Gerald Bullett

“ Compared with the soothing syrup of Aunt Hester’s religion, despair was almost intoxicating: she tasted it eagerly, as though it had been wine. In those days she and Hypatia had echoed each other rapturously enough, agreeing—with what delight—that life was but a dry husk and death a fit ending to a witless scheme. But now Hypatia, with a fatal instinct for novelty, had subsided into the arms of a new religion, a religion that made summary end of all problems by denying their existence. It was this, Sheila divined, that had put that look of assured calm into her eyes. ”

“ Alone with these my poems...
Alone with these my poems, when night is still,
Earth seems but a speck of fluttering dust,
Moth-like, in a waste of eternity.
Alone with these symbols of human thought,
All our measureless system of whirling worlds
Seems itself a symbol, a chance phrase
In a poem wrought by the hand of a brooding god,
Where we ourselves are less than commas and dots. ”

“ There was a fire in the grate, and a lamp like a great harvest moon glowed yellow on the table.
‘Listen to me, Saunders,’ cried Bellingham, refusing to sit down. ‘You are my best friend, my only friend; and Joan is my wife, the finest wife that any man had. The All-Seeing Eye is watching me now, as always; that street-accident, as you call it, was the plain speech of God telling me to desert this woman. I’m a doomed man, Saunders, and I can speak my mind now. I believe in God as firmly as ever I believed in Him, but I have learned something. He is not worth serving. ”

“ Beauty became incarnated in the person of Stephen Redshawe, whose son she later encountered in the house at Maadi. The past rose in sad loveliness, enveloping her with the fragrance of pressed flowers; but of all the memories that surged in her, this one alone broke in pitiless splendour over her consciousness. In that moment Stephen Redshawe lived again, less as a man and a lover than as a gleam, an ecstasy, a chord of divine music, a symbol of all that she had longed for and lost. Other things she could recall minutely, but Stephen remained a vague splendour. ”

“ He dropped on to the seat beside her and sat, hunched and shaking, a figure of desolation.
‘Never mind,’ said Sheila firmly. ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk. You’re quite free now to go back to her. And you’ve done me no harm.’
He stammered in amazement. ‘You can say that! Don’t you see how contemptible I am! I would like to kill myself!’
He brooded on that thought. Death was the only escape from his own insufferable egoism. Then he began to perceive that he was extracting enjoyment even from the savour of his own self-loathing. ”

“ Helena was dead.... Like a city besieged Sheila fought against the cruel memories that invaded her.
Aunt Hester came with food on a tray, and urged her to try to eat something, just a morsel, just a sip. What was the good of it all? And the voice of Aunt Hester stayed with her interpolating dull remarks about funerals, trains, Penlington, nice to be home again, poor dear mother, make a friend of Jesus, try not to brood, into Sheila’s busy thought. But Sheila pushed them all from her. She was eager to brood. Without brooding, life was empty: a dry husk. ”

“ For his youth and good nature, for his docility, for the irresponsible levity that even the Fairfield atmosphere could not entirely inhibit, and still more for the less definite charm he unconsciously exercised over her, Sheila conceived a liking that trembled sometimes dangerously on the verge of tenderness. She was stirred by his voluntary surrender of his personality into the grasping hands of Hypatia, the high-priestess of a new oracle, and trembled at the thought of his being immolated, a blood sacrifice, upon that godless altar. ”

“ Poor Geoff! ‘But, dear, you can see me now.’
‘Your face, your clothes. Let me see you, all your beauty. Venus Anadyomene....’
She burned with shame as something of his meaning dawned on her ... and now, as she stood in her bedroom re-living the scene, the plan he had unfolded seemed both wild and wicked. Wild and wicked, yes: yet shot through with a flash of poetry. An illuminated ‘Thou God seest me’ gleamed at her from one wall, and a pledge to abstain by God’s help from all intoxicating liquors as beverages, signed in childish caligraphy Harriet Mason, accused her from another. ”

“ Without a word, the young man followed Hypatia out of the room.
The flame of battle was awake now in Sheila’s heart, burning away all lingering reluctance, all doubts and fears. If there was to be a feud, there was no doubt upon which side she would fight. Age had declared war upon Youth, and all the spirit in her woke to the challenge. Edward, her comrade, was being threatened with disinheritance. Sheila knew now that she was irrevocably his: a hint of doubt would have been shameful treason. ”

“ A woman with love must bestow it somewhere: Sheila poured it without stint upon her dream of Kay. Ten years divided them, and more, before that dream was finally destroyed. Sophie, his wife, gave birth to a child, and Sheila, impelled by who knows what medley of motives, visited her. They sat and talked about nothing in a room pervaded by yellow. A pale-brown flower perpetuated itself at intervals on the walls; a small occasional table set in the middle of a dark yellowish carpet was covered by a buff cloth; a gilt-framed oval mirror surmounted the mantelpiece. ”

“ Freedom consists in being left alone, left with room to grow, not in being penned round with affection and told every minute of the day that of course we can do as we like if we don’t love mother and father.’
‘You’re hitting too hard,’ whispered Sheila.
‘You think,’ Edward continued, ‘because you’ve born and bred us and sacrificed yourself [263] for us that Hypatia and I belong to you.’
‘Oh no, you don’t belong to me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield in fierce sarcasm. ‘I’m only your mother: that’s all.’
‘Precisely,’ said Edward. ‘Our mother, not our owner. We belong to nobody. ”

“ Fairfield,’ broke out Redshawe after a while. ‘I shouldn’t have blundered in with my self-pity. But mine isn’t a boyish fancy or any rot of that kind. To me she is just pure beauty. I’ve always worshipped beauty. I could have poured out my life like wine at her feet.’
‘And to me,’ said Sheila, ‘she was a little helpless thing that fumbled at my breasts. She’s been my whole life for twenty-six years. ”

“ The policeman, with a kindly word, handed him over to Joan’s care. She was all for summoning a doctor, but Bellingham would not hear of it. White-faced, hiding his rising tumult behind a mask of steely calm, he told her curtly to fetch me. She obeyed, poor child, in terror of her life and his own. I was with them ten minutes later.
‘Saunders,’ he greeted me, without preamble. ‘God has flung down His last challenge.’
‘You mean this accident!’ said I, scoffing gently.
‘Accident!’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Do you, a priest of God, talk to me of accident! Not a sparrow falls without God. ”

“ And when she opened them again, birds were chattering outside her window and pale dawnlight, like a ghost, was in the room. ‘Like a ghost,’ Sheila said, and shuddered. Aunt Hester was not there; her bed had not been slept in.
Sheila got quickly out of bed, a dry sob of fear breaking from her, and ran barefooted into the green corridor. She stood quite motionless for a while, one hand resting on the door handle, and listened; tiptoed a few steps up the passage, her eyes fixed dreadfully on the room that held Helena; and drew back again. Time became a throbbing agony. ”

“ He won her heart by the smile that flickered for a moment in his face at first sight of his patient, and by the gentleness with which he unclasped Rosemary’s fingers from the woolly bear that her arm embraced. Sheila gave herself to the answering of his professional questions.
Her fears a little stilled by the doctor’s reassurances, she surrendered to Hypatia’s importunity by withdrawing with her into the garden for a few moments.
‘Now, Sheila, my dear,’ Hypatia urged, taking her arm with a sisterly caressing, ‘you’re not to worry. Worry’s fatal. ”

“ As for me, I looked from one face to the other, trying to read what was written there, and so my glance fell upon Bellingham. Fell and was arrested, for the face of Bellingham was a revelation. What it revealed is difficult to describe in cold prose; a musician could better express it in some moaning, unearthly phrase of music. It was as if there shone from that face not light but darkness, and as if over that head hovered a halo of dark fear, a crown of shuddering doom. ”

“ Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.
‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.
‘But they were awfully funny, those two,’ Sheila remarked. ‘People so comic must have a spark of goodness in them somewhere.’
‘Goodness!’ said Clive Bunter, ‘Gallons and gallons of it. It ought to be put a stop to, this monopoly of goodness. But as for brains—all the brains in the Band of Hope wouldn’t fill a pin’s head.’
‘You’re not including your own, are you?’ asked Kay.
Sheila, who considered Clive rather conceited, laughed with relish. She was at some pains to show her appreciation. ”

“ My body had broken his fall, and I now released Joan in order to turn my attention to her lover. The sight of him prostrate restored her to courage. She was always ready when needed. I left Bellingham to her care for a moment and turned again to that haunted corner. I have never known fear such as I knew at that moment, and yet I felt infinitely braced by the dramatic significance of this conflict with an unknown terror. It was as if hell had invaded earth, and that God had [41] left me as His sole witness. At such crises a man with religion turns to it. ”

“ Miss Lettice fell in love with Jack, but the love she yearned to lavish on him was maternal love. If you think me perverse in calling that love a hopeless passion I must disagree with you. It was passion, and it was, in part, physical passion, as all human love must be. Why do we shrink from admitting that maternal love is as deeply rooted in the body as any other? Miss Lettice loved Jack Turnbull for his strength, his masculinity, his youth, and because, by a fatal coincidence, he was born in the same month of the same year as her Bernard. ”

“ This was the common lot: by contact with the world to rub the down of paradise off our souls, to grow drab and dull in spirit, drab and dull in mind, even before that waning of physical strength which alone could assuage the bitterness of the process. In Kay youth had died; in Edward—Edward had never been young; but in herself youth lived and craved more life. ”

“ Persons change,’ she added sadly.
‘You’re thinking of Hypatia,’ he suggested.
‘Hypatia, yes. And someone else. It’s like building your house on sand, you know, ever to rely on persons.’
‘Still,’ said Edward, ‘if a person’s rational and consistent—and there are consistent persons.’
‘Yes, and there are clockwork toys. A perfectly consistent person must be very much like them, I should think.’
‘But surely you agree that man is just that: a mechanical toy in the hands of Necessity. The illusion of freewill is only disguised mechanism.’
‘How dreadful!’ Sheila exclaimed. ”

“ When you are in science you will see everything more clearly.’
‘I shall see that there’s nothing to see at all,’ said Sheila. ‘Isn’t that your fundamental doctrine?’
‘True, matter does not exist, if that’s what you mean,’ said Hypatia. ‘That is perhaps Our Leader’s greatest discovery. God is All-Good, the very Principle of Goodness, and man is His reflection. Sin, disease, and death——’
[220] ‘Exist in the reflection but not in the reflector,’ remarked Sheila. ‘Are your people of the same way of thinking?’
‘Oh no.’ Hypatia shook her head. ”

“ Sheila’s interest in Kay, her urgent desire to protect him, led her into strange places; for he was a youth of inscrutable impulses. The Band of Hope was good fun; and to accept sometimes the hospitality of Sophie’s pew in a strange chapel full of green gloom was a defection from Wesleyanism that Aunt Hester found it easy to forgive: the easier when she reflected that it was a further step from the dreaded Popery. But the Seven Days’ Mission was something that taxed Sheila heavily. A new humility was growing upon her; the beatific vision of Kay drew her with a power she found irresistible. ”

“ The words died on his lips, which remained open only because in his bewilderment Mr. Pardoe forgot to close them. He seemed to have stepped into the very heart of Spring. The sounds and colours and the rich earthy smell of the woods made him tingle with delight. Never before had he breathed such air. It was like strong wine in its effect, and that alarmed Mr. Pardoe, who dreaded nothing so much as to lose control of himself. For him the light of reason was the only legitimate light in the universe: moonlight, starlight, sunlight—these were merely decorative. ”

“ As an excuse for delay he began examining the instrument in his hand, which was a perfectly ordinary pair of household scissors having, as all scissors have, one sharp end and one blunted. The sharp end interested him most. He scrutinized its point and pressed it against the ball of his thumb; and the thought flashed to him, as though the devil himself had whispered it: ‘This is sharp enough—one thrust under the left ear.’ He shuddered, recoiled from the idea, and burned with shame and fear for having ever had it. ”

“ I have, as you know, an insatiable curiosity about human nature—especially freaks of human nature, I’m afraid—and Bellingham had piqued that curiosity. I had repudiated his particular version of God as being nothing but an almighty Peeping Tom, and yet a weakness for peeping is my own besetting sin. All my life I have been a kind of amateur detective of the human soul. ”