May Sinclair

“ Persistent, invincible affirmation was part of her method, her secret.
Milly replied a little wearily (she knew nothing about the method) .
“I haven’t time to be afraid,” she said. “And as long as you’re not—”
“It’s you who matter,” Agatha cried. “You’re so near him. Don’t you realize what it means to be so near?”
Milly smiled sadly, tenderly. (As if she didn’t know!)
“My dear, that’s all that keeps me going. I’ve got to make him feel that he’s protected.”
“He is protected,” said Agatha.
Already she was drawing her charmed circle round him. ”

“ Their passion weighed on them with the unbearable, unescapable boredom of immortality.
“Oscar—how long will it last?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know whether this is one moment of eternity, or the eternity of one moment.”
“It must end some time,” she said. “Life doesn’t go on for ever. We shall die.”
“Die? We have died. Don’t you know what this is? Don’t you know where you are? This is death. We’re dead, Harriott. We’re in hell.” ”

“ That in this power of your imagination to conceive, this freedom of your will to create your universe, God is cutting a clearer path for himself than through that constrained and obstructed consciousness you had on earth?”
“That’s it. When I think of that appalling life of earth, the pain, sir, the horrible pain, the wickedness, the imbecility, the endless struggling through blood and filth, and being beaten, I can’t help wondering how such things can exist in the Absolute, and why the Absolute shouldn’t have put us—or as you would say, thought us into this heavenly state from the beginning.” ”

“ He had turned to Agatha.
“Forgive me if I suggest that you cannot really know. Heaven forbid that you should know.”
Milly, intent on her “plan,” persisted.
“But, dearest, you said yourself it was. The one place.”
“I said that? When did I say it?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday? I daresay. But I didn’t sleep last night. It wouldn’t let me.”
“Very few people do sleep,” said Agatha, “for the first time in a strange place.”
“The place isn’t strange. That’s what I complain of. That’s what keeps me awake. No place ever will be strange when It’s there. ”

“ We treat the dead as if they were dead, as if they were not there. If he had really believed that she was there, he would have died rather than say the things he had said to Effie. Nobody, he told himself, could have accused him of unkindness to his mother while she lived. He had really loved her up to the moment, the moment of supreme temptation, when he wanted Effie. He had not willed her to die. He had been barely conscious of his wish. How, then, could he be held accountable? How could he have destroyed the thing whose essence was the hidden, unknown darkness? ”

“ She went at first uplifted in the joy of her deliverance, drawing into her the light and fragrance of the young morning. Then she remembered Harding Powell. She had noticed as she passed the Farm-house that the blinds were drawn again in all the windows. That was because Harding and Milly were gone. She thought of Harding, of Milly, with an immense tenderness and compassion, but also with lucidity, with sanity. They had gone—yesterday—and she had not seen them. That could not be helped. She had done all that was possible. ”

“ For three days Oscar was madly in love with Harriott and Harriott with him. As she lay awake she would turn on the light and look at him as he slept at her side. Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it entirely hid his eyes.
In six days reaction had set in. At the end of the tenth day, Harriott, returning with Oscar from Montmartre, burst into a fit of crying. When questioned, she answered wildly that the Hotel Saint Pierre was too hideously ugly it was getting on her nerves. ”

“ Agatha must not allow herself to doubt the Power. How could she, when she saw what it had done for Harding? If she doubted, what could she expect of Harding? But, of course, she must take care of her own dear self. If she failed—if she gave way—what on earth would the poor darling do, now that he had become dependent on her?
She wrote as if it was Agatha’s fault that he had become dependent; as if Agatha had nothing, had nobody in the world to think of but Harding; as if nobody, as if nothing in the world beside Harding mattered. And Agatha found herself resenting Milly’s view. ”

“ He would catch words coming into his mind: “He ought to be dead. He ought to be dead.” To think that this thing that ought to be dead, this old, shrivelled skin-bag of creaking bones should come between him and Dorsy, should have power to drive Dorsy from him.
One day when he was brushing Mr. Greathead’s soft felt hat a paroxysm of hatred gripped him. He hated Mr. Greathead’s hat. He took a stick and struck at it again and again; he threw it on the flags and stamped on it, clenching his teeth and drawing in his breath with a sharp hiss. ”

“ It had gone, that little tragic droop in Agatha’s face. The corners of her eyes and of her beautiful mouth were lifted, as if by—he could find no other word for the thing he meant but wings. She had a look which, if it were not of joy, was of something more vivid and positive than peace.
He put it down to their increased and undisturbed communion, made possible by her retirement to Sarratt End. Yet as he looked at her he sighed again.
In response to his sigh she asked suddenly: “How’s Bella?”
His face lighted wonderfully. “It’s extraordinary,” he said; “she’s better. Miles better. ”

“ Agatha’s house, white as a cutting in the chalk downs, looked south-west, up the valley and across it, to where a slender beech-wood went lightly up the hill and then stretched out in a straight line along the top, with the bare fawn-coloured flank of the ploughed land below. The farm-house looked east towards Agatha’s house across a field; a red-brick house—dull, dark red with the grey bloom of weather on it—flat-faced and flat-eyed, two windows on each side of the door and a row of five above, all nine staring at the small white house across the field. ”

“ And besides, Agatha herself was an attraction. It had occurred to Milly Powell that it might do Harding good to be near Agatha. There was something about her; Milly didn’t know what it was, but she felt it, he felt it—an influence, or something, that made for mental peace. It was, Mrs. Powell said, as if she had some secret.
She hoped Agatha wouldn’t mind. It couldn’t possibly hurt her. He couldn’t. The darling couldn’t hurt a fly; he could only hurt himself. And if he got really bad, why then, of course, they would have to leave Sarratt End. ”

“ He apologized for the darkness in which they found him. Harding Powell’s manners had always been perfect, and it struck Agatha as strange and pathetic that his malady should have left untouched the incomparable quality he had.
Milly went to the windows and drew the blinds up. The light revealed him in his exquisite perfection, his small fragile finish. He was fifty or thereabouts, but slight as a boy, and nervous, and dark as Englishmen are dark; jaw and chin shaven; his mouth hidden by the straight droop of his moustache. ”

“ She had known in the beginning that it was by love that she held them; but now, though she loved Rodney and had almost lost her pity for Harding in her fear of him, it was Harding rather than Rodney that she held.
In the morning she woke with a sense, which was almost a memory, of Harding having been in the room with her all night. She was tired, as if she had had some long and unrestrained communion with him.
She put away at once the fatigue that pressed on her (the gift still “worked” in a flash for the effacing of bodily sensation) . ”

“ She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become insubstantial, but that she knew, in a flash, that what she saw was the very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid as crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent.
Agatha in her moment saw that the whole world brimmed and shone and was alive with the joy that was its life, joy that flowed flood-high and yet was still. ”

“ She could conceive that, if it had not been for Rodney Lanyon, she might have had the courage to have gone on. She might have considered that she was bound to save Harding, even at the price of her own sanity, since there was her word to Milly. But it might be questioned whether by holding on to him she would have kept it, whether she really could have saved him that way. She was no more than a vehicle, a crystal vessel for the inscrutable and secret Power, and in destroying her utterly, Harding would have destroyed himself. ”

“ A porter pulled him back.
“Quick work, that,” said Steven.
Before he left the station he wired to Mr. Greathead’s London hotel, announcing the time of his arrival.
He felt nothing, nothing but the intense relief of a man who has saved himself by his own wits from a most horrible death. There were even moments, in the week that followed, when, so powerful was the illusion of his innocence, he could have believed that he had really seen Mr. Greathead off by the five o’clock train. Moments when he literally stood still in amazement before his own incredible impunity. ”

“ The dead did know. She had come back to tell him that she knew. She knew that he thought of her with unkindness. She had been there when he talked about her to Effie. She knew the thought he had hidden even from himself. She knew that she had died because, secretly, he had wished her dead.
That was the meaning of her look and of her tears.
No fleshly eyes could have expressed such an intensity of suffering, of unfathomable grief. He thought: the pain of a discarnate spirit might be infinitely sharper than any earthly pain. It might be inexhaustible. ”

“ In this vision Elizabeth’s adultery, which had once appeared so monstrous, so overpowering an event, was revealed as slender and insignificant.
And now the universe dissolved into the ultimate constituents of matter, electrons of electrons of electrons, an unseen web, intensely vibrating, stretched through all space and all time. He saw it sucked back into the space of space, the time of time, into the thought of God.
Mr. Spalding was drawn in with it. He passed from God’s immanent to his transcendent life, into the Absolute. ”

“ Greathead’s phantasm was getting a little thin, as if it couldn’t last more than an instant. He had never so longed for it to go, as he longed now for it to stay and help him.
“Well, Steven, any flesh-and-blood man would tell you to go and get hanged to-morrow; that it was no more than your plain duty. And I daresay there are some mean, vindictive spirits even in my world who would say the same, not because they think death important but because they know you do, and want to get even with you that way. ”

“ She could turn it on to Harding Powell without any loss to Rodney Lanyon; for it was immeasurable, inexhaustible.
She looked back at the farm-house with its veiled windows. Formless and immense, the shadow of Harding Powell swayed uneasily on one of the yellow blinds. Across the field her own house showed pure and dim against the darkening slope behind it, showed washed and watered white in the liquid, lucid twilight. Her house was open always and on every side; it flung out its casement arms to the night and to the day. ”

“ Except Rodney when his inn was full, nobody ever came to Woodman’s Farm; and Agatha’s house, set down inside its east gate, shared its isolation, its immunity. Two villages, unseen, unheard, served her, not a mile away. It was impossible to be more sheltered, more protected and more utterly cut off. And only fifteen miles, as the crow flies, between this solitude and London, so that it was easy for Rodney Lanyon to come down.
At two o’clock, the hour when he must come if he were coming, she began to listen for the click of the latch at the garden gate. ”

“ Not that that altogether accounted for it to Harding Powell. He said so at last to Agatha.
They were returning, he and she, by the edge of the wood at the top of the steep field after a long walk. He had asked her to go with him—it was her country—for a good stretch, further than Milly’s little feet could carry her. They stood a moment up there and looked around them. April was coming on, but the ploughed land at their feet was still bare; the earth waited. On that side of the valley she was delicately unfruitful, spent with rearing the fine, thin beauty of the woods. ”

“ He saw its face distinctly, the greyish, stuck-out bud of the under-lip, and the droop of the pinched nose. The small eyes peered at him, glittering. The whole figure had a glassy look between the darkness behind it and the pane. One moment it stood outside, looking in; and the next it was mixed up with the shimmering picture of the lighted room that hung there on the blackness of the trees. Mr. Greathead then showed as if reflected, standing with Steven in the room. ”