Rebecca West

“ Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger, which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all, the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark. But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body, and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the dark with Marion. ”

“ She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned the meaning of life as one lived it.
So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. ”

“ Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely. ”

“ Life is thirst without you. I grudge every moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now I do—that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima, you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you; we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my lovely red-haired Ellen.... ”

“ The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch, and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland, is it?" ”

“ She knew that Roger's drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity. They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it. ”

“ Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away. The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices. Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...." ”

“ On the table between the loaf and the syrup-tin there was a jug filled with red and white roses; on the mantelpiece three vases that had long held nothing but dust now held roses, and doubtless felt a resurrection joy; and on the book-cases roses lifted stiff stems from two jam-jars. Ellen, being a slave of the eye, grew so pale and so gay at the sight of the flowers that almost everybody in the world except one man would have jeered at her, and she put her arms round her mother's neck and kissed her, though she knew the gift could not have come from her. ”

“ I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! ”

“ Lips pursed with these long imaginary kisses were too oppressive for a child's mouth; she had lost utterly that sacred, radiating lethargy which hushes a house so that a child may sleep: on a child's path her emanations were beginning to cast not light but lightning.
She called out to herself: "You fool! If you really love Richard you will let him run out to his game when he wants to, that he shall grow strong and victorious, and if you call him back it must be to give him an orange and not a kiss!" ”

“ For she knew then perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their beautiful dark child. ”

“ He knew there was no reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover; but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of disloyalty to some fair standard.
He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a severe receptive passion ”

“ Yaverland bit his lip suddenly. He had told the story without shame, for he knew well and counted it among the heartening facts of life, like the bravery of seamen and the sweetness of children, that to a man a woman's bed may sometimes be an altar. But Mr. Philip had ducked his head and his ears were red. Shame was entering the room like a bad smell.
For a minute Yaverland did not dare to look at Ellen. "I had forgotten she was a girl," he thought miserably. "I thought of nothing but how keen she is on Spain. I don't know how girls feel about things...." ”

“ Life must be lovely and amusing for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills around it ”

“ The passion that possessed him was so strong that it killed sensation. He desired her body ardently, but only because it was inhabited by her soul, for their flesh had become unreal. He felt an exaltation, an illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light, and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a richly coloured film blown round the fact of her. If he wanted to hold her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out like comets' hair. ”

“ The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.
There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. ”

“ An elm-tree in a grove to the east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he exclaimed.
"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ. ”

“ The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight beams were still unclouded.
"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a revolver.
Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.
"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?" ”

“ Ellen found it not altogether Grantown's gain that it was wholly uninhabited by horror, being an honest row of fishers' cottages set on a road beside the Firth to the west of Leith. Its wonder was its pier, a granite road driving its rough blocks out into the tumbling seas, the least urban thing in the world, that brought to the mind's eye men's bare chests and muscle-knotted arms, round-mouthed sea-chanteys, and great sound bodies caught to a wholesome death in the vicinity of upturned keels and foundered rust-red sails and the engulfing eternal sterilisation of the salt green waves. ”

“ She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr. Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects was not so great as she would have hoped. ”

“ You are hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you. Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. ”

“ Even now, every time Marion let him take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any man that ever lived. ”

“ Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on the tradition of brave life, and it made her want to cry to see how crowsfeet of pleasure came at the corners of their eyes when they looked at Richard, and how they liked to slap his strong back with their rough hands, which age was making delicate with filigree of veins and wrinkles. ”

“ Yaverland was leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this was anybody but Ellen—Ellen, who was far different from every other woman in the world and more desirable. ”

“ She recanted all she had lately thought of Harry. Hatred and resentment fell from her. The promise of her lover's near presence came on her like a south wind blowing over flowers. At his message that he was waiting for her on the marshes under the hillside she remembered what love is—a shelter, a wing, a witty clemency that finds the perfect unguent for its mate's hurt as easily as a wit finds jests, a tender alchemy that changes the dark evil subsistence of the universe to bright, valuable gold. ”

“ Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest sound of a whimper from Ellen.
"What's the matter?" he asked tenderly.
"Nothing," she quivered. "There's something awful sad about the evening sometimes. I've got an end of the world feeling." And indeed there was something awesome and unnatural about this quiet hour in which there was so much light and so little heat, in this furnace of the skies from which there flowed so glacial a wind. "Supposing the end of the world is like this," said Ellen, nearly crying. ”

“ She found consolation in this frost-polished morning: the pale, bright sky in which the light stood naked, her abandoned veil of clouds floating above the horizon; the swoop and dance over the marshes of the dazzling specks that were seagulls; the fur of rime that the dead leaves on the hedgerow wore, and the fine jewellery-work of the glistening grass tufts in its shadow. The world had neglected nothing in its redding up.
At her elbow Ellen spoke shyly. "Richard's come down at last. May I go in to him, Mrs. Yaverland?"
"Of course you may. You can do anything you like. ”

“ It was against nature that he should have forgotten the woman he loved when he came under the roof where she was sleeping her beautiful sleep. Could it be that Ellen was not the woman he loved and that his engagement to her was some new joke on the part of destiny? She whirled round to have a look at him, exclaiming to make time, "Oh, she is the most wonderful creature who ever lived." But he had forgotten his embarrassment now, and was standing with bent head, thinking intently, and on his face there was the dazzled and vulnerable look of a man who is truly in love. ”

“ It was impossible that they could shed such tears as smudged her bright colours now, such exquisite distillations of innocent grief at the wasting of the youth of which she was so innocently proud, and generous rage at the decrying of a name that was neither relative nor friend nor employer but merely a maker of beauty. Without doubt she lived in a lonely world, where tears were shed for other things than the gift of gold, and where one could perform these simplicities before a witness without fear of contempt, because human intercourse went only to the tune of charity and pity. ”

“ But this was an irrational emotion, and Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that would justify it.
It was there. Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were brought forth by movement. As she bent over the menu, and gave orders that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift, automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows. ”

“ Never had he been able to look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself nearly in love. ”

“ For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to find in the robust. ”

“ Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the lanterns of masked men. ”