But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship, he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"

She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting, did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and the farm-men, for she had grown very sly about her fellow-men, and knew that it was best to hide happiness lest someone jealous should put out their hand to destroy it. So she had gone down to the orchard and sat in the crook of a tree, looking out at an opal estuary where a frail rainstorm spun like a top in the sunshine before the variable April gusts. She wondered how his dear brown face would look now he had outfaced danger and had been burned by strange suns. She had heard suddenly the sound of steps coming down the path, and she had turned in ecstasy; but there was n.o.body there but a pale young man who looked like one of the East-End trippers who all through the summer months persistently trespa.s.sed on the farm lands. As he saw her he stopped, and she was about to order him to leave the orchard by the nearest gate when he flapped his very large hands and cried out, "Mummie! Mummie!" There was a whistling quality in the cry that instantly convinced her. She drew herself taut and prepared to deal with him as a spirited woman deals with a blackmailer, but as he ran towards her, piping exultantly, "Now I'm sixteen I can say who I want to live with--the vicar says so,"

she remembered that he was her son, and suffered herself to be folded in his arms, which embraced her closely but without suggestion of strength.

That day, at least, she had played her part according to her duty: she had corrected so far as possible the sin of her inner being. It had not been so very difficult, for Roger had shown himself just as goldenhearted as he had been as a child. He would not speak of the years of ill-treatment from which he had emerged, save to say tediously, over and over again, with a revolting, grateful whine in his voice, how hard Aunt Susan had worked to keep the peace when father had one of his bad turns. It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice in a draper's shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained of was that the "talk was bad." Tears came into his light eyes when he said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for her. There would never be any end to that. All through the midday meal he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and would say whistlingly: "Ooh, mummie, d'you know, I used to think it must be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think I've ever seen such another head of hair."

But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."

Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a h.e.l.l, and that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here, Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see it's Roger!"

Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure, she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice, "h.e.l.lo, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not bear to look at his warty hands any longer, and then asked: "Roger, dear, is there anything the matter?" She spoke to him always without any character in her phrases, like a mother in books. He mumbled, "Nothing, mummie," but would not lift his head; and after a gulping minute whimpered: "I want to go back to the shop." "Back to the shop, dear? But I thought you hated it. Darling, what is the matter?" He remained silent, so she took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.

Perhaps that had not been a very wise thing to do.

Marion had dropped her hands and gone back to Richard, and said with simulated fierceness: "You haven't done anything to Roger that would make him think that we don't like having him here?" He glanced sharply at her and recognised that their destiny was turning ugly in their hands, and he answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to a chap who's been through such a rotten time." She thought, with shame, that if his face had become cruel at her question, and he had answered that he thought it was time the other went, she would have bowed to his decision, because he was her king, and she realised that it was no wonder that Roger had found out. That moment of which she was so proud because she had said heartily, "Richard, don't you see it's Roger?"

without showing by any wild yearning of the eye that she would have given anything to be alone with him, had been instantly followed by a betrayal. For when he had lifted his lips from her cheek and had turned to greet Roger with courtesy that was at once kind and insincere, he had left one hand resting on her shoulder as it had been when they embraced, and his thumb stretched out to press on the pulse that beat at the base of her throat. If she had been completely loyal she would have moved; but she had stood quite still, letting him mark how she was not calm and rejoicing at all, but shaken as by a storm with her disgust at this loathsome presence. His hand had relaxed and he had pa.s.sed it caressingly up her neck. She had let herself sigh deeply; she might as well have said, "I am so glad you understand I hate him." That was the first of a thousand such betrayals. The words said between souls are not heard by the eavesdropping ear, but the soul also can eavesdrop, and tells in its time. That morning there must have come a moment to the poor pale boy, as he worked at his silly present in the little shed, when it was plain to him that the mother and the brother whom he had thought so kind were vulpine with love of each other, vulpine with hate of him.

There was no disputing his discovery, since it was true. The only thing to do was to try to arrange some way of life for him in which he would have a chance to become an independent person who could form new and unspoiled relationships. It was, of course, out of the question to send him back to the shop, but the problem of disposing of him was one that raised innumerable difficulties which Marion was the less able to face because her bad dreams had begun again. He had so little schooling that it was impossible to send him in for any profession. He, himself, who was touchingly grateful because they were not sending him back to the shop, chose to be trained as a veterinary surgeon, and he was apprenticed to old Mr. Taylor at Canewdon. But it turned out that though he had a pa.s.sionate love for animals he had no power over them. After he had been chased round a field three times and severely bitten by a stallion with whom he had sat up for two nights, Mr. Taylor p.r.o.nounced that it was hopeless and sent him home. They tried him as a chemist's a.s.sistant next, and he did well for ten months, until there was that awful trouble about the prescription. There had been nothing to do after that save to put him to work as a clerk and give him an allowance that with his wages would enable him to live in comfort and try to seem glad when he came home for his holidays.

For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city, because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.

From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.

And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing would happen. But what thing? She would put her hand to her head, but she was never able to remember.

And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen; though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing. She herself had never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it, but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had always done its duty by Roger. It told, of course, the most moving story of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller's in Watford and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his allowance, he could not possibly pay.

The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger. It had been unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation of the note of love. It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur, "Oh, but he was speaking the truth. I'm quite comfortably off. I've come to pay the jeweller," and watch the look of amazement on the hot, high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man, and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no longer. Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger. Marion felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to feel.

She liked, too, going into the jeweller's shop and sitting there under the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely voice that she had learned from her lover: "Yes, but I don't want you to take them back. I want to pay for them. There seems to have been some misunderstanding. There is no difficulty about the money at all. My son only wanted you to wait till his quarter's allowance came. I have the money here in notes. If you would count it...." She was playing a mother's part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller's eyes were examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious woman...."

But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.

She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you, mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and s.p.a.ce, there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....

But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then in Rio de Janeiro. There she was happy. She was one of those Northerners to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its natives. For over those the sun has had power since their birth, consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth. But with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons. She could walk across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had always impotently desired to do.

And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had established it over her being from the moment of his conception. There was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in hesitancy, but in simultaneous s.n.a.t.c.hings at life by both of the warring forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation. He loved riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him in his pleasure. But he gave the core of his pa.s.sion to his work and disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he was always cool and remote like a priest. It gave him pleasure to be insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of fineness and humility. He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality of his work that he rejected half the world's offers to him. And always he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country that had banished them and were earning great honours. She wished this life could go on for ever.

But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap. She did not open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.

His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an Indian's in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.

That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think of Richard's actions as being good or bad, but only as being different in colour and l.u.s.tre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are pearls, and there are emeralds. But it made her feel lonely, and she turned soberly to opening her letter. It was from Roger. He was in trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help. At first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly: "Richard, how can I cable money to Roger? He wants it quickly. And, Richard, I think I should go home and look after him." Richard had set his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment's quivering silence, had broken into curses. "Oh, don't speak of poor Roger like that!" she had cried out, and he had answered terribly: "I'm not speaking of him; I'm speaking of my father, who let you in for all this." She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace with his father before he died. Not even for Harry's sake would she imperil the love between her and her son.

She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been useless. Roger would never come back to live with her. All she could do was to sit at Yaverland's End, ready to receive him when he turned up, as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was going to do in the future. Usually on these occasions he brought her a present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a gla.s.s jar of preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking magnificent when he saw it in the grocer's shop. She would kiss him gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in cities.

A regular routine followed these visits. First he wrote happy letters home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job and owed money to the landlady. Then she would seek him out, wherever he was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.

At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.

For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become so if he went back and lived with her. As things were, he could interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.

Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so sorry for his landladies. To admit that he could not earn a bare living when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would have broken his spirit.

Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her, but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend together on these occasions. There fell increasingly moments of silence when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his unpleasantness. For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.

As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was something else about his appearance, something tarnished and disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at Leicester said to her: "I do think it's such a pity that a nice young man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don't take more care of himself like he ought to." Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world, because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her son a murderer than a drunkard. She had wondered if the truth need ever reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind's eye a newspaper paragraph: "Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course of their duty...." She had asked quickly, "What is he like? Does he get violent?" The woman had answered: "Oh no, mum; just silly-like," and had laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.

Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d! When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear, but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for daring to be Richard--an intention that was vindictive against beauty and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.

They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.

Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been so different...."

If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them threatened, not one of them doomed....

Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.

The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.

Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...."

There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric bell.

She looked at the clock by her bedside. It was three o'clock. She said to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange things have happened a.s.sume when they fear that yet another is approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation, "It's late for anyone to call."

But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.

She cried out, "Ah, yes!" She knew who it was. It was Roger, come in rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself. She hurried over to her wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, "Roger, Roger, Roger! ... Why, it's you, Roger!... Come in. Come in, my boy.... What is it, my poor lad?..."

She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and smoothed from it certain lines of loathing. Bowing her head, she murmured a remonstrance to some power.

But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.

CHAPTER VII

He could not at once discern in the darkness who it was that opened the door, and he remained an aloof black shape against the moon-glare, lifting his cap and saying, "I am sorry to knock you up at this hour,"

so for a minute Marion had the amusing joy of seeing him as he appeared to other people, remote and vigilant and courteous and really more hidalgoesque than the occasion demanded. She laughed teasingly. The hard line of him softened, and he said, "Mother," and stepped over the threshold and folded her in his arms, and kissed her on the lips and hair. She rested quietly within his groping, pressing love. This indoor darkness where they stood was striped with many lines of moonlight coming through cracks in doors and the margins of blinds, so that it seemed to have no more substance than a paper lanthorn, and outside the white boles and branches of the lit leafless trees were as luminous stencillings on the night. There was nothing solid in the world but their two bodies, nothing real but their two lives.

She did not ask him why he had come at this hour. There was indeed nothing so very unusual in it, for more than once when he was a sailor she had been wakened by the patter of pebbles on her window and had looked down through the darkness on the whitish oval of his face, marked like a mask with his eagerness to see her; and later, in southern countries, he had often walked quietly into the dark, cool room where she lay having her siesta, though she had thought him a hundred miles away, and it had seemed as if nothing could move in the weighty heat outside save the writhing sea. It had always seemed appropriate to their relationship that he should come to her thus, suddenly and without warning and against the common custom. Thus had he come to be born.

She pushed him away from her. "Have you put your motor-cycle in the shed?" she asked indifferently.

"No. It's outside the gate."

"Put it in. There may be frost by the morning."

He turned away to do it. To him it was always heaven, like the peace of dreamless sleep, to hand over to her the heavy sword of his will.

She watched him go out into the white ecstatic glare and pa.s.s behind the illuminated twiggy bareness of the hedge, which looked like the phosph.o.r.escent spine of some monstrous stranded fish. This was a strange night, crude as if some coa.r.s.e but powerful human intelligence were co-operating with nature. She had a fancy that if she strained her ears she might hear the whirr of the great dynamo that served this huge electric moon. But however the night might be, this strange, dangerous son of hers was a match for it. She looked gloatingly after him as he pa.s.sed out of her sight, and then turned and went into the kitchen. It was easy to prepare him a meal, for there was a gas-stove and the stores lay at her hand, each in its own place, since in her five minutes' visit to the cook every morning she imposed the same nervous neatness here and kept the rest of the house rectangular and black and white.

She heard the closing of the front door and his steps coming in search of her. She liked to think of him finding his way to her by the rays of light warmer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her, that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.

When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."

Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....

He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.