whispered her own name to
herself over and over again.

"Hateful Lena. Loveless Lena. Lena who had nothing but a name. Lena
who had no body. Lena who had no soul. Lena who was less desired than
death...." She would have cried out at the sound of her own name
spoken aloud; she could only whisper it fearfully, as one might
whisper the name of a ghost.

She heard Daley go to her room next door to prepare herself for
dinner. The doors were open. Lena could hear Daley singing a little
slow song in an undertone.

    There was a rich Josephine in China did dwell,
    She had four little puppykins and she loved them well.
    Sing Josephine--sing Josephine--sing Josephine so fair,
    Sing Josephine--sing Josephine--sing Josephine so fair.

The song was apparently sung in absence of mind, for this verse was
sung about eight times, and the plot, such as it was, remained
undeveloped. A slight swishing noise could be heard, and this was the
sound of Josephine's tail wagging against the boards in appreciation
of the theme of the song. After the song was over Josephine talked for
a while, though of course Lena thought the voice was Daley's. The
words, uttered in the compressed squeak consecrated to Josephine, were
mostly inaudible in the next room, though sometimes Lena could hear
such remarks as, "Cowslip doesn't understand a highstrung dog like me,
mum, he's never _suffered_," or, "Oh mum, _I_ love you anyway--and all
the puppies love you--I've seen to that." To which Daley in a small
normal voice returned such strange words as, "My smutriculator ... my
bird in the hand ... my maybug from Darkest Africa...." To all this
Lena listened in moody surprise. Presently the voices stopped, and
Lena heard Daley sigh twice and then go along the passage to the
diningroom, still humming the song about Josephine.

Lena sat up in bed. She put her trembling bare feet out on to the
carpet and walked across the room, wavering a little weakly. She was
so light and thin that she made no sound. She stood at the open
window. It was a threefold window, a triptych with the moonlit grove
painted upon it. A bowl of pale roses, which looked white in the dim
light, stood on the window seat and increased the likeness to an
altar. Lena caught the altar suggestion, though, when she stood at the
middle window with her outstretched arms against the window frame, she
did not know that she furnished the altar with a crucifix. She
remembered her aunt's reference to the angels of God walking on the
mountains, and she shivered. The painted grove, the painted mountains,
were as meaningless as painted angels. She thought she could see
sneering gargoyles carved in the rough elaborate pinnacles and domes
of the trees and mountains that pierced the moonlight. Her lover had
broken away through the trees as a man might break through death, and
he would never come back. Only the cold angels of God, waiting on the
mountains, might expect him now.

She gave a convulsive start which almost threw her backwards from the
window seat, as she realised that there was some one quite close to
her, looking in from the garden. The moonlight caught the uneven
planes of the large bony face of Mr. Lorne.

"I'm afraid I startled you," he said in a cold voice. "I was coming to
speak with you. I have not told the Cottons that I am here."

Lena looked at him feverishly and unsteadily but made no answer.

"You are ill, I know," said Mr. Lorne awkwardly. "But I must speak
with you. If you will listen to me patiently for a moment, I will
stand here outside the window and say what I have to say."

Lena huddled herself in her shawl on the window seat and turned her
face away from him.

"You will think I have no right to be here," said Mr. Lorne. "But I
have really. My wife told me that you were in pain and sorrow and that
you were not able to turn to God. That alone gives a messenger of God
a right to come."

Lena thought, "I knew it. The cold intruding angels of God." She said
aloud in a weak sneering voice, "Why penalise good honest pain and
sorrow? What business has God to send messengers to me? Messages from
far off are always irrelevant. God hasn't touched my life at
all--nothing has--not life nor death nor magic.... God doesn't know my
life."

"I have no doubt your life has been extremely wicked. So has every
life. But life cannot be lived far off from God. You see, God _is_
life."

"I tell you, I know nothing about life. I am not alive. I am neither
living nor dead. I am not wicked as you think. To be wicked you have
to be alive."

"Yes, you are right. Not to be alive, not to let life in, is to accept
corruption--it is worse than wickedness. Yes, that is the One Sin.
But you--you admit pain and love and longing--there are tears in your
eyes at this moment--how can you say you are not alive?"

Lena answered in a smothered voice, "I was born diminished and denied.
My agony and my love are not the agony and the love of a living body
and soul. Go away, messenger of God, you can't argue a minus into a
plus...."

"I didn't come to argue," said Mr. Lorne. "I know nothing to argue
about. Argument has no voice at all. How could argument take away your
sorrow?"

"I want nothing taken away. I want something given." After a moment
she began to cry. "Oh, I want _glory_ given to me--even a minute's
_glory_...."

Mr. Lorne moved, rustling against the creeper outside. "Be still, poor
creature, be still. Glory is yours. You inherit glory. You are made of
glory. You breathe glory. What is this air but glory? What are those
stars but glory? What are all these songs of little creatures but
glory? What is your burning consciousness--what are your tears--but
glory? Call it glory--call it magic--call it just life if you like. I
call it God. Without glory you couldn't cry for glory. What are you,
apart from this glory? Nothing but dust. What is it that beats and
cries and loves and seeks within you? You may have been starved of
common pleasure--you can't be starved of glory. Deny glory--deny
God--deny life--and what do you leave yourself? Nothing but dust."

"Nothing but dust," agreed Lena.

"But there is glory in the dust. A flame of glory in a pillar of
dust."

"Go away--go away--don't bother me," cried Lena, suddenly weakly
furious. "I won't be comforted. I won't be hypnotised----" Then she
checked herself and laughed. "That's Clifford's old magic again."

"Call it what you like," said Mr. Lorne. "But just hold yourself high
for a moment and listen. Listen."

For a few seconds Lena surrendered and listened. Certainly the night
was alive. Everything breathed, everything moved, everything spoke; a
million unknown wild hearts beat on in the dark. All the stranger
stars followed glory through the sky. The mountains were enclosed in a
sheath of humble and brilliant immortality. Everywhere among the
hidden trees, life fell like a rain, and hallowed the breathing earth.

"It is as though we were swimming in a sea of life," said Mr. Lorne.
"There is only one sin and that is to let go and sink--to accept death
and weakness and corruption and indolence--to sink from the light of
the sun and close our eyes to God--to take into our mouths the evil
taste of the depths below the surface of glory...."

And at that moment, Lena remembered to sneer again. "Ff-ff," she
laughed, and she thought, "I won't be hypnotised. Salvation's a quack
drug. I can't be cured of being Lena." She forced the interview into a
ridiculous light. "Ff-ff--so damn virginal. Perfect gentleman and lady
with eyes mutually averted. Duel of high ethics at a safe range of
fifteen feet ... chaste begetting of a soul...." And she did not speak
again. She looked blankly at a million stars and whispered her own
name again and again to herself. "Lena--Lena--Lena--who lived without
being alive...."

Mr. Lorne stood in silence for a long time. He had not heard her
laugh, and her sneering distraught face was in shadow. Yet it was not
with a feeling of accomplishment that he went away at last.

Outside the Cottons' gate, his wife was waiting for him. She put her
hand through his arm. They were the same height. They walked away
close together, throwing a square single shadow in front of them in
the moonlight. Their small blunt shoes, tramping in unison, trod on
the retreating shadow, and on all the dark shadows scrawled by the
trees upon the ground.

Some people see the moonlight as a dream and the shadows in the night
as snares, but Mrs. Lorne dreamed no dreams and feared no snares. She
did not really see with her eyes at all. The mountains and the skies
were only the gross clothing of God, after all, and she called them
"pretty scenery."

"I tried to catch you up, Edgar dearie, because I thought--Oh dear, by
rights I ought to have told Edgar all about what is on Lena's mind, so
as to help you to choose healing words, though I'm sure you left her
strengthened in spite of not really knowing what it was all about. But
you walked so fast, I couldn't. I should have told you before you set
out that Lena told me that she and Mr. Cotton are entertaining sinful
thoughts about each other, and that is what makes her so unhappy
though of course we should not judge others or betray their confidence
except when justified as in this case. Circumstances alter cases and
Mr. Cotton is not a very temperate man and perhaps not many moral
advantages in upbringing, for if one can ever say that a fellow-sinner
has an evil mind, I must say I think old Mrs. Cotton is so. Oh. When I
think of what she said--and how she said it, though possibly I can't
help thinking a little truth in it. But Lena is my sister's girlie and
I know you will feel just as I do about it, Edgar, more in sorrow than
in anger, being always the woman that pays."

"She seemed to be grieving," said Mr. Lorne, "more over a lost love
than a found love."

"Perhaps you opened her eyes to a consciousness of sin and made her
resolve to lead a better life though indeed any one less inclined to
brazen things out than Lena I never did see."

"She has let go," said Mr. Lorne. "That is her sin and she is very
conscious of it. She has allowed herself to live less finely--less
tensely than she could have lived. Not to exert the whole strong power
of life is the only sin, really--it embraces all sins. To accept the
whole of life is not an easy thing. That poor creature has been
seeking an easy way into life, just as drugs are sought by some as an
easy way into pleasure. Glory is the breath of life--she knows that,
but she does not know that there is--there must be--austerity in
glory. Since glory is only one of the names of God."

He walked along, looking firmly at the ground, kicking at his shadow.

"If we remember our heritage of austere glory, the choice between the
body and soul is not necessary. There is no choice. Both can be
gloriously served."

"You can't serve two masters, dearie," Mrs. Lorne corrected him
gently. "You remember--great was the fall thereof and there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth." She thought, "That's what I was
doing--serving two masters, when I set too much store by my
Bertie ... and there _was_ weeping...."

"There are no two masters," insisted Mr. Lorne. "Body and soul are
one--together they make life, as the torch and the flame are one, and
together make light in dark places. But the torch has to be held high
by a strong hand...."

"Constance," he cried suddenly. "We _have_ been human--we _have_
accepted all life--haven't we--haven't we? I have begotten
children...."

Mrs. Lorne could only hope that no one could overhear him. He had
these moods, almost amounting to a cross, moods which in another man
would be really nothing less than coarse. And suddenly, at this
inopportune moment, her lifelong habit of seeing nothing was broken.
She was suddenly sure that some one was listening--some one besides
the angels. How unlucky if a listener should overhear Edgar in this
unfortunate mood. Of course the Bible talked about begetting
children--dear little things--but the Bible said they were born in
sin--begotten in sin--which probably meant that it was coarse to talk
about birth or begetting. One should leave that to the Bible, which
seemed to be able to purify the coarsest ideas. And Edgar had a very
pure mind too, whatever he might say. Angels, she hoped, would
remember this, but other listeners might misunderstand. She saw the
moonlight with opened eyes, and did not like it at all. She could not
rid her mind of the idea that there were leering dancing crowds among
the bamboos. She could almost hear the sound of laughter in the
pomegranate orchard. She could not see the little red stars of
pomegranate blossom, but she half-saw a scurry, as of mocking
eavesdroppers, escaping from the bright orchard into the dark grove.
Certainly not angels.

Mr. Lorne thought about the first time he saw Constance in her
nightgown.

"It is not true," he said loudly, "that bodies are only seducers of
the virgin soul. It is not true that souls are always ravished virgins
and bodies always legalised seducers. Marriage between the body and
soul is honourable, in the sight of God. And we have achieved it,
Constance, haven't we--haven't we?"

Mrs. Lorne withdrew her hand from his arm. Two separate oblong shadows
walked in front of them now.




CHAPTER XIII

    Though you be mighty,
    Lover, to win your dear,
    Yet shun fighting
    Against fairy spears,
    Seeing no bannered delight,
    No challenge hearing.

    Midsummer nights
    Are dangerously starry,
    And the far-sighted
    Must travel far.

    Shut your heart's eyes,
    Lover, lest your heart see
    The fine-spun surprises
    Of frie.
    So may you wisely
    Escape freedom;
    So may you truly cry
    To your love, kneeling,
    _Dear, I have sacrificed
    A thousand worlds for thee_.


Lion stood at the Cottons' front door looking darkly at the moon. He
felt finally dismissed by Daley's cry to the absent Clifford; no
reproach, he thought, could have been more cruelly final. Very well
then--he would leave her to her ineffectual comforters--her husband
who was no husband and her music which was no music. However, he did
not leave. He stood on her doorstep, waiting for her to call him back.

Mr. Diamond, still doggedly followed by Milady, Edna, the doctor and
Chang Chu-lien, came up the garden path. Poor Mr. Diamond would have
liked to walk quietly about Kan Lu Pa by himself, looking cool and
sapient, elucidating the mystery of Clifford's behaviour and
chivalrously protecting weak women from a knowledge of the process.
But he could not get rid of his superfluous supporters. He looked
quite hot now, having tried for so long to be gentlemanly under such
difficulties.

"Any news?" he asked Lion, and Lion replied, "No, I was going to ask
you the same thing." The tiresomeness of women, and man's common wish
to be allowed to appear clever drew Lion and Mr. Diamond together at
last.

"You ladies ought to be in bed," said Mr. Diamond, but without much
hope. "I am deep-ply grateful for your assistance. Most deep-p-ply.
But ladies mustn't miss their beauty sleep--must they, Doctor?
Certainly not. Certtainly nott."

"Certainly not," he repeated a little forlornly, after a pause during
which Milady and Edna made no move.

The far off sound of Daley's gramophone was like a faint stain on the
clear air. "How ubiquitous women are," thought Mr. Diamond
plaintively. They all jumped as Liu Sao-shing appeared at the garden
gate.

"Good evening. Is Mr. Cotton at his home?" asked Liu Sao-shing as he
came up the path.

"No."

"Then where is he, if you please?"

"Where indeed?" sighed Mr. Diamond.

"If you can tell us that, laddie," said Milady, "you win the bag of
bulls-eyes."

"He is not in prison cell?" said Liu Sao-shing.

"Certainly not," replied Mr. Diamond. "Why should he be?"

"_I_ say, why should he _not_ be in prison cell?" said Liu Sao-shing.
"If Chinese gentleman in Shanghai become intoxicated and walk about in
beastly forgetting of decency, British policeman would immediately
remove him to prison cell. Yet British drunken chap----"

"When did you last see Mr. Cotton?" interrupted Mr. Diamond.

"One hour and half ago," said Liu Saoshing. "He was laid down in
tree-shade. I saw his head waving from small bushes. I had business
matter to say to him concerning the roof over printing machine shed,
so I said, 'Mr. Cotton please, a structure of light bamboo such as
these structures upon my properties'----"

"But what did _he_ say?" asked Mr. Diamond.

"_I_ said, 'Mr. Cotton, such a structure is not intended for heavy
foreign machine. Foreigners at own risks import'----"

"Yes, but didn't he make any reply?" asked Mr. Diamond.

"To first question he makes no reply," said Liu Sao-shing. "But when I
talk of rain coming in upon machine, he spoke a very intoxicated
answer, saying, 'Rain--yes--now you mention, I remember rain'..."

"That doesn't sound intoxicated," said Mr. Diamond, vicariously
offended. "It simply sounds as if he'd been asleep. Was he lying on
his back?"

"At first he had laid upon his back, but subsequently he sat bold up
and I then see he is without clothes. He was severely intoxicated. He
shout, 'What is this world? What is this trees? Where palaces? Where
dancers?' or something like this and he then began to sing most boozy
song. He sing strongly for a minute and subsequently he shuts up and
says, 'Oh, song is fading away--oh, I am forgetting song,' and so he
cry a little bit. I said, 'Mr. Cotton, I give you notice that I will
not pay repairs to printing shed roof; it is matter for Mission
and'----"

"Did he look ill or anything?"

"His face and breast all blooded with scratches. He looked without
sense. He refused to undertake that Mission should repair roof, though
I told him that last night's strong rain had already----"

"Please, Mr. Liu, keep to the matter in hand."

"My matters _are_ matters in hand, Mr. Diamond. Chinese matters are
equally in hand as foreign matters. Why should foreign persons always
think----"

"Yes, I know--I know.... I'll see Mr. Lorne tomorrow about the mission
press roof. But tell me now what happened to Mr. Cotton--how you left
him."

"He shouted in big voice, 'Oh rain--oh cold wind--oh tears--oh
darkness--' and many other such nouns, saying that he had recently
visited country where rain was not customary--in this way evading
matter of rain on press. I saw that he was intoxicated and I said,'Mr.
Cotton please, you are intoxicated.' I thought to myself privately,
'Justice shall at least be done sometimes,' so I went to police
station and conducted Police-officer Ch'en to the place where Mr.
Cotton was laid, saying, 'This drunken chap--in spite of British
nationality--must be thrown in prison cell'----"

"What on earth were you thinking about?" shouted Mr. Diamond, becoming
quite pink. "Don't you know that----"

"Yes, I know British persons in China are hiding behind unjust
treaties to escape laws of country they populate. I know British
persons say Chinese law has no rights to punish British criminals and
drunks. But I am Chinese. I say British law has no rights to work
vengeance on innocent Chinese patriots in Chinese territories. If
British do so, Chinese also shall do so. I order Police-officer Ch'en
to be patriotic and remove Mr. Cotton harmlessly to prison cell."

To be accurate, he had given Mr. Ch'en sixty-five cents for his
patriotism.

"But it's an outrage!" exclaimed Mr. Diamond.

"Outrages are common in China in these modern days, in my opinions. If
foreign police-officer can exercise judgement to murder Chinese
patriotic student--shall not Police-officer Ch'en exercise judgement
to suppress intoxicated and horrid spectacle? However, as affair turns
out, Mr. Cotton did not necessitate."

"Did not what?" gasped Mr. Diamond.

"Mr. Cotton was not present in the place where formerly I have been
speaking with him. His subsequent whereabout is unknown."

There was a pause, long enough for Daley's distant Victrola to play
several bars of 'Poppies, Xylophone Solo.'

"I consider," said Mr. Diamond, "that you acted in an unreasonable and
unneighbourly way--to call it by no harsher name. Not a doubt of that.
Not a doubt. You deliberately----What's that?"

Tuning his ears to verify some reticent and hinted sound, he was
shocked and revolted by a wild scream from Milady. She stood in the
opening of the sweet-pea hedge, looking on to the lawn, and screamed
and screamed with every breath. Only after the first two or three
screams was it evident that she was laughing. The air was indecently
torn by her yells of laughter. Her feet could be heard staggering and
shuffling on the grass to the convulsions of her body. "Oh lawd--oh my
lawd--oh gurls--oh my lawdy!"

Mr. Diamond listened anxiously to assure himself that Daley was not
frightened by this clamour, but rather to his surprise, the sound of
the gramophone droned and wavered on, if anything, a little louder, as
if she had raised the lid of the machine to increase the noise and
drown this wild intruding laughter.

Mr. Diamond pushed past the sweet-peas on to the lawn. Opposite to him
stood Mr. Lorne without his coat. His shirt could now be seen to be no
shirt but only a "front." The rest of his upper half was clothed in a
neat Chinese singlet. The "front" leaned a little away from his
panting breast, and was striped with bold blue stripes and decorated
with a little false bow tie, buttoned, apparently, to the wearer's
Adam's apple. The whole thing was an ingenious and thrifty contrivance
of Mrs. Lorne's, designed to save washing rather than to meet the
public eye.

Milady, doubled up with wild laughter, appeared to be bowing before
him.

"What in the world does all this mean?" asked Mr. Diamond sharply. To
Milady he added, "Oh please do be quiet." He was startled out of his
politeness.

"There is no cause either for laughter or surprise," said Mr. Lorne,
patting down the "front" without embarrassment. "We have found
Clifford Cotton, naked in the forest. He is in a sort of trance. He
has had a vision. He has been vouchsafed a revelation. I think he need
no longer seek wisdom. He has sought it so faithfully all these
years."

"What kind of vision? What do you mean?" asked Mr. Diamond.

"He says he has travelled golden ways and has seen shining faces. He
says he has been made familiar with an unspeakable wisdom. He hardly
seems the same man."

"But you also have been perhaps cracked and robbed?" asked the
bewildered Chang Chulien. "Of garments? Of how many? One? Two?"

Mr. Lorne looked at him patiently, his chin lifted proudly above his
little false tie. "I have been robbed of nothing," he said quietly.
"Naturally I did my best to clothe the naked."

"Do be more clear. Please," said Mr. Diamond with a precarious
restraint. "Tell me plainly where Cotton is now."

"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr. Lorne. "My wife and I heard
his voice in the shadow of the grove as we were walking home along the
path. He was repeating his own name--Christopher Clifford
Cotton--Christopher Clifford Cotton. I called him and he said, 'Is that
the voice of a man?' I went aside into the grove and found him kneeling
upright by a mossy mound with a broken stone pillar on it--probably an
old Chinese grave. It seemed to me that there was a curious light
there--or rather that there had been a light which had now almost
faded. Cotton said, 'They have left me behind,' and he shed some
tears. I spoke to him soothingly, and presently he said, 'I have been
the guest of shining hosts for a thousand years.' I asked him what he
could mean. I reminded him that he had been talking with me as late as
three o'clock this afternoon. He answered, 'Not I--I was far away.
Alas, I have been born again.' I said, 'Cotton, you have had a vision.
Have you seen God?' He said, 'Oh I dare say...but now I am born
again--left to the mercy of strange men again--left alone among these
damp leaves and in this cold air.' I wrapped him in my coat and scarf
and my wife lent him her mackintosh. I said, 'Come home to your wife,
Cotton, she is anxious about you, she is waiting for you.' But he
answered, 'I am widowed, I am widowed now. I have been married to the
Beautiful and the Wise.' 'Oh,' he said after a moment, holding out his
hands to me, 'don't let me forget--teach me--teach me to
remember....' I laid my hand upon his arm and promised that he and I
together would try and keep his memory of this day holy.... But it is a
heavy fall--from the high pastures of the blessed...."

"I cannot understand a word you say," said Mr. Diamond. "Where did you
leave him? Why did you leave him? Why didn't you bring him straight
home?"

"He was very much scratched--apparently by thorns," answered Mr.
Lorne. "So, as we were then within a few yards of the Mission, my wife
took him there to bathe his wounds and to lend him some more clothes,
for he was cold. As soon as this is done, she will bring him home."

Mr. Diamond looked round him uneasily. The fantastic element in these
stories and in the night disturbed him. It was like a snake in his
garden of reasonable polite things; he could not get close to it, he
could not lay hands on it, he could not dismiss it from his mind.

"We'd better not tell Daley anything of this," he said in an undertone
to Lion, "till Clifford actually arrives and we know what kind of a
state he is in. I must say I don't understand it. I simp-ply don'tt
understand itt." But he spoke rather brightly to Milady and Edna.
"Now we really mustn't keep you ladies any longer. The mystery is now
happily cleared up and we men will just wait about a few minutes to
hear Cotton's own story and then all go home to our well-deserved
beds. I will get Mrs. Cotton's coolie to light you home. Hey, coo----"

"Not ser fast, moossioo," said Milady. "This is the only battle murder
or sudden death I've ever been a party to, and I've simply got to see
it to its bitter end. You couldn't pry me off this property with a
stick of dynamite, Mr. Diamond my lad, and that's a fact. Edna feels
the same way about it--don't you Tubby? Besides we're as thirsty as
pickled shrimps, and I've an idea that if we could get in to Mrs.
Cotton's diningroom, I've a sharp enough nose to smell out a whiskey
and soda all round.... What-you-say, boys and gurls?"

"Carried unanimously," said the doctor in a boisterous undertone. "But
don't let's disturb poor little Mrs. Cliff till Cotton comes back.
Let's leave the poor kid to play with her toy while she can--bless
her...."

They all tiptoed in and sat down in the diningroom on chairs round the
wall. Mr. Lorne alone stood, looking out of the window, watching for
his wife and Clifford. Liu Saoshing said to Mr. Lorne in a hollow and
rather hopeless voice, "Mr. Lorne please. I give you notice the roof
over your mission printing machine in my shed must subsequently admit
rain which spoils machine, very likely. Nevertheless it is not my
matter--on contrary, it is your matter." But his fears were justified.
Mr. Lorne made no reply.

There was a long silence, broken only by a stifled giggle from Milady
whenever she caught Edna's eye after a glance at the neatly darned
back of Mr. Lorne's singlet.

Silence in a group of people was always most repugnant to Mr. Diamond.
There should be, he thought, something polite and pleasant to be said
in any circumstances. But for the moment he could not find it. Of
course he remarked at the very beginning, "It looks as if the rain has
cleared away, doesn't it?" and Edna rather eagerly replied, "Yes it
does, doesn't it--not a cloud in the sky." But even Mr. Diamond did
not feel that this was very satisfactory. Silence made one look at
people too closely, he felt. Nearly every one, when silence falls, is
afflicted with some unpleasant form of fidgeting. Something must wag,
if the tongue cannot. Lion, for instance, was picking at a little
piece of rough skin on his palm. The doctor, unusually serious, was
twisting his mouth with a gnawing movement; his eyes were fixed upon
Milady's fat ankles in a glare of abstraction. Milady clinked her long
pointed nails upon her glass of whiskey, playing some unknown tune to
herself with an irritating persistence. Edna folded and refolded a
rather dirty pocket handkerchief very meticulously upon her knee. Mr.
Lorne's lips moved. Chang Chu-lien looked as though his enthusiasm had
been suddenly deflated. He was like the drummer in an orchestra, whose
energy has all been concentrated on the two _ponks_ which the score
demands as his only contribution to a symphony. He has twiddled the
drum-keys to perfection, shifted his seat, blown his nose, breathed on
his drumstick, swept away unconsidered _ponkless_ pages of the score,
pinned a fierce eye on the conductor as the moment approached--and
then--_ponk_--_ponk_--two seconds of self-expression and his show is
over. The music leaves him behind; he sits flaccid, blind to the
further frenzies of the conductor; he listens no more to the silly
violins and bassoons bleating and mooing on.

Chang Chu-lien, though despondent, was quite still. He and Liu
Sao-shing alone let their hands and faces rest in sad dignity.

"The most profoundly reasonable people on earth--the Chinese," thought
Mr. Diamond, looking at their quiet faces. "Nothing can tempt them
away from reason--a reason so detached from all our fancy
considerations of unselfishness and mystic picturesqueness and what
not--that it seems almost like nonsense to us...." He thought of
Chinese with a sense of escape from a troublesome fantastic day. He
thought of Chinese peasants watching with a singlehearted intensity
foreign picnickers eating hardboiled eggs; he thought of the crumpled
sensible cheerful faces of trousered farm women who, at seven and
twenty, had borne a dozen children; he thought of Chinese babies
disturbing Buddhist services by their impudent noisy mimicry of the
officiating priests--and nobody minding in the least; he thought of
that Chinese alchemy which, practised by a few mission converts, could
transmute English low-church highflown nineteenth century theology
into something useful, rational and undisturbing; he thought of the
unpretending opportunism of local politics; he thought of merry
grimacing mummers at Chinese funerals. "Absolutely prosaic," he
thought. "Really a splendid people--splendid--splendid."

Mr. Lorne said, "Here is my wife--alone."

In a moment Mrs. Lorne stepped on to the verandah and into the
diningroom. "Has he come?" she asked. Her face was glowing with a
gentle excitement. It had refreshed her very much to minister to some
one she had so nearly disliked.

The distant sound of Sibelius' 'Valse Triste' stopped suddenly with
that gulping yawp peculiar to interrupted gramophones.

"Oh Edgar--is he not here?" cried Mrs. Lorne. "He ran away again
before I could stop him though I said, 'Stop, dear Mr. Cotton, don't
go away again, it's very late and your dear wife waiting for you and
quite anxious I am sure,' I said. But he was gone though I went on
saying, 'Mr. Cotton--stop--stop,' but of course thinking he was quite
all right again now and a touch of iodine wherever the skin was
broken. I lent him your Sunday suit, Edgar dearie, though very much
too small of course and here's your coat, put it on quickly, daddie
dear, the cold night air, and I looked everywhere for him thinking
perhaps a joke or possibly a trifle feverish or I walked too slow for
him, but I heard him walking away across the grove. So I ran as
quickly as I could along the short cut thinking 'I shall find him
there when I get to the Cottons' but I'll just make sure'--and now he
is not here...."

"Oh _damn it all_" said Mr. Diamond. "Are we never to be done with
finding Clifford Cotton and losing him again?"

"Yes," said old Mrs. Cotton's harsh voice at the door. "You are done
now. He is fou-hound. He is safe in his American ho-home. Not a
changeling. Not a changeling any more. My son has come ho-home--after
seven years...."




CHAPTER XIV

    I am no more a mourner.
    Since I have forgotten
    That I was born--
    Lo--I am not.

    Be choked, my life, in a noose
    Of strong night; I hoped no better.
    If for me no sun rose,
    No terrible sun shall set.

    I have no fears,
    Though the night come with thunder.
    Why should I mourn the stars,
    Who knew no sun?

    Should I not be proud
    To be so safe?
    Forgetting glory now,
    I shall not again know grief.


When Lena, huddled at her window, heard Mr. Lorne shut the garden
gate, she straightened herself and looked out at the moonlight with a
wide excited stare. She watched the moon slide upwards, and the stars
smoothly free themselves in groups from the jagged dark skyline of the
grove. It was as if the moon and the stars were wild monstrous
creatures assembling, and she their fascinated prey.

"Why is it that life is so very strong and overflowing, and yet cannot
fill this body of mine?"

The moon was wedged in the right-hand corner of the window. "It's
going up out of my sky for ever," said Lena. "This is the last time I
shall see the moon."

She remembered a moon of her childhood. She remembered lying in bed, a
sick child, coughing and crying, watching the moon bowling up an
invisible slanting line from pane to pane of her window. Then, as now,
the moon had seemed to flaunt the possession of something that she
could not share. She had felt an intolerable hunger for comfort.
"Mother--Mother...." And her mother had come running in, carefully
calm in demeanour, dressed in a pink flannel dressing-gown. "What is
it, my kitten? What does my kitten want?" "I don't know. I don't
know.... Oh, Mother, I want a Wonderful Surprise."

"A Wonderful Surprise ... Tck tck ... a Wonderful Surprise...." Her
mother had looked helplessly round the room ... at the climbing
moon ... at all the expensive doctors' things bought to keep the child
alive. "Tck tck ... a Wonderful Surprise.... What kind of surprise,
dearest? Tell me and I'll do anything I can...." The poor lady's mind
had been palpably empty of ideas. Lena remembered her own hopeless
tears. "Oh Mother ... of course if I tell you it'll spoil it--besides,
I don't know.... It's just that I want to wake up in the morning and
find a Wonderful Surprise under the pillow, and be very happy and
surprised...."

"Why of course she shall have her Wonderful Surprise. Mother's Kitten
must go to sleep and in the morning--oh--what will she find under the
pillow? Something the fairies will have brought from the moon,
perhaps...." The child Lena had lain awake, coughing and feverish,
unable to sleep for thinking of perfect happiness on its way to her at
last ... a Wonderful Surprise in the morning ... a new Lena in the
morning....

She had heard her mother coming, she had heard her mother breathing
carefully at the door, listening for proofs of sleep. Lena had
pretended to sleep--stifled her cough for a moment. She had felt her
mother's hand slip under the pillow and away again, had heard her
mother's breathless retreat.

What a little tiny surprise! ... It had scarcely made any lump under
the pillow at all.... The thing had gone wrong--she knew it at once.
What had she expected--to find immortal joy under her pillow? She put
her hand under the pillow--already hopeless. There was a small oblong
parcel there, wrapped thinly in tissue paper. She drew it out and
looked at it by the light of the moon. It was tied with blue
baby-ribbon; a little piece of goldy paper, cut in the shape of a star,
was pushed under the ribbon and showed the words: "For Mother's Darling
Kitten--a Little Surprise."

But Lena had not opened it. She could feel it through the paper. She
knew what it was. It was that wooden pen that Father had brought
Mother from Switzerland long ago. There was a sitting-down wooden bear
on the end of it. Lena had often fidgeted with it on her mother's
writing table--often vaguely asked if she might have it for her own.
She put it back under the pillow unopened; she buried her agonised
face in her pillow. "A Wonderful Surprise ... a Wonderful
Surprise ... there's no such thing in the world as a Wonderful Surprise
for me...."

And now, thirty years later, she waited still, hopelessly for the
Wonderful Surprise that was her due. Tonight, as thirty years ago,
every little white moth that blew across the moonlight could boast the
possession of something that was denied her. For a few hours last
night, it had seemed that life accepted her at last--that she was to
be given a gift better than any she had longed for--that the gift was
in her hands. She had not been able to receive it with joy--her
capacity for joy was atrophied. But she had been dimly conscious of
glory on its way to her--after a long ordeal. "Why wasn't I happy? Why
wasn't I mad with joy while the hope lasted? I might have known that,
for me, finding was only a postponement of loss. Why didn't I dare to
feel glorious while I might? If he was a flame--why didn't I catch
fire? To burn my soul away would be better than to feel it die slowly
in the cold...."

The regular rise and fall of the cicadas' purring note sounded like,
"Why--why--why?" But the rhythm was interrupted by a blurred sound of
music. Daley's Victrola had begun to defy the night's challenge with a
weak incantation.

Lena listened. "I ought to have been born a machine," she thought. "Or
an American...."

She listened. Her fingers, against her will, were strumming out the
'Shepherds' Dance' on her knee.

"Death is the cure," she thought suddenly. "One can't have death by
halves at least."

She listened. And while she listened she laid her plans for death. A
beam ran across the room, several feet below the ceiling, buttressing
up the frail plaster walls. To that beam she could hitch a rope, if
she had one. She knew how to make a slip-knot. She had always been
good at knots--good, for instance, at tying up parcels. Years ago she
used to send a great many presents to people she knew, in the hope of
making friends of them. Now she would tie her last knot, seal and
despatch the last gift of all--a gift of death to poor Lena. A
Wonderful Surprise.

Her eyes wandered about the room, looking for more appliances for her
purpose. But her ears were worried by the distant silly music.

"I can't die to music like that," she thought. But she could not shut
out the sound. She could not even stop her fingers from hammering out
'Poppies' on her knee. 'Poppies'--she had accompanied some fool who
sang it once at one of the suburban music halls--twenty years
ago--gallant little Japs--rising sun flags....

She heard the wild screams of Milady's laughter on the other side of
the house. She listened. "Poor old Milady. She's never missed
anything...." After the screams there was a rustling and a gradual
subsiding in the garden and grove, as though many little wild things
had been awakened and were now soothing one another. And while Lena
strained her hearing, resentful yet somehow jealous of that crude
laughter, she heard a heavy tread among the trees and then a crackling
pause, as though some hurried traveller had suddenly stood still to
watch from the shadows.

And she saw the face of Clifford Cotton, like a mask pinned suddenly
upon the dark wall of the grove. All the moon's fingers pointed
suddenly to that blank face. It was transfixed upon an oblique spear
of moonlight.

Lena felt as though her heart flamed up and was extinguished in a
breath.

"He's mine after all. Yes, he's not a man--he's a fairy after all. I
won't call. I won't call. If he comes to me it must be his own
doing--if he comes, it will be life at last. A Wonderful Surprise."

The face gave no news. It was round and blank and still, like a little
moon risen in a new low sky. Lena could see the eyes in the mask
glitter. She could see that the eyes were fixed ambiguously upon her
face.

"I won't call. I won't call. I won't even pray. I won't spoil it by
asking, this time...."

But her lips were soundlessly forming her appeal. "Oh, fairy ... fairy
... fairy...."

And the next moment he was gone. The shining face was suddenly
quenched in shadow.

She watched for the shadows to part again. "Fairy ... fairy ... fairy
..." she whispered. "I'm here. Here's all my wisdom for you...."

But she could hear the rustling of his retreating steps. It seemed as
though shadowy curtains, one after another, further and further away,
swung open to admit him and closed between her and the fugitive. The
stirring in the darkness dwindled to a spark of sound and was blown
out. There was no sound but the "Why--why--why?" of the cicadas, and
the faint raving of the gramophone.

Lena made a little broken sound like a cry at a feverish awakening.
"Well," she said aloud, "it's only death after all...."

She let her shawl drop into a limp coil on the window seat and walked
about the room in her thin nightgown, looking for a pair of scissors.
She cut off the three long cords of the window-blinds. She tied all
three to the window bolt and began plaiting them together. The even
movement of her hands made her thoughts rise and fall like
waves of the sea. "Lena? she's dead.... Lena? she died long
ago.... Lena--Lena--what was she like? Oh I don't know--poor Lena--she
died so long ago."

The music of the gramophone stopped. Quite suddenly--in the middle of
the 'Valse Triste'--silence swallowed the tin music in one gulp.
"That's better," thought Lena. "It dirtied the clean noise of the
crickets. I'm glad a machine won't be the last creature to speak to
me...."

There was nothing to do now but pull the chair across under the beam
and climb on it. She did this. The chair was too low. It was also
obstinately firm on its feet. It would be a difficult thing to kick
away. The little table would be better. It was fragile and might even
help by collapsing at the right moment.

The stagger, scrape, tinkle and crash of the forgotten glass of barley
water and the hand-bell, as she tilted the little table, made her cry
out. She tried to listen for steps coming to interfere. But she heard
no sound except the roaring in her ears. Her thin shins hurt her as
she knelt on the little table.

Old Mrs. Cotton, in the doorway, attracted by the little urgent silver
crash of the breaking glass, seemed to see two Lenas--the Lena she had
expected to see limply hunched in bed, and another Lena, kneeling on a
table near the window. The moonlight in the window behind this other
Lena made a mere blur of the thin garment she wore, so that her
silhouetted body looked almost naked--almost bare even of flesh.

"Fairy ... fairy ... fairy ..." Lena was chanting to herself in a thin
whisper, as she fumbled with her rope.

"It's no use calling fa-hairy in this house now," said old Mrs.
Cotton. "There are no fa-hairies now...."

The old woman, so used to witchcraft--so weary with unsurprised old
age, did not wonder why Lena, at the sound of her voice, collapsed
from her high kneeling eminence and flung herself on the bed crying
wildly.

Old Mrs. Cotton found her difficult slow way across the room to a
chair beside the bed.

"You have lo-host your changeling lover," she said. "And I my
changeling son."

Lena did not answer. She lay face downward, making no sound now.

"They have taken back their own. With music--with mu-husic they stole
him away. They have sent home to us--something they have no use
for--my son, lost seven years ago. Even so far away--he could
hear--the--call--of--America.... American mu-husic brought him
home ... American mu-husic is--answered--at--last...."

"Who has come home?" asked Lena in a smothered voice.

"Some one you never knew--Culliffudde Cotton, my son...Daley lo-host
him--seven--years--ago ... and I found a fairy in his stead. Eh--what
a change for me.... For my son Culliffudde was a fool--_so_
manly--_so_ practical--_so_ good-hearted.... He used to call Daley his
American swee-heetheart and take her to the movies.... Well. Well. We
have the American ho-home complete at last. He came home from
fairyland five minutes ago and found his American swee-heetheart
playing her mu-husical-box. I was there. I could see at once that this
was the fool I bo-hore. He had one of Daley's _cute_ little pu-huppies
in his hands and he said, 'Here's a snapdragon for you,
swee-heetheart, it has no teeth. I was right.' Oh, how he laughed! Oh,
how she cri-hied! Oh, how they hu-hugged each other.... Oh, what a
happy--American--home...."

"Perhaps," said Lena slowly, lifting a distraught face, "perhaps the
world's a little better for the loss of a stony-hearted fairy...."

"Perhaps it is a little better," said old Mrs. Cotton. "A little
ki-hinder. A little more American. But oh," she cried, raising her
knotted hands before her face, "but oh--there are so many men,
and--so--few--fairies...." Her voice died away on a low murmur, "No
more...no more fairies...."

THE END




[End of _Goodbye, Stranger_ by Stella Benson]
