Penelope Page was small and dark and plain. She had lank hair that streaked over her ears in wisps, and eyes that looked at you as dog’s eyes do, pleadingly, with a consciousness in their depths that the owner of them must of necessity be found wanting in some way. She was made plainer by the possession of two extremely pretty sisters, one older and one younger than herself. Mrs. Page had had her children with Early Victorian simplicity—one after the other at intervals of a little over two years. And she had had five—three girls and two boys.
The boys liked Penelope best. “You know where you are with Pen. Of course she’s as ugly as sin, but then she’s so awfully good-tempered. Come on, Pen. Leave those silly fatheads to stew with their dolls and bring your stilts.”
“Can’t I bring Mabel?” Mabel was something hardly human in the way of a doll, but Pen worshipped her.
“Yes, bring the beast, if you want to—oh, let her, George, it makes her happy, and what does it matter?” And the three would go plunging off down the garden, the best of companions, Gerald carrying his little sister’s stilts for her; she was such a stupid little thing she would be sure to fall over them.
But that was many years ago. George had been killed in the Great War, dying gallantly at the age of twenty-one. Gerald had very nearly been killed too, but he had got off eventually with a very severe wound, and was now doing quite well in a large shipping firm. Madeline, who had been engaged when war broke out, was beginning to wonder what she was going to do with her life; her man had been killed almost at once, at the end of 1914. Penelope, being only just twenty, had not yet begun to think of life as a thing that concerned herself at all. She was placidly happy with her books and her girl friends and with all the ordinary enjoyments that go to make up the life of a girl in a well-to-do family of the middle classes. And Doris, who was still attending the Clapham High School—her last year of it before she went abroad—was madly happy in the way that a girl of her age always is madly happy—hockey, a frantic adoration for a teacher, two desperate friendships going on at the same time. Everything when you are sixteen conspires to make life a very pleasant thing, especially when all these things are coupled with the lurking consciousness that one day you are going to be very pretty. Madeline was very pretty in the way that Doris promised to be, fair and fragile, with a rose-leaf complexion. But it is a type that very soon shows signs of wear and tear, and it is a type also that does not carry much brain with it, so sometimes, especially when it was cold, when Madeline saw herself in the looking-glass, she was afraid, especially if Doris was anywhere about.
This pleasant and ordinary family lived in a large square house, standing in a beautiful garden, in one of the wide leafy roads of Clapham Park. Mr. Page, a prosperous elderly stockbroker, very keen on his garden, went daily to the City, walking always to the Brixton High Road to catch a Southwark Bridge tram. He would not keep a car, nor would he have the telephone installed in The Oaks. Those were his only outward expressions of his inward immense disapproval of the present-day tendency to undue luxury.
“Mother, make father have the telephone!” This came from Madeline one day, when, pale with disappointment, she rushed in to show her mother a letter that had come by the midday post. “Phyllis would have taken me, if she had had time to get at me,” she stormed.
“My darling child, don’t you know by now that it is quite useless to talk of making your father do anything,” replied Mrs. Page, twisting round a little from her writing-table. Mrs. Page was like Penelope, or rather Penelope was like her mother had been—the same eager look in the brown eyes, the same alert, twitching look about the sensitive lips. But Mrs. Page had early learnt to control her eagerness, a bitter lesson learnt with many tears. But she was child enough still to take her children into her confidence about it. Mr. Page did not like twitchings and eagernesses, he liked to know exactly where he was. Everything very clear and very definite. And Mrs. Page had submitted herself to this, largely because she lived in an age when a wife was supposed to submit to everything unreasonable that a rather stupid husband chose to dictate. But she did not see why a family of growing and intelligent children should be forced to regard things in the same way, and she was always strictly impartial in her discussions with them.
“It would serve him right if we all went away from home,” raged Madeline, the bitter tears streaming out from under her white eyelids. He would have been there, that nice uncle of Phyllis’s, and he had seemed . . .
“My darling, be sensible. Where would you find anything to compare with the comfort of this home that your father provides you with?” Mrs. Page leant forward out of her chair and drew Madeline nearer to her. She was dreadfully sorry for this eldest child of hers. To a fraction of a detail she knew what she was suffering. The awful feeling of getting older and older and the longing for marriage and a home of her own. That was why, when the great blow fell that had almost crushed Madeline, she had implored the girl of twenty to pull herself together.
“Mother, you don’t understand. . . .” Madeline with her face to the wall had refused to be comforted.
“Darling, believe me, I do, I do!” Mrs. Page, well out of sight, had wrung her hands together. Her own light quenched at the age of twenty in very much the same way, a scrap on the Indian frontier. And years of refusing to be comforted. And then an awakening, too late, that the best of her youth had slipped away. And then—Mr. Page! “Darling, I do, I do understand,” she said.
But it was of no use. And now she drew her eldest daughter to her with a throb of almost painful sympathy. If only Madeline could find something to fill her life. Men of her generation were practically non-existent. Gerald’s friends were too young. George’s would have been the ones. And when Mrs. Page thought of George she felt again the pang that she always felt in thinking of her eldest son. Why had she not felt his death more? Why, when she was staring, sick with panic, through the large plate-glass windows of The Oaks, had it always been with a thought of Gerald that she had feared and sickened at the sight of the telegraph boy? Because George was the only one of her children at all like their father, Mrs. Page knew it was that, although even to herself she tried to pretend that it wasn’t.
Breakfast at The Oaks was a very pleasant meal. Mrs. Page kept it so by deliberate intent. She believed in the influence of a daily going out from a harmonious home as a most powerful factor in the welding together of the different members of a family. Mr. Page did not, otherwise he would never have insisted on extremely long and uninteresting family prayers.
“Mother, can’t you get the pater to dry up a bit?” Gerald, twitching to be off, had leapt up from his knees the instant Mr. Page came to an end. The bacon was not allowed to be brought into the extremely comfortable dining-room until Mr. Page had finished. He had now, and had gone out into the hall to speak to the head gardener.
“No, darling, I can’t, and you know I can’t.” Mrs. Page put both her hands on the shoulders of this passionately loved son of hers. Gerald and Penelope—when Mrs. Page thought of them she got an extraordinary creeping feeling round her heart. It was a real physical feeling of love—love incarnate, encircling the beloved. “Gerald, I adore you,” she said, and she kissed the brown face.
“Ahem!” but although Gerald spoke scoffingly he got a queer feeling at the back of his eyelids. Had other men a mother like this? he wondered, as he flung pieces of bacon down his throat. Surely not, otherwise they wouldn’t do such sickening things. She was so utterly utterly . . . What was she? Gerald gave it up as Penelope came in.
“Late again, Face! Thank you, Ugly!” This to Doris, fair and radiant, who had taken her brother’s plate to the sideboard with her own. “By the way, that new mistress of yours, poor thing! The other day when I had dropped you I nearly knocked her down with Mox. And the radiator cracked, I swear it did.”
“It didn’t; she has a most heavenly face!” Crimson had flamed up to the roots of Doris’s fair bobbed hair. “Mother, hasn’t she? you’ve seen her!”
“Gerald, don’t be so unkind!” Mrs. Page’s face was all crinkled with laughter. “Pen, darling, you’re late—why are you? It annoys your father. Yes, Doris, I think Miss Foster is a dear.” Mrs. Page was kissing her second daughter tenderly.
“Pour out my tea, quick, and then he won’t know; he didn’t see me as I came downstairs; he was looking at that dwarf tree on the carved oak thing.” Penelope was taking an egg with a little cosy on the top of it. “Besides, he’s late; how can he mind!”
“Darling!” Mrs Page shot a quiet, reproving glance down the table, and Penelope seeing it, got up again. “Mother!” Stooping, she kissed the grey hair and then walked back to her place.
“Where’s Madeline?” Gerald had finished, and getting up was still rolling up his dinner napkin. “Hurry up, Ugly, or I shan’t take you!” He addressed his younger sister, who fled from the room, leaving her coffee untasted.
“Madeline has a headache and is having her breakfast in bed. I told Janet, mother. Bother this egg, I never can do it this way! Gerald, you do it.” Penelope, very slim and elf-like in her pale green polo jersey, leant back in her chair and smiled ingratiatingly at her brother.
“I like that! You stroll in at any old time, and expect me to wait on you. Like this, you muffin head!” Gerald seized the egg in his nice brown left hand and decapitated it at one fell stroke.
“Joy! Thank you, Gerald! Now then!” Penelope began to reach out for things. The butter . . . she stabbed her small knife into a bunch of three pats and fortunately landed them all on her plate at once, for at that very moment the master of the house came into the room. And with his coming the very faintest, vaguest film of irritation spread over everything. Intangibly, but it was there. Everybody felt it. Even Mrs. Page, inured to it by years of close association with this man, felt it, and feeling it anew, wondered what it was. For he had not yet uttered one word.
“Hilda, I wish you would . . .” Mr. Page was walking to the window with quick irritable steps. “These blind cords . . . it is really so simple . . . every morning . . .” Mr. Page was disentangling them.
“Yes, it’s Janet . . . she doesn’t really understand them.” Mrs. Page was looking pleasantly towards the window. What did it matter? she was thinking. At least, what did it matter then? It was so important to start the day nicely. Mrs. Page at heart was still a child, and like a child terribly, mortally susceptible to atmosphere.
“Well, wouldn’t it be perfectly simple just to show Janet once for and all? After all, those are the little things. . . .” Mr. Page was nearing the fireplace. “Heavens! what a fire for a day like this!” he said, and stooping, he did something with a poker that caused a large lump of burning coal to fall out, and rolling to the front of the fender, send out a thick yellow spiral of gassy smoke into the room.
“I’ll do it, father.” Penelope, with the intuition of intense love, knew to a fraction what was going on under her mother’s imperturbable exterior. She got up and walked over to the fireplace.
“Thank you, Penelope.” Mr Page liked his second daughter the best of all his children. He had never analysed the reason for this. But it was not difficult to discover. Penelope was like her mother had been before he started to mould her to a particular type that he thought he admired. He did not admire it really, but that was the disaster—he thought he did. And as Mrs. Page was very sweet-tempered, she tried to be like it. It was only when she was alone with her children that she was the Hilda Graham of pre-married days.
“Now then. . . .” Mr. Page had sat down with a sort of unspoken intention about him of taking the thing up. “I’ll have the toast, Gerald, please. Motoring up to the City, my boy?” Mr. Page said it with a sort of forced sprightliness. He loathed the idea of his son motoring when he himself did not think it right to do so. But being a conscientious man, he did not think it right, now that his son was in a position to afford a motor, to object to his having one.
“Yes, father, I am. Bye-bye, mother.” Gerald spoke pleasantly and walked round the table to drop a second kiss on the grey hair. “Where’s that wretched child?” he said, as he made for the door.
“Here I am.” Doris, brilliant in her ugly blue serge uniform, dashed into the room, colliding with her brother. “Oh, hallo, father!” She hastened to escape again. But Mr. Page was too quick for her.
“You have not drunk your coffee, Doris,” he said firmly; “do so before you start for school.”
“Mother, Gerald won’t wait for me if I do.” Doris had almost begun to cry. “Need I?” She stood trembling in front of her cup.
“Do what your father tells you, darling.” Mrs. Page spoke quietly, but with her hands locked together under the table. Such a little thing really, and yet so overwhelmingly important. Always the feeling that where the father was. . . . But he was speaking. “Hudson says that those rose-trees will never do well under the south wall, Hilda; what do you think?”
“I should think that they would,” said Mrs. Page, who did not care for anything at that express moment except that Gerald and the beloved Mox should not have started without her youngest child. Had he gone? . . . No, he hadn’t—at least, not before Doris had had time to get to the front door. Mrs. Page heard the triumphantly ascending scale of the klaxon as Gerald swept out of the gate.
“What makes you think that they would do well under the south wall, Hilda?” Husband and wife were alone in the dining-room now. Penelope had slipped out after Doris’s tumultuous exit. She had finished her breakfast hurriedly and gone. She never cared to be alone with her father and mother; she always longed to prompt the latter. “Don’t say that to him, dear, it’s the wrong thing to say.” Sometimes the words actually trembled on her lips. And then she would pull herself up and wonder how she dared be so disrespectful even in thought. But it wasn’t disrespect really, it was only an intense understanding of what another person felt. A bad gift to have; Penelope often wished vaguely that she hadn’t got it.
“I think that they would do well there because Hudson doesn’t think so,” said Mrs. Page, feeling more cheerful now that all the children had left the room. She was like Penelope, in that a discordant atmosphere affected her like the sound of scissors scratching on a slate, only in a different way.
“A very inadequate reason, surely?” Mr Page had got up and was wandering down the disordered table. “Doris did not finish her coffee after all,” he said, stooping to peer into the blue willow-pattern cup standing in a sea of crumbs.
“Didn’t she, Wilfred? How naughty of her.” Mrs. Page had got up from her seat behind the old silver teapot and was standing by the fire staring down into it, her elbow on the mantelpiece. She suddenly poked wildly at a projecting piece of coal with her velvet toe.
“Hilda! be careful, dear!” Mr. Page had come back from his tour of the room and now stood very close to his wife. He loved her very dearly in spite of her many and obvious faults. They were such little faults too, as he often thought, walking majestically up Streatham Place to catch his tram. Little faults that with an equally little effort could so easily have been corrected. Little exaggerations of speech—wild assertions that, when surveyed in the broad light of common sense, were instantly found to have nothing even of probability to sustain them.
“It nearly caught fire!” Mrs. Page was laughing delightedly like a child.
Mr. Page did not answer this extremely foolish speech. Of course a velvet shoe nearly caught fire if you thrust it into flame. In fact it was a very extraordinary thing that it had not quite caught fire. But to laugh about it . . . and at his wife’s age too! And then Mr. Page suddenly looked more closely at his wife. Was it a tear that glistened on the thick lower lashes? No, not possible; she was laughing more uproariously than ever.
“To return to the rose-trees,” he said, not taking any more notice of this extremely foolish ebullition of untimely mirth. Mr. Page described it to himself in exactly those terms. He liked to put things into words, it made them more tangible. “You say that you don’t think Hudson has any reason to contemplate their failure to bloom if left in the place where they now are? Why?” Mr. Page took off his pince-nez and looked at his wife without them, blinking a little.
And somehow that blink was just what Mrs. Page needed to put her right again. He was getting older, this husband of hers, and he was the father of all their heavenly children—children that stood round her like little clearly burning lamps, making light where there would otherwise have been darkness. She took an impulsive step forward and cupped his face in her hands.
“Funny old boy!” she said: “let’s go out in the garden and see for ourselves. I’ll change my shoes first.” Mrs. Page put in the last sentence very hurriedly. Somehow she did not want him to get it in first.
And Mr. Page was pleased. Somehow nowadays Hilda very rarely suggested their doing anything together. Always some little excuse—the children—a little job of work that must be done at that precise moment. He waited for her in the spacious carpeted hall and hummed as he waited, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” They had sung it well the Sunday before. Not that he was sure that he cared for this new scheme of processing about the place. “With the Cross . . . going on before. . . .” Well, of course it had . . . but still . . . Ah! here she was, looking like a girl really in her woolly coat and skirt. And, after all, Mr. Page suddenly felt a very uncomfortable pang shoot through him as he watched her come down the shallow stairs. What was she . . . fifty-four or fifty-five? Ten years younger than he was, anyhow. Never mind, that daily walk to the tram . . . wonderful what it did. Mr. Page felt quite himself again as Mrs. Page, reaching his side, stood quietly there, smiling up at him.
St. Jude’s was one of those rather narrow redbrick churches that one sees a good many of nowadays. They generally stand in the middle of, or surrounded by, other red brick buildings, tiny little houses dreadfully and horribly alike. But this St. Jude’s did not do that: Clapham Park prided itself on being far more up to date than other suburbs. So as the leases of the square Cubitt-built houses fell in, the landlord let them fall in, and did not, as most landlords do, instantly sell the acre or so of vacant and beautifully treed land for the erection of revolting little houses upon it, and the hacking of horrible roads across it. It did not pay him at first, but eventually it did, for one day a group of prominent financiers, motoring from London to the Crystal Palace to attend an engineering conference, saw this expanse of waving trees and flowering gardens, and on their way back made inquiries, and the result was that a terrific deal was made, and the garden suburb of Clapham Park sprang into existence. At first the old inhabitants of the square houses still left standing objected to this, but when they went to places like Streatham and saw beautiful oak-trees lying hacked and prostrate on their sides, and desolation where there had once been dignity and beauty, they were reconciled, and rallied round the Garden Suburb, defending it to their last breath. So St. Jude’s stood in the middle of a lovely village green, with prettily shaped houses all round it. Even the shops were “vetted” before they were allowed to spring to life. Kind old Mr. Brandon had had a good deal to contend with first and last in the way of discontent from the Streatham staff when they surveyed the half-timbered front of the gabled offspring of the parent shop standing placid beneath the flapping plane-trees. So St. Jude’s stood, as the House of God ought to stand, in quiet placidity in the midst of beautiful surroundings. The Vicarage lay close at hand, red-tiled, and with bottle-glass casement windows. Those windows had lately been shrouded. The Vicar had died as placidly and quietly as he had lived, in his sleep from heart failure. And the question now agitating the hearts of innumerable women was, was the curate going to succeed to the living, or not? It was discussed morning, noon, and night in almost every house in Clapham Park. Only The Oaks remained untouched by it. For the Pages went to St. Michael’s, the old stone church in King’s Road. It had only been just by chance that Mr. Page had dropped into St. Jude’s the Sunday morning before. Rain in cataracts had prevented the rest of the family from going out at all—in fact from doing anything more than staring out of the window; and St. Jude’s was handy, only five minutes’ walk in fact.
“But I don’t care for it.” He had said it firmly, standing over the substantial uncut sirloin in front of him. Gerald always wished that his father would let him carve, he would do it so much better. Also, he spent a good deal of time in talking and letting the joint get cold. He was doing it now. “I don’t care for it,” he said again, and this time the maid at his elbow, who was not at all afraid of him, rattled the spoon in the vegetable dish.
“Mphm.” Mr. Page began to carve, and as no one took up the question of St. Jude’s and its ritual, the discussion languished. Lunch on Sunday was a very excellent meal, and everyone was hungry. There is nothing like an absolutely idle morning to stimulate the appetite to its highest pitch, especially if that morning happens to be a Sunday.
Doris all unwittingly revived it. She had finished her helping first, being accustomed to lunch at school and eat fast. “You can be three sorts of religions now,” she announced. “Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, and Protestant.”
“Who says so?” inquired Penelope dreamily. She had spent a very happy morning, writing to a great friend of hers in Yorkshire. There had been a very excellent fire in the schoolroom, and she had sat right in front of it, with her feet in the fender. There had been something so heavenly in thinking that you couldn’t go out even if you wanted to, also it had been something to miss church.
“Miss Foster,” said Doris, with a hidden smile of rapture in her soul. Even to say the beloved name was something, and to-morrow would be Monday, and she would see her again.
“Rot!” Gerald was leaning back in his chair, with his hand affectionately curled round a tankard of beer.
“It isn’t rot.” The quick tears were in Doris’s large blue eyes. “Is it, mother?” She flung a glance down the table.
Both maids waiting at table were staunch adherents of St. Jude’s, and Mrs. Page knew it; so she waited until the helpings of fruit tart and the attendant cream and sugar had been passed before she replied.
“I shouldn’t exactly call it rot, darling,” she said; “nothing to do with religion can be that. But the distinctions are rather new to me . . . you see, I am old-fashioned,” and Mrs. Page smiled at her youngest daughter.
“The distinctions are ridiculous!” Mr. Page here broke in, and as he broke in the atmosphere changed very subtly. There was antagonism in the air now, even good-tempered Gerald felt it. He began to think of things to say in favour of Anglo-Catholicism, before he had been whole-heartedly against it. “The Roman Church and the English Church are two entirely separate entities,” went on Mr. Page, “and to call any part of the English Church Anglo-Catholic is both disloyal and ridiculous. In fact, I will not have anyone in this house doing it,” he ended.
And Mrs. Page heaved a sigh of relief that Janet and Mabel were well out of the way. Such splendid reliable girls. Mrs. Page would not have cared if they were Seventh Day Baptists as long as they went on being like they were now. But they might have taken exception to Mr. Page’s tone: he was being so very fierce about it.
“Let’s go, shall we?” The wordless message passed between Penelope and her eldest sister, and Gerald sensing it also got up to go. But Doris, uneasy, ran round the table to her mother.
“Mother!” She pressed her fair head down on the grey hair. “Darling!” Mrs. Page returned the pressure with a slender ringed hand, and Doris, restored, followed her brother and sisters out into the hall. But left alone, the parents looked at one another.
“Who is this Miss Foster?” demanded Mr. Page, swinging a little round in his chair.
“One of the mistresses at the High School. Don’t worry about it, Wilfred; she is quite a nice woman. After all, you know, Doris is not a child now, and she must hear things discussed. This Anglo-Catholic movement is tremendously in the air just now; even I have heard about it; and, as you know, I don’t go in for reading religious papers. But the Guardian and the Church Times are full of very little else. Why it matters, I can’t think,” Mrs. Page sighed restlessly.
“People will go to the stake for a two-penny ha’penny question of doctrine,” said Mr. Page angrily. “I will not have the children beginning it. We have always attended St. Michael’s, and St. Michael’s we shall continue to attend. This morning St. Jude’s! . . . I swear the place smelt of incense! And such a set out, people bobbing up and down in their seats. Not a moment’s peace from beginning to end. And what was going on in the chancel Heaven only knows, I am sure I don’t. Ridiculous I call it!” Mr. Page fumed.
“I don’t like it, Wilfred, either. At least—no, I wouldn’t quite say that,” Mrs. Page corrected herself. “It’s so difficult to know.” She went on as if she were talking to herself. “After all, St. Michael’s is dull. Supposing Our Lord were to walk into a service there, what would He think of it? I should think He would be appalled!” and her clear gaze met her husband’s.
But Mr. Page never cared for this kind of talk, it savoured to him of a sort of indecency. Like telling people the price of things, or handing your doctor a five-pound note in payment of his bill. Hilda was rather given to it; he had often had to correct her about it; and in fact, because of that they very rarely discussed religious things. In fact—and the thought suddenly struck Mr. Page with a strange force—they very rarely discussed anything. He said what he thought about a certain thing, and his wife listened, and then generally disagreed. Why was it? He looked reflectively at her from over his glasses.
But Mrs. Page had gone off into a vague distance of thought where she trod alone, except for a quiet sure-footed Figure by her side. How He would hate it, all the dreadful monotonous droning of St. Michael’s. Wails about being a miserable sinner almost before you had settled yourself in your seat. But how He would equally hate a fuss and elaborate bowings, and the dressing up of men made in God’s image in garments that made Him look dreadfully unlike anything but a caricature of a Bible picture. But how He too would shrink from ugly chapels, smelling of varnish, and people not kneeling, but only crouching, and shaking hands with one another in the aisle, and talking out loud. What did He want? Mrs. Page came back to realities again; her husband was speaking.
“Try and pay attention, Hilda,” he was saying. “I want you to realize that I am in earnest over this. I will not have the children beginning to question the form of religion in which they have been brought up. St. Michael’s has been our church ever since we came to live in this neighbourhood, and our church it will remain. Do you quite understand what I mean?”
“I do, absolutely,” replied Mrs. Page. This was the only possible answer to give, she knew from long experience, so she gave it. And Mr. Page was perfectly satisfied, and with a look of great affection he got up from his chair and threaded his arm through his wife’s.
“Shall we go and sit in the library, dear?” he said; “there is no fire there. I told Janet not to light it; but we ought to get any sun there is through the French window. Or if you think you might feel chilly, you might get a coat perhaps.”
“Yes, I think perhaps I will get a coat first, Wilfred,” said Mrs. Page.
“Will you be cold?” asked Mr. Page. There was something in his wife’s expression that made him feel uncomfortable. But nobody required fires after Easter. . . . She didn’t. She thought she did, but that was another matter altogether. “Will you be cold, Hilda?” he repeated.
“No, dear,” said Mrs. Page quietly.
The question of whether he was going to succeed to the living of St. Jude’s was also fairly prominent in the mind of the Reverend Paul Coward, but being a very unworldly man, as well as a very good one, he did not allow it to predominate. There was a great deal of work to be done in Clapham Park Garden Suburb. Houses with flagged garden paths, and casement windows glazed with bottle-glass, and little dwarf trees in green tubs, do not prevent people from being very much alive. They may not be alive in quite the same way as people who live in dreadful little houses stuck in a dwindling and eternally drab row; that sort of living takes you in quite a different way, the way that sends you home blind drunk quite twice a week so that you may not see it. But people can be alive in different ways, especially women. And as every unmarried woman in the Clapham Park Garden Suburb was more or less in love with the Reverend Paul Coward, he saw a great deal of them. Married and unmarried, all fell beneath his sway. Why was it? The old Vicar, who had been extremely fond of him, had often wondered. Because he was not in the least the type of clergyman who runs after women. Nor was he a tame cat—he loathed tea-parties. Nor was he athletic, in the sense that he liked leaping immaculate in white flannels over a tennis court. The old Vicar, being a man, could not solve the problem. But Miss Winnower could have told him—Miss Winnower, who adored the Reverend Paul Coward so madly, that sometimes she thought that she would die of it.
“Padre”—Miss Winnower had once been to India, so she always kept up that form of address—“Padre, may I speak to you after Evensong to-night?”
“To-night?” The Curate was half-way across the green and the little shrinking spinster had stopped him. “What do you want to say?” His monkish, impersonal gaze was on her.
“I can’t very well tell you now.” Poor Miss Winnower was pale with suppressed adoration.
“Very well; come into the vestry at six. Not before that time, and not after,” and the Curate had gone on his way, swinging over the short turf with the undulating, loping stride of a deer.
And Miss Winnower, left alone, stopped quite still before she resumed her way to the shops. She would see him again, and to speak to, therefore her day was completely changed. Every moment would bring her nearer to the moment, when, refreshed and brightened by her simple afternoon tea, she would slip along the wide Avenue Road to St. Jude’s Church. And there, in company with about twenty other women of all ages, she would kneel on the flat crimson pad with its leather underneath. Resting the backs of her sad little hard hands on the curved white wood back of the rush-bottomed chair in front of her. Pressing her little plain face into the palms of them. Trying desperately hard to lose herself in prayer, and not realizing that God so utterly understood how she was feeling, that there was no need to pray at all.
But now she started a little guiltily and began to hurry. There was a great deal to be done before that blessed hour of solace would dawn. Servantless, the Winnowers lived in a tiny self-contained flat. A good many of the red-roofed, lattice-windowed houses in the Garden Suburb were flats, although flats most skilfully disguised. To begin with, they were surrounded by trees, beautiful old trees that had sheltered nice, prosperous people under their flat-spreading branches. People who arrived in well-sprung roomy landaus behind two fat horses to enjoy themselves at garden parties, where there was a great deal to eat, all very solid and expensive. These trees had sheltered other sorts of people too, girls very shy and frightened in dresses very high up to the neck, gripping terrified hands together at being proposed to. And men, trembling with chivalry, and conscious of their own unworthiness, and with a longing to protect and all sorts of other things that are neither required nor expected of you in these delightful days of equality of the sexes. Miss Winnower could remember those days quite well really, although then she had lived elsewhere; but she could never remember being proposed to. Even in those days men liked soft, rounded things in their arms, not queer, ill-shaped little gnomes. And whichever way you looked at Miss Winnower, she was not the right shape. But she was very much liked by her own sex; you could tell that when she arrived at the Pantiles, a name flagrantly and openly filched from Tunbridge Wells. The shops in the Garden Suburb were all ranged along the Pantiles like they are at Tunbridge Wells, and the same idea had been followed out as regards flagged paving stones, and a certain amount of glazed roofing. And the whole female population of the Garden Suburb gathered there in the mornings, cap-à-pied with shopping basket, iridescent or otherwise.
“Hallo, Miss Winnower! Hallo, Miss Winnower!” it came from all sides, “How’s your mother?”
This last came very cheerfully and caused Miss Winnower’s breath to fail in her throat. It came from the Reverend Paul Coward’s sister, Miss Mary Coward, who was keeping house for her brother at the moment.
“Oh, Miss Coward, how kind of you to ask!”
Miss Winnower’s flat little brown face was pushed upwards.
“Not a bit. That’s the best of this place, we are at least interested in one another. Better, is she?” Miss Mary Coward was young and jolly, and obviously belonged to a class of society that the rest of the inhabitants of the Garden Suburb did not. “Yes, thank you. Much better. Wonderfully better in fact. Oh, Miss Coward.” Miss Winnower’s mind was racing and digging like a boxed-up animal. What should she do to in a way get into touch . . . Ah! . . . “I shall be making some of those stuffed dates to-morrow,” she said; “might I? . . . could I, would you like to have some? I believe the Padre”. . . Miss Winnower faltered as she said the last word.
“Stuffed dates! Rather! Why Paul made a perfect pig of himself over them after the last bazaar! I had to take the box away from him!” Miss Mary was laughing robustly, showing strong white teeth.
“A perfect pig!” Poor Miss Winnower shuddered away from the sacrilegious words. The box that she had made with her own hands out of an Erasmic soap-box . . . torn from those cool and compelling fingers . . . she got very red.
Miss Mary watched her, a little contemptuous in her radiant youth. What a life! How could Paul stick it? All the rest of the Coward menfolk were soldiers—at least all of them that were left to be anything were. And here was Paul, wrapped up in this place, rebuking her—that was the only word for his dignified reproof—when she burstingly drew his attention to the number of women who chose the way past the Vicarage to the shops.
“They must get there somehow.” The cape of his cassock crumpled against a cushion, he was sunk in a large chair, a pipe between his teeth, his monkish, melancholy eyes fixed on the fire.
“Yes, but they needn’t come this way. Look at Miss Melford for instance. Here she comes, by the way; how odd I should just have said her. Why, she lives in Plane Street. Plane Street is miles away from here. By the time she has got to the Pantiles she will almost have described a complete circle.” Mary Coward flicked a little of the greying ash from the end of her cigarette, and walked over to the fireplace.
“You are uncharitable, Mary.” The Reverend Paul was leaning over the fireplace, tapping out his pipe. He allowed himself two pipes a day, one after breakfast and one after dinner. None during Lent; but then Lent was just over.
“When a man puts on a cassock, women seem to think that none of the ordinary rules that apply between the sexes do apply,” said Mary inconsequently.
“Nor they do,” replied Mr. Coward, getting up and putting the pipe away in a little corner cupboard.
“But clergymen marry.”
“Not if they are wise.”
“I think it’s ridiculous!” burst from the girl, radiant and intolerant in her almost aggressive youth.
“I know you do; but you see we priests have been taught to think differently.” And with this remark the Reverend Paul Coward had gone out of the room.
And now, on the Pantiles, with the pale spring sunshine filtering through the leaves and making a little pattern on Mary Winnower’s old-fashioned straw hat, Mary Coward looked down at the little spinster with pity as well as contempt in her heart. What a life! Mary knew that Miss Winnower had an extremely cross and exacting mother, always thinking there was something the matter with her, and not liking to be left. Somebody had told her that. She would ask her to tea—that very afternoon. Not two or three days ahead, or there would be time to wish that she hadn’t.
“Come to tea with us this afternoon,” she said abruptly.
“Oh, Miss Coward—I should love to . . . but” . . . Miss Winnower’s mind, in fact her whole being, was in a turmoil. No, no, not to-day . . . to begin with—her mother, and then . . . she was going to speak to the Padre in the vestry after Evensong. It would seem . . . it would seem. . . . What would it seem? Breathlessly Miss Winnower tried to think. Then she gave it up. She couldn’t think, it would not do—so far she could get and no farther.
And Mary Coward went on her way, relieved. She felt it her duty to entertain the parish to a certain extent, but she always felt cross when she had done it. . . . They sat so meekly, these dozens of single women that she had in twos and threes to tea. Only galvanizing into dreadful sprightliness when her brother came in. She wouldn’t have minded if they had admitted that they went to church and pattered about the parish, because by so doing they met her brother in a way that they would never have done otherwise—not only her brother, but any clergyman. But to pretend that it was religion. . . . Mary was intolerant and a little cruel in her judgment as she went on her way, swinging her stick and thinking about her next dance. It was to be at the Grafton Galleries, and Major Poole was going to motor out and fetch her . . . and then Mary walked a little quicker and thought harder, and smiled as she thought. And then she was conscious of hurrying footsteps behind her.
“Oh, Miss Coward, I will bring those dates in one morning, if I may.” Poor Miss Winnower was breathless and unbecomingly flushed as she spoke.
“Do,” said Mary cordially.
The Winnowers lived in Number 1A Avenue Road. The A’s were upstairs flats, and had their entrances at the side; the B’s were downstairs flats, and had their entrances in front, and a little flagged path leading up to them. The A’s had a path and a tiny little garden too, only not so large. They were nice flats, with brick fireplaces and distempered walls, nothing sordid about them, and they were inexpensive, considering what you got for your money.
But Mrs. Winnower had to have a grievance, and she found this in the stairs. For some mysterious reason, once up them she could never go down them again. Like a large white ant, she moved from room to room.
“But, mamma, a little fresh air. . . .” Bewildered and dismayed, Miss Winnower faced this new problem in her life. Never to be alone again, at least not indoors . . . she stood, her mouth a little open.
“Not with my knee, dear; I could not face the stairs.” And so the question of Mrs. Winnower’s future movements was settled once and for all.
Acutely lazy, and although with a gentle and outwardly submissive manner, extremely selfish, Mrs. Winnower settled into Number 1A Avenue Road, until she should leave it, feet first, her knee a thing of the past.
“But what is the matter with your dear mother’s knee, Ada?” Some tactless relation invited to spend the day had once drawn Miss Winnower aside and asked this question.
“She strained it during the moving, Aunt Harriet.” And with this, almost the first lie in her gentle life, Miss Winnower took up and shouldered the responsibility of this fresh cross. Because Mrs. Winnower was very difficult to live with. Mountainously she padded from room to room, wearing soft slippers so that you could not hear her coming. And her enormous bulk did not make her easy-going and equable, she arrived peevishly to interfere and suggest. And what was hardest of all to bear, she was dreadfully unkind to Miss Winnower about her passion for going to church.
“What is this, Ada?” That had been the beginning of it, when one day, while Miss Winnower was out, her mother had found her little oratory. She had thought it was so safe, because she had arranged it behind curtains. In the corner of Miss Winnower’s tiny bedroom was an arrangement for hanging up clothes, a little triangular piece of wood sticking out from the wall, two curtains on rings in front of it. And this had done so beautifully—the flat kneeling-pad covered with green serge, the slender framework of the prie-Dieu, with the devotional books on the narrow ledge, all were concealed by the innocent curtain of it. The joy with which Miss Winnower would go prowling out on to Tooting Common to gather any sort of field flower, or beautiful coloured leaf, for the brass altar vase, the vase which she had bought with such palpitations and heart-beats from the Catholic Repository near Clapham Common. And now it would be made the subject for ceaseless criticism and cruel innuendo . . . and it was; for Mrs. Winnower was staunchly Protestant. She did not really mean to be unkind, that was the worst of it.
“It is a pity, Ada, that you cannot devote the time you spend in popish observances and monkey tricks at that church of yours to steady study of the good old Book.” And Mrs. Winnower would point at the limp Bible that always lay on the little table by the side of her bed. Mrs. Winnower would always read her portion out loud; Ada could hear her in the mornings, it came droning through the wall. Mrs. Winnower liked the Old Testament best, she was always glad when it was the turn for that. In her heart of hearts she considered the teaching of the New Testament unpractical.
“Mother, don’t!” Stung and outraged. Miss Winnower felt a rush of angry tears to her eyes.
“There you are, you see—up in arms in a moment. I don’t know what you young people are coming to.” Mrs. Winnower could never realize that her daughter was well over forty. “‘Honour thy father and mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’” And with this parting shaft Mrs. Winnower hurried away to be first to get the Daily Sketch. The boy would bring it up the stairs if she stood at the top of them and shouted to him.
But Miss Winnower, left alone, stood with both hands on her thin chest, and almost swooned with the conflict of feeling that was shaking her frail body. How dared her mother! How dared she! And this was what had brought her to the decision that she would seek spiritual help on this question. After an almost sleepless night, spent between the narrow black iron bed and the flat kneeling-pad, she had decided to consult the Reverend Paul Coward.
And she had chosen a very sensible person to consult. Utterly persuaded that the expression of the faith which he held was the only expression possible of that faith, the Reverend Paul Coward was ready for anything. Also he was sorry for Miss Winnower. She knelt before him now, her little flat face streaming with tears, and even to anyone as much a priest as the Reverend Paul Coward her unfeigned worship of him was obvious.
“You must pray,” he said hardly, and without an atom of emotion in his voice. “‘More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.’ Lay hold of God. Make Him hear. Take your mother to Him; stand before Him with her hand in yours. Ask Him that her heart may be touched, and that she may be brought to see. Her eyes are holden. Ask Him to open them.”
“I have,” sobbed Miss Winnower.
“Not rightly, or they would have been opened a long time ago. In your heart of hearts you doubt. You allow yourself to think that there may be other ways of worshipping God. Don’t you?” Paul Coward was suddenly brutally personal.
“Sometimes I think that there might be for mother,” sobbed Miss Winnower.
“Then you yourself are sadly in need of help.” The eyes of the young priest were suddenly on fire. “My child . . .” And half an hour later Miss Winnower stumbled out into the slanting sunlight, her soul possessed of a great peace. Surely God had been with her in that narrow vestry. She hurried across the green so as to be home well in time to prepare the simple evening meal. Her mother . . . erring, astray, she would present her to God that very night. That very night, when the blessed hour of retreat to her little sanctuary arrived.
But that night it was long in coming. After mother and daughter had removed the little meal and washed it up and tidied it all away, with the dreadful perception which is given to those who live together of how to wound and sting, Mrs. Winnower decided to read to her daughter aloud from the Record. It had been lent to her by the lady from downstairs, whose husband was People’s Warden at St. Michael’s.
“There’s a nice little piece about the Eastward Position,” she had said, bringing it up the steep stairs. “No, I won’t come in, thank you, Mrs. Winnower.”
And Mrs. Winnower had taken it into her fat hand and thanked the lady from downstairs. And then she had read it all through, and had found things in it that would do better even than the bit about the Eastward Position. Things that to hear even put into words made Miss Winnower wince and blench and bite her lips. So that when at last she reached the haven of her own room, she could only go mechanically about the business of getting undressed; and when at last she was ready, in her ugly nightgown and old-fashioned red dressing-gown, she could only fling herself down in front of the little crucifix and cry bitter and hopeless tears. All the glow had gone, all the feeling of being able to strive and attain, with which she had left the red-brick vestry. All she wanted now was to be allowed to die.
But there had been a Third in that little sitting-room while Mrs. Winnower had been reading, and He stood beside Ada now. Hadn’t that been almost one of the hardest things that He had been called upon to bear when on earth—the utter lack of understanding of those around Him? “By their works ye shall know them.” This woman had listened in silence, biting back the words that she could so easily have let loose, and saying a gentle good-night to that difficult mother. He laid a gentle hand on the bowed head. And Miss Winnower felt it there, although she did not know that she did. Suddenly it had all gone—the misery. She rose from her knees and got quietly into bed.
Madeline was certainly not at all herself, constantly laid low with severe headaches, and only asking to be allowed to stay in bed and take aspirin. Everybody noticed it, and Mrs. Page privately worried a good deal about it. Especially as she herself was not feeling at all well. Once, if not twice, lately, she had suddenly got a most extraordinary feeling of emptiness round her heart as if it had suddenly missed a beat for some reason or other, and was wondering whether to go on or not.
“Indigestion,” the pronouncement came swiftly from Mr. Page. He had had it too, many, many times and in exactly the same form. “Take a soda mint after every meal. I’ll get you one now. . . .” And Mr. Page had hurried into his dressing-room. But afterwards Mrs. Page had wished that she had not mentioned her strange symptoms. Some careless person in helping themselves to a soda mint had forgotten to replace the cotton-wool in the bottle.
“The utter lack of thought! . . .” From the look on Mr. Page’s face you would have thought that at least his gold watch was missing from its accustomed place in his dressing-table drawer. He went on putting on his clothes in a state of acute irritation.
“Doesn’t the screw top thing fit tightly then?” Mrs. Page was doing her hair, sitting sideways and staring out of the window as she brushed it.
“That is not the point,” said Mr. Page. And Mrs. Page listened with a queer little silent smile on her lips as he talked on and on. And when he had safely gone to town, and all the rest of the children except Madeline were well out of the way, she sent a note round to the doctor, asking him if he would come at about twelve. He came, and when his very exhaustive examination of Mrs. Page was finished, he looked at her closely before speaking. What had worn this woman out? Because she was worn out. Not so much outwardly as inwardly. That heart! He walked away to the window and stood there staring out.
“Tell me straight out. Is it my heart?” Mrs. Page was putting her blouse straight in front.
“Yes,” said Dr. Carter, coming back.
“Could I die suddenly? Tell me; I’d much rather know.” Mrs. Page had the eager look of a child.
“You could,” said Dr. Carter, putting both hands on the slender shoulders. He knew Mrs. Page very well, having brought all the little Pages into the world.
“Joy!” said Mrs. Page, with a sigh of deep relief. “There is nothing I should loathe more than to die of something that killed me by inches.”
“But you may live for a very long time indeed yet,” said Dr. Carter. “That is if you take reasonable care. Don’t run upstairs. Don’t ever run. See?”
“Yes, I see,” said Mrs. Page quietly. And then she dismissed the whole thing from her mind with a pleasant little smile. Death had no terrors for her, except for the thought of those she would leave behind. So she must be very, very, very careful for their sakes. And now for Madeline. She spoke at length, and the old Doctor listened very attentively. He had attended Madeline often years before, when she had only screamed at him and told him to go away. It was the result of that great shock now, of course . . . he said so, sympathetically and kindly.
“Yes, I know; but what can we do for her now?” Mrs. Page had entirely forgotten herself in her thought for her child.
“Find her a nice husband,” said Dr. Carter quietly.
“Yes, I know; but there are so few men of Madeline’s generation left. Both girls go to a good many dances, and see a fair number of men, one way or another, but they are almost always of Penelope’s age. Everyone of Madeline’s age seems to be married. It is perfectly tragic the way the War . . .” And then Mrs. Page stopped suddenly. It was George’s birthday, and she had forgotten it.
“Yes, it is tragic.” Dr. Carter had a good many worse problems than Madeline on his mind, and they distressed him. Motherhood . . . it was the only career for women, thought this old-fashioned man. Failing that . . . and it came a very bad second, some absorbing occupation.
“Does Madeline interest herself at all in Church work?” he asked.
“No,” said Mrs. Page; and she smiled quietly, remembering her children’s criticism of the six or seven evangelical spinsters who frequented St. Michael’s.
“It’s a pity,” said Dr. Carter, and he got up. “Speaking very frankly, Mrs. Page, religion and sex are very closely allied. And it has saved many a single woman from worse than a nervous collapse to have an orgy of services and Church work to plunge herself into. I don’t say that it’s the highest motive for going in for such things, but still . . . And nice Dr. Carter reached out for his dog-skin gloves.
Left alone, Mrs. Page sat very still and thought for quite a long time. About herself first, and oddly enough with a feeling of adventure. At any moment she might find herself in another world— what an experience! Although she had been very young when that first lover of hers had left her for the East, she had always been a thoughtful girl. And when she had emerged from that abyss of agonizing desolation, she had remembered with such joy that she had said that to him. “Neville, if either of us die before we see one another again—we shan’t, but supposing we do—let’s spend all the time before the other one comes, in waiting for them.” And he had laughed, tenderly: normal young men of twenty-five or so don’t concern themselves much with the next world, this one being enough for them. But now Mrs. Page remembered it again, and as she remembered it, she sat for a minute or two with her hands over her eyes. She would see him then . . . had he heard what Dr. Carter had said, or had he known before, and was he waiting for her, expecting her . . .? Mrs. Page got up and walked steadily to the door. No more of that, or she would not be able to settle down to anything. She must go up and see Madeline.
Madeline, lying with her face turned away from the light, had frankly given it up and was crying. Surrounded by all the outward expression of extreme comfort, Madeline was utterly wretched. Aspirin stills pain, but it stimulates the imagination. And for several hours now Madeline had been seeing herself as she would be two years hence; Doris home from her year abroad, dazzlingly fair and radiantly young, as she, Madeline, had been young once and was now no longer. And with nothing to do but either to face it and retire from the lists, or to struggle to keep pace with this beautiful young sister of hers. It was odd in all this how Madeline never thought of Penelope as a possible rival.
“Darling, your head is really bad.” Mrs. Page laid a cool, consoling hand on the hot forehead.
“Mother, if you only knew how wretched I am!” And Madeline, with the frankness so rarely met with between mother and daughter, rolled over on to her side and poured it all out. “Mother, it isn’t exactly that I am unhappy at home, you know it isn’t; you make everything so lovely for us. But now somehow I want something more. It’s all so empty, so futile. What is going to become of me? . . . what am I going to do with my life? What is the good of anything . . .?” And Madeline groped fiercely under her pillow for her handkerchief, already dreadfully wet.
Consolation under these circumstances is difficult, and Mrs. Page felt a little spent when she again walked into the morning-room. But Penelope was there this time, Penelope looking like a wood nymph, the soft close-fitting felt hat hiding the strands of hair. “Mother!” she was bursting with excitement, “Mother, may I have my hair shingled?”
“Oh, my darling!” Mrs. Page just sank limply down on to the sofa. This was just the last straw. Wilfred! She would never hear the last of it. Such a little thing, really, if the child wanted her hair shingled, but could she go through with it? The prospect of what it would entail in the way of discussion and reproaches suddenly weighed upon Mrs. Page, as the thought of the last and largest trunk to be hoisted to its place weighs on the old cabman who is really too old to do it.
“Angel, say yes.” Penelope had come nearer and was stroking her mother softly up and down under the chin.
“Darling. . . .” And then Mrs. Page stopped. Always the father . . . it was not right. How could they be expected to remain fond of him?
“Father won’t mind when he’s once faced it,” said Penelope frankly. “After all, if he settled what we did, we should all be going about dressed like Aunt Agnes. No one has long hair now, it’s fearfully old-fashioned; and you know I never can do mine. Look, mother, it would suit me. My head bulges out behind, and I would have it all chopped round my face like one of those old-fashioned pages in pictures. Look! “Penelope had reft off her hat and began pulling long strands of hair out over her ears.
“But why to-day?” Mrs. Page had already given way inwardly, although she felt that she must make some semblance of a fight. That glorious passionate feeling of eagerness—have this thing this minute I must, or I shall die. Who was she to quell it? Didn’t it die a natural death easily enough by itself? Or . . . it could so easily be quenched—Mrs. Page shut her eyes suddenly.
“Mother, you see it’s like this.” And then Penelope began breathlessly to explain. She had met that awfully nice girl at the corner of Avenue Road, Mary Coward. “You know, mother, Mary Coward, she has that clergyman brother who always goes about in a cassock. I like her most awfully; she was at the Robsons’ the other night, and her hair looked sweet. She’s just going up to Streatham to have it trimmed, and I suddenly thought, why not have mine done at the same time, and I rushed all the way back to ask you if I mightn’t. Angel!” Penelope turned her mother’s face up to hers with a soft finger under the chin.
So it was settled, and Penelope with a passionate embrace flung herself out of the room again and tore down the road. The mad excitement of this . . . short hair, like a boy’s. No more stragglings with clips and hairpins. No more feeling before the joyous moment of dressing for a dance began that the whole thing would be spoilt by her hair being done wrong.
“I say! I may,” she almost overwhelmed Mary Coward, who stood whistling and swinging a stick at the end of Avenue Road.
“Good for you!” Mary Coward responded slangily and cheerfully. “We’ll take a tram from Streatham Hill Station, it passes the door of the place I always go to. Go home I tell you, Waggles, we can’t take you now.” Mary stood threateningly over the spaniel grovelling at her feet.
“Can’t we?” Penelope’s eyes were suddenly soft. It was so awful to be disappointed like that. There were tears in the brown eyes on a level with Mary’s sturdy shoe.
“No, we can’t; they won’t let you take dogs in trains; besides, he’s so stupid, I’m always afraid he’ll be run over. Go home! Paul’s there, you silly!” Mary suddenly made a flourish with her stick, and Waggles got up hopelessly.
“Is Paul your brother?” asked Penelope. Waggles had decided that there was nothing for it and had begun to trot away, his tail almost trailing on the ground.
“Yes,” said Mary. “Look, he must have just come out of that house. See Waggles, he must have spotted him. The two girls stopped to watch. The spaniel had started to bolt along the path, his large ears flapping up and down like the fins of a seal. Charging round a comer, he was gone— out of sight.
“Is your brother fond of him?” asked Penelope curiously. Somehow a dog and a man who lived in a cassock didn’t seem to go together. That hadn’t been her idea of Mary’s brother at all, a man who would make a friend of a dog.
“Rather!” replied Mary vehemently. “If you ask me, I should say that Waggles is the only person that Paul ever would be fond of. He’s not like an ordinary man a bit.”
“Clergymen never are,” said Penelope, with an air of knowing a very great deal.
Oddly enough, the fact that Penelope had had her hair shingled excited very little comment in the family circle. That was because she looked very much nicer with it short.
“If you weren’t so hopelessly ugly, I should say that you looked almost pretty,” said Gerald, glancing down at the little pointed face upturned to his.
And Mr. Page said practically the same thing, only he said it in the privacy of his dressing-room. “I don’t admit for a moment that I think you were right to have allowed it, Hilda, but I do think that it suits the child.” And with that Mrs. Page was more than content. Anything so that the happiness of the young people should not be interfered with, it had become with her almost a mania. Happiness was so brief, so fleeting. Why shouldn’t they have it while they could? They should, they must. She would do everything in her power to ensure it for them.
And she did. Mr. Page was always very fairly generous about money, and oddly enough he trusted his wife in the spending of it. So The Oaks blossomed out in the way of entertaining, and Gerald had a wireless and a loud speaker installed in the smoking-room, and once, if not twice a week, he asked his friends in to dance to the Savoy Orpheans band. Penelope asked hers in too, Mary Coward among them.
“Isn’t that the sister of that ridiculous fellow who goes in for all that popish nonsense at St. Jude’s?” demanded Mr. Page.
“Yes, it is,” replied Mrs. Page, holding her breath. Because it was vital that Wilfred should not concern himself with St. Jude’s just now. Madeline was beginning to look so much happier, so much more at peace. Every day at half-past five Madeline would vanish. Mrs. Page knew where she went, but she was the only one of the family who did.
“The Cowards are friends of the Pooles,” she said. “You know, dear, the Dreford Pooles?”
Mr. Page did know. Old Sir Dreford Poole had once owned the whole of Clapham Park, and had been a very great man indeed. So the question of St. Jude’s and the obvious wrong-mindedness of it was allowed to drop for the moment.
Madeline certainly was much happier: oddly, strangely happier. It had come about like this. Janet had been dusting her room one day while she was in bed; Janet was the house-parlourmaid, and had been with the Pages for years. It really was not her duty at all to dust Madeline’s bedroom, but she liked doing it because she was fond of Miss Madeline.
“I thought it was your Sunday out, Janet.” Madeline was miserably and dreamily watching the motes of dust sailing up and down the great slanting band of sunlight. Her bedroom window was open, there was a sort of hot, summery feeling in the air, although it was still spring. Madeline felt the hot feeling of summer like a sword turning between her slender ribs. It tore and lacerated her . . . she would die from it. . . .
“No, Miss Madeline, I go out this afternoon and evening.” Janet had a nice, cheerful, sensible face. “I’m so glad; I love the evening service, now it’s beginning to draw out a bit. And the Reverend Father seems to preach better than ever in the evenings, although he couldn’t really preach better than he does.”
The Reverend Father! Then Janet was a Roman Catholic. How odd that she had never known that before. But then how could she come up to prayers? Madeline asked, suddenly feeling alert and interested.
“Oh no, Miss Madeline!” Janet was smiling and deprecating. “I’m Church of England all right. Anglo-Catholic, not Roman Catholic, miss.”
“But . . .” And then Madeline had stopped, she must not display her ignorance to this servant, although she was an old and trusted one. All the rest of the day she pondered over it though, and the next morning she got up and came down to breakfast. And after breakfast she followed her mother into the morning-room.
“Well, my treasure!” Mrs. Page had watched her eldest daughter during that rather difficult meal. Doris had been cross and argumentative, having lost her arithmetic book. Gerald had been abstracted and very silent. Was he beginning to fall in love with Mary Coward? wondered his mother. Penelope, with a slender virginal look, sat eating an egg, her mind elsewhere. Where? thought the mother. How deliciously pretty the child looked with her little dark Florentine head. And Madeline had sat, only eating a little toast and butter and marmalade; pinched in the sunlight that streamed in at the two large windows, darkly shadowed under the eyes. . . .
“Mother, I’m not a child now; I want to choose my own Church.” That was the gorgeous part of having a mother like Mrs. Page, you could always go straight to the point with her.
Mrs. Page’s mind instantly leapt forward. But her husband would not be home until half-past six, and there would be time before then to settle what she would say to him. “Tell me, darling.” Mrs. Page sat down on the sofa and drew her daughter down beside her.
“Mother, I must get something to do.” Madeline’s eyes instantly filled with tears. “I can’t go on like this: I’m utterly wretched. You see I am. If I had something like Church work; something that made me think of other people, I might be better. You can’t work at St. Michael’s, it’s so ugly. I know I oughtn’t to think of that, but I do. You want a beautiful service to help you. Father will object,” Madeline suddenly brought it out with a burst; “but he simply mustn’t this time. Mother, if I don’t get something to do soon, I shall go mad—I feel I shall.” And Madeline broke down sobbing.
But Mrs. Page soothed her. She would speak to father. He would be kind about it, she was sure he would. And Madeline went away consoled, and then Penelope came in, strolling and humming as she came.
“Mother, what is the matter with Madeline? She always looks so awfully wretched now.” Penelope swayed a little as she spoke, and made one or two little dancing steps in front of her mother.
But Mrs. Page never discussed her children with each other, and they knew it and that was why they chose her as their dearest confidante. So Penelope did not repeat the question, she only looked at her mother like a soft inquiring bird, and then flung her arms round her neck.
“Petkins, would you like it if Mary’s brother fell in love with one of us?” she said. “He’s a clergyman, and walks about in a cassock. I saw him the other day. He’s got the most awful boring eyes, and the sort of voice that goes quivering down into your feet. Mary’s terrified of him, but all the other women in the parish worship the ground he treads on. Mary says they do. They keep on coming round about nothing just in case he might be there.”
“Darling, don’t be so foolish!” But Mrs. Page’s heart gave a great leap, although the minute it had leapt she was ashamed of it. What a solution! Madeline and Mr. Coward would probably be just about the same age. Wilfred should not raise any objection to his eldest daughter worshipping somewhere else.
And he had not done so, and at the moment things were very happy and harmonious at The Oaks. Madeline spent a good deal of time out of the house; very often she just came quietly in and went to bed, and did not join the dancers in the smoking-room at all. Janet would slip up to her room with a basin of bread and milk, and would wait while Miss Madeline ate it. At breakfast she would be quiet and serene, and would start out almost immediately afterwards, generally with a little basket in her hand. And as for Sunday, no one saw her at all. She would leave the house before six, and not return to it until lunch-time. Mr. Page rather objected to this at first, but Mrs. Page interceded for Madeline. “Dr. Carter says that unless Madeline’s mind is very thoroughly absorbed in something outside herself,” she said, “we may have serious trouble with her.”
So Mr. Page gave way. It was all very ridiculous and nonsensical, and Hilda was quite wrong to encourage it; but still . . . if she was so set on it. And Mrs. Page, with a spontaneity very unusual to her, suddenly got up and flung her arms round his neck. “Wilfred!” she said, “Wilfred!” and the tears formed in her eyes and ran down her face.
“What on earth are you crying for, Hilda?” Mr. Page was testy at once, and, put out, he spoke irritably.
“Nothing, dear,” said Mrs. Page, wiping her eyes. How could she tell him that she was crying because she had suddenly realized how different things might have been if only he had been like this at first. They could have lived their life together—in mind and spirit, as well as body. And now—there was so little of it left—in fact, there mightn’t be any. And thinking that, Mrs. Page remembered, and she blew her nose resolutely and put away her handkerchief. “Not to run, and not to allow yourself to feel things too keenly.” Dr. Carter had been very insistent on those two points before he had driven away the other morning.
Madeline and Miss Winnower soon got to know one another. “Where thy treasure is, there shalt thy heart be also.” Both women worshipped the Reverend Paul Coward to such an extent that they thought of nothing else, and St. Jude’s became as a casket for a jewel.
“It’s Penelope Page’s sister who’s always in church now,” Mary Coward made the announcement one day at breakfast. She was having it alone, her brother was celebrating again at noon, and did not break his fast until lunch-time.
“Is it?” The priest was staring out of the window, his eyes dwelling broodingly on the soft grass of the Green. He had been far away when his sister had spoken. Who was Penelope Page? what was she in the scheme of things? What was anything in the face of the Great Mysteries with which already he had been concerned three times that day? If only his sister . . . he suddenly swung round from the window.
“Oh, Paul, I wish you would eat something!” Mary was suddenly petulant and anxious. Really her brother’s soul seemed to shine through his skin. It was not natural. Surely people weren’t meant to go on like that. Why, in the old days people had the Holy Communion in the evening. “It started like that. They had it like that at St. Michael’s on at least two Sundays in the month. Why was it so important?” “Paul!” Mary was just going to begin. But something in her brother’s face checked her. He had a different look in his face to the Vicar of St. Michael’s. He looked what did he look? He looked like someone who had stopped to gaze at something very beautiful, and in gazing was riveted there. It would not be right to irritate him by asking tiresome questions. Besides, he had answered all that once. It hadn’t seemed entirely convincing to Mary, but it must have been right, or he wouldn’t have been so sure about it. She got up from her place at the polished table.
“Paul, I really believe you’ll die of holiness one day,” she said.
“Don’t be so ridiculous, Mary!” The melancholy in the dark eyes suddenly faded. “Waggles, what do you say to that?” The tall figure in the clinging black robe stooped to the dog at his feet.
“Waggles would agree,” said Mary dryly, and she got up from the table. Somehow she suddenly felt coarse and earthy, swallowing large quantities of food that she did not really require. She, too, had been to church, but she had come home healthily hungry. Why was her brother not hungry too? Probably he was, but he relegated food to its proper place. His body was run by his spirit, not by his appetites.
And that was the secret of the Reverend Paul Coward’s influence with women. He regarded them entirely impersonally. When he stared fixedly at them with those dark and inscrutable eyes, thereby reducing them to the last stages of tremulous adoration, he was not thinking of them as women at all. They were souls—souls flung across his path by God, who in some mysterious way considered him best fitted to deal with them.
And the women who came in contact with him did not in their turn think that they thought of him as a man. But they did really, and that was why St. Jude’s was always full of women. One by one they came, especially after tea—daily Evensong was said at half-past five—pushing open the high oak door, and quivering when it swung back too quickly, making a muffled booming noise with its baize inside. Sinking with virginal austerity before the beautiful altar, and then slipping sideways in between the rush-seated chairs. And then burying their pathetic faded faces in their hands, trying to voice their loneliness and longing for something to happen to them, and only succeeding in wondering in a sort of awful tumult of soul and body whether Father Coward was going to read the Office or not. As a matter of fact Paul thought more about the women who filled his church than his sister thought he did. For the first time since he had taken over the charge of St. Jude’s he was a little worried. Worried is too importunate a term to apply, perturbed would be better.
He was perturbed to-night as he swished his way from behind the green curtain into the high oak stall. Madeline had written to him for the third time that week: the verger had just handed him the little grey envelope. As, tall and austere, he flung his cold voice and colder glance over the dim church he could see her standing there, very slim and pale, with her hands clasped over her long coat. She wanted to see him after Evensong, and would come round to the outside vestry door in case he was free. . . . “Saying after me “. . . and the Reverend Paul Coward dropped on to his knees and ran his long thin fingers in under his dark hair. What should he say to her, to check her? He had had to check women before, but then they were older, and somehow it had been easier. This girl was so pathetic in her tremulous desire to do right, and to fill her empty life with the service of others. God would show him the way, and Paul rose to his feet to pronounce the Absolution with renewed calm in his soul.
But as, at half-past six, with Waggles at his heels, he walked swiftly across the Green to his own home again, he was not quite so calm. This time Madeline’s spiritual difficulties had obviously been fabrications. At least that was perhaps going rather too far. But they had been thoughts this time. Thoughts that distracted her from her devotions. Thoughts that . . . and then Paul saw a little crowd at his gate, and dismissed this problem from his mind. He would take it up later in the solitude of his own room.
Penelope was there, very small and slim and childish in a pleated skirt, and her jade-coloured polo jersey to match it. “How do you do?” She got very red as the thin fingers clasped hers. How odd to be shaken hands with by somebody like a monk. Creepy, rather; she detached her little soft hand.
“Hallo, Paul.” It was Harley Dreford Poole who was speaking. Harley was the second son of the old dead baronet who had once owned the whole of Clapham Park. He had been having tea with Mary when Penelope had called to bring back a book. He had taken rather a fancy to the funny little thing, and Mary had felt an odd, unexpected clutching at her heart when he suggested strolling down to the gate to speed her on her way.
“Hallo!” And then an odd little silence fell on the group. No one seemed to know quite what to say. Paul whistled abstractedly to Waggles, who was trying to make himself flat enough to squirm under the next-door gate. A large white cat, very neatly encircled by its own tail, was watching him from a window-sill.
“Well, I must go.” Penelope broke the silence rather awkwardly. “Oh, I say, how awful!” She clutched frantically at her hat, which eluding her, sailed tranquilly over a wall into the Vicarage garden.
“I’ll get it!” Harley turned, and with a lean brown hand on the top of the wall he vaulted neatly on to the little lawn. Then he vaulted back again, and stood laughing in front of Penelope. “Don’t think me rude,” he said, “but you’ve got a head just like a little wet seal.”
“Have I?” And Penelope laughed delightedly back. “That sort of thing is always happening to me,” she said: “that’s the worst of shingled hair—there’s nothing to stick a pin into.”
“Have it bingled!” suggested Harley, showing all his nice teeth.
“What is that?” asked Penelope naïvely. She had forgotten Mary and her brother; this man was so awfully nice. Nice with a sort of friendly natural niceness, not like a man at all. That must be because he was not quite young. Penelope had seen the grey hair brushed back above the ears.
“I haven’t the remotest idea!” said Harley, still smiling, and still looking down at the little face below his. “Let me walk with you as far as your gate,” he went on, “and we may be able to work it out together. Like a cross-word puzzle!”
So they started off together, and brother and sister, left alone, just turned and went in at their own gate. As he adjusted the wrought-iron latch Paul stared after them, and for some inscrutable reason he felt oddly annoyed. He could not have vaulted over that wall because of his cassock. That fact and the thought of it irritated him. A head just like a little wet seal—it had been like that, small and dark and sleek. Paul strode up the narrow flagged path. So that was Miss Page’s sister, was it? The young priest held the front door open for his own sister.
“That’s the Penelope Page I was talking about. Thank you, Paul.” Mary spoke in rather a heavy voice, and shot her stick into the hat-stand with a clatter. She had rather thought that Harley would have suggested a walk, so she had gone out prepared.
“Is it?”
“Yes. She isn’t a bit like the other one, is she?”
“No,” said the Reverend Paul Coward, also speaking rather heavily.
Madeline and Miss Winnower had got to know one another like this. They took it in turns to clean the altar brasses, and at the end of Madeline’s week she had realized that the polishing leather wanted to be renewed. She had an idea that Miss Winnower was not very well off, she had seen her at District Visitors’ meetings, and at the meetings of the Communicants’ Guild, and her clothes were not the clothes of a woman who had anything to spend when the ordinary necessities of life had been provided. So early one Monday morning Madeline was off to the grocer’s shop at the corner of New Park Road, a shop that smelt deliciously of tarred rope and bass, and had attractive things like bundles of white wood clothes-pegs, and carpet brushes with long yellow bristles hanging about in it. The wash-leathers hung in a golden cascade tied together by a piece of string threaded through the corner of them. Madeline chose one with the loving absorption that a bride would devote to the selection of a fabric for her wedding-dress.
“I thought it was time. . . .” Breathlessly Madeline’s whisper stole through the chill incense laden air of St. Jude’s. The Sunday before had been some great day in the Church’s year, and High Mass had been very ornate. In fact, one or two people had gone angrily out, and were even now in the throes of composing angry letters about it to the Record.
“Oh, thank you so much!” Poor little Miss Winnower’s eyes were deeply shadowed. It had not been easy to get to the church that morning. And it had been more or less of a fight all the day before. Mrs. Winnower was becoming more cruelly alert to the “goings on” at St. Jude’s. The Clapham Clarion had got hold of them, and was doing its utmost to draw attention to itself by plastering its common paper with large headlines: “Scarlet Lady in a South-West Suburb. Are we a Protestant Nation or Are we Not?” And Mrs. Winnower had somehow got hold of the Monday’s issue of this horrid paper, and had been reading it when Miss Winnower took in her carefully prepared tray. And Monday morning, especially before breakfast, is not a time when the soul is sufficiently encased in the wrappings provided for it by innumerable services well attended, to withstand the shafts thrown by a hand that knows exactly where the chinks are.
“This Father Coward of yours. . . .” But Mrs. Winnower, looking over the top of the vilely printed sheets, had discovered that she was speaking to an empty room. Ada had gone back to the tiny scullery, where she had left one small shoe of bacon on the gas-ring. Water and fat do not mix well, and indignant and additional frizzlings marked the advent of each fresh tear.
But now Miss Winnower was in church, and her soul was at peace. At any moment . . . but no, she would not allow herself to think of that. More than once lately she had had to flagellate herself with dreadfully searching questions from an impertinently personal little book of devotions. Miss Winnower, gentle, and instinctively deeply religious, had not realized until she had read that little book that the horrible sin of impurity lay so terribly near at hand. In fact, although she did not even confess it to herself, that little book had put it into her head.
Madeline’s eyes were friendly. “Let me . . .” And the two women moved silently about the sanctuary. And this was beautiful work, the setting in order of the House of God. As we would get ready our spare room for a very dearly beloved friend. Everything just as he would wish it: the light here . . . the flowers there. . . . And so the two women worked; preparing, renewing. And then, after a brief moment or two on their knees, they walked out together into the light. Both were blinking as they faced one another. It had been dark in the chill, aromatically scented church. Madeline spoke first, quietly, as befitted one who had but lately trod in a Holy Place.
“I have often seen you,” she said, “and I have often wanted to speak to you. What is your name? Do tell me.”
And this had been the beginning of a very great friendship, a friendship that completely, or almost completely, filled the lives of both women. Gerald was the first to object to it; he did not like finding Miss Winnower sitting about in The Oaks when he came home from town.
“Who is that hideously ugly female that Madeline is always bringing here?” Gerald spoke irritably to his mother, as, having found Miss Winnower sitting in the drawing-room, he had bolted hastily out and taken cover in the morning-room.
“My darling, don’t!” Mrs. Page’s face was suddenly all alight with laughter.
“Well, but she is! I mean to say, Madeline is a cut above that sort of thing! I suppose it’s all part of this business of grovelling round after a clergyman. Why women can’t leave it alone I can’t think. What’s the attraction? . . . a miserable specimen like Coward going about dressed up like a woman. Madeline is a cut above that sort of thing,” Gerald repeated himself irritably.
So Mrs. Page had an additional burden laid upon her, namely, the task of keeping the peace between her son and his elder sister. For Madeline was beginning to be terribly sensitive about St. Jude’s.
The tranquillity that had begun to dawn on her face had now begun to wane. And Gerald, from being a very pleasant and considerate brother, had become captious, and apt to come down to breakfast in a controversial mood. Things were not going quite right with him either: Mrs. Page was dreadfully afraid of it. The impromptu dances that had seemed to be such fun were fun no longer. Gerald made excuses and shrugged his shoulders when his mother asked what was happening about them.
Penelope sensed all this, and, wandering to her mother, consulted her about it. “Everybody seems so fearfully grumbly all of a sudden,” she complained. “And Madeline looks so weird and sort of starey. Is it that she has too much Church, do you think, mother?”
Mrs. Page thought that it probably was, but she did not say so. Instead of that, contrary to her habit, she tried to find out a little about her two eldest children. “Pen, darling,” she said, “I trust you very much, or I would not say this to you, but I know you will not repeat it. Does Mary ever speak about Gerald?”
“No, mother.” Penelope’s answer came at once and very frankly. “She only talks about that man who walked home with me the other night, Major Dreford Poole. He has gone back to India. I wish he hadn’t. Somehow I always felt that she was going to be engaged to him. But I think he didn’t ask her, or something; anyhow, she isn’t.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Page was silent for a little while, and then she spoke again. “Pen, is Madeline much at the Cowards’ house?” she asked.
Penelope hesitated. This was a leading question, and she did not want to answer it. As a matter of fact, Madeline was always there: Mary had told her so. Sometimes, although Mary was too well bred even to hint at it, Madeline was in the way. And there was something else that Penelope, with her almost perilous gift of being able to divine other people’s feelings, had sensed from Mary’s manner when she mentioned her sister’s name. Madeline was in love with Mary’s brother. Everybody was, apparently; but Penelope was sorry that Madeline had joined the rest in this particular respect. People in cassocks ought to be immune from that sort of thing, thought Penelope vaguely. And now, how much of this was she to. communicate to her mother? . . .
“Well, darling?” Mrs. Page was watching the little perplexed face with the tenderest love in her own.
“Petkins, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not say anything about Madeline.” Penelope spoke suddenly and without any premeditation, and as she spoke she heaved a sigh of relief. That had settled that. How could she tell her mother about her own sister? She couldn’t—that was quite certain.
And Mrs. Page did not pursue the subject. Penelope had told her all that she wanted to know, or rather all that she did not want to know. She sighed painfully as she stooped to kiss the top of the little smooth head.
“Why not ask Miss Penelope Page?” Paul spoke to his sister through the wide open window. The Vicarage garden was full of flowers: sweet peas. Paul was picking them, recklessly, as sweet peas ought to be picked, with heaps of buds and curling green tendrils.
“All right.” Mary’s downbent eyes were amused. Life was amusing, if you did not take it too seriously, and the weather was heavenly. And she was beginning to get over Harley Poole’s defection. Gerald Page was a dear and had such nice manners. And now this new development . . . that was entertaining if you liked. Mary went away to write Penelope a note. Someone had lent them a car, and they were going out into the country for a day.
“Oh, I say, shall I go, mother?” Penelope came tearing into the morning-room where Mrs. Page was sitting doing the tradesmen’s books. “Fancy a picnic with a monk, what fun!”
“Why, where are you going, Pen?” Penelope had not seen Madeline, she was standing putting things into a little basket. Her voice was sharp as she raised her head.
“Why, Mary has written to ask me to go out with her and her brother for the day. Someone has lent them a car, and they want to get right out into the country. I was wondering—perhaps I shan’t go.”
All the animation had died out of Penelope’s eyes and voice. Madeline looked as if someone had struck her in the face; surely even her lips had got whiter. . . . How could she go if her sister felt like that about it?
“Well, what do you feel about it, dear?” Mrs. Page spoke without looking directly at either of her children. “Oh, my God, not this!” Suddenly Mrs. Page lost control of herself mentally. Without looking at Madeline, she could see the bleak pallor of her. This would be too cruel . . . because Penelope would never look at him.
“Well, I don’t know, mother.” Penelope, hesitating and fidgeting, was swinging from one foot to the other. And as she swung, Madeline took up her little basket and walked swiftly out of the room.
“Mother, she minds!” Penelope, like a frightened child, stared panic-stricken at the closing door.
“Yes, Penelope, I am afraid she does; but still, that is only between you and me, darling. Now then, you must make up your mind. What is it to be, Pen?”
“I should like to go; mother.” Penelope’s little seal’s head was nodding. After all, it was only that Mary wanted her. She was Mary’s friend. Why should they ask Madeline, after all?
“Very well, darling, then go.” And with a few more tender injunctions—a coat, a tin of chocolates from the store cupboard, cook would give it to her—Mrs. Page was alone. But left alone, she sat for quite ten minutes with her head in her hands; somehow she felt that she had not strength left with which to cope with this new situation.
Madeline felt that she had not strength either. She had been terrified at the surge of feeling that receding had left her gasping and in a sense stranded in a sort of desert of despair. Penelope, her own sister, had been asked to spend a whole day with him. Why had they not asked her? After all, he and she had things in common: they worked together; they worshipped together. Penelope was only a baby; besides, she scoffed at Church work. She would wound his sensibilities. She didn’t understand. . . . Madeline was almost beside herself as she ran to the shelter of number 1A Avenue Road. But Ada Winnower was there, ready with all the sympathy that even anyone as distracted as Madeline could require. But the expression of it had to wait until the ant-like mother had been disposed of.
“Well, I’m sure—come in, Miss Page.” Mrs. Winnower peered mountainously from the top of the little flight of stairs. “I thought it was the boy from Boot’s; they promised to send round. . . . Here’s your friend Miss Page, Ada. . . Mrs. Winnower turned her head to look over her shoulder.
And this went on for about ten desperate minutes. And then at last the two women were alone in the tiny bedroom.
“Ada!” Madeline’s tears could no longer be held back. “Ada!” And she dropped on to a little wicker stool and flung her hands out over her knees.
“My dearest, what is it?” Poor plain little Miss Winnower’s dark flat face was all twisted with sympathy and anguish. Her very, very dear, dear friend. She took the little basket and set it the right way up on the end of the bed.
“Ada!” And then Madeline struggled up out of her crouching position and began to pace up and down the room. There was so little room in which to pace, too, each couple of steps brought her back to her friend. “Ada, I tell you that I cannot live if this goes on—I really cannot.” Her fair pretty face was all stained with crying.
“If what goes on, my dearest?” Poor Miss Winnower was almost mad with anxiety to help. But how could she unless her dearest Madeline . . .?
So Madeline told her. Overwrought and hysterical, she gave away the two things that up to that present moment she had managed to keep very successfully concealed. The first was that she worshipped the Reverend Paul Coward to distraction, and the second that she was afraid that he was going to fall in love with her own sister. And at that second disclosure Ada Winnower walked very quietly away to the window. “No, dear God!” Maimed, and pitifully fluttering, her soul winged its way upward.
“But why else should he want Penelope to go with them into the country?” demanded Madeline, longing passionately for Ada to think of something, anything, that would lay this terror in her soul.
“He would never fall in love with anyone in an earthly sense,” asserted Miss Winnower fiercely and almost desperately. This thing should not be —it could not be. She turned back from the window.
“Why not?” Madeline was wiping her eyes, vaguely comforted. Ada minded too. Even to Madeline’s blurred perception her friend looked as if she had shrunk a little.
“Because he is truly celibate in soul as well as body,” said Miss Winnower; and so saying she walked up to Madeline and took hold of her hand.
“How do you know?” sobbed Madeline, losing control of herself again at this very tangible expression of comfort.
Ada spoke as if she really knew. “Because I do,” said Miss Winnower.
And then her little puny strength gave out before the tumult in her soul. She loved him, so dreadfully, so terribly! How could she live? . . . if he. . . . And then she rallied again.
“Madeline, let us pray about it,” she said.
“What are we to say?” gasped Madeline. They often prayed, these two women, prostrate before the little prie-Dieu. From the ivory crucifix the gentle Face looked down, utterly and tenderly comprehending. But to-day . . . “What shall we say?” she asked.
“Nothing,” replied Ada, feeling suddenly that unless she fell on her knees she would die where she stood. God must shoulder this burden for her, she couldn’t; it was too bitterly, bitterly heavy even to be prayed about. Her little hard overworked hand reached out blindly for her friend’s.
“Hallo! you’ve given up looking like a monk!” It had taken some time to find the chocolates, and Penelope had run all the way to the Vicarage. She grasped the thin fingers held out to her in a cheerful and substantial handshake.
“Yes; do you prefer it?” Paul, in a soft turn-down collar, certainly looked more human. Mary, watching him, laughed to herself.
“Yes, much. Somehow in your other clothes you always looked to me as if you didn’t have enough to eat! Does he, Mary?” Penelope turned laughingly to her friend.
“No,” said Mary decidedly, “he does not; we’re always quarrelling about it. Scold him, Pen, it will do him worlds of good.”
“I can’t, I’m afraid of him!” Penelope looked up at the cadaverous face with an odd mixture of feeling. He was nice in a way, this queer man, and yet in a way repellent. Something about him was human and something wasn’t. Something was fearfully, fearfully hard. Penelope gave up thinking about it; he was to be her host anyway, so she would not criticize him even in her own mind.
And Paul proved to be a good host. Mary was astonished. She was accustomed to seeing him sit silent and aloof when women were anywhere about. Now he was animated. He actually laughed heartily. Not the ordinary clerical laugh of a man amused almost in spite of himself, but the laugh of a man really amused. Entering into all Penelope’s silly, babyish remarks with an odd zest.
“Oh, let’s stop here, it’s heavenly!” The big Austin car had brought them right into the heart of Surrey in a little over an hour. They were on the top of a little rising, with fields all round them. Glorious fields, all dotted and starred with flowers. The lane was narrow, a real country lane, with wild roses climbing all over the briary hedges of it.
“All right, this’ll do as well as anywhere. Stop here, will you?” Paul was leaning over and speaking to the chauffeur. They had all three decided to sit together behind, putting the lunch in front.
“Oh, I say!” Penelope had clambered out, leaving Paul, who had been sitting in the middle of the two girls, with an odd feeling of desolation in his heart. There had been something very companionable in the little soft figure wedged close to his. He swung himself out after her, gloomy again. He suddenly longed for his dog. Waggles had been left behind because of sheep and rabbits and other disturbing things.
“What’s the matter—stiff?” Mary was shaking out her skirt and yawning. “Oh, I’m hungry! Let’s have lunch here, shall we, Paul? What’s the time? Oh, how gorgeous it all smells I I do adore the country, don’t you, Pen?”
“Rather!” Penelope wrinkled her small white nose in keenest appreciation. “The monk finds a nice place for lunch,” she said audaciously.
Mary caught her breath abruptly. Pen was going a little too far. She glanced at her brother a little anxiously. But Paul, stooping over a luncheon-basket, had a smile trembling on his lips.
“The monk won’t do anything of the land unless he is helped to do so? “he said, and he lifted his head and looked straight at Penelope.
And there was a something in that look that produced in Penelope the sensation of having been winded. He was magnetic—was he, or wasn’t he? Pen did not quite know what magnetic meant. But she was aware that she was standing close to something very powerful and compelling. It frightened her. Suddenly the picnic had ceased to be fun. It was like an awful game they had played when they were children, of daring one another to go past a dark cupboard where coats were hung.
“Come along and make yourselves useful, both of you.” Paul’s eyes were on the luncheon-basket again. “Get out the things, and meanwhile I’ll go along and find a place where we can sit down. Somewhere not too windy, because of the spirit stove.” He straightened himself, and again his eyes met Penelope’s. And this time the glance was a gentle one.
So lunch was a very pleasant meal. Paul found just the right place, on the outskirts of a pinewood. A lovely sunny slope starred with daisies and smelling deliciously of new grass.
“Oh, I say, it’s bliss!” Replete, and yet delightfully restored by a cup of very good coffee, Penelope lay on her back and stared up into the dark feathery branches waving above her.
“You lazy creature, I’m going to work hard!” Mary, with a cigarette between her lips and speaking with difficulty because of it, had begun to fumble in a large brightly coloured Oriental bag. “I can’t get anything worth doing from here, but I think I can over there.” . . . Mary, with almost closed eyes, was standing with her hands formed into a penthouse.
“I’ll settle the chauffeur first, and then I’ll come back.” Paul, with deft movements of his thin hands, was packing up. “We’ll leave the tea-things out, because we needn’t start from here until at least half-past five. Give me your Burberry, Mary, you’ll want it to sit on.” . . . And brother and sister started to walk off in the direction of the car.
Left alone, Penelope raised herself on her elbow, staring after them. Mary was going to sketch, that meant that she and the clergyman brother would have to spend the afternoon together. What should she say to him? It would become overwhelming after a bit. Now, it had been so easy to talk to that nice man that she had met at Mary’s. His eyes had laughed into hers, and they had seemed to like exactly the same things. But when she had said that to Mary, she had suddenly got odd and chilly. Stiff and constrained, somehow, and not a bit like herself. Major Harley Dreford Poole. Penelope said the name over to herself very softly and quietly. Why had he gone back to India so soon? She had liked him. His eyes. . . . And then she met other eyes looking down into hers.
“Well, what are you thinking about?” Paul had dropped down on to the grass beside her.
“A man that I met at your house,” said Penelope, sitting up abruptly. You must never sprawl with a man about. Gerald had told her that once.
“Who was that?” Paul was stalking a flustered ant with a long white finger.
“A Major Harley Dreford Poole,” said Penelope, lingering over the name as if she liked saying it.
There was an instant’s hesitation, and then Paul spoke again. “Yes, he is a very great friend of Mary’s,” he said; and although the words were simple enough, they filled Penelope with an enormous discomfort. It was almost as if he had said, “You have no right to like that man because he already belongs to my sister.” And yet he didn’t . . . they weren’t engaged. Or were they perhaps? she asked timidly.
“No,” said Paul.
But again Penelope felt vastly uncomfortable. There was something else behind all these noes and yeses. Why hadn’t Mary told her if she was engaged to that nice man? It wasn’t fair to keep that sort of thing to yourself. Penelope, suddenly feeling inclined to cry, longed desperately for her mother. Someone to run to and hide your face in.
Paul was speaking again. “You never come to church with your sister, do you, Miss Page?” He was looking straight at her, twisting a little piece of grass between his fingers.
“No,” said Penelope.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like that sort of a church,” said Penelope, feeling for some reason oddly perturbed and out of temper.
“And why not, again?”
“Because it’s only an excuse for masses of women to be in love with you, and I don’t call that religion,” said Penelope fiercely, wondering as she spoke if she had gone mad. And yet, if she had died for it, she would have had to say those words. And yet . . . “I don’t mean Madeline.” She added the words breathlessly.
“Of course you don’t,” said Paul; and he kept his eyes on the grass. What was he thinking? Penelope, unobserved, searched his face wildly. Why had she said this ghastly thing? She waited for him to speak.
He did so, after a little pause. “I think you are a little unjust when you say that,” he said, and he spoke very quietly.
“I don’t!” Penelope was suddenly all on fire again. She felt that she must somehow make this man see this thing as she saw it. “You don’t understand because you’re a man,” she said; “women are different to men. They must have something to grovel to, someone to order them about, someone to be slavish to. How do I suddenly know that?” . . . broke off Penelope, staring about her like a frightened child.
“I don’t know,” said Paul; and suddenly the impersonal sexless look slid into his eyes again.
“I do.” Penelope forgot herself again in her excitement. “It’s something to do with you,” she said. “You have that sort of staring way that makes women feel like that. I could imagine getting to feel it too, if I allowed myself. That’s why your church is all wrong; you divert people from going straight to God. It’s nicer to do it through somebody else that you adore. The only thing is that it’s not being really religious to do it like that, and people ought to know it. . . .” And then, very red and breathless, Penelope stopped speaking.
There was a very long silence, during which Paul stared at the grass. This child! . . . his thoughts were pitiful. And yet there was something else that was not pity mixed up in them, something that drove the sexless impersonal gaze from his eyes, and that suddenly made him lift his head.
“How dare you speak like that?” he said.
“Why . . . why . . . what? . . .” Penelope was all fear again.
“How dare you? You have not the least idea what you are talking about.” Paul was blazing.
“Don’t! I’m afraid of you when you look at me like that. We’ve come out to enjoy ourselves.” Penelope was standing up and jumping up and down like a child.
“Retract it!” Paul was standing over her, towering.
“I forget what I said now.” Penelope was wringing her hands together and beginning to cry. Oh, this awful face looming over her. It was like a face she had once seen in a picture of the Inquisition. Coldly merciless, and utterly regardless. “Mr. Coward!” She reached out a trembling and pleading hand and took his.
And at that soft touch something died in the fierce eyes and something else was born. With a muffled exclamation Paul turned away from her, and cramming his hat down over his eyes he swung away down the grassy slope.
After her daughters had left the house, Mrs. Page sat for quite a long time doing nothing at all. It seemed suddenly impossible to add up tradesmen’s books . . . what did they matter in a world where your children had to suffer and you couldn’t prevent them from doing so? She suddenly felt odd and stifled. The usual morning’s routine was practically at an end, the cook had been up for orders, and she could hear the dragging about of furniture and the muffled burring of the carpet-sweeper overhead. Janet and Hester were turning out Madeline’s bedroom. From the lawn just below the morning-room window the whirring of the mowing-machine sent up a friendly bustling sound. Mrs. Page got up to look at it, she always liked to see the tiny pieces of grass raining into the white inside of the bright green receiver—it was so tidy. She stood there looking at it for some time, and, sensing her presence, Jim, the under-gardener, looked up and touched his hat and smiled a little sheepishly, and Mrs. Page returned the smile with a pleasant little glow at her heart. She was fond of her servants; she always felt them rallying round her like a little bodyguard; and after thinking a minute, she stooped and pushed up the heavy glass sash to speak to Jim. But the sash had been heavy, and after saying a breathless word or two about how beautiful the sweet peas were going to be, she felt that she would be happier up in her bedroom. Dr. Carter had given her quite a simple little mixture to take when she got that breathless feeling, and she would go up and take it, and then lie down for a little on the box ottoman by the window and mend some of Gerald’s socks. So she went, met on the first landing by a glorious clean smell of furniture-polish and Sunlight soap combined. That was the best of Janet and Hester, they cleaned a room so thoroughly. So Mrs. Page went on into her bedroom with a little of the sadness in her mind removed. Her dear children and her nice loyal servants—Mrs. Page quite forgot Dr. Carter’s mixture in the little glow of feeling that these thoughts brought with them.
The bedroom was full of sun and very pleasant to sit in, or rather to lie down in. Mrs. Page settled herself a little wearily on the box ottoman. Gerald’s socks would have to wait, she did not feel equal to the effort of finding the different things that would be required for the mending of them. As she lay there just looking round the room, suddenly the overwhelming significance of it all struck her. Her bedroom—no, not her bedroom, their bedroom. One room, not so very large, either, although large as bedrooms went, for two people. Two absolute separate entities forced to resign for ever their claim to solitude. Why had they to? Mrs. Page, suddenly feeling absolutely reckless for some reason or other, asked herself searchingly the question. Her mind fled back over the passage of many years; the common sleeping-place had been the cause of most of their disagreements. Mr. Page was orderly to a fault, Mrs. Page was not. The clash had begun very early on in their married life. Very often it had started the day badly . . . it was difficult to forget cross things said before breakfast, the remembrance of them had a habit of colouring the day. Why need such a state of affairs exist at all! It didn’t exist nowadays in a circle of society above their own. It was only the middle classes who hung so passionately on to this relic of Early Victorianism. What would be more heavenly than the “May I come in, darling?” Why, it would make you feel heavenly to say it. It made Mrs. Page feel heavenly even to think it to herself. Marriages would turn out successfully much more often if people were not herded together like animals. You couldn’t love if you had got to love at any minute of the day or night; and thinking this Mrs. Page got up to get her mixture. These fierce emphatic thoughts had made her feel breathless again. Dr. Carter had warned her against feeling too keenly.
Somehow the mixture did not seem to restore her so completely as usual. . . . However—there it was . . . and Mrs. Page went and lay down again. But she was restless mentally, her thoughts darting here and there. The whole of her life kept on heaving itself up in front of her and then sinking away again. Tiny little forgotten quarrels. Why was it the horrible things that she kept on remembering? Why couldn’t she remember when Wilfred had been kind? . . . because he had been kind, often and often. He was good and generous to her in money matters; he had never grudged the children any reasonable expense so far as their education was concerned. What was it then that gave her that feeling of desolation now, as if she had been cheated out of something? The feeling that at any cost her children must have it. That they mustn’t start wrong . . . crammed into one room because it was the proper thing to do in their class of life. . . . And then, dreadfully alert, Mrs. Page’s thoughts went swinging back in the opposite direction. How fearfully she must have worried Wilfred! How awful to have a very orderly, well-directed mind, and to find that your wife hadn’t one. Always having to fortify yourself against alarums and excursions. Wilfred had been very patient with her. And then suddenly the memory of him looking patient rose up in front of her, and other memories began to crowd in, jostling the first one, and elbowing out the ugly original ones, until the tears were streaming down Mrs. Page’s cheeks, and she was holding out her hands, talking brokenly aloud. He had been so pleased when Doris was born, and he had been anxious too. At first he had seemed to think that having a baby wasn’t much more bother than walking up to the end of Streatham Place to catch a tram. But when Doris had been born he had come in and knelt down by the bed with his head on her hand; and thinking that, Mrs. Page got up and began to walk blindly towards his dressing-room. If only he would come in . . . she would tell him . . . she would tell him . . . and then, Mrs. Page, still holding out her hands and still talking out loud, stopped walking and put her hand up to her heart; and then with a little bewildered gasping sigh she took another step, a final one this time, and it took her out into a fuller life.
“Sunk down on the floor, just by your easy chair, sir!” Janet, sodden with tears, imparted this information when Mr. Page, very white, or rather terribly grey, walked into the inner hall with Dr. Carter by his side. It had taken some time to get him from the City. Dr. Carter had had to call him on his own telephone after his return from The Oaks. Jim had been to fetch him, Jim blubbering, and trying to tell Dr. Carter how his mistress had smiled to him from the morning-room window only just about twenty minutes before Janet had found her lying there.
“So there is that to be thankful for, Page: she died without the least suffering.” Dr. Carter, very much upset himself, blew his own nose again.
“I can’t. . . . She must. . . . Carter! . . .” Mr. Page was standing very still, staring in at the morning-room door, which was open. He could see the garden through the big window at the end of it. The wire of the aerial was blowing very faintly to and fro.
“My dear Page.” Dr. Carter, deeply moved, although he had never very much cared for Mr. Page, took the hand nearest to him in a close grip.
“The children.” Mr. Page moved a little blindly forward.
“They are all out—apparently until the evening. I was not sure of Gerald’s telephone number, or I would have let him know at the same time.”
“Oh!” Mr. Page just turned and looked at the old doctor, and then the two men walked together to the foot of the shallow stairs. “Carter!” And the elder man, deeply pitying, threaded the trembling arm through his own.
Mrs. Page lay, looking just as if she was very fast asleep, in the middle of the big mahogany bed. She was smiling, just a very little. It was the same smile that curved her lips when she peeped into a room and saw Gerald or Penelope sitting there. When she had first been found she had not been smiling, it had come since she had been quietly lying on the bed. As if there had been time for that which had gone out of her to look round a little in the wonderful new world in which it found itself. As if the spirit, rapturously content, had wrenched itself free to flee back to whisper that all was well. After all, that tired body lying there had been loyal and brave. . . . Why should it not share?
But Mr. Page only saw the wife that he had devotedly loved in his own queer unimaginative way lying there still and cold, and incredibly remote from him, and with all the anguish of a regret that he had not been nicer to her when he had had the chance, he stood there, the tears raining down his face.
Mrs. Page’s death smashed up the life at The Oaks. It was bound to be so, she had been too much the aim and object of the whole thing for it to go on without her. Penelope felt it most; Penelope, who had come bursting back from her day in the country full of things that she wanted to tell her mother.
“Miss Pen, your mother . . .” Janet, beginning to cry again, opened the front door the minute she had rung the bell. She had been sitting in the hall waiting.
“What’s happened?” Penelope had run from the end of the road where the car had put her down, and was panting.
“She is dead, Miss Penelope!” Janet was too upset to try to clothe the news more kindly.
“What!” Penelope had a queer sensation as if someone had dug her in the ribs, and she must burst out into a shriek of laughter. And then she saw her father coming slowly out of the morning-room. “Father!” she ran down the hall to him.
“Penelope, your mother . . .!” But Mr. Page’s face was not the more tragic of the two when the awful news had gone home.
“Mother!” Penelope, with her eyes strangely large and blue in her grey face, had sat down abruptly on the carved oak hall chair. And then she got up. “I must go and tell . . .” And then, flinging herself away from the old servant, she dashed across the hall and fled down the front steps.
She got to the Vicarage in a little over five minutes. Mary did not hear her. She was up at the top of the house in her bedroom changing her frock and finding fresh stockings, and doing the little things that required to be done after a fairly dusty day spent out of doors. But Paul was in the hall. He had just taken off his walking-shoes and was standing in pumps, staring round for Waggles.
“Mr. Coward!” Penelope had flung herself through the outside glass door and was standing there, the handle of it still in her hand. Her hat was in the other hand. It had blown off on the way round, and she had snatched it up and run on, not knowing whether it was on her head or not
“My dear child!” The young clergyman took a quick step forward, and put both hands on Penelope’s shoulders. “What on earth . . .?” He looked down into the dazed, staring eyes.
“My mother . . .” The whole of Penelope s face was twitching. “She’s dead! At least, they say she is. She can’t be. . . . I was going to tell her . . . Mr. Coward!” Penelope began to tremble all over.
And in this sort of thing the priest was at his very best. Dead or not—and to the Reverend Paul Coward death was a very little thing indeed—this child needed immediate help, that was obvious.
“Come in here.” He pushed open his study door with one foot, and led Penelope into it, keeping one arm round her.
“I’ve never been here before.” Penelope was staring stupidly round her.
“No, and you shall look all round it presently. Now tell me: you ran round here to tell me something. Sit down in that big chair. Hallo, Waggles! Here we are, you see!” Paul shut the door, with a quiet thin hand on the brass handle of it.
“You’re fond of your dog, aren’t you?” Waggles, a fatly curling expanse of rapture, was prone at his master’s feet, shamefully subservient in his joy.
“Yes, very.” Paul sat down on a low chair, drawing it near to the bigger one. “Now then,” he said, “you wanted me.”
“Yes, I did.” Penelope drew her brows perplexedly together. “What was it? I . . .”
“Something to do with your mother,” prompted the clergyman, with his eyes on Penelope’s.
“Oh yes. Janet said . . .” And then the cloud cleared a little, and the terror loomed larger. “Mother . . . Mr. Coward. Mother. . . Penelope made a little shriek in her throat. “She’s dead . . . she can’t be! Mother. . . .” And then the merciful tears surged up, and Penelope flung herself across the little space that separated her from the smaller chair and clutched at the black cloth sleeve.
He soothed and comforted her, stroking, almost unconsciously, but not quite, the short ruffled hair. This child . . . this poor little distracted child. “Cry as much as ever you like.” The spare ascetic face was bent over the hidden one.
“You’re accustomed to people being dead. Let me stay with you.” Penelope was gasping and choking.
“You shall. But let me go for just one moment. I want to speak . . .”
“No, no.” Penelope was trying to hold him down, clutchingly.
“Very well, then—come with me. Yes, and Waggles too . . .” for Penelope’s free hand was groping for the spaniel.
And when Mary saw them like that, as she came down the narrow felt-carpeted stairs, her heart leapt. Penelope happily engaged to her brother, what a difference it would make! Perhaps that had been why—Gerald had thought that she couldn’t be spared perhaps. She began to smile.
But the smile was short-lived. Briefly it was explained to her. He would go round at once to The Oaks: he might be of some help there. Miss Page would stay . . .
“No, no . . . I want to come with you. . . .” Penelope was sobbing again like a terrified child.
So they went together. And Mr. Page, wandering like a grey shadow in and out of rooms, accepted his presence quite calmly. None of the other children had come in yet. Why, after all, should they come? There was nothing to come home for. So Paul Coward took command, and he also took Penelope up to see her mother. “Yes, I wish it,” he gently forced her, clinging and weeping.
“I shall be afraid . . . and afterwards . . .”
“Afterwards you will be glad,” said Paul; and they stood together looking at the peaceful remoteness of her. And afterwards Penelope was glad, for the terror was laid for ever. And for one brief moment, as he stood there, almost every single atom of everything that he had been taught at his theological college dropped from Paul. A God of Love, an unspeakably beautiful world to go on to, only these two things stood out in his mind. How did it matter how you got there, after all? Be propped up all the way along by religious observances by all means, if you feel you must, only don’t call them essentials. And then, a fuller consciousness of his surroundings drawing in on him, and remembering too that Mrs. Page had passed into the Unseen unfortified by the last rites of the Church, he quietly dropped on his knees.
Penelope, watching him, was unmoved by anything but the profoundest despair and misery. A God that would do a thing like this was not a God that she cared to have anything to do with. Penelope had always attended St. Michael’s, where the theology was antiquated and sledge hammer, and concerned itself a good deal with unpleasant judgments and afflictions. Mrs. Page, especially as she had got older, had shied away from these ideas, but she had been too sensitive to talk to her children much about it. Theology at St. Jude’s had advanced a little further, although not so very much. But Madeline, when she came in, was passionately glad of the presence of the Reverend Paul Coward.
“Father!” Forgetting everything but him, she broke down hopelessly into tears.
“Mind father doesn’t hear you!” Penelope, even in the midst of her own grief, felt uncomfortable. And she felt more uncomfortable still when Gerald came in, because he, although stunned and sick with misery, was openly resentful at the sight of the young clergyman.
“What on earth has he come round here for?” He drew his younger sister outside the library door, speaking in an undertone.
“I rushed round and fetched him,” said Penelope.
“Then you shouldn’t have done. Mother would have hated it,” said Gerald; and then, his own anguish overcoming him, he walked away and went very slowly up to his own bedroom. And so the ghastly three days dragged themselves to an end; and when all that was earthly of Mrs. Page had been scattered to the four winds, the family tried to take up the ordinary life again. But they could not do it. Doris could, she was young and volatile, and her life at the High School was absorbing; and her being in mourning made Miss Foster, if possible, more heavenly than ever. But the others could not, and now it was only a question of what they were going to do with themselves and with their lives.
Paul pressed his advantage. Swept off his feet by a torrent of passion that in his sane moments terrified him, he was almost unconscious of what he was doing. Mechanically he performed his religious duties, blindly he went about his daily work. He had never had anything to do with women before, except in an almost entirely impersonal way. Now one woman blotted out the whole of his horizon: he wanted her, that little frightened, unhappy creature, to care for and cherish for the rest of his life.
Everybody saw it: Mary with inward satisfaction, Madeline with despair, Miss Winnower with something too great even to be termed despair, and Gerald with unconcealed wrath.
“Keep that devil-dodger out of my way, or I shall kick him,” he said to Penelope one day, when on his return from town he saw the Reverend Paul Coward sitting under the big oak-tree at the corner of the lawn. When he came home from town, Gerald, sore and inwardly tortured with longing for his mother, liked to go straight to Penelope. Now, because of that silly ass always hanging about the place, he couldn’t do so. He blindly hated him.
“You ought to like him: he’s Mary’s brother,” Penelope retorted, stung and angry. She was ashamed of the feeling that made her rather enjoy pouring out her soul to the young priest. He listened to her with blazing eyes, and was always kind. It filled up the agonizing blank in her life.
“Why should I like Mary’s brother particularly?” Gerald fired it out with a dreadful wounded look in the back of his eyes.
Penelope saw the look, and her heart ached for her brother. Why didn’t Mary like Gerald back? He was so kind and good-tempered always. She would try to find out one day.
“I don’t know why you should, Gerry.” And then Penelope’s misery melted in tears, and she rushed away. “Mother, mother!” She and Gerald minded most—they did, they did! . . . Someone who always wanted to hear things—someone who always understood, and was always ready. That was why she liked talking to Mr Coward, he wanted to hear things too . . . he was always ready.
He was—desperately ready. And he knew exactly what to say, that was the worst of it. The authority of the Church behind him, he could speak with a note of command. And he used it with great effect. Not wilfully, because he was a genuinely good man; but, torn with longing to predispose this little creature in his favour, he would not have been human if he had not used every means at his command.
“When you speak like that, I feel most terrifically comforted,” said Penelope one day when, after about an hour’s pacing about the well-rolled gravel paths, they came to a standstill under a tall sunny wall.
“Do you?” said Paul, his melancholy eyes ablaze.
“Yes, I do. Why is it, I wonder?”
“Because I love you,” said Paul, and his blazing eyes burnt into hers.
“Oh!” After that brief exclamation Penelope was silent. Then she spoke again, rather uncomfortably this time. “I thought you did,” she said.
“You must love me in return. I must have you do so.” Paul had begun to walk feverishly up and down in front of her.
“I don’t think I can. You don’t make me feel at all like that,” said Penelope, wondering why the sight of the man she admired so suddenly repelled her. It was because he was at her mercy, and not she at his. That was all wrong. She sort of sat at his feet always; she didn’t want it the other way round.
“You shall,” said Paul; and for once in his life he was all man, primitive and devouring. And yet all the time he was intensely conscious of himself, and horrified at the riot of feelings that sent him trembling across the path to her side.
“I tell you I won’t,” said Penelope, and she thrust her hands damply into the woolly pockets of her jersey coat. “Clergymen aren’t meant to marry, that’s why women are always so friendly with them. You couldn’t be hours in a vestry telling a person things if you thought they would ask you to marry them at the end of it. It’s—it’s incongruous, that’s the word I mean. It’s like flirting with your deceased wife’s sister when the wife’s alive. When she’s dead it doesn’t matter, because you can marry her. Oh, no, you can’t—I forgot. That’s what I mean, you can do all sorts of things with a person when you know that they’re sort of tied up. But I thought you could marry your deceased wife’s sister, can’t you? Hasn’t the law been altered?”
“I don’t think you quite know what you’re talking about,” said Paul, quietly and coldly, brought abruptly to himself at the mention of the great controversy. “What you have been saying doesn’t actually make sense.”
“Then I haven’t explained it properly,” said Penelope eagerly. “What I exactly mean is this: Supposing I knew that a lion was very tightly chained up, and that its chain was absolutely safe, well, then I could go very close up to it, couldn’t I? That’s like me and you. I know you’re chained. So I feel quite safe to come very close indeed. See?” And Penelope, very sweetly and engagingly, glanced up into the dark face brooding over hers.
“I am not chained,” broke from Paul, a deep surge of colour staining his forehead.
“Then I think you ought to be,” said Penelope. “It’s the only fair way for a clergyman like you. You can’t have it both ways. Roman priests don’t: they have Mass and confessions and things; but then they don’t have wives, and it must be awfully miserable for them sometimes. You want wives, and all the other things as well. I don’t think it’s fair.”
“Don’t talk about things that you do not understand,” said Paul; and as he spoke he was conscious of an intense feeling of shame that he cared so little for this attack on what he held to be a matter of conscience. And then he consoled himself: it was a child speaking, you did not pay attention to a child.
“I do understand,” said Penelope, “and that is why I wish you had not said anything about love to me. It has spoiled things. I don’t look at you in a lovery sort of way at all. I like to feel that you are there to talk to and to confide in when I am miserable. . Mother! . . .” And then Penelope began to cry very piteously.
And at that the best in Paul Coward was uppermost again, and he took Penelope very sensibly and kindly by the hand. “Forget anything that I may have said that has distressed you,” he said “and only remember that I want to be your very sincere friend. Put away that handkerchief. We have had enough tears.”
“When you talk like that I feel that I should like to marry you,” said Penelope, lifting a face disfigured with tears from the very wet handkerchief in question.
“We will not discuss any question of marriage at present,” said the Reverend Paul Coward, and his heart gave such a tremendous leap in his throat that he felt that Penelope must surely have heard it.
“Any of the other women who go to your church would have said yes instantly,” went on Penelope, feeling as she spoke that this man must know that Madeline adored him madly, and wondering if she could say anything about it.
“No, they would not.”
“Yes, they would. That’s what I say: it’s not a fair way to do things. Look at us, for instance; I began by rushing to you because I was in trouble. I couldn’t have rushed to any other man except a relation. And here we are in love with each other. At least you are with me. As a rule it’s the other way round. That sounds as if I was thinking of it carelessly. I’m not—indeed I’m not. I thank you very, very much for being in love with me. I am truly grateful, I really am.” Penelope’s lower lip began to tremble.
“Love me in return then,” said Paul, and his thin sensitive fingers were locked behind him.
“You can’t love a person in a cassock; there’s something improper about it. You’re a different thing when you’re dressed like that. Can’t you see it?” urged Penelope impatiently.
“No, I cannot,” replied Paul; and his soul rose up and steadfastly regarded him at the lie. But he turned his face away. Why hadn’t he put on his ordinary clerical clothes? He very nearly had, and then somehow he had been ashamed. . . .
“I can.” said Penelope quietly.
About a month passed, and all the time things were getting more miserable and more complicated. The Oaks was a house divided against itself. Mr. Page moved about in it, a broken man. If it had not been for Janet, things would have been a good deal worse than they were. She saw that the master of the house changed his outside shoes when they ought to be changed, and took his tonic when it ought to be taken. No one else really cared. Mr. Page had never made any attempt to endear himself to his children, and in the minds of all of them there lay a feeling of resentment. Father had always been so cross . . . and especially to the beloved mother. Things like the car . . . and the telephone. It would have been so easy . . . and it would have made her life so much happier. So they all went on their own way regardless of their father; and Mr. Page, suffering in reality a very agony of desolation, went on his own way too. A way of bitter and unavailing regret, what more awful a highroad for human feet to tread alone?
Madeline was, next to her father, the one most to be pitied. Consumed day and night by a torment of jealousy, her life became a hell. Her younger sister, childish, irresponsible, utterly irreligious, had won the love of the man she worshipped. Ada Winnower was often very seriously alarmed. “My very dearest friend . . .” she would feverishly remonstrate with her.
“Don’t! You haven’t the faintest conception of what I am suffering.” Madeline would go raging up and down the tiny bedroom.
“But, my dear love, you do not know that what you dread is actually a certainty. Father Coward shows no sign of it. His sermon last night was inexpressibly beautiful.” Poor little plain Ada Winnower wrenched her hands together.
“I know he was looking to see if she was there.” It came scorching out of Madeline’s mouth.
“My dearest, I know that he was not,” said Miss Winnower; and her dark face flushed darker. At a moment like that . . . to allow his thoughts to wander. . . .
And Ada was right. Paul was fighting his obsession as a man caught in the undertow of a fierce tide fights to keep his head above water. If he keeps quiet, he may drift into safety; if he fights and gets down, he is lost. The night before, as he had lifted the stole to his lips, and had seen all that white mass of faces upturned to him, he had had one of his brief moments of sanity. “Feed My lambs”; he had chosen those words for his text. But by now, and it was a lovely sunny morning in Clapham Park Garden Suburb, he was down again. Penelope—with the little head like a wet seal. . . . Paul was going up and down the lawn, his cassock swirling blackly round his heels.
“Paul! you’ll get sunstroke! Look at Waggles, with his tongue hanging out.” Mary was standing at the open French window watching her brother. Mary was young and very modern, and she expressed herself frankly to Gerald. Somehow Gerald and she were being brought closer together over this affair. Letters from India did not come now with the same regularity that they used to come, and Gerald was near at hand and a dear. “It’s the very devil!” She said the words laughing, and showing her strong regular teeth.
“I’m sorry for him.” Gerald had said the words with his nice honest heart in his eyes.
“So am I, awfully. Why won’t Pen?” Mary was frowning.
“Why won’t you?” Gerald’s voice was quiet.
“Don’t!” Mary was still frowning. “You see, it’s not the same as you and me, Gerald,” she went on more eagerly. “Paul has never paid the faintest attention to any woman. You probably have had some sort of a flirtation from time to time. Yes, you have,” as Gerald was beginning to speak; “any ordinary man has. But Paul never has. He has been surrounded by women ever since he took Holy Orders . . . and you have no conception.”
Mary hesitated. This man’s own elder sister . . . did he know? she wondered.
“You mean that he has got it badly,” asked Gerald, not having the ghost of an idea that Madeline was in any way concerned in this.
“Fearfully,” said Mary.
“Then I’m sorry for him,” said Gerald, and his nice ordinary face flushed heavily. As a matter of fact he hated discussing his sister and this girl’s brother. The whole thing was out of the question, that was how he described it to himself. Pen was a kid . . . it would be plenty of time if she thought of getting married in five years’ time. And in the meantime . . . “Mary,” he said heavily.
“No, I don’t want to now,” said Mary, and Gerald, like a wise man, let it go at that. He was feeling a little more hopeful anyhow, and that, after the despair of the past weeks, was something. Perhaps if he said a word to Pen . . after all, if Mary was so keen about it . . .
And Penelope leapt at this sign of interest from the beloved brother. “Oh, Gerry, isn’t it ghastly!” she said dramatically.
“What?” asked Gerald, stuffing the tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe. Brother and sister were alone together. Gerald had just come back from town, and had walked down to the lower lawn to see if his favourite sister was there.
“Why, about Mr. Coward and me. And the awful part is that Madeline minds so dreadfully. Don’t say anything to her about it, will you? I know you won’t. How can I help it if Mr. Coward likes me best? I can’t!” Penelope took off her soft straw hat and smoothed her hair down all round her head with small neat hands.
“Madeline! How is she mixed up in it?” Gerald was sending out great puffs of smoke and frowning.
“Gerry, all the women at St. Jude’s adore Mr. Coward. I don’t know why it is, but they do. Mary says so too. They go flocking round there on any excuse. They rush to have interviews with him in the vestry. The other day someone pretended that she was dying so that she could get him round to her house. She really did, Mary found out. Of course, Mr. Coward never says anything about it. He says they aren’t, and of course I dare say he thinks they aren’t. But I know they are,” ended up Penelope, nodding her head.
“Yes, but Madeline wouldn’t go grovelling around a clergyman; she’s a cut above that sort of thing.” Gerald spoke uncomfortably, and puffed heavily at his pipe.
“Yes, I know . . . you’d think she was. But I think she’s caught the sort of mania that everyone has round there. I can’t explain it, but sometimes I feel that I am almost getting it too. When he comes swishing into the church fearfully grave and very tall, and looking not a bit conscious of anyone or anything, it gives you a sort of thrilly feeling inside. And when I know that he does like me rather, then I feel more thrilly,” ended up Penelope, nodding her little seal’s head.
“Would you like to marry him, Pen?” Gerald asked the question curiously. After all, Coward was a gentleman. And if Mary was set free. . . . he might have more of a chance. . . .
“Well, I would and I wouldn’t,” replied Penelope. “Something inside me likes him, and something doesn’t. When he’s sort of ordinary and ordering about and monkish, I like him. When he gets sort of trembly and beseeching, I don’t. It doesn’t seem right for him, somehow.”
“I see. Look here, Pen.” Gerald turned away and began knocking out his pipe with a rather shaky hand. “It’s like this . . . you and I have always been rather pally, so I can tell you. I’m most fearfully fond of Mary . . . simply horribly fond. She keeps on saying that she can’t leave Paul—well . . .”
“You mean that if I married him he’d be all right,” interrupted Penelope breathlessly.
“Yes,” said Gerald bluntly.
“Oh, I see.” Penelope suddenly got a cold feeling at her heart. Another person gone, that was why Gerald hadn’t been the same lately, then. He was in love with Mary, and was thinking about her all the time. He had always been her favourite brother, entering into her thoughts, and being glad about things that she was glad about. And now . . .
“But look here, Gerald.” Penelope burst it out abruptly. “What about that man in India? Mary liked him. I am sure she did. Are you sure she likes you?”
“What man?” demanded Gerald, stern and white all in an instant.
“Major Dreford Poole. I met him one day at the Vicarage, and I thought him the most heavenly man I had ever seen. He had the most adorable way of looking at you, as if he understood everything that you were going to say for ever. And his mouth was all kind all over . . . don’t you know? Not made to look kind just for a minute, but really kind when it wasn’t doing anything else.” Penelope was breathing heavily in her efforts to make herself understood.
“Dreford Poole!” Gerald was laughing in his unfeigned relief. “Why I knew him in France; he’s years and years older than Mary. Dreford Poole. . . . Gad! he can put it away! I remember him at a binge we once had. . . . Yes, of course Mary knows him, quite well . . . but as for there being . . .” Gerald laughed again. “Why, whatever made you think so?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I only thought it,” said Penelope, suddenly feeling profoundly miserable. Then she had been wrong. Mary hadn’t cared for him after all. How could she have? He was one of those wild people who got drunk, that was what Gerald had meant of course. And years and years older. . . . Penelope suddenly felt that a very beautiful dream had gone smashing down in front of her. She had liked him . . . she had . . . a different sort of liking to anyone else. And now. . . . “Do you suppose he has ever been in love with anyone?” she inquired timidly.
And at that Gerald simply roared with laughter. Dreford Poole in love! “My dear Pen, every other woman in Peshawar was on his heels in 1920. Wiltshire told me; you know Wiltshire, he’s in the same regiment. Dreford Poole in love! I say, what a rag!” And Gerald laughed again at the thought of it.
So, inwardly wincing dreadfully at the careless laughter, Penelope made up her mind. That really and truly had been what was holding her back; she hadn’t known that it was, but it was. Major Dreford Poole had been a sort of dream man in her mind, a sort of example of what a really nice man could be. Now . . . she would marry Mr. Coward and finish up with anything of the kind. Gerald would be happy then, and she was wretched, anyhow. Mother . . . and now Gerald gone . . . and Madeline furious with her. What did anything matter? “Mother, mother! . . .” Penelope had started off, rushing to the house, holding her handkerchief to her mouth, and not caring a bit if anyone saw her or if Gerald wondered what was the matter. “Mother, mother!” Penelope tore in at the garden door and fled up the shallow stairs, and bursting into her own room flung herself down on the bed sobbing.
Having made up her mind to marry Mr. Coward, Penelope wanted things settled. So that evening she did not dress for dinner, but only put on a soft blouse and a pleated skirt to match it. Dinner since Mrs. Page had died was always a fairly miserable meal, Mr. Page never having realized that to have a happy home everyone must do their share. So he sat silent over his plate, a little hunched, and Gerald and Penelope kept up a desultory conversation together. Madeline was out; she had had something on a tray at half-past six, and had left the house immediately afterwards; and Doris did not have late dinner. This was the time that she did her homework, or was supposed to do it. As a matter of fact she spent most of her time in making raids on the things that came out of the dining-room, or scrimmaging with Janet with shrieks of suffocated laughter.
Immediately after dinner Penelope announced her intention of going out. Gerald was relieved; he wanted to do the same, only he would not have suggested it if it had meant leaving his younger sister alone. He was very fond of Penelope, and any time that he could spare from his own thoughts he spent in thinking about her. Was she happy? She did not look so. Perhaps this affair with Coward was worrying her. She had rushed away looking very queer after their talk in the garden that evening. He would take the thing up in a couple of days, when he himself . . . Gerald made a great many good resolutions as he put his finger on the self-starter of his Morris-Oxford.
He overtook her on his way to the Vicarage. “Hallo! I didn’t know you were going this way, Pen. Like a lift?” Gerald lifted his soft hat with an affectionate grin.
“No, thank you, Gerald.” Penelope spoke with a sort of chastened solemnity. Her heart was all a-thrill with the thought of what she was doing, or of what she was about to do. Like people in books who made wonderful sacrifices for other people, she was going to sacrifice herself so that other people could be happy. Gerald principally. If she took Mary’s place, then Mary would be free to marry Gerald, and that would make two people happy, because no one could marry anyone as good-tempered and friendly as Gerald without liking it. Then Mr. Coward would be made happy too. Anyone who could look at her, Penelope, in the way he did must presumably be very anxious to have her for his own, and when you wanted a thing very badly and then got it, it was the most heavenly thing in the world. Penelope remembered what she had felt like when her mother had persuaded her father to allow her to have a bicycle. And then the thought of the mother brought that dreadful little screwing pain in the region of her heart again, and, blinking fiercely once or twice, she put it resolutely away from her.
Mr. Coward was in. The maid at the Vicarage knew Penelope and beamed at her. “And Mr. Page has just taken Miss Mary along with him for a drive,” she said, beaming again.
“Oh!” Oddly enough the thrill in Penelope’s heart faded a little. It was like having screwed oneself up to go to the dentist without an appointment, and then finding that he was at home. All your inside really had been praying that he wouldn’t be. However, there it was. . . . Penelope followed the neat maid into the inner hall.
“Yes, come in.” The deep voice came very quickly after the tap, and Penelope heard it come with a throb of relief. If it had been delayed, it would have meant that he was praying, and she would have flown out of the door and run all the way home.
“Miss Page, sir.” Penelope could hear what Annie said.
“Oh, just wait a minute, Annie, I will come out.” And then there was the scrape of a chair and the sound of footsteps across the polished floor. And then the tall austere figure stood in the doorway. Grave, very, thought Penelope, by now thoroughly depressed.
But the gravity broke up in a smile of intense sweetness as Paul saw the little figure standing in front of him. “Hallo! I had no idea it was you,” he said, and his voice was almost boyish.
“Yes, it’s me. Why, who did you . . .?” and then Penelope broke off abruptly. He had thought it was Madeline, and had not wanted to see her. How fearfully awkward! She got suddenly very red. “Yes, it’s me,” she said, repeating it stupidly.
“Come in, come in. . . . All right, Annie, I will look after Miss Page. Waggles, get down, sir!” Paul caught at the collar of the spaniel and began to drag him towards the end of the hall. “Yes, you take him with you, Annie, that will be the best.” Paul was back again, breathing rather heavily.
“Oh, he hated going!” Penelope was staring at the glass door leading into the kitchen. She could see Annie’s cap through it, and Waggles’s hind-legs pawing the air ineffectually.
“Never mind, he’s a hopelessly spoilt dog at any time. Come in.” Paul was holding the door back and smiling.
But Penelope suddenly felt a swift revulsion of feeling. What was she doing? The interior of the room into which she was looking was like a church. The wall facing her was dominated by a huge crucifix, below it a kneeling-desk. Paul himself; the caped cassock. Why, it might be a church. . . .
Paul was watching her, and he seemed to sense her thoughts. “I know you don’t care for me in this,” he said; “if you will wait a minute I will change it. Sit down, I won’t be . . .” And Paul had gone, up the stairs hurrying. Not so easy with the skirts round his heels, he gathered them in one hand impatiently. “There!” he was back again, tall and spare in his round clerical coat.
“Yes, that’s better.” Penelope had spent her time of waiting in prowling round the room. The only thing that made it ordinary was a pipe-rack and Waggles’s drinking-bowl and leash. Otherwise, it might quite easily have been a vestry.
“Well, what did you want of me?” Paul sat down, and had the instant’s impulse to take hold of Penelope and set her between his knees. She was such a child. Her firm little mouth was trembling.
“I want to know if you still want to marry me,” said Penelope, going straight to the point as was her habit, and not taking any notice of his request to her to sit down.
“Yes,” said Paul, and he drove his hands into his pockets.
“All right then, you can,” said Penelope, standing very still.
Paul was only conscious of a hopeless whining coming from the kitchen, of that, and of the thundering of his own heart. “Dear God!” He got up and walked over to the window, and stood staring out into the garden. It was beginning to get dark, and the sweet peas stood out against a sky of gold and ultramarine. The next-door people had a loud speaker on, it sounded tinny coming across the lawn and the herbaceous border.
“You don’t seem to want to.” Penelope, left standing, spoke tremulously, with her damp hands pressed closely against one another. How perfectly awful if he had given up the idea, she thought. One often said yes blindly, knowing all the time that you wouldn’t have to really.
But Paul was back, and to Penelope he seemed suddenly to fill the whole room. Almost like an evil thing, he hung over her, as if everything within him that had been holy and sort of sanctified had been turned to a consuming flame in which she was to be engulfed. For one instant she hated him, blindly and unreasoningly. Get away from him she must or die . . . or perish. She flung out her hands.
“What’s the matter?” Paul’s voice was hoarse and strained. Penelope’s vision of a power of Evil had not been so far from the mark. It was even at that very moment at the throat of Paul’s guardian angel. This was a monstrous affair. This man had given his life to the Church. “Leave him alone.” The white wings were fluttering wrathfully.
“Not I. Any man is fair game.” Evil spoke triumphantly. It had assisted at many a midnight vigil held by this young priest. Paul knew that he ought not to marry, he knew that his life had been dedicated to the service of God. He knew also that he could not do things by halves. Penelope or God . . . it was like that with him, he could not help it. Other men might marry, and carry on their work with the same vigour, but he could not. It was all or nothing with him. And quietly and deliberately he chose.
“What is the matter?” He said it again, more quietly this time.
“I don’t know,” said Penelope; and as she spoke she had a swift recollection of an incident of her childhood. She had been staying with an aunt, and one of her greatest joys had been to punt about a tiny pond in a tub. And one day she had driven the pole too far down into the mud, and had had to leave it there sticking while she drifted vaguely about. Until at last one of the gardeners had seen her, and had hauled her in with a rake. Oh, the rapture of feeling dry land underneath her feet again! But here there was no one to haul her in, she was drifting, drifting, and there would never be any safety again anywhere.
And Paul came quietly up beside her and took her closely into his arms.
There seemed no particular reason why Penelope’s marriage should be delayed, and so it was more hurried on than anything else. Penelope was thankful. Home was intolerable to her now. Madeline was awful. It had begun on the night of her engagement. Paul had walked home to The Oaks with her, and had had a few words with Mr. Page, and had then joined her in the garden. And then Madeline had come in, and Gerald had met her in the hall and told her the great news; but instead of coming out into the garden, she had gone straight up to her room. And later, just as Penelope was rolling over on to her side with that lovely blurry feeling well established in her head, Madeline had come into her bedroom, and had got as far as the bed without Penelope hearing.
“Oh, how you made me jump!” Penelope made a loud squawk in her throat.
“Is it true that you are engaged to Father Coward?” Madeline seemed to be peering down into the bedclothes, hanging over Penelope like something baleful.
“Yes,” said Penelope, feeling terribly uncomfortable. To begin with, hearing the man you were going to marry called Father wasn’t nice, it was almost like hearing that the Pope was engaged. Then Madeline’s voice was so awful . . . as if she had a piece of string tied round her neck so that she couldn’t speak properly.
“How dare you seduce him from his true vocation?” said Madeline, and she spoke with the most terrible venom in her voice.
And this had been the beginning of really the most awful scene. Madeline was like someone possessed. Thinking it over afterwards, Penelope wondered if Madeline hadn’t gone a little mad for the time being. She had said the most dreadful things, things that made you feel hot and cold all over to remember. Things that you don’t generally say . . . about people like . . . Oh, well! Penelope tried to forget them. But the gist of it all was that Mr. Coward was in reality a very good man—a saint, in fact. And that Penelope was in some obscure way making him bad. Dragging him down . . . that was the gist of it, dragging him down.
“I’m not dragging him down!” Penelope was sitting very straight up in her bed, her hair ruffled and sticking out round her head. “You oughtn’t to say so, Madeline; you’ve caught the sort of mania that they all have at St. Jude’s. You’re in love with him yourself, you know you are. I wouldn’t have said that you were dragging him down if he’d asked you to marry him. Why didn’t he? He easily could have done if he’d wanted to. It’s just because I didn’t take any notice of him that he did. He’s sick of women running after him. . . . Mary says he is. Leave me alone, can’t you? . . . it’s brutal and horrible of you to go on like this when I’m just engaged . . .” and Penelope had cast herself down in the bed again, stuffing the corner of the pillow into her mouth and choking and sobbing.
And this had been the end of any discussion with Madeline. Like a frozen person, she moved about the house, finally absolutely declining to be a bridesmaid.
“Do, Madeline.” Penelope was tremulous and disconsolate at this point-blank refusal. How utterly wretched being married was, she thought, standing at her bedroom window, staring out into the beautiful garden.
“No,” said Madeline, with her mouth like a vice. “I decline to assist at what I consider . . .”
And then, the rest of the sentence unfinished, Madeline had left the room. And Penelope went on with her preparations with utter desolation in her heart. Years afterwards she wondered what had possessed her to marry at all. She would not have done so if she had had her mother by her side; she realized that long before the honeymoon was over.
But meanwhile there was a great deal to be done, and Penelope did it with a fair amount of excitement. Mr. Page, apparently with a good deal of bewilderment at this abrupt engagement of a daughter whom he had always regarded as a child, was generous in the matter of trousseau, and Penelope and Mary got plenty of fun out of almost daily expeditions up to town. Gerald very often met them for lunch, and then Penelope would leave them, wandering alone up Regent Street, staring into shops, until half-past two, which was the time that Gerald went back to his office, and then she would pick Mary up somewhere, generally finding her dreamy and pink and smiling. And then one day the great news was imparted to her, news that for some reason or other plunged her into a very abyss of despair. And yet why? Hadn’t she really got engaged for that very reason?
“Gerald and I are going to be married,” said Mary, almost defiant in her joy.
“Oh, are you?” Penelope was so taken aback that she forgot what she was saying. “Why, I thought you liked that awfully nice man from India,” she said.
“What? Major Poole!” Mary laughed happily. “Why, I believe I rather did once,” she said. “Anyhow, I know I was fearfully sick when he seemed to like you! But, of course, it was always Gerald really with me; he’s much more my age.” And Mary, humming a little, hung back a pace or two to look in at Robinson and Cleaver’s window.
“Seemed to like you.” Penelope heard the words through a roar of buses and cackling motor horns. “Seemed to like you.” The simpering wax face behind the slab of plate glass seemed to be repeating the words mockingly.
“Yes. Don’t you remember that day when he walked home with you? He came back awfully excited; awfully excited—that is, for Harley; he hardly ever says anything about a girl. And, now you are engaged I can tell you, he wanted us both to go and have lunch with him and do a theatre two or three days after that. But I was a pig, and was jealous, and so I wouldn’t go in for it. I knew it wouldn’t matter to you whether you saw him again or not, or I think I would have tried to be nicer. But anyhow, you see it has all turned out for the best. You’re going to be my sister, and I simply love the thought of that, and I’m going to be yours.” And Mary gave a little skip in the middle of the pavement.
But Penelope was not listening. She had only heard the first part of Mary’s little diatribe, and it had made her brain feel blurred and funny. He had liked her and had wanted to see her again. Then why hadn’t he? why hadn’t he? Because Mary had interfered. Beast! Fiend! Penelope’s gentle little soul was suddenly seared with fury; fury that seemed to strike her and quiver right through her from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. That man, that glorious kind man, he had liked her, and had wanted to see her again. And she, what would she not have given to have seen him again! What would she not have given! “Oh, Lord God!” Penelope stopped walking and stood still in the middle of the pavement.
“What is the matter?” Mary had not noticed that Penelope had stopped, and she came hurrying back through the jostling crowds. “What on earth are you doing? Come on!” She seized her friend by her slender wrist.
“I don’t feel very well.” The surge of feeling had left Penelope cold and trembling. Is this what Madeline feels? she was wondering vaguely. If so, how awful! . . .
“No, you don’t look well.” Mary was alarmed. Penelope was all grey round her top lip. Something must have upset her at lunch . . . or perhaps it was too hot crammed round these shops with all this mob of people. “Come along into Liberty’s,” she said; “it’s heavenly cool and quiet there, and no one bothers you to buy.”
“All right.” Penelope allowed herself to be hurried down the little side street and into the barbaric splendour of surely the most beautiful shop in the world.
“Sit down here.” Mary pushed her anxiously into a low cane chair, and stood staring at her.
“I’m all right.” The colour began to steal back into the little pointed face. Somehow Penelope could not look at Mary, though. She had prevented . . . she had prevented . . . she got out her handkerchief and put it up to her mouth.
“Oh dear, what is the matter with you? Pen, do get better quickly. We’ve got to meet Gerald again at four o’clock!” Mary, perturbed and excited about her own affairs, did not feel at all inclined for this sort of thing.
And that filtered through to Penelope. Mary and her brother were going to meet again. All right, then, she could go home and get out of all this. She stood up and said so.
“I’ll get a bus outside Jay’s,” she said; “that will take me to Victoria. Give me my return half please, Mary.”
“Are you sure you are all right by yourself?” asked Mary, feeling enormously relieved at the thought of a tête-à-tête tea, and yet at the same time not feeling quite easy. Pen looked so very queer. . . Was it anything she had said, she wondered.
But Penelope was smiling again. With an increased vitality pride had come back. You didn’t show it when you felt like she did. You hid it, deep, deep down, so that no one should ever even guess at it. “Of course I do,” she said. “Mary, look at those gorgeous embroidered shawls. Don’t you hope someone gives you one for a wedding present?”
“Rather!” said Mary enthusiastically. “Penelope, I’ll give you one, I will really. Would you like it, Pen?” Mary was searching the little still face anxiously.
“I would, awfully,” said Penelope quietly.
After all, Penelope’s wedding was put off. Only for a little while though, so that Mary and Gerald could be married first. This was thought best for all reasons, and Paul concealed his frenzy of impatience at the delay as he too saw the sense of it. He could manage perfectly well alone at the Vicarage; Mary could not. So one day St. Jude’s, with all the ritual of which it was capable, tied the knot that made Mary Francis and Gerald Hamilton one, until death should them part.
But unfortunately this same ritual roused Mr. Page to an unusual antagonism. As a rule now he moved about as if he were only half alive. But the day after Gerald’s wedding he called Penelope into the library. Penelope went, a little alarmed and greatly wondering.
“Penelope, I will not have your wedding at St. Jude’s,” he said; and as he spoke his heavily veined hand trembled on the table.
“Why not, father?” Penelope lifted her head like a little bird.
“Because I will not,” replied Mr. Page. “St. Michael’s is our church, and our church it will remain. I am a Protestant, and not a Roman Catholic. That is enough, Penelope; you may go.” And Mr. Page walked over to one of the high book-shelves and pretended to be looking for a book.
“But Paul won’t think we’re really married if we’re married at St. Michael’s,” protested Penelope. “He thinks you must have all those things to make it legal or something. You don’t understand the St. Jude’s people at all, father. You have no idea how much they think of all those sort of extra things that we don’t mind about. No friend of Paul’s would come to St. Michael’s to marry us. They wouldn’t feel it was a church at all. . . .” Penelope was almost weeping.
“Send the young man to me, and I will explain to him,” said Mr. Page grimly. And that night Penelope dismally told her lover that her father wanted to speak to him.
“What about?” asked Paul swiftly.
“Oh, about our wedding,” said Penelope, suddenly feeling that if only she had the courage to break off her engagement once and for all now, how much happier it would be all round.
“What about it?” Paul’s cadaverous face got, if possible, more cadaverous.
“He hates the way Gerald was married. Too fussily!” Penelope was struggling with some garment covered with lace and spoke without looking at her lover.
“Too fussily!” Paul got up. “I will go at once,” he said, and stooping he kissed Penelope passionately.
“Don’t! I hate it!” Oh, how nearly the words leapt out, but Penelope controlled them. After all, after marriage that sort of thing died down, she thought philosophically, getting up to spread the offending garment out on the table. How did it fasten . . .? paper patterns were always so vague. . . .
In the library the two men faced one another. “Yes, Penelope was right, I do want to speak to you,” said Mr. Page. “I have made up my mind,” he said, staring fixedly at the young priest, “that I will not have her wedding at St. Jude’s. To my mind the ritual there is excessive and displeasing, and I dislike it extremely.”
Paul flushed heavily, and the blood began to drum in his ears. “Well?” he said.
“That is all. Penelope’s wedding shall take place at St. Michael’s.”
“No!” said Paul fiercely.
“Yes!” said Mr. Page grimly, still staring at this future son-in-law of his whom he had never liked.
“Penelope must be consulted,” said Paul, breathing heavily.
“Very well, consult her,” said Mr. Page, walking to the table and taking up a slender paper-knife and tapping the back of his hand with it.
Paul was trembling with suppressed feeling as he returned to the drawing-room. But he controlled it. Nowadays he seemed to spend all his time in controlling himself in different ways. Hours spent on his knees in fervent prayer. For what reason? Paul hardly knew himself. It had not been so in the old days. . . .
Penelope listened cheerfully. “Oh, well, never mind,” she said. “As long as we’re married, what does it matter? After all, it’s a legal thing. You’ve got to have a safe or something to keep the register in. Or a man has to be there . . . oh, no, that’s in a chapel you have to have a man. . . . Don’t let’s think about it, Paul. Tell me, how do you think this thing fastens?” Penelope displayed the garment in question, holding it up in front of her face.
Paul stared at it, unseeing. And then, suddenly towering over her, he struck it out of her hand. “Don’t!” he said.
“Why? What have I done?” Penelope, suddenly enraged, stooped to the floor. “You’re rude, fearfully, fearfully rude,” she said, straightening herself and glaring at her lover.
Paul’s face went suddenly white. “Don’t!” he said.
“But I think you are. People don’t hit things out of other people’s hands if they know how to behave. Let’s stop being engaged; I’m tired of it. This will do as an excuse, that we can’t agree as to which church we shall be married in. People will understand that you wouldn’t like that. Belonging to St. Jude’s, of course you would like to be married there. We’ll put it down to father. . . .”
Oh, the relief! . . . Penelope’s face suddenly seemed to shine with an inner light.
“Penelope, Penelope, don’t!” To Penelope’s horror Paul suddenly went down on his knees. “Don’t . . . don’t speak like that! I can’t do without you. I shall die if you throw me over! I will be married where and when you like . . . it is a matter of no consequence whatever to me. Only don’t speak to me like that. Don’t speak as if our love was a matter of no consequence. To me it is a matter of life and death, Penelope!” And to Penelope’s horror the grey emaciated face broke up in tears. And to the young girl these tears seemed to be a thing of tremendous portent. This man, whose wonderful sermons filled that big red-brick church, whose sister said that almost all the women in Clapham Park Garden Suburb were in love with him, was so much in love with her that he cried when she said that the engagement must be broken off. A strange, wondering gratitude filled her heart. It would be fearfully selfish to consider her own feelings entirely over this. After all, what would she gain by breaking it off and staying at home? Madeline hated having her about, and Doris was going to Vevey in the autumn. Madeline and Mr. Page would be quite all right together. Of course, if only mother . . . and then at the cruel anguish of that thought Penelope’s tears also broke forth.
And in the role of comforter Paul was at his best. Dr. Carter had summed it up when, very much perturbed, he had told his wife about the engagement. “The man has no right to marry at all,” he said emphatically. “As a priest he is excellent, he is a born priest. But when he lets loose all that neurotic fanatical temperament in the role of husband, disaster is bound to follow. Also it won’t last. After a couple of months I should not be in the least surprised if he actively dislikes Penelope, regarding her as the means by which he has been seduced from his true vocation. You’ve only got to look at the man; he’s got the eyes of a mystic and a fanatic. Not the eyes of a normal man who would settle healthily down to matrimony and a cheerful little wife, and rejoice in each child that she bore him.”
“Then you ought to say something to Mr. Page,” said Mrs. Carter indignantly. “He would listen to you, Tom. Don’t let it go on. You know the Pages well enough, you easily could.”
“No, my dear.” Dr. Carter spoke decidedly. “No good has ever come of interference in a matter of this kind. Penelope is twenty-one, and is old enough to know her own mind.”
And there the matter ended. And as Paul gathered the girl closely into his arms, Penelope felt that perhaps she was unjust. After all, he was all right as long as he kept off kissing. And people did when they were married. . . . When had she ever seen father kiss mother, for instance. Only stiffly at breakfast. She would go through with it, knowing that she was doing a kind and unselfish thing in giving herself to this good man who obviously wanted her so frightfully.
And so Penelope put her little seal’s head into the noose. So easily slipped in, and so desperately difficult to get out again; and she did it quite cheerfully too, with a smile on the little pale face under the veil. This was fun, a terrific fuss, and two men like monks to marry you. For the Vicar of St. Michael’s had pleasantly withdrawn from the fray. Mr. Page was a very old friend and a churchwarden, too; he would only be too delighted. . . . But he would be glad if Mr. Coward, . . . etc., etc.
So Paul, with a burning shame in his heart, had warned his two friends, both of his year at Cuddeston. And both had looked at him kindly and impersonally, and one of them had seemed almost inclined to speak. But he had thought better of it, and had eventually closed his tight ascetic lips with a quiet nod.
And when the dreadful, irrevocable words rang through the church, there was only one little disturbance at the back to divert people’s attention from them. Miss Winnower, very stupidly and idiotically, had fainted, tumbling helplessly up against Madeline, and then doubling down over a high footstool. And Madeline, who had only slunk in at the last at her friend’s impassioned entreaties, had helped to haul her awkwardly out.
“Madeline! Madeline! . . . He . . . my love! . . . my darling! . . . my own, own love! . . .” Miss Winnower, utterly unconscious of what she was saying, was choking over a glass of water held out by the obviously very Low Church verger.
“Be quiet, Ada!” Madeline, terribly aware of the verger’s affronted glance, was also dreadfully conscious that he was a relation of Janet’s. He knew all about her—Madeline’s—secession to St. Jude’s. For years he had ushered the Page family into the square wooden seat with a red cushion and footstools made like boxes, full of prayerbooks. Gerald used to keep popcorn in the end one. Madeline had often found it difficult to eat her share, because she had spent most of her time in leaning up against her mother, stroking her sealskin coat up and down. Up, meant all silvery and smooth; down, all furry and soft. “Mother! mother! . . .” Over Ada’s drooping head the tears fell from Madeline’s tormented eyes.
“My love! . . . my darling!. . .’’ Ada was still quietly moaning. And within the church Paul stared straight ahead of him up to where there should have been beauty and mystery. But here, only a stone anchor discreetly introduced into the fretwork of vine leaves at the back of the Holy Table. Paul, for some reason or other, was fiercely, passionately glad of it.
Penelope emerged from her honeymoon feeling exactly as if someone had given her a stunning blow on the back of her head. This was a new world in which she found herself, nothing could ever be the same again, of course—nothing. She surveyed Mary with an odd impersonal curiosity. How could she be happy? But then, of course, she had married Gerald. Gerald would be different . . . not like . . . Penelope shivered.
They were back at the Vicarage, Waggles mad with joy to see them again. Somehow Paul had not wanted Waggles on the honeymoon, he would have been in the way. And as they had spent their honeymoon in the Lakes, and it had rained nearly all the time, he probably would have been in the way. And now they sat facing one another over the breakfast table, both occupied, one with her thoughts and one with his letters.
“Mphm!” Paul had propped a letter up against the brown loaf and was staring at it. “Mphm!” He bent again to his slice of ham.
“Why do you say mphm?” The words were on Penelope’s lips, but she swallowed them down again. After all, he was quiet now. She was beginning to be wary. If she left him alone he forgot about her. And surely, surely he forgot about her a tiny, tiny atom longer each time. At first—Penelope reached out for a piece of toast with a trembling hand—at first . . . well, of course . . . Penelope suddenly swallowed blindly and fought for hasty self-control.
“Mphm!” Paul, pushing away his plate, folded the sheet of thick notepaper and replaced it in the envelope. “Well, any letters, Pen?” He glanced over the table.
“No—at least, yes, Madeline. She was sorry she couldn’t be here to meet us, but she was staying with Aunt Agnes, and won’t be back until to-morrow. She hopes the maids will be all right. They are,” ended Penelope.
“Good!” Paul stretched out a thin hand. “Come round here,” he said fondly.
“I’m still eating,” said Penelope, snatching hurriedly at the marmalade.
“So you are. Little gourmande!” Paul laughed again, and a little absently this time. His thoughts were evidently elsewhere. Where? wondered Penelope, hardly daring to breathe lest she disturb this new order of things. They had only got back to Clapham Park the day before. Was it going to be different? . . . less horrible?
“I’ve got a heavy day, dear; don’t wait any meals for me, if I seem to be going to be late. There’s a great deal of sickness in the parish. By the way, Mrs. Winnower died while I was away. Do you remember her?” Paul had got up and was walking round the table.
“Ada Winnower and Madeline were quite mad about one another,” said Penelope, putting the last piece of toast and marmalade into her mouth, and licking the tops of her small fingers after doing so.
“Really!” Paul’s eyes remained quietly impersonal. How much did she know of her sister’s insane infatuation for himself, he wondered. Nothing probably, and a very good thing too. Both those women had probably by now got over it. In any event, he could not disregard this pathetic appeal from the little faded spinster. She was in trouble. . . . Paul suddenly held out his arms. . . .
Penelope shivered, but got up dumbly. It was her duty . . . he had said so when she had sobbed and implored. . . .
But Paul was still thinking of something else. He kissed her quietly, and then almost seemed to press her down into her chair again. And then he was gone . . . out of the room. Penelope stared after him, hardly believing her eyes. Was it the same man who . . .? Penelope got up and walked to the open French window. The garden looked heavenly, a mass of mauve in the corner under the chestnut-tree. Michaelmas daisies, and the lawn all freckled with falling leaves, Waggles squirming about on the lawn, making great distorted patterns in the dew. . . .
“Come here, you idiot!” Penelope was laughing, showing all her tiny white teeth, a laugh bubbling up from the very depths of her. Surely she had not laughed since . . . Penelope suddenly remembered the little whitewashed house set close under the hills. What a dear the landlady had been, offering to light a fire, although it wasn’t a bit the time of year for a fire. Making awfully nice things to eat . . . things such as south-country Penelope had never seen, like a round apple cake, a flat pastry thing with apple inside. And even she had been concerned at the weather, standing at the window, clacking her tongue, staring out at the driving rain. Penelope had never seen such rain; it came down in long, drifting streaks, blowing sideways, seeming to sail down the valley. And yet how divinely beautiful it had made everything look. In the fine intervals they would go out, always in Burberrys and thick shoes, and Penelope in a mackintosh hat, and the beck at the end of the little front garden would be hurling itself over the stones, brown and bursting with the little tributary streams that poured into it from all sides. And the hills that shut them in would be green and blue, with a green and blue surely of heaven, with little thready snowy streaks of waterfalls cascading down the sides of them. Penelope could see them in the early morning as she lay in the big bed under the low ceiling, and she would look at them with an ache in her throat. This could have been all such fun, if only it could have been different. Who had made the plan that two people who didn’t know one another at all hardly, had suddenly to be driven into one room without any privacy at all! Crammed into one bed, when you loathed sleeping with anyone else. You wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it with your own sister, for instance. How could you help hating the person who had made it necessary . . . how could you help? . . . Penelope swung round.
“The greengrocer, ma’am.”
Hester was round and plump and a friend of Janet’s. She liked taking service with the clergy, especially when they weren’t too awfully poor. Janet had explained that Mr. Coward had a certain amount of money of his own, and could afford two maids, so she had had no difficulty in staffing the Vicarage. Penelope was pleasant to deal with, too, and had always been liked by the servants at The Oaks, so her domestic path promised to be free from pitfalls.
“All right, I’ll come, Hester,” she said; and when the brief ten minutes in the kitchen were over, she emerged, feeling more cheerful than she had done for weeks. It was fun having your own house, fun to think that you could do what you liked in it. And there was more room here. . . . Paul had his own dressing-room, and it didn’t open into the bedroom either. . . . Also he had his study, and he had already made it rather plain to her that he didn’t want her in there. Of course he didn’t. After all, you couldn’t make love to a person in a room in which you prayed. And yet . . . Penelope on her way upstairs stopped to think about this. Why couldn’t you? You ought to be able to take everything to God; loving, and having fun like going up to town and standing for a pit, even shopping, and having things on approval. Surely He would be interested in every tiny little detail that made up your life. Well, He would if the things were the right sort of things. The right sort of theatre, for instance . . . the right sort of love. And at this Penelope stopped dead and stared out of the little casement window down on to the dew-covered lawn. The dew had begun to go a little in the pale sunlight, as well as where Waggles had scrabbled in it. How did you know the sort of love that God would like? You knew. Deep, deep down in her heart Penelope heard the words as if someone had said them.
The morning was pleasant. A visit to The Oaks, feeling very leisurely and grown up, and a message to Doris via Janet to say that she would be glad if she would come to tea the next day. And then home again, with Waggles rushing on ahead, his ears flapping up and down like small fins. And almost directly after she got in, a ring on the telephone from Gerald, to say that he wanted to speak to her, and could she get up to the Army and Navy Stores that afternoon.
“Whatever can he want?” Penelope had the receiver in her hand as her husband came in through the glass door. He laid his soft hat on the oak chest and nodded quietly without speaking.
“Go.” He said it with his lips.
“All right, I’ll come, Gerald. All right, the lounge at four, then; good-bye. Why, what does he want, Paul?” Penelope was hanging up the receiver.
“Go up and find out, darling.” Paul was leading the way into his study. “Come in here, Pen; I haven’t seen you for such ages.” The dark, cadaverous face was beginning to glow with the look that Penelope had learnt to dread.
“Oh, not when you’re dressed like that!” It leapt out before Penelope had had time to stop it. “And not in this room, either,” she said, standing with her heart beating furiously, and her hands clenched behind her.
“And why not?” Paul had his back to the closed door, and was standing, very quiet and still in the long cassock.
“God would hate it!” burst from Penelope.
Paul’s eyes were suddenly fierce, and then they quietened and became sombre again.
“Child, don’t speak like that,” he said; and he suddenly walked to the window, and stood there staring out, his long black garment clothing him like a shroud.
“You look exactly like a monk from behind,” said Penelope, feeling suddenly awkward and ill at ease, and not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
“Do I?” said Paul, and he still stood where he was, staring out into the garden.
“Yes, would you like to have been one?”
“Don’t, Penelope!” Paul suddenly swung round with a dreadful look on his mouth. An awful look. A look as if . . . Penelope tried to analyse it as, after a hasty and very silent lunch, she walked quickly up to Streatham Hill Station. Paul had hardly eaten anything, and had hardly spoken to her either. Did he wish he had been a monk instead of marrying her? . . . Why had she put it into his head? Because now he couldn’t be, even if she died he couldn’t be. And he might suddenly begin to bear her a grudge over it. How perfectly dreadful! Without knowing that she did so, Penelope broke into a little run.
Penelope got to the Army and Navy Stores a quarter of an hour before her time, so she amused herself by staring about her. She was enjoying her little expedition alone as a married woman. She had taken off her gloves in the first-class compartment coming up, so that the other people should see that she was married. Parts of being married were dreadful, but parts were fun, like this was being fun, going about on her own and sort of showing off. Also she had a great many new clothes; for instance, the pale putty-coloured coat and skirt that she had on now was new, also the jumper underneath it, and the little soft hat. Also the shoes and the stockings. Penelope stuck them out and looked at them. And as she was sticking them out and looking at them, Gerald came in from the door that led into the China and Glass department, and he got a swift impression of something very young and very sweet and fresh sitting there.
“Hallo, Gerald!” Penelope got up and flushed sweetly pink. Mary had thought Penelope looking prettier since her honeymoon, but not so happy.
“I hope Paul’s being nice to her,” she said to her young and adoring husband.
“How do you mean, nice?” demanded Gerald, feeling suddenly uneasy. Pen was such a little brick. If Coward didn’t treat her properly . . .
“Oh, I don’t know. . . . He’s so weird . . . at least, he is sometimes. Quite kind. I don’t mean that exactly . . . but . . . Oh, I don’t know——weird. That’s all that expresses it. Not, like you, absolutely open airy and sort of fearfully ordinary. Darling, I adore you!” Mary caught her husband round his thick brown neck.
And this occurred to Gerald as he took off his hard hat. Pen certainly looked older, and now he had this nasty jar to give her. But she was sensible . . . she might be able to do something. . . .
“Look here, we’ll go up and have tea,” he said; “this way . . . the big lift’s the nicer.”
Tea, and a number of very nice and expensive pastries in front of them, Gerald went straight to the point. “Look here, Pen,” he said, and he smoothed the hair back from his nice open forehead with a hand that somehow looked apologetic, “look here, I’ve got a nasty jar for you. The pater is going to be married again.”
“Going to be what?” Penelope stared vaguely round the room. “Going to be what? Gerald, he can’t! He’s old!”
Gerald laughed, a little grimly. “Well, he is,” he said; “that is, if we can’t do anything to stop it. I want you to try, Pen. Wait till you hear who it is. I hate telling you, but of course you must know. Well, it’s Janet.” And Gerald flushed very deeply.
“Janet!” Penelope’s eyes, stupefied, came round to her brother. “Janet! Gerald, after mother! Janet! Father! He can’t!”
“I know . . . of course that’s how I feel . . . it’s simply . . .” And Gerald, ashamed of the tears that were pricking under his eyelids, drove his fork fiercely into the pastry on his plate.
“Does Paul know?” Penelope, after a long drink of very hot and well-made tea, felt a little calmer and more able to think clearly.
“Yes. I wrote and told him this morning. The point is this, that’s why I want you to try and reason with father . . . he always liked you the best. It’s the money, as much as anything else. The idea is ghastly . . . and revolting . . . and all that sort of thing. In fact, it doesn’t bear thinking of; but the money is going to affect us all very badly, especially Madeline and Doris. I’m all right, at least fairly so; and Mary has a little of her own, as you know. Anyhow, I can carry on, and so can you. You’re married, so that’s all right. But Madeline and Doris will be absolutely in the soup, so far as I can see, that is, unless father can be made to see reason.”
“But how do you mean—the money? Janet can’t have father’s money that really belongs to us.”
“But of course she can. Mother had no marriage settlement—at least, I believe there is one amounting to about two thousand pounds. Five hundred for each of us . . . well . . .” Gerald shrugged his shoulders. “But the pater is a rich man . . . I mean to say . . . And Gerald looked terribly worried and harassed.
“Five hundred for each of us . . . why, that’s a lot!” Penelope smiled a very little, although very faintly. The news was so dreadful. And she suddenly became conscious that she only had a very little money of her own left. All she had was in her purse, about five shillings and sixpence. Where did she get any more when that was done? . . . Paul hadn’t given her any since they were married. She had even paid her own fare to-day.
Gerald laughed shortly.
“Five hundred each brings in exactly twenty pounds a year interest, Pen. Doris has got to finish her education, remember, and Madeline has got to live somewhere. The point is this, will you go round and see father and talk to him? I’ve seen him, as a matter of fact, and it’s absolutely useless for me to try and do any more.” Gerald broke off abruptly. “I say, I must go, dear. I’m awfully sorry about this.” Gerald was twisting round and reaching up for his hat. “The whole thing’s ghastly, but I felt I must get hold of you somehow . . . and see if you . . .” Gerald was scrutinizing the bill. “Oh, yes, of course, we pay at the desk. Thanks very much.” Gerald smiled pleasantly at the waitress.
And eventually Penelope found herself at the Vicarage again. The bell for the five-thirty Evensong was clanging as she crossed the Green. Only one figure going in at the wrought-iron gate, at least only one so far as Penelope could see. Of course, there might be some more already in the church, but she had an idea that there weren’t nearly so many people generally at the five-thirty Evensong as there used to be. Miss Winnower was always faithful. That must be she with the hat rather perched up. . . . Penelope hurried. Oh! she did not want to have to stop and speak to anyone. Fancy, if they knew . . . Janet was always at St. Jude’s.
Paul was very nice and sympathetic when Penelope poured out the account of her meeting with Gerald. Dreadfully loving, but Penelope braced herself up for that. Because if he got it over now . . . Penelope dressed for dinner, feeling more cheerful. He certainly had been nice; decided, like he used to be before he fell in love with her. And he approved of her going round to see her father.
So after the simple dinner, eaten with the casement window open, and the birds making a jubilant going-to-bed twittering, and the slanting rays of the sun lighting up the Michaelmas daisies in the round corner bed, Penelope went off to The Oaks, feeling a good deal more settled in her mind. The weather was heavenly. What a difference it made in one’s feelings when it was like this! The leaves under one’s feet dry and crackling, sort of making you think of wintry evenings when you cuddled up close to a fire, or almost of the nipping cold when you crawled down to the foot of your bed in the pitch, pitch dark to feel your stocking. Fat and bulging, and crackling like these leaves, with the shiny paper at the ends of the crackers in it. And Janet coming in on her way downstairs—you knew she was coming by the sudden rim of light under your door, the gas on the landing popping into flame. “Now then, Miss Penelope,” and the funny candly smell of the wax taper that she carried with her. Janet always would pinch the glowing end of it to put it out. Janet . . . yes, of course, Janet.
And Janet opened the door of The Oaks. She had seen Penelope coming from the area window, and she had hurried up the kitchen stairs. Nowadays she did not hurry at all to do anything except wait upon the man she was going to marry. And it made things very uncomfortable at The Oaks.
“Oh, Miss Penelope.” Janet was nervous. Penelope could tell that by the way she blundered back to the old mode of address.
“Hallo, Janet!” Penelope’s lips suddenly felt frozen; it was as if the coldness of them prevented her jaw from working properly. This was intolerable, she knew it the minute she saw Janet. A servant, however faithful and devoted, to replace that mother of hers! She faltered and started to walk on into the inner hall without saying any more.
“Mr. Page is in the library, miss—ma’am, I mean.” Janet was following her with a look of mingled assurance and dismay on her face. She had almost got used to the idea that she was as good as anybody. But somehow Penelope’s quiet disregard of her made her wonder if she really was.
“Thanks. I’ll just go straight in; don’t bother to tell him first. Hallo, father!”
Penelope was inside the door and Janet on the other side of it before the latter had had time to realize that she was.
“Hallo, father!” Penelope felt oddly uncomfortable at the task that lay before her. And even more so when she saw how very much happier her father looked. He had lost that broken, crumpled-up look. He was reading, his feet stretched out to a cheerful little fire. A fire! Why, that was what mother had often minded so much, not being able to have one because it made him cross. . . .
“Well, Penelope.” Mr. Page was also ill at ease. But he became less so as Penelope, very red in the face, and with once, if not twice, her voice dying unexpectedly in her throat, explained her errand.
“Which of you children ever tried in the remotest degree to make up to me for the loss of your mother?” inquired Mr. Page, when Penelope had finished, keeping a finger in between the leaves of his book as he spoke, and lowering it slowly down on to his knee.
This was a poser, and brought in some extraordinary way the interview abruptly to an end. It was impossible to give the answer that she felt would meet the case, namely, that if you have been cross all your life, you can’t, just when you want it, expect people to rally round you. Especially when those people know quite well that very often you need not have been cross at all. And many poignant memories set Penelope’s chin fiercely aquiver, and she said a hasty good-night to her father and left the house hurriedly. And as she walked slowly back along the insufficiently lighted suburban road, she thought it all over again and from another point of view this time. After all, wasn’t it true what he had said about none of them having tried to be nice to him after their mother died? They hadn’t! Janet had: she had tempted him to eat, fetched his shoes, made him remember to take the tonic that Dr. Carter had ordered. And that was what men wanted, and what wives were for. Loving came awfully last, especially after the beginning, and Penelope walked a little slower and thought a little harder. And as she went noiselessly up the Vicarage stairs she thought even a little harder than that. That was what marriage was for, then: men had to be looked after, so they chose somebody to do it. And in exchange for that you got—you got—what?
Penelope sighed a little heavily as she drew the comb through her short wavy hair. You got a great many kisses, and other things that you disliked even more than kisses, and they were supposed to make up to you for never being alone any more. Although, of course, Janet would get more out of it than that. She was marrying above her station, and that in itself was nice. Also she had always had to earn her own living . . . and when you did that . . . And then Penelope heard the front door chain being slipped into place, and she caught her breath and began to hurry. After all, if she bundled on her dressing-gown and caught him before he went into his dressing-room, she could tell him all about her interview with her father then, and that would take up the time. . . . Penelope got quite breathless as she flew through a rather curtailed toilet.
Paul Coward had had two letters on the morning of Penelope’s expedition to the Army and Navy Stores, one from his brother-in-law to tell him of the proposed remarriage of Penelope’s father, and another that occupied his mind much more, and this was a letter from the Bishop of his diocese. It had been suggested that a delegate from the recently met Anglo-Catholic Congress should be sent to India to visit and report on the various missions under their aegis. Would Mr. Coward care to accept this post?
Paul was sitting in his study now, with the letter under his hand. Breakfast was just over, and he could see Penelope, got up in her old Burberry, going down the garden path with a pair of gardening scissors in her hand and Waggles at her heels. She was going to cut Michaelmas daisies for the altar flowers. Miss Winnower would call for them later. Miss Winnower. . . . Paul’s thoughts wandered away from the Bishop’s letter, and focused themselves on the little spinster. He had had a rather pathetic interview with her the day before. In response to her letter he had gone round, and had found her, white and tremulous, peering at him from over the gate at the top of the little flight of precipitous stairs.
“Oh, Father!” Miss Winnower had been so obviously unhinged at seeing him that Paul had been strangely moved. He had followed the poor little flat-chested figure into the empty sitting-room and had sat down with a kind smile. And weeping and choking, she had poured it all out. Her mother’s sudden death. “It was her heart, Father, it was her heart. And there was no time . . .” And Miss Winnower’s gnome-like face was all twisted with anguish.
And the Reverend Paul Coward was very kind. Very kind, but very stern. “We must not limit the power of God. No, no, not for one moment. He is infinitely, infinitely merciful and infinitely kind. We will leave your mother in His hands.”
And Miss Winnower felt a wild rush of comfort flood through her soul. Then all would be well with that dreadfully trying mother of hers. God had her in His keeping. Why hadn’t she been able to think of that herself? Ada Winnower wondered that rather tremulously as she watched the tall figure in the swirling cassock making its way down the Avenue Road.
And oddly enough Paul was wondering the same thing. With a strange feeling of disloyalty all the same as he wondered. Penelope had put it into his head. “They want so much bolstering up all the time,” she had said that one day when they had been discussing St. Jude’s in the Lakes. “If you teach a person a thing, they ought to know it, and get on by themselves. But they keep on rushing to you to be propped up. I suppose it is because you are a man that they can get at, and they haven’t any man of their own.”
And Paul had instantly been sternly reproving. But now it recurred to him as he walked down the pleasant leafy road. And it returned to him again as he sat and stared out into the Vicarage garden watching his wife. All his thoughts suddenly seemed to be reversed. The Church, something to hang on to because you were afraid. Desperately afraid, you fled to the Roman Church because she told you that you were not to ask questions, because she knew best about everything. And then, horrified and appalled, he seemed to stumble back from these thoughts and face himself. Where was he going to? What did it all mean, this? Was this the result of marriage? Crushing the Bishop’s letter in his hand, he crossed the room, to fling himself down in front of the crucifix. He would pray passionately for guidance, for help. It had never been denied him. And then he suddenly remembered how that only yesterday when he had been on his knees Penelope had come in in the middle. Penelope, with Waggles jumping up at her. Instantly and apologetically she had withdrawn, of course, closing the door very quietly behind her. But still . . . and Paul went and sat down at his table again.
And lunch-time still found him there. As a rule he spent the mornings in his house to receive people, and as a rule they came so closely together that they had to wait. Mary had been used to scoff at them, saying that they only came to see him, and he had been angry with her—at least, vexed. And now . . . Paul suddenly felt a flood of something very much like nausea surge over him. What was the meaning of it, this fierce revolt against himself and everything else? A sort of sick desolation of soul, and aridness of spirit. He pushed the letter from his Bishop into the top drawer of his writing-table.
But after lunch he took it out again. Penelope had been cheerful and very talkative at lunch. Her little head shone as she spooned out the potatoes, and helped him to cauliflower. She looked more cheerful—far more cheerful. She had seen Madeline on the Pantiles, Madeline and Miss Winnower.
“Do you know, I believe they’re going to live together,” she announced. “Don’t you think it’s a scheme?”
“An excellent scheme,” agreed Paul. With Mr. Page’s remarriage, Madeline would have been a problem, and he would very much have disliked the idea of having her at the Vicarage.
“Two people mad on you in one house—no, flat. What a time you’ll have when you go there! . . .” Penelope was joyfully putting her fork in and out of her mouth.
“Don’t speak like that, Penelope.” Paul suddenly felt almost a distaste for his wife. How utterly opposed to everything serious she was— everything . . . He got up abruptly. “Come into the study when you’ve finished your lunch,” he said; “I have something about which I wish to consult you. I have had all I require.”
“Why don’t you wait till I’ve done?” The words were on Penelope’s lips, but she suppressed them. After all, husbands got casual like that after a bit; her own father had been. Often coming in late for meals and not saying he was sorry, but always glaring angrily if anyone else did. It was all part of this scheme of marriage. Why did people marry? Penelope, restored by lunch and a cup of excellent tea from the kitchen teapot, wondered cheerfully.
But in her husband’s study the feeling of oppression returned. Paul was grave, portentously so. He motioned her to a chair, almost as if she had been a penitent. Penelope laughed awkwardly, and, feeling awkward, spoke at random.
“Now you’re married, if people come to confess to you, you’ll have to tell me what they say,” she said.
There was a dreadful silence in the beautiful study. For one awful moment Paul could not trust himself to speak. It was his wife who had given utterance to that remark, to him supremely blasphemous. He clutched blankly at a paper-weight.
“I believe they make things up. I don’t believe people would tell about horrible little cheating things they do, or how they put less in the offertory bag because it wasn’t a plate, or how they went to early service because they thought they ought to, not because they believe in it,” went on Penelope, nervously, feeling that she was saying worse and worse things and yet feeling somehow that she must.
“Be silent!” said Paul fiercely.
He got up and began to pace about the room, his nervous fingers locked behind him. Waggles, seeing him thus obviously disturbed, got up too and trotted after him, his nose very close to the low black heels, his tail trailing.
“I won’t! “said Penelope, her soul suddenly aflame. “I’m not one of those grovelling people who thinks everything you do must be right. I believe if you were to tell somebody else about. . .”
And then Penelope’s voice faltered and became faint in her throat. Her husband had swung round and was coming towards her with his hand lifted up.
“Be quiet! “he said, and there was a dreadful, parched quality in his voice. “Be quiet, I tell you!”
And Penelope faltered, panic-stricken and penitent. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very sorry, Paul. I didn’t mean to say it.”
“Very well.” There was another long silence, during which Paul stared out on to the leaf-covered lawn, and Penelope struggled with tears that threatened. Then he walked to his writing-table again and sat down at it. “I have heard from the Bishop,” he said. “He suggests my going out to India at the end of October. How do you like the idea?”
“Me to come too?” Penelope’s eyes were suddenly all alight.
“Certainly.” Paul was fingering the thick notepaper.
“Oh, what awful fun!” Penelope jumped up and began to walk about the room. “India! What frantic fun, Paul! Waggles, think of mother going to India! I say, what fun. I shall have to get some more clothes—dance frocks. Mary says you dance all the time in India. Paul, what a darling the Bishop is to think of you!”
“I shall have work to do in India.” Paul had stooped to stroke Waggles, who had suddenly stopped following Penelope and was crouched down at his master’s feet.
“What sort of work?”
“Missionary work.”
“Yes, but that won’t mean that we shall never be able to do anything else, will it?” queried Penelope anxiously.
“No, not entirely; but the work must come first,” said Paul gravely, and he slowly opened the top drawer of his writing-table and shut the Bishop’s letter up in it.
“Yes, but we’ll get some fun out of it, I know. Paul, what frantic, frantic fun; it’s made me feel quite different already. All that sort of dreary feeling has gone. All that sort of . . And then Penelope stopped abruptly. This was not quite the sort of thing to say to a husband. “But don’t you know what I mean?” she continued hurriedly. “Father marrying Janet, and Madeline being so stony and horrid. We shall get out of all that if we go right away, shan’t we?”
“Yes,” said Paul quietly, his hand still on Waggles’s smooth head and his eyes fixed on the glory of Michaelmas daisies in the corner of the lawn. They had almost buried Miss Winnower when she came in to fetch them. And this evening he would see them glowing there, out from the shrouded dimness of the altar. “Go away now, dear, please.” He spoke very quietly and gravely.
“What, tired of me already?” Penelope, laughing and showing all her small teeth, was making little dancing steps across the felt carpet. “Tired of me already, Paul? Waggles, father is tired of mother!” Penelope had reached the writing-table and was feeling for the spaniel with a small, mischievous foot.
“Go away now, dear, please.” Paul repeated the words, and Penelope left the room, feeling strangely small. It was almost as if he was tired of her, either that, or he hadn’t heard what she said. Which was it? Penelope thought about it all the way up to her bedroom. He hadn’t been a bit the same the last day or two. What was the matter with him?
Penelope arrived in India feeling a little bewildered. Everything was so alarmingly different. As a matter of fact things had started to be different directly they had settled to go to India. Paul altered, to begin with. He became a man absorbed, engrossed in his work. Daily expeditions to London. Masses of correspondence to deal with. Long conversations on the telephone. And finally, unconcealed grief at leaving St. Jude’s, for Penelope gathered that they were not coming back there after their visit to the East.
“Where shall we go then?” inquired Penelope, bright and interested over her porridge.
This was all being very diverting, although she rather wished that Paul would consult her a little more about things. As a matter of fact he never consulted her about anything.
“I don’t know,” replied Paul, cadaverous and brooding and staring at her over the top of a letter, as if he had suddenly woken up to the fact that she was there.
“Oh, I say, how exciting! I love not knowing what’s going to happen next.” Penelope, in her high-necked jersey, looked little more than a child as she sat with one leg curled round the leg of her chair. And as a matter of fact she felt little more than a child. It was so perfectly heavenly having Paul different. All the lurking horror gone, or the feeling of being fearfully ashamed gone. Sort of feeling that he was being like he ought to be, bracing and busy about his Father’s business. Penelope said the words over to herself softly. That was what clergymen were meant to be; they weren’t meant to be fond and inclined to kiss—that spoilt it. And for her herself! Oh, the joy of feeling that it was done with for ever! . . . She reached cheerfully out for an apple.
“You might let me have some money, will you, Paul?” she said. “I want lots of things, and I had better begin to get them. Things like hats and thin frocks. Mary says I shall want almost a trousseau.”
“Hm! I don’t know that I approve of Mary’s ideas on these points,” said Paul, also reaching out for an apple and staring at it frowningly. “Don’t forget that you are the wife of a clergyman, Penelope, and that we are going out to India on a mission, and not for our own enjoyment.”
“Yes, I know that; but still I must have clothes, mustn’t I?” Penelope, inwardly dashed and a little uncomfortable, spoke jauntily. This was awful . . . this having to apply to someone for money who obviously did not want to give it you. She flushed crimson over her plate.
“You had a very excellent outfit a couple of months ago,” responded her husband.
“Yes, but some of the things are worn out,” said Penelope, feeling hot and resentful and wretched all in one. And after a little pause, during which she munched speechlessly, having finished her apple, she got up and left the room. She would not ask him again; she would see Mary about it first. And later in the day she saw Mary. Gerald had come over in the car to see his father, and Mary came on in the car to the Vicarage.
“Oh, you’ll never get anything out of Paul for clothes!” she exclaimed. “My dear, you ought to have fixed something up beforehand! He’s awfully funny about money. Not mean exactly, but funny. For instance, when I was here I had to go on and on until he would give me a cheque for the housekeeping bills. What do you do about that?”
“He pays them,” said Penelope dully.
“Oh, well, I don’t know what you can do.” Mary, secure in the consciousness of an adequate little income of her own, was airily unconcerned. “Make him cough it up somehow, Pen. Worry him! Men will do anything if they are worried enough. Oh, here’s Gerald. Hooray! What do you think of the car, Pen?”
“Lovely!” said Penelope, feeling suddenly inclined to cry. And when she saw her brother with the girl he had married, she felt more inclined to cry than ever. They were obviously having such awful fun. They chaffed each other with eager, loving eyes. They referred to each other in any little diversity of opinion. Gerald told a funny little story about Mary, and told it with the look of a doting father relating some utterly unimportant anecdote about his only child. In fact, you could see that they adored each other, these two. Real love, real friendly, heavenly love . . . like it was meant to be. Like it would have been with . . . And then Penelope darted back from her thoughts. Why, they were going to India . . . they might see him. . . .
And from that moment the thought of India permeated her mind like the thought of something very precious, something almost too precious to be spoken of. Karnmore, Mary had said that he lived there. Where was it? She pored over a Bartholomew’s Handy Atlas until Paul, observing her, asked what she was looking for.
“A place called Karnmore,” replied Penelope, hating to have to say it. She wanted for some reason or other to keep all this entirely to herself.
“Why, what do you know about Karnmore?” Paul, flung in a low wicker chair after a heavy day in the parish, spoke lazily. “Come over here; I haven’t seen you properly all day, Pen.”
Ah! there it was again. Penelope’s little ears, close set to her head, reacted to it. The stealthy tone in his voice. The sort of hot intonation in it. The sort of giving way of the corners of his mouth. Penelope shot a fleeting glance across the room. Yes, there it was again, after all these weeks. What should she do?
And mercifully it was settled for her. With the shrill of the telephone bell across the hall, Paul had jerked himself to attention again. Out of the room and in again and speaking hurriedly.
“A call from the Infirmary, dear. Don’t wait up for me; if I’m late, I’ll sleep in my dressing-room.”
And soon after that they had started for the East; seen off from Tilbury by a band of workers from St. Jude’s. Penelope, wandering about the deck of the huge liner, devoured with interest and staring at everybody, reflected with a sort of humorous ruefulness that so far as she was concerned she might as well not be alive. No one from St. Jude’s even bothered to look her way; even her own sister was utterly absorbed—staring with a dreadful glazed look of despair at the tall figure in the caped overcoat, even ignoring her very dear friend Ada Winnower.
“Well, good-bye, my child.” Paul had drawn a little aside to say good-bye to his sister-in-law. Unworldly though he was, he was conscious of a very real feeling of relief that for a time, at any rate, the sea would lie between him and Madeline. She had been at home alone the last time he had been in to see his father-in-law, and it had not been easy. “Come, come!” He laid a thin hand on the heaving shoulders.
“Father, I cannot!” Madeline was convulsed with tears.
“Come, come!” Paul, looking round, espied Miss Winnower, standing with her hands wrenched together and watching. He beckoned to her. “Take her home,” he said quickly. “Good-bye, Miss Winnower; many thanks for all you have done for me. I will let you know how I get on. I don’t know where my wife . . . Oh yes, here she is. Penelope, your sister and Miss Winnower are just going.”
“Good-bye, Maddie!” Penelope put out her face with a little uncomfortable smile. How oddly the women at St. Jude’s went on about her husband, she was thinking. If only they knew what he was really like. At least, if only they knew some things. Of course, he was all right really. He was all right about holy things, but the sort of little ordinary everyday things. However . . . “Good-bye, Maddie,” she said again.
But Madeline ignored the little extended face. In fact, she looked as if she would gladly have struck it.
“Come, Ada.” Summoning a certain amount of self-control and dignity to her aid, she turned to go.
But this time it was Ada’s turn. Pallid and gnome-like, her face was the face of an old woman.
“Father!” Her tears rained down on the thin white hand she held.
“I say, do look at those women.” It was one jolly, bronzed young Englishman speaking to another. “Did you ever see anything like it? How women do carry on about clergymen—it’s extraordinary.”
“It’s jolly hard on them.” Roy Pentland was staring at Penelope. “Who’s the kid with him? Look at her looking at them! What a rag!”
“Wife, I expect,” responded the other. “Just the type of woman a man like that goes a mucker over, and then wishes he hadn’t. Yes, she is. See, they’re going, and she’s staying on. By gad! that one with the felt hat extended the frozen mitt with a vengeance! What a lark!” He laughed in his throat.
But Penelope could not laugh. Her own sister to speak to her like that!
“I will not kiss you good-bye, you have broken my heart!” Why, Madeline could have Paul if she liked for herself; she didn’t care. She walked to her cabin, her eyes burning and her throat throbbing. Marriage and all the fuss about it, being supposed to be a treat and all that. Why, it was horrible . . . miserable!
But by the time Penelope had arrived in India she was feeling cheerful again. Bewildered she certainly was, but it was a bewilderment of effervescence and excitement. The voyage had been the most terrific fun. There had been a great many people in the first-class saloon, and Penelope had been very much liked. She was so fresh and unspoilt, and took such an unfeigned interest in everything. She hardly saw her husband. He had discovered two men of his year at Cuddesdon on the second-class deck; both were going out to Bombay to join the Society of St. John the Evangelist, and he spent practically the whole of every day with them, pacing up and down the deck. Penelope would see them all three together, hands linked behind them, the two Cowley fathers in black cassocks as far as Port Said, and then after that in white cassocks with a black rope round their waists.
“Whatever do you talk about all day?” Penelope, with her feet curled up under her, was sitting on her berth, sewing rosettes into a pierrot’s costume. She had borrowed it from a fellow passenger. There was to be a fancy-dress dance that night. Paul had come in to look for a book, and was stooping over his suit-case, which he had dragged out from under his berth into the middle of the carpet.
“Things which would not interest you,” replied Paul, speaking, although he did not realize it, a little bitterly. Absorbed as he was in his two old friends, he was observant enough to see that Penelope was having a gorgeous time without him. And in a way he resented it.
However, he did not interfere, and Bombay was reached without anything occurring to mar the outward harmony between the two. People discussed them freely on board. Coward was a fool to have married as he had done; he was one of the coming men in the Anglo-Catholic party, and it would not do him any good to have his wife going off the deep end. “Look how he leaves her alone, to begin with. A young, pretty, unsophisticated girl like that, why he’s asking for it.”
But Penelope had more sense than people thought she had. There had been a little contretemps in the Canal after this same fancy-dress dance. Roy Pentland had lost his head badly. Penelope had danced a good deal with him, and she certainly had looked entrancing in the baggy trousers with the frills round her slim ankles. And with the wide moonlit desert spread out on each side of them, and the little twinkling pinpoint of light at the masthead, it was small wonder Roy Pentland, only just promoted to his third pip, badly lost his head.
“I say, let’s go right up in front, shall we?” he said breathlessly, releasing Penelope from a rather hot embrace. They had danced the one-step to the very end, and both were panting.
“Oh, rather, if it’s cool there!” Penelope was shamelessly mopping her face. “How do we get there? Aren’t there lots of things to step over? Can I do it? I say, what a boiling place the Canal is, isn’t it?”
“Yes, rather . . . come on.” Roy Pentland, replying absently, was urging Penelope towards the companion steps. She was a dove, this girl; a tiny drop of perspiration twinkled on her short upper lip.
“Don’t drag me, I shall tumble over.” Penelope, making large uncertain steps from one huge roll of sailcloth to the other, was hanging desperately on to the young impulsive hand. “I say!” She suddenly blundered, half falling, on to a clear space of deck.
“There now!”’ Roy Pentland, very young and triumphant, steadied her. “There now, isn’t this a topping spot I’ve brought you to?”
It was. Astern, lithe and spare and silhouetted against the star-studded sky like a figure cut out of black paper, the lascar on duty kept watch. Suddenly Penelope saw him swing round and lift his arm, and mingled with the rhythmical throb of the engine the ship’s bell rang out. It seemed to chime out over the vast wastes of sand on either side of them with an odd sound of fatality. Penelope shivered.
“Oh, I say! Fancy being lost in the desert and hearing that. Knowing that you couldn’t get to it in time, and yet knowing that it was your last chance. Dying of thirst perhaps!”
Penelope’s eyes, upturned to her companion, shone mysterious and round in the moonlight.
And Roy Pentland forgot everything except that this girl had a husband who wasn’t, in his opinion, fit to black her boots. Spending his time mooning about with a couple of fellows who only had a bath once a week—so the legend ran in the second-class saloon. He stepped forward and caught her in his arms.
“Let me go . . . you! . . .” Penelope, suddenly, passionately enraged, kicked out fiercely. “I’m married, you wretched boy! How dare you try to kiss me! Let me go!” Penelope, fighting, was abruptly released. “What are you thinking about?” She faced the young discomfited figure in front of her with wrath in her eyes. And then the wrath suddenly died. He looked so dreadfully uncomfortable. So ashamed. So young! “Had you forgotten that I was married, then?” she inquired more mildly.
“No,” replied Captain Roy Pentland grimly. And then he held out one hand. “I’m sorry,” he said frankly.
“So am I—dreadfully. It’s spoilt everything. Because you and I were quite friendly. Whatever made you suddenly go off like that?” Penelope, her wrath evaporating, was peering curiously up through the moonlight. Here it was again. Something giving way round the corners of the mouth. Something hidden, suddenly coming out with a leap. Alarming, but apparently usual, because that was what had happened to Paul when he had got to know her better. Was one always, liable to it, then? Was marriage no protection? She inquired, hesitatingly, and choosing her words with care.
“Oh, I say, don’t! You simply make me . . .” Roy was stammering and gripping his hands together. “I say, Mrs. Coward, forget it, for Heaven’s sake. I . . .” And Roy Pentland stared dumbly out over the desert.
So all was settled harmoniously. And before she left the ship Penelope put a question that had been burning on her lips ever since she had got to know this nice man so well. He was the sort of man that you could trust not to repeat things, and she would hate anyone to know that she had asked this.
“I say, do you know a man called Poole?” she spoke one day, as she lay back in her deck-chair, her hands gripped together under the big cretonne workbag.
“Do you mean Harley Dreford Poole in the Guides?” Roy Pentland had just rapped out his pipe over the tub of water, and he held it suspended over his pocket.
“Yes. At least, I don’t know anything about Guides, but his name is Harley, and he is a Major.” Penelope suddenly wondered why her feet had got cold.
“Oh yes, rather, I know him quite well. Why, do you?” Roy Pentland had put his pipe back into his pocket and was leaning back, turning a little in his chair.
“Yes—at least, no, I don’t know him really well. But I’ve met him—that’s all.”
Penelope’s face was red, and her hands were moving restlessly in her lap. Why was she red? She bit her lip angrily.
Roy Pentland put his feet deliberately up on to the rail, white painted. “I would keep out of his way, if I were you,” he said slowly. “He’s got a bad reputation with women. He’s no end of a good shot and all that. I don’t mean that he’s a poodle-faker. But he’s . . . Oh, well!” he broke off impatiently.
“How do you mean, a poodle-faker?” inquired Penelope, suddenly feeling her ears burn. No word that sounded as stupid as that could possibly describe the man she was thinking of.
“I said he was not a poodle-faker,” said Roy Pentland, suddenly feeling angry and resentful and miserable all at once. Why did this girl want to know about that particular man? Poor old Cator’s wife, coming unstuck in the most hopeless way, and she well over forty . . . the little up-country station had rung with it. What chance would a girl . . . “I say, keep out of his way.” He said it again, and eagerly this time.
“But I shan’t be in his way,” said Penelope, feeling her heart suddenly begin to beat faster. “Besides, I’m married. How can another man matter to me? He doesn’t, he can’t. Besides, we aren’t going a bit to the same place in India. India’s huge; we shan’t be likely to meet. We’re going a tour round somewhere in the Central Provinces looking at missionaries. He wouldn’t be doing that, would he?” Penelope, wondering why she suddenly felt so perturbed and ruffled, sat up abruptly in the sagging canvas of her chair.
“It depends on how good-looking they were,” said Roy Pentland bitterly.
This girl was all aglow, all aflame, his bruised spirit meditated gloomily on the chances of her meeting this man. It would be just the sort of thing that would be sure to happen, whilst he . . . He lifted his eyes to meet Penelope’s soft gaze.
“Don’t be cross,” she said suddenly, smiling enchantingly. “Because I like you very much. Besides, you don’t understand. I don’t want to get mixed up in a lovery sort of way with any man. I could only say this kind of thing to you, because I believe you would understand it. I hate that sort of thing. Do you know what I mean? Hate it! Of course, I know I ought to because I am married, and married women don’t do it; but anyhow I hate it. I hate it for itself. I loathe it!” And suddenly the little face got very white, and there was a still frozen look in the round eyes.
“I see.”
Roy Pentland spoke quietly, but inwardly he was all aflame. That confirmed what he had thought. He had always loathed that tall lanky padre with the hollow cheeks and blazing eyes. And now his wife loathed him too, or something precious near it, unless he was very much mistaken. He got up with a muttered excuse and walked quickly away down the deck.
Bishops in India look very nice. They wear, when it is hot—and it is generally hot in India, unless you are very far north—a dress exactly corresponding to their episcopal brothers in England, only it is white. White drill gaiters look very nice, especially when worn by someone spare and tall; and as the Bishop of Chota Palanpur was both spare and tall, his wife was very proud of him when she saw him coming into the verandah, as he was coming now.
“The English mail, dear.” He walked over to her and dropped a bundle of letters into her lap.
“Rapture!” Mrs. Mayhew feasted her eyes on the pile for an instant, and then looked up again. “But I shan’t read them now, I have too much to do. Any news, darling?” She put out a swift hand.
“Yes. Jackson writes that Paul Coward is coming out to tour the diocese. You remember, it’s the new scheme of trying to link up the Foreign with the Home Missions; a very excellent scheme too. Although I’m not so sure . . . However, there it is. He’ll begin from here, and we must do what we can for him.” The Bishop released the hand he held with a gentle pressure and walked to a chair. “Let’s see, he arrives . . .” The Bishop ran his eyes quickly down the page. He arrives . . . My dear child, he arrives next week, and brings a wife with him. . . . What is Jackson thinking of?”
“A wife! Good heavens!” Mrs. Mayhew’s round, good-tempered face was dismayed. “Do you mean to say that any man is going to be selfish enough to drag a wife through these jungles. It’s madness! She will be terribly in the way, to begin with.”
“I know, but that’s not our affair, dear. The Society does not concern itself with wives. Coward is, of course, paying his wife’s expenses himself. As a matter of fact, I believe he has private means . . . Wait a minute, yes. ‘Coward seems anxious to take his wife out with him, and as he is able to be entirely responsible for all the expense involved, I hardly like to raise any objection. Personally I think it is a mistake, but as he has only recently been married, I hardly like to veto it off-hand.’”
“How like Bill. He never can say no!” Mrs. Mayhew’s eyes became affectionately reminiscent. “However, as you say, it is nothing to do with us. They’ll be here next Saturday, then, and they’ll, anyhow, stay for the week-end. Good! Now then for the store cupboard and the dusters. How we women of India live in the store cupboard, and spend our lives giving out dusters!”
“And a very good thing too. A pity there is not more of it. We should have less nonsense in this country if women concerned themselves a little more with domestic detail. I feel so dreadfully sorry for Ferrers, for instance. I was telling you about it last night, you remember. The poor fellow is absolutely broken-hearted, and she absolutely declines to return to him. That’s what I cannot understand. That girl, only married a couple of years, chooses to live a life of deliberate sin, in preference to living a life of decency with the man she has taken for better for worse. What has come over the present generation I cannot conceive.”
“You wouldn’t be able to.” Mrs. Mayhew, half-way across the matted verandah, turned and looked half-humorously down into the depths of the capacious wicker chair. “Besides, Will, I don’t excuse Mrs. Ferrers entirely—in fact, in this not at all. But you know, a new thing has crept into married life. There is such a thing now as Why should I? We can’t leave it out of account. Paul Ferrers never left the Club until well after half-past eight every evening—you know he didn’t; we have often remarked on it; always in the bridge-room. Well, a woman gets tired of waiting until nine o’clock every night for her dinner. Unpunctuality may be a small thing in comparison with infidelity or excess in drinking: I know it is. But, on the other hand, it is a thing that rankles. And it is the things that rankle that separate husband and wife. Oh, if only newly married people would realize that early enough and be careful—and be careful.”
Mrs. Mayhew stared out through the softly flapping “chicks” with a furrow between her brows.
“Then you think Mrs. Ferrers began to ask herself why she should wait till nine o’clock for her dinner?” said the Bishop whimsically.
“I am sure she did. Not consciously, but the feeling was there. ‘Why should I think of him when he doesn’t think of me?’ And unfortunately in this country there is always someone who will think of you if your own husband doesn’t. Geoffrey Forrester has always been notoriously successful with women, and I am positive it is because he gives them that feeling of being cherished and thought highly of above all things. Whether he will go on making them feel it when they have cast in their lot with him is another thing. Probably he won’t, and probably Mrs. Ferrers will have cause bitterly to regret the step she has taken; she may even regret it now. But the fact remains that she took it, and I expect, if the truth were known, she made up her mind to take it at about twenty minutes to nine one evening, when she was tired and hungry and wanted her dinner.”
“I don’t like to hear you speak of these things lightly.” The Bishop was stooping to retrieve a letter slipped from his gaitered knee.
“I don’t. You know I don’t, Will. But I do think that common sense must be brought to bear on a problem like this. We’ve got to face it. A fierce sense of duty has departed from amongst us, and women will no longer put up with neglect, especially systematic. A man, when he marries a girl, has her as wax in his hands; he can do anything with her if he likes to give his mind to it. But as a rule he doesn’t try. If he is a keen gardener, he devotes more care to the rearing of his plants than he does to the care of his wife. You don’t buy a rose-tree that you have coveted for a long time and simply stick it in the ground and leave it there to look after itself. You watch it, you water it, you keep an eye on its general welfare, and notice whether the soil and the situation suit it; and if they don’t, you move it. But a man takes to himself a wife, and she hands herself body and soul over to him; and then he just plants her down and leaves her there. I think he is a fool.” Mrs. Mayhew flushed suddenly.
“My darling!” The Bishop stood up.
“Yes, I know, and that’s just it. I am your darling, and you have never let me forget it. Always showing it to me in a practical way. Not only saying darling, but being darling.” Mrs. Mayhew looked up swiftly.
“My beloved!” The Bishop was stooping.
“Yes, I know. . . . Don’t, Will. I shall only begin to cry, and Fazal will see. Oh! God has been good to give us to one another! What have we done to deserve it, Will?” Mrs. Mayhew had her face hidden.
“Nothing.” The Bishop was quoting gently; “‘More ready to hear than we to pray; wont to give more than either we desire or deserve.’ You know what the Collect says. And now, darling, this won’t do. Dusters and files and other tiresome things demand our attention. Besides, there is this letter from Bill. I must write to Bombay at once if I am to catch Coward. What shall I do? . . . Ask them both here for, at any rate, the week end, and then see what happens? Sure you can manage it?” The Bishop’s voice was tender, and he held his wife’s hands lingeringly between his own.
“Of course I can. I shall love it. We shall have an empty bungalow, and it will give Mrs. Coward a chance of looking round and absorbing new impressions. Until lunch-time, then . . . and don’t forget that the General is coming. Yes, all right, Fazal.” Mrs. Mayhew gave her husband’s hand a gentle squeeze as she hurried off down the verandah.
Mrs. Mayhew and Penelope took an instant fancy to one another. It began when the Bishop’s well-worn Ford brought them humming up to the low thatched bungalow at the end of the baked earth drive, and she saw Mrs. Mayhew standing there ready to welcome them. There was something in the look of the solid matronly figure that warmed her heart.
“I like the look of her!” She turned excitedly to her husband.
“How do you know that it is she?” Paul turned his brooding eyes from the dusty landscape, “As sheep having no shepherd,” the whole of his being profoundly moved by the thought of this great continent literally sitting in darkness. Penelope, for him, had practically ceased to exist. Multitudes of people. Souls waiting to be saved. “Lord, send me!” His very being was a prayer.
“Oh, I know it is.” If Penelope had not been constantly reminding herself that she was a married woman, she would have been bouncing up and down on the seat. And as it was, she was all tingling and aglow with excitement, as she wrenched at the awkward handle struggling to turn it round.
“Well!” Mrs. Mayhew’s eyes were affectionately welcoming. “What a little dear!” she said it to herself as she took Penelope’s hand in hers.
“Oh, I say, what a heavenly bungalow!” Penelope’s eyes were flying as she walked rather uncertainly up the shallow stone steps. The pale matting underfoot smelling vaguely of hay and barns; the low chairs with scarlet cushions in them: the spotless servant with his huge flaunting puggaree suddenly appearing from nowhere; and last, but not least, the Bishop, very tall and clean-shaven, and advancing to meet them. “I say, it’s like a play!” Penelope stood wrenching her hands together and staring round her.
“I’m glad you like it.” The Bishop was laughing all over his clever face. “How d’ye do, Coward?” he spoke to Paul over Penelope’s head. “Your wife seems to approve of India, which is a good thing, as she has come to stay for some time. Isn’t it?” He levelled his searching gaze on the young flushing face.
“Oh, I love it! At least I love this. I didn’t care for Bombay. It was so fearfully hot, and we stayed in an hotel that looked as if it had never been swept. Didn’t it, Paul?”
Penelope turned suddenly to her husband, standing tall and silent by Mrs. Mayhew’s side. How stiff he was—how sort of stuck. Nothing seeming to him to be fun. Everything with a sort of dull meaning about it. For instance, in Bombay when they had seen Mohammedans saying their prayers, kneeling in the open air on their little many-coloured prayer mats, bowing their heads to a wonderful flaming sky, a huge molten ball of a sun dropping out of sight into a sea of aquamarine. Gorgeously overwhelmingly beautiful, Penelope’s vivid imagination had flamed to it. But Paul had been sad; almost melancholy. “A people sitting in darkness.” He had muttered the words to himself, and Penelope had heard them.
“How do you know that they are? Perhaps it’s what they’re meant to be in this sort of Eastern country. Mohammed was a good man, wasn’t he?” Penelope suddenly felt a wild driving of impatience. Paul could never get away from the gloomy part of religion. You didn’t always want to be dragging it up. For instance, if you were a geologist, you didn’t spend all your time grovelling about on the ground. Sometimes you went for a walk and turned your face up to the sky and saw stars and other beautiful things. She tried to express this, although stammeringly and haltingly in her eagerness.
But Paul had only stared at her a little hardly. Vaguely he was resenting Penelope’s capacity for enjoyment. She seemed almost literally to bubble. Everything to her was fun. Even the horrible tikka gharry in which they were driving at that very moment was fun.
“Oh, Paul, look at his hat! It’s a duster tied round his head.” Penelope was rocking from side to side on the cracked American cloth cushions, staring up at the unconscious and extremely dirty gharry wallah ahead of her.
“I fail to see anything humorous in his hat.” Paul had said the words almost in spite of himself, and then he had been sorry when he had seen Penelope’s joy wither like a frozen leaf. But still . . . she was the wife of a priest, and a priest with a great work ahead of him; she must at least try to take things a little seriously.
And Penelope instantly did. Silently and with a queer lump in her throat, she swallowed her sense of disappointment, and looked out freshly again into a world the excitement and joy of which she must obviously keep to herself. But here were two people who would understand. She beamed frankly from one to the other.
“Fazal, show the sahib’s servant the memsahib’s room. This is your servant, Mr. Coward, isn’t it?” Mrs. Mayhew, still with her hand on Penelope’s arm, began to move along the verandah.
“Attcha, memsahib!” The old Mohammedan padded down the shallow verandah steps, and with a comprehensive glance absorbed the rather grimy exterior of the servant who had extricated himself from the seat next to the driver. “Juti nikalo.” (Take off your shoes.) He glanced down at the slim feet encased in very yellow new tan shoes.
“Attcha!”
But Andrew spoke with a scowl. He prided himself on these shoes, and the sahib and memsahib fresh from the vilayat would not know that he had no business to be wearing them. Andrew was a product from a Mission in Bombay, and called himself a native Christian. Fazal, with the perception of his race, saw him for what he was, a low-caste man who had adopted Christianity as a means of social advancement, and he despised him accordingly.
“Pick up the luggage and follow me.” He spoke in the vernacular, staring out from under the white swathings of his towering head-dress.
Andrew did as he was told, but with a scowl on his unpleasant face. Penelope had never liked the man from the moment when he had presented himself with a chit from the head of the Bombay Mission.
“Paul, I hate his face. Do let’s try to get one of these people who wear turbans, or one of those like the stewards on board. I’m sure we can if we wait a bit.”
But Paul had liked the idea of a native convert, and had even refused to strike any bargain about wages. “The man says that he is accustomed to receive fifty rupees a month,” he said, folding and returning the atrociously dirty chit that Andrew had produced from an inner pocket, “and I do not propose to insult him by doubting his word.”
So there it ended, and Andrew adopted the clergyman and his wife as his sahib and memsahib. He would have a high old time, he thought, travelling round and getting a rupee extra a day as travelling allowance. Eighty rupees all told. He struck the final bargain one day when Penelope was out, having her shingled hair trimmed at the Army and Navy Stores.
“Is that a usual allowance?” Paul had asked the question quietly, his clear impersonal gaze on the dark face.
“Yess, Sar.” Andrew prided himself on his atrocious English, and considered himself worth double what another man in his place would have thought himself lucky to receive. So all went well until he arrived at the beautiful bungalow in the up-country station. This was not going to be so pleasant, he thought, stooping sulkily over the suit-cases that he had distributed angrily all over the matted floor.
But Penelope moved round the spacious whitewashed room with a delicious feeling of adventure in her soul. This really was India. The funny little bathroom with its huge shallow earthenware bowl of water, and the galvanized iron bath tub. The tiny window with the neat frilly muslin curtain across it giving on to a bed of gay petunias. And the room itself, very large and bare, with rather common furniture standing out from the wall. A wardrobe leaning a little forward. A dressing-table with the looking-glass on it rather spotty. The beds, small and iron, and standing in the middle of the room, and each with its own mosquito curtain flung over the frame of it. Two beds, and each capable of being shut up like a meat-safe. Hooray! Penelope stood looking at them, her tiny teeth all agleam.
“Well, how do you like it?” Paul, unperceived, had come in at the long curtained door leading out on to the verandah. He was feeling more at peace with himself, a great work opening out in front of him. The Bishop had been sympathetic, very. Even in the short space of twenty minutes he had succeeded in making his visitor feel thoroughly happy and at home.
“Oh, I love it! Look at the lizard, Paul; quick! See! behind the picture, wriggling. Oh, I say, what fun! I wish it would come out!” Penelope had dashed across the room and was eagerly preparing to get up on a chair.
Paul looked at her with the feeling of gloom beginning to descend on him again. A reminder of a time that he was anxious to forget. Why had he brought her out with him? Why had he? . . . And then, without knowing that he did it, he flung his hand up over his eyes. Why had he married her? Ah! it was out at last, the question that had been jovially waiting to swagger out into the open. It had jostled his elbow on the big liner, when, in company with the two men of God, he had glanced up at the hurricane deck and seen his wife in the middle of a cheerful group of young people. A link with the world when he wanted to be quit of the world; handcuffed to material things when he only craved for the spiritual. Ah! The young priest stood very still, his hand still pressed over his eyes.
“What’s the matter? Have you got something in your eye?” At the sound of the muffled exclamation, Penelope stopped peering under the picture-frame and turned round on the unstable chair. “I say, you have! Wait a minute and I’ll get it out. I’m awfully good at it.” Penelope got down, showing a good deal of slim young leg in the process.
But Paul almost started away from her. Suddenly he felt that if she laid her hands on him he must strike her. A man of God . . . what right had any woman . . .? he crossed the room to where an embroidered Kashmir curtain hid the dressing-room from the bedroom.
“Have you anything in your eye, or haven’t you?” Penelope was following her husband, speaking rather plaintively. This was awful . . . really he had been almost better when he was loving. This constant awful condition of detached gloom was beginning to get on her nerves. “Let me see at least.” She dragged the swinging curtain aside.
But Paul spoke harshly. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I have nothing whatever in my eye. I only wish to be left quiet and undisturbed.”
“You can’t when you’ve just come to stay with people. We’ve got to unpack, and there are heaps of things I want to talk to you about. Look! have you seen the bathroom? A huge thing for water, like a thing you keep bread in at home. Do come and see, Paul!” Penelope was standing like a child, her hands eagerly twisted together.
“Leave me alone!” Paul repeated the words with an odd hoarseness in his voice, and Penelope, swinging round, passed through the curtain and back into her own bedroom. Her eyes were burning under their white lids.
“I hate him when he speaks like that—he is so rude!” She said the words fiercely under her breath.
Mrs. Mayhew summed it up very tersely when the last of the tongas that were taking the Cowards and their kit out into camp had rumbled out of the white gate.
“The man’s going off his head!” She said it almost fiercely as she threw himself down into the low wicker chair.
“My dear child!” The Bishop, always kindly, anxious to be charitable, spoke reprovingly. But in his heart of hearts he was not so sure that his wife was not right. Coward was certainly an extraordinary character—extraordinary. Magnetic, undoubtedly, and with a wonderful gift of oratory. He had preached at the Cathedral on Sunday morning, a Cathedral packed with troops, bronzed faces staring up at the tall thin padre who juggled with words like a Chinaman in the bazaar juggles with knives. Standing with hands loosely linked behind him, but with eyes that blazed out of the thin face down into the mass of rather bovine faces turned up to him. “As sheep having no shepherd.” Many who up to that moment had scoffed at Missions stirred rather uncomfortably in their chairs as the sermon proceeded. The young priest did not hesitate to drive it home. “You are responsible, you, educated and enlightened members of a great Christian community, set down in an alien land.” Above and below the whirring electric fans the words thundered out, and the dark face brooded.
“Responsible for what?” Penelope, who had been impressed by the sermon, approached her husband as he lay spread out in an easy chair in their room. Parade service had been over by ten o’clock, and they were breakfasting at eleven. He sat there looking less gloomy than usual, less abstracted. Penelope felt something of the old thrill return. She liked him when he preached, and he certainly did preach gorgeously.
“Responsible for their spiritual welfare, Penelope. You remember the great dual commission that our Lord bequeathed to His Church: ‘Preach the Gospel and heal the sick.’” Paul’s eyes began to glow. “Lord, send me.” Muttering the words to himself, he got up and began to pace up and down the room.
“Yes, I know, but what about the second part of the commission? No one thinks anything about what our Lord said about healing the sick,” proceeded Penelope chattily, preparing to settle herself down in a chair opposite her husband. This was a good chance to have a talk. Paul so rarely talked to her, seeming to think her incapable of anything in the shape of intelligent conversation. But she could be sensible. . . . This was sensible. It had so often occurred to her, and now was the time to let it loose. If missionaries healed people as well as converted them, they would have a terrific following. The heathen would think there was something in it, so to speak. After all, if you were told that a certain thing had a certain effect and it hadn’t, you began to doubt it.
“What is the use of telling a person that if they ask anything in the name of the Lord Jesus they will have it, when you know that they won’t?” she inquired. “The apostles didn’t do that. They knew that He could do certain things, like making a lame man walk and a blind man see; they had seen Him do it themselves, and He had taught them how to do it too. Why can’t you do it? You are descended from the Apostles: I have often heard you say so in sermons, so you ought to be able to. Why are you only out here preaching the Gospel? You ought to be healing the sick, too. Just think, Paul, a man coming rushing in from the jungle with a snake bite, and you just laying your hands on him and saying, ‘Be thou whole,’ and his being whole. Why, everybody would be a Christian instantly. You wouldn’t send a person out here to sell a thing for taking out stains, for instance, if it didn’t take out stains. Well, why should people adopt Christianity, first if it doesn’t do what it says it will; secondly if the people who preach it don’t know how to work it? It’s making a mock of the most wonderful thing in the world. Learn how to work it first, and then preach it.” Penelope, very flushed and eager, leant forward, her little seal’s head on one side.
And when the Bishop, very tall and spare in his white habit, pronounced the brief Latin grace over the mulligatawny soup, Mrs. Mayhew shot a swift glance across the table and wondered a little indignantly why the child had been crying. She ought never to have married the man. A man wrapt up in his work to the exclusion of everything else, padding about the house in a cassock with his eyes fixed on the ground. It was bound to end in disaster. She had a good mind to keep the child with her and not allow her even to begin this insane and unsuitable itinerary through some of the thickest jungle in the Central Provinces.
But she had not carried out her intention because the Bishop, with a firmness very unusual to him, had forbidden her to interfere.
“Get the child an ayah if, as you say, you think Coward is not capable of looking after her properly,” he said, “but I will not have you interfere between husband and wife. It never answers, and in this case especially I do not think it would be right.”
So the Cowards had included in their retinue Beena, the wife of the Hindu butler at the General’s bungalow. Beena had but lately returned from Bombay, where she had been in service with a memsahib who had now gone to England. She did not care for the idea of taking naukri (Service) with a missionary’s wife; Beena was accustomed to move in circles where the pay ran into thousands, and where the sahibs put the mystic letters I.C.S. after their names.
“Thik nahin.” (Not good.) Beena was hanging over something that looked like the wrenched-out bottom of a frying-pan, on the concave surface of which something extremely savoury stuck and frizzled.
“Bahut thik!” (Very good.) Fazal, the Bishop’s Mohammedan butler, was squatting on his haunches looking like a large bale of white calico. “The memsahib is of a class above the padrelogue. Her hands are small, and her voice is low. The padre-sahib is mad, but that is of no account. His wants will be attended to by the Mahar whom he has attached to his person.”
“A ‘kelistian’?” Beena was rather proud of her English.
“Hain. Rice kelistian!” Fazal spoke laconically, and with a contemptuous smile on his bearded lips. He spat meditatively.
“I see.” Beena spoke in the vernacular. “The pay?” She asked a few searching questions, which Fazal answered quietly, his eyes on the dancing flames of the little charcoal furnace. The old Mohammedan had felt his heart stir at the sight of the little soft memsahib. So had been the missy-baba of the Lord Bishop sahib, who had died quietly in his arms many years ago. Only a little blunt darting head from under a loose stone in the Chaplain’s compound, but it had been quite enough. The deaf adder—surely the kerait of modern days.
So Fazal felt that he wanted this little soft memsahib properly taken care of, and Beena would be the person to do it. The padre-sahib would be useless: the old Mohammedan recognized the type. The low-caste servant would be worse than useless: Fazal had already conceived a passionate dislike for Andrew. Beena would be the person, and Beena must be made to see it too.
And Beena did see it directly she made her first salaam to Penelope. Penelope was struggling with one of her husband’s suit-cases, trying to wedge shoes into the corner of it, and displacing all the collars in so doing. Beena had caught sight of Andrew as she came through the servants’ quarters. He was lolling up against the whitewashed wall of the little detached brick kitchen, obviously making eyes at the dhobi’s wife. And this while the memsahib struggled with the sahib’s packing? No! A swift bargain as to pay being concluded, Beena vanished, and in virtue of her recently assumed office let loose a flow of excellently chosen abuse at the lounging native Christian.
“I simply love Beena!” Penelope, enraptured at the sudden release from all the little irritating detail of a routine that she did not understand, spoke enthusiastically as she put on her solar topee. She and Mrs. Mayhew were standing together on the sun-flooded verandah waiting for the Bishop and Paul Coward to come out of the little office.
“Do you? I am very glad.” Mrs. Mayhew spoke with content in her voice. She did not like parting from Penelope, but she felt more reconciled to it now that she knew that the child would have some woman with her. Beena, shrill and vociferous, was superintending the loading of the luggage in the three tongas that stood with impatiently moving country ponies on the gravel space in front of the house.
“Fool! place the memsahib’s suit-case where it will be easily obtainable. Upon the hat-box, so!” Andrew, scowling with rage, moved sullenly from one tonga to the other, followed by Beena, who, with snapping black eyes and white teeth all agleam, was thoroughly enjoying this showing off before the grinning tongawallahs.
“Yes, having her has made all the difference to me. Don’t you know how it does? the feeling that you’ve got someone to turn to. She’s so awfully capable, too. Yesterday, when my head ached, she spread her fingers all over my head, and somehow it seemed to get better at once. It’s nice of Paul to let me have her, because I’m afraid she is very expensive.” Penelope suddenly flushed crimson. Would her husband tip the servants properly? Fazal had done so much for them, and that morning when he had brought in the letters, and it had seemed just the moment to do it, Paul hadn’t even thought of it. Those were the things that made life with a man so worrying, thought Penelope, wrinkling her forehead under the stiff hat.
“I am sure that it will be a great relief to him to know that you will have someone with you when he goes off on a long trek,” replied Mrs. Mayhew kindly. But later she expressed herself more forcibly to her husband. “The man is mean as well as mad,” she said; Mrs. Mayhew had noted Fazal’s still dignified although depressed back. “And I think that to drag that child on a six months’ tour through the districts is absolutely criminal. You know what these dâk bungalows are. He will be off perhaps for days at a time, and she will be left alone. If it hadn’t been for me she would have been left with that villainous boy of theirs. But I have put a stop to that.” And Mrs. Mayhew settled the cushion behind her with a series of vicious punchings.
“My darling!” But with that gentle reproof the Bishop came to the end of what he was going to say. Was Coward quite mentally stable? He had begun to wonder it himself. There had been a strange outburst the night before, a confession almost, but not quite. A fiery denunciation of himself, the man with a convulsed face pacing up and down the little office. Wild revelations—or had they been figments of a diseased imagination? In any event, the Bishop had instantly dismissed them from his mind. He had sat very still, his slim, thoughtful hands linked across his gaitered knees. And when the young priest had almost hysterically flung himself at his feet, he had unlinked those kind hands and held them out.
“Come, come,” he had said it kindly.
“Father! Father, your blessing!” The tears had been streaming down the cadaverous face.
“Of course. . .” But, for the first time the Bishop was at a loss. Ought he not to put his foot down on this tour? he was thinking. Ought he not somehow to get that young and obviously extremely unsuitable young wife away from this young man? Ought he not perhaps to stop the whole thing? That Coward was terribly overwrought was only too obvious. But now as his wife spoke he felt a flood of relief quite disproportionate to the cause. An ayah! and a heathen one at that! A strange thing for a Christian bishop to be elated about. But he was: uneasily thinking over the tour in front of these two young people, he felt suddenly enormously relieved.
And to Penelope it made all the difference in the world. Breathing in the cool, crisp air of this entrancingly beautiful cold weather morning, she felt, for the first time for weeks, almost happy.
To Penelope that starting out into a gradually-awakening dawn was a revelation. Every tree, every twig was alive with the twittering of birds. Chirping a fierce salute to the withdrawal of the curtain of night, they preened and shook themselves, in purest joy. Surely Paul would notice the beauty of it all. Penelope shot a side glance at her husband as he sat beside her perched rather uncomfortably on the hard shiny cushion of the two-wheeled cart.
But Paul was not noticing anything going on around him. His eyes fixed on a little black book in his hand, his lips were moving monotonously. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Evidently he was coming to the end of something, or was he only beginning it? Beginning it, apparently. Penelope withdrew her eyes and settled herself to think about all the wonderful happenings of that day. So much had happened already.
They had got up early—awfully early. Penelope had felt that they could only just have gone to bed when there was a mysterious scrabbling at her mosquito curtain, and there was Beena with the flickering hurricane lantern beside her on the floor. Beena, with her head all rolled up in a purple shawl and looking oddly grotesque against the whitewashed wall on which she was portrayed in weirdest silhouette. Beena, with a crackling brass tray on which were rattling cups and toast and tea, both of them smelling deliciously. Penelope sat excitedly up in bed.
“Salaam, Beena.” She returned the whispered salutation with the wildest feeling of adventure. Here it was again, the feeling of the Christmas stocking. Surely Paul would feel it too.
But Paul did not feel anything except that he was getting up unpleasantly early, and that he did not like it. He took his cup of tea and piece of toast and withdrew with it to his dressing-room. The early hours of the dawn were wasted unless, stripped of all material thought, you prostrated yourself before the Great Mystery. To eat at such an hour was repugnant. He ate and drank with a feeling of resentment, levelled oddly enough at Penelope, who, thoroughly enjoying the cheerful ministrations of her ayah, had begun to sing quietly as she moved about her room.
And now he felt resentful again, although he gave no sign of being anything but entirely absorbed in the breviary in his hand. She was there . . . beside him, when he wanted to be alone. A woman . . . what place had any woman? The tonga lurched suddenly as Paul got out of it.
“Oh, I say, how you made me jump! Why didn’t you tell me you were going to get out?” Penelope, with her solar topee knocked a little crooked with the lurch of the canvas hood over her head, leaned out and spoke a little petulantly. Paul never seemed to think it was necessary to make it nice for other people. Little things that mattered he never seemed to think of. But those were the things . . ..
“I shall walk . . . and Andrew will walk with me. Halt!” The priest held up his hand, and the three tongas following the first one stopped abruptly. “Ari!” The tongawallah hauled in his ponies with a wild staring of his opaque eyes. A sahib who flung himself in and out of the tonga without giving any due notice was a sahib to beware of. He got out and went reassuringly to the heads of his ponies.
“We will pray. Here under God’s canopy we will kneel and ask His blessing on the work that lies in front of us. Andrew!” And Paul started to walk down the line of carts.
“Paul, you can’t!” Penelope was disentangling herself from the suit-case at her feet and was hurriedly getting but of the tonga. “You can’t! Half of them are heathen, and they won’t understand. Don’t—it looks so sort of mad!” She had caught her husband by the arm and spoke with her hand on it.
“Silence!” Paul turned fiercely round, and Penelope shrank back alarmed at the look that had leapt into his eyes. “Andrew! *’ He had started to walk on again.
“Yess, sar.” Andrew hastily flicked the bidi he was smoking out into the jungle that lay close up to the cart-track along which they were proceeding, and got down from his seat. “Yess, sar,” he smiled unctuously.
“We will pray,” said Paul quietly.
“Yess, sar!”
Andrew folded his hands meekly in front of him and stood very still, with his heels very close together. Penelope, following, had a swift sensation of nausea. The man had hypocrisy written all over him. How was it that her husband could not see it? She stood watching, a feeling of curiosity taking the place of the first feeling of disgust. After all, they were miles away from anyone who could see and scoff. What did it matter what Paul did in the depth of this waste of scrubby jungle? God understood, and God was here . . . very evidently here. The swift flight of a bird drew Penelope’s eyes to a palm-tree standing tall and slim a few feet away. A streak of coldest blue and aquamarine. A jay, perched on the lowest branches of it watching them, its head a little on one side. What Hand but a divine one could have laid on that colouring? Penelope smiled to herself.
“Memsahib praying?” Beena, stout, and still enveloped in her purple chuddar, had also descended from her bullock-cart and was standing at Penelope’s elbow. “My praying.” Beena folded her hands with an expression of acute piety.
“Can you? I thought you were something else in the way of religion?” Penelope swung round and spoke shyly. This would simplify matters if Beena were a Christian too. All this dreadful awkwardness would cease if both the servants belonged to the Church of England. They would think it an ordinary sort of thing for Paul to stop anywhere and have a service.
“Memsahib praying, my praying,” said Beena stolidly. “Sahib praying, he too praying,” she continued, shooting a side glance of extreme venom at Andrew. “He very bad mans—stealing my little brooch,” she ended up fiercely.
“Oh, no, Beena!”
“Stealing, memsahib,” said Beena with finality. “My saying ehmen when sahib saying ehmen. Saying ehmen now.” And Beena, with an almost audible creaking of her old joints, sank on to her knees.
Long afterwards Penelope remembered that little open-air service under the sky. Paul prayed like a man struggling with an unseen enemy. His face turned up to the sky, he seemed literally to be wrestling with God. What was the matter with him? Penelope, kneeling on the damp, uneven turf beside her ayah, wondered. He was altering. At first when she had known him he had seemed just like an ordinary clergyman, an awfully high one certainly, but otherwise just like anyone else. But now, now he had a sort of queer look about him, a sort of unbalanced look, a sort of—and then Penelope sank her chin on to her jersey coat with a little sigh. “The Peace of God that passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds. . .” Paul’s hand was uplifted, the thumb stretched across the narrow palm of it. But he hadn’t got it, he hadn’t got it. “How can you sort of bequeath it to anyone else if you haven’t got it yourself?” Still kneeling, the words seem to leap to her lips in spite of herself. But Paul was standing looking round at his little congregation, and Penelope got slowly up on to her feet. “Now shall we start off again?” she said.
“‘As sheep having no shepherd!’” Paul was looking through her down to where Beena still knelt with her eyes tightly closed.
“Yes, they have, they’ve got you now. Besides, Beena says that when you and I pray she can too, so we need not have that awful worry that she is a Hindu. Oh, Paul, do let’s go on; the drivers are all staring, and it seems so queer to stop here. Besides, aren’t we going to stop at some Mission place for breakfast? Mrs. Mayhew said so, and she said it would take quite till twelve o’clock to get there.”
“True! Andrew!”
“Sar!” Andrew spoke with his eyes still tightly closed and still on his knees.
“We will continue on our way, Andrew.” Paul spoke a little uncertainly. He was loth to disturb the man in his devotions, but he had pronounced the Blessing. But Andrew was not going to move until Beena did. He hated Beena. He mistrusted and loathed her. She should not kneel longer than he did. He was the Christian: she was only a low-caste Hindu.
“Get up, Beena.” Penelope spoke in a miserable and uncomfortable whisper.
“Attcha, memsahib!” Beena shot a side-glance at Andrew and got on to her feet. “Chalo.” Beena was among the gharrywallahs seated in a circle round a bubbling hookah. She, the personal attendant of the memsahib, would show that she was in command of this expedition. Beena had the shrewdness of her race. The sahib was mad, and the memsahib small and afraid. The hog servant of the sahib was a rogue, therefore she, Beena, would take control.
And she did. Andrew, scowling and swearing horribly under his breath, was hustled ignominiously into the rear tonga. Beena took her place in the second one after she had, with shrill vituperations, driven the native drivers from their siesta. The patient bullocks were driven with much tail-twisting from their peaceful nosing among the heaps of straw and pushed unprotestingly under the clumsy yokes again. The caravan was ready to start on its way.
“Ready, memsahib?” Beena, with her sharp monkey eyes darting from under the hood of the bullock-cart into the back seat of the tonga ahead of her, spoke with shrill authority.
“I am, Beena; but what has happened to the sahib?” Penelope, who since rising from her knees had felt a stirring of comfort round her heart, spoke anxiously. Paul had wandered off with a muttered excuse. Surely it was time he came back. “I’ll go and look for him,” she said, and she slipped from the high, awkward seat. “No, I will.” She waved Beena back, Beena importantly preparing to get down, clutching at Penelope’s dispatch-case in its canvas cover. “I’ll go; I can go quicker than you. You stay here and look after . . .”
And Penelope had gone, running, diving into the undergrowth. She ran for some time. She ran until the trees began to meet over her head, great enveloping trees with long trails of creeper hanging from them. Creeper that in some way looked oddly alive, alive in a gruesome way, with swollen bulbous leaves on it. Creeper that swung long pale suckers over her head. One caught her hat and dragged it crooked.
“Oh!” A little shaken, Penelope stopped dead. Where on earth was she? And then, still standing motionless, she drew her hand down again from her hat. There was something on it—-something that clung and partly hung down behind and touched her neck, something alive . . . moving slimily.
And then—then what happened next? Often and often Penelope tried to remember, but it was only sometimes in the very, very early hours of the dawn that she was able to bring it at all to memory. Everything suddenly got very quiet, she could remember that—quiet with the sort of quiet that comes before an eclipse; a dying down of every ordinary sound of living thing; a hush like the hush that falls on a great congregation before it rises from its knees and streams out of the great church. “The King of Glory passes on His way!” Why did those words suddenly ring out like a chant in Penelope’s soul? But there were Footsteps . . . there were . . . and the falling together again of parting undergrowth. Penelope, forgetting her terror, swung round. “Lord, wait!” She turned to run . . . she must follow after, flee after Someone . . . Something.
And then . . . then she was back in the midst of the little trail of bullock-carts. Beena . . . Beena peering anxiously from under the canvas hood, Paul . . . Paul, with his hand shading his eyes, staring in the direction from which she had come.
“Here you are . . . come along.” He spoke a little impatiently.
“Paul, I was nearly bitten by a snake!” Did she or did she not say the words. Long afterwards she tried to remember and could not. In any event he paid no attention to them, and surely he would have done if she had really said them aloud. Penelope got quietly up into the tonga.
“Who’s the blighter that’s setting the whole district by the ears?” The man who spoke spoke from the depths of a long chair, over the head of a kneeling servant. “Yes, that’s all right. Gad! what a relief to get them off. Yes, bring my pumps, Sewa.” And with a shake of both stockinged feet, Harley Poole sank back into his chair again.
“It’s a padre of sorts. Odd that you should mention it to-day, because I only heard of it this morning. I was out round that jheel while you were having your bath and I met Manning. He was no end worried, poor chap. Apparently this fellow came out from home on some sort of itinerary round the Mission stations, rather on the proselytizing tack, I gather. You know this new Anglo-Catholic business—at least, I don’t suppose you do know. Well, I’ve got a young cousin who’s hot and strong on it, and I tell you, meals in that house have become pretty strenuous! It sticks in Uncle Charles’s gizzard, and I don’t blame the old boy. However, that’s not the point. But these people round here don’t like it. Thanks, we’re busy—nothing doing. Keep your vestments and your paraphernalia to yourself. We’ve got to get down to brass tacks. Rome depends on frills, we don’t—at least, we haven’t done up till now. That’s, I gather, the tone that the Mission stations in the Central Provinces have taken—at least, that’s how Manning has it, and he ought to know, being Assistant Collector here. But this apparently has sent Coward regularly off the deep end, and he’s cut loose from the parent society. Some sort of Society sent him out, and he’s settled himself in an old tumble-down construction bungalow in the very middle of the Ronaghar Forest, and there he holds the most terrific services. He’s rigged up one of the rooms as a chapel. . .”
“Coward? I wonder if it’s any relation to a Coward I used to know?” Harley Poole had struggled himself a little more upright in his chair and was staring down into the bowl of the pipe that he had abruptly taken out of his mouth.
“Probably . . . it’s not a common name. Anyhow, there he is, and apparently no one can dislodge him. He’s got the whole of the native population at his back, too; they simply love it. Can’t you imagine how they would? A blaze of candles, acolytes, and all the set-out of Rome without any of the bother of it. Manning said he came by there the other night and there was a mob round the house of about five hundred natives. Absolutely silent, staring at this fellow conducting some sort of a service on the verandah. Manning said it gave him the creeps absolutely. Pitchy darkness all round, and this blaze of light from this altar that he has rigged up. Everything absolutely perfect too. Apparently he has private means, so that he can snap his fingers at everybody.”
“The Coward I knew is married.” Harley Poole spoke thoughtfully, and as he spoke he crammed the smouldering tobacco in the flat bowl of his pipe a little lower down. He was remembering Mary’s letter. “Paul has gone absolutely off the deep end about that girl you met here and rather liked, Penelope Page. I don’t know that she is so keen on him, but when Paul once gets set on a thing he always brings it off. . .” So apparently he had brought it off. Because he was married, that Harley knew, and some time ago. “I suppose he’s left his wife at home?” He spoke thoughtfully, staring across the matted verandah at his friend.
“No, that’s just what he hasn’t done, and that’s what’s worrying old Manning. Being a bachelor, he’s a tender-hearted fellow. And apparently the wife has rather a thin time of it. The Cators wanted to take her along with them. They passed through the Ronaghar Forest and got wind of all this, and I believe they did their level best to make Coward let her go. But he wouldn’t. Raved at old Cator, and quoted screeds from Holy Writ about a wife’s duty to her husband. And, of course, when you begin to interfere between the two, you do get on to rather dangerous ground. Cator got cold feet and fled.”
“The Cators wouldn’t have been at all the sort of people to look after Coward’s wife, if she’s the girl I think she is.” Harley got up on to his feet and began to knock out his pipe against one of the upright pillars of the verandah. “So long, Hay; I’ll tub before dinner.” And Harley Poole started to walk along to his room, a tall powerful figure in his shabby shooting kit.
And Colonel Hay watched him go, an amused twinkle under his freckled eyelids. By gad! he had put his foot in it! Cator’s wife, of course. The whole of the Punjab had rung with it a couple of years before. But lately Poole had seemed to calm down a bit. Right off women, and on this shooting trip he had drunk hardly any whisky at all. Hay got up and strolled to the edge of the verandah staring out into the darkness. A good thing, too, because Poole had undoubtedly drunk more than was good for him in the past. But he was a darned good fellow, a darned fine fellow too; Colonel Hay’s mind fled back to the end of 1914 as he flicked the still smouldering end of his cheroot out into the compound and turned to walk along to his own bedroom. And as Harley Poole moved about the funny, desolate-looking bedroom of the dâk bungalow, his mind too was concerned with the past. Cator s wife! Hay’s casual remark had dragged it all up in his mind again. Not a very savoury memory either. Harley dismissed it with an involuntary frown. What did women see in him? Turning casually to be sure that his servant had gone, he advanced almost shyly to the looking-glass. A powerful frame, that part of the business he could understand. He went a little nearer and thrust his face a little closer to the glass. A couple of rows of excellent teeth—well, they were all very well in their way; he grinned complacently at the reflection of them. But apart from these two very obvious virtues, what? And Harley Poole, closing a mouth of almost womanish sweetness, went on with his dressing. They clung to him so, they clung and worshipped at the same time. Regarding him apparently in the light of a slave-driver, coupled with the joyful relationship of a mother, or at least of some very intimate female relation. It was odd—odd, to say the least of it. But they were sweet . . . awfully sweet some women were, most of them, in fact. So awfully touching with their little hopes and fears and frights and anxieties. You’d only got to be kind to them and listen to their little outpourings and understand their little torments of soul and frenzies, and they adored you. Why was it that the average man could only go clumping beefily in and out of their little trembling prejudices and fears, and put their soft little backs up? As Harley unhooked the strop of his safety razor from the button of the looking-glass and hung it over the tarnished knob of the bed in the middle of the floor, he wondered anew. Such numbers of marriages even in his own experience turning out utter failures. Men were such fools, such crass, self-opinionated, selfish fools; Harley felt more and more sure of it as he held his razor under the dripping tap in the little white-washed bathroom. Coward, for instance, more or less dotty, and obviously cut out for a monk’s cell, and yet having the effrontery to ask a girl to share his life. What girl had been fool enough to do it? Harley wondered anew as he wiped the razor carefully and laid it back in its velvet bed. He would find out—he would get Hay to shoot in the Ronaghar jungle the next day, or at any rate to trek through part of it and give the old construction bungalow a call. After all, he had known Coward at home. That would give him sufficient excuse for breaking in on his solitude. For Manning had apparently made it very clear that Coward did not welcome visitors.
Colonel Hay was accommodatingly agreeable to the proposed expedition for the next day. “As a matter of fact, I’ve started a brute of a blister on my left heel, and I shall be only too glad to give it a rest. We’ll ride . . . if we start early enough we ought easily to be able to get there and back in a day. We’ll get the old khansamah here to put us up some tiffin, some of those curried puffs like we had to-day. They were awfully good. I’ll tell Akbar, and he and Sewa can fix it up between them.”
So the next morning saw the two men on horseback. It was an exquisitely beautiful dawn: even Harley Poole, inured to beautiful dawns, strolled to the window with his cup of early tea in his hand and watched it with an odd tightening at his throat. The gradual lifting of the dark curtain of night behind the range of low, flat hills. The flooding in of light, penetrating, far-reaching, stretching out long golden fingers to stain everything with gold. There, it had reached the jheel they had shot over the day before, and as if in swift response to its beckoning finger a flight of duck rose and winged their way fanwise into the undergrowth. Harley could hear them quacking cheerfully as he turned again and put down his cup. And he remarked on it as he sat carelessly astride his horse watching his syce adjusting one of his stirrups.
“You know, we get so darned used to it,” he said; “but there is no doubt that a cold-weather early morning out here wants a lot of beating.”
“True,” responded Colonel Hay, who had also spent a good deal of time looking at the sun stealing in over the hills, but who was not going to say so. “Now then, Jagaroo, get a move on. Where are those fellows with the tiffin basket? Gone on? Of course they have: so they ought to have done hours ago! Now then, Poole, you go first.”
The little cavalcade moved down the rough gravelly path of the old dâk bungalow. Wali Mohamed, the venerable old Mohammedan who filled the post of custodian and general factotum, coupling with it the most excellent grasp of things culinary, watched them go with complacence. These were pukka sahibs, these two; sahibs who combined in their persons all the virtues of the great and powerful race to which they belonged. They were courteous; they expressed approbation of the food laid before them, they were worthy of Mohamed’s most pronounced efforts, and they should have them. Wali Mohamed turned and bustled back importantly into the little kitchen.
Harley Poole felt oddly cheerful as he rode along the narrow dusty cart-track. It was too narrow for two to ride abreast, so with his syce close at his horse’s heels he kept a little ahead. They had some way to go before they plunged into the dense jungle that would gradually merge into the Ronaghar Forest. Coward apparently had taken possession of an old Public Works Construction bungalow. A ghastly place to live in at any time, but in the very heart of some of the densest forest land in the Central Provinces too awful to contemplate. What did his wife think of it? And who was his wife? Was it that little thing with a slippery shingled head that he had seen that afternoon outside the St. Jude’s Vicarage? If so, what a hell of a time she must be having! Coward at any time would be a bit of a trial as a husband, but combined with a house falling about your ears he would be just about the limit—at least so decided Major Harley Poole, reining in his horse suddenly as it shied at a scuttling of wild things in the high cactus hedge.
But when after a couple of hours’ hard going they came in sight of the old construction bungalow, it was not so bad as he had expected. Desperately unhealthy probably, but extraordinarily picturesque to look at. It stood in a little clearing right in the middle of the trees. Huge trees that stooped shelteringly over it, and trailed long creepers down the sides of it—trees that were ranged like sentinels round it. . . .
“Gad, it must be feverish!” Colonel Hay pushed back his pith helmet from his forehead and began to mop himself. “You go in, Harley. . . . I’m not fit to be seen. You know the fellow, I don’t. Get him out of that place before he dies of malaria, and his wife, too. That’s my advice.” And Colonel Hay wheeled his horse round and retreated a little way down the path along which they had just come.
Harley flung one long leg over the saddle and slipped down on to the ground. Throwing the reins to the waiting syce, he gave a nervous tug to the back of his shirt. Now he had arrived he felt oddly uncomfortable. What excuse was he going to make? After all, he hardly knew Coward, and had more or less gone out of his way to avoid him when he had been in the same country with him. He had half a mind . . . and then the ground was cut from under his feet. A servant had emerged from the dark, sloping verandah, and was coming down the narrow weedy path.
“Sahib hai?” Harley spoke curtly. He disliked servants who wore cheap European shoes, and Andrew’s were bright yellow and objectionably new.
“Yess, sar,” Andrew smiled. “The sahib will be pleased to see you,” he added officiously.
“Will he?” Harley felt an overwhelming desire to kick the native in front of him. Where had Coward picked up the worm? A typical low-caste native. A ghastly person to have about the house. Harley swiftly visualized his old Mohammedan bearer, curled black beard, great powerful feet, naked except when he walked through the jungle, when he wore roughly made native shoes with curled-up toes. “Give him my salaams,” he said briefly, speaking in the vernacular with deliberate intent. “Poole Sahib, from the vilayat.”
“Attcha, sahib.” With true Oriental perspicacity Andrew summed Harley Poole up as a sahib who knew what he was about. He began to run. And Harley, following more slowly, switched his little leather cane from side to side and wondered anew how any human being could stick an isolation like this. Why, it would drive him dotty in a week. And then he ceased to wonder. Coward was dotty, or at any rate well on the way to be. He had come out of a door at the end of the tumble-down verandah and was advancing to meet him.
“Well, Harley!”
No, he was sane enough. But the man’s get-up! A narrow straggling beard hid his mouth and chin, and his long lank figure was clothed in a garment that looked like a cross between a cassock and a bathgown. It was made of a material that Harley recognized as a local product, a coarse copper-coloured woven material that fell in ugly folds. His feet were bare, and to Harley’s fastidious perception they did not look any too clean. However . . . here was an old friend. He held out his hand.
“Well, I am very glad to see you.” Paul’s voice was cordial, but again Harley absorbed a swift impression that his eyes were not. “Sit down. You’ll have lunch, of course. Andrew!”
“No, thanks, we lunched on the way. A friend of mine and I rode over from Karghar, where we’re having a three weeks’ shoot. No, thanks—he’s gone off to have a trek round.”
This in swift response to a wandering glance from the hollow eyes. Good heavens! to present this extraordinary figure to his friend’s conventional gaze. Hay would have a fit! And here was that horrid servant again, creeping about behind him. Harley moved uncomfortably in his chair.
“Are you in the district for long?” The hollow eyes were burning into his.
“No—at least, yes, I rather think we are.” Harley had an instant’s impulse to qualify the negative. For some reason or other Paul did not want him about. All right, then, very probably he would stay about. No Englishman had any business to make a guy of himself like this, especially one with a wife. By the way, he would find out about the wife. There was no sign of her. Probably she was a myth. “I hear that you’ve joined the noble army of Benedicts, Paul,” he ventured. “Brave man! When did you do it?
“About six months ago.” The hollow eyes swept the verandah, and rested for an instant on a door at the farther end of it. Ah! she was there, then: Harley felt a quick stirring of interest. And Paul did not want him to see her. What sport! He would make him produce her.
But it was more difficult than he anticipated. In fact, when he rose, after a visit that he could not in decency prolong any longer, she had not even been mentioned again. And Harley rose with a feeling of anger in his mind. He was accustomed to get what he wanted; besides, he wanted to see if Mrs. Coward was the girl with the sleek little head that he remembered. Besides, no man had any business. . . . But Paul was speaking.
“Well, good-bye, Harley. It was good of you to come over. Andrew, see that the sahib’s syce is ready.”
Paul was walking down the verandah by his side. Bother the fellow! Couldn’t he be got out of the way?” Then he could bolt ahead of him and have a look through that door. There was somebody behind it. Harley suddenly felt passionately certain that there was. He must see.
But Andrew was back. Grinning sickeningly, Harley felt a fierce desire to strike the heavy face.
“Syce ready, sar.” Andrew was looking fawningly at his master.
“Good. You remain here, then, while I accompany the sahib to the gate.” Master and servant exchanged glances, Harley could have sworn that they did. Filled with a fierce disgust and rage, he swung himself into the saddle.
“Well, I’ll be over again in a day or two,” he said curtly. Paul should have that to stew over. He didn’t want him there. All right, then, he was coming. “So long,” he said again.
“Good-bye, Harley.” The priest, oddly dishevelled, and yet with a strange dignity about him, waved a thin hand in farewell. Harley reined in his horse and started off down the narrow grassy path at a canter. Blow the man, he had practically turned him out! Where was that little slip of a girl with a head like a wet seal? Behind that door. Harley could sweat to it. And with that beastly low-caste man to look after her. Harley could have sworn to that too. He would find her out, he would get behind that door somehow. . . .
Colonel Hay was openly derisive when Harley told him what had happened. A very intimate friend of Major Poole’s, he was able to express himself freely.
“Well done the devil-dodger!” he said, and he laughed uproariously. “Your reputation has preceded you, Harley, my boy. Nothing doing in that direction evidently.” And Colonel Hay guffawed again.
But all through the long ride home Harley was morose and silent, and when, after an excellent dinner, the two men lay stretched out in long chairs under the stars, Colonel Hay spoke again, more sympathetically this time. His friend was evidently upset.
“But why the hell are you?” he exclaimed, rather impatiently. “You don’t know the girl, do you? She’s probably one of these hefty females who could put the padre in her pocket. Why get in such a stew because she didn’t appear? She was probably teaching the young idea to shoot in the back garden, or making some miserable convert try on garments sent out by an enthusiastic working-party at Upper Tooting. You’ve no idea how these Mission women work. Get a grip on yourself, Harley. Have another drink. Whisky soda lao!” the Colonel bellowed towards the bungalow.
“No, thanks.” Harley too spoke impatiently. How utterly unimaginative some men were. There was Hay, for instance, a rattling good chap certainly, but with no idea beyond a drink. “Look here, I shall ride over there again to-morrow,” he said, and he got abruptly up out of his chair.
“My dear fellow, I beg that you will do nothing of the kind.” Colonel Hay uncrossed the feet extended along the rests of the long chair. “On your own showing the fellow looks a little touched in the upper storey. Well, don’t run the risk of sending him quite off the deep end by going and poking about his tumble-down premises. Manning has tried to get him out, and can’t. Cator wanted him to let his wife go along with them, and he won’t. She is probably a young woman of decided opinions, and loves all this going on . . . women do. You’ve only got to turn in to any of these Anglo-Catholic places to realize that. You won’t get anything out of it. Leave it alone, Harley. Don’t be a fool. If the girl wants championing, let her go to one of these Mission people. You don’t want her turning up here. There are heaps of them in the neighbourhood.”
“None nearer than about forty miles.” Harley spoke with his back turned to his friend.
“Well, what’s forty miles? It’s a mere fleabite in this country.” Colonel Hay eyed his friend’s back with a certain amount of anxiety. This was something new. Harley had betrayed no interest in any woman, married or unmarried, for a very long time. Did he know Mrs. Coward, then? He put the question tentatively.
“No—at least, I’m not sure if I do or not. I knew Paul Coward’s sister, and the last time I was at home I met a girl at their house who might be she. In any event, I’m going to find out. No man has any business to bury himself in the middle of a jungle and dress himself up like a fakir if he’s got a woman with him. It’s a scandal . . . it’s a monstrous state of affairs.” Harley had begun to walk up and down the stone chabutra.
“Oh, my sainted aunt!” Colonel Hay let loose the exclamation quietly, and with a humorous twist on his mouth. Harley was off . . . there would be no holding him now. “I’m damned if I’m going to have another day jiggered up by a wild goose chase after a lunatic!” he said. “Go by yourself, if you must; but if you take my advice you’ll keep clear of the whole thing.”
But as Harley moved about his room that night he knew that it was impossible. Something was urging him, forcing him to go to that tumble-down bungalow among the trees. And when, after an almost sleepless night, he gulped down his early morning tea, and dragged on his heavy khakicord riding breeches, he stuffed a small automatic pistol into his hip-pocket, smiling at himself almost shamefacedly as he did so, but doing it all the same. You never knew . . . there might be a cobra in the undergrowth . . . or that servant might turn nasty. . . .
The ride that day seemed shorter. It was only twelve o’clock, and the blazing sun was overhead by the time he drew rein at the end of the little path. He slipped off the saddle and threw the reins to his syce.
“I shall be some time,” he said in the vernacular. “Eat, for we may not be back until nightfall.”
As he strode up the broken gravelly path the whole place seemed to be lying under a pall of silence. Only from one end of the verandah came a queer monotonous droning. Harley shifted the leather cane a little in his hand. The sound was an unpleasant one . . . weird. He went on, treading a little cautiously. He would see where the sound came from. Ah, he had located it. It came from the end where the bungalow was more shrouded in trees, the end where Paul had rigged up his chapel. Now then. . . .
But a figure had raised itself from the verandah —a figure that had been crouching there.
“Salaam, sahib!” It was Andrew, with his yellow shoes and his shifty eyes. Harley choked back a feeling of fury. The brute had been spying on him, watching him coming up the drive.
“Sahib hai?” He spoke curtly.
“Hain, sahib!” Andrew was all attention. “Padre-sahib nimaz karte,” (Saying prayers.) he added, with his eyes on the bronzed face towering over him.
“Oh, well, then, don’t disturb him.” Harley took off his pith topee and smoothed his hair back with a brown hand. That was what that howling was, then. Paul was undoubtedly going off the rails. . . . But he hoped he would be offered some food. He was darned hungry.
He was. Andrew was still hovering. “The sahib will partake of breakfast?” he inquired.
“Yes.” Harley was not going to waste words on this creature. Only let him get off the scene to give the order to the cook, whoever he was, and he would see into that door at the farther end of the verandah. But Andrew only leant over the rail of the verandah and clapped his hands.
Harley choked back his annoyance, as in answer to that summons a grimy servant appeared from somewhere and then disappeared again. After all, there would be other opportunities. And here was Paul. . . . A queer, stupefied-looking Paul stumbling out into the light as if he could not see. And surely that was blood. . . . But Paul had gone, seeming to feel his way through one of the tall doors that gave on to the verandah. Harley sat still, feeling oddly shaken. It had looked like blood, running stealthily off one thin bare heel. But here he was back again, trying to smile a welcome, and signally failing.
“Ah, Harley, Andrew tells me. . . .”
“Yes, I was passing, and dropped in to see if you could give me a meal. “I’m sorry if it is inconvenient.” Harley was standing up, and staring down at the queer figure in front of him.
“Not at all, not at all. We shall be breakfasting in a few moments. Ah! there is Andrew; apparently it is already served. Follow me, Harley.” And the priest got up and padded noiselessly down the verandah.
Harley followed, tingling with a queer excitement. Now he would see her, and his apprehensions would be laid for ever. After all, this was all normal enough. There was something grubby-looking about Paul’s heel, but probably he never had a bath. Priests often looked dirty. And anyone who could have a beard . . .
“Sit down, Harley.” Paul was crumpling himself up into an odd shape and letting himself down on to the floor. “As you see, we have adopted Indian habits. Be seated, Andrew.”
“I don’t feel very much inclined. . . .” Something fierce had leapt into Harley Poole’s eyes. This was intolerable. The man was undoubtedly mad. A meal spread out on a cloth laid on the floor, a native servant to sit down with them. And yet he was this man’s guest. “Look here, I am afraid my legs are a little long for this,” he said. “Get that servant of yours to get me a chair, and I’ll have my food, if I may, on that table over there.”
“Andrew is my very dear friend and my brother,” replied Paul, his lips twitching under his straggling beard. “And if you wish to partake of food under my roof, you must partake as I do.”
There was some sense in this, and Harley, conscious of a feeling of healthy hunger, coupled with a feeling of intense irritation, stirred uncomfortably on his feet. How could he get away without creating a scene? The very idea of eating at the same time as that low-caste creature made him feel ill. And then his common sense reasserted itself. He had come over for a specific purpose, and he was not going until that purpose had been achieved. He dropped awkwardly on to the floor, stretching his long gaitered legs and his heavy riding-boots so that they lay a few inches from Andrew’s haunches.
The meal progressed in dead silence. With a feeling as if he were taking part in charades, Harley ate and drank. A young woman in native dress came in and placed a bowl of rice and a bowl of curry in the middle of the floor, and then went out again. All three men dipped their fingers into it, native fashion, and ate silently. Harley was conscious of a feeling of excitement. Directly the meal was over he was going to get down to it. He was going to find out where Paul’s wife was.
But directly the meal was over he found out that that was the last thing that he was going to do. Paul scrambled on to his feet, and crossing himself hurriedly, held out a thin hand.
“It is our hour for prayer and contemplation, Harley,” he said. “Good-bye, my friend.”
“I say, you’re rather pushing me out, aren’t you?” Harley stood, his feet a little apart, laughing uncomfortably. “Can’t we have a smoke and a bit of a buck?”
“No, my friend.”
Uneasily Harley saw the melancholy eyes fixed on his. Jove, the man was mad! But where was his wife? “Look here,” he began to speak.
But Andrew was at his elbow. “Sahib’s horse ready, sar,” he said.
Harley swung round. Yes, there it was, his syce leading it up the path. The fellow had been to fetch it. “Look here,” he turned again to speak to Paul.
But the priest was already half-way down the verandah, muttering, his chin sunk on his chest.
Harley Poole rode away from the tumble-down bungalow among the trees, feeling a good deal worse than he had done the day before, when he had done the same thing. There was some ghastly mystery going on there, and he was being very effectually kept out of it. He dragged his pith helmet a little lower down over his eyes and gnawed furiously at his lower lip. And then his horse rearing wildly, he dragged heavily at the reins. “Quiet you!” He struck at its quivering haunches with his riding-whip.
“Sahib!” “Beena, her purple chuddah muffling her up to her eyes, was crawling out from under a mass of undergrowth. “Sahib!” She held up her hands in supplication.
“What do you want?” Harley reined in his horse with an exclamation of annoyance. Some beastly beggar! He stared angrily down.
But Beena spoke in halting English. “Sahib sending on syce,” she said; “my speaking then.”
Ah! he was going to get at something. With a feeling of wild excitement, Harley flung the reins to his syce and slipped off the saddle. But Beena came closer.
“Sahib keeping horse,” she whispered. “Sahib going quickly. Only sending way syce.”
“You clear off ahead.” Harley spoke swiftly to the native groom who stood gaping. “Now then.” He gathered the reins up into one brown hand and stood leaning against the dangling stirrup. “What do you want? Spit it out!”
“Sahib!” The black eyes in the wrinkled face were weirdly alive. “Sahib, my Coward memsahib’s ayah. Padre-sahib saying send Beena ’way, she wicked womans . . . she heathen womans. My saying, my saying ehmen, my kelistian if sahib wants me be. Andrew, he very bad mans. He hating Beena. He trying kill Beena. He telling sahib you very holy mans, why you want wife? You not want wife. You kill wife!” Beena’s eyes suddenly started out of her head, and she drew in her breath with a hiss.
“What?”
“I telling truly, sahib.” Beena stretched out a claw-like hand from under her chuddah and caught hold of her right ear. “Padre-sahib mad, sahib. All day, all night, praying and beating. Saying, I very sinning having wife. Lord Jesus, take ’way wife. Andrew saying, ‘You pray hard, Lord Jesus taking ’way wife.’ All times Andrew running in jungle and picking bad flower. Putting in dinner. Memsahib dying.” Beena flung her chuddah over her head and began to weep quietly and hoarsely.
“Good God! Don’t! Go on!” Harley stooped and dragged at the heaving shoulder.
“Memsahib trying run ’way. But bungalow too far. Andrew catching and bringing back. Sahib coming; sahib helping.” Beena clawed at the khaki sleeve.
“Yes, but how can I?” Harley ground his teeth suddenly and drove his free hand into his pocket. A day’s march from anywhere. He might go back and have a scene with Paul and get a knife in his back from Andrew that would effectually finish him. And then what use would he be? No, whatever was done would have to be done with the most tremendous care. But how much time was there? He put a few searching questions.
“Sometimes Andrew not finding flower, then memsahib better,” said Beena, wiping her old eyes with the back of a skinny hand. “Memsahib very much sleeping. Sometimes Beena giving dinner when Andrew gone out. Then memsahib waking and very much crying, ‘Beena, take me ’way.’” Beena began to weep again.
“What sort of a memsahib is your memsahib?” Harley, with a feeling of relief at his heart—for Beena’s last words showed plainly that anything that was being administered was only in the nature of a soporific—spoke curiously. Before he thought out what he was going to do, and whatever he was going to do would require a good deal of thinking out first, he would find this out. Suddenly he felt he must know.
“My memsahib very tiny memsahib,” said Beena, and she made a graphic gesture with her free hand. “My memsahib got tiny face and tiny feets. Beena very much loving memsahib,” ended Beena, her old face grotesquely screwed up again.
“Oh!” And Harley fell abruptly silent. Then he was right, because he had always felt pretty certain that Paul’s wife was the girl he had thought she was. And now he must get on, because it was getting late. Already the afternoon sun was slanting through the huge trees, and he would have his work cut out to get back before it was too dark to see his hand in front of his face. “Look here, I’ll come back.” He spoke reassuringly to the old woman. “Take care of your memsahib, and don’t worry. I’ll be back to-morrow without fail. And meanwhile . . .”
And then Harley stood very still. Beena, with her old finger held to her lips, had shrunk back into the undergrowth.
“Sahib! sahib going,” she hissed, her voice coming weirdly and whistlingly through the leaves.
And like lightning Harley was in the saddle again. Thank God he had kept his horse. Far, far down the path he had just come along a little figure was moving. It stood as if staring, and then turned back again. It was much too far away to have seen Beena, or him either for the matter of that, as he was standing against a dark background; but still, it was a warning. Harley pressed his heels against his horse’s flanks and galloped on again. Beena would see that things were all right for the next twelve hours, and then he would do something. But what? What? . . .
Harley galloped until his horse’s labouring breath brought him to himself. If he was to get back to Kharghar that night he must consider the animal between his knees. He drew rein, and leaning forward, patted the horse apologetically on his neck. “Sorry, old chap,” he said, and then he turned round and glanced back along the path he had come. His syce was nowhere to be seen—not to be wondered at either, considering the pace at which they had come along. He would wait for him here. Harley slid quietly from the saddle. “Here” was a beautiful little clearing in the middle of the forest; green and quiet, and overhung with luxuriant vegetation. Extraordinarily quiet; only the whistling of the breath through the horse’s inflating and deflating nostrils broke the completeness of the silence. He would tie the animal up for a bit, he thought, and wait there until the syce caught them up. Meanwhile he would have a stroll round and smoke a pipe at the same time How wonderfully quiet it was . . . and Harley, blowing a cloud of smoke out through his nostrils, left his horse quietly cropping, and started to wander through the dense greenery. And how beautiful, too! Here the Flame of the Forest hung in great luxuriant cascades from the tranches over his head; the grass under his feet was soft like a padded carpet. Everything suddenly seeming to look more beautiful .. . as if Nature was putting forth a profound effort . . . to do homage . . . Harley suddenly stopped dead, the trailing branch that he was dragging aside still held in his hand.
Just ahead of him, sitting on the trunk of a tree flung across the pathway was a man. Oddly dressed, Harley absorbed that, although on the man the clothes really did not look odd. Something loose and flowing, anyhow. Harley did not take much notice of it then, but he remembered it afterwards. What riveted his attention then was the man’s occupation. He was listening, apparently, anyhow leaning forward as if he were listening, to two large langoor monkeys. Four eyes, full of a despairing melancholy, were fixed on this man’s face. Two mouths, oddly human in their sensitive mobility, were sending forth a little sibilant caressing sound. And then one of them, alarmed, thrust out a grey-bearded chin, and both were off, uttering hoarse cries of fear as they slung themselves up the nearest tree-trunk, and flung themselves across the maze of branches interlaced over Harley’s head.
“I’m sorry . . . I’m afraid I’ve . . .” For some reason that he could not explain to himself Harley spoke apologetically as he walked out into the open, and for the same reason the pipe in his mouth was abruptly whipped out of it.
“Not at all . . . it is sad how these wild creatures . . .” The man seated on the trunk turned quietly round on it and spoke with a hand held out. “Sit down. Why have you put away your pipe? I don’t object to it in the least.”
“Oh, thanks, I don’t feel very keen.” Harley spoke stammeringly. Who on earth was this fellow who spoke like someone very big indeed, and yet who looked like a tramp? And yet not like a tramp. His hands and feet were quiet, and still, and beautiful. Harley sat down beside him, feeling oddly shaken.
“You are late on your way, are you not?” The man spoke after a short pause, during which Harley sat a little hunched, his head sunk in his hands. What on earth was the matter with him? He felt as if he wanted to weep and howl and rave all in one. Anyhow, to let go, because it wouldn’t matter if he did—here . . .
“Yes, I am a little late.” And then out it all came. Harley could never remember afterwards quite what he had said, and sometimes he wondered if he had spoken at all. But he must have done, because the man was answering him.
“Yes, I know Paul Coward, and his wife, too.” The man fell silent again.
“What on earth shall I do about it?” Harley swung round. He wanted to see this man’s face.
He must have done so already, but he couldn’t remember it, and he would want to describe it to Hay.
But when he turned round again there was no one beside him on the tree-trunk at all. Harley stared, not believing his eyes. But the man had been there—he had seen him! He had been talking to him. Had he? Or was the whole thing a dream? What on earth was the matter with him? Had he got a touch of the sun? He flung his hand up to his topee. No, it was there all right. Ah! but what was that? Harley took down his hand from his pith helmet, and stood listening. Suddenly he was a little boy again, leaning out of a balcony in Whitehall, taken to see the King going to open Parliament. He had passed, but it was still going on ahead of him. Just like that . . . chorus after chorus of jubilant sound as the King came into sight. Birds, though, this time . . . not human beings. But birds alive, tingling with rapture, just as Harley himself had tingled with rapture, when fat and wedged into his sailor suit he had leaned from the narrow balcony shouting with all his tiny strength, “The King of Glory passes on His way.” Harley, without knowing that he did so, whipped off his hat and stood motionless, his eyes straining into the undergrowth ahead of him.
And then? Then what? Then in some mysterious way the old dâk bungalow again, and his servant running to meet him.
“Hallo, Harley! You’re back earlier than I expected. How’s the parson?” Hay shouting cheerfully to him from the depths of a long chair. And Harley, still feeling oddly shaken, responding equally cheerfully. But as he moved about his room that night he thought it all over again, and a little uncertainly this time. It had all seemed real enough then . . . but still . . . Anyhow, ten grains of quinine wouldn’t hurt him. He would take it at once . . . just to be on the safe side.
It was long after midnight before Harley Poole got off to sleep that night. But when he did get off to sleep, he slept with the quiet placidity of a child. Everything had suddenly become quite clear to him. He, in some way, was meant to go to the rescue of Paul Coward’s wife. Rescue sounded theatrical and rather foolish. Probably that ayah had enormously exaggerated things; but in any event things at that tumbledown bungalow were not right, and he was going there to try to make them so.
Colonel Hay was derisive when Harley told him of his change of plans.
“It doesn’t affect me, as you know, because in any event my leave was up on Saturday,’’ he said. “But you’ve got another month if you care to take it. You don’t mean to say that you’re going to hang about that filthy place with a lot of native Christians tumbling over you? You’re mad . . . you’ll be as dotty as the padre before you’ve done with it.” Colonel Hay was fuming into his cup of coffee.
But Harley Poole had made up his mind, and when he had done that there was nothing more to be said. The only thing now was to tell his old servant a little of what he intended to do, and he called him into his bedroom to do it.
“We are going into tents for a little while, Akbar,” he said, speaking in the vernacular. “Some way from here, in the middle of the Ronaghar Forest.”
“Hain, sahib.” Akbar’s dark bearded face was impassive.
“See that they go on ahead as soon as they are ready for transport, Akbar.”
“Hain, sahib.” Akbar raised his hand respectfully to his forehead.
“We shall go alone. Colonel Hay Sahib returns to Karnmore to-morrow.”
“Hain, sahib.” Akbar’s dark face was impassive.
“Well, I think that’s all. Do you know the Ronaghar Forest at all, Akbar?” There was a flicker of a smile under the close-cropped moustache as Harley put the question. These fellows were the very devil in the way they betrayed no emotion. If he had told Akbar that they were going to start off for Siberia that afternoon he would probably have only said, “Hain, sahib.” . . . “Do you know it at all?” he said, repeating the question curiously.
“Hain, sahib. Very mad padre-sahib living there. Killing wife slowly, slowly.” Akbar grinned confidentially as he imparted this piece of information.
Harley swung round abruptly, and began to dive into the recesses of his suit-case. By gad! Akbar knew it already. How on earth did these fellows find things out? But he was not going to discuss it with his servant. Only it made things easier that he should know it already, also it meant that it was probably true.
“We must put a stop to that, then, Akbar, mustn’t we?” Harley swung round from his suit-case and looked the old Mohammedan straight in the eyes.
“Hain, sahib,” said Akbar, smiling as if with an inward content. Was it not time that the dirty, low-caste servant masquerading as a Christian should get his deserts? he thought. And he would get them from the hands of the sahib—-his sahib, who had won the Kadir cup only a short six months before. A fitting end to a hog Mahar. Akbar grinned under his curling black beard as he wended his way across the dusty compound.
But as, late that afternoon, Harley found himself again in the depths of the beautiful forest, all his disquiet and misgiving seemed to return, and this time with renewed force. If only he could see that . . . half unconsciously he turned in his saddle. And then he uttered an exclamation of pleasure.
“By Jove! just the person I wanted to see,” he exclaimed, and he slid excitedly down to the ground. “I was just wondering.” He flung the reins to his syce. “I say, can you spare me a minute?” he said; and he turned to walk into the deep greenness of the little copse with one hand thrust nervously into his pocket. This fellow . . . he had such an air of being in authority, and yet. . . Harley spoke hurriedly and confidentially. “I say, I don’t know how much I told you last night,” he said. “In fact, did I tell you anything at all?” Harley broke off abruptly and stared.
“I can spare you as much time as you want,” said the stranger quietly. “I heard you calling me, and that was why I waited.”
“Did you? Why, I had no idea I spoke. How odd . . . Well, it’s like this . . .” And then Harley plunged into the very middle of it all. It was so easy to tell things to this man, he seemed to understand . . . to grasp. . . .
“Yes, you are doing the right thing in going.” The stranger spoke without the slightest hesitation. “But don’t forget, Major Poole, that there will be dangers. Many and manifold. ‘We wrestle against principalities . . . against powers. . . .’” The stranger hesitated and seemed to sigh.
“Dangers! I shall rather enjoy them.” Harley felt like a boy again as he put his hand round to his hip-pocket. “Since the war one’s got rather stale. Well, I’ll get on my way . . . I say . . .” And Harley suddenly coloured deeply under the tan.
“Yes?” The stranger smiled.
“Well—you know, you rather remind me of someone I saw once in France. Most people would think me quite dotty even to say such a thing, but I believe you’ll understand. I was wounded pretty badly, I believe; anyhow it seemed a long time till the stretcher-bearers came along. And while I was waiting someone came and stooped over me . . . I have never forgotten . . . his expression. Well . . . you rather remind me . . .” Harley suddenly stopped dead.
“Yes?”
“You’ll think me a most awful fool . . . but would you . . . before I go on?”
Harley suddenly dragged off his topee and dropped quietly down on one knee. And above the extended hands the stranger was smiling—a tender, comprehending smile. This man was very dear to him. . . . He was so rarely recognized. He dropped his hands quietly on to the dark hair.
And as Harley went on his way again, he felt extraordinarily cheerful. What was there about that man? . . . He was so . . . Quite unlike anyone he had ever met, anyhow. And then he forgot all about everything else in his sudden excitement. There was Paul, and by himself, by Jove! What an extraordinary stroke of luck!
Paul had the affrighted, bewildered look of the sleep-walker , as Harley hailed him.
“Dear me . . . I had no idea . . .” He blinked up through the straggling hair that fell lankly across his forehead.
“No, I don’t suppose you had. You won’t have any ideas beyond a plot six feet by four if you persist in going about without a topee. Why on earth do you do it, man?”
“Our Indian brothers and sisters do not wear topees,” replied Paul simply.
“No, of course they don’t, because they’re accustomed to the climate,” retorted Harley; “but you’re not, and you oughtn’t to do it. You’ll have sunstroke if you don’t look out.”
“I have had it,” replied Paul simply.
“Have you, though?” Harley slipped down from his horse. That explained it then. Paul really was off his chump. He glanced at him a little curiously.
“Yes, and the doctor who attended me said that I ought to go home. I smote him with my open hand,” said Paul. “Because I knew that I had not had it. It was a grievous affliction sent me from the Lord.”
“Yes?” said Harley sympathetically. The man was evidently quite dotty—at any rate for the moment. And the more he wandered about under the glaring sun the more dotty he would become. Therefore he would now induce him to sit down under a tree until the sun got down a bit, and while he did so he would try to find out how the land lay.
“I have sinned grievously,” went on Paul, dropping down on to a little patch of grass under a huge banyan-tree. “My soul has lain among the husks.” He began to sob convulsively.
“Oh, I don’t suppose it has really . . . at least not nearly as badly as you think it has,” said Harley, with a sort of jolly sympathy. “Yes, lead the horse about for a bit, Dugarroo. Now, then, spit it out, Paul. I may be able to help you.” He dropped down on to the grass beside the huddled figure.
And Paul poured it all out, and Harley watched him curiously. Absolutely off his crumpet obviously. And then he suddenly paled, as Paul, kneeling up, his strained face working, was speaking gaspingly.
“And she, she who has seduced me from my true vocation, she to-day will tread the awful path of expiation alone. Andrew, that man of God, that man who has walked with me even as Christ walked with His disciples, he will set her feet upon that path.”
And Harley did not wait to hear more. Shouting to his syce to stay where he was and watch the padre-sahib, he flung himself into the saddle. Paul’s incoherent outpourings had told him so much, that Andrew was making something out of all this. Paul was dotty. A dotty man would do anything, especially one of Paul’s type. His back was scarred with what looked like the marks of a scourge. He had displayed it to Harley’s horrified gaze. Only, pray God that he would be in time! He dug his heels into his horse’s streaming flanks.
And as he tore up the broken, crumbling path, and took the shallow steps on to the verandah two at a time, he literally did pray aloud. It was so vital that he should be in time . . . Penelope, he could remember her name. He let out a powerful kick at the closed door.
But the room was empty. Gasping, he flung himself across it. The bathroom—another closed door. He sent it open with a fierce shove of his powerful shoulder.
“Sahib!” It was a cry, hardly human, that came from the muffled, struggling figure in the corner.
“Sahib! . . . quickly! . . . The old empty well.” Beena, with great weals across her face, from where the rope had cut her, was stretching out a cramped quivering finger. “Quickly, sahib! . . .”
And Harley was out at the little broken-down door that gave on to the back verandah before Beena had done speaking. It was like a scene in a film, he thought stupidly, as he took the three steps at a jump and tore across the dusty compound. Three miserable fowls squawked themselves out of his way: he thought, with a throb of amusement, that they probably represented Paul’s next three substantial meals. The empty well—the amusement died in horror. There it was, unmistakably in front of him . . . the old broken, but well-trodden ramp up which the patient bullocks had wended many a weary mile . . . the round bricked opening to it, overgrown with ferns and masses of trailing creeping things.
“I say, is anybody down there?” Harley hung over the little circular brick wall and shouted. “Anybody down there?” . . . The words came up hollowly and mockingly from the blackness.
“My goodness, what am I going to do?” Harley spoke aloud with a sort of despair. She might not be down there at all. And in any event . . . the very idea . . . wells had always frightened him ever since he had been a little boy. And then he knew that of course there was only one thing to be done, and obviously he the only person to do it, and he set about it, quietly and methodically.
The well was bricked, and the bricks were old and rather crumbling. Snakes had a horrid way of living between bricks; Harley thought of it every time he put in his straining, clawing fingers and took them out again. So had scorpions . . . and you often found the air at the bottom of a well foul. Besides . . . if by any chance he found what he was looking for, how would he get it out? One person could climb, but not with another person in his arms. Besides, Andrew might find out, and kill Beena, and then who would know that they were there . . .? One horrid possibility after another fled through his mind. But at last he was down, and with a kicked-out groping foot he felt round the pitchy darkness behind him. And then his groping foot touched something, and he let go the crumbling brickwork.
It was Penelope, obviously. It was odd how Harley never doubted it, although he could not see her. Perhaps if he got her plumb under the tiny opening miles above them though: he dragged her very gently towards it. And then, as his straining eyes got more used to the blurred blackness in which he found himself, he could see her more plainly. It was she, of course, the tiny little pale face all white, and tinier much than he remembered it . . . the bluey-black eyelids tightly shut. But living, evidently, he laid a quick hand on her heart. Andrew’s courage must have failed him at the last, and he must have carried her down—natives were like cats. And now, what? Harley smiled a little cynically under his cropped moustache. Sit down and wait for death? Certainly, if it became obvious that it was the only thing to do; but until it was obvious he was jolly well going to do something more practical. And then he knew that death was miles away—two tiny heads were blackly silhouetted against the pale circle above him.
“Sahib!” It was Akbar’s voice, fierce and agonized.
“All right, Akbar.” Harley’s voice went echoing up cheerfully and reassuringly, but he was conscious of the prickling of tears behind his eyelids all the same. How the devil had Akbar managed to get there so quickly? And then he caught his breath— Akbar was coming down. He was; like a monkey, with huge unhesitating strides. There was no doubt they were the queerest people: Harley watched him with an amused smile. But the smile was lost in a quick intake of breath as Harley felt his servant groping for his hand.
“Sahib.” Akbar’s tears were raining down.
“That’s all right, Akbar. Now then, we must get the memsahib up somehow. How? Harley stooped and lifted the little figure in his arms. He had not done that yet, conscious of an odd shyness. But how light she was; and how tiny, held closely against his breast!
“We will secure the memsahib with my puggaree.” Akbar was rapidly unwinding the snowy swathings from his head. “The sahib will place the memsahib upon my shoulders and secure her there.” Akbar was gathering up the yards of dimly seen material from the ground.
“Are you sure it’s all right?” Harley spoke anxiously. Supposing his servant slipped? . . . Hadn’t he better . . .?
But Akbar was already holding out one limp white end, and after about five minutes’ careful binding, Harley stepped back with his heart in his throat. Supposing the crumbling sides . . .
But Akbar’s toes were tough and like a monkey’s, and after what seemed like an eternity, Harley saw the tiny white circle above him blocked up, and then Akbar climbed over the edge and was gone. And then it was his turn—a gruesome business, hanging on by breaking nails and feet that clawed and slipped. But at last he was up, too, and they stood a little dejected group together. Akbar still with Penelope tied on to his shoulders, a Penelope with limply swinging hands . . . Beena with hands held out, wailing, wailing.
“Shut up, ayah.” Harley spoke with the swift reaction from fear to irritation. “Look here, you stay here, Akbar,” he said, “and I’ll go and see if it’s all clear at the bungalow.”
Akbar was grinning. “All clear, sahib,” he said in halting English; “all servants running ’way. Andrew running ’way. Padre-sahib coming back, very mad, all the time screaming. My making bundobast for sahib. My fetching doctor-sahib for memsahib.”
“Yes, but you won’t find a doctor-sahib under about forty miles.” Harley spoke with the irritation of sudden indecision. Why had he mixed himself up in this, he was thinking. Paul quite dotty, and his wife drugged almost to the point of death; and an ayah who squalled. “Oh, my sainted aunt!” He spoke fiercely under his breath.
But Akbar was already leading the way. “My finding doctor-sahib very quickly,” he said. “My knowing doctor-sahib.”
Father Bernard was small, and he came up on to the verandah an insignificant little figure enough. But his grasp of the situation was instant.
“Both will do well,” he said, as he came out of the two sick-rooms. “But both will need care and watching. Will you be able to remain here, Major Poole?”
“Where on earth have you come from?” Harley ignored the first question in his frank astonishment at the turn things were taking. Akbar had gone straight out of the bungalow and fetched this man in. Where on earth had he found him? He put the question in bewilderment.
“Most of the natives in this part of the world know me, Major Poole,” said Father Bernard, with a little quiet smile; “and all know that I am anxious to help where I can. Here I can be of use. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Coward ought to be moved for at least a week or ten days from now. They both require absolute quiet. Mr. Coward, in addition to a slight touch of the sun, is obviously in the last stages of nervous exhaustion: Mrs. Coward has been drugged with opium. Both need watching and constant care. I shall be in the neighbourhood for the next week or so, and can devote myself to them. If you can remain and get that good servant of yours to run the bundobast of the house all will be easy. I gather from Mrs. Coward’s ayah that there has been some rascality at work here.”
“There most decidedly has.” And then Harley described what he had seen and what had just taken place. “It was only a blessed mercy that I happened to be at hand,” he said briefly, “otherwise it might have gone very differently with Mrs. Coward. It was a most extraordinary thing the hold that that native Christian fellow had got over Coward. I knew Coward at home, of course; he was always one of these rather neurotic chaps. He ran one of these new-fangled Churches—you probably know the sort of thing. There’s a great movement on at home now—Anglo-Catholics they call themselves. Personally, it seems to me to be a lot of energy misdirected. However, that’s only my opinion. It suits women . . . you’ve only got to go into one of these churches to see that.”
“Our Lord had always a very tender sympathy with women,” said Father Bernard simply; and he glanced out to where the evening sun came filtering through the dense trees.
“Yes, I know He had.” Harley suddenly felt extraordinarily interested and anxious to talk to this man. Everything was going on all right inside . . . couldn’t they have a buck? He seemed so—so easy to talk to. So receptive. “I say, let’s have a talk about things.” Harley spoke eagerly, like a boy.
“We will, by all means. But first . . . will you just see your servant and find out if he can fix up a cook and get in some sort of provisions? In a place like this there are generally buffaloes, and fowls, and probably a certain amount of stores are already here. Akbar will know, and the ayah is unusually intelligent.”
“I will, of course.” Harley walked quickly out to the back, and in a couple of minutes was on the verandah again. “By Jove, they are a wonderful race!” he said, laughing. “Akbar has got down to it already. A relation of his apparently hangs out near here, home on leave from somewhere near Jhansi, and he’s hard at it. The kitchen is simply humming with preparation for what promises to be an elaborate four-course dinner. They’ve caught a buffalo with its calf and tied it up to the back verandah. That means plenty of excellent milk for both our patients, Father Bernard.” Harley laughed joyfully. Somehow he felt oddly lighthearted, strangely at peace with the world. Here he was being of some use to some one, of some real value. That child in there—he had saved her from an awful death. His old friend—he had put him on the way to recovery. He had still a fortnight of his leave left to him, he could devote it to completing what he had begun, and when he did at last go back to his own station, he could go back with a feeling of satisfaction.
“Well, Major Poole, and what did you want to say to me?” Harley turned, still smiling, to meet the luminous gaze of the man at his side. Father Bernard was smiling too, quietly smiling.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Harley swung round on his heel. “You seem so—so easy to talk to. And when one gets down to it, it is fearfully important—you know the sort of thing—religion, I mean. After all, we’re here for an extraordinary little while, and there’s something ahead of us—there must be—something pretty big, too. Why don’t we think about it more? Make it more a matter of ordinary conversation. Why should it be so hedged round with a sort of self-consciousness? After all, when Christ was on earth He took it all as a matter of course. Why has it come to be like this? Why?” Harley suddenly stumbled and stopped dead. How oddly he was talking. He shot a swift glance at the man at his side.
But apparently Father Bernard did not think it was odd. He was watching a wood-pigeon preening itself and cooing on one of the lower branches of a plane-tree.
“The Church has lost her grip of the people, Major Poole,” he said, after a little pause. “In a day of material wonders such as we live in now, religion as it stands will no longer satisfy. It should do infinitely more. Think of what it used to do! The people of this world are weary for a Sign. They will not be content with what they are offered. Think of wireless, for instance. Is a man who for a few shillings can fix up in his sitting-room an instrument that can convey to him, and that without any apparent material aid, a marvel of sound from miles away, going to be content with a form of religion that so far as signs and wonders are concerned is a dead thing? Christ laid hold of the Word of God and made it speak. Until our clergy are able to do that they are beating their heads against a stone.”
“Then you don’t care for this modern way of going on? All this set-out about forms and ceremonies and laying such tremendous stress on details?” Harley Poole was watching Father Bernard’s face. It was heavily overspread with sadness.
“They brought to Him those that were sick, and He healed them,” said Father Bernard quietly. “What is the Church about, Major Poole? Christ gave the dual command. How can they reconcile their almost slavish adherence to the one, and their almost total disregard of the other? Faith without works. What is the use of it? Who is going to accept it? Christ walked about the earth followed by a little band of men—rough, uneducated and simple men, but men blazing with the spirit of God.” Father Bernard stopped abruptly.
“Do tell me what you think of it all.” Deeply stirred, Harley walked to the edge of the verandah and leant his elbows on the wooden rail of it. “Coward, for instance. Up to the eyes in all this modern business of formalism. Symbolism he would call it. It’s his life. He would go to the stake for it.”
“Mr. Coward is one of a large number of thoughtful men who, conscious of the fact that the body to which they belong has lost its power, is endeavouring to restore it by a passionate appeal to the mystic,” said Father Bernard. “Inherent in every one of us is a craving for the supernatural. Clothe the vestment with a supernatural meaning, the form and ceremony with the same, and you can do a great deal with the groping soul. It does not stop to ask itself if anything so white hot with power should need such clothing. It only sees something in which it can slake its thirst, and it slakes it and remains slavishly content.”
“But the people who run the Church of England must know that it’s all wrong,” said Harley, raising his head from his hands and staring down at the man in front of him. How queerly he was dressed, and how his eyes glowed! Who was he? he wondered.
“They do know it, Major Poole,” said Father Bernard. “Does one trouble passionately to defend what one knows to be the Truth? The time is coming when they will know it even more than they do now. I often think of that. The trembling soul, spending a life of perhaps three-score years in faithful religious observance. And yet stumbling terrified on out into the Unknown, sent on its way, perhaps propped up with the last rites of the Church. And yet only having to hold out a hand to be reassured. Waiting to be gathered in by a Father who is only tenderly amused by the panic; as those of us who are fathers would be tenderly amused by the panic of a child.”
“I say, do tell me who you are.” Harley turned round and stood with his long back propped up against the rickety woodwork of the verandah. “You talk like a parson, and yet you don’t. Don’t mind my asking, and of course don’t say if you’d rather not.”
“I don’t mind in the least.” Father Bernard’s rather wrinkled face was creased with a smile. “I came out here, Major Poole, about five years ago, one of a band of clergy who were visiting India on a Mission. While I was out here I was led to think that the way in which we were evangelizing India was not the way in which we were meant to do it. So I cut adrift from the parent Society and left the beaten track. I preach the Gospel where and when I can, and where and when I can I heal. God has been very good to me in imparting to me a measure of His power in this respect.”
“I see.” Harley was silent. Should he ask this man if he too had come across that other man in this jungle. He deliberated swiftly. It would sound so crazy perhaps—it would be wiser to leave it alone. And then he decided to risk it. Father Bernard did not seem the sort of man who would think out-of-the-way things crazy. He put the question almost shyly.
“Yes, I have seen him,” responded Father Bernard readily. “And you, too, Major Poole; you have indeed been blessed.”
“Yes, I know, that’s what I felt,” replied Harley eagerly. “I say, who is he? Do you know? I always get the same sort of feeling when I see him . . . it’s difficult to describe it; but I dare say you know it.”
“Yes, I expect I do, Major Poole,” said Father Bernard quietly.
“And I always see him . . . at least I have done the few times I have seen him, twice I think it is, just when I feel I’m at the end. . . . Do you know what I mean?—not knowing quite which way to turn. Sick of thinking what is the best thing to do. And then it all suddenly seems quite clear. It’s most extraordinary.” Harley suddenly relapsed into a profound reverie. What an odd turn things were taking, he thought. Pouring out his soul to this comparative stranger. What on earth would Father Bernard think of him?
But Father Bernard had moved away from his side, and was walking quickly down the verandah. He was needed again. Paul’s quavering voice was shrilly uplifted.
How extraordinary it all was! Harley thought so with renewed force as he lay a long figure sprawled out just outside Penelope’s door. Dinner was over, and Father Bernard had gone back to Paul. All round the funny broken-down bungalow lay the pitchy blackness of the jungle; every now and then a flying fox would skim in under the matted shade of the verandah, wheel noiselessly round the globe of the punkah-proof lamp, and disappear again. No wonder Paul had gone dotty. This life, coupled with an obsession that he had done wrong in marrying, was enough to send a man off the rails. And what about Penelope? . . . That little funny thing he had seen at home would not be built to stand this sort of thing either. How tiny she was! Harley had already spent a good deal of time that evening in staring down at her as she lay stretched out very straight under a rezais in the middle of the little iron bed in the middle of the matted floor. Paul had evidently collected a certain amount of furniture round him, because there were chairs and tables and beds. But precious little else, thought Harley, his mouth twisted ruefully. What would a girl fresh from the solid comforts of Clapham Park think of it? And then he started: Beena had crept out of the open door close to his feet.
“Going for food, sahib,” she said. “Memsahib drinking littly, littly milk, and then sleeping ’gain.”
“All right, Beena. I’ll carry on till you come back.” Harley heaved himself up, a tall, powerful figure in the lamplight. “I shan’t be going to bed to-night, so take your time about it.” He smiled at the little shrunken old woman; she had done jolly well. Many native women would have bolted long before this. He turned quietly into the sparsely furnished room. Penelope was still lying in the middle of the narrow bed, only not quite in the same position.
He tiptoed out again. It was taking rather an unfair advantage to watch somebody who was asleep, he thought shyly, and then he swung abruptly round again.
“God, I am so afraid, so fearfully, fearfully afraid.” It came in an almost inaudible murmur from under the rezais.
Heavens! She had slept it off a bit, then. Harley trod quietly back.
“There is nothing to be afraid of now,” he said, “nothing whatever. Nobody can either touch you or hurt you.”
“Why can’t they?” Penelope had shrunk down quite under the rezais this time. Her whisper came faintly out from under the padded rim of it.
“Because you have got people here looking after you,” said Harley, and he drew nearer to the little bed.
“Where is Paul?” Penelope’s voice had a parched quality in it.
“He is asleep in his room.”
“Where is Andrew?” A tiny hand came up, and the rezais was drawn up a little higher.
“He has gone.”
“He will come back for me. Sometime when I am quite asleep he will take me away for his own, and keep me. He has said so.”
“He will do nothing of the kind.” A dreadful still fury woke in Harley’s voice. So that was it, was it? Devil? . . . He came quite near and sat down on the bed.
“You are one of Andrew’s friends. Now it is coming. Beena has gone, and there is no help for me. They come to the services, and one day they will kill Beena. They have killed Beena now. I am all alone with Andrew.” Penelope’s voice rose and died again in an awful shriek under the muffling rezais.
“Rubbish! Come along! Let me take down that rezais, and you will see that I am not by any means our friend Andrew.” Grimly reassuring, Harley laid a firm hand on the padded quilt. But once he had got hold of Andrew . . . his breath came sharply through his teeth.
“No, no! . . . God help me! . . . No, no! . . Penelope was writhing and twisting. She gathered the rezais tightly in her hands and held it closely down to her sides. “No, no!” She was shrieking in wildest panic.
“Come, come . . . don’t be a silly little girl.” Harley slipped off the edge of the low bed and knelt down on the matted floor. “Look here, let go of that rezais and look at me. You’re perfectly safe now—no mortal thing can touch you. I’m here; a very nice doctor man is here, too. Andrew has gone—for good. There now—what do you think of that? Let me see your face, and then you will see that everything is all right. Let go of that rezais—that’s it . . . Now, can you see me?” Harley drew the padded quilt gently down from the small white face.
“Everything looks funny.” By the dim light of the lamp on the wall Harley could see the shadowed eyes and the contracted pupils of them. Penelope was peering out—gropingly, uncertainly.
“Yes, it does now, but it very soon won’t.” Harley was conscious of an odd twist of his heart at the sight of the little shrunken face. She must have been through something, this child. He got up from the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Have a good look at me,” he said; “and I think that you’ll find that you’ve seen me before.”
“I can only see your face sailing about,” said Penelope weakly.
“Well, wait a minute, then, and it’ll probably get clearer.” Harley sat, a powerful figure in his shabby khaki coat, staring down at the little figure on the bed. Penelope’s gaze was becoming more coherent . . . more comprehensive.
“I begin to see.” She was lifting her cropped head from the pillow.
“That’s good.” Harley spoke in a voice of quiet satisfaction. Man-like, he detested anything in the way of drugging. There had been something awfully horrible, too, in that descent down into that well, the flaccid figure in his arms. But here was Penelope becoming normal again—the little seal’s head, with its shamefully cut hair.
“You’re the man that I met with Mary. The awfully kind man with the understanding mouth.” Penelope was speaking in a sort of breathless undertone. “I’ve always longed . . . I’ve always prayed . . .” Her voice died in her throat.
“Have you? Well, that’s very nice of you.” Taken completely aback, Harley was smiling under his short moustache. So she remembered him, did she? The funny little thing! How nice of her, because they had only been together for a minute or two. “Well, so you see that I’ve come to take care of you,” he said, “to look after you, so that nothing can hurt you. Not Andrew or anybody else.”
“He said that he would come and take me away with him.” Penelope suddenly sat up and threw out her hands with a little shriek.
Harley caught hold of them swiftly. “He would have to come over my dead body, then,” he said, grimly; “so dismiss any idea of that from your mind. Now lie down, and go to sleep again, and I will stay with you until you do. Or until ayah comes back,” as a muffled figure padded silently into the room.
“No, no! . . . you stay, and ayah.” Penelope was still sitting up, clutching frenziedly at the strong brown hands. “Ayah, it’s the sahib from England, a wonderful sahib, who makes everything safe. Don’t let him go! Don’t let him go! Ayah, ayah, hold him here.” Penelope had begun to cry wildly.
“Ari, baba.” Beena, with her wise old eyes alert, was coming swiftly across the room. “Beena sees the beautiful sahib, the wonderful sahib from the England. He will stay with Beena’s memsahib till she goes sweetly to sleep. Staying, sahib,” exhorted Beena in a fierce undertone.
So Harley, distinctly amused in spite of himself, sat on the narrow bed with the tiny clutching hands closely imprisoned in his own. And Beena, hunched up on the matting, with only her brilliant, bead-like eyes peering out from her chuddah, like a wise old owl, watched them with satisfaction. This was a sahib . . . a real sahib. Akbar, his own servant, had entertained the whole kitchen with accounts of his prowess. And her memsahib was a little soft memsahib who needed a strong sahib like this to defend her. “Padre-sahib quickly dying,” thought Beena, with the ruthlessness of the Oriental, her bright eyes dwelling on the two seen faintly through the lamplight.
But Paul Coward showed no signs of dying. In fact, in less than a week he was wonderfully himself again. Far more himself in reality than he had been when he had started out for the East. Father Bernard was constantly with him. He made the old construction bungalow his headquarters, clearing ruthlessly away, although with the greatest reverence, everything in the chapel that had been the scene of so much of Paul’s mental downfall.
“Anything that will remind him of the past is to be avoided,” he said to Harley; “and as there is not room for me in this bungalow unless we do use that old room at the end, we will just clear it and say nothing about it.”
So Paul drowsed and slept his way back to sanity, and he did it with a strange mental dependence on the little man who was constantly at his side. Father Bernard went in and out of the bungalow just as he wished; often he would start out in the early dawn with a few chupatties wrapped up in a big plantain-leaf, and come back when the big trees round the bungalow were full of noisily cawing crows settling uproariously off for their nights’ rest. But he always came back with a look of quiet serenity, and after he had gone into Paul’s room and spent a little time with him there, he would come out and join Harley on the verandah. Harley, immaculate in his dinner clothes, was always glad to see the little man.
“But when is Mrs. Coward going to join us out here?” Father Bernard spoke one evening after this quiet, uneventful life had been going on for about a week. “It is time that she took up the ordinary routine again. I have heard from the Bishop, and he and Mrs. Mayhew are only too anxious to welcome both the Cowards directly they are both able to be moved. In my opinion they will be perfectly able to be moved in at most a week. Your leave terminates then, Major Poole, and you will require your excellent servant with you when you go. Also, this life is hardly the sort of life for a man who counts each moment of his hardly earned leave. You have been most good in the way you have devoted it to these two poor sick people.”
“Oh, I don’t know—I have been only too glad.” Harley moved a little uneasily in his long chair. “Have a drink, Father—no, I know it’s no use asking you. Attcha—yes, all the soda, Akbar.” Harley’s long fingers were closed rather tightly round the common bazaar tumbler.
“Well, but still”—Father Bernard’s shrewd eyes were on the long feet suddenly crossed and uncrossed—“it is time that Mrs. Coward made the effort. I see her daily, and she seems to me to be in excellent health. The life here, although dreadfully trying and full of nervous distress for her, has been in its extreme simplicity extremely beneficial. They have lived on the simplest and most wholesome fare. Far more beneficial than that very excellent dinner that I have no doubt will be served to us in another quarter of an hour or so.” Father Bernard laughed, very delightfully.
“Well, I managed to get a couple of geese to-day.” Harley Poole laughed, too, but there was no mirth in the laugh. “I went out soon after you left the bungalow, Father. There is no doubt that after a time this place does get on my nerves.” And Harley got abruptly up out of his chair and started to walk up and down the verandah.
“Does it? Well, in a way I can understand it.” Father Bernard folded his thin hands quietly over his brown cassock. “And in that event, Major Poole, I should say that it would be wise if you were to leave us at once. We can manage here with Mrs. Coward’s very excellent ayah and the cook that the good Akbar has obtained for us. The time is short now; at the end of next week we shall all be moving on. Go your way, Major Poole. Your work here is done.” And Father Bernard also got quietly up out of his chair.
“No, I can’t.” Harley’s reply came in a strangled undertone. “I’m not going to leave her. You don’t understand.” He came fiercely up to the little doctor and stared down at him. “That fellow along there.” Harley flung up his head and glared down the verandah. “He’s useless . . . worse than useless. The very thought of him . . .” Harley swung round and started to walk up and down again.
“He happens to be her husband, Major Poole.” There was something taut and resolute about Father Bernard’s little figure as he stood very still under the hanging lamp.
“I know. And anything more damnably incongruous I have never come across! Coward had no business to marry at all. These men with their snatching at the trappings of Rome and their casting aside of and jibbing at any of its real austerities! I’ve nothing but contempt for them.” Harley spoke in a sudden gust of passion.
And Father Bernard was silent. After all, what was there to say? The two people concerned must fight this thing out alone, but. . . . He came near and laid a gentle hand on the black sleeve.
But Harley shook it off with a muffled exclamation. This wasn’t the moment . . . he couldn’t stick . . . And then the merciful intervention of the commonplace came to the rescue, as it so often does in this disjointed world of ours.
“Khana taiyar kai!” (Dinner ready.) Akbar, immaculate in snowy starched coat and flaunting puggaree, was standing at the lean illumined oval of the dining-room door.
“Jove, these fellows! They would announce one’s dinner if the place was tumbling about one’s ears in an earthquake!” Harley laughed a little wildly. “After you, doctor-sahib . . . pass right along the car please.” Harley laughed again, stupidly this time, driving as he did so one trembling hand deep into his pocket.
And Father Bernard heard the laugh with distress. This poor fellow . . . and that child in there . . . and that other poor fellow along the verandah. How would it all end? He bent his head on his loose woollen gown and muttered his Latin grace sadly.
How would it all end? Harley asked himself the same question as, after tossing sleeplessly about on his newar bed for hours, he resigned himself to thought; lying long and lean under the sagging mosquito curtain. Penelope was his . . . as much his as a soft little bird would be his if it lay trapped in his hand. She did not know it yet—she did not know that every time she raised her rather round blue eyes to his face her heart lay revealed in their innocent depths. If she had said it aloud, it could not have been more evident. His visits to her room were a rapture, and now she was beginning not to mind showing it.
“Beena, the sahib!” Penelope, sitting up in bed, would pull her woolly coat a little closer round her neck and speak joyfully, beaming towards the door. “Beena will get you a chair, Major Poole. Yes, put it there, Beena. Now you can go away, Beena, and don’t come back for ages—shall we say an hour, Major Poole? Can you stay as long as an hour?” Penelope would look up like a confiding bird with her cropped head a little on one side.
“Yes, I should say I could. But why send Beena away?” Harley was chuckling to himself. “Let the old lady stay. She’s not in the way, and she can’t understand a word we say. Yes, you squat down there, Beena.” And Harley would make a quiet gesture of authority, and Beena would instantly obey it.
“Oh, but I’d rather have you all to myself!” Penelope at first had rebelled, but Harley had quenched the rebellion with a quiet smile.
“I know this country better than you do, Mrs. Coward,” he had said, “and believe me, these people have funny ideas, and it’s better not to run up against them.”
So Beena always remained, and she would sit like a hunched-up old bird, her back to the pair in the middle of the room. But all her old Oriental soul was agog with the romance that she scented—this beautiful sahib, and her little soft memsahib. Beena had never cared for Paul.
But for the last two or three days, Harley had begun to wish that Beena was not there. He hated himself for the wish. He flung himself at the throat of it as a man flings himself at the throat of the demon of drink. But it remained there all the same, fierce and insistent.
And Penelope voiced it one day, staring thoughtfully at the old brightly coloured back. Beena was highly delighted with a new chuddah she had bought from a passing boxwallah, and spent most of her days rolled up in it.
“You and I never seem to be alone, do we?” she said; and as she spoke her eyes lingered on the brown hands lying carelessly on the thick khakicord breeches.
“No, we don’t. But why should we be?” The fingers of one brown hand had quivered just a little, but Penelope did not see them.
“Oh, I don’t know! Only I’ve got that sort of feeling about you. Everyone else is in the way. Do you know it? Even Beena is.” Penelope spoke a little hesitatingly.
“Well—then . . . why not get up?” Harley crossed and uncrossed his long legs. “Father Bernard says that you are quite fit enough now. If you could get out on to the verandah it would do you good. A change—something new to look at. Those are the things that help people to get well, you know.” Harley smiled very kindly.
“Yes, I know, but I have a sort of feeling . . .” Penelope hesitated, flushing painfully. “I don’t want to see Paul,” she said, and the tears slowly gathered in her eyes. “And then as well as that, there is another feeling, too. I am fearfully afraid of Andrew. I don’t know why . . . I know he is gone really, and that I am quite safe here, but somehow I feel that I’m not. He will get me somehow—sometime.” Penelope began convulsively to cry.
“My dear child, he will not.” Harley leaned forward and quietly took the trembling fingers between his own. “No one can hurt you if I am here to look after you. And look here now, too, you need not see your husband yet, even if you do come out. He has not got on quite as quickly as you have really, although he is very fit considering all things. But Father Bernard thinks that the quieter he is kept the better. So that if you do come out it will only mean a quiet time with Father Bernard and me. It will do you good to get out of this room, believe me it will.”
“Will you stay with me all the time?” asked Penelope, her blue eyes searching.
“Yes, every instant of it,” said Harley, suddenly speaking fiercely. “And I’ll carry you out and tuck you up in the long chair, too. You’d like that . . . wouldn’t you?” Harley, not knowing that he had done so, had dropped the little hands and was standing up staring down on to the bed.
“I should worship it,” said Penelope, fervently.
“Come and see . . . it’s got it all cuddled up to it, like a baby. Oh, do come! . . . Oh, there you are, I couldn’t think where you were. Look, they’ve all come down again, all those monkeys. Aren’t they heavenly?” Penelope, with her eyes all alight and chuckling with a vast entertainment, was hanging far out over the verandah. It was a glorious day, crisp and chill with the chill of iced champagne. The sun came slanting down through the trees, flecking the dim verandah with patches of dancing light. Paul was not allowed on the verandah yet, because of the sun. Marvellously better, in fact almost himself again, he spent his days drowsing in a long cane chair in his darkened room.
“Mind your head. Don’t you remember that I told you that you must wear your topee after nine o’clock in the morning unless you were right under cover,” Harley Poole spoke after a little pause. “Oh, it’s those monkeys! Brutes! They always make me creep, they’re so like human beings. Look at that front one.” Harley’s face also broke up in laughter. “Wait a second. I left my plantain at chota hazri . . .” He was off down the verandah like a boy.
Left alone, Penelope stood very still. What was it about this man? What was it that made him so heavenly to be with? Why, it was because he understood, everything. A monkey to him was only a monkey—something that he didn’t care very much about; but she liked it, so he instantly thought what would be fun to her. To feed it would be fun. . . . Harley was back again with the plantain.
“Now watch.” He threw it deftly. “By Jove, aren’t they quick?” In a second the monkey had pounced on it, and, interspersed with horrid grimaces at Harley, was peeling it swiftly. Both the tall man and the girl beside him watched it silently. Penelope was not thinking about the monkey at all.
“He is tall,” she was saying to herself, “heavenly tall. I only come up to just below his shoulder.”
“Now they’re off.” With a shrill whoop the leader of the little squatting troupe of brown animals had started to sling itself up a tree. They all followed, and in a moment the leafy space in front of them was deserted.
“That was fun,” said Penelope, turning round. “Wasn’t it?” She looked up at the face towering over her.
“Great fun,” said Harley, and he stooped to flick a drifting leaf from off his canvas gaiters.
“Why is everything with you fun?” said Penelope, after a little pause. That was another thing about this man, you could say anything to him, knowing that he wouldn’t think you meant anything else by it.
“I can’t imagine,” said Harley; and this time he stooped again, groping, Penelope thought a little vaguely, for the leaf that he had already flicked away.
“Well, it is,” said Penelope with decision. “I felt it the instant I saw you. Do you remember that day when I met you outside the Vicarage and you walked home with me? And always, ever since that I have felt it. Whenever I have seen anything I liked or whenever I have been anywhere I liked, I have always wished you were there, too. Do you know that feeling?”
“Yes,” said Harley, with his eyes on the little face upturned to his.
“Well. I’ve even got it now,” declared Penelope. “And we are doing nothing at all . . . only just standing close to one another. Perhaps that has something to do with it,” she ended up innocently.
And Harley Poole’s strained nerves gave way in a great burst of laughter. He walked to the edge of the verandah and leant his elbows on it, mopping his eyes and still laughing. And then he blew his nose rather fiercely and walked back again.
“You know, you’ve got to get used to doing without me,” he said, and he said it very quietly.
“No,” said Penelope under her breath.
“But I say yes,” said Harley Poole, and he said it with one hand clenched in the pocket of his rough tweed coat. “I’ve been here ten days already, and you know Father Bernard fixed everything up for you to leave at the end of a fortnight. Even your passages are taken.”
“Yes, but I can’t go now.” Penelope suddenly got a queer, blinded look about her eyes. What was the matter with her? The day had started so joyfully. All the days had been joyful. Heavenly, sheltered days, eating as much as she wanted and sleeping as much as she wanted. A sort of groping of her way back to a real life again, not a life of horrors and terrors, but a life of joy and happiness. And whenever she had suddenly got afraid, someone strong and protecting by her side. Even in the middle of the night, once, screaming and panic-stricken, she had dragged at Beena rolled up in her rug beside her on the floor, and old Beena had only just had to stumble sleepily next door and he had come, looking somehow bigger than ever in his camel-hair dressing-gown. And his voice . . . hearing it Penelope had rolled over and clung to the kind, strong hand.
“Come, come, little girl. . . .” He had even put a gentle, stroking hand on her head.
“I can’t do without you.” Penelope said it again, obstinately this time.
“But you must,” said Harley Poole, and in the strong light his eyelids seemed to droop for an instant. “However, we are not going to talk about it now. There are four days yet, and they are going to be happy days. Now, to-day you can see your husband. Father Bernard said so before he left yesterday. He is practically himself again, and you can see him just for a few minutes.”
“No,” said Penelope, and her eyes again took on their funny blinded look.
“But, my dear child . . .” Harley drove both hands into his pockets this time and stood very still. “Oh, my God, why have I got to go through this?” His soul suddenly cried out.
“I had forgotten about him,” said Penelope, putting both hands up to her head, and catching hold of her ears.
“That may be, but he is there,” said Harley quietly.
“But he oughtn’t to be . . . he oughtn’t to be . . . I . . .” And then Penelope suddenly flung out her hands and rushed down the verandah. “Beena . . . Beena . . .!” she dashed into her bedroom calling wildly.
“Memsahib!” Beena, squatted on the ground cleaning Penelope’s white shoes, started to struggle up on to her old feet. “Why memsahib crying? Telling Beena. . . .” With a wealth of love in the old eyes, Beena held out her arms.
And Penelope fell into them sobbing. She needn’t say anything . . . Beena would know. Beena had lived with them and had seen Paul—Paul, who only cared about religious things by themselves, not sort of making them part of things so that you made the people round you happy. But keeping them separate . . . masses of services and fusses about what vestments you wore and even tiny little unimportant things like the Bread for Holy Communion; not simple brown or white bread like you had at meals at home that was in a way God’s Altar; because you couldn’t live at church and you did at home, so it was home that mattered; but something special, that no one ever saw anywhere else; and Penelope, her thoughts and emotions in a tumult, clung to her old ayah, sobbing.
And Beena crooned and soothed with the fullest understanding. She and Akbar had already discussed the situation in all its bearings in the shelter of the back verandah. And Akbar summed it up, in musical highflown Hindustani, the words coming burring out from between his bearded lips.
“Your sahib padre-sahib,” he said. “Padre-sahibs not taking wives. My padre-sahib not taking wives, my Mulvi very holy mans. Taking wives not thinking properly ’bout holy things. Wife disturbing.”
“My sahib very holy mans,” said Beena, instantly on the defensive.
“Holy mans,” agreed Akbar, pleasantly accommodating. “But not thinking ’bout wives. My Major-sahib good mans, and liking wives.” Akbar closed his lips with a gesture of finality.
And Beena held the little sobbing figure very closely to her, and stared out into the compound with lips compressed as closely as Akbar’s. How would it all end? Her beloved memsahib, she pressed her closer to her old breast.
Paul lay in the shadowed dimness of his matted room, also with his thoughts and emotions in a tumult. For the first time for weeks he seemed to be able to think with some coherence. And oddly enough, his first coherent thought was one of material things. When he had been taken ill, where had he put his money and his watch? He got laboriously and painfully out of bed to look. In the little dispatch-case that always lay in the same place at the bottom of the gaunt and rather unsteady wardrobe. Paul, a pathetic figure, groped at the badly varnished door, and opened it with feeble fingers. The dispatch-case was there, but naturally there was no watch and no note-case in it. He went back to bed feeling oddly shaken.
And now after a week of complete rest his thoughts were not a whit less tumultuous. He dismissed the thought of Andrew from his mind with vigour. That was a horror that he did not care to remember, mixed up with other horrors, such as crowds of staring, grinning faces, looming out of darkness, bright lights; physical torment. Paul passed his hand wearily over his forehead. What did it all mean? He did not know. Only one thing stood out clearly in his mind—he was married, and that marriage stood between him and his God. Penelope—she was there . . . she had to be reckoned with. How could he help thinking of her with abhorrence—almost with hatred? Paul groaned aloud in acute anguish of spirit.
And in the matted room next to his Penelope stood in equal anguish of spirit. Paul was her husband, she belonged to him. Major Poole had said that she would have to see him that very day . . . it was almost time now. Ayah had just gone for her food, and that meant twelve o’clock. She could not. . . she could not. Penelope stood with her hands in front of her, wrenched damply together.
And as she stood like that, Harley saw her. He was walking down the verandah, his topee pulled down low over his eyes. He would go out . . . get away for a bit. This had got to be tackled, and he would have to tackle it alone. But when he saw her standing like that he knew he could not go and leave her. She was so small—she would not understand . . .
“Hallo! hard up for occupation?” He stood there, tall and powerful, his white topee in his hand.
“Yes—at least, no . . . I’m thinking. I’m thinking about what you said—you . . .” Penelope stopped abruptly.
“Yes?”
“You said that I must see Paul to-day.”
“Yes, I think you ought to. He is well enough to see you now, and Father Bernard . . .”
“I can’t see him,” interrupted Penelope.
“And why not?”
“Because he is my husband, and he oughtn’t to be,” said Penelope in a stifled undertone.
There was a little silence, during which Harley took out his gay silk pocket handkerchief and then mechanically put it back again.
“Don’t say that,” he said quietly.
“But I must, because it’s true. It’s no good pretending things. If a thing’s a terror and a horror and an agony, say it out, and you feel better,” said Penelope, speaking hardly and fiercely.
“But I think in this case it makes it worse to say it,” replied Harley quietly; and this time he did take out his handkerchief and wipe his lips with it.
“I don’t. I think it makes it better. When I say that I loathe him, and feel that shivery, horrible feeling coming all over me when I remember that he’s my husband, it seems to make it better,” said Penelope, and she lifted her eyes and stared up at the man standing there.
“It doesn’t make it better for me,” replied Harley, and he turned swiftly round and stood with his back to Penelope.
“Why doesn’t it?” Penelope was staring at the tweed back. It was an old, well-worn coat that Harley wore, and the pockets were bagging and sticking out. Beloved coat! Penelope closed her eyes abruptly and took a swift step forward. Precious, precious coat! She fell on her knees and gathered it to her lips.
“Penelope, don’t!” Harley swung abruptly round, dragging the coat out of Penelope’s tender grasp. “Get up!” he spoke almost harshly.
“No, because that’s where I ought to be in front of you . . . on my knees, I always have felt that, ever since I knew you. You make me feel like that . . . you always have done . . . you are so awfully, awfully kind to me.” Penelope’s voice was breaking.
“Get up, I tell you!” Harley had an odd livid look round his lips, as he stooped. He held her pinioned between his hands. “You are not to kneel to me,” he said hoarsely.
“Why not?” Penelope’s little white throat was uplifted.
“Because, to put it plainly, I am not fit to black your boots,” said Harley, and he let go of her abruptly. “Look here . . . I’m going out.” He started for the door, dragging his topee down over his eyes.
“Not leaving me feeling that perhaps I’ve said something to make you angry.” Penelope made a little run across the floor. “No, no, don’t. . . . She clung to his sleeve.
“Let me go, I tell you.” The words came to Harley’s lips almost in a cry. “All right then . . if you won’t . . .” He swept round. “You’ve asked for it . . . you can’t expect any man . . He held her strained against his heart. “Beloved . . .! Beloved!” Penelope’s tiny chin was gripped between the powerful fingers. “Beloved! No, don’t be afraid, I shan’t hurt you.” Harley laughed quietly in his throat. “I’m only going to kiss you . . . only going to kiss you . . . that’s all. . . .” Harley laughed again.
Harley was back again in the old tumble-down bungalow, after a day spent principally on his face under the huge enveloping trees. He had left Penelope standing still and breathless in her room, and had taken up his gun and flung out of the bungalow. He had done the inexcusable—the utterly caddish thing—he had made love to another man’s wife with that man lying ill and under the same roof only a stone’s throw away. Now the point was how could he soonest get away, and with the least risk of disgracing himself further?
Father Bernard was helpful and profoundly sympathetic. He pitied Harley deeply, and was also extremely sorry for Penelope. But the monastic side of him rebelled against the situation. “Thou shalt not,” quietly spoken to the man crouched in a low chair opposite to him—Father Bernard voiced his conviction in those few pregnant words.
“I know—that’s all very well for people like you.” Harley flung up a haggard head. “But what about her? Couldn’t I take better care of her than that invertebrate fool along there? Of course I could. I could cherish her . . . love her. What does he know about it? I will have her! I shall!” Harley got suddenly up on to his feet and began to walk about the room.
“Get away from here as soon as you possibly can, Major Poole.” Father Bernard spoke quietly, and in the light of the indifferent lamp his face looked wan and drawn. “I will escort the Cowards safely to the Mayhews’. They are anxious to receive them; as you know I heard from the Bishop only a few days ago.” This poor fellow! There was profound pity in the kindly eyes lifted to the ravaged face.
“But I tell you I want her! What do people like you know about it? She is mine. Why shouldn’t I take her? That fool could never stop me! Spending the whole of his life with a pack of women at his heels! A regiment of guttering candles, sputtering out all their natural instincts and capabilities in grovelling round a clergyman! It makes me sick!” Harley, almost beside himself, spoke wildly and with tears of exhaustion burning his eyelids.
And the kindliness in the clear eyes went out in a surge of anger. This man, who had stolen the love of another man’s wife, spoke inadvisedly when he condemned that man: Father Bernard spoke trenchantly and to the point.
“I know . . . I know I’m disgusting and a cad. You can’t tell me anything that I don’t know about myself in that way.” Harley was back in his chair, crouching, with his hands gripped over his ears. “And I came back prepared to clear out at once. But when I think of her, there . . . . perhaps wondering why I don’t come—I always have gone straight to her when I have come in—I can’t . . . I simply can’t! . . .” Harley’s voice broke in a great sob.
“To begin with, you want something to eat, Major Poole.” Father Bernard’s voice was kind again. “And I do not say that you must leave the bungalow without even a word of farewell, that would be cruel as well as unnecessary. But I do say that you must leave it within the next twenty-four hours. To-morrow there is no excuse for Mrs. Coward not to see her husband. He asked for her again to-day. And it would be easier for her, I think, if you were not here when she did see him. Let us dine as usual: try to appear as though there were nothing much the matter, and afterwards I will leave you alone, and you can explain to her gently what you have decided to do. You must be very gentle with her, Major Poole, for you are dealing with a very fragile and sensitive little soul.”
So, after a dreadful dinner during which Penelope sat almost silent, only shooting from time to time a timid glance at the man opposite her, Father Bernard, with a quiet good-night, moved off down the verandah.
“I have promised to read to Mr. Coward,” he said. “Good-night, Mrs. Coward, if I do not see you again.”
“Good-night, Father.” Penelope stood up. “Do you want to go too.” She spoke to Harley.
“No, I don’t.” Harley, tall and powerful in his evening clothes, had heaved himself up out of his rather rickety chair. “I want to talk to you, and we will go outside to do it. There is a gorgeous moon. Put something on, and we’ll go out for a bit. I know a place where we can sit down.”
So a few minutes later Penelope joined him on the verandah; tremulous, and a little shrinking in an old Burberry. “I wish I had nice clothes to put on when I am with you,” she said; “everything is so frightfully old now, and half our luggage seems to have gone.”
“I dare say our friend Andrew could shed some light on that,” said Harley, speaking a little grimly, although with his breath catching in his throat. What a little tiny thing she was! He could break her with one hand.
They had reached a little clearing in the jungle. Across the compound, through the trees, the hanging lamp on the verandah shone palely yellow. Overhead, the full moon blazed down, turning Penelope’s short hair to silver. Harley stopped beside a fallen tree-trunk.
“When I’ve poked round here a bit with my stick, you can sit down on it.” he said. “Just a poke or two first in case of snakes.”
“Once I was nearly bitten by a snake,” said Penelope, dreamily watching the brown hand. “But someone came by and it wriggled away.”
“Did it? That was a stroke of luck for you.” Harley spoke almost vaguely, and as he spoke his soul surged up in a wave of misery, and he wondered how he was going to begin. “That’s all right. Now sit down.” He spoke almost roughly. “I’ll sit down beside you,” he said, and he sank his long length on the huge log.
“I’ve often wondered who it was.” Penelope, still speaking dreamily, was watching the clear-cut shadow of the powerful figure beside her thrown on the short grass in front. “A sort of feeling as if red carpet was being rolled out in front of someone. I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt it. It was a queer feeling to get in a jungle.”
“I did feel it once,” but Harley spoke hurriedly. He did not want to think of that now, not now, when he had this little creature so close to him. “Look here—I want to say something,” he said, and as he spoke he turned almost completely round on the log. “I’ve got to go away from here, soon—almost at once.”
“No!” The word came out on a fierce inrush of breath. Penelope was gasping. “No,” she said again.
“Yes, but I must. Don’t you see?” Harley took the two little groping hands in his. “I love you,” he said; “you know I do, and I believe you love me. That makes it impossible for us to be together. We can’t. You must see that we can’t.”
“I only see that because of that we must and we can,” said Penelope. “I’ve always loved you, always adored the idea of you. And now I have got to know you I only adore you more. You’ve kissed me; it’s not fair to say that. You must go on with it. It’s brutal; it’s cruel.” Penelope had begun wildly to cry.
“Darling, be quiet.” Harley’s lips had blanched suddenly white. “It’s far harder for you than for me, believe me,” he said, and he got abruptly up from his seat.
“Then why do you do it?” said Penelope, flinging round fiercely.
“Because you belong to another man, and there is such a thing as playing the game,” said Harley quietly.
“I don’t! I don’t! Paul has never had me really. He did in a sort of way—you must when you marry a person—but he never had my soul; and it is the soul that counts. My body always loathed him—always tried to get away from him. Paul’s soul loathed me too. He knew that he wasn’t meant to marry me, and directly he had married me he knew it more. And it’s all been like that ever since the beginning, a sort of seeing me and having to love me, and then wishing he hadn’t. Misery, misery, awful, awful misery for both of us. Take me away, let me be with you for ever, and then Paul will be able to divorce me; and he will be glad. Indeed, indeed he will.” Penelope was clutching at the black sleeve with imploring hands.
“My dear child.” Through his despair Harley smiled. He was up against it now, and it was going to be harder than he expected. But somehow Penelope’s frantic surrender made it easier. The strength, the passionate desire to do the right thing must come from him.
“We must do right, darling,” he said, and there was something very tender in the way in which the tall figure stooped over the smaller one. “I’ve led a rotten life in many ways; heaps of it I should hate you to know about. But I know now what real love is—love that makes one feel that one could go to any lengths to save the person you love from suffering. I feel that about you. You don’t know, darling little child that you are, the buzz of foulest gossip that would settle round your head if you emerged from this jungle a woman about to be divorced. A woman with a sick husband; a sick husband left to look after himself while you ran away with an officer man. It would be ghastly! You have no idea.”
“It’s only that you don’t really love me after all, then.” Penelope, with her short hair wild about her small face, had slipped abruptly from the log. “That’s it . . . that’s how men who have made women love them get out of it. They pretend it’s because they’re good. They aren’t really. It’s because I showed you so frightfully, frightfully plainly that I adored you; now you know it you don’t want it. That’s what men are like, they despise things that they can get easily.”
“You really think that?” There was something dreadful in the bleached pallor of the face showing whitely under the moonlight.
“Yes, I do. I know it’s that. How nice it must be for you! A sort of superior feeling. This poor little thing! Oh well, she’ll get over it if I adopt the heroic tack.” Penelope, stung and frantic with misery, was reaching desperately out for other means to sting. He was going to leave her! He could not, he should not! Her soul, her body, her very being was under his feet.
“Then if you really think that there is no more for me to say . . .” Harley, both hands gripped behind his back, had queer blue patches at the root of his nostrils. This was a way out of it. Easier for her. And if his soul was in hell what did it matter? Stung and embittered, Penelope’s pride would come to her rescue. Only one of a succession of women! Oh, well, he could take it lightly, so could she.
“Say that it’s not that.” Penelope, suddenly down on her knees, was clutching at the black silk ankles.
“I can’t say anything more than I have said. And now you must get up; the dew is very heavy. Come now—we must go back to the bungalow. We will say good-bye out here. I must pack and I shall be off the first thing in the morning. Father Bernard is staying on, and will take you both to Chota Palanpur.”
“You want me to say good-bye, hating you?” Penelope’s eyes, uplifted, were dark and frozen in the moonlight.
“Yes, I think it is better. By and by you will really hate me, and that will help. Now then . . . careful how you go, or you will stumble. Let me give you a hand.”
But as Harley reached out to grasp the little elbow, Penelope broke from him.
“Brute! brute! you have taken my soul and trampled on it,” she almost screamed. “I do hate you! I do hate you! Someone on the ship coming out told me that about you, you always had some woman in love with you and you revelled in it. Oh, why did I ever meet you? Why did I ever meet you?” And Penelope, uttering queer little wailing cries, turned and fled back to the bungalow, a dark, stumbling figure among the trees.
And Harley watched her go, a drawn, rigid look on his mouth. “A certain amount of expiation contained in that last few minutes, I think,” he said; and he stood very still, drawing in his breath with difficulty. Then he also turned. “And now to pack and clear,” he said, and stepping over the fallen tree-trunk he started to walk towards the bungalow.
But half-way there he stopped dead. An uncomfortable sensation of being followed; he swung round, his hand clapped to his hip-pocket. Not much use to clap it there though, his automatic pistol was at that very moment reposing in the top drawer of his dressing-table. But there was no one behind him, only a vague flapping of leaves among the undergrowth and a stealthy rustling of the overshadowing trees, standing tall and dark all round him. Harley, his chin sunk in his breast, went quietly on his way.
Midnight, and the tall powerful figure moving stealthily about the disordered bedroom. “Have the coolies gone on, Akbar?”
Harley spoke in a whisper. Penelope’s room was next door, and his whole soul was a prayer that she was asleep. Harley’s fortitude was very near to breaking-point. To leave her, thinking that he was a cad—was such a sacrifice demanded of him?
“Gone, sahib.” Akbar’s dark bearded face was impassive. He was not quite clear as to what this sudden exit portended. Ayah had been virulent about it.
“My memsahib very much loving your sahib,” she had said; “very bad bundobast this.”
“All womens very much loving my sahib.” Akbar had returned it with complacency. “My sahib taking very grand miss-sahib for wifes. Lord-sahib’s miss-sahib.” Akbar had included the Viceroy in a comprehensive sweep of his hand towards Simla.
And ayah had been silenced. True, her memsahib was only the memsahib of a padre-sahib. But a little soft memsahib. A real memsahib: Beena had the perception of her race. And now Akbar Harley’s dispatch-case in his hand, stood looking at his sahib. Everything was in train, the luggage coolies gone on ahead; his friend Abdul the cook installed on the back verandah on a charpoy in case of alarm. A box of English stores in the dispense-khana in the event of their being any delay in the setting forth of the rest of the party for Chota Palanpur—Harley, with the foresight of the man accustomed to the East, had provided against every eventuality. Only one faint stirring of uneasiness in Akbar’s mind. Beena had not turned up as usual that night to take her evening meal in the kitchen. But that could be easily explained, thought Akbar, still staring at his sahib and wondering if he should say anything about it. Beena lately had developed a friendliness with the dhobi’s wife. She was probably in her quarter, and would go straight to her bed in Penelope’s room; she had done that once before.
“All ready, sahib,” said Akbar, shifting the dispatch-case a little uneasily from one hand to the other. There was something amiss with his sahib. “My bringing syce up to verandah?” he inquired respectfully.
“No, leave him down at the end of the path, and I’ll get on there,” said Harley, looking round rather vaguely for his topee. It had been a bother to pack it, he had elected to wear it instead of his cap, which he had stuffed into his pocket. “I’ll come on in half a second,” he said, almost impatiently. “You go on and wait for me there.”
And now he was alone. Absolute stillness all around the deserted bungalow, only from time to time the unexpected call of an abruptly awakened bird. The moon was very bright. A couple of sleepy crows at the top of a palm-tree, thinking that it was time to get up, were cawing raucously—Harley heard the caw with a catch in his breath. Now to turn out the lamp, and then the end of this—this too heavenly interlude in his life. He trod quietly to the lamp, hanging a little crookedly on the distempered wall.
And then, as he turned again to tiptoe out across the matted floor, he saw her standing there, outlined against the moonlight, a tiny figure in the silvery oblong of the door.
“God, don’t say he has gone!” Penelope’s voice came stilly through the darkness.
“No, not yet. Come in here. Penelope—you shouldn’t.” Harley had dropped his leather cane on the matting.
“No, I know; but when you love anyone like I do you, things like ordinary pride don’t matter. I couldn’t have it end like that. Say it out to me that you don’t really love me. I’d rather have it like that than not knowing, and thinking that afterwards if I’d said something else it might have been different.”
Penelope was advancing uncertainly into the room.
And Harley held out his trembling, longing arms. After all, he was going to play the straight game; to leave her in misery was not required of him. He strained her to his heart, almost in an agony of love. “Beloved, you know it,” he said; “only I felt I must do right. Somehow, since I’ve been here, it seems the only thing that matters. And some day, if God is good . . .”
“I know, I feel that too,” Penelope was whispering into the rough tweed coat. “Harley, it’s easy now I know. I felt that if you went away like that I couldn’t live. But now I can. Especially if you go before I . . .” Penelope had her hands up to her throat. If she once began to cry . . . and she was afraid, too. Ayah hadn’t come in as usual that night, and she hated that, although once before she had been late. . . .
“Well, then, I will, darling. Promise me . . . never to doubt. . . . And the very first instant”—Penelope’s eyes, shut and tearless, lay still under the cool muscular lips—“I’ll come . . . from the ends of the earth. You know I will . . . the instant I can . . .”
“I know you will . . .” And then he was gone. And Penelope, groping and a little stupid in her groping, felt her way back to her room. Ah, but ayah had come; there was a stooping figure in the corner of the room, also groping. Odd: ayah could generally find her way so easily into her bedding. But never mind if she was there: Penelope, stupefied with misery, flung herself face downwards on to her bed. And then the sobs came, awful, tearing ones, right up from the depth of her. Perhaps ayah would come and comfort her. Even ayah would help in this awful extremity of loneliness and despair. Once before, when she had sobbed and cried, she had gathered Penelope to her heart.
But ayah was even now tearing with her frantic but still sharp old teeth at the skilfully tied knots. “Sahib! Sahib! Help!” Beena shrieked and twisted in the little old shed where in the days of departed glories the engineer sahib’s mali had been wont to keep his gardening tools.
Paul was restless—dreadfully restless. For the early part of the night he had slept, but now, at about three o’clock in the morning, he had waked, and was lying a haggard, unshaven figure, staring at the faintly illumined square of the window. The night before had been an agitating one for him. Harley had come along in his evening clothes to say good-bye to him, and the consciousness of what he owed to this man had made Paul shaky and tremulous. But Harley had brushed it all impatiently aside. “Oh, that’s all right,” he had said, frowning, and after a few conventional words of farewell he had left the room. But Paul had remained uneasy and fidgety, and it had needed a good hour of quiet reading by Father Bernard to restore him to any sort of quietude. Father Bernard read well, and he had chosen the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans to soothe his friend that night. Paul had listened hungrily, and with his thin hands, with their blue veins that showed far too plainly, clasped restlessly over the gay rezais.
“‘To be carnally minded is death.’” As Father Bernard stopped reading, Paul’s voice came on a still broken breath across the little patch of matting that separated the chair and the bed.
“‘For I am fully persuaded . . .” Father Bernard’s response was instant, and with his quiet hands folded over the closed Testament he repeated the last verses of that immortal chapter. “‘ Neither life nor death,’ Paul. Hold on to it; it has helped men in greater extremity than yours.”
“I have sinned . . . grievously. . .” And then Paul had turned moaning on his pillow. And when Father Bernard had eventually completed his simple toilet and crept on to his narrow bed, he had felt very tired both mentally and physically. These poor people in this old deserted bungalow! Tired as he was, Father Bernard had remained for almost an hour on his knees.
And now Paul was the only person except one left awake in the bungalow. Penelope was asleep; the sleep of intense emotional exhaustion, than which there is nothing more profound. Father Bernard, with his kind simple face turned towards the moonlight, lay dreaming of the day that had passed, and even in his sleep his spirit communed with his God.
And Paul lay awake; all his life, for some reason, heaving up and down in front of him. St. Jude’s . . . the services there . . . Madeline and Miss Winnower. The first time he had seen Penelope, and the fierce reaction of his soul against the obsession that he had sensed was going to engulf him.
Their marriage, and the succeeding weeks of it: Paul groaned. And then the voyage out to India and his association with the two Cowley Fathers, and the profound talks that the three men had had together. The gradual realization that in marrying he had in a sense ruined his life. And then the Bishop, with his kindly words of comfort; and then the pilgrimage out into the wilds. And then Andrew—ah, yes, Andrew; Paul in his torment of thought suddenly sat up and dragged at the enveloping mosquito curtain. It had been Andrew who had in the end wrecked everything; without that man beside him he could perhaps have made good. The poison of his powerful Oriental presence had permeated his every action. Like a fatal miasma, it had clung about his soul, stifling it, stultifying. . . . Paul suddenly shrieked aloud. It was here again, like the soft, insidious, sweetish flavour of sewer-gas . . . stealing round him . . . suffocating . . . throttling. At the noiseless pad of bare feet Paul tore at the enveloping curtain.
But although it took longer than he had anticipated, Andrew did his work very thoroughly. Besides, there was no hurry; the only man who could have interfered with him was at that very moment riding hell for leather in the opposite direction. Grinning from the folds of Beena’s cherished and brightly coloured chuddah, Andrew had seen him go. Abdul the cook was snoring with his head rolled up in a padded quilt, blind and deaf to everything but his own immediate comfort. Also Andrew had a very excellent knife with him, but blood left tracks, and he did not want to use it unless he was obliged. The little doctor-padre could be left where he was—he was harmless, and was well known in the district, too; to injure him might recoil on his own head. But this fool . . . Andrew stuffed Paul’s lolling and lifeless head rather disgustedly under the gay rezais and turned to take up the real work he had in hand—Penelope. Ayah’s rezais and the chuddah he had left on the floor—with them both he ought to be able to muffle her up all right.
And it was at that very moment that Harley, with the sweat pouring out from under the green lining of his topee, reached the compound again. What had sent him back he never knew. But that suddenly he had been sent back he never doubted. It had been when he had been riding for about an hour; if the warning had been spoken aloud it could not have been clearer. “Go back!” The very trees that surrounded him seemed to shout it out as they stood tall and silvery under the moon that was just beginning to wane a little.
And, wrenching at his horse’s mouth, Harley dragged it round on the narrow path and started to gallop back. Jamming his topee down on his head, he stooped to avoid the overhanging branches, and tore, driving his heels into the horse s heaving flanks. His syce—he left him breathless, trying to keep up. “God, that I may be in time!” Drawing his breath in in great choking gasps, he prayed as he fled back the way he had come. The construction bungalow . . . thank God! . . . He flung himself off the still galloping horse, stumbling and lurching, and nearly going headlong; then steadying himself against the rickety gatepost he turned and tore up the narrow path.
And that was just the moment that Andrew had reached the door of Penelope’s room again. “Aie!” With a snarl of rage the native’s white teeth bared themselves in a savage grin. The sahib— back again . . . just when everything had promised so well. ”Aie!” With almost a hiss of rage he flung himself at the powerful figure in riding-clothes. Ah! but a figure that drew its breath in gasps. Andrew smiled again as he felt round to where the long knife lay snugly tucked away.
But Abdul the cook did not sleep with quite the same profundity that Andrew thought he did; also Paul’s stifled shriek had subconsciously disturbed him, although he did not know that it had. So sleepily, and with his old head dishevelled in the moonlight—his folded puggaree lay neatly on the ground beside him—he shook himself free of his heavy wrappings and decided that to compose himself anew he would have a pull or two at the hookah that he had left smouldering in the little brick kitchen. Leisurely, and with a swift glance at the wire-netting door of Penelope’s room to see that all was well, he heaved himself off the old string bed. All well there . . . he would have his quiet smoke, and then return to his couch.
But Beena’s shrieks broke on his old ears before he had padded half-way across the moonlit strip of compound that separated the main building from the kitchen, and muttering in his henna-dyed beard, he lifted his old head and sniffed like an old war-horse. The dhobi beating his wife! Thik! a garrulous woman and a gossip at that.
But the shrieks were not those of the dhobi’s wife, and Abdul, who had been an athlete in his day, did not take long, once he had grasped the situation, to reach the dilapidated tool shed, “Ari!” Lighted up by the moonlight, Beena’s struggling figure and wild eyes came into view. “Ari!” His sharp cook’s knife quickly severed the coarse cocoanut fibre rope. “Ari!” for Beena was off, limping lamely, but stumbling feverishly over the rough ground towards the bungalow, crying aloud.
And in an instant Abdul was after her. Something wrong here . . . his Oriental mind leapt at once to a probable solution of the mystery. The tall powerful soldier sahib had gone, carrying with him a good deal of powerful protection; and whose had been the trailing figure in woman’s draperies that he had seen crossing the compound late that night, and entering by the back door of the memsahib’s bedroom? . . . Abdul muttered in his beard and fingered his long knife lovingly.
And he got on to the verandah just in time. Harley, gasping, was trying to do two things at once—hold Andrew, who had taken the native’s usual precaution of oiling himself, and get round somehow to his hip-pocket. Why hadn’t he? . . . his breath was going, as Andrew, lithe as a cat and fresh as paint, was feeling with his black slippery fingers round the muscular throat. It was so dark . . . coming straight in from the bright moonlight he had stumbled almost stupidly straight into the slippery embrace. “Ah!” . . he drew in his breath with a sobbing choke—those foul, greasy thumbs pressing in under his ears. God! he was going to be done in . . . and by a beastly native too! . . . Harley made a supreme last effort to get round to his hip-pocket. If only the brute hadn’t been oiled. . . . he couldn’t hold . . .
And at this moment Abdul and Beena appeared on the scene—Beena screaming, and beside herself with rage. With the old Mohammedan beside her, she flung herself on the two writhing figures on the ground.
“Stealing my little brooch!” she shrieked; “very bad mans this Andrew fellow! You killing, Khansamajee . . . my holding!” With the true instinct of the Asiatic, Beena had gone straight for Andrew’s eyes. And with the indrawing of life-giving choking breaths, Harley heard the struggle with a grim feeling of amusement. Hardly the idea to be rescued by a couple of natives, perhaps—but still . . . And then unconsciousness coming to his aid, he rolled a little over on to one side.
But Abdul did not need Beena’s admonitions to kill Andrew. Had he not been in naukri with the sahiblogue for many a long day? No, this struggle between a sahib and a low-caste servant was unseemly. Catlike in the dark, he sighted the gleaming brown throat, and pulled out his long cook’s knife, caressing the sharp blade of it lovingly. ”Thik!” he muttered, and uttering a little prayer as was his wont when he slaughtered a fowl for the evening meal, he slit Andrew’s throat from end to end.
The crows were all awake, and the tropical sun was sending its first yellow fingers pointing through the tall trees before any sort of calm lay on the old construction bungalow again. Paul had been buried in the very early dawn, as is the custom in the East. Harley and Father Bernard had carried the fragile body wrapped reverently in a sheet to its last resting-place, and now they stood alone by the grave.
“What are you going to do with Andrew’s body?” Harley, replacing his pith helmet on his head, spoke a little hoarsely.
“I am going to have him cremated. It is the Hindu custom, and I should rather doubt his being allowed to rest in his grave if I put him there. The feeling against him in this compound is very strong. I shall arrange it with the sweeper.” Father Bernard spoke quietly but very firmly.
“I see.” Harley fell silent. Then, “What do you think I ought to do?” he asked.
“I think you ought to go on ahead of us, Major Poole. It will be better, I think, if I conduct Mrs. Coward to Karnmore alone. I have telegraphed to the Bishop—a native runner took the telegram in this morning. Your work here is done, and Mrs. Coward will be better if she is left alone to be quiet. The happenings of the night, or rather of the early morning, have been a terrible shock to her. Fortunately, her ayah has kept her head and is invaluable.”
“I see.” Harley fell silent again, and then turned to fall quietly into step with the little doctor, who had started to walk back towards the old construction bungalow. “Do you think I could see her?” he said anxiously.
“Yes, I am sure you could.” And even in his distress of spirit Father Bernard almost smiled at the sudden uplift of the tall figure beside him. Children, both of them, he thought, sighing a little painfully as, the old bungalow reached again, he turned a little wearily into his own room.
But Penelope had left childhood behind her with the dawn, and Harley saw it when a few minutes later he took the shadowed face tenderly between his hands.
“Don’t fret, sweetheart,” he said, gently. “Only rest to-day, and you will feel ever so much better presently.”
“I oughtn’t to feel only mad with joy that nothing stands between us,” sobbed Penelope. “I ought to feel sorry for him. I am, I am . . . you do know it, don’t you? Only somehow—I wanted you so—I can’t . . .” Penelope broke down again.
“Of course I understand.” Harley’s downbent face was very tender. “And you know . . . don’t forget it, darling, we were trying to do right. Always hang on to that when you feel reproachful. I would have gone—in fact, I had gone, only something sent me back. Or Someone sent me back.” Harley fell abruptly silent. Had it been only the moonlight, or had there been a quiet Figure standing between the trees on that very early dawning?
But Penelope only wept and clung to the brown hands, and wept again. He had been good; she had not; it was no good pretending, even to her own heart that she had. But God would help her to be good now, because she did want to be; really, really she did want to be. “Harley, help me to be like you are.” Penelope bowed her head in a very passion of weeping.